Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 6th, '08

[JackSpratts]

In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms
David Kravets

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

"I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "It's very troubling."

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, announced late Monday he wanted to discuss 11 questions at Tuesday's hearing, one of which goes directly to the heart of the immunity legislation.

Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision?

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says the immunity legislation, if upheld, "makes it possible to extend immunity to other areas of the law."

He agreed, for example, that it would not be far-fetched to imagine Congress immunizing ExxonMobil for the 1989 Valdez oil spill "for national security reasons." A jury awarded about $5 billion in punitive damages in that case, an amount the courts reduced to $500 million.

In the telecom immunity challenge, the government argues that the telecoms should not be punished, or suffer the threat of punishment, for a surveillance program that the Bush administration claims was designed only to fight terrorism. The government also denies the lawsuits' allegations that the surveillance was a broad dragnet that sucked down Americans' communications on a wholesale basis.

The administration also says the immunity is warranted because the lawsuits threaten to expose government secrets.

The EFF brought the original spying lawsuit in 2006 against AT&T, and has since been joined by dozens of others targeting the nation's telecommunications companies.

The EFF's case, which has been consolidated with the others in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco, includes so-called whistle-blower documents from a former AT&T technician. The EFF claims the documents describe a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco that is wired to share raw internet traffic with the NSA.

The government sought to dismiss the original EFF case, and others that followed, on the grounds that they threatened to expose state secrets. Judge Walker has ruled against the government, saying the case could proceed.

The government appealed. But before the appeal was decided, Congress on July 9 gave the president the power to grant immunity to the carriers.

The EFF is now challenging the immunity legislation on the grounds that it seeks to circumvent the Constitution's separation of powers clause, as well as Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights," the EFF's Cohn says. "You can't do that."

Two weeks ago, the administration told Walker in a court filing that the immunity legislation "represents the considered judgment of our nation's political branches that, in the unique historical circumstances following the 9/11 attacks, telecommunications companies should not bear the burden of defending against claims that those companies assisted the government in its efforts to detect and prevent further terrorist attacks."

Congress, the government continued, "concluded that those companies should not face further litigation if they provided such assistance pursuant to a court order or a written certification, directive or request from a senior government official, or did not provide the alleged assistance."

The immunity law allows the government to file a classified brief with Judge Walker activating immunity for a particular communication company. Walker then has little power to deny the request, unless the judge finds the immunity legislation is itself unconstitutional.

Oral arguments in Walker's courtroom are scheduled for 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday. Threat Level will cover the proceedings live.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...guin.html#more





BitTorrent: Register Report on Protocol Change is "Utter Nonsense"
Lincoln Spector

BitTorrent has slammed a report in The Register that suggests a planned protocol change could threaten the stability of the Internet.

According to blogger Richard Bennett, developers of the BitTorrent client uTorrent are reportedly taking steps that could slow gamers and voice-over-IP throughput, and even bring the Internet to a crawl. Writing for the The Register, Bennett described uTorrent's preference for the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as a warning of slow times ahead.

As an Internet protocol, UDP is not as well-known as TCP, which has important traffic control features. Bennett says uTorrent's switch to UDP as its default peer-to-peer protocol could make the amount of ungovernable traffic could go through the roof. "By most estimates," according to Bennett, "P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users. Oops."

ISPs could control the problem by slowing down UDP traffic, but Bennett argues that "such throttling will utterly destroy VoIP."

Is Bennett right? His article makes some pretty broad assumptions ("most [P2P downloaders] have a sense of entitlement where their etiquette gene should be") and offers few references. And as one Slashdot.org forum participant said of Bennett's article," the bottleneck for end users is typically the uplink on their last mile connection, so this probably won't bring the internet down or crash any ISPs, but it will make life worse for people sharing the connection."

When contacted by the Industry Standard, BitTorrent marketing manager Simon Morris described the Bennett's report as "utter nonsense," and said that the switch to uTP -- a UDP-based implementation of the BitTorrent protocol -- was intended to reduce network congestion. "It completely mischaracterizes what we're trying to do with uTP," Morris said in an email. "We're trying to roll out a protocol that is latency sensitive/performance neutral, NOT a greedy one that kills the internet."
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...utter-nonsense





BitTorrent Site Pwns Anti-Piracy Outfit
Ernesto

Anti-piracy organizations are known for their excellent lobbying skills. However, knowledge of the Internet and technology doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite. Recently the Lithuanian anti-piracy outfit changed its name, but forgot to register the new domain. It now belongs to the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in the country.

There are a lot of BitTorrent users in Lithuania, and the two largest BitTorrent sites in the country, Torrent.lt and Linkomanija.net are in the top 20 of Lithuania’s most visited websites.

Of course, a country with plenty of ‘pirates’ has to have its own anti-piracy organization, and Lithuania is no different. The local anti-piracy outfit goes by the name ANVA, an acronym for ‘Antipiracines Veiklos Asociacija’. Their main targets are the local BitTorrent sites, which they have announced they will sue for millions in damages.

To use the word ‘Lithuania’ in a Lithuanian organization’s name requires government approval. Recently, ANVA changed its name to LANVA, after they succeeded in getting this authorization. This seal of approval may give the organization more credibility, but there is a small problem. They forgot to register the domain lanva.lt when they changed their name. Before, they were using anva.lt, but while they did make a new logo with the L included, registering a new domain didn’t come to mind.

Usually, mistakes like this can be easily overcome by paying a certain amount of money to the person who was smart enough to register the domain, but not this time. Kestas Ermanas, the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in Lithuania, registered the domain as soon as he found out about the name change, and he is not planning to hand it over to his arch rival.

The domain Kestas bought currently displays the following message: “This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the Internet and the future.”

LANVA has scheduled an emergency meeting next Thursday to discuss what they can do to get the lanva.lt domain in their possession. The chances that they will get the domain through a dispute are very slim though. There have been several cases in Lithuania where large companies sued owners of domain names, and they lost every single time.

This is not the first time that an anti-piracy organization has had a domain dispute with a BitTorrent site. October last year The Pirate Bay got hold of the domain name of IFPI, under which they wanted to launch the “International Federation of Pirate Interests.” The case was later lost by The Pirate Bay, but the fact that they acquired it in the first place is yet another example of the tech illiteracy of these organizations.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-s...outfit-081206/





Change.gov Set Free
Lawrence Lessig

Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.

This is great news about a subject that's harder than it seems. One might well ask why is this an issue at all? The one thing copyright law is pretty good at is exempting works of the government from copyright protection. Why should the published work of a transition, or a President, be any different?

I don't think it should be, but I get why this is a hard issue. Whether or not one was free to republish works printed by the GPO, the freedom that digital technologies enables here is certainly enough to give one pause. I'm fine with the pause; I'd be happy to defend the freedom explicitly. But it is understandable that this is something that any administration would have to think through.

I'm glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/changegov_set_free.html





DMCA Exemptions Desired to Hack iPhones, DVDs
Chris Soghoian

For copyright activists, Christmas comes but once every three years: a chance to ask Santa for a new exemption to the much-hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act's prohibitions against hacking, reverse engineering, and evasion of digital rights management (DRM) schemes protecting all kinds of digital works and electronic items.

Judging from the list of 19 exemptions requested this year, some in the cyberlaw community are thinking big. (Disclosure: One of the DMCA exemption requests was submitted on behalf of this blogger by Harvard University's Cyberlaw Clinic.)The requests include the right to legally jailbreak iPhones to use third-party software, university professors wishing to rip clips from DVDs for classroom use, YouTube users wishing to rip DVDs to make video mashups, a request to allow users to hack DRM protecting content from stores that have gone bankrupt or shut down, and a request to allow security researchers to reverse-engineer video games with security flaws that put end users at risk.

Electronic Frontier Foundation uber-lawyer Fred von Lohmann told Wired News earlier this week that the government "has repeatedly dismissed any consumer-oriented fair uses, such as making backup copies of DVDs or video games, as well as requests for exemptions to enable copying DVDs to laptops and portable devices." He also told them that the DMCA exemption process is "hopelessly broken."

That depressing outlook doesn't seem to have stopped Lohmann from co-authoring two significant requests to the copyright office for exemptions squarely targeted at members of the public.

The highlights
The 19 requests are too lengthy to blog, and so only the most noteworthy (to this blogger) have been presented here. Those wishing to read through the others can find all of the submitted exemption requests at the Copyright Office's Web site.

First, the EFF has asked that consumers be allowed to jailbreak or hack smartphones to run lawfully obtained third-party software on the devices. Such an exemption, if granted, would be great news for the estimated 1 million users who have hacked their iPhone, and risked the wrath of Steve Jobs as his engineers played cat-and-mouse to stop the jailbreaking. Such an exemption would also be fantastic news for Mozilla, which is currently prohibited by Apple's terms of service from bringing the popular Firefox browser to iPhone.

In the EFF's second request, the group has asked the Copyright Office to permit end users to circumvent the DRM protecting DVDs, for the purpose of creating noncommercial videos that fall squarely within the protections of fair use. While such circumvention is already trivially easy to do with tools such as Handbreak, it is technically illegal to do so. For the millions of YouTube users who remix and mash up snippets of copyrighted works (including Sen. John McCain), such an exemption would mean digital freedom.

In complementary filings, representatives from Duke University, the University at California at Berkeley, Middle Tennessee State University and the Library Copyright Alliance asked for a similar exemption for DVD ripping, but solely for professors who wish to create compilations of digital film clips for classroom use. A more limited professor exemption was granted back in 2006, but only for those teaching film studies. Both groups would like to see that exemption expanded to professors and K-12 teachers from all fields.

The Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University, representing this blogger, has asked the Copyright Office to allow end users to circumvent the DRM protecting music, video, software, and games in the event that a central authenticating server is shut down. This has happened several times in the past few years, including Microsoft's MSN Music Store, Google's Video store, Yahoo Music, and Wal-Mart. The team also asked that researchers be permitted to reverse engineer functioning DRM stores (such as Apple's iTunes) before any shuttering is announced, for good-faith documentation purposes.

Finally, Professor J. Alex Halderman has expanded his successful "Sony Rootkit" 2006 request, and has asked that security researchers be allowed to circumvent the DRM in digital works, software or games that create or exploit security vulnerabilities on the computers of end users. While his request is broad, the main focus is on DRM schemes such as SafeDisc and SecuROM, which are widely used in the video game industry (such as in Electronic Arts' Spore).

Next steps
During the next few months, the Copyright Office will allow members of the public to submit comments on the exemptions requested during this cycle. Later, in March, two public hearings will be held, in Washington, D.C., and California. There will likely be appearances by several public-interest groups and law school clinics speaking in support for their exemptions requests, while representatives from the recording, motion picture, and software industries are likely to show up to fight against such efforts to weaken the DMCA. At the very least, the hearings promise to be quite a spectacle.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10112046-46.html





Valve Says DRM is Stupid, But Microsoft Still Doesn't Get It
Ben Kuchera

Valve is a wonderfully open company—in many cases, direct questions sent to the publisher will be answered by a member of the creative team within hours. One gamer recently e-mailed Valve and asked why he saw EA's logo on a commercial for Left 4 Dead: he bought the game via Steam but didn't want to support EA after the Spore DRM debacle. He got a reply from a managing director at the company, Gabe Newell, that was to the point: EA only handles distribution for the physical product, and Valve thinks most DRM is "just dumb."

"Left 4 Dead is developed entirely by Valve. Steam revenue for our games is not shared with third parties. Around the world we have a number of distribution partners to handle retail distribution of our games (i.e. make discs and boxes). EA is one of those partners," Newell wrote. In other words, if you buy Left 4 Dead through Steam, EA doesn't see any of your money. This should be good news for gamers who want to slaughter some zombies but don't want to break their EA boycott.

Newell doesn't have kind words for the use of digital rights managements. "As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)," he wrote. "We really really discourage other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches."

Buying Left 4 Dead on Steam supports Valve, not EA

It's easy for him to say; Steam is its own form of DRM, one that makes programs like SecuROM redundant. "You'd have to ask Valve for specific numbers," PC Gaming Alliance President Randy Stude told Ars, "but I believe piracy on Steam is very low." You can add games you obtained at retail to the Steam service to take advantage of its social networking features, but you need your CD key to do it; cracked games are out of luck. Don't assume that buying a game via Steam means escaping SecuROM however, as EA has included the program on some its own games that it has released via Steam, such as Crysis: Warhead.
If we don't kick you in the gut, can we punch you in the face?

Newell's take attracted the attention of others in the gaming industry. "I think the problem with DRM is not so much the particular method used, but the attitude behind it. It makes us feel like we're all being punished for the sins of the few," Microsoft's Games for Windows Community Manager Ryan Miller wrote on his blog. "It is also pretty clear that most DRM is not a problem for the pirates, just for the legitimate consumers. These two factors combine to make a ton of bad feelings on the consumer side."

This is an arguable sentiment: gamers do care about the method of DRM that is used. Programs such as SecuROM (which don't uninstall along with the game) and limits on the number of installations allowed anger PC gamers. When we reported on the use of SecuROM in Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC, many of our readers pledged not to buy the game on principle.

Miller addresses that controversy directly. "Rockstar has put an interesting twist on the much-maligned software by removing the install limits that have plagued other games, though the software still installs components that can be very difficult to remove should you want them off your hard drive," he wrote. "It seems like a reasonable compromise to me, but what do you think? Is the lack of install limits enough to overlook the installation of code you can't remove?"

This is the sort of question that may sound reasonable from Miller's point of view, but will enrage PC gamers. SecuROM serves no purpose other than to annoy legitimate customers, and a version of the game that lacks the program (and is superior for that) will be available to pirates as soon as the game is released, if not before. The fact that Rockstar won't limit installations, a new twist on DRM that has drawn bile from gamers and seemingly given pirates the high ground, doesn't excuse the use of SecuROM in the game.

While Steam is a step in the right direction, giving gamers the ability to play games on multiple systems without having to worry about losing discs or CD keys, some gamers have reported issues getting their games to work in offline mode, and worry about Valve shutting down the servers at some point in the future. Piracy is a complex issue with no easy answer, but what's clear is that gamers are less and less willing to put up with intrusive DRM technology in their games, but there doesn't seem to be much of a movement to lessen its use among game publishers.

What the industry has to understand is that gamers have the upper hand, as they can simply go to the torrents for a free version of each game that includes no DRM. Until publishers do more to welcome their legitimate customers as friends instead of treating them as potential pirates, piracy will continue to eat at profits and morale.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...nt-get-it.html





Microsoft Targets Windows XP Pirates

Criminal gangs create their own version of XP called Blue Edition
Mark Harris

Microsoft today announced legal action around the world against online auctioneers who allegedly orchestrated international marketing schemes and sold counterfeit software.

At the centre of its lawsuits is the so-called Blue Edition of Windows XP, a counterfeit version of Microsoft's aging operating system on CD.

In the UK, Microsoft began seven civil cases for alleged trademark infringement against traders on various internet auction sites for selling "high quality counterfeit" Windows and Office software.

Hundreds of buyers duped

Microsoft reckons that these sellers may have sold over 900 individual counterfeits to an estimated value of over £69,000.

Similar legal proceedings - 63 in all - were launched in the US, Germany, France, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Mexico and New Zealand, emphasising the global nature of software piracy.

Despite the rampant sale of counterfeit and pirated software on internet auction sites, none of the actions Microsoft filed today have been brought against eBay or other auction sites.

In fact, says Microsoft, "Certain internet auction platforms, like eBay, proactively cooperate in the fight against counterfeiters."
http://www.techradar.com/news/softwa...pirates-490950





Forget Citigroup and Lehman, Puppet Show Needs a Bailout
Jennifer Steinhauer

There are many ways to measure California’s tanking economy: an 8.2 percent unemployment rate; a multibillion-dollar state budget gap; threatened endowments of the city’s museums, causing some cultural institutions to nearly default on mortgages; and the continued weakening of the Hollywood studio system. But the meltdown of the marionettes may say it all.

Near a freeway overpass on a decidedly scrappy edge of downtown Los Angeles is a marionette puppet theater that has enchanted children over nearly five decades, several recessions, two riots, at least four failed urban renewal plans and an earthquake or two.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s shows, employing an eclectic selection of Mr. Baker’s 3,000 handmade puppets prancing about a shoebox-size theater perpetually decked out in gold garlands, are a staple of a Los Angeleno childhood. It is the cultural equivalent of the annual march by the nation’s third graders to the neighborhood firehouse.

But the struggling California economy and some bad business decisions by Mr. Baker have left the Bob Baker marionettes in a deep financial ditch, and Mr. Baker, a rather unheralded Hollywood legend, with an uncertain future. “We have all kinds of problems that have come up recently,” Mr. Baker said. “But we’re not going to close. We’re going to fight this out to the very bitter end.”

Over the last few months Mr. Baker, 84, has fallen $30,000 behind on his mortgage and lost a rent-paying tenant, while his two major sources of revenue have dried up. First, the public schools have reduced financing for field trips. And second, some of his lower-income parents, he said, unemployed and swimming in debt, are unable to come up with the $15-per-ticket admission.

“We’ve had quite a few people call who are losing their houses and have to cancel birthday parties,” he said.

In addition, Mr. Baker said, a few years ago he refinanced the theater’s mortgage to help pay for rising operating costs, and the mortgage payments have shot up. A business deal he made to improve his space went bad. He said he was negotiating with his lenders, and added ruefully, “I am more of an artist than a businessman.”

In a city where children’s movies are often screened in a Hollywood theater with white-glove popcorn service and the organic certifications of birthday cakes are debated at length on Web sites aimed at parents, Mr. Baker’s theater is a charming throwback.
As they have for generations, children gather in a circle on the floor of the 200-person capacity auditorium as Mr. Baker’s elaborately appointed marionettes scamper about to the sounds of old phonograph records, scratches and all. The theater is one of the few places in Los Angeles that routinely attracts racially and economically diverse groups of children.

A typical show requires about 15 workers, including 8 puppeteers, a lighting designer, a costume maker and ticket takers. There are usually two productions a year, one with a Christmas theme. The second show might be “Something to Crow About,” a barnyard spectacular; the Latin-flavored “Fiesta”; or a revue like “Bob Baker’s Musical World,” which might evolve over the season and employ a rotation of 100 or more puppets. Mr. Baker also performs puppet shows around Southern California for birthday parties and other events. The annual budget, Mr. Baker said, is about $360,000.

Victoria Hurley, 42, grew up in Los Angeles going to the shows, and now takes her children, who are 5 and 3. “They still serve the exact kind of ice cream with the exact same wooden spoon I got 30 years ago,” Mrs. Hurley said. “The quality of the entertainment has certainly held up fantastically, but I think the building could use some sprucing. It is almost like they haven’t even repainted. I personally think it is charming, but if I came from New York and brought my children I might feel otherwise.”

At a recent performance of “The Nutcracker,” an eclectic mix of Mr. Baker’s handmade puppets appeared, ranging from a Mouse King, resplendent in velvet, to what is perhaps best described as selections from the “Soul Train” collection, white leisure suits and gold trim included.

The marionettes are handled by Mr. Baker’s students, who spend a good year under his tutelage before they are allowed to don black clothing and work before an audience. As they moved through the room they occasionally dropped a puppet into the lap of a delighted toddler. As usual, the whole affair ended with a cup of vanilla ice cream handed to each child.

The shows are not exactly linear. The “Soul Train” marionettes, for example, are wedged into “The Nutcracker,” and the story seems oddly lacking in the middle section. But the focus is really on the puppets, in their glorious velvet and gossamer.

“There is a magic thing about a live puppet show,” Mr. Baker said recently. “I was watching the children just today and they were hugging the puppets, and then they always come up after me and ask me how they work. A lot of children who come here have never been to a live show and may never go to a live show again.”

The number of people whose careers as puppeteers Mr. Baker started is “amazing, at least a dozen professionally,” said Greg Williams, 51, a professional puppeteer who helps Mr. Baker with his road shows. “I started with him when I was 15, and was cleaning the party room. I went from there to doing the sets to the lights. One day a puppeteer wasn’t available, and I got shoved on the floor,” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Baker “gets a lot of the neighborhood kids, and some of these kids who look like they would have no future are here entertaining and enjoying it,” Mr. Williams said. Mr. Baker still does many private birthday parties personally. “You get those Beverly Hills parents and you need to keep those people happy,” he added.

Mr. Baker, whose puppet passion began at an early age, has had an authentic Hollywood career — something not immediately evident given his modest site downtown.

He grew up in what is now Koreatown, in a house often full of actors and others from the “theatrical world,” Mr. Baker said, and graduated from Hollywood High School. When he was a little boy, his father took him to a holiday show at an area department store, which featured, as many store entertainments did in the early 20th century, puppets.

When he turned 7 he bought two puppets and soon started working the birthday party circuit. He said his first party was for Mervyn LeRoy, a producer and director for both Warner Brothers and MGM, which set off a word-of-mouth campaign. Years later he would perform at Liza Minnelli’s fourth birthday party. (And, keeping it in the family, a few years after that, he appeared in the 1954 Judy Garland film, “A Star Is Born,” conducting a marionette show.)

In the 1940s Mr. Baker worked as a puppet maker for George Pal, creator of the Puppetoons, whose movies and television credits include cult films like Edgar G. Ulmer’s “Bluebeard” (1944), the original “Star Trek” series and “Bewitched.”

Mr. Baker started his production company in 1949 with his business partner, Alton Wood (who died in 2001). It has remained one of the more well-known training grounds for puppet makers who have gone on to work in fantasy films.

But it is the theater, opened in 1960 in a warehouselike building, for which Mr. Baker is best known around town. The elaborate facade meant to suggest “Alice in Wonderland” is long gone, as are the evening performances, which Mr. Baker said faded after the 1965 Watts riots made people afraid to venture downtown at night. Weekends and shows for school groups — along with sales of puppets and movie work — have sustained him, and he hopes the doors of his theater will stay open.

“My mother used to say, ‘We can fall into a mud puddle and come up smelling like roses,’ ” Mr. Baker said. “We have gone through some pretty hard times, and I just have to see the light of day. We’re just going to make it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/theater/02pupp.html





New Windows Worm Builds Massive Botnet

Half a million PCs infected, botnet still growing, says researcher
Gregg Keizer

The worm exploiting a critical Windows bug that Microsoft Corp. patched with an emergency fix in late October is being used to build a new botnet, a security researcher said today.

Ivan Macalintal, a senior research engineer with Trend Micro Inc., said that the worm, which his company has dubbed "Downad.a" -- it's called "Conficker.a" by Microsoft and "Downadup" by Symantec Corp. -- is a key component in a new botnet that criminals are creating.

"We think 500,000 is a ball park figure," said Macalintal when asked the size of the new botnet. "That's not as large as some, such as [the] Kraken [botnet], or Storm earlier, but it's still starting to grow."

Last week, Microsoft warned that the worm was behind a spike in exploits of a bug in the Windows Server service, which is used by the operating system to connect to network file and print servers. Microsoft patched the service with an emergency fix it issued Oct. 23, shortly after it discovered a small number of infected PCs in Southeast Asia.

However, the new worm is a global threat, said Macalintal. "This has real potential to do damage," he said. Trend Micro has spotted infected IP addresses on the networks of Internet service providers (ISPs) in the U.S., China, India, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

The worm first appeared about a week and a half ago, and began spreading in earnest just before Thanksgiving, he added.

Macalintal also said that it appears the botnet is being built by a new group of cyber-criminals, not one of the gangs that lost control of compromised computers when McColo Corp., a California hosting company, was yanked off the Internet. When McColo went offline, crooks lost access to the command-and-control servers which gave marching orders to some of the world's biggest botnets, including "Srizbi" and "Rustock."

One result of the McColo takedown was a temporary slump in spam; some message security vendors said last week that they had seen a sharp increase in spam as the hackers managed to regain control of their botnets.

Security experts, including those at Trend Micro, are coordinating efforts, said Macalintal, to pass along their lists of worm-infected PCs to ISPs, who have been asked to contact the computers' owners and urge them to clean their machines of the worm.

"But that's an uphill climb," admitted Macalintal.

Users who haven't applied the emergency patch -- labeled MS08-067 by Microsoft -- should do so as soon as possible, Macalintal said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9121958





Hacker in Final Showdown to Avoid Extradition to US

Briton accused of biggest hack in US military history wins delay in judicial review
Bobbie Johnson,

The British man accused of hacking into US military computers will have his final showdown in the UK courts next month.

After almost four years of fighting extradition to the US as a result of what prosecutors have called "the biggest military computer hack of all time", Londoner Gary McKinnon will face a judicial review conducted by the high court on January 20.

McKinnon – who used the online name Solo – is accused of hacking into computers belonging to the Pentagon, Nasa and US armed forces in raids conducted between 2001 and 2002.

Prosecutors say he shut down thousands of machines and caused up to $700,000 worth of damage, while the 42-year-old claims he was searching for evidence of UFOs.

Over the course of the case, defence lawyers argued that McKinnon will face unduly harsh punishment for his actions and should instead face trial in the UK, since the alleged hacking attacks were conducted from a house in north London.

By the time the decision is made, it will be almost seven years since McKinnon ended his activities. During that time a succession of arguments have been made against his removal – including that he faces up to 60 years in prison or detention at Guantánamo Bay, and that he should receive leniency because he suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

Such protestations have so far proved unsuccessful, however, with a string of decisions against him, including rulings by the law lords and the home secretary. McKinnon's last chance to avoid removal to the US will come in next month's judicial review.

Prosecutors acting for the government argued that McKinnon's review should take place today but his lawyers succeeded in pushing it back until the new year.

The news brought cheer to some campaigners who see the date as an auspicious sign. Coinciding with the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, supporters at the Free Gary website suggested the date could be the equivalent of "waving a couple of fingers" at the Bush administration.

In recent months campaigners – including former home secretary David Blunkett have argued that McKinnon should be tried in the UK because of his medical condition.

His supporters are hopeful that they can sway the final judgment, particularly after Gordon Brown spoke about the case publicly for the first time last week and hinted that McKinnon may not end up in a US jail.

During prime minister's questions last week, Brown was asked about McKinnon's situation and said that existing conventions would enable him to serve any prison sentence in Britain, rather than in the US.

"The UK and the US are signatories to the Council of Europe convention on the transfer of sentenced persons, which enables a person found guilty in the United States of America to serve their sentence in the UK," he told MPs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...adition-hacker





Leaked Army Files Highlight Dangers of Peer-To-Peer
Ben Worthen

Organizations that have suffered data breaches usually rush to plug technology or policy holes that led to the loss of information, but trying to retrieve data that has already leaked can be a difficult task.

Once information is out, it’s hard to get back

Consider the case of an apparent data breach of Army soldiers’ names and personal information, the details of which were described in an August letter sent by then Sen. Joseph Biden to Pete Geren, secretary of the Army. The letter, which has been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, mentions “files containing the personal identifying information of nearly 24,000 U.S. soldiers” that became publicly accessible through a so-called peer-to-peer network. “The files include full names and social security numbers” of the soldiers, the letter says.

The Army wouldn’t confirm or deny the existence of the files, and said it doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations or incidents. A spokeswoman replied in an email that the Army has taken steps in recent months to boost its security. However, there’s little it can do about information on computers the government doesn’t control; in that situation, “the Army can only ask the owner of a public site to remove the information,” she says in the email.

In this case the files—spreadsheets that appear to be lists of soldiers due for promotion—made their way to a peer-to-peer file-trading network, which lets people connect their computers directly to one another. People most commonly use these networks—examples include Limewire and BitTorrent—to swap music files or videos.

But in many cases the software used to connect to the network also makes available all the files on someone’s computer, such as bank statements or work documents. It’s not clear how the apparently leaked Army information reached the network, but one possible scenario is that someone in the military had stored the information on a home computer that was used to exchange files.

Businesses and other organizations are just starting to appreciate the risk these networks pose. For example, peer-to-peer networks were named on only a few ballots in a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy think tank, asking security professionals to identify potentially-dangerous software. But it was considered the single greatest threat among the security pros that cited it.

This wouldn’t be the first time that military files have been available over peer-to-peer networks, says Robert Boback, chief executive of Tiversa Inc., a security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology. He says that he’s come across many such documents in the past, although he declined to say whether this included the list mentioned in Mr. Biden’s letter.

The Army says that its policy forbids people from installing peer-to-peer software on Army-owned computers. Additionally, in May the Army stopped including social-security numbers and other personally-identifiable information on promotion lists. And in June, the Army developed a training program on the threat of information leaks and how to prevent them, which personnel will be required to take.

Breaches like this are preventable, says Bob Gourley, former chief information officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency. It requires investing in technology that would control who has access to certain information and strict enforcement of policies now in place. It requires effort, time and money. Unfortunately, organizations don’t seem willing to make that effort. “We’ve had 10 years of warning of how damning and dangerous this kind of activity can be,” he says. “Why is it still occurring when it doesn’t have to?”


Comments

Can you please stop oversimplifying everything?

Almost rarely, except if the program is a delicate trojan, do peer-peer files share “everything” on a computer. Instead, the idiot installs and then OPTs in to share particular folders — such as My Documents for everyone to use.
Comment by Sigh. - December 2, 2008 at 3:26 pm

Ben -
In the case of Bittorrent, there is no concept of sharing one of your folders (or accidentally sharing your whole hard drive). Instead, you explicitly download a file, and as you download it you also upload pieces of it to others. The “danger” you’re talking about does not apply to Bittorrent. Just because BitTorrent is a P2P application does not mean it creates these dangers. Skype is also a P2P application, and like BitTorrent it also does not create these dangers. You correctly do not mention Skype in your post. I wish you would amend or remove your reference to Bittorrent. I hope you can correct your article.
Best regards,
Simon Morris
VP Marketing
BitTorrent, Inc.
Comment by Simon Morris - December 2, 2008 at 3:33 pm
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/12...-peer-to-peer/





Thieves Winning Online War
John Markoff

Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it.

Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect its Windows operating system, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware surreptitiously takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread more malware to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of the onslaught.

As more business and social life has moved onto the Web, criminals thriving on an underground economy of credit card thefts, bank fraud and other scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year, according to a conservative estimate by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A Russian company that sells fake antivirus software that actually takes over a computer pays its illicit distributors as much as $5 million a year.

With vast resources from stolen credit card and other financial information, the cyberattackers are handily winning a technology arms race.

“Right now the bad guys are improving more quickly than the good guys,” said Patrick Lincoln, director of the computer science laboratory at SRI International, a science and technology research group.

A well-financed computer underground has built an advantage by working in countries that have global Internet connections but authorities with little appetite for prosecuting offenders who are bringing in significant amounts of foreign currency. That was driven home in late October when RSA FraudAction Research Lab, a security consulting group based in Bedford, Mass., discovered a cache of half a million credit card numbers and bank account log-ins that had been stolen by a network of so-called zombie computers remotely controlled by an online gang.

In October, researchers at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center reported that the percentage of online computers worldwide infected by botnets — networks of programs connected via the Internet that send spam or disrupt Internet-based services — is likely to increase to 15 percent by the end of this year, from 10 percent in 2007. That suggests a staggering number of infected computers, as many as 10 million, being used to distribute spam and malware over the Internet each day, according to research compiled by PandaLabs.

Security researchers concede that their efforts are largely an exercise in a game of whack-a-mole because botnets that distribute malware like worms, the programs that can move from computer to computer, are still relatively invisible to commercial antivirus software. A research report last month by Stuart Staniford, chief scientist of FireEye, a Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicated that in tests of 36 commercial antivirus products, fewer than half of the newest malicious software programs were identified.

There have been some recent successes, but they are short-lived. On Nov. 11, the volume of spam, which transports the malware, dropped by half around the globe after an Internet service provider disconnected the Mycolo Corporation, an American firm with Russian ties, from the Internet. But the respite is not expected to last long as cybercriminals regain control of their spam-generating computers.

“Modern worms are stealthier and they are professionally written,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom. “The criminals have gone upmarket, and they’re organized and international because there is real money to be made.”

The gangs keep improving their malware, and now programs can be written to hunt for a specific type of information stored on a personal computer. For example, some malware uses the operating system to look for recent documents created by a user, on the assumption they will be more valuable. Some routinely watch for and then steal log-in and password information, specifically consumer financial information.

The sophistication of the programs has in the last two years begun to give them almost lifelike capabilities. For example, malware programs now infect computers and then routinely use their own antivirus capabilities to not only disable antivirus software but also remove competing malware programs. Recently, Microsoft antimalware researchers disassembled an infecting program and were stunned to discover that it was programmed to turn on the Windows Update feature after it took over the user’s computer. The infection was ensuring that it was protected from other criminal attackers.

And there is more of it. Microsoft has monitored a 43 percent jump in malware removed from Windows computers just in the last half year.

The biggest problem may be that people cannot tell if their computers are infected because the malware often masks its presence from antivirus software. For now, Apple’s Macintosh computers are more or less exempt from the attacks, but researchers expect Apple machines to become a larger target as their market share grows.

The severity of the situation was driven home not long ago for Ed Amaroso, AT&T’s chief security official. “I was at home with my mother’s computer recently and I showed her it was attacking China,” he said. “ ‘Can you just make it run a little faster?’ she asked, and I told her ‘Ma, we have to reimage your hard disk.’ ”

Beyond the billions of dollars lost in theft of money and data is another, deeper impact. Many Internet executives fear that basic trust in what has become the foundation of 21st century commerce is rapidly eroding. “There’s an increasing trend to depend on the Internet for a wide range of applications, many of them having to deal with financial institutions,” said Vinton G. Cerf, one of the original designers of the Internet, who is now Google’s “chief Internet evangelist.”

“The more we depend on these types of systems, the more vulnerable we become,” he said.

The United States government has begun to recognize the extent of the problem. In January, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 54, establishing a national cybersecurity initiative. The plan, which may cost more than $30 billion over seven years, is directed at securing the federal government’s own computers as well as the systems that run the nation’s critical infrastructure, like oil and gas networks and electric power and water systems.

That will do little, however, to help protect businesses and consumers who use the hundreds of millions of Internet-connected personal computers and cellphones, the criminals’ newest target.

Despite new technologies that are holding some attackers at bay, several computer security experts said they were worried that the economic downturn will make computer security the first casualty of corporate spending cuts. Security gets hit because it is hard to measure its effectiveness, said Eugene Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue University.

He is pessimistic. “In many respects, we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” he said, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

The cyber-criminals appear to be at least as technically advanced as the most sophisticated software companies. And they are faster and more flexible. As software companies have tightened the security of the basic operating systems like Windows and Macintosh, attackers have moved on to Web browsers and Internet-connected programs like Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime.

This has led to an era of so-called “drive-by infections,” where users are induced to click on Web links that are contained in e-mail messages. Cyber-criminals have raised the ability to fool unsuspecting computer users into clicking on intriguing messages to a high art.

Researchers note that the global cycle of distributing security patches inevitably plays to the advantage of the attacker, who can continually hunt for and exploit new backdoors and weaknesses in systems. This year, computer security firms have begun shifting from traditional anti-virus program designs, which are regularly updated on subscribers’ personal computers, to Web-based services, which can be updated even faster.

Security researchers at SRI International are now collecting over 10,000 unique samples of malware daily from around the global. “To me it feels like job security,” said Phillip Porras, an SRI program director and the computer security expert who led the design of the company’s Bothunter program, available free at www.bothunter.net.

“This is always an arm race, as long as it gets into your machine faster than the update to detect it, the bad guys win,” said Mr. Schneier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/te...6security.html





Who Protects The Internet?

This guest post is written by Matt Rutherford, Web Strategist and technology producer for Charlie Rose. Matt focuses on the macro themes affecting the internet and the wider world. You can read Matt’s previous guest post, Larry Lessig Defends Copyright, Loves Charlie Rose Remixes, here.

Who protects the internet? In part, it’s this man – General Kevin Chilton, US STRATCOM commander and the head of all military cyber warfare. We’re broadcasting an interview tonight with General Chilton, in which he discusses the threat of cyber warfare, along with his other remits of space warfare and the US nuclear deterrent. Chilton is fascinating, and amongst other things has been a NASA space shuttle pilot, logging over 700 hours in space. You can watch the full interview here (and it is embedded below).

The discussion with General Chilton brings to light a crucial question, however. Is the internet actually protected? The military remit is to defend the .mil networks, prevent online espionage, and develop offensive strike capabilities. But who’s protecting the rest? Given its integration with every aspect of our lives and economy, it’s surprising just how little we know about who defends our electronic nervous system.

The Threat

There’s copious discussion about exactly how vulnerable the US is to online attack. The alleged Russian DoS attacks on Estonia in 2007, and on Georgia this summer, highlighted the potential damage of state sponsored attacks. China has also been developing cyber warfare capabilities for some time, mounting online intelligence operations against Taiwan, and almost certainly against the US. The Chinese military has openly stated that it plans to be able to win an “informationized war” by the middle of this century. Russia, Israel and Romania are also alleged to have high-level cyber warfare capabilities.

This developing threat from state actors led Sami Saydjari, CEO of Cyber Defense LLC, to testify to the US House Committee of Homeland Security in 2007, saying:

“The US is vulnerable to a strategically crippling cyber attack from nation-state-class adversaries.” Such an attack has the potential to turn the US “from being a superpower to a third-world nation practically overnight.”

I should point out that many have disputed the apocalyptic nature of Saydjari’s statement. Kevin Mitnick, the reformed hacker, noted in a recent phone call:

“Could we face a mass DOS attack, as in Georgia and Estonia? I don’t think so. I think it would be more of a surveillance operation to get intelligence. Technically you could have a mass attack against the thirteen root nameservers around the world. But as for cyber war, I don’t think we’re at that point yet, I think it’s over-stated.”

Regardless of the impact of an offensive cyber attack, everyone appears to agree on the insidious danger from online intelligence gathering. Former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke eloquently summarized this in Foreign Policy recently:

“People tend to think about attacks that change things—turn off power grids, or whatever. And while that’s possible, what is happening every day is quite devastating, even though it doesn’t have a kinetic impact and there are no body bags. What’s happening every day is that all of our information is being stolen. So, we pay billions of dollars for research and development, both in the government and the private sector, for engineering, for pharmaceuticals, for bioengineering, genetic stuff… and all that information gets stolen for one one-thousandth of the cost that it took to develop it.”

Who protects us?

The problem is that it isn’t clear who has the remit for comprehensive defense of the internet. The US military and intelligence agencies defend government networks and track targets online, both domestically and abroad. A new Bush-ordained funding boost in January this year will help them become more coordinated. However, as Richard Clarke goes on to note, “the problem is that much of what we need to protect is not in the U.S. government; it’s in our private companies and our private networks”.

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division operates various public-private initiatives, such as the rather prosaic National Cyber Security Awareness Month. But beyond this, the general response appears highly fragmented with little grand oversight or public-private coordination. I emailed Jonathan Zittrain to ask his opinion on ‘who protects the internet’. He replied:

“Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices — unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the North American Network Operators Group. But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls — a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.”

Hackers to the rescue?

When Obama appoints a white house CTO, there will at least be an official figurehead in charge of this matter. Proposed candidates for the role currently include Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos and Julius Genachowski from IAC.

However, perhaps the future of internet security really lies in the hands of the community. Indeed, Jonathan Zittrain talked about ‘good hackers’ on our show in May, and he argues the importance of community policing in The Future of the Internet. The last few years of the internet have been about empowering the masses, and removing intermediary apparatus – so why not leverage the community to defend its cyber territory? The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Indeed, this is already happening, to a certain extent. Just look at Dan Kaminsky, a computer consultant who discovered a fundamental flaw in DNS, allowing him control over any website online. This flaw was astounding in what it gave access to – yet Dan Kaminsky didn’t turn to a government agency or organization, or abuse the hack himself. Instead he made a phone call to Paul Vixie, one of the creators of the BIND9 DNS routing software, and they assembled a team of civilians and private companies to resolve this apocalyptic vulnerability.

It will be interesting to see what happens from here. And whilst it’s certainly entertaining to envision vigilante hackers and rag-tag groups of high school kids overcoming nation states, I think there’s more serious matters at stake. The way that the internet community reacts and operates with state apparatus in defending against cyber threats will be a crucial indicator of our future society. How reliant are we on the nation-state to protect us? Will it ever be possible for internet communities to erode the relevance of the nation state? Or will the internet turn out to be just as Hobbesian as the real world has been?

Charlie Rose’s discussions with General Kevin Chilton and Jonathan Zittrain are available at our website, www.charlierose.com. Matt Rutherford can be reached at matt@charlierose.com.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/02...-the-internet/





Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web
Joshua Davis

How to Plug the Hole in the Internet

In June 2005, a balding, slightly overweight, perpetually T-shirt-clad 26-year-old computer consultant named Dan Kaminsky decided to get in shape. He began by scanning the Internet for workout tips and read that five minutes of sprinting was the equivalent of a half-hour jog. This seemed like a great shortcut—an elegant exercise hack—so he bought some running shoes at the nearest Niketown. That same afternoon, he laced up his new kicks and burst out the front door of his Seattle apartment building for his first five-minute workout. He took a few strides, slipped on a concrete ramp and crashed to the sidewalk, shattering his left elbow.

He spent the next few weeks stuck at home in a Percocet-tinged haze. Before the injury, he'd spent his days testing the inner workings of software programs. Tech companies hired him to root out security holes before hackers could find them. Kaminsky did it well. He had a knack for breaking things—bones and software alike.

But now, laid up in bed, he couldn't think clearly. His mind drifted. Running hadn't worked out so well. Should he buy a stationary bike? Maybe one of those recumbent jobs would be best. He thought about partying in Las Vegas ... mmm, martinis ... and recalled a trick he'd figured out for getting free Wi-Fi at Starbucks.

As his arm healed, the details of that Starbucks hack kept nagging at him. He remembered that he had gotten into Starbucks' locked network using the domain name system, or DNS. When someone types google .com into a browser, DNS has a list of exactly where Google's servers are and directs the traffic to them. It's like directory assistance for the Internet. At Starbucks, the port for the low-bandwidth DNS connection—port 53—was left open to route customers to the Pay for Starbucks Wi-Fi Web page.

So, rather than pay, Kaminsky used port 53 to access the open DNS connection and get online. It was free but super-slow, and his friends mocked him mercilessly. To Kaminsky that was an irresistible challenge. After weeks of studying the minutiae of DNS and refining his hack, he was finally able to stream a 12-second animated video of Darth Vader dancing a jig with Michael Flatley. (The clip paired the Lord of the Sith with the Lord of the Dance.)

That was more than a year ago, but it still made him smile. DNS was the unglamorous underbelly of the Internet, but it had amazing powers. Kaminsky felt drawn to the obscure, often-ignored protocol all over again.

Maybe the painkillers loosened something in his mind, because as Kaminsky began to think more deeply about DNS he became convinced that something wasn't right. He couldn't quite figure it out, but the feeling stuck with him even after he stopped taking the pain pills. He returned to work full time and bought a recumbent stationary bike. He got hired to test the security of Windows Vista before it was released, repeatedly punching holes in it for Microsoft. Still, in the back of his mind, he was sure that the entire DNS system was vulnerable to attack.

Then last January, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon, he flopped down on his bed, flipped open his laptop, and started playing games with DNS. He used a software program called Scapy to fire random queries at the system. He liked to see how it would respond and decided to ask for the location of a series of nonexistent Web pages at a Fortune 500 company. Then he tried to trick his DNS server in San Diego into thinking that he knew the location of the bogus pages.

Suddenly it worked. The server accepted one of the fake pages as real. But so what? He could now supply fake information for a page nobody would ever visit. Then he realized that the server was willing to accept more information from him. Since he had supplied data about one of the company's Web pages, it believed that he was an authoritative source for general information about the company's domain. The server didn't know that the Web page didn't exist—it was listening to Kaminsky now, as if it had been hypnotized.

When DNS was created in 1983, it was designed to be helpful and trusting—it's directory assistance, after all. It was a time before hacker conventions and Internet banking. Plus, there were only a few hundred servers to keep track of. Today, the humble protocol stores the location of a billion Web addresses and routes every piece of Internet traffic in the world.

Security specialists have been revamping and strengthening DNS for more than two decades. But buried beneath all this tinkering, Kaminsky had just discovered a vestige of that original helpful and trusting program. He was now face-to-face with the behemoth's almost childlike core, and it was perfectly content to accept any information he wanted to supply about the location of the Fortune 500 company's servers.

Kaminsky froze. This was far more serious than anything he could have imagined. It was the ultimate hack. He was looking at an error coded into the heart of the Internet's infrastructure. This was not a security hole in Windows or a software bug in a Cisco router. This would allow him to reassign any Web address, reroute anyone's email, take over banking sites, or simply scramble the entire global system. The question was: Should he try it?

The vulnerability gave him the power to transfer millions out of bank accounts worldwide. He lived in a barren one-bedroom apartment and owned almost nothing. He rented the bed he was lying on as well as the couch and table in the living room. The walls were bare. His refrigerator generally contained little more than a few forgotten slices of processed cheese and a couple of Rockstar energy drinks. Maybe it was time to upgrade his lifestyle.

Or, for the sheer geeky joy of it, he could reroute all of .com into his laptop, the digital equivalent of channeling the Mississippi into a bathtub. It was a moment hackers around the world dream of—a tool that could give them unimaginable power. But maybe it was best simply to close his laptop and forget it. He could pretend he hadn't just stumbled over a skeleton key to the Net. Life would certainly be less complicated. If he stole money, he'd risk prison. If he told the world, he'd be the messenger of doom, potentially triggering a collapse of Web-based commerce.

But who was he kidding? He was just some guy. The problem had been coded into Internet architecture in 1983. It was 2008. Somebody must have fixed it by now. He typed a quick series of commands and pressed enter. When he tried to access the Fortune 500 company's Web site, he was redirected to an address he himself had specified.

"Oh shit," he mumbled. "I just broke the Internet."

Paul Vixie, one of the creators of the most widely used DNS software, stepped out of a conference in San Jose. A curious email had just popped up on his laptop. A guy named Kaminsky said he'd found a serious flaw in DNS and wanted to talk. He sent along his phone number.

Vixie had been working with DNS since the 1980s and had helped solve some serious problems over the years. He was president of the Internet Systems Consortium, a nonprofit that distributed BIND 9, his DNS software. At 44, he was considered the godfather of DNS. If there was a fundamental error in DNS, he probably would have fixed it long ago.

But to be on the safe side, Vixie decided to call Kaminsky. He picked up immediately and within minutes had outlined the flaw. A series of emotions swept over Vixie. What he was hearing shouldn't be possible, and yet everything the kid said was logical. By the end of the third minute, Vixie realized that Kaminsky had uncovered something that the best minds in computer science had overlooked. This affected not just BIND 9 but almost all DNS software. Vixie felt a deep flush of embarrassment, followed by a sense of pure panic.

"The first thing I want to say to you," Vixie told Kaminsky, trying to contain the flood of feeling, "is never, ever repeat what you just told me over a cell phone."

Vixie knew how easy it was to eavesdrop on a cell signal, and he had heard enough to know that he was facing a problem of global significance. If the information were intercepted by the wrong people, the wired world could be held ransom. Hackers could wreak havoc. Billions of dollars were at stake, and Vixie wasn't going to take any risks.

From that moment on, they would talk only on landlines, in person, or via heavily encrypted email. If the information in an email were accidentally copied onto a hard drive, that hard drive would have to be completely erased, Vixie said. Secrecy was critical. They had to find a solution before the problem became public.

Andreas Gustafsson knew something was seriously wrong. Vixie had emailed the 43-year-old DNS researcher in Espoo, Finland, asking to talk at 7 pm on a hardwired line. No cell phones.

Gustafsson hurried into the freezing March evening—his only landline was the fax in his office a brisk mile walk away. When he arrived, he saw that the machine didn't have a handset. Luckily, he had an analog phone lying around. He plugged it in, and soon it let off an old-fashioned metallic ring.

Gustafsson hadn't spoken to Vixie in years, but Vixie began the conversation by reading aloud a series of numbers—a code that would later allow him to authenticate Gustafsson's emails and prove that he was communicating with the right person. Gustafsson responded with his own authenticating code. With that out of the way, Vixie got to his point: Find a flight to Seattle now.

Wouter Wijngaards got a call as well, and the message was the same. The Dutch open source programmer took the train to the airport in Amsterdam, got on a 10-hour flight to Seattle, and arrived at the Silver Cloud Inn in Redmond, Washington, on March 29. He had traveled all the way from Europe, and he didn't even know why. Like Gustafsson, he had simply been told to show up in Building Nine on the Microsoft campus at 10 am on March 31.

In the lobby of the Silver Cloud, Wijngaards met Florian Weimer, a German DNS researcher he knew. Weimer was talking with Chad Dougherty, the DNS point man from Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. Wijngaards joined the conversation—they were trying to figure out where to have dinner. Nobody talked about why some of the world's leading DNS experts happened to bump into one another near the front desk of this generic US hotel. Vixie had sworn each of them to secrecy. They simply went out for Vietnamese food and avoided saying anything about DNS.

The next morning, Kaminsky strode to the front of the conference room at Microsoft headquarters before Vixie could introduce him or even welcome the assembled heavy hitters. The 16 people in the room represented Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and the most important designers of modern DNS software.

Vixie was prepared to say a few words, but Kaminsky assumed that everyone was there to hear what he had to say. After all, he'd earned the spotlight. He hadn't sold the discovery to the Russian mob. He hadn't used it to take over banks. He hadn't destroyed the Internet. He was actually losing money on the whole thing: As a freelance computer consultant, he had taken time off work to save the world. In return, he deserved to bask in the glory of discovery. Maybe his name would be heralded around the world.

Kaminsky started by laying out the timeline. He had discovered a devastating flaw in DNS and would explain the details in a moment. But first he wanted the group to know that they didn't have much time. On August 6, he was going to a hacker convention in Las Vegas, where he would stand before the world and unveil his amazing discovery. If there was a solution, they'd better figure it out by then.

But did Kaminsky have the goods? DNS attacks were nothing new and were considered difficult to execute. The most practical attack—widely known as cache poisoning—required a hacker to submit data to a DNS server at the exact moment that it updated its records. If he succeeded, he could change the records. But, like sperm swimming toward an egg, whichever packet got there first—legitimate or malicious—locked everything else out. If the attacker lost the race, he would have to wait until the server updated again, a moment that might not come for days. And even if he timed it just right, the server required a 16-bit ID number. The hacker had a 1-in-65,536 chance of guessing it correctly. It could take years to successfully compromise just one domain.

The experts watched as Kaminsky opened his laptop and connected the overhead projector. He had created a "weaponized" version of his attack on this vulnerability to demonstrate its power. A mass of data flashed onscreen and told the story. In less than 10 seconds, Kaminsky had compromised a server running BIND 9, Vixie's DNS routing software, which controls 80 percent of Internet traffic. It was undeniable proof that Kaminsky had the power to take down large swaths of the Internet.

The tension in the room rose as Kaminsky kept talking. The flaw jeopardized more than just the integrity of Web sites. It would allow an attacker to channel email as well. A hacker could redirect almost anyone's correspondence, from a single user's to everything coming and going between multinational corporations. He could quietly copy it before sending it along to its original destination. The victims would never know they had been compromised.

This had serious implications. Since many "forgot my password" buttons on banking sites rely on email to verify identity, an attacker could press the button, intercept the email, and change the password to anything he wanted. He would then have total access to that bank account.

"We're hosed," Wijngaards thought.

It got worse. Most Internet commerce transactions are encrypted. The encryption is provided by companies like VeriSign. Online vendors visit the VeriSign site and buy the encryption; customers can then be confident that their transactions are secure.

But not anymore. Kaminsky's exploit would allow an attacker to redirect VeriSign's Web traffic to an exact functioning replica of the VeriSign site. The hacker could then offer his own encryption, which, of course, he could unlock later. Unsuspecting vendors would install the encryption and think themselves safe and ready for business. A cornerstone of secure Internet communication was in danger of being destroyed.

David Ulevitch smiled despite himself. The founder of OpenDNS, a company that operates DNS servers worldwide, was witnessing a tour de force—the geek equivalent of Michael Phelps winning his eighth gold medal. As far as Ulevitch was concerned, there had never been a vulnerability of this magnitude that was so easy to use. "This is an amazingly catastrophic attack," he marveled with a mix of grave concern and giddy awe.

It was a difficult flight back to San Francisco for Sandy Wilbourn, vice president of engineering for Nominum, a company hired by broadband providers to supply 150 million customers with DNS service. What he heard in Redmond was overwhelming—a 9 out of 10 on the scale of disasters. He might have given it a 10, but it was likely to keep getting worse. He was going to give this one some room to grow.

One of Wilbourn's immediate concerns was that about 40 percent of the country's broadband Internet ran through his servers. If word of the vulnerability leaked, hackers could quickly compromise those servers.

In his Redwood City, California, office, he isolated a hard drive so no one else in the company could access it. Then he called in his three top engineers, shut the door, and told them that what he was about to say couldn't be shared with anyone—not at home, not at the company. Even their interoffice email would have to be encrypted from now on.

Their task: Make a change to the basic functioning of Nominum's DNS servers. They and their customers would have to do it without the usual testing or feedback from outside the group. The implementation—the day the alteration went live to millions of people—would be its first real-world test.

It was a daunting task, but everyone who had been in Redmond had agreed to do the same thing. They would do it secretly, and then, all together on July 8, they would release their patches. If hackers didn't know there was a gaping DNS security hole before, they would know then. They just wouldn't know exactly what it was. Nominum and the other DNS software vendors would have to persuade their customers—Internet service providers from regional players such as Cablevision to giants like Comcast—to upgrade fast. It would be a race to get servers patched before hackers figured it out.

Though the Redmond group had agreed to act in concert, the patch—called the source port randomization solution—didn't satisfy everyone. It was only a short-term fix, turning what had been a 1-in-65,536 chance of success into a 1-in-4 billion shot.

Still, a hacker could use an automated system to flood a server with an endless stream of guesses. With a high-speed connection, a week of nonstop attacking would likely succeed. Observant network operators would see the spike in traffic and could easily block it. But, if overlooked, the attack could still work. The patch only papered over the fundamental flaw that Kaminsky had exposed.

On July 8, Nominum, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Ubuntu, and Red Hat, among many others, released source port randomization patches. Wilbourn called it the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet. The ISPs and broadband carriers like Verizon and Comcast that had been asked to install it wanted to know what the problem was. Wilbourn told them it was extremely important that they deploy the patch, but the reason would remain a secret until Kaminsky delivered his talk in Las Vegas.

Even as Kaminsky was giving interviews about the urgency of patching to media outlets from the Los Angeles Times to CNET, the computer security industry rebelled. "Those of us ... who have to advise management cannot tell our executives 'trust Dan,'" wrote one network administrator on a security mailing list. On one blog, an anonymous poster wrote this to Kaminsky: "You ask people not to speculate so your talk isn't blown but then you whore out minor details to every newspaper/magazine/publishing house so your name can go all over Google and gain five minutes of fame? This is why people hate you and wish you would work at McDonald's instead."

With a backlash building, Kaminsky decided to reach out to a few influential security experts in hopes of winning them over. He set up a conference call with Rich Mogull, founder of Securosis, a well-respected security firm; researcher Dino Dai Zovi; and Thomas Ptacek, a detractor who would later accuse Vixie and Kaminsky of forming a cabal.

The call occurred July 9. Kaminsky agreed to reveal the vulnerability if Mogull, Dai Zovi, and Ptacek would keep it secret until the Vegas talk August 6. They agreed, and Kaminsky's presentation laid it out for them. The security experts were stunned. Mogull wrote, "This is absolutely one of the most exceptional research projects I've seen." And in a blog post Ptacek wrote, "Dan's got the goods. It's really f'ing good."

And then, on July 21, a complete description of the exploit appeared on the Web site of Ptacek's company. He claimed it was an accident but acknowledged that he had prepared a description of the hack so he could release it concurrently with Kaminsky. By the time he removed it, the description had traversed the Web. The DNS community had kept the secret for months. The computer security community couldn't keep it 12 days.

About a week later, an AT&T server in Texas was infiltrated using the Kaminsky method. The attacker took over google.com—when AT&T Internet subscribers in the Austin area tried to navigate to Google, they were redirected to a Google look-alike that covertly clicked ads. Whoever was behind the attack probably profited from the resulting increase in ad revenue.

Every day counted now. While Kaminsky, Vixie, and the others pleaded with network operators to install the patch, it's likely that other hacks occurred. But the beauty of the Kaminsky attack, as it was now known, was that it left little trace. A good hacker could reroute email, reset passwords, and transfer money out of accounts quickly. Banks were unlikely to announce the intrusions—online theft is bad PR. Better to just cover the victims' losses.

On August 6, hundreds of people crammed into a conference room at Caesars Palace to hear Kaminsky speak. The seats filled up quickly, leaving a scrum of spectators standing shoulder to shoulder in the back. A group of security experts had mockingly nominated Kaminsky for the Most Overhyped Bug award, and many wanted to know the truth: Was the massive patching effort justified, or was Kaminsky just an arrogant, media-hungry braggart?

While his grandmother handed out homemade Swedish lace cookies, Kaminsky took the stage wearing a black T-shirt featuring an image of Pac-Man at a dinner table. He tried for modesty. "Who am I?" he asked rhetorically. "Some guy. I do code."

The self-deprecation didn't suit him. He had the swagger of a rock star and adopted the tone of a misunderstood genius. After detailing the scope of the DNS problem, he stood defiantly in front of a bullet point summary of the attack and said, "People called BS on me. This is my reply."

By this time, hundreds of millions of Internet users were protected. The bomb had been defused. The problem was, there was little agreement on what the long-term solution should be. Most discussion centered around the concept of authenticating every bit of DNS traffic. It would mean that every computer in the world—from iPhones to corporate server arrays—would have to carry DNS authentication software. The root server could guarantee that it was communicating with the real .com name server, and .com would receive cryptological assurance that it was dealing with, say, the real Google. An impostor packet wouldn't be able to authenticate itself, putting an end to DNS attacks. The procedure is called DNSSEC and has high-profile proponents, including Vixie and the US government.

But implementing a massive and complicated protocol like DNSSEC isn't easy. Vixie has actually been trying to persuade people for years, and even he hasn't succeeded. Either way, the point might turn out to be moot. Kaminsky ended his Las Vegas talk by hinting that even darker security problems lay ahead. It was the type of grandstanding that has made him a polarizing figure in the computer security community. "There is no saving the Internet," he said. "There is postponing the inevitable for a little longer."

Then he sauntered off the stage and ate one of his grandma's cookies.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/...urrentPage=all





Apple Recommends Security Software for Mac Owners
Barry Collins

After years of boasting about the Mac's near invincibility, Apple is now advising its customers to install security software on their computers.

Apple - which has continually played on Windows' vulnerability to viruses in its advertising campaigns - issued the advice in a low-key message on its support forums.

"Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult," the the support message reads.

It goes on to recommend a handful of products to Mac owners, including Intego VirusBarrier X5, Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh and McAfee VirusScan for Mac.

Apple has continually played down the threat of viruses on the Mac platform. One of the first adverts in its "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign focused entirely on viruses.

"Last year there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs," the PC character said in the advert. "PCs, not Macs," the Mac character replied.

Even today, on the Get a Mac FAQ, the company claims: "Mac OS X resists most viruses, so you can do anything - without worrying about losing everything." It does go on to concede that "no computer connected to the internet is 100% immune to viruses and spyware."

Whilst the Mac platform is without doubt a lesser target for virus writers, the company may have been spurred into its security software recommendation by the growing trends towards web exploits that target cross-platform browsers, including Apple's own Safari.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/240255/a...ac-owners.html





Report: Hard Drive Shipments Slumping

iSuppli's 'optimistic' outlook shows HDD sales flat in Q4
Lucas Mearian

Worldwide shipments of hard disk drives (HDD) used in PCs and other consumer electronics gear will be flat or could even decline in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to last quarter, according to iSuppli Corp.

At the same time, iSuppli is estimating that solid state disk (SSD) drives shipped over the next year will leap 6x from 3.2 million this year to about 18.9 million next year and will produce $1.4 billion in revenue in 2009 compared to $163 million this year. By 2012, iSupply is estimating SSD sales will produce $9.3 billion in revenue from 88.6 million units shipped.

ISuppli's "pessimistic outlook" for hard drive shipments estimates that as few as 149.4 million units will go out during the current quarter, a 10% sequential drop. ISuppli's more optimistic outlook calls for global HDD shipments of 157.5 million units in the quarter ending Dec. 31, basically flat compared to the 158.3 million units shipped in the third quarter. If that forecast holds true, overall HDD shipments for 2008 would total 593.2 million units, up 14.9% compared to the 516.2 million units shipped in 2007, iSuppli said.

Krishna Chander, a storage analyst at iSuppli, said her company considers the optimistic sales forecast more accurate because it is in line with sales predictions from leading hard drive makers, such as Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. (WDC). Seagate in October predicted the HDD industry would ship 156 million units in the fourth quarter; WDC's outlook, when extrapolated, amounts to about 161.7 million.

"OEMs that traditionally purchase more components in the fourth quarter are reducing their procurement budgets or are buying with low incoming inventory -- resulting in reduced pricing for HDDs," Chander said.

In September, iSuppli forecast HDD shipments would rise 4.9% sequentially in the fourth quarter and 16.6% for all of 2008. Next year will bring even greater uncertainty, according to iSuppli. HDD unit sales growth is predicted to range from 4.3% to 6.8% above 2008 levels.

The average selling price of an HDD is also expected to drop sharply next year, iSuppli stated. HDDs are expected to sell for about $58 in the second quarter of 2009 before recovering to the near $60 range late in the fourth quarter. Those prices reflect an average of all HDDs regardless of size. "This weak pricing represents a drag on the HDD industry as a whole, one that will make it harder to cut a profit," iSuppli stated.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top





In Deal With Hitachi, Intel Will Expand Its Flash Memory Business
Ashlee Vance

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, records most of its profit from its core business, the microprocessors that serve as the brains of most computers. But the company’s side venture in flash memory — which is used to store songs on digital music players and photos on digital cameras — has been another story.

Although Intel does not disclose financial details of the business, flash-based storage is an intensely competitive industry, with specialty companies like SanDisk and giant electronics makers like Samsung and Toshiba battling for market share amid eroding prices of the underlying high-speed memory. Some shareholders have been pushing Intel to exit that low-margin business, which it operates through a joint venture with Micron.

But Intel is taking a different approach. On Tuesday, it will announce a deal with Hitachi to become the sole supplier of flash memory for Hitachi’s forthcoming line of high-end solid-state computer drives intended for computer servers and storage systems. Intel and Hitachi also plan to share research and development costs.

Although solid state drives are expensive, they are faster, tougher and more energy-efficient than traditional drives with spinning disks. Intel and the other players are hoping the drives will become popular for data-center computers used by corporate customers — potentially a more profitable market than the consumer laptops where the solid state drives are mostly used now.

“We believe this combination spreads out the risk and gives the venture the highest probability for success,” said Troy Winslow, a director of marketing at Intel.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, formed in 2003 after Hitachi acquired I.B.M.’s storage business, is the third-largest seller of hard disk drives, trailing Seagate Technology and Western Digital. As such, it has deep ties to the server and storage makers, whose corporate customers have often been more willing to pay a premium for higher-performance technologies, like flash drives.

Intel and Hitachi plan to release their first drives in the early part of 2010, making them late to the market. STEC, a company that sells solid state drives, will ship products valued at $50 million to business customers this year, according to its chief executive, Manouch Moshayedi. Samsung is the other leading seller of solid state drives.

Hardware makers like EMC and Sun Microsystems are just beginning to introduce products based on solid state drives. Analysts expect sales of the new drives to accelerate sharply in 2010 and 2011.

“What Intel doesn’t want is another company like Intel dominating the memory business,” said David Wu, an analyst with Global Crown Capital. “They desire anything that weakens Samsung’s presence in storage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/te...y/02intel.html





Too Good to Ignore: 6 Alternative Browsers

Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari lead the market, but there are other browsers out there for PC and Mac users. Which are better?
Michael DeAgonia, Ryan Faas and Preston Gralla

When Microsoft, Mozilla or Apple comes out with a new version of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, it makes news -- mainly because most of us use one or more of these three Web browsers. In fact, with the exception of Google's Chrome (which made a big splash, mostly because it came from Google), most of the alternative browsers out there tend to get lost in the shuffle.

And it's too bad, because some of these relatively unknown browsers are good -- and could be better for some users than the ones they're using now. We asked three of our writers to take some lesser-known browsers out for a spin and see how they do.

They chose six candidates: Camino (for the Mac), Maxthon (for the PC), OmniWeb (for the Mac), Opera (both the Mac and the PC versions) and Shiira (for the Mac). Which is the best? It all depends on what you need from a browser.

For example, Camino is for those who want a simple, basic browser, while Maxthon is overflowing with every power feature in the book. OmniWeb offers speed and an interesting approach to tabbing (but, at a base price of $14.95, is the only browser in this roundup that isn't free), while Opera brings with it a number of features it has pioneered over the years, along with a strong fan base. Finally, Shiira has an interface that is more Mac than Apple's own Safari.

It's possible that none of these will do what you need better than the browser you're already using. But as we all know, sometimes you have to step outside of the tried and true in order to find something really great.

Check these browsers out -- one of them may work for you.

Camino 1.6.4

Camino, an open-source browser based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, is clearly designed to be a simple, easy-to-use, yet fully functional browser. With a look and feel very similar to Safari and Firefox, almost anyone will find it easy to work with in seconds; I found myself completely at home with Camino from the second I launched it.

One major difference between Camino and Firefox is that Camino was designed and programmed specifically for the Mac instead of ported over as Firefox was (so it's less likely to "feel" like a Windows application). In addition, one gets the impression that the developers of Camino didn't try to duplicate all the features of Firefox and focused on the core browsing functionality, which probably results in leaner code overall and thereby increased performance and stability.

At a Glance
Camino 1.6.4

The Camino Project
Price: Free

Pros: Designed for the Mac, straightforward design, stable

Cons: Standard feature set

Camino isn't big on flashy features. It does have a few that, while not unique, are nice to have. For example, Camino lets you save the URLs for all pages currently opened in tabs as a set that re-opens all of them -- in the same positions. This is a pretty nifty feature if you repeatedly open the same set of pages every morning when checking sites (or if you use a number of Web-based applications every day).

Beyond that, the features and preferences options are pretty standard browser fare, though I do have to commend Camino's developers for including a Web features tab in the browser's preferences that includes the options to block Flash animations and advertising as well as to prevent Web animations from repeating.

Given that many Web browsers now try to implement too many features, some of which are better left to separate applications (RSS being a common example, which Camino eschews), I found Camino's straightforward focus refreshing. The approach leads to a simple design that implements the core features in an uncluttered fashion. Combined with the Web features options that put a user in control of just how much distracting Web content he wants to see, I couldn't help thinking that this would be the perfect browser for people like my father -- you know, the type of person who wants a cell phone that's nothing more than a phone.

Since Camino keeps its feature set small and targeted, I was not surprised to find it to be very stable; it renders content both well and quickly. As with Shiira, Camino handled Flash, scripting and other complex Web technologies very well. When I compared it to Safari, Firefox and Shiira on the Mac, it outperformed those other browsers in rendering some pages. Sites heavy with Flash content and animations, in particular, seemed to load, render and function faster when I used Camino.

I should note that some Camino add-ons are available. Like the add-ons available for Firefox, these tools offers various capabilities, from backing up bookmarks to changing the look using themes or skins, though the choices for Camino are more limited.

All in all, Camino is probably not the perfect browser for everyone. If you're looking for a more full-featured browser, you may want to opt for Firefox, Safari or Shiira. But if you want a stable, simple and no-nonsense Web browser (or one that can easily limit distracting content) Camino is a good choice.

-- Ryan Faas

Maxthon 2.1.4

If you're looking for a browser that bristles with power features, and don't mind a somewhat unattractive interface and some confusing configuration, then Maxthon is the browser for you. It's got just about every feature built into competing browsers, and many that you won't find anywhere else -- such as a "file sniffer" that makes it easy to download YouTube videos and a pop-up notepad for pasting or dragging text you want to save. Power users will love it. Those who like sleek design will turn away.

The interface is quite cluttered, with a file menu, Address Bar, Favorites Bar and other toolbars, and stray icons near the top and bottom of the screen. Think of it as the un-Chrome. But there's a reason for the clutter: The browser has so many features, they need to fit somewhere. And you can customize the interface, if you like, to cut down on the clutter.

Maxthon has far too many features to cover in a short review, but among my favorites is its great tab and window handling. You can, for example, create two side-by-side browser instances, each with their own tabs; you can create tab groups; you can "tear off" a tab into a separate browser instance and then recombine it; you can assign a shortcut key to any URL and visit that URL just by pressing the key -- and that's just for a start.

The browser also uses "mouse gestures," so that you can navigate forward, backward and so on by moving your mouse in a certain way. It has a great tool for filling out Web forms, a built-in screen capture tool, and an innovative search screen that lets you do a search and then click on tabs in that screen to see the results from various search engines. And there's a CPU Saver mode that minimizes Maxthon's processor use, freeing up your CPU for other tasks.

At a Glance
Maxthon 2.1.4

Maxthon International Ltd.
Price: Free

Pros: Lots of power features

Cons: Cluttered interface, confusing configuration

All that is to the good, but there are some problems, mostly because Maxthon uses the same Trident rendering engine used by Internet Explorer. For example, click Tools --> Internet Options, and you'll come to a familiar tabbed Internet Options screen. In fact, it looks like the screen for changing Internet Explorer's options -- because that's exactly what it is.

There's far more than all this, and there are plug-ins available as well. You simply won't find a browser with more features.

In fact, when you make a change to the Maxthon Internet Options screen, you'll also make changes to Internet Explorer. And while this screen has an option for setting your home page, it won't work for Maxthon -- you need to select Tools --> Maxthon Setup Center and make your changes there. I contacted Maxthon, and a rep told me that the Options screen is used to control the Trident rendering engine only, and doesn't affect other Maxthon options such as setting the home page.

Still, if you're a power user, you can get used to those eccentricities. If you're looking for the most features in a browser, live with Maxthon a while, and you may learn to love it.

-- Preston Gralla

OmniWeb 5.8

OmniWeb has been around longer than Mac OS X, dating back to the NeXT platform of the 1990s. Throughout its history, OmniWeb has always been an excellent citizen of technologies specific to the NeXT -- and later, OS X -- platform, and the polish shows through in even minor details.

Even though OmniWeb was one of the first native browsers to grace OS X, with an interface that has remained top-notch, it has faced rivals such as Firefox and Camino that are powered by speedy Gecko-based rendering engines -- not to mention Apple's own Safari browser, which has been integrated with OS X since 2003. That's kept OmniWeb's browser share limited to a fairly small audience. However, the advances seen in OmniWeb since its rendering engine revamp in 2004 may mean it's time for surfers to give this browser another serious look.

OmniWeb, now at Version 5.8, is easily one of the best examples of a properly implemented interface on the Mac today. The Omni Group has always taken care to make sure that its products feel like native Mac applications instead of ports from other platforms, and the attention to detail makes using OmniWeb a joy.

Some of OmniWeb's best features include extensive (if not zealous) ad-blocking, auto-saved Web browsing sessions and site-specific preferences. From the unique tab drawer -- more on this later -- to support for browsing Web pages using OS X's built-in Speech Recognition, OmniWeb's embrace of Mac-specific technologies wrapped in a clean and uncluttered interface makes the product a delightful browser alternative.

At a Glance
OmniWeb 5.8

The Omni Group
Price: $14.95

Pros: Feels like a native Mac application, excellent feature set, good performance

Cons: Not free

It renders Web pages quickly, easily on par with the fastest of the competition, right up there with Safari and Firefox. That's significant because rendering speeds used to be a major source of disappointment, something that changed with Omni Group's embrace of Apple's own open-source WebKit frameworks. WebKit is used by Apple itself in several of its software packages -- Mail, Safari and Dashboard, to name a few -- and the Omni Group's adoption of this technology allowed it to focus on designing an elegant user interface instead of worrying about updating its rendering engine with every new Web standard.

Among the interface niceties is the aforementioned tab drawer. Instead of offering up a layout like its competitors -- with small tabs displayed horizontally near the address field -- OmniWeb shows a resizable window pane attached to the browser. The pane, which can be displayed on the right or left side of the main browser window, previews tabs as mini-Web pages rendered in real time. The real-time page rendering allows you to skip on to other sites when one is loading slowly, while still keeping an eye on the site's progress.

OmniWeb may be the most properly implemented interface on the Mac.
Click to view larger image

OmniWeb's user experience is top-notch and Mac-like -- something that can't be said about competitors like Firefox -- but that experience comes at a price. At a time when most Web browsers are free, a license for OmniWeb 5.8 costs $14.95, while an upgrade license from earlier versions costs $4.95.

Even if you don't want to pay for a browser, I still recommend downloading the software and taking it for a free 30-day test run. The thought of paying for a browser probably won't sit well with those accustomed to free alternatives -- especially since the alternatives themselves are good -- but after using OmniWeb for a few days, you might decide it's worth the price.

-- Mike DeAgonia

Opera 9.6

Opera is a Windows-based browser that has been ported to many different platforms, including most Unix variants such as Mac OS X and Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris; cell phone operating systems, including Windows Mobile, PalmOS, BlackBerry OS, and even the popular Wii gaming station. But despite its ubiquitous nature, Opera has so far only captured 2% of the browser market. That's something of a surprise, because it isn't as though this browser lacks ability or features.

Version 9.6 for Macintosh is a fast, option-laden browser that represents a formidable entry in an extremely competitive product category. Opera uses its own proprietary rendering engine called Presto to display Web content; this engine is almost as capable at rendering code as the Gecko engine used by Firefox and Camino, and nearly as fast as Safari and OmniWeb's WebKit engine. In fact, there were some sites that Gecko had trouble rendering accurately, but Opera displayed most sites properly.

There are many things to like about Opera, including customizable skins, live preview of Web pages when you mouse over tabs and a welcome full-screen mode -- especially useful for recent Windows converts who are accustomed to viewing Web pages using every bit of screen real estate possible.

One of Opera's standout features is the Speed Dial startup page. Speed Dial lets you customize a page with up to nine different sites, with each site's content displayed in miniaturized format. Clicking on the mini-page brings up the site in a full browser window.

At a Glance
Opera 9.6

Opera Software ASA
Price: Free

Pros: Fast, very customizable, Speed Dial feature

Cons: Cluttered interface

Another Opera plus is the extensive search engine support built into the browser. As well as the usual suspects like Google and Yahoo, Opera also supports Ask, Wikipedia, eBay and Yahoo Shopping. Interestingly enough, Opera also supports Bit Torrent searching and downloads, as this browser doubles as a Bit Torrent client.

Opera also offers support for widgets. Although similar in function to those found in Mac OS X, Opera's widgets are freed from the restraints of the Dashboard, instead floating on the desktop like any application window.

The Opera interface is a little more cluttered than some of the other browsers I've looked at, but skin support in concert with the ability to alter interface details means you can customize to your heart's content. With the addition of Mouse Gestures, it's entirely possible to browse pages without using any of the interface elements at all, relying instead on mouse or trackpad swipes to navigate pages.

The bottom line is that Opera is a good example of healthy competition in the browser market, and the price of admission -- free! -- is certainly worth giving this program a once-over.

-- Mike DeAgonia

Opera 9.6

There was a time, years ago, when Opera seemed to be giving Internet Explorer and Netscape a run for their money. Now it's the great forgotten browser, rarely mentioned or used.

And that's a shame. Opera sports a clean interface with easy access to its innovative capabilities, and is a model of simplicity and elegance, with attractive icons and tabs, and plenty of features within easy reach. If you're looking for a powerful alternative to your existing browser, you won't go wrong with Opera.

Much has been made of browser Address Bar tools such as Chrome's Omnibox and Firefox's Awesome Bar. But no one bothers to mention that Opera has already been there and done that. As with those browsers, type parts of a URL into Opera's address bar, and you'll get a list of likely matches. Better yet, type in search terms, and Opera will do a Google search for them.

That's just one of the innovative features you'll find in Opera; there are too many to mention them all. What Opera calls "Speed Dial" is also useful. When you open a new tab, Opera opens a page with space for multiple thumbnails of Web pages. Click on any blank thumbnail and enter a URL, and from then on, when you open a new tab, it will open to a page with those thumbnails. To visit any page, click it.

Opera also features an excellent download manager that lets you pause and resume downloads, and then open any files you've downloaded. For each download, you're also shown information such as where it was downloaded from, where you downloaded it to, file size and so on. There's also a progress indicator showing you current download speed.

At a Glance
Opera 9.6

Opera Software ASA
Price: Free

Pros: Elegant interface, innovative features

Cons: Not as many add-ins as Firefox

Useful for anyone who fills out Web forms (which pretty much means all of us), is the Wand, which not only remembers passwords and fills them in, but also fills in other information, such as name, address, e-mail address and so on.

Opera sports many other features as well, such as a quick way to turn off all images on a Web site with the single click of a button, and a way to view every single link on a Web page.

Opera has too many innovative features to enumerate.
Click to view larger image

Opera's main drawback is that it doesn't have add-ins as Firefox does, so you won't be able to extend the browser's features. You can download Opera widgets, but they aren't really add-ins -- they're instead gadgets that live on your desktop.

Apart from the lack of add-ins, though, you'll find Opera an excellent browser. If you're looking for a great blend of simplicity and features, it's well worth the download.

-- Preston Gralla

Shiira 2.2

Shiira is a relatively new entrant to the Mac Web browser market. Like Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, Shiira is based on WebKit.

One of the first unique interface elements that I noticed was Shiira's PageDock. The PageDock provides the same functionality as tabbed browsing, but with complete thumbnails of every page that is opened.

At first, I saw this as something that took up valuable screen real estate, but after a little use, I found it to be an invaluable addition to the browser experience -- making it easy to see not only what each "tab" was (beyond just a name), but also what was happening on each page, which proved particularly nice with any page that sported dynamic content (from Facebook chats to sites featuring animation elements). For those who prefer traditional tabbed browsing, the PageDock can be turned off.

As I explored Shiira, I noticed that many of its features and interfaces took cues from Apple's Mac OS X interface. There's a button that displays all open pages next to each other like Apple's Exposé feature, making it easy to pick one page to work with. Bookmarks, history and RSS feeds can also be browsed from floating translucent pallets reminiscent of Apple's iLife and iWork applications.

The preferences dialog borrows heavily from the look of the Mac's System Preferences application. Even the bookmarking tool that Shiira refers to as the Shelf offers column and list views patterned after the Mac's Finder window (as is the customizable window toolbar).

All of these made Shiira seem more Mac-like to me than Apple's own Safari browser. What I found particularly nice was that, much like the PageDock, these features all served useful functions rather than just being eye candy.

At a Glance
Shiira 2.2

Shiira Project
Price: Free

Pros: New approach to tabs, Apple-inspired interface, stable

Cons: Some options seem unfinished

I also found a couple of unusual features that seemed so intuitive that I couldn't believe they weren't more common in other browsers. These include menu items for automatically e-mailing the URL or entire contents of a page with a single click, and a very effective full-screen-mode option that would be perfect for presentations or watching video.

As far as performance, I found Shiira to be very solid. It loaded pages of all kinds, rendered Flash animation with no problems, and even beat out Safari and Firefox in terms of rendering speed on a couple of pages (albeit not by a particularly noteworthy margin). The browser was also very stable. All of this is important because, bells and whistles aside, the most important piece of a browser to me is that it can actually surf the Web painlessly and quickly.

Shiira feels more Mac-like than Apple's own Safari.
Click to view larger image

Unfortunately, I did see some unfinished aspects of this open-source browser. Some of Shiira's preference options seemed unfinished. For example, the RSS feed preferences pane refused to open at all (even so, the built-in RSS reader functioned fairly well -- though being used to full featured stand-alone RSS readers, I'm not sure it would be my first choice). In addition, the pane in the preferences dialog called Key Mappings, which should allow users to assign keyboard shortcuts to menu items, does not seem to be implemented yet (though I was able to open the pane itself).

Even so, the combination of good features, Apple-inspired interface and overall performance left me convinced that, with a little more development, Shiira could easily give other Mac browsers a run for their money. Without a doubt, Shiira is definitely worth a look, but be prepared to spend a little time getting used to its interface.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9121009





Opera 10 Alpha Aces Acid3 Browser Test

Newest preview boosts browsing performance by 30%, claims Norwegian company
Gregg Keizer

Opera Software ASA yesterday launched a preview of its next browser, Opera 10, that aces the Acid3 Web standards test, a mark that most browser makers have pursued without success.

Opera 10 also contains the Norwegian browser maker's newest rendering engine -- dubbed Presto 2.2 -- that the company plans to use as the foundation for all future builds of its desktop and mobile products. Opera claimed that the new engine boosts rendering speeds by up to 30% over its predecessor, Presto 2.1, which debuted last June as part of Opera 9.5. Other additions include an auto-update tool and a spell-checker that works as users type in the browser window.

The results of Computerworld's tests

Opera 10-- 100
Webkit -- 100
Firefox 3.1, nightly build (XP) -- 92
Firefox 3.1, Beta 1 (XP) -- 88
Opera 9.6.2 (XP) -- 85
Chrome 0.4.154.31 (XP) -- 79
Safari 3.2.1 (XP/Mac) -- 75
Firefox 3.0.4 (XP) -- 71
Firefox 2.0.018 (XP) -- 52
IE8 Beta 2 (XP) -- 21
IE7 (XP) -- 12

But Opera also touted its perfect Acid3 score yesterday. "Opera has fine-tuned its standards support and, as a result, Opera 10 alpha achieves an Acid3 100/100 Test score," the company said in a statement Thursday.

Earlier this year, Opera and the WebKit project, the open-source initiative that produces the engine that powers both Apple Inc.'s Safari and Google Inc.'s Chrome, duked it out over Acid3 bragging rights.

On March 26, Opera claimed that it had created a "reference build," a version used internally for testing and development, of its browser that scored 100 on Acid3, a test suite produced by the Web Standards Project that checks how closely a browser follows certain standards, particularly specifications for Web 2.0 applications.

Later that same day, WebKit developers countered with similar claims, and backed them up with in-progress builds to prove them. More recently, WebKit programmers said that after more work, their engine was "the first browser to fully pass Acid3" by not only scoring a perfect 100, but also meeting Acid3's "smooth animation" requirement.

Computerworld's tests confirmed that the alpha of Opera 10 scored 100 on Acid3, and that only WebKit matched it. Acid3 was run on either an iMac powered by Mac OS X 10.5, or a PC running Windows XP SP3.

The Opera 10 preview can be downloaded from the company's site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9122719





Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click
Stephanie Clifford

ONLINE advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image.

Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad’s success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad’s brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.

The question is, “how do we combine creative energy, which is a manual and sort of qualitative exercise, with the raw processing power of computing, which is all about quantitative data?” said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, the investment unit of Publicis Groupe.

“I think it’s clear that the traditional process of agencies is clearly not going to survive the digital era without significant changes to our approaches,” Mr. Hanlon said.

•

The push to automate the creative elements of ad units is coming from two companies in California, not Madison Avenue.

Adisn, based in Long Beach, and Tumri, based in Mountain View, are working both sides of the ad equation. On one, they are trying to figure out who is looking at a page by using a mix of behavioral targeting and analysis of the page’s content. On the other side, they are assembling an ad on the fly that is meant to appeal to that person.

Both companies assume there is no perfect version of an ad, and instead assemble hundreds of different versions that are displayed on Web sites where their clients have bought ad space, showing versions of an ad to actual consumers as they browse the Web.
That might lead to finding that an ad for a baby supply store is more popular with young mothers when it features a bottle instead of diapers.

(Adisn and Tumri both measure the ad’s effectiveness based on parameters the advertiser sets, like how many people clicked on the ad or how many people actually bought something after clicking on it. They compare those with standard ads they run as part of a control group.)

Adisn’s approach has been to build a database of related words so it can assess the content of a Web site or blog based on the words on its pages.

Adisn then buys space on Web sites, and uses its information to find an appropriate ad to show visitors to those sites. If a visitor views pages about beaches, weather and Hawaii, it might suggest that the visitor is interested in Hawaiian travel.

Based on that analysis, Adisn’s system pulls different components — actors, fonts, background images — to make an ad. For example, it might show an ad with a blue background, an image of a beach, and a text about tickets to Hawaii. “Once we’ve built this huge database of hundreds of millions of relationships” between words, said Andy Moeck, the chief executive of Adisn, the system can “make a very good real-time decision as to what is the most relevant or appropriate campaign we could show.”

Simple Green, the cleaning brand, began working with Adisn this year to advertise a new line of products called Simple Green Naturals.

“If it’s a woman looking at a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator, they can show a stainless steel product,” said Jessica Frandson, the vice president for marketing for Simple Green. While Ms. Frandson gave Adisn a general idea of what she wanted, she also let the agency do almost random combinations with about 10 percent of her ads to see which of those combinations had the highest click-through rates.

“If it wants to be purple and orange, if that’s going to be appealing to my customer, then so be it,” she said.

Even Mr. Moeck said he was often surprised by the success of certain ads. “Some of it, I just scratch my head and say, ‘I have no idea,’ ” he said.

Tumri’s approach is slightly different. It creates a template for ads, including slots for the message, the color, the image and other elements.

Unlike Adisn, it does not buy ad space, but lets clients — like Sears and Best Buy — choose and buy space on sites themselves. And rather than building a contextual database like Adisn, Tumri uses whatever targeting approach advertisers are already using, whether it is behavioral or contextual or demographic, and assembles an ad on the fly based on that information.

“It’s reporting back to the advertiser and agency saying, ‘Guess what? The soccer mom in Indiana likes background three, which was pink, likes image four, which was the S.U.V., and likes marketing message 12, about room, safety and comfort,” said Calvin Lui, chief of Tumri.

•

Some advertisers are using that information just to see which version of the ad works best, but Mr. Lui emphasized that the appropriate ad is not static, and changes all the time as content on the page changes.

While the planners and buyers in advertising agencies are intrigued by the idea of measuring each part of an ad, the creative staff that designs ads is less focused on measurement and more focused on the overall effect.

“I think the creative community has to get very comfortable with results-based outcomes in marketing,” said Mr. Hanlon, whose company has an interest in Tumri. “There are a lot of creative people who didn’t sign up for that kind of world.”

Bant Breen, the president of worldwide digital communications at Initiative, the Interpublic Group media buying and planning firm, had a similar view. “The traditional creative process right now is not structured to essentially deliver hundreds of permutations, or hundreds of ideas for messaging,” said Mr. Breen, whose firm is using Tumri to determine which ads are working.

“There’s no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process.”

But, he said, “that’s not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/bu...ia/03adco.html





Times Extra Adds Outside Sources to New York Times
Kevin Purdy

The New York Times launched a new version of their front page today, "Times Extra," that incorporates up to eight related or supporting blog posts and news articles from outside sources, including news firms the Times could be seen as in direct competition with. The Grey Lady is only lightly treading in the content-aggregation/link-friendly waters, though—you have to click the "Extra" button in the upper right to get the extra sources, and the cookie switches back to a standard view after 24 hours. Still, it's an intriguing step forward by an old media company looking to what's new—new in the last decade, at least.
http://lifehacker.com/5101831/times-...new-york-times





Craigslist Rant Ends in Rare Criminal Charges

Colorado man charged with criminal libel for comments he allegedly posted on Craigslist
Scott Michels

A Colorado man accused of posting comments about his ex-girlfriend on the Web site Craigslist has been charged under a rarely used criminal libel law.

J.P. Weichel faces up to 18 months in prison if convicted for unflattering statements he allegedly posted in Craigslist's "rants and raves" section.

Colorado's criminal libel law, passed in 1963, bans statements "tending to blacken the memory of one who is dead" or that "impeach the honesty, integrity, virtue, or reputation or expose the natural defects of one who is alive."

Although similar laws, which trace their roots back to at least the 15th century, are on the books in at least 16 states, they are rarely used and many others have been struck down as unconstitutional. A study by the Media Law Resource Center found 77 reported actual or threatened criminal libel prosecutions between 1965 and 2002, although the actual number is likely higher.

But observers say there has been a rise in criminal libel cases since late 1990s, many of them tied to the easy access and false sense of anonymity of the Internet. In 2008, at least 13 such cases have been brought, in such states as Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, Florida, Louisiana, Montana and Oklahoma, according to the center.

"Many people convince themselves it's anonymous," said Sandra Baron, the director of the Media Law Resource Center, who said criminal libel laws should be abolished. "And, of course, the reach of the Internet is such that once it's out there, it's so widespread and so provocative that it inspires people to want to take action to stop it."

The case against Weichel began when his former lover reported postings about her to the police. Court records cited by The Associated Press say one Web post allegedly written by Weichel suggested the woman traded sexual acts for legal services from her attorney.

When confronted by detectives, Weichel allegedly said he was "just venting," according to the AP.

Weichel, who has not yet entered a plea in the case, could not be immediately reached for comment. His lawyer declined to comment. He was charged in October, and a court hearing is scheduled for later this month. Web sites like Craigslist are generally not legally liable for comments posted by their users.

Most libel cases are civil lawsuits and criminal charges for false statements are rare.

There have been several controversial criminal libel prosecutions in the past several years. A college student in Colorado was investigated under the law in 2004 for publishing a satirical online journal that was critical of the University of Northern Colorado. Prosecutors eventually declined to file charges.

The Web site featured a photograph of a professor, altered to look like Kiss guitarist Gene Simmons, with a caption describing the person in the photograph as a former Kiss roadie who made a fortune by riding "the tech bubble of the nineties like a $20 whore."

A Web site in Tulsa, Okla., that features comments criticizing local politicians has been subpoenaed for the names of its anonymous posters in a criminal libel investigation, according to local news reports. A New Mexico man was convicted in 2005 of criminal libel after he carried a picket sign in front of the local police department that called an officer a "liar" and "dirty cop."

First Amendment advocates warn that the prosecutions may stifle free speech. Criminal libel laws have their origins in the Star Chamber, which prosecuted critics of the British crown.

"Criminal libel is just an anachronism," said Thomas Kelly, a First Amendment lawyer in Denver. "Using the criminal law to punish speech is just such an ugly display of the power of the state that I think most law enforcement officers would tell someone with a complaint like that to file a civil action."

The Associated Press contributed to this article
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6370213&page=1





CPJ's 2008 Prison Census: Online and in Jail

New York, December 4, 2008--Reflecting the rising influence of online reporting and commentary, more Internet journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists working in any other medium. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, released today, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that 45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors. Online journalists represent the largest professional category for the first time in CPJ's prison census.

CPJ's survey found 125 journalists in all behind bars on December 1, a decrease of two from the 2007 tally. China continued to be world's worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five jailers from among the 29 nations that imprison journalists. Each of the top five nations has persistently placed among the world's worst in detaining journalists.

At least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ's census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. The number of imprisoned online journalists has steadily increased since CPJ recorded the first jailed Internet writer in its 1997 census. Print reporters, editors, and photographers make up the next largest professional category, with 53 cases in 2008. Television and radio journalists and documentary filmmakers constitute the rest.

"Online journalism has changed the media landscape and the way we communicate with each other," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. "But the power and influence of this new generation of online journalists has captured the attention of repressive governments around the world, and they have accelerated their counterattack."

In October, CPJ joined with Internet companies, investors, and human rights groups to combat government repression of online expression. After two years of negotiations, this diverse group announced the creation of the Global Network Initiative, which establishes guidelines enabling Internet and telecommunications companies to protect free expression and privacy online. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have joined the initiative.

Illustrating the evolving media landscape, the increase in online-related jailings has been accompanied by a rise in imprisonments of freelance journalists. Forty-five of the journalists on CPJ's census are freelancers; most of them work online. These freelancers are not employees of media companies and often do not have the legal resources or political connections that might help them gain their freedom. The number of imprisoned freelancers has risen more than 40 percent in the last two years, according to CPJ research.

"The image of the solitary blogger working at home in pajamas may be appealing, but when the knock comes on the door they are alone and vulnerable," said CPJ's Simon. "All of us must stand up for their rights--from Internet companies to journalists and press freedom groups. The future of journalism is online and we are now in a battle with the enemies of press freedom who are using imprisonment to define the limits of public discourse."

Antistate allegations such as subversion, divulging state secrets, and acting against national interests are the most common charge used to imprison journalists worldwide, CPJ found. About 59 percent of journalists in the census are jailed under these charges, many of them by the Chinese and Cuban governments.

About 13 percent of jailed journalists face no formal charge at all. The tactic is used by countries as diverse as Eritrea, Israel, Iran, the United States, and Uzbekistan, where journalists are being held in open-ended detentions without due process. At least 16 journalists worldwide are being held in secret locations. Among them is Gambian journalist "Chief" Ebrima Manneh, whose whereabouts, legal status, and health have been kept secret since his arrest in July 2006. From the U.S. Senate to the West African human rights court, international observers have called on authorities to free Manneh, who was jailed for trying to publish a critical report about Gambian President Yahya Jammeh.

Nowhere is the ascendance of Internet journalism more evident than in China, where 24 of 28 jailed journalists worked online. China's prison list includes Hu Jia, a prominent human rights activist and blogger, who is serving a prison term of three and a half years for online commentaries and media interviews in which he criticized the Communist Party. He was convicted of "incitement to subvert state power," a charge commonly used by authorities in China to jail critical writers. At least 22 journalists are jailed in China on this and other vague antistate charges.

Cuba, the world's second worst jailer, released two imprisoned journalists during the year after negotiations with Spain. Madrid, which resumed cooperative programs with Cuba in February, has sought the release of imprisoned writers and dissidents in talks with Havana. But Cuba continued to hold 21 writers and editors in prison as of December 1, all but one of them swept up in Fidel Castro's massive 2003 crackdown on the independent press. In November, CPJ honored Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, who at 65 is the oldest of those jailed in Cuba, with an International Press Freedom Award.

Burma, the third worst jailer, is holding 14 journalists. Five were arrested while trying to spread news and images from areas devastated by Cyclone Nargis. The blogger and comedian Maung Thura, who uses the professional name Zarganar, was sentenced to a total of 59 years in prison during closed proceedings in November. Authorities accused Maung Thura of illegally disseminating video footage of relief efforts in hard-hit areas, communicating with exiled dissidents, and causing public alarm in comments to foreign media.

Eritrea, with 13 journalists in prison, is the fourth worst jailer. Eritrean authorities have refused to disclose the whereabouts, legal status, or health of any of the journalists they have imprisoned. Unconfirmed online reports have said that three of the jailed journalists may have died in custody, but the government has refused to even say whether the detainees are alive or dead.

Uzbekistan, with six journalists detained, is the fifth worst jailer. Those in custody include Dzhamshid Karimov, nephew of the country's president. A reporter for independent news Web sites, Karimov has been forcibly held in a psychiatric hospital since 2006.

Here are other trends and details that emerged in CPJ's analysis:

• In about 11 percent of cases, governments have used a variety of charges unrelated to journalism to retaliate against critical writers, editors, and photojournalists. Such charges range from regulatory violations to drug possession. In the cases included in this census, CPJ has determined that the charges were most likely lodged in reprisal for the journalist's work.

• Violations of censorship rules, the next most common charge, are applied in about 10 percent of cases. Criminal defamation charges are filed in about 7 percent of cases, while charges of ethnic or religious insult are lodged in another 4 percent. Two journalists are jailed for filing what authorities consider to be "false" news. (More than one type of charge may apply in individual cases.

• Print and Internet journalists make up the bulk of the census. Television journalists compose the next largest professional category, accounting for 6 percent of cases. Radio journalists account for 4 percent, and documentary filmmakers 3 percent.

• The 2008 tally reflects the second consecutive decline in the total number of jailed journalists. That said, the 2008 figure is roughly consistent with census results in each year since 2000. CPJ research shows that imprisonments rose significantly in 2001, after governments imposed sweeping national security laws in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Imprisonments stood at 81 in 2000 but have since averaged 128 in CPJ's annual surveys.

• The United States, which is holding photographer Ibrahim Jassam without charge in Iraq, has made CPJ's list of countries jailing journalists for the fifth consecutive year. During this period, U.S. military authorities have jailed dozens of journalists in Iraq--some for days, others for months at a time--without charge or due process. No charges have ever been substantiated in these cases.

CPJ does not apply a rigid definition of online journalism, but it carefully evaluates the work of bloggers and online writers to determine whether the content is journalistic in nature. In general, CPJ looks to see whether the content is reportorial or fact-based commentary. In a repressive society where the traditional media is restricted, CPJ takes an inclusive approach to work that is produced online.

The organization believes that journalists should not be imprisoned for doing their jobs. CPJ has sent letters expressing its serious concerns to each country that has imprisoned a journalist.

CPJ's list is a snapshot of those incarcerated at midnight on December 1, 2008. It does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year; accounts of those cases can be found at www.cpj.org. Journalists remain on CPJ's list until the organization determines with reasonable certainty that they have been released or have died in custody.

Journalists who either disappear or are abducted by nonstate entities, including criminal gangs, rebels, or militant groups, are not included on the imprisoned list. Their cases are classified as "missing" or "abducted."
http://www.cpj.org/imprisoned/cpjs-2...jailed-mor.php





Facebook Group Creator Detained by Croatian Police
AP

Send good karma, post a photo, criticize the prime minister — all things you can do with the click of a mouse at Facebook, right?

In Croatia, the last one might be a click too far. A man who launched a Facebook group critical of Prime Minister Ivo Sanader has been detained and questioned by police.

Some in the country are crying foul, sensing a move to quash cyber-debate.

Political analyst Jelena Lovric called the detention a "notorious abuse of police for political purposes." And the leader of the opposition Social Democrats, Zoran Milanovic, said Monday the police action endangered freedom of expression.

The kerfuffle in the Balkan country, which was once part of Yugoslavia, had its origins several months ago when Niksa Klecak, 22, set up an anti-Sanader group on Facebook, the social networking Web site. The name of the group was, "I bet I can find 5,000 people who dislike Sanader."

Last Friday, though, the hammer fell. Police questioned Klecak for three hours and searched his home and computer.

Krunoslav Borovec, a senior national police official, rejected criticism of the detention. Police acted legally, he said, because Klecak's group displayed a photo montage of Sanader in a Nazi uniform. Nazi symbols are banned under Croatian law.

Croatian police chief, Vladimir Faber, also insisted the investigation was "motivated by the content, not the author's political affiliation."

And the prime minister himself had no problem with the police action, either.

"There is no satire with Nazi insignia," Sanader told Croatian state-run radio. "The photo montage, he said, "was not an attack on me, but Croatian democracy."

But Klecak, who is a member of the Social Democrats' youth branch, wasn't buying the explanation about Nazism. He was convinced, he said, that his was a "politically motivated case."

Lovric, the political analyst, said the case exposed officials' fear of the Web. The government "cannot influence Internet, and that deeply frightens it," Lovric said.

Traditional Croatian news organizations are relatively free, although they do face pressure from political or business interests. But opposition against Sanader is boiling on Web sites — and it has exploded since the police action against Klecak.

The government may find quashing debate on the Web a bit difficult. New anti-government Facebook sites are popping up like animals in the Whack-A-Mole arcade game.

One, calling for a protest against Sanader later this month, has gathered 80,000 members. Klecak's group has grown to 6,200 members since Friday — exceeding his original goal of 5,000. And another Facebook group, called "Search my flat, you Gestapo gang, Croatia is not a police state," surfaced over the weekend and already has about 2,600 members.

By contrast, a group called "I bet I can find 7,000 people who LIKE Sanader" has just 19 members so far.

Still, the online activists may find that cyber-protests don't necessarily translate into real ones. It's easier to click a mouse than to take to the streets. A Facebook-launched protest against mafia-style murders in Zagreb, the capital, drew just a few hundred people.

And in Egypt earlier this year, a Facebook group called for a general strike on President Hosni Mubarak's 80th birthday. The group had 60,000 cyber-members, but the protest was a bust.

And real-life detention and questioning can certainly make a point. Damir Kajin, another opposition politician in Croatia, said the police action "was a message to those who found a new way of political fighting on the Internet."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Croat Police Apologize For Facebook Arrest

Croatia's police officials apologized on Wednesday for detaining a local web activist who had put up posters calling for an anti-government rally, but denied any political motivation for their act.

The man was part of a group on Facebook, the online social networking site, which called an anti-government rally in several towns, including the capital Zagreb, for December 5. The group has more than 80,000 members.

"Posting posters does not constitute a disturbance of public order," national police chief Vladimir Faber told a news conference.

He said some police officers would face disciplinary action for arresting the young man in Zagreb.

His comments came only hours after Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, faced with mounting criticism from opposition and media, asked the Interior Ministry to investigate possible abuse of police authority.

"No one in Croatia can be detained or arrested because of a different opinion or because of a protest against my or any other political view. My main task as a prime minister is to defend that right," Sanader said in a statement.

In the last few days police have held and questioned several Internet activists who were criticizing or ridiculing the government.

Last Friday police questioned a member of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, after he launched a group called "I bet I can find 5,000 Facebookers who dislike Sanader."

Police said they had acted because he posted a photo montage portrait of Sanader in a Nazi uniform and that no abuse of police authority had taken place.

An editorial in a local daily this week, entitled "Stop Facebook," said the authorities were acting in a manner similar to Yugoslav communists, who distrusted the media and wanted to control it.

Sanader, whose government hopes to conclude European Union membership talks by the end of next year, said he wanted a report from Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko on those cases.

"I asked for a report on police actions and I want appropriate sanctions if police did not respect regulations," his statement said.

(Reporting by Igor Ilic, Editing by Alison Williams)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...k-sanader.html





Cops Arrest Two in Brisbane on Pirate Film Website Raid
David Earley

TWO Brisbane men have been arrested over an illegal movie download site that distributed millions of films to punters all around the world.
The two men were nabbed yesterday during a raid by Australian Federal Police on their Parkinson home, on Brisbane's south side, and they have been charged with copyright and proceeds of crime offences.

Last year a man was convicted for distributing one movie over the internet.

But the Brisbane pair, aged 21 and 27, are alleged to have transferred the equivalent to 14.3 million copies of digital movies and television programs to about 400,000 members around the world, as well as paying subscribers, via an offshore BitTorrent tracker website.

As well as the hundreds of thousands of casual members, the two men are thought to have collected up to $10,000 per month from "VIP Members", who paid a $10 per month fee for direct access to downloadable content.

A bank account belonging to one of the men, containing more than $50,000, was frozen overnight, while investigations into other bank accounts continue.

During the raid three computers and other hardware were seized, as well as more than 1200 DVDs.

The men have been charged with distributing copyrighted material and dealing in proceeds of crime worth $10,000 or more.

They will appear in Brisbane Magistrates Court on December 18 and face a maximum 10 years jail and/or a fine of $66,000.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013044,00.html





Quebec Seller of Pirated Software Fined $100,000 for Contempt of Court

Microsoft Corp. has welcomed a $100,000 fine imposed on a Quebec man who pleaded guilty to contempt of court for persevering in sales of counterfeit software.

Carmelo Cerrelli of Montreal recently pleaded guilty in Federal Court and was fined $50,000 on each of two counts of contempt.

"The problem of software piracy continues to be a primary focus for Microsoft since it affects a wide range of Canadians, from the rights holders to consumers to legitimate businesses," Christopher Tortorice, anti-piracy lawyer for Microsoft Canada, said Monday.

Cerrelli, who operated under the name Inter-Plus, was found in December 2006 to have violated Microsoft's copyright and was ordered to pay $700,000 in damages.

In November 2007, more counterfeit software was seized at his place of business, including versions of the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

"The substantial fine handed down by the Federal Court of Canada in the contempt proceedings emphasizes that orders of the court must be respected," Tortorice said in a news release.
http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=114622





Canadian Parliament Closed in Bid to Keep Prime Minister in Power
Ian Austen

With the approval of Canada’s formal head of state, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down Canada’s parliament until Jan. 26, seeking to forestall a no-confidence vote he was sure to lose.

Mr. Harper, who won re-election less than two months ago, acted after receiving the approval of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, Queen Elizabeth II’s representative. Had his request been rejected, he would have been forced to choose between stepping down or facing the no-confidence vote on Monday.

The current turmoil was touched off last week when Mr. Harper presented an economic plan that outraged the opposition by calling for nothing in the way of a stimulus for Canada’s flagging economy. Instead, it recommended cutbacks, including a threat to cut off public financing for political parties, something his Conservative Party could weather more easily than his opponents.

Since then the two rival parties, the Liberals and New Democrats, have hastened to put together a coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois to replace Mr. Harper’s Conservative-led government.

Technically, what Mr. Harper did was to “prorogue” Parliament, a move that stops all actions on bills and the body’s other business, and thus goes well beyond an adjournment. It is not unprecedented — prorogues are used routinely to break off sessions for elections, for example — but this is the first time any members here could recall the maneuver being used in the midst of a political crisis.

Mr. Harper declared the parliamentary suspension after a two-and-a-half hour meeting in Ottawa with Ms. Jean. “The public is very frustrated by the current situation in Parliament,” he told reporters as snow swirled outside of Rideau Hall, the governor general’s official residence, ”and we are all responsible for it.”

In contrast to the relative indifference to the elections two months ago, the current situation has provoked a passionate debate in the country online, in public and through radio call-in shows.

The issue has also inflamed old regional tensions. In Western Canada, the main base of support for the Conservatives, political commentators are arguing that the coalition is an attempt by more populous Ontario and Quebec to deny political influence to the West.

At the same time, many Quebecers, particularly French speakers, have been offended by Conservative suggestions that they have no interest in remaining a part of Canada. In the House of Commons, where debate is not always temperate, the political rhetoric has been particularly heated.

Some Conservative members are now suggesting that the coalition members are near-traitors.

“That is as close to treason and sedition as I can imagine,” Bob Dechert, a Conservative member said on Wednesday, echoing a refrain widely heard from callers to radio programs in Mr. Harper’s home province of Alberta.

Ms. Jean cut short a trip to Europe on Wednesday and flew back to Ottawa in an effort to deal with the growing political crisis. Her meeting with Mr. Harper began at 9:30 a.m.

Stéphane Dion, the Liberal Party leader and head of the opposition, had urged her to turn down Mr. Harper’s request in a letter dated Dec. 3.

“A prime minister cannot request that the Parliament be prorogued to avoid a confidence vote,” he wrote. “It would be an abuse of power on the part of the executive branch without precedent in the history of Parliament.”

On Thursday, the coalition of the Liberal and New Democratic parties said it would continue with its effort to form a government despite the closure of parliament and condemned Mr. Harper’s tactics as undemocratic.

Mr. Dion, who would become the coalition’s prime minister, addressed reporters before the closed doors of the House of Commons. “For the first time in the history of Canada, the prime minister of Canada is running away from the Parliament of Canada,” he said.

“We do not want any more of his words, we don’t believe them,” Mr. Dion said of Mr. Harper’s pledges to work with the opposition on the federal budget before Parliament reopens in January. “We want to see changes, monumental changes.”

The leader of the New Democrats, Jack Layton, also decried Mr. Harper’s move. “He’s put a lock on the door on the House of Commons,” he said. “He refuses to face the people of Canada through their elected representatives.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/wo...canada.html?hp





Help Crack the Sensor-Size Code
David Pogue

If there’s a single factor that predicts the quality of the photos you’ll get from a camera, a single letter grade that lets you compare cameras, it’s this: the sensor size.

Big sensors absorb more light, so you get sharper detail, better color, and clearer low-light images. Small sensors, on the other hand, pack too many light-absorbing pixels into a tiny space. So heat builds up, creating digital “noise” (random speckles) in your photos.

But here’s the problem: it’s really hard to find out how big a camera’s sensor is. The manufacturers diligently bury this detail. It’s not on the box, it’s not in the ads, and sometimes it’s not even on the camera’s Web site.

And even if you find the sensor-size measurement online, it’s very hard to compare the sensor sizes of different cameras. The companies publish this spec in two different formats to make comparison difficult. For small cameras, they use a bizarre fraction like “1/2.5 inches.” This is a diagonal measurement; divide 1 by 2.5, and you find out that the sensor is actually 0.4 inches diagonally. In other words, a smaller denominator is better.

For an S.L.R., though, sensor sizes are published as millimeters on a side, like “24 x 16 mm.” If you convert that to inches, and then calculate the diagonal, you find out that that’s 1.14 inches diagonally.

In short, it’s a lot of work to find out the true diagonal measurement of a camera’s sensor size.

So here’s my request: Among Pogue’s Posts readers, I’m quite sure there’s a Web genius who could create an online sensor-size calculator. It would let you plug in the ratio (for a small camera, like 1/1.8) or the millimeters on a side (for an S.L.R., like 24 x 16)—and, with one click, give you what you really want to know: the diagonal measurement, in inches.

If you will create such a calculator, I’ll blog it and refer to it in my writings. And you’ll be doing the world a huge favor. Any takers?

=======
UPDATE: The challenge has been met… in two hours! Reader Ryan Willers has not only built the calculator beautifully, but even registered http://sensor-size.com, to make finding and remembering it simple.

Congratulations, Ryan–and thank you!

UPDATE 2: Emil H. has also done a beautiful job!

Holy cow, people… two solutions in three hours? Next week, I’ll assign you guys a program that solves the Federal deficit and Social Security!
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...sor-size-code/





Mobiles Distract Drivers More than Chatty Passengers

Mobile phone calls distract drivers far more than even the chattiest passenger, causing drivers to follow too closely and miss exits, US researchers reported on Monday.

Using a handsfree device does not make things better and the researchers believe they know why - passengers act as a second set of eyes, shutting up or sometimes even helping when they see the driver needs to make a manoeuvre.

The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, adds to a growing body of evidence that mobile phones can make driving dangerous.

Lee Strayer of the University of Utah and colleagues have found in a series of experiments using driving simulators that handsfree mobile phones are just as distracting as handheld models.

They have demonstrated that chatting on a mobile phone can slow the reaction times of young adult drivers to levels seen among senior citizens, and shown that drivers using mobile telephones are as impaired as drivers who are legally drunk.

For the latest study, also using a simulator, Strayer's team showed that drivers using a handsfree device drifted out of their lanes and missed exits more frequently than drivers talking to a passenger. They tested 96 adults aged 18 to 49.

"The passenger adds a second set of eyes, and helps the driver navigate and reminds them where to go," Strayer said in a statement.

"When you take a look at the data, it turns out that a driver conversing with a passenger is not as impaired as a driver talking on a mobile phone," he added.

Passengers also simplify conversation when driving conditions change, the researchers wrote.

"The difference between a cell phone conversation and passenger conversation is due to the fact that the passenger is in the vehicle and knows what the traffic conditions are like, and they help the driver by reminding them of where to take an exit and pointing out hazards," Strayer said.
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0...9357393,00.htm





Behavioral Screening -- the Future of Airport Security?
Dana Rosenblatt

Keep your shoes and belts on: Waiting in long airport security lines to pass through metal detectors may soon be a thing of the past.

Airport security checkpoints may become opportunities for screeners to study passengers' intentions.
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Security experts say focus is shifting from analyzing the content of carry-ons to analyzing the content of passengers' intentions and emotions.

"We are seeing a needed paradigm shift when it comes to security," says Omer Laviv, CEO of ATHENA GS3, an Israeli-based security company.

"This 'brain-fingerprinting,' or technology which checks for behavioral intent, is much more developed than we think."

Nowhere is the need for cutting-edge security more acute than Israel, which faces constant security threats. For this reason, Israel has become a leader in developing security technology.

Several Israeli-based technology companies are developing detection systems that pick up signs of emotional strain, a psychological red flag that a passenger may intend to commit an act of terror. Speedier and less intrusive than metal detectors, these systems may eventually restore some efficiency to the airplane boarding process.

One firm, WeCU (pronounced "We See You") Technologies, employs a combination of infra-red technology, remote sensors and imagers, and flashing of subliminal images, such as a photo of Osama bin Laden. Developers say the combination of these technologies can detect a person's reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration, signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack.

With these technologies, the emphasis is on speed and seamlessness. Ehud Givon, CEO of WeCU, envisions a day when a passenger can breeze through a security checkpoint in 20 to 30 seconds.

Although traditional security profiling can discriminate by race and religion, security experts say behavioral profiling is more fair, more effective and less expensive.

WeCU has received grants from the Transportation Security Administration within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which hopes to implement a system to pinpoint internal threats such as airline employees intending terrorist acts.

Once these technologies are in place, a passenger may pass through a security screening without realizing it. For example, passengers could use an automated check-in system or gaze at a screen with departures information without realizing they've just been exposed to the words "Islamic jihad" written in Arabic.

These stimuli, explains Givon, will intrinsically elicit some sort of biometric response -- whether the passenger knows it or not -- that can be picked up by WeCU's strategically placed sensors.

"I believe that we introduce a new layer in security," Givon says. "This is something that couldn't be done in the past: finding the connection between a certain individual and the intent to harm."

The Orwellian-sounding startup has gone further to develop a system that detects a passenger's behavioral intentions by scanning their every step, literally. While walking around certain parts of the airport terminal, a passenger may not realize he has stepped on a "smart carpet" filled with hidden biometric sensors.

The technology is still under development, says Givon, who believes it will be strong enough to pick up biometric information from a footstep. If a passenger is wearing heavy hiking boots, for example, WeCU will rely on biometric sensors combined with video and thermal biometric imaging to detect malicious intent.

Another option from WeCU is a "smart seat," or cushion full of hidden biometric sensors that could provide a more detailed read on someone sitting in an airport waiting area, Givon says.

While the technology sound like something from a James Bond flick or even "A Clockwork Orange," Givon insists that passengers will not find the techniques intrusive. "We don't want you to feel that you are being interrogated," he says.

Givon is negotiating contracts with airports worldwide and believes his company's technology may be implemented as soon as 2010.

Nemesysco, another Israeli-based technology company, believes the key to a person's emotions and intentions lies in their voice. The company's patented LVA, or Layered Voice Analysis, technology can pick up verbal cues from a passenger who may pose a threat.

Unlike a polygraph test, which checks for lies, Nemesysco's systems work as an "emotion detector," says Nemesysco CEO Amir Liberman. In other words, it's not what passengers say, but how they say it.

Nemesysco's devices use a series of patented signal-processing algorithms that can differentiate between a "normal" voice and a"'stressed" voice. If emotional stress is detected, officials can determine if the passenger should be taken aside for further questioning.

The system works on the premise that all voices have a certain frequency, and any deviation of that baseline frequency can indicate stress.

Liberman says it takes approximately five to 10 seconds for their system to capture a "normal" voice in casual conversation, which establishes a baseline. Their system then measures changes from the baseline voice that signify an increase in stress, excitement, anticipation, hesitation or other emotions that can indicate a potential terrorism threat.

A computer processes the voice patterns and then flashes words such as "high risk," "medium risk," "excited" and "highly stressed." Through his system, Liberman says, he "can see what's going on in your brain."

Versions of Nemesysco's system already have been successfully tested at Moscow Domodedovo International Airport, where officials used it to target criminals and drug traffickers. A version was recently implemented at another major international airport which Liberman declined to identify.

Layered Voice Analysis also has been used to test for insurance fraud and on the TV program "Big Brother Australia."

Layered Voice Analysis has limitations, including the inability to trace the vocal patterns of a person with a speech impediment. But the system is more effective than current security measures, claims Liberman, who believes a terrorist currently can pass through airport security with explosive material "that can take down any plane."

In fact, many experts express little confidence in the current state of airport security.

Philip Baum, London-based editor of Aviation Security International magazine, says would-be terrorists could easily slip through security checkpoints, even with new regulations that check for liquids.

"The archaic system of an X-ray machine and metal detector cannot pick up other potential threats posed by passengers," Baum says. "I can have a ceramic weapon or chemical weapons and walk through an archway metal detector and it won't be picked up. Yet we have huge faith in these metal detectors that can only pick up one substance."

Laviv, whose consulting firm focuses on securing mass transportation systems, is equally skeptical.

"It is possible today to hijack an aircraft using only five or six able-bodied passengers who are well-trained in Kung Fu fighting," he says. "There is no technology in place in airports to detect a threat like that.
"The question is, should our desire be to look for each and every threat agent, rather than focus our efforts on identifying the [violent] intention of the passenger?"
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/02/a...ity/index.html





DNA Database 'Breach of Rights'
BBC

Thousands of DNA samples from innocent people are currently retained

Two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

The men's information was held by South Yorkshire Police, although neither was convicted of any offence.

The judgement could have major implications on how DNA records are stored in the UK's national database.

The judges said keeping the information "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was "disappointed" by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.

The database may now have to be scaled back following the unanimous judgement by 17 senior judges from across Europe.

Under present laws, the DNA profiles of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are kept on the database, regardless of whether they are charged or convicted.

Discriminatory

The details of about 4.5m people are held and one in five of them does not have a current criminal record.

Both men were awarded £36,400 (42,000 Euros) in costs, less the money already paid in legal aid.

The court found that the police's actions were in violation of Article 8 - the right to respect for private and family life - of the European Convention on Human Rights.

It also said it was "struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales".

The judges ruled the retention of the men's DNA "failed to strike a fair balance between the competing public and private interests," and that the UK government "had overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation in this regard".

The court also ruled "the retention in question constituted a disproportionate interference with the applicants' right to respect for private life and could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society".

'Privacy protection'

The home secretary said: "DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month.

"The government mounted a robust defence before the court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

"The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

Solicitor Peter Mahy, who represented the men, said that the decision will have far-reaching implications.

"It will be very interesting to see how the UK government respond.

"The government should now start destroying the DNA records of those people who are currently on the DNA database and who are innocent of any crime."

Human rights group Liberty said it welcomed the court's decision.

Director Shami Chakrabarti said: "This is one of the most strongly worded judgements that Liberty has ever seen from the Court of Human Rights.

"That court has used human rights principles and common sense to deliver the privacy protection of innocent people that the British government has shamefully failed to deliver."

'Invasion of privacy'

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID group, which campaigns against identity cards, said: "'This is a victory for liberty and privacy.

"Though these judgements are always complicated and slow in coming, it is a vindication of what privacy campaigners have said all along.

"The principle that we need to follow is simple - when charges are dropped suspect samples are destroyed. No charge, no DNA."

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics reports on the ethical questions raised by recent advances in biological and medical research.

Its director, Hugh Whittall, said: "We agree wholeheartedly with this ruling. The DNA of innocent people should not be kept by police.

"People feel it is an invasion of their privacy, and there is no evidence that removing from the DNA database people who have not been charged or convicted will lead to serious crimes going undetected.

"The government now has an obligation to bring its own policies into line."

Rights breach claim

One of the men who sought the ruling in Strasbourg, Michael Marper, 45, was arrested in 2001.

He was charged with harassing his partner but the case was later dropped. He had no previous convictions.

The other man - a teenager identified as "S" - was arrested and charged with attempted robbery but later acquitted.

In both cases the police refused to destroy fingerprints and DNA samples taken when the men were taken in to custody.

The men went to the European Court of Human Rights after their cases were thrown out by the House of Lords.

They argued that retaining their DNA profiles is discriminatory and breaches their right to a private life.

The government claims the DNA profile from people who are not convicted may sometimes be linked to later offences, so storing the details on the database is a proportionate response to tackling crime.

Scotland already destroys DNA samples taken during criminal investigations from people who are not charged or who are later acquitted of alleged offences.

The Home Office has already set up a "contingency planning group" to look into the potential implications arising from a ruling in favour of the men.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7764069.stm





Big Brother Police to Get 'War-Time' Power to Demand ID in the Street - on Pain of Sending You to Jail
James Slack

State officials are to be given powers previously reserved for times of war to demand a person's proof of identity at any time.

Anybody who refuses the Big Brother demand could face arrest and a possible prison sentence.

The new rules come in legislation unveiled in today's Queen's Speech.

They are presented as a crackdown on illegal immigration, but lawyers say they could be applied to anybody who has ever been outside the UK, even on holiday.

The civil rights group Liberty, which analysed clauses from the new Immigration and Citizenship Bill, called them an attempt to introduce compulsory ID cards by the back door.

The move would effectively take Britain back to the Second World War, when people were stopped and asked to 'show their papers'.

Liberty said: 'Powers to examine identity documents, previously thought to apply only at ports of entry, will be extended to criminalise anyone in Britain who has ever left the country and fails to produce identity papers upon demand.

'We believe that the catch-all remit of this power is disproportionate and that its enactment would not only damage community relations but represent a fundamental shift in the relationship between the State and those present in the UK.'

One broadly-drafted clause would permit checks on anyone who has ever entered the UK - whether recently or years earlier.

Officials, who could be police or immigration officers, will be able to stop anyone to establish if they need permission to be here, if they have it, and whether it should be cancelled.

No reasonable cause or suspicion is required, and checks can be carried out 'in country' - not just at borders.

The law would apply to British citizens and foreign nationals, according to Liberty's lawyers. The only people who would be exempt are the tiny minority who have never been abroad on holiday or business.

A second clause says that people who are stopped 'must produce a valid identity document if required to do so by the Secretary of State'. Failure to do so would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of 51 weeks in jail or a £5,000 fine.

Currently, police are allowed to ask for identity documents only if there is a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed an offence.

During the Second World War, ID cards were seen as a way of protecting the nation from Nazi spies, but in 1952 Winston Churchill's government decided they were not needed in peacetime.

They were thought to be hindering the police because so many people resented being asked to produce them.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said last night: ' Sneaking in compulsory identity cards via the back door of immigration law is a cynical escalation of this expensive and intrusive scheme.'

Tory spokesman Damian Green said: 'This scheme will do nothing to improve our security, may make it worse, and will certainly land the taxpayer with a multi-million bill.

'Labour should concentrate on things that will improve our security, like a dedicated border police force.'

LibDem spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'Ministers seem to be breaking their promise that no one would ever have to carry an ID card. This is a sly and underhand way of extending the ID card scheme by stealth.'

There was also concern last night that the Government is seeking to revive controversial plans for secret inquests.

The measure - which would have let the authorities hold a hearing like the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest behind closed doors - was removed from counter-terrorism legislation earlier this year.

But it could be re-introduced as part of a Coroners and Death Certification Bill.

Other Bills set to be unveiled include plans to extend flexible working and new laws giving every employee the right to request time off to train.

These have been widely criticised by business leaders who warn that extending employees rights will damage small firms.

Under a new welfare crackdown, benefit cheats will lose their handouts for one month and council staff will be given powers to use 'lie detector' technology to root out fraudsters.

Dole claimants who refuse to seek work could be made to dig gardens as punishment or they may be ordered to spend an entire nine-to-five day in an office looking through vacant jobs.

Plans for a crackdown on cigarette sales are being reviewed, and a new statutory code of conduct to govern the banks has been added to the list of forthcoming Bills.

The Speech is reported to have undergone last-minute changes, driven by Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, to reflect the economic crisis.

But he is said to have failed in a bid to block health measures on tobacco sales.

Of the Bills dropped altogether, the most high-profile is the Communications Data Bill, which would have created a giant 'Big Brother' database of phone calls, emails and internet visits.

The Home Office said last night it had no intention of making people carry ID cards.

A spokesman said: 'It is simply wrong to claim there are any plans whatsoever to make identity cards compulsory for British citizens or to require British citizens to have an ID card at all times and present it when asked.

'To maintain effective immigration control it is only right that we ask everyone attempting to enter the UK to produce a valid identity document.'

Every worker wins right to training

Ministers are to press ahead with a raft of new workplace rights in the Queen's Speech, despite fears about the impact on businesses battling the recession.

Government sources said plans to extend flexible working have been revived and the country's 22 million workers will get a new right to ask for time off to train.

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has lost a battle against plans to give millions of parents the right to flexible working.

The flexible working scheme is now expected to be extended in April to 4.5million parents of children up to the age of 16. Plans to extend paid maternity leave from 39 weeks to 52 weeks are also likely to go ahead.

The move will anger business leaders, who say extending employees' rights will hit small firms.

The 'right to train', to be implemented in 2010, will be less contentious as many businesses accept the need to improve employees' skills, especially in difficult economic times.

A tighter rein on the banks

Banks will have to sign up to a compulsory code of practice under plans to be revealed in the Queen's Speech.

It will tear up the voluntary 'Banking Code' which has been in place since 1997.

Key commitments will include ensuring charges are 'open and transparent' and treating customers in financial difficulties in a 'sympathetic and positive' way.

The move comes amid growing fury at the way banks are failing to keep their side of the bargain over the £37billion Government bailout.

In a pre-emptive move, Lloyds TSB - one of the three banks being part-nationalised - will today launch a new charter for small businesses.

The six-point plan will only help businesses with an annual turnover of up to £1million. About 600,000 customers will benefit.

Lloyds said it will agree 'any reasonable request for short-term finance' and promised to pass on the full benefit of any further cuts in Bank of England base rate.

It also promised not to change the interest rate or availability of an overdraft as long as the business does not exceed the agreed limit.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ing-jail.html#





Washing Hands 'Affects Moral Judgment'

The old adage that cleanliness is next to godliness has now received scientific support after researchers discovered washing your hands can affect your moral judgment.
Murray Wardrop

A new study has found that people are more likely to be lenient in making decisions if they have just washed their hands.

British scientists who carried out the research said the findings suggest that jurors in criminal trials who have cleansed their hands may make their verdict less severe.

And voters may be more likely to excuse a politician's misdemeanours when going to the ballot box if they have just had a shower.

In the study, 22 people who had washed their hands, and 22 who had not, were made to watch a disgusting three-minute clip of heroin addicts from the hit film Trainspotting.

All 44 were then asked to rate how morally wrong they deemed the series of acts shown to them on a scale of one to nine, with one being acceptable and seven being very wrong.

The actions included stealing money from a wallet, lying on a job application, cooking and eating the family dog, killing a dying plane crash survivor to avoid starvation, and abusing a kitten.

All said they thought the actions were 'wrong'. However, the participants who had washed their hands were less likely to judge the actions as harshly as the group who had not.

In another experiment, a group was asked to read sentences with words such as 'purity' and 'cleanliness' before being posed the same moral dilemmas. Another group was given sentences with neutral words.

Again, the 'clean' group judged the unethical behaviour less harshly.

Lead researcher Dr Simone Schnall, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth, said: "We like to think we arrive at decisions because we deliberate, but incidental things can influence us.

"This could have implications when voting and when juries make up their minds."

Lancaster University psychologist Professor Carey Cooper described the findings as "terrifying".

He said: "It suggests that washing can make us more prepared to accept wrongdoing.

"It is very scary when you think of the implications, especially in the judicial world."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sciencean...-judgment.html





Firm Makes One Billionth Mouse
Maggie Shiels

A Silicon Valley company has hailed as a major landmark the production of their one billionth computer mouse.

Logitech's description comes at a time when analysts claim the days of the mouse are numbered.

"It's rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company," said Logitech's general manager Rory Dooley.

"Look at any other industry and it has never happened. This is a significant milestone," he told the BBC.

But sounding the death knell for the device is Gartner analyst Steve Prentice who said "the mouse will no longer be mainstream in three to five years."

However he did acknowledge the manufacture of the one billionth mouse was a "tremendous achievement."

"It speaks volumes to the success of the mouse that they (Logitech) have produced a billion and good luck. But past performance is not a guarantee of future success.

"The world has changed and the nature of machines has changed. The multi-touch interface I believe really does seal the coffin of the mouse," added Mr Prentice.

He claimed the other technologies that will consign the mouse to the dustbin of history will involve facial and movement recognition for the mainstream market.

Mr Dooley however believed the new technologies will have a place alongside the computer mouse and that it does not have to be an either or situation for users.

"The fundamental functionality of the mouse has not changed for 40 years and that is one of the keys to its success. We do not envisage unlearning all those years of learning but that doesn't mean to say there will not be a place for touch interfaces.

"Touch will augment the things you can do today with the mouse and keyboard interface," he added.

Challenge

The mouse faces some stiff competition. Laptops and notebooks use a touch pad and are increasingly taking the place of the desktop computer. Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii game have introduced a new generation to the world of touch screens and movement sensors.

HP is pushing a mouse-less TouchSmart PC while Microsoft have invested heavily in 'surface' computers which react to gestures and touch.

Mr Dooley however put talk of the death of the mouse down to hyperbole.

"The reality is it's always easy for people to drum up interest in a story by making an extreme statement. And in the story of the "mouse is dead" campaign by Bill Gates a few months ago, that was started to drum up interest in Windows 7, the next version of the operating system."

"The challenge with these new technologies is going to be will you touch a screen that is two feet away from you a thousand times a day? Is touch accurate enough to let you get into the cell of a spreadsheet.

"Those are just some simple questions we believe will not necessarily be answered by the touch interface of tomorrow, " Mr Dooley explained to the BBC.

Mr Prentice strongly disagreed and said that the pace of progress cannot be denied.

"Just look forward five years and computer screens will be built into the walls of our homes and that would make it difficult to drive with a mouse. That's where all the new technology like multi touch and facial recognition comes in. This is where the computer stops being a computer and becomes part of a building.

"Push things back 30 years and we would never had said we'd sit in front of a computer or that computers would hold all our music when everyone bought gramophones. Computers are not just computers anymore, they are part of our lives," added Mr Prentice.

Logitech's one billionth mouse rolled off the production line in the middle of November.

As part of the fanfare around that, the company has launched a global competition to find the mouse with a reward of $1000 of Logitech products going to the winner. Clues as to its whereabouts will be posted on the company's blog.

The computer mouse will achieve a milestone of its own next week when it turns 40.

It was 9 December 1968 when Douglas C. Engelbart and his group of researchers at Stanford University put the first mouse through its paces.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7751627.stm





Bush Signs Law Promoting Censorship of Kids' Programming
Stephanie Condon

President Bush on Tuesday signed the Child Safe Viewing Act, requiring the Federal Communications Commission to explore the market for technologies that allow parents to censor the programming their children watch.

The new law requires the FCC to issue a notice of inquiry to examine what advanced content-blocking technologies are available for various communication devices and platforms. It also calls for the FCC to consider how to encourage the development and use of such technologies without affecting content providers' pricing or packaging.

The term "advanced blocking technologies" is defined in the law as technology that enables parents to protect their children from "any indecent or objectionable video or audio programming, as determined by such parent, that is transmitted through the use of wire, wireless, or radio communication."

The FCC will have to report its findings to Congress within 270 days.

The bill was introduced last year by Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark. It passed unanimously in the Senate and passed without objection in the House in October.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10111752-38.html





Edward S. Rogers Jr., Canadian Media Mogul, Dies at 75
Ian Austen

Edward S. Rogers Jr., who transformed Canada’s first FM radio station into one of North America’s most diverse communications and media companies, died on Tuesday at his home in Toronto. He was 75.

The death was announced by Rogers Communications, the company he founded and of which he remained chief executive. The announcement said that the death of Mr. Rogers, who was known as Ted, was related to congestive heart failure.

Businesses controlled by Mr. Rogers included Canada’s largest wireless operator, its biggest cable television system, several of its largest-circulation magazines, the leading provider of residential Internet service, 52 radio stations, 10 television stations, a shopping channel, a national sports cable network and the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.

Rogers Communications, which posted revenue of about 10 billion Canadian dollars last year, currently outperforms its rivals, particularly Bell Canada, by most financial measures. But in the past, Mr. Rogers’s reliance on debt brought the operation close to ruin more than once. And his relentless drive for expansion sometimes created clashes with regulators, competitors and consumers.

As Mr. Rogers told his story, the creation of his company was almost predestined as a way to honor the memory of his father, who had the same name.

The senior Mr. Rogers had invented the first vacuum tube that allowed radios to be plugged into wall outlets and operate off household alternating current, rather than rely on batteries.

His father used the proceeds from his invention to build a radio manufacturing company and opened a Toronto radio station, CFRB, for Canada’s First Rogers Batteryless.

When the younger Mr. Rogers was 5 years old, his father died. Three years later, in financial distress, his mother, Velma, sold the family’s stake in the business.

With help from his stepfather, John W. Graham, Mr. Rogers made his first broadcast acquisition, an FM radio station, while still a law student in Toronto, using mostly borrowed money.

When he bought the station, CHFI, in 1960, fewer than 3 percent of homes in the Toronto area had FM radio receivers. While Mr. Rogers was an FM broadcaster more out of financial necessity than by choice, he did believe that its superior sound quality would eventually make it the dominate radio system. He overcame Toronto’s lack of receivers by selling low-cost FM sets that doubled as ads for CHFI.

From that point on, Mr. Rogers tried to focus his efforts on new technologies.

“If you’ve got a product that’s on the growth trend your company can just explode,” he said.

That was certainly the case with cable television, the business that was to create the foundation of the Rogers operation.

In its early days, cable was an easier sell in Canada than in the United States because it offered Canadian viewers a clear view of American channels, which had a wider variety of programming.

Not everything worked according to plan. Rogers Communications lost $500 million in the 1990s when it joined a partnership to start the first alternative long-distance telephone company in Canada when the monopoly system ended. And debt, much of it with low ratings and high interest rates, grew alarmingly as his acquisitions continued, particularly his hostile takeover of Maclean-Hunter in 1994 for 3.1 billion Canadian dollars.

While Mr. Rogers was mainly interested in Maclean-Hunter’s cable operations, he retained most of its magazines, including Maclean’s, the largest Canadian newsmagazine, and Chatelaine, the leading Canadian publication aimed at women.

Everything eventually worked out, and the debts were largely retired. While cable companies in the United States are just now making forays into wireless phone service, Rogers Communications has Canada’s most up-to-date network and the country’s largest wireless customer base.

Mr. Rogers was active in the company’s daily operations until last October, when he was hospitalized.

His successor is not clear; a trust will maintain his family’s control over the company. His son, Edward III, is currently the head of the Rogers cable unit, while his daughter Melinda Rogers is the senior vice president of strategy and development for the overall holding company. Mr. Rogers is also survived by his wife, Loretta, and two other daughters, Lisa Rogers and Martha Rogers.

While it is a very small part of Rogers’s business, the acquisition with the least obvious purpose was the company’s purchase of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2000. Mr. Rogers was not a big baseball fan, and he never became strongly associated with the team.

But the team ownership did enable Rogers to buy the SkyDome, the retractable-roofed stadium where the Jays play, a feature of Toronto’s skyline. Soon after the deal, the stadium was emblazoned with the Rogers name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/bu.../03rogers.html





Mobile Broadband to Hit 42Mb/sec in 2009
Stuart Turton

Mobile broadband speeds could hit a blistering 42Mb/sec as early as next year, according to Ericsson's chief technology officer.

The idea seems far-fetched given that even the fastest dongles currently hover at around 7.2Mb/sec, but according to John Cunliffe, the technology to smash that barrier is just around the corner.

"If you look at what's actually happening, the fastest service in the UK at the moment is 7.2Mb/sec, but we can easily see how we get to 14Mb/sec by improving the codes using the modulation," he tells PC Pro.

"After that there are two steps that can boost speed. We go to the modulation that is 64 QAM... that's 64 combinations of information in the same slot as one piece of information. In other words it's massively spectrally effecient. We think that's going to give us 21Mb/sec.

"But then there's another technique called MIMO, multiple in multiple out. What this means is you have multiple radios on a device, this is like Wi-Fi uses with the N standard.

With MIMO we can go from 14Mb/sec to 28Mb/sec. They're two paralell paths, but we can then combine them to get 42Mb/sec. Essentially this is happening through 2009."

Cunliffe acknowledges that while the technology to boost speeds exists, it may take another year or so for the dongles themselves to catch up. However, he doesn't think speeds will stop at 42Mb/sec.

"We think even more in the future, we can probably squeeze that to 80Mb/sec, and that's before we even get to Long Term Evolution."

For a comprehensive roundup of all the UK's mobile broadband services, read our feature.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/240672/m...c-in-2009.html





Net Speed Rules Come into Force
BBC

Customers will be better informed about the speed of their net connection under new rules.

The Ofcom-backed code of practice has won pledges from net firms to give more information about line speeds.

Net firms covering 95% of the UK's broadband users have signed up to the voluntary scheme which comes into force on 5 December.

Over the next six months Ofcom will monitor net firms to ensure they live up to their promises.

No penalty

The code of conduct was drawn up in response to research that suggested consumers were confused by adverts that promised broadband speeds that few consumers could achieve.

Almost a quarter of people do not get the speed they expect, according to early results from Ofcom research, which is due to be published in full in 2009.

The code requires net firms to:

• Give new customers an accurate estimate of the maximum speed their line can support.

• Explain how technical issues could slow speeds and give advice about how to combat these problems.

• Downgrade a customer's deal, at no penalty, if line speeds are a lot lower than the original estimate.

Customers must also get timely warnings if they breach the data download caps that many net firms impose on customers.

Consumers can check whether their net firm has signed up to the code of practice via the Ofcom website.

Anna Bradley, chair of Ofcom's Communications Consumer Panel, welcomed the code.

"The new code will help consumers make better informed choices," she said in a statement.

"It addresses the concerns that we raised with Ofcom and the ISPs last year about broadband speeds - about the mismatch between the speeds that consumers think they are buying and what they actually get."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7764489.stm





Comcast To Offer Bandwidth Use Tracker In January

Online tool to be available January 5 for all users...
Karl Bode

When Comcast recently started capping all users at 250GB per month, they annoyed some by failing to provide a tool to track usage, though they did tell us they were working on it. An anonymous Comcast tipster informs us that Comcast will soon implement a viewable online usage meter starting January 5. According to the source, the tool won't update users in real time, but will have a three hour delay. It will also retain three months of bandwidth usage records, and will come with the option of monitoring multiple MAC addresses.

At the moment, the Comcast FAQ tells users to do a web search for bandwidth meters or use the meter included in the McAfee Security Suite the company gives out free to subscribers.

Given the Comcast cap is so high, the vast majority of Comcast users will never run into it, and those who will probably use a software client or router firmware to track their usage.

But after their tangle with the FCC for forging packets and throttling P2P traffic, Comcast's all about transparency. According to Comcast, less than 1% of all users will ever brush against the current cap. Still, should the cable operator ever use lower caps or implement overages, they'd need to be sure that customers understand how much bandwidth they're using.

A recent survey indicated that 83% of Americans don't know how much bandwidth they consume, or even what a gigabyte is. AT&T, who recently starting testing caps ranging from 20-150GB caps with $1 overages, offers customers in Nevada and Texas test markets an online web usage tool. So does Time Warner Cable, who is testing caps ranging from 5-40GB with $1-$1.50 overages in Beaumont, Texas.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...-January-99427





New Coalition Drawing Up Nationwide Broadband Access Strategy
Cecilia Kang

President-elect Barack Obama has said getting affordable high-speed Internet service to every American home would create jobs, fuel economic growth and spark innovation. Yesterday, representatives from technology and telecommunications companies, labor unions and public interest groups frequently at odds with one another agreed to provide the next president with a roadmap for how to accomplish those goals.

That map could include tax breaks, low-interest loans, subsidies and public-private partnerships to encourage more investments in upgrading and building out high-speed networks, representatives from Google, AT&T and public interest group Free Press said during a panel discussion on broadband policy that also served as a coming-out party for their newly formed coalition.

The details of how to meet those goals still must be worked out by the group, whose aim is to bring more affordable high-speed Internet access to every consumer.

Many of the group members have been at odds with each other on whether the government should set limits on how much spectrum a company can hold, the use of unlicensed devices on fallow broadcast airwaves and net neutrality -- the notion that network operators should be prevented from blocking or slowing Internet traffic. The formation of the group is an effort to move beyond their differences.

"The coalition is a positive in that it demonstrates we agree that we have a broadband problem, which not everyone was willing to admit to two years ago," said Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press and a member of the group. "The key is whether we'll see this group produce policy solutions that will require difficult choices."

At stake is the nation's ability to compete technologically and economically, the group said. The United States has dropped from the top 10 nations for broadband access, speeds and price in the last several years. The coalition is pushing for a federal plan that would provide access to high-speed Internet service, much as the government did with electricity, roads and phone service.

Obama famously used the Internet for outreach during his campaign and received 370,000 donations online. He's proposed using blogs, social networking tools and community Web pages known as wikis to connect citizens to government agencies. And Obama has argued for massive upgrades to technology infrastructure such as high-speed, or broadband, Internet.

So far the coalition's plans to increase broadband usage mirrors Obama's plan, but there could be disagreement over deployment, analysts said.

Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen said the union supports a proposal by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) to increase definitions for broadband to 10 megabits per second for downloads by 2010. The current definition for broadband speed in the United States is 768 kilobits per second downstream, which is far below standards in many other nations.

Achieving that goal at prices acceptable to consumers, however, would be expensive for telecom and cable network operators. Some in the coalition could push for laws that would achieve lower prices and higher speeds through more wireless and telecom competitors, but that could cause further disagreement among members, Scott said.

Some have already suggested requesting funds from the federal economic stimulus plan for broadband deployment. Yesterday, an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Pelosi was in favor of that idea.

AT&T chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi said the company has moved closer to the view of public interest groups and Google that the Web should be open for all users without discrimination of technology and content on their network. But unlike Free Press and consumer groups, AT&T opposes new laws or rules on net neutrality, saying Federal Communications Commission rules are sufficient, and any violation should be handled on a case-by-case basis.

"There will be significant outstanding debates that will be very tough and there will still be daylight between the groups on many, many issues," said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst at investment firm Stifel Nicolaus. "But both sides are in a phase right now where they are emphasizing how much they share in terms of their views on what is an appropriate framework for looking at this issue."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...120203164.html





AT&T Plans to Cut 12,000 Jobs
AP

AT&T, the telecommunications company, said Thursday that it was cutting 12,000 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force, because of the economic downturn.

The company, based in Dallas, said the job cuts would take place in December and throughout 2009. The company also cited a changing business mix and a more streamlined structure as other reasons for the layoffs.

It was not immediately clear what departments and cities would suffer the cuts. However, like most telecom companies, AT&T has been seeing many customers defect from landline phones to wireless services, and the company noted that it would still be hiring in 2009 in parts of the business that offer cell phone service and broadband Internet access.

The company also said it planned to reduce capital spending next year.

AT&T plans to take a charge of about $600 million in the fourth quarter to pay for severance costs. The company noted that many of its non-management employees have guaranteed jobs because of union contracts. All affected workers will receive severance a “in accordance with management policies or union agreements,” the company said. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/te...s/05phone.html

Landline Operations at a Glance

AT&T isn't disclosing where it is cutting 12,000 jobs, 4 percent of its work force. But the company did say one reason for the cuts is a ''changing business mix.'' That refers, at least in part, to the long-term trend in which customers are abandoning traditional landline phone service for wireless options or phone service from the cable company. Here are the 22 states where AT&T provides local phone service:

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...ance.html?_r=1





Free Web Plan Being Pushed by FCC Head
Amy Schatz

Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups.

At its December meeting, the FCC could also consider new rules designed to speed up consideration of disputes between independent cable programmers and cable providers such as Time Warner Cable Inc. and Comcast Corp., which either refuse to carry some channels or put them on specialty tiers of service that cost subscribers more.

The agency also will ask for more feedback on its proposal to require programmers to sell their channels to cable operators individually instead of in bundles.

The free Internet plan is the most controversial issue the agency will tackle in December. Mr. Martin shelved plans to consider a wider variety of sticky issues pending at the agency, including a request by the Hollywood studios to hobble TVs and set-top boxes so studios can offer copy-protected theatrical releases sooner.

The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. The winner could establish a paid service that would have a fast wireless Internet connection. The free service could be slower and would be required to filter out pornography and other material not suitable for children. The FCC's proposal mirrors a plan offered by M2Z Networks Inc., a start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr.

Consumer advocates have objected to the FCC's proposed pornography filter, while the wireless industry has objected to the entire free Internet plan. To address concerns about the filter, the FCC is proposing that adults could opt out and access all Internet sites.

T-Mobile USA, in particular, has raised concerns. The Deutsche Telekom AG unit paid about $4 billion a few years ago for nearby airwaves and has complained that the free wireless Internet plan will likely result in interference for consumers of its new 3G wireless network. The FCC dismissed the company's interference concerns this fall, although T-Mobile disagreed with that finding.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122809560499668087.html





Stimulus Plan to Include Internet-Access Funds
Corey Boles and Fawn Johnson

The federal government's economic stimulus package will include investment in broadband Internet infrastructure and funds to upgrade and repair the national power grid alongside more traditional funding for road and bridge repair, a senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday.

Details of the package including how much money will be included in the larger economic rescue package for the technology investments and how such funding would be allocated are still being worked out, the aide said.

The overall size of the package, including an income tax cut for the majority of working Americans, could be around $500 billion, but that too is still being finalized.

The investments in technology infrastructure would fit in with Speaker Pelosi's determination that the spending package not only gives the ailing U.S. economy a short-term jolt, but also pays dividends over the longer term, the aide said.

A substantial investment in upgrades to the country's power grid could be a precursor to a revamped energy policy placing more emphasis on renewable energy technologies -- a key priority of both Rep. Pelosi and President-elect Barack Obama.

Similarly, the goal of universal broadband Internet coverage was often mentioned by Obama on the campaign trail.

Unlike other traditional forms of infrastructure spending, the backbone to the Internet has largely been financed by private companies in the U.S.

Congress could opt to provide hefty tax credits to the phone and cable companies who have been responsible for the rollout of broadband Internet access. Or lawmakers could opt to expand existing subsidies to the companies to offset the costs of providing high-speed Internet service in rural, underpopulated parts of the country.

A third option would be to increase aid to states, which are likely to have a better idea where Internet service isn't currently available.

Several major technology and communications companies including Google Inc., AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco Systems Inc. have joined forces with unions, state governments, and advocacy groups to press the case for the inclusion of Internet build-out incentives in the stimulus package.

"We're reasonably confident that if we work together like we are here that we can see broadband incentives in the economic recovery package in January," Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen said Tuesday.

More than 50 companies and organizations that have previously disagreed on some aspects of Internet policy signed on to a statement saying Obama should make high-speed Internet access a top national priority.

Mr. Cohen said 100,000 jobs could be created by immediately investing in more high-speed Internet networks across the country. "Jobs is the best single stimulus," he said.

The demand for services created by broadband Internet access could create another two million jobs, Mr. Cohen argued.

As with his campaign, Mr. Obama's transition operation regularly refers to Internet access as an important factor in creating jobs and spurring innovation.

The "call to action" statement that the CWA and companies have signed says Internet access could be boosted in underserved areas through tax incentives, grants, low-cost loans, loan guarantees and government subsidies.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122825292368073455.html





Pirates of the Amazon Abandon Ship
Brad Stone

Earlier this week, two students from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, made headlines by releasing a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that made it easy for people who were browsing books, music and movies on Amazon.com to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.

Lawyers for Amazon.com promptly served the students’ Internet service provider with a take-down notice, and on Thursday the students complied and removed the tool.

In an interesting twist, the students now say their project was a parody and an “experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture,” according to their Web site. One of the students, John, who did not give his last name, tried to explain further in an e-mail message.

Amazon and the Pirate Bay “might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide,” he wrote. “Our project demonstrated this practically. So it’s a parody of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or subcultural.”

Parodies are given a certain amount of protection under United States copyright law.

John added: “The project struck quite some nerve; it surprised us that most people did not seem to get the humor and absurdity of it.”

Florian Cramer, the course director of the Media Design program at Piet Zwart, wrote further about the project Friday on Nettime, a mailing list that covers issues of Internet culture and art. Mr. Cramer maintained that Pirates of the Amazon was legal, since the tool only provided simple links between two Web destinations, Amazon.com and the Pirate Bay. He also lamented the hostile reaction from the Internet community, saying that a majority of commentators failed to see the artistic nature of the experiment, and he worried that his students were being censored.

“With the take down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute,” Mr. Cramer wrote. “We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues.”

The students will be collecting further reactions to Pirates of the Amazon for their project. So, Bits readers, let’s give them a hand. What do you think of this experiment in free media, piracy and interface design?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/1...-abandon-ship/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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