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

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"A lay person getting this -- first of all, it's 60 pages thick. It's full of legalese and jargon from the company. They see the record company suing them for thousands of dollars. They get scared." – James Brink


"His job is to make money off you. You’re from Mississippi. I thought you would have known that." – Howlin’ Wolf to Muddy Waters in Cadillac Records



































December 6th, 2008




Ho Ho Ho

Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon
Ernesto

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is under attack by online pirates. An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integrates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay.

The timing of the ‘Pirates of the Amazon‘ launch could not have been more (un)fortunate. At the busiest time of the year for on- and offline retailers, this Firefox browser add-on offers users a download link to pirated copies of products that can normally be found in the Amazon online store.

When the add-on is installed, it integrates a new “download 4 free” button into the Amazon product page when the same article is also available via The Pirate Bay. It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and basically all products that can be converted to a digital format.

With their mashup of the largest online retailer and the largest BitTorrent tracker, the project aims to “be a counterpart to the current models of media distribution”, and to “redistribute the wealth”.

The people behind the project have chosen to link to The Pirate Bay, but clearly state that they act independently. “We are not affiliated with The Pirate Bay, and do not host or even link to any illegal content,” they write. “This artistic project addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities.”

‘Pirates of the Amazon’ is not the only pirate add-on for Firefox, in fact there are quite a few. IMDB, Last.fm, and Rotten Tomatoes all have their own pirate skin available. Most of them use the Greasemonkey add-on which allows the installation of all kinds of useful user scripts which customize the web to your pirate needs.
http://torrentfreak.com/firefox-pira...amazon-081203/





Teen Transplant Candidate Sued Over Music Downloads

Ross Township woman says she isn't guilty of piracy

A young Pittsburgh woman who needs a transplant has another fight on her hands. She's being sued by the music industry for illegally downloading music from the Internet.

But 19-year-old Ciara Sauro strongly denies the charge and says she and her mother are overwhelmed with medical debts.

"Look and see where it (the downloads) came from, and look and see that it's not me. It's not fair to do to me," said Sauro.

Sauro, who lives in Ross Township, is disabled with pancreatitis. She needs an islet cell transplant and is hospitalized weekly.

Because she didn't defend herself against a copyright lawsuit, a federal judge in Pittsburgh ruled she's a music pirate, and that could cost the Sauros almost $8,000 in fines.

"I already have severe depression. I mean, it's so hard to sit there and think that I have to get in trouble for something that I didn't do. It's not fair," Sauro said.

Sauro and her mother, Lisa, are being sued for the fines because they didn't challenge a music industry lawsuit in Pittsburgh federal court.

The lawsuit accuses Ciara Sauro of illegally sharing 10 songs online with strangers through free Internet software.

"You want to know the truth? I make $8.25 an hour. She can't work. This child is very sick. I mean, what am I supposed to do?" Lisa Sauro said.

The Sauros said they've lived in their home since Ciara's father moved out. They claim the Internet account in the lawsuit was opened by him at his new address.

"I just want them to know that I have to go through enough stress in my life with my sickness and my family, and I don't think that they should go after people just because they want money for something that's not even fair to us," Ciara Sauro said.

Attorney James Brink told WTAE Channel 4 Action News that he's offering to represent the Sauros for free and ask a judge to reopen the case.

Brink, who has defended other similar lawsuits, said the persons being sued only have so many days to respond before a judge enters a default judgment. He also said it's common for people to be intimidated by the legal documents.

"A lay person getting this -- first of all, it's 60 pages thick," he said. "It's full of legalese and jargon from the company. They see the record company suing them for thousands of dollars. They get scared."

An attorney who represents the record companies in the lawsuit against the Sauros did not return phone calls for comment Monday.
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/...65/detail.html





Punters Buying Used PCs to Avoid Vista

XP proving to be golden oldie
Sylvie Barak

PUNTERS ARE APPARENTLY scrambling to get their hands on used, second hand PCs (WiR, 11/29/08 – Jack), not just because they offer a cheap fix in tough economic times, but mainly because they come loaded with Windows XP rather than Vista.

Studies carried out by both Gartner and IDC have found that because older software is often incompatible with Vista, many consumers are opting for used computers with XP installed as a default, rather than buying an expensive new PC with Vista and downgrading.

Big business, which typically thinks nothing about splashing out for newer, more up-to-date PCs, is also having trouble with Vista, with even firms like Intel noting XP would remain the dominant OS within the company for the foreseeable future.

Josh Kaplan, president of computer repair outfit, Rescuecom, told PC World people wanted to stick with XP to avoid standardisation problems. His company has resold XP-based PCs to companies that use software that is incompatible with Vista and which would require a substantial upgrade to become compatible. " Having five PCs that are Vista and five XP can create training and compatibility issues," he said.

Of course, buying a second-hand PC without having to shell out for a Vista license is also much cheaper and certain cheeky resellers are attempting to bump up their own profits even further by selling computers with illegitimate copies of XP bunged in, something which Gartner severly frowns upon, by the way.

Naughty, naughty, chipping away at Microsoft’s billions like that.

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Tut, tut.
http://www.theinquirer.net/feeds/rss...ld-second-hand





The Outlook for Vista Gets Even Worse
Glyn Moody

As someone who has been following Microsoft for over 25 years, I remain staggered by the completeness of the Vista fiasco. Microsoft's constant backtracking on the phasing out of Windows XP is perhaps the most evident proof of the fact that people do not want to be forced to “upgrade” to something that has been memorably described as DRM masquerading as an operating system. But this story suggests an even greater aversion:

Studies carried out by both Gartner and IDC have found that because older software is often incompatible with Vista, many consumers are opting for used computers with XP installed as a default, rather than buying an expensive new PC with Vista and downgrading.

Big business, which typically thinks nothing about splashing out for newer, more up-to-date PCs, is also having trouble with Vista, with even firms like Intel noting XP would remain the dominant OS within the company for the foreseeable future.

What's really important about this is not so much that Vista is manifestly such a dog, but that the myth of upgrade inevitability has been destroyed. Companies have realised that they do have a choice – that they can simply say “no”. From there, it's but a small step to realising that they can also walk away from Windows completely, provided the alternatives offer sufficient data compatibility to make that move realistic.

That may not have been the case before, but the similar poor uptake of Microsoft's OOXML, taken together with the generally good compatibility of OpenOffice.org with the original Microsoft Office file formats, implies that we may well be near the tipping point for migrations to free software on the desktop.

That doesn't mean everyone is going to rip out Windows and replace it with GNU/Linux, simply that they will stop upgrading Microsoft Office too, and start using OpenOffice.org on new systems instead. More people will come into contact with OpenOffice.org, and start using it at home – not least because they are actually *allowed* to take copies from office systems. Throw in Firefox usage that is starting to creep up to significant levels, even in the UK, and you have the recipe for a subsequent migration to GNU/Linux systems running these same apps that is almost painless.

Registration is free, and gives you full access to our extensive white paper library, downloads, speciality areas and more.

I'm obviously not the only one thinking along these lines. Last weekend, Dell was advertising its new Inspiron Mini 9 in at least one national newspaper. This would have been unthinkable even a year ago, when the company's fear of upsetting the mighty Microsoft by mentioning the “L” word would have been too great, and is further evidence that GNU/Linux is indeed becoming a mainstream option.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/commu...1573&blogid=14





Windows Market Share Dives Below 90% for First Time

Posts biggest one-month drop in the past two years; Mac OS X gains ground
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the past two years, erasing gains made in two of the past three months and sending the operating system's share under 90% for the first time, an Internet measurement company reported today.

In November, 89.6% of users who connected to the Web sites that Net Applications Inc. monitors did so from systems powered by Windows, a drop of 0.84 of a percentage point from October. The decrease was the largest slip by Windows in the past two years and easily bested other recent down months, including May 2008 and December 2007, when Windows lost 0.51 and 0.63 percentage points, respectively.

Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, posted its biggest gain in the same two-year period, growing by 0.66 percentage point to end the month at 8.9%. November was the third month running that Apple's operating system remained above 8%.

Vince Vizzaccarro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing, attributed Windows' slip to some of the same factors he credited with pushing down the market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. "The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up," he said. November was notable for a higher-than-average number of weekend days, as well as the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., he said.

Windows' share typically falls on weekends and after work hours, as users surf from home computers, a larger percentage of which run Mac OS X than do work machines.

Notable in Windows' downturn was a dramatic drop in share of the aged Windows XP -- the largest decrease since January 2008 -- and a major uptick in Windows Vista's share. While XP lost 1.81 percentage points, Vista gained back 1.16 points of that, its largest move since last January.

Windows 2000, the only other edition that Net Applications tracks, continued its slide toward 1%, falling to 1.56% during November.

As expected, Vista cracked the 20% mark for the first time last month, ending November with a 20.45% share.

Windows' share shows no sign of stopping its slow slide; in the past 12 months, Microsoft's market share has fallen from 91.79%, a decrease of more than 2 percentage points. During the same period, Apple has increased its operating system market share by 1.56 points, or a gain of 21.3%.

Net Applications also noted a small boost in market share for the open-source Linux operating system, which grew from 0.71% in October to 0.83% last month. In August and September, however, Linux had a share above the 0.9% mark.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9121938





November OS Share Numbers: Should Microsoft Be Scared?
Tom Reestman

The latest numbers from Net Applications’ Operating System stats are available, and they provide a nice epilogue to last month’s numbers. In October the Mac’s share was down, and Vista’s was up, prompting some to write about the apparent anomaly.

I countered that notion with my own writeup that showed both Windows and Mac have ups and downs in their numbers, so any single month isn’t particularly relevant. This is also true because Net Applications’ numbers themselves are really just a measure of OS usage hitting their network of web sites worldwide (~40,000 sites). It may be as accurate an OS measure as any, but one would still have to say it’s not conclusive. If anything, since some of those sites could be IE-only, it might even be skewed against any non-Microsoft OS.

But the data is sure fun to play with.

Looking at November’s numbers for just Windows and Mac we see the Mac back up, wiping out the tiny “loss” of last month while adding over half a point. Meanwhile, while Vista is up again (~1.2 points), XP is down (~1.8 points). This is just additional confirmation of the point in my previous article: Vista’s gains are coming primarily at XP’s expense. Hardly unexpected.

For even more fun, let’s take a look at Windows (all flavors) and Mac (Intel and PowerPC) over the last two years (in the graph below note that the Windows scale is in the left, and Mac scale is on the right):

From 12/06 to 11/08 Windows loses 4.2 percent while Mac gains 3.2. Where did the other 1 percent of Windows losses go? Well, Linux picked up nearly half a point, and I assume the other half-point went to the ever-popular — and every statisticians’ best friend — category known as “Other.”

In short, the trends are these:

• Vista is gaining share.
• XP is losing share as fast (or faster) than Vista is gaining it.
• Windows “net” is that it’s losing share.
• Mac is gaining share.

Obviously, these things go slowly. After all, the above graph took two years. It’s not like Microsoft should panic now that that they’ve dipped below 90 percent; nor should Apple crow that they’re up to nearly 9. That’s a 10 to 1 disparity; it’s pretty obvious which one is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

Still, the overall trends are not in Microsoft’s favor, and Apple’s move from 5.7 to 8.9 represents a 56 percent increase in two years. That’s impressive no matter how you look at it.
http://theappleblog.com/2008/12/03/n...oft-be-scared/





Danish ISP Ordered Again to Block Pirate Bay

Landmark decision or just a needle prick?
Jan Libbenga

Danish ISP Sonofon (part of Tele2) has once again been ordered by a Danish court to block the controversial Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. The record industry represented by The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) calls it a landmark ruling and says the decision confirms the illegality of Pirate Bay.

The judgment delivered Wednesday by the Danish appeal court upholds the decision earlier this year requiring access to the Pirate Bay to be blocked. The court believes Sonofon is contributing to the infringements by allowing access to the pirate site.

IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy believes the decision "sets a precedent for other countries and highlights the key role that ISPs should play in helping protect copyright online". Jesper Bay, head of the Danish IFPI, expects other ISPs to follow suit, he told the Danish magazine Computer World.

However, the IFPI may have picked the wrong ISP: Sonofon does not have substantial broadband operations in Denmark and is losing market share. Also, Tele2 could still take the case to the Supreme Court.

The original court case to force Danish ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay was initiated by the IFPI itself earlier this year. A similar Danish court order obtained by the record industry in 2006 to cut off the murky Russian music download site AllofMP3.com at DNS level was quickly sidestepped by internet users - as was the blocking of The Pirate Pay.

So far, IFPI's actions against The Pirate Bay haven’t exactly diminished the Pirate Bay's popularity. The site is actually celebrating its fifth birthday this week and reached 25 million users earlier this month.

The four individuals responsible for setting up and running the site are facing criminal prosecution in Sweden and the hearing is scheduled to begin in February in Stockholm.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...ck_pirate_bay/





European Council Agrees on New Version of the Telecom Package

The European ministers with responsibility for telecommunications arrived at a joint position on the planned amendment of the Telecom Package at a meeting in Brussels on Thursday 27th of November. They largely accepted the compromise proposed by the French presidency of the Council that copyright aspects should be excluded. Proposed amendment 138 to the framework directive for the regulation of the telecommunications market, which the European Parliament proposed in order to ensure that users could access "lawful content", was not accepted by the Council. The European Parliament had wanted to ensure that any interference with the rights and freedoms of end users would require a court order.

During the debate, Denmark and Austria were among those wanting to keep that clause, signalling their opposition to the controversial French plans to introduce a system of "graduated response" to copyright infringements, which could go all the way up to barring access to parts of the internet. Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary too wanted the package to completely exclude questions of copyright enforcement and the promotion of creative content. French government spokesman Luc Chatel said, however, that in the end there were only three abstentions when the amendment was eliminated. He said the EU Member States had not wanted the entire legislative process to be blocked on this point.

In advance of the Council session, two MEPs – Guy Bono of the Socialists and Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the Greens – called upon the ministers in a letter to resist the "dictation" of the French Council presidency, which they accused of ignoring the current proposals of the Commission and the Parliament. They said President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to introduce a "three strikes and you're out" law under which repeated illegal downloads would mean internet users' having their web access blocked. This "graduated response" would enable their internet access to be blocked for copyright infringement without any prior court order. The two MEPs therefore asked the Council to respect their proposed amendment 138. They said deleting the article nine months before the European elections would give a very bad impression of European democracy in general and the Council in particular.

The position taken by the government representatives means that the "universal service directive" now requires internet providers to cooperate more closely with the entertainment industry. The ministers deleted the Parliament's addendum to promote "lawful content". The Council erased proposed amendment 166, by means of which Parliament wanted to guarantee that "any restrictions to users' rights to access content, services and applications, if they are necessary, shall be implemented by appropriate measures, in accordance with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness." Ultimately it is now left up to the Member States independently to embody internet prohibitions in their laws in cases of copyright infringement.

The ministers further scrapped suggestions for the setting up an EU regulatory body. The Parliament had already transformed the "super-regulator" originally proposed by the European Commission into the "Body of European Regulators in Telecommunications" (BERT), a committee holding fewer powers. If things go in accordance with the wishes of the Council, the existing regulators will now only cooperate in a joint group called "GERT" (Group of European Regulators in Telecoms). The Commission is not to have a right of veto. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media, expressed her regrets that Europe was thus throwing away the prospects of a strong common telecoms market.

The German Government achieved a majority in favour of a proposed amendment to the French stipulation, to give more weight in future to the investment risks implied by regulatory decisions dealing with the establishment of new broadband networks. In a watered-down version of the original German proposal, incentives are to be given to investors in, for example, the extension of fibre-optic networks. With reference to the EU's dispute with the German Government over "regulatory holidays" incorporated in the German telecommunications law (TKG), aimed at easing controls over Deutsche Telekom in "new markets", Reding emphasized that there would be no such regulatory holidays.

The package also contains provisions for consumer protection as well as a revised directive on data protection in electronic communications. According to the Council's version, providers may store connection and location data if this is "unconditionally necessary" for maintaining the functioning and security of the network. The Council, Commission and Parliament now want firmly to lash down the final regulatory framework in what they call a "trilog" procedure. If this works, no second reading in Parliament will be necessary.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/E...ckage--/112095





Internet Service Provider (ISP) Filtering
Gov’t faq

Part of the Australian Government's Cyber-safety plan is the introduction of Internet Service Provider (ISP) level filtering. The policy reflects the view that ISPs should take some responsibility for enabling the blocking of 'prohibited' material on the internet, as they do in a number of western, developed countries.

The Government's election commitment was that filtering would block content using a blacklist of prohibited sites maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in accordance with legislation. The ACMA blacklist is a list of internet web sites, predominantly comprising images of the sexual abuse of children, which are defined as 'prohibited' under Australian legislation which has been in place since 2000.

Consideration is also being given to more sophisticated filtering techniques for those individual families who wish to exclude additional online content in their own homes.

The Government's approach will be informed by the filtering technologies adopted in countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Canada where ISP filtering, predominantly of child pornography, has been successfully introduced without affecting internet performance to a noticeable level.

The Government's ISP filtering policy is being developed through an informed and considered approach, including industry consultation and close examination of overseas models to assess their suitability for Australia.

ACMA laboratory trial

ACMA completed a laboratory trial of available ISP filtering technology in 2008. The trial looked specifically at the effect of a range of filter products on network performance, effectiveness in identifying and blocking illegal and inappropriate content, scope to filter non-web traffic, and the ability to customise the filter to the requirements of different end-users.

The laboratory trial indicated that ISP filtering products have developed in their effectiveness since they were last assessed in 2005.

The results of the laboratory trial have been published in the report Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering, which the Minister publicly released on 28 July 2008.

ISP filtering live pilot

In 2008-09 the Government is undertaking a live Pilot of ISP filtering which will provide valuable information on the effectiveness and efficiency of filters installed in a 'real world' ISP network. The live Pilot is proceeding in close consultation with the internet industry.

The Government is committed to working closely with the internet industry to address any concerns, including costs and internet speeds. These concerns will be carefully considered during the Pilot and will further inform the Government's cyber-safety policy.
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communicatio..._isp_filtering





Children's Welfare Groups Slam Net Filters

Support for the Government's plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children's welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money.

Live trials of the filters, which will block "illegal" content for all Australian internet users and "inappropriate" adult content on an opt-in basis, are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children's rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was "fundamentally flawed" because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

"Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people's view," she said.

"The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it's going to throw up false positives - many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation."

Doel-Mackaway noted the claims by the internet industry that the filters would be easily bypassed, would not block content found on peer-to-peer networks and chat rooms and would be in danger of being broadened to include legitimate content such as regular pornography, political views, pro-abortion sites and online gambling.

Laboratory test results released in June by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found available filters frequently let through content that should be blocked, incorrectly block harmless content and slow network speeds by up to 87 per cent.

James McDougall, director of the National Children's and Youth Law Centre, expressed similar views to Save the Children.

He said the mandatory filters simply would not work and children should be able to make decisions for themselves. Concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they desired, or ask their internet providers to switch on voluntary filtering.

"This is called a child protection measure yet the vast majority of all serious child abuse does not occur on the internet, it occurs in the home," said McDougall.

"I take issue with the minister's perspective that children are themselves the danger in a sense that we have to make this decision for them because they are not capable of making it for themselves - I think there's very little evidence to support that and plenty of evidence to show that children are responsible decision makers given the skills and information."

Other childrens' welfare organisations, such as Child Wise and Bravehearts, continue to support the filters, saying the flaws are acceptable as long as they help block some child pornography.

On Thursday, as political activist group GetUp announced its plans for an elaborate anti-filtering campaign, 70 ISP filtering stakeholders converged on the University of NSW to examine the merits of the proposed censorship scheme.

"There seemed to be some consensus that the proposed mandatory filter model would not actually be directed at the real channel of child porn distribution, which is not the blacklist of known web sites, but via various other internet protocols and tools," said David Vale, executive director of UNSW's Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre.

"The idea of doing whatever was possible in stopping the problem at the source, including education of parents, kids, teachers and politicians, and serious law enforcement efforts at detection and prosecution of perpetrators and distributors, was seen as probably as, or more, effective than a filter initially aimed at preventing inadvertent browsing of child porn on the web by young people.

"Another aspect was the potential for the filter, once in place, to become the subject of a repeated bidding war, depending on which minor politicians had balance of power in parliament, or who had the 'moral panic of the day'."

Senator Conroy's spokesman, Tim Marshall, has consistently failed to respond to requests for comment on the issue.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...?page=fullpage





Anti Internet Filtering Rebels Hit the Streets

Protests planned across the country
Darren Pauli

Opponents to the government's Internet content filtering scheme will take to the streets in a series of protests planned in Australia's capital cities.

The protests, organised by members from activist groups including the Electronic Freedom Project and Digital Liberty Coalition, will be held at Sydney's Town Hall, Brisbane Square, Melbourne's State Library, Adelaide Parliament House, Perth's Stirling Gardens and at Tasmania's Parliament Lawns.

Participants have created Facebook groups and a YouTube video to rally support and direct activists to the events. Opposition and Greens senators have expressed interest in attending the protests.

The government initiative, funded as part of the government's $125.8 million cyber safety plan, will impose mandatory ISP-level Internet content filtering nation-wide, and will block Web pages detailed in two blacklists operated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Prescribed filtering technology, short-listed following a July trial, will be tested again by ISPs during the Christmas period.

A spokesperson from one of the country's largest ISPs, who requested anonymity, told Computerworld he expects the filters to fail because the prescribed filtering technology is unsuitable for most networks.

Sources privy to the pilot's EOI documents say the trial will be restricted to 12Mbps — a small fraction of ISP network connections — which they say will undermine the final test results.

Critics made similar comments after the filtering technology was tested last July against a simulated load of 30 users. They said even the most accurate filter, which returned a 94 percent accuracy rating, would incorrectly block up to 10,000 Web pages out of 1 million.

The trial is expected to use a blacklist of 10,000 banned Web pages, using the rumoured 1300-page blacklist held by the ACMA mixed with dummy data.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...16&fpid=1&pf=1





The Tangled Web of Porn In the Office
Anna Kuchment and Karen Springen

Jenna Jameson now has a 9-to-5 job. Fully one quarter of employees who use the Internet visit porn sites during the workday, according to October figures from Nielsen Online; that's up from 23 percent a year ago. And hits are highest during office hours than at any other time of day, reports M. J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online magazine, which tracks the adult video industry.

What's driving workers to get their kicks on company time? It's one more thing we can pin on the slow economy. "People are looking for an escape," says Steve Hirsch, CEO of Vivid Entertainment Group, an adult online-video provider. And rightly or wrongly, they think their bosses are too busy to notice, says Dawn Adams, CEO of Wisconsin consulting firm HResults. "Managers are dealing with so many issues right now," she says, "that sometimes people are able to hide out and no one knows what they're doing." AVN's McMahon attributes the rise in workplace porn to the proliferation of free Web sites, such as xtube.com, that allow users to quickly log on and off. But a larger factor is the evolving sense—not universally shared—that porn is no big deal. "You're looking at a younger consumer who has grown up with pornography being out there in the pop culture," McMahon says.

Some can't seem to stay away from it. Earlier this year, nine Washington, D.C., city employees—including at least one from Child and Family Services—were fired for viewing porn sites thousands of times while on the job. The worst offender reportedly logged an average of one hit every 2.5 minutes.

The threat to companies isn't just the lost hours of productivity and the risk of sexual-harassment lawsuits. Adult sites also expose computers to viruses, adware and spyware—though such ills can serve as smoking guns. At her last job, Adams fired an executive for spending hours a day on adult sites. "His computer was always crashing," she says. "That's how we found out."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/171279





UK.Gov Says Exteme Porn Isn't Illegal If You Delete It...

...unless you know how to recover a hard drive
John Ozimek

The Ministry of Justice promised to provide public guidelines to the new extreme porn legislation this week and – behold! – here they are ( http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/announcement261108a.htm ).

They have been greeted with some degree of criticism from those opposed to the legislation, on the grounds that they add little new to what was already known and fail to make matters as clear as they could. Much of this criticism, however, is as much to do with the substance of the law as the guidelines.

What almost all those involved agree – whether for or against – is that we shall not know how wide-reaching this new law will be until the first few cases are heard before a court. Everything else is mere parlour room speculation – and readers who wish to indulge in a little speculation of their own should proceed rapidly to the end of this artcle.

To fall foul of the new law – ss 62-67 of the Criminal Justice Act 2008 ( http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2008...#pt5-pb1-l1g63 ) – images must be pornographic, grossly offensive and portray activity that threatens harm to life or limb, or involves sex with a corpse or animal.

"Life-threatening" is defined according to the usual dictionary definition: "serious injury" is not defined, but "could include the insertion of sharp objects or the mutilation of breasts or genitals".

"Explicit and realistic" take their ordinary dictionary definition.

The guidance is clear that the material will include "images which are indistinguishable from photographs and films": that includes cgi; and also, if sadville ever gets its act together, some of the more extreme performances of virtual sadism ( http://uncensored.xstreetsl.com/modu...&ItemID=737231 ).

Deleting an image will be sufficient to prove you no longer "possess" it – unless you have the skill to recover it. In which case you could still be done: techies beware.

Two interesting features of this new law arise in respect of potential defences. The first is where the material in question is a BBFC classified film, that should be an absolute defence. However, if you extract images or sequences from that film, your defence may fall.

That raises the interesting question of whether the BBFC would ever pass for viewing any scene, however transitory, that would fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act. The interesting answer from the BBFC was that although they knew of no such instance, the theoretical possibility was always there, not least because juries in different parts of the UK might have different views on what constituted obscenity.

Back in 1997, the Police took possession of material produced by Nigel Wingrove. Mr Wingrove is no stranger to controversy, being both the impressario behind the Satanic Sluts, and an avant-garde filmmaker famed as producer of Visions of Ecstasy ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098604/ ), the only work still banned by the BBFC on the grounds of potential blasphemy.

When Mr Wingrove objected that the material in question had been passed by the BBFC, the Police suggested that they might have to raid that body as well.

Such a move would have been devastating for film in the UK, which is why it never happened. The BBFC has no formal powers at all to ban film: but Councils use its recommendations almost without question. Loss of faith in the BBFC system could lead to a collapse of the classification system – and the need for government to intervene.

A question asked by opponents of the law is whether the new legislation might trigger such a collapse – or at least cause problems. Despite repeated claims by its advocates that this offence is merely a filling in of loopholes under the OPA, it clearly is not, criminalising categories of image that would not fall foul of the existing law.

If, as seems inevitable, images from mainstream film eventually end up on the charge sheet in court, this may turn out to be a field day for moralists who have always insisted that the BBFC do not go far enough.

The guidelines further confirm that although you may possess pics of you and your beloved (singular or plural) indulging your taste for the extreme, this defence does not extend to the photographer, unless they were also a participant in the hanky-panky. Whether that means they have to set the timer going, then rush round the front to appear in the action, or just need to alternate turns with the camera and the nipple clamps is still unclear.

Debate - NSFW

As promised, here are some images or suggested images from mainstream film that might not stand the test set by the new law. Do feel free to comment and or provide your own suggestions and links (whilst recognising that our moderators are only human and do not all have cast-iron stomachs).

We start with our now familiar pic of two Satanic Sluts taking a bloodbath ( http://salvationgroup.com/satanic/sluts/087a.jpg ) together

Then there is the rape scene ( http://www.wwnorton.com/college/film...ge022_0000.jpg ) from "Clockwork Orange ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/ )" – which has been banned from Youtube.

Here is an award winning Finish short ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJhHLSLzk9s ), which highlights the problem that this law might pose for much of the horror genre.

From "Matador ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpOQ20Z1mgo )", by Pedro Almodovar, look carefully for the instant where the hero holds his girlfriend's head underwater in the bath so that she starts to drown whilst they are having sex. The guidelines target asphyxiation.

And here's some gratuitous violence ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiHHdhxxp-Q ).

A writer on UK film has also suggested a couple more scenes, for which we have been unable to obtain links:

The scene in "The Man who Fell to Earth ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074851/ )", where David Bowie's character threatens his girlfriend with a gun in a classic sex scene set to the tune "Hello Mary Lou".

In "Blue Velvet ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/ )" Dorothy holds Jeffrey at knifepoint after discovering him spying on her. She orders him to undress and they subsequently have sex.

If, however, you enjoy gross mutilation in a non-sexual context, have no fear: this new legislation will not touch such classics as Saw ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387564/ ), Saw II, Saw III etc.

Apparently extreme images are only dangerous if watched by sexual deviants: psychopaths and murderers are unaffected by them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/28/extreme_images/





Cash Demand Over 'Porn Downloads'
Jim Reed

Thousands of internet users have been told they'll be taken to court unless they pay hundreds of pounds for illegally downloading and sharing hardcore porn movies.

Newsbeat's found out that people across the UK have been accused of using file-sharing networks to get hold of dozens of adult titles without paying for them.

A German company called DigiProtect claims the users are breaking copyright law and is demanding £500 to settle out of court.

A 20-page legal letter lists the name of the film involved along with the time and date of the alleged download.

Lawyers say they have been contacted by hundreds of worried individuals over the past few weeks.

Many deny copying the movies and say they have no idea why they were identified in the first place.

Michael Coyle from Southampton-based solicitors Lawdit is acting on behalf of hundreds of people who have already received legal papers in the post.

"It's the embarrassment factor," he said. "One lady told us she fainted when she opened her letter. Teenagers right up to old-age pensioners have been accused of downloading hardcore porn. The overriding feeling is one of outrage."

'Upset and angry'

Twenty-seven-year-old 'Helen', not her real name, from Hull, told Newsbeat she was "upset, scared and angry" after a letter landed on her doormat last month demanding £525 for sharing a single adult movie over the net.

"It's a big letter accusing me of downloading a porn film called Young Harlots In London. "I've never heard of it before, certainly never seen it and never downloaded it."

"I got a letter from my ISP a few months back saying that they had received a court order which meant they had to release my details to a law firm."

"I waited for the letter to turn up. It gives me three weeks to pay up, or they'll take me to court."

"I think their methods of going about this have been completely wrong. They are terrifying quite a number of people."

Sixty-year-old 'Mary' from Bedfordshire received a similar letter.

"I'm a pensioner, so it was such a shock. I didn't even know what a P2P network was before this," she said. "I didn't sleep for a week."

Porn campaign

The illegal sharing of copyright material over the web is a major headache for music, movie and game companies.

Six million people in the UK alone are thought to download music and movie files for free each year with more than half under-25s said to use file-sharing networks like Gnutella, BitTorrent and eDonkey.

When an individual user downloads sections of a film or song over the network, they are simultaneously uploading different parts of the film to other users.

The government recently brokered a deal between record labels and internet companies that was meant to discourage this kind of illegal copying.

Broadband providers like BT, Tiscali and Virgin agreed to send warning letters to customers identified by the music industry body, the BPI, as illegal file-sharers.

A handful of independent music and gaming companies have gone further and started taking direct legal action.

But this is thought to be the first time pornographic material has been targeted.

Michael Coyle said: "The cynical lawyer in me would say this is a money-making exercise.

"If you send out 10,000 letters and ask for £500 each time, you only have to get half to pay up and you've made a significant amount of money.

"Because it is porn, the person who's being accused won't want to go to court and is more likely to pay up to make the matter go away even if they are completely innocent."

Lawyers representing DigiProtect say the £500 demand is calculated as a token sum in damages for lost sales plus the "considerable" costs involved in obtaining evidence and legal fees.

IP addresses

Little is known about DigiProtect, the German firm behind the latest wave of copyright litigation.

The company is based in Frankfurt and brands its business with the motto "turn piracy into profit".

It has represented a range of rights holders in the past including the game company Atari and the German techno band Scooter.

It tracks down alleged pirates by logging the individual Internet Protocol, or IP, address of internet users logged on to file-sharing networks.

It then applies to the High Court to force broadband companies to release the physical contact details of customers matched to those addresses.

In legal letters to internet users seen by Newsbeat, the company claims: "Each copy… represents a potential lost sale and is tantamount to someone walking into a shop and taking a physical copy without paying for it and then giving a copy to anyone who asks for it."

But critics claim the technology DigiProtect uses to track internet use is unreliable.

The websites that allow users to access the file-sharing network have told Newsbeat that fake IP addresses are routinely entered into the system to throw companies like DigiProtect off the scent.

The growing popularity of wireless, or WiFi, networks in the home means it is easy to share an internet connection with a neighbour, especially in a block of flats.

"It's positively encouraged to have an open wireless network these days," said Michael Coyle at Lawdit. "Most people use very standard default passwords so it's very easy to use someone else's WiFi."

Lawyers representing DigiProtect claim the technology behind the company's tracking process is "highly sophisticated" and has been backed by courts in Europe.

They say it is the responsibility of broadband users to ensure they will not allow others to use their internet connections for unlawful purposes like illegal file-sharing.

'Completely misrepresented'

Many of the letters seen by Newsbeat indicate that DigiProtect is acting on behalf of one of the biggest adult studios in the United States, Evil Angel, run by American porn mogul John Stagliano.

When contacted, Mister Stagliano appeared to be unaware of the £500 DigiProtect is demanding from alleged file-sharers to settle out of court.

"It's not my understanding that they ask for anything near that. I think the amount was $50 (£34) or €50 (£43)," he said.

"I would be very surprised and I wouldn't be happy because it would mean it was completely misrepresented to me."

DigiProtect refused to comment directly for this article.

But in a statement, its legal representatives Davenport Lyons said: "[The £500 settlement fee] consists mainly of the cost of the considerable work required to identify the owner of the IP address.

"The sum in the settlement is a fraction of what would be ordered by a court if an individual were found liable after a trial.

"There is no compulsion on the individual to accept this settlement if he is innocent."

"Where submissions are made (such as someone claiming that they have not uploaded the copyright material or that the ISP has wrongly identified them as the owner of the IP address) we look into these carefully before deciding whether to proceed."

"The lawyer representing people accused who says this is a money making scheme is simply wrong.

"This action is designed to prevent further illegal exploitation of our client's copyrighted material and the settlement sum in no way compensates for the loss suffered or the cost of getting the settlement."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/new...00/7766448.stm





Most Employers Restrict Staff Time On Internet, Says Survey
John Carvel

Two-thirds of employers monitor staff use of the internet during working hours and block access to sites deemed irrelevant to the job, a survey of managers revealed yesterday. The Chartered Management Institute said the censoring of employees' web browsing was an example of old-fashioned thinking in boardrooms where senior executives have not caught up with the business benefits of exploiting new technology.

The institute interviewed 1,000 managers aged 35 and under, working in industry, commerce, local government and the police. Their most common complaint was that older bosses regarded the internet as "a massive timewaster". Half said their organisations did not take up web-based technology until it was tried and tested, and 16% described their employers as "dinosaurs". The survey found most young managers wanted to use the internet for research, professional development and other aspects of getting the job done. But employers treated it with suspicion. The survey found 65% of organisations monitored usage, rising to 86% in local government and 88% in the police. This led 65% of employers to block access to "inappropriate" sites, rising to 89% in local government and 90% in the utilities. Eighteen per cent of employers limited internet access to certain times of day, rising to 38% in the insurance industry.

The survey, published in association with Ordnance Survey, found a generation gap in the use of internet technology. Jan Hutchinson, human resources director at Ordnance Survey, said: "The low-level adoption of new technology runs in tandem with employers' belief that internet usage is a timewaster. The longer this situation is allowed to remain unchallenged, the greater the likelihood UK employers will fall behind their international competitors."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...blocked-access





Young Workers' Use of Social Networking Sites Concerns IT Staffs
Steve Johnson

Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are being targeted so often by cybercrooks and other mischief-makers that half of the information-technology specialists surveyed recently by Intel expressed concern about workers under 30, who disproportionately use such sites.

Of the 200 corporate and government IT professionals in the United States and Canada who were surveyed, 13 percent said they regard so-called Generation Y employees as "a major security concern," and 37 percent tagged them as "somewhat of a security concern." The biggest worry they mentioned was the tendency of many Gen Yers to frequent social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Among other problems, the IT executives said employees using such sites may download viruses that wind up on their employer's computers or reveal information about themselves on the networking sites that compromises their employer's business secrets. To prevent such problems, some companies, including Intel, ban their workers' access to social networking sites.

"Their wide-ranging use of the Internet can expose the company to malicious software attacks," said Mike Ferron-Jones, who directs an Intel program that monitors new computing trends. "This is a big deal now, and it's going to get bigger as more Gen Yers come into the workforce."

On the positive side, the IT executives noted that Gen Yers tend to be computer savvy and are brimming with new ideas, which are highly desirable corporate qualities.

MySpace executives didn't respond to a Mercury News request for comment on the report. But Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt acknowledged that his site has seen increasing cyberassaults.

"The more a site grows, the more it becomes a target of bad guys," he said. Nonetheless, he stressed that Facebook "acts aggressively and proactively to protect our users."

Among other things, Facebook does statistical analysis of how often people send messages to identify scammers targeting large numbers of its users. And while he declined to provide data on how many scams are launched against the site each year, he said "only a very small percentage of users have been impacted by security issues."

Even so, the threat posed by identity thieves, con artists and malevolent hackers is considerable and growing, other experts have concluded.

On Tuesday, cybercrime specialists at the security software company McAfee in Santa Clara said they had discovered a link for a movie posted on Facebook. After the link is clicked, a so-called worm detours the user's Internet searches to certain Web-based ads, according to McAfee threat researcher Craig Shmugar.

McAfee's list of top 12 Christmas scams also warns that people on some social-networking sites have been receiving messages that say "You've got a new friend." When clicked, the messages downloads software that steals their financial information.

Increasing numbers of employees access social-networking sites at their job or while using a personal computer linked to work. And the problems they encounter on those sites can turn into big headaches for their employers, according to experts.

In a study earlier this year, security firm Sophos said, "Organizations are facing the dual concerns of social-networking Web sites causing productivity issues by distracting employees from their work" as well as viruses or other malicious computer code "being introduced to the workplace."

Sophos warned employers to be particularly wary of the common tendency of people to use the same password for every site they access. If a crook successfully guesses the person's social-network password, the study said, "They may well be guessing it for the company network, too."

Users of social-networking sites tend to be unusually trusting and willing to share information, said Scott Mitic, chief executive of TrustedID in Redwood City, which offers identity-theft protection services. While they would never dream of leaving their trash cans out when going on vacation, they often seem unconcerned about revealing details of planned trips on social-networking sites.

"I can tell you right now of my friends on Facebook whose house I should be breaking into," he said. "I know who's in Russia now. I know who's on a business trip to L.A."

Because some of Intel's computer chips can block viruses and other security threats, the company may be able to use the research to promote its technology, said Ferron-Jones. But he added that Intel — like other companies — also benefits from its employees using sites like Facebook to confer with customers or business associates.

That poses a big dilemma for businesses grappling with the social-networking phenomenon, he said, adding, "how do you harness all of the good, but avoid the bad?"


What Is Gen Y?

The cohort of people born immediately after Generation X, Gen Y is generally considered to be the last generation of Americans entirely born in the 20th century. As generations are not defined by a formal process, there is no precise consensus as to which birth years constitute Generation Y. Market research suggests, however, that if the common years of 1978-2000 are used, the size of Generation Y is approximately 76 million.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_11138550





"Koobface" Virus Turns Up On Facebook
Jim Finkle

Facebook's 120 million users are being targeted by a virus dubbed "Koobface" that uses the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, then tries to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

It is the latest attack by hackers increasingly looking to prey on users of social networking sites.

"A few other viruses have tried to use Facebook in similar ways to propagate themselves," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said in an e-mail. He said a "very small percentage of users" had been affected by these viruses.

"It is on the rise, relative to other threats like e-mails," said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee Inc.

Koobface spreads by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been infected. The messages, with subject headers like, "You look just awesome in this new movie," direct recipients to a website where they are asked to download what it claims is an update of Adobe Systems Inc's Flash player.

If they download the software, users end up with an infected computer, which then takes users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com, according McAfee.

McAfee warned in a blog entry on Wednesday that its researchers had discovered that Koobface was making the rounds on Facebook.

Facebook requires senders of messages within the network to be members and hides user data from people who do not have accounts, said Chris Boyd, a researcher with FaceTime Security Labs. Because of that, users tend to be far less suspicious of messages they receive in the network.

"People tend to let their guard down. They think you've got to log in with an account, so there is no way that worms and other viruses could infect them," Boyd said.

Social network MySpace, owned by News Corp, was hit by a version of Koobface in August and used security technology to eradicate it, according to a company spokeswoman. The virus has not cropped up since then, she said.

Privately held Facebook has told members to delete contaminated e-mails and has posted directions at www.facebook.com/security on how to clean infected computers.

Richard Larmer, chief executive of RLM Public Relations in New York, said he threw out his PC after it became infected by Koobface, which downloaded malicious software onto his PC. It was really bad. It destroyed my computer," he said.

McAfee has not yet identified the perpetrators behind Koobface, who are improving the malicious software behind the virus in a bid to outsmart security at Facebook and MySpace.

"The people behind it are updating it, refining it, adding new functionalities," said McAfee's Schmugar.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle, Additional reporting by Emily Kaiser; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...4B37LV20081205





French RIAA Vs. SourceForge, Take Two
Serdar Yegulalp

Last month the French RIAA, the SPPF, declared that it was bringing suit against SourceForge for aiding and abetting peer-to-peer piracy. It sounded ludicrous, and now there's better evidence to show it is indeed every bit as stupid as it sounded.

For a local perspective on the lawsuit, I was directed to the blog of the "CoPeerRight Agency", which according to their masthead is "the first specialized agency in the protection of royalties and the fight against digital piracy on Peer-to-Peer networks and the Internet" ("1ère agence spécialisée dans la protection des droits d'auteur et la lutte contre la contrefaçon numérique sur les réseaux Peer-to-Peer et Internet"). They seem to be of the general stance that online file sharing is not illegal, or at the very least does not deserve to be countered by suing everyone in sight on shaky legal ground.

The blog entry in question is entirely in French, which I do read (although not at a collegiate level), and with some effort I found what seem to be the key reasons for the lawsuit against SourceForge. Here's the original French:

Nous aimerions revenir sur l’assignation étonnante de SourceForge, qui ne manque pas de nous plonger dans la perplexité. Le directeur général de la SPPF, Jérôme Roger, explique cette mise en cause de la manière suivante : « SourceForge est une société qui a travaillé pour le compte de Shareaza et que nous avons mise en cause dans la mesure où ses ingénieurs ont procédé au développement du logiciel – qui a aujourd’hui disparu en tant que logiciel P2P – Shareaza ». Mais, tout d’abord, le logiciel Shareaza existe toujours puisque sa dernière version date du 1er octobre 2008 (version 2.4.0.0).

Par ailleurs, en suivant le raisonnement adopté par la SPPF, pourquoi ne pas attaquer 01net qui propose des liens vers Shareaza, Limewire, eMule, Azureus etc. ? De même, si toute société qui développe des programmes permettant de commettre des actes de contrefaçon numérique devait être assignée en justice, pourquoi ne pas attaquer les navigateurs Internet comme Firefox (distribué par Mozilla Foundation), ou Chrome (développé par Google) ?

Le directeur général de la SPPF mentionnait que 180 logiciels avaient été identifiés comme permettant l’échange illégal d’œuvres de son répertoire, pourquoi alors la société a-t-elle ciblé trois éditeurs en particulier ? Enfin, d’après les explications de la SPPF justifiant ces procédures judiciaires, pourquoi n’a-t-elle pas attaqué BitTorrent qui est le protocole utilisé par le logiciel Vuze ?

Here is my (admittedly shaky) translation; corrections are welcome:

We would like to return to the astonishing indictment of SourceForge, which does not fail to plunge us into perplexity. The managing director of the SPPF, Jerome Roger, explains the reasoning for this in the following way: “SourceForge is a company which worked on behalf of Shareaza and which we blamed insofar as its engineers carried out the development of the software - which disappeared today as a P2P program - Shareaza”. But, first of all, the Shareaza software has always been available, up to its most recent version dated October 1, 2008 (version 2.4.0.0).

In addition, while following the reasoning adopted by the SPPF, why not attack 01net which has connections with Shareaza, Limewire, eMule, Azureus etc? In the same way, if any company which develops programs that enable acts of digital piracy were to be accused, why not attack Internet browsers like Firefox (distributed by Mozilla Foundation), or Chrome (developed by Google)?

Whey, then, if the managing director of the SPPF mentioned that 180 Software had been identified as enabling the illegal exchange of works in its [SPPF's] repertory, did the company target three editors in particular? Lastly, according to the explanations of the SPPF justifying these legal procedures, why didn't it attack BitTorrent which is the protocol used by the software application Vuze?

If my reading of this is correct, the SPPF is bringing suit against SourceForge not only for the mere act of hosting the Shareaza project, but for actively collaborating with them in its development. This to me speaks of an astounding level of ignorance on the part of the SPPF with regard to how software is developed -- either on SourceForge or in general, really.

I'll have more as I can dig it up.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...h_riaa_vs.html





How an Italian Judge Made the Internet Illegal

New technology? It's all a mistake
John Ozimek

Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.

The story begins back in May, when a judge in Modica (in Sicily) found local historian and author Carlo Ruta guilty of the crime of "stampa clandestina" – or publishing a "clandestine" newspaper – in respect of his blog. The judge ruled that since the blog had a headline, that made it an online newspaper, and brought it within the law’s remit.

The penalties for this crime are not onerous: A fine of 250 Euros or a prison sentence of up to two years. Carlo Ruta was fined and ordered to take down his site, which has now been replaced by a blank page, headed "Site under construction", and a link directing surfers to his new site. Hardly serious stuff – except that he now has a criminal record, and his original site has disappeared.

The offence has its origins in 1948, when in apparent contradiction of Article 21 of the Italian Constitution guaranteeing the right to free expression, a law was passed requiring publishers to register officially before setting up a new publication. The intention, in the immediate aftermath of Fascism, may have been to regulate partisan and extremist publications. The effect was to introduce into Italian society a highly centrist and bureaucratic approach to freedom of the Press.

A further twist to this tale took place in 2001, with the realisation that existing laws were inadequate to deal with the internet. Instead of liberalising, the Italian Government sought to bring the internet into the same framework as traditional print media. Law 62, passed in March 2001, introduces the concept of "stampa clandestina" to the internet.

The suspicion expressed by a number of commentators is that this extension of the law suited government and publishers alike. The state was able to maintain its benevolent stranglehold on the media, whilst publishers could use the system of authorisation and regulation as a means to extend state subsidies to their ventures on the internet.

What few noticed at the time was that this law had the capacity to place blogs on a par with full-blown journalism. It would only take a judge to decide that something as simple as a headline was what defined a "newspaper".

One of the supporters of this law in 2001 was Giuseppe Giulietti, now a Deputy with the Italia di Valori Parliamentary Grouping.

Back then, he brushed aside criticism of the proposed law with the reassurance that "The Press Law has never had as its objective the regulation of the online community".

What a difference a few years make. Earlier this month, the same Giuseppe Giulietti could be found writing to the Minister for Justice that "current logic means that almost the entire Italian internet, by its very nature, could be considered illegal – "stampa clandestina" – which is a complete contravention of the democratic rulebook".

So is this just a storm in a teacup? After all, if this law potentially affects some 5 million Italian websites, there are at least 4,999,999 that have not yet been taken down. Why was Carlo Ruta singled out?

One clue lies in the location of the court that found him guilty (Sicily). Another, in the fact that his blog contained much detailed research of links between politics and the mafia – always a sensitive subject in Italy.

Since May, a Calabrian journalist and blogger, Antonino Monteleone, has also fallen foul of local magistrates, suggesting that the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. Failing a reversal of the Ruta ruling in a higher court, it is going to need action at the parliamentary level to guarantee an Italian freedom to blog and to return the law to what most Italians believed it to be.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...aw_kills_blog/





Berlusconi Plans to Use G8 Presidency to 'Regulate the Internet'

Forza Italia?
Chris Williams

Italian president and media baron Silvio Berlusconi said today that he would use his country's imminent presidency of the G8 group to push for an international agreement to "regulate the internet".

Speaking to Italian postal workers, Reuters reports Berlusconi said: "The G8 has as its task the regulation of financial markets... I think the next G8 can bring to the table a proposal for a regulation of the internet."

Italy's G8 presidency begins on January 1. The role is taken by each of the group's members in rotation. The holder country is responsible for organising and hosting the G8's meetings and setting the agenda. Italy's last G8 presidency in 2001, also under Berlusconi, was marred by riots at the annual meeting in Genoa.

Berlusconi didn't explain what he meant by "regulate the internet", but the mere mention of it has prompted dismay among Italian commentators. Berlusconi owns swathes of the Italian mass media.

The left-wing newspaper L'Unita wrote: "You can not say that it is not a disturbing proclamation, given that the only countries in the world where there are filters or restrictions against internet are countries ruled by dictatorial regimes: those between China, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia."

La Stampa reports Italian bloggers are planning to protest against any move by the president to tighten government control over the web tomorrow. They plan to display anti-Berlusconi banners on their websites.

Any G8 move next year to "regulate the internet" led by Berlusconi is likely to attract criticism. He has often been accused of using his power to try to silence dissent. He lost a long-running libel battle against The Economist earlier this year after it said he was not "fit to run Italy" and was this week suing American critic Andrew Stille for defamation*.

However, the governments of industrialised nations have been ramping up their rhetoric against internet content they view as unacceptable. The UK has introduced new laws and revived arcane ones to clamp down on extremist websites and niche pornography. Australia is busy implementing filters.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...i_g8_internet/





A Premier With a Hand in TV News Sues His Journalist Critics
Rachel Donadio

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi governs with a solid majority, oversees RAI, the state broadcaster, and owns the country’s leading private television networks.

So why, with all those means at his disposal, does the prime minister continue to respond to his journalist critics not on television or in the press but instead with lawsuits?

In recent years, Mr. Berlusconi has sued the magazine The Economist for writing that he was not “fit to run Italy” and the British journalist David Lane for his 2004 book, “Berlusconi’s Shadow,” which explored the origins of his fortune and noted that some of his associates had been investigated for Mafia ties. Mr. Berlusconi lost those cases in lower court and either has appealed them or still has the possibility of doing so.

Now, he has set his sights on Alexander Stille, America’s best-known Italianist and one of the prime minister’s most vocal Anglophone critics. A lower court in Milan was expected to rule on Tuesday in a defamation case filed against Mr. Stille by a close associate of Mr. Berlusconi. But in court on Tuesday the judge postponed the decision until mid-January at the request of the plaintiff's lawyer, an attorney for Mr. Stille said.

Mr. Berlusconi is not alone in suing reporters. In Italy — where journalists often play fast and loose with the facts and the legal system is devised to protect personal honor — politicians, magistrates and public figures sue journalists so often that the Italian National Press Federation has a “solidarity fund” to help with legal fees and damages.

“It’s one of the intimidation techniques of the political class,” said Franco Abruzzo, a journalism professor and a former editor of the financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore.

And something of a bipartisan sport as well. In 1999, Massimo d’Alema, a former Communist who was then a center-left prime minister, sued a political cartoonist for a drawing that showed him whiting out names in the Mitrokhin Report on Western cooperation with the Soviets during the cold war.

Yet, when the plaintiff is Mr. Berlusconi, the situation inevitably takes on other dimensions.

“What makes it different is that he’s the most powerful politician and richest man,” said Mr. Lane, the Rome correspondent of The Economist and a target of Mr. Berlusconi’s lawsuits. “He controls the media. He’s working from a position of maximum strength.”

Indeed, some see such lawsuits as part of a more troubling pattern in which Mr. Berlusconi tries to intimidate the press — even as he claims that the same news media organizations he largely controls are out to get him.

In 2002, Mr. Berlusconi criticized three left-wing critics — the comedian Daniele Luttazzi, the talk-show host Michele Santoro and the journalist Enzo Biagi — from RAI, which soon canceled their programs. (Mr. Luttazzi and Mr. Santoro eventually returned to television, and Mr. Biagi died last year.)

Today, Italy’s answer to Tina Fey, Sabina Guzzanti, famous for imitating members of the government, and Beppe Grillo, a Michael Moore-style provocateur, are given little airtime on television, albeit for complicated reasons, in spite of their large populist followings. Yet a leading send-up show, “Striscia la Notizia,” routinely mocks those in power and is shown on Mr. Berlusconi’s Mediaset network. In the case to be heard Tuesday in Milan, Fedele Confalonieri, the chairman of Mediaset, is suing over several passages in Mr. Stille’s 2006 book on the rise of Mr. Berlusconi, “The Sack of Rome.”

Mr. Confalonieri objected to Mr. Stille’s having reported that he was investigated in 1993 for illegal financing of the Socialist Party, without also noting that he was later cleared of those charges.

He found fault with Mr. Stille’s assertion that Mr. Berlusconi “has fused his business and private life almost totally,” as evidenced by his appointing Mr. Confalonieri, “his oldest childhood friend,” to run Mediaset.

And he objected to Mr. Stille’s quoting someone who said that many of Mr. Berlusconi’s close associates based their friendships “on blackmail” because they were the ones who knew where “all the skeletons in the closet are hidden.”

Although the assertions were not new and had been reported in the Italian press, Mr. Confalonieri maintained in his suit that they “directly damage the honorability and the reputation” of the parties in question. Mr. Confalonieri and Mediaset are seeking undisclosed damages.

A lawyer for Mr. Confalonieri, Vittorio Virga, said other journalists had avoided lawsuits by publishing retractions saying they now considered Mr. Confalonieri “a gentleman.”

“We shook hands and ‘arrivederci,’ ” Mr. Virga said. But Mr. Stille, he added, “didn’t show any initiative toward making peace.”

For his part, Mr. Stille, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of several well-regarded books on Italy, said that being sued for printing facts was “a Kafkaesque experience.”

“If they had been sincerely interested in setting the record straight and establishing the truth, they had many simpler ways,” Mr. Stille said.

Mr. Berlusconi’s lawyer, Nicolò Ghedini, said Italian newspapers rarely punished erring journalists so public figures had to defend their names in court. He added, “How come a journalist should have the right to defame?”

Under Italian law, even printing that someone has been investigated can be tantamount to defamation. Yet defamation suits are difficult to win, and public officials are usually on the short end.

But Mr. Stille and others contend that the point is not to win a judgment as much as to intimidate journalists and news outlets with the prospect of a lengthy and expensive court proceeding if they write something unfavorable. “For each of these suits, you may affect the behavior of another 100 journalists,” Mr. Stille added.

Such litigation seems to have an effect.

Mr. Lane, of The Economist, said he was considering cutting all references to Mr. Berlusconi in the Italian — but not the British — edition of his forthcoming book on the Mafia. “I’m too tired of spending my own money,” he said. “There are no medals to be won by being sued by Berlusconi.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/wo...e/02italy.html





Judge Throws Out Case Against Journo Bugged by Police

Same charges that Damian Green faces
John Oates

Sally Murrer, a journalist for the Milton Keynes Citizen, has had charges against her for receiving leaked information dismissed by the judge.

Murrer faced charges of aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office brought by Thames Valley Police. An ex-police officer, Mark Kearney, his son, and another reporter faced related charges.

Mr Justice Southwell said the reporters were entitled to protection under the European Convention on Human Rights. The judge ruled that police bugging evidence was inadmissible because journalists have the right to protect their sources. Thames Valley Police's case relied on bugged conversations between Murrer and Kearney.

Southwell said: "The protection of journalists' sources is a cornerstone of the freedom of the press... which is so important for a healthy and democratic society.", according to the BBC.

All four were formally acquitted at Kingston Crown Court today.

Murrer told the Press Gazette :"I’m totally numb, it’s a fantastic victory for all the press – not just me but every journalist in the country." Murrer doubts she will be able to work as a reporter again.

Mark Kearney was at the centre of a previous enquiry into the bugging of MPs. He was responsible for bugging conversations between MP and solicitor Sadiq Khan and one of his constituents at Woodhill Prison.

The judge's decision has casted further doubt over the arrest of Shadow Home Office minister Damian Green who could face similar charges for receiving information leaked by a Home Office official.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...ase_dismissed/





EU to Search Out Cyber Criminals
BBC

The measures aim to improve data sharing between forces

Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime.

The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs.

It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals.

Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees.

Data share

The five-year plan won the backing of the EU ministers at a meeting which also granted 300,000 euros (£250,000) to Europol to create the system to pool crime reports and issue alerts about emerging threats.

The ministerial meeting also backed the anti-cyber crime strategy that will see the creation of cross-border investigation teams and sanction the use of virtual patrols to police some areas of the net.

Other "practical measures" include encouraging better sharing of information between police forces in member nations and private companies on investigative methods and trends.

In particular the strategy aims to tackle the trade in images of children being sexually abused. In a statement outlining the strategy the EU claimed "half of all internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography".

Forces will also take part in "remote searches" and patrol online to track down criminals. The EU said controls were in place to ensure that data protection laws were not breached as this information was gathered and shared.

"The strategy encourages the much needed operational cooperation and information exchange between the Member States," said EC vice-president Jacques Barrot in a statement.

"If the strategy is to make the fight against cyber crime more efficient, all stakeholders have to be fully committed to its implementation," he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7758127.stm





Guitarist Satriani Sues Coldplay
BBC

Grammy nominees Coldplay have been sued by rock guitarist Joe Satriani, who claims the band's song Viva La Vida uses one of his riffs.

In court papers filed in Los Angeles on Thursday, he said the song used "substantial original portions" of his 2004 instrumental If I Could Fly.

Satriani, 52, wants a jury trial and is seeking damages and "any and all profits" for the alleged plagiarism.

Coldplay are shortlisted for seven Grammys, including song of the year.

Viva La Vida is credited to the band's four members - singer Chris Martin, bass player Guy Berryman, guitarist Johnny Buckland and drummer Will Champion.

The song's title was inspired by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

It appeared on the album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends - which was released in June and went to number one in 36 countries - and was also one of their hit singles.

Satriani's track appears on his album Is There Love in Space?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7766683.stm





Forrester Predicts Digital Boom Over Next Five Years
FMQB

JupiterResearch, a division of Massachusetts-based Forrester Research, released a new report titled U.S. Music Forecast, 2008 to 2013 in which they predict that 55 percent of U.S. online consumers will pay to download digital music in 2013. The report also said that digital music sales will total 41 percent of the entire U.S. music market by 2013, up from 18 percent this year. However, JupiterResearch also noted that growth in digital music sales will not compensate for declining CD sales, with the overall U.S. music market shrinking over the next five years from $10.2 billion to $9.8 billion, according to Reuters. However, 64 percent of the subscribers to digital services and 57 percent of consumers who download music have still bought a CD in a store in the past year.

Also of importance is the fact that while online piracy has long made up the bulk of digital downloads, paying for music is becoming increasingly popular. Researchers credited companies such as Amazon.com with helping propel digital sales by allowing consumers to buy music that can be transferred between various devices without restrictions. The report also found that digital music consumers are shifting an average of 60 percent of their music spending to digital formats.

Just before Thanksgiving, Atlantic Records revealed that more than half of its music sales in the United States already come from digital products, including downloads and ringtones. Atlantic is the first of the major labels to reach that milestone.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=1022392





Rising Royalties Send Yahoo's Launchcast Net Radio Service to CBS
Michael Liedtke

Yahoo is plugging its Internet radio service into CBS's Webcasting network in a move driven by dramatically higher fees for airing music online.

Yahoo's retreat from operating a standalone service, announced today, makes it the second major Web site this year to flee the rising royalty rates by hitching its radio service to CBS. AOL Radio, owned by Time Warner, hooked up with CBS in June.

Yahoo's radio channel, called Launchcast, will combine with CBS beginning in February.

Under the arrangement, Yahoo will depend on CBS Radio to power Launchcast and sell all the ads on the service. Yahoo employees will still oversee the programming for Launchcast's roughly 150 channels, drawing from CBS Radio's content.

In return for the helping hand, Yahoo's highly trafficked news and sports sections will feature some of CBS's top-rated radio stations, including WFAN in New York and KNX-AM in Los Angeles.

The combination also will widen Launchcast's audience by enabling users to listen to the service through the Firefox and Safari Web browsers for the first time. Launchcast's player has worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Much of the promise of Internet radio is that it offers a vastly wider selection of music than commercial radio. So Launchcast's annexation into a traditional radio network saddened the founder of a rival Internet service, Pandora Media.

"It's a real shame because Yahoo was such a pioneer in this field," said Tim Westergren, who now serves as Pandora's chief strategy officer nearly nine years after he started the company. "It should serve as a cautionary tale of what can happen when copyright holders too much money."

CBS believes its system for targeting ads at Web listeners in specific ZIP codes will help boost Launchcast's revenue and ultimately provide the service with more resources, said David Goodman, president of CBS Radio's digital media and integrated marketing

Yahoo has been taking a hard look at all its services as management tries to trim about $400 million in annual expenses, but the company was reassessing its commitment to Internet radio well before the cost-cutting campaign began in October, said Michael Spiegelman, who heads Yahoo's music service.

The reason: a March 2007 decision by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that raised the royalties for music streamed over online radio. That aided the music industry, which is desperate to offset steadily declining revenue from compact disc sales, but it meant by some estimates that royalties could eat 70 percent of Internet radio stations' revenue.

Recently passed legislation has opened a window for Internet radio stations to negotiate lower royalties with the music industry, but Yahoo didn't want to run the risk of facing higher costs for a service that has never been a big moneymaker.

"Because of the unfavorable rates, we didn't think it made sense to invest in the product," Spiegelman said.

Launchcast evolved from Broadcast.com, which Yahoo acquired in 1999 in a deal initially valued at $5.7 billion. One of Broadcast's founders, Mark Cuban, used his part of the windfall to buy the Dallas Mavericks, a National Basketball Association franchise that he still owns.

Yahoo's waning interest in Launchcast had already diminished its audience. It shrunk 43 percent to 2.9 million U.S. listeners in the year ending in October, according to the Internet research firm comScore Inc.

Some of those listeners appear to have migrated to Pandora, which boasted an audience of 5.3 million in October, a 58 percent gain, comScore said.

Pandora is "cautiously optimistic" it will be able to decrease its royalty rates so its radio service can play on, Westergren said. If the higher royalty fees are passed along, Pandora would have to pay $17 million to $18 million to cover the bill this year, consuming almost all of its projected revenue, Westergren said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_11127937





Apple May be Chilling iTunes Competition: Critics
David Lawsky

Apple might be unfairly blocking rival software makers who want to sell music for its iPhone, according to some rivals and a technology rights group.

The iTunes store accounts for four out of five songs sold on the Internet in the United States and is becoming more important as CDs fade. A milestone was reached last month when Atlantic Records announced digital sales had surpassed CD sales.

Everyone agrees Apple achieved its dominance in music downloads and players with good products and marketing, which makes it entirely legal. Apple is not a monopoly because there are hardware competitors such as Microsoft Corp's Zune.

Nonetheless, rivals and a technology rights group are concerned Apple is overly aggressive.

Apple declined to comment, but its lawyer wrote a competitor and said the company is defending its rights under copyright law.

Apple's music business operates in three parts. First there is the hardware, an iPod or iPhone. Second, iTunes software on computers manages music on the hardware. Finally, there is the iTunes store, which sells music. The whole process is easy but importing music from competitors is more difficult, the critics say.

But Susan Kevorkian of IDC reports more vigorous competition, saying Amazon.com Inc has ramped up usage of its service in a scant 10 months and Wal-Mart Stores Inc has also captured some market share.

Apple has a few small rivals for iTunes. They include WinAmp, gtkpod for the alternate operating system Linux and Songbird.

"We love Apple's products," said Rob Lord, chief executive of Songbird.

His for-profit company makes software designed to run on iPods, or any other music player.

User Choice

"Users should have the choice of the iTunes store or somebody else's store," Lord said, adding consumers should be able to switch to Nokia, Blackberry In Motion Ltd or MP3 players without having to dump their entire music library.

Analysts do not believe companies such as Lord's pose a real threat to Apple's exclusive approach to music marketing.

"This may not be a big deal in the long run. Most people who go to alternatives probably wouldn't have bought songs from iTunes in the first place," said Michael Gartenberg with Jupiter Media.

But it is a big enough deal that Apple felt compelled to act last month, out of concern its copyright was violated.

Apple told the operator of website bluwiki.com to remove postings that talked about ways to work around a special Apple file, known as iTunesDB. Apple said copyright law prohibited such talk.

People such as Lord need to use iTunesDB for their software to work properly with the iPhone and iPod touch, both of which have protected versions of iTunesDB.

Sam Odio, operator of bluwiki, disliked the Apple notice, but did what it demanded, removing several postings.

"When a lawyer calls you up and implicitly threatens litigation that would bankrupt your little project you obviously have no choice but to comply," he said.

The technology rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken on Odio as a nonpaying client to see if it can protect his freedom to post.

"This is a pure attack on interoperability," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Foundation.

He said that, until a year ago, iPods worked well with many kinds of music software.

"In October of last year, they added (software) which has no purpose other than to prevent applications other than iTunes from working," he added.

Von Lohmann said court precedents make it clear others have a right to write software for iPods and iPhones.

(Editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...120302026.html





Warner Music Pitches Music Tax To Universities: You Pay, We Stop Suing

Back in March, we noted that Warner Music Group had hired Jim Griffin, a music industry guy who has been pushing the concept of a "blanket license" for file sharing. The idea would be to get various ISPs to simply add an additional fee to everyone's internet access, have that money go into a pool that the recording industry would be responsible for paying out -- and then let people have free reign for file sharing. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. It's basically a music tax -- allowing the record industry to be lazy. Someone else gets to go out and collect all this money and hand it over to the industry to distribute (or, actually, not distribute). It effectively sets the business model of the recording industry in stone, and harms better, more innovative business models by inserting the recording industry (and not the musicians) into a role where they don't belong.

We hadn't heard much about this music tax lately, but apparently Griffin has been focused on getting universities to buy into the plan first. An anonymous reader passed on some details, saying that Columbia, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Washington, MIT, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, Cornell, Penn State, University of California at Berkeley and University of Virginia have expressed interest and talks are under way. A basic presentation that's being given to these universities is below (if you're reading via another site, click through to see it):

There's obviously something appealing about ending the lawsuits and letting people file share freely. But, it's quite problematic to add an effective "tax" when none is necessary. Plenty of other business models, such as those we've outlined here and elsewhere can suffice to fund the creation of music. On top of that, giving the proceeds of this tax to the very industry that has so badly mismanaged musicians for so many years is a travesty -- sort of like bailing out the failed auto industry or banking industry. The presentation says that a nonprofit has been set up to handle the money, claiming that it's "to be clear we intend to operate with good intentions and not profit as a motive," but given the way the industry has acted in the past, that's difficult to take at face value. Also, this isn't really a license. It's a "covenant not to sue" -- meaning that lawsuits could still result.

Of course, while the introduction frames this as a "voluntary" blanket licensing program, the presentation also mentions that they'll need some way to get all ISPs and universities to buy into the plan, or they'll have to work out a way to "avoid massive leakage." So, basically, it's not voluntary at all. It's either join, or get saddled with significant limitations. In other words: all ISPs and universities need to agree to pay a huge tax to the very industry that hasn't been able to adapt, and then trust them to distribute the funds fairly.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081204/1534153023.shtml





An Online Sales Boom That May Not Last
Claire Cain Miller

In a rare bright spot for the retail industry, e-commerce sites had a strong holiday weekend, with online sales from Friday through Monday up 13 percent compared with last year, according to data released Wednesday by comScore.

The Monday after Thanksgiving was the second-heaviest online spending day on record, comScore said, behind only Dec. 10, 2007. Online sales climbed to $846 million, up 15 percent from the previous year.

“It was higher than I would have anticipated, but I’m not entirely surprised, just because the level of discounting was so aggressive,” said Andrew Lipsman, a senior industry analyst at comScore, which tracks a variety of Internet data.

Still, strong Web sales are unlikely to bail out the retail industry, which is contending with a recession and a sharp decline in consumers’ wealth. E-commerce now accounts for only 7 percent of overall sales, according to Shop.org, the e-commerce arm of the National Retail Federation. And online sales were down 2 percent for the season so far — the first decline since the Web became a significant retail channel.

The Monday after Thanksgiving — which Shop.org calls Cyber Monday — has been a bellwether for online holiday sales. Sales growth on that day has historically fallen within two percentage points of total online sales growth for the season.

This year will be a different story, Mr. Lipsman said. ComScore has predicted that sales will be flat this season, and the firm is not changing its forecast as a result of sales Monday.

“There was evidently some pent-up demand,” said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org. “The consumer could have said, ‘I’m going to do most of my shopping this day,’ and we could see a drop-off for the rest of the season.”

The online sales growth over the weekend mirrored offline sales, which the National Retail Federation said increased 18 percent over last year. Many retailers will give precise figures Thursday in their November sales reports.

Online, the virtual big-box stores, which had some of the steepest discounts, got the most visits. On Monday, eBay, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy were the top e-commerce sites, Nielsen Online said.

At PayPal, which is used to process almost all eBay sales, the number of transactions Monday was up 27 percent from the year before, said Jim Griffith, whom eBay calls its marketplace expert. To lure shoppers, the auction site is promoting $1 holiday “doorbusters.”

The most popular product sold on eBay Monday was the Nintendo Wii game console — 3,017 were sold for an average price of $349. The Wii Fit, an add-on device for the console, was also popular, with 1,305 units sold for an average $143.

Amazon.com had strong sales of consumer electronics and toys, said Sally Fouts, a spokeswoman for the company. Deals included a Logitech universal remote control, marked down to $137.28 from $249.99, and a Canon digital camera, down to $159.94 from $299.99.

Beauty products accounted for a surprisingly large slice of sales Monday, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at the research firm Forrester. “Cosmetics are doing really well this year, because it’s those affordable luxuries,” she said.

Average order values have been smaller this year, Ms. Mulpuru said: “It may not be a sweater, but it’s a scarf.”

One reason that shoppers finally filled their online shopping carts might be that there are five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year than last. “People have to spend a certain amount of money during Christmas,” Ms. Mulpuru said, “and that money was not spent in November, which means it has to be spent in December.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/te.../04online.html





Black Friday Fails to Stem Sales Drop
AP

A shopping lift on the day after Thanksgiving could not save a weak November for most retailers, fueling more concerns about a bleak December and beyond amid what could be a deep and long recession.

As merchants reported their November sales figures on Thursday, disappointments cut across all sectors as shoppers, worried about layoffs and shrinking retirement funds, focus on necessities.

Among the beneficiaries of that was Wal-Mart Stores, which posted sales results that beat Wall Street estimates. However, Costco Wholesale, usually a strong performer, reported a bigger-than expected sales decline. And mall-based stores like Limited Brands, Bon-Ton Stores and Pacific Sunwear of California fared much worse.

“It looks like Black Friday gave a modest boost so instead of sales being miserable they are just terrible,” said Ken Perkins, president of RetailMetrics, a research company. December and beyond will prove a big challenge for retailers, he said, because there is “no near-term catalyst to loosen purse strings.”

Sales data from the Thanksgiving weekend showed a buying binge on Black Friday — so named because it historically was the day that a surge of shoppers pushed stores into profitability — but shoppers retreated the rest of the weekend.

And even at the stores on Friday, they focused on bargains and on small-ticket purchases as they cut their holiday budgets — meaning only modest sales gains for the weekend. The worry is that shoppers will not return to malls until the final days before Christmas, making the typical lull between Thanksgiving weekend and the final days before Dec. 25 even more pronounced as shoppers wait for the best deals.

Wal-Mart reported a 3.4 percent gain in same-store sales, surpassing the 2.1 percent increase forecast by analysts. The results excluded sales from fuel. Including fuel, sales increased 3 percent.

Costco reported a 5 percent decline in same-store sales, larger than the 2.4 percent drop analysts expected. Excluding the effect of lower gas prices and currency fluctuations, Costco would have posted a 3 percent sales gain.

Bon-Ton reported a 16 percent decline in same-store sales, worse than the 14.5 percent drop that Wall Street anticipated. Limited Brands posted an 8 percent drop, though the results were better than the 11.6 percent decline that Wall Street expected.

Pacific Sunwear reported a 10 percent same-store sales drop for the month, not as steep as the 14.3 percent decline Wall Street projected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/bu...my/05shop.html





Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008
Ernesto

As 2008 is slowly moving toward its end, we start taking a look at the most pirated titles in various categories. First up are games. As expected, Spore is by far the most downloaded game on BitTorrent, in part thanks to the DRM that came with the game.

Traditionally, games can’t compete with the most pirated movies and TV-shows in actual download numbers, but Spore came very close this year.

Only 10 days after the game’s launch date, already half a million people had downloaded the game. During the months after that, another million people obtained a copy of the game via BitTorrent. According to our estimates, Spore was downloaded 1.7 million times since early September, a record breaking figure for a game.

When we posted about the impressive download rate on Spore - inflated due to the DRM that was put into the game - EA doubted our statistics. EA’s Mariam Sughayer said that every BitTorrent download was not a successful copy, and that several downloads didn’t work, were buggy, or contained viruses. We wont deny that on badly moderated torrent sites, malicious torrents probably can be found. However, this constitutes less than 1% of the available torrents, and they are not added to our statistics.

Below is the list of the 10 most downloaded (PC) games on BitTorrent in 2008, with an estimated download count for each. In second place we see The Sims 2, also from the hands of Spore creator Will Wright. Assassins Creed completes the top 3 with just over a million downloads.

PC Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2008 as of December 4, 2008

# game downloads released

1 Spore (1,700,000) (Sept. 2008)
2 The Sims 2 (1,150,000) (Sept. 2004)
3 Assassins Creed (1,070,000) (Nov. 2007)
4 Crysis (940,000) (Nov. 2007)
5 Command & Conquer 3 (860,000) (Mar. 2007)
6 Call of Duty 4 (830,000) (Nov. 2007)
7 GTA San Andreas (740,000) (Jun. 2005)
8 Fallout 3 (645,000) (Oct. 2008)
9 Far Cry 2 (585,000) (Oct. 2008)
10 Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (470,000) (Oct. 2008)
torrentfreak.com

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-...f-2008-081204/





A Generation of Local TV Anchors Is Signing Off
Brian Stelter

One of the most familiar voices in Denver is about to sign off for the last time.

In October, three weeks after Ernie Bjorkman, an institution in Colorado television, signed a new annual contract worth close to a quarter of a million dollars, he was told he was being let go by KWGN, the CW affiliate in Denver, a victim of consolidation with another station.

In the self-assured baritone of his profession, Mr. Bjorkman, a 36-year television veteran who will be paid through the end of his contract period, said, “I don’t think we’re going to see the anchor people grow old with the audience anymore.”

Across the country, longtime local TV anchors are a dying breed. Facing an economic slump and a severe advertising downturn, many stations have cut costs drastically in the last year, and veteran anchors, with their expensive contracts, seem to be shouldering a disproportionate share of the cutbacks. When station managers are forced to make cuts, hefty anchor salaries are a tempting target.

In Chicago, the 23-year anchor Diann Burns was laid off from WBBM. In Boston, the renowned sports anchor Bob Lobel was let go by WBZ. In Houston, the 26-year veteran Carolyn Campbell was dismissed from KHOU.

When the anchors depart, they take decades of experience and insight with them. “Basically, you replace someone who knows City Hall with someone who can’t find it,” said John Beard, who lost his job at KTTV last December after 26 years as a news anchor in Los Angeles.

Almost all of the country’s 1,300 television stations with network affiliations have a face, or a pair of faces, that represent their news operations better than any logo or commercial can. Many years after signing off, the larger-than-life characters are still fixtures of newscast lore, like Bill Beutel in New York, Fahey Flynn in Chicago and Ann Bishop in Miami.

While some anchors in top markets can still command million-dollar salaries — like Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons on WNBC in New York — the positions are becoming more vulnerable to the market forces that are roiling local TV, analysts say.

“There is certainly an erosion of longtime anchors happening at many stations across the country, for a very simple reason: economics,” said Al Primo, a television news consultant who developed the “Eyewitness News” format in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Primo says anchors’ salaries now seem “out of sync with the reality” of budgets. As stations record lower revenue, managers are trying to adjust anchor salaries accordingly.

“We’ve been aggressive in our cost controls,” said Peter Diaz, the executive vice president of the Belo Corporation, which instituted a companywide wage freeze at its 20 TV stations in mid-November. Although anchors have separate contracts, they have been asked to participate in the freeze, and many have agreed, he said.

Local TV, although it lacks the glamour of the network nightly news or the prestige of print newspapers, remains the most popular single source of news in the United States. Slightly more than half of the population watches local news regularly, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, while only 34 percent read a newspaper each day and 29 percent watch a network evening newscast.

But the ratings for the broadcasts have gradually eroded over the years. The typical late newscast now reaches 12 percent of viewers watching TV in a given market, down from 21 percent 10 years ago.

The news departments are not alone in feeling the squeeze. Advertising is falling sharply, partly because of cutbacks in spending by automakers and car dealerships, which represent the single largest category of advertiser for broadcasters.

Until mid-November, a trade association for stations, the Television Bureau of Advertising, had expected total commercial revenue to be flat compared with 2007. It revised the forecast, however, and predicted a 7.1 percent decline. The group expects a 7 to 11 percent decrease in revenue next year. Already, the financial pressures are trickling down to newsrooms.

“The conditions are as bad as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been on TV since 1980,” said Rich Rodriguez, who is 54 and has anchored newscasts for 20 years, most recently at KSEE in Fresno, Calif. He was laid off in October. When the station’s general manager asked him to take a 25 percent pay cut, Mr. Rodriguez refused. He was fired the same day his first grandchild was born.

“It’s scary for people over 50,” he said.

Many stations — and viewers — still place a premium on the gravitas that older anchors provide. But confronted by the era of always-available news and information on the Internet, local stations are being forced to rethink their mission.

On the Web, users can assemble their own newscast from an around-the-clock buffet of options, making anchors seem somewhat superfluous, especially to younger viewers. Perhaps as a result, station layoffs are in the news almost every day now, said Tom Petner, who edits the television industry newsletter ShopTalk.

“The industry is moving from star players to more of a team sport,” he said.

News is still a profit center for many local TV owners; it represents about 40 percent of an average station’s revenue. But as that revenue shrinks, local news operations have automated many of their technical operations and spread their staffs ever more thinly.

“There aren’t a lot of bodies left to cut, unless you scale back newscasts,” said Robert Papper, chairman of Hofstra University’s journalism department. After surveying 300 newsrooms last summer, Mr. Papper projected that about 360 local TV news jobs had been lost this year. (That represents only a small fraction of the thousands of journalists laid off by newspapers, though TV news operates with a much smaller base of employees.)

Mr. Papper says longtime anchors at top-rated stations in local markets are at little risk of being laid off. But “if I were a very highly paid anchor of a No. 3 station, I’d be really nervous,” he said.

Looking forward, Mr. Bjorkman, the Colorado newsman, says he doubts that many TV anchors will manage to stay in the same market for decades. He expects more mergers, consolidations and cost-cutting as local news grapples with competition online and on digital channels.

His last day in local TV will be Dec. 31. Presciently, Mr. Bjorkman, 57, started taking veterinary technician classes two years ago, acting on a decades-old dream of working with animals. While performing his veterinary internships, some residents have recognized Mr. Bjorkman as their local anchor, and a few have wondered whether he was working undercover on an investigative reporting assignment.

He has explained to them, this will be his new full-time assignment. He finished his course work in September, two weeks before he found out he would lose his anchor job. “I’m ready to reinvent myself,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/bu.../01anchor.html





Who Needs a TV? I’m Watching on a Laptop
Laura M. Holson

I HAVE been compared to many things in my life; never, though, to Sasquatch.

But that is what Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal, suggested when I told him I had gotten rid of my television set last year and started watching “30 Rock” and “CSI” on my laptop instead. “I hear about people like you,” he said, a hint of skepticism in his voice. “But the notion that people have forsaken watching cable and network television is an urban myth.”

Then he hissed what sounded vaguely like an insult.

“You probably read.”

Yes, I do enjoy The New Yorker or a John Irving novel from time to time. But just because I don’t have a television set doesn’t mean I don’t crave “Gossip Girl” and obsess over whether Serena will (finally!) get back together with Dan. It’s just that I don’t have a large television in my living room and a monthly payment to make to my cable company. I don’t need one: the major networks and many other broadcasters have made it easy to find their shows free online.

Most Americans still watch shows primarily on their televisions. I’ll concede that point to Mr. Wurtzel. But there is much to suggest that watching shows online is more than just a passing fancy. The Internet has proved to be an excellent promotional vehicle. NBC says 7 out of 10 viewers were spurred to watch some shows on television only after sampling them first online. At ABC, 8 percent of viewers they track — or about one out of every 12 people — watch network shows solely online.

Consider the following. My friend Louise uses a projector hooked up to her laptop to watch “Lost” on a white wall in her living room. My 24-year-old niece never owned a television set until I gave her mine. Now she uses it for DVDs and watches “America’s Next Top Model” online. And it’s not just for the cosmotini set. A 40-something executive I know watched the last presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama on his home computer.

Of course, my house wasn’t always television free. When I lived in Los Angeles, I had cable but was rarely home to catch my favorite shows. I paid extra for HBO but only to watch “Entourage.” Unlike other friends, I never subscribed to TiVo, knowing I would feel guilty if I let shows stack up.

The funny thing is, despite not having a television, I actually watch more network programming than I did when I had cable. The difference is that I am more selective. No more flipping channels just to see what’s on, the television equivalent of a one-night stand. Instead I am in a committed relationship.

For network television shows the best places to start are their home Web sites, including ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com and Fox.com, where shows are posted usually within 24 hours of being shown on television. ABC.com, in my experience, is one of the simplest to use. It was a pioneer in putting shows online, although stingy in the early days because it didn’t want to share its toys with other sites.

ABC.com also demands viewers be engaged, requiring them to click a button to continue watching the program after an ad ends. It is a deceptively smart strategy: I was forced to sit through a 30-second commercial — and click — to find out whether Mike Delfino actually died from smoke inhalation on “Desperate Housewives.” It’s only 30 seconds I figured (and I can watch the countdown) which kept me in my seat.

To save time, I usually stay away from sites like Veoh.com, Joost.com, Bebo.com or AOL. Quite simply, there is little there to entice me. Each has a similar syndicate of already-released movies and television shows, and can be confusing if you are not sure what to look for. The exception is Sling.com, which offers much of the same content, but with a more user-friendly setup.

Of course there is a plethora of sites with pirated content, but I don’t go to those because I don’t want to get busted.

Recently I was talking with Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive, who wanted me to visit the CBS channel on YouTube. But it was so cumbersome to find that Mr. Smith had to guide me on the phone as I sat in front of my laptop. MGM plans to offer movies there, too, but the list is not comprehensive.

The one standout is Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC and Fox. It is well organized and simple to use. (Even Mr. Smith called it “the gold standard.”) It not only has current shows like “The Office,” “The Simpsons,” “24,” and “Heroes,” but a trove of classics like the original “Battlestar Galactica,” “Married With Children” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

The site, too, like others, has cable shows including the quirky “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” Quite honestly, I never watched “The Daily Show” when I owned a television; I discovered it on Hulu. I can almost say the same for “Saturday Night Live,” which I gave up watching in the 1990s. During election season, though, I eagerly checked Hulu for both shows to see what I might have missed.

Of course, it wouldn’t be television without a blooper or two. So many online “Gossip Girl” fans showed up to watch last season’s shows, they threatened to crash cwtv.com. As a result the CW banned the show online, hoping viewers instead would watch it on their televisions. Fans protested, though, and the show reappeared online, much to my delight and that of my 14-year-old neighbor who agrees that Jenny Humphrey’s new model friend, Agnes, is a bad influence.

Then there’s iTunes. Apple’s media store has been selling TV shows for three years now, and buying is easy to do. The problem I have with iTunes is that you have to pay for the shows in order to watch them. With so many legal ways to get shows free, there’s little incentive for me to pay unless it’s something I can’t stream, like “Mad Men” or “Entourage.” And yes, while a series like “Lost” may require multiple viewings to fully appreciate them, do I really need to own episodes of “Two and a Half Men”?

Movies, too, pose a problem for entertainment companies who might want to put them on their sites. On Hulu and others, there are a number free — “Ordinary People” and “Men in Black” among them — but none are current.

“That’s a whole different business for us,” said Albert Cheng, a digital media executive at ABC. “We are still trying to figure out if there is a movie audience.” I am a dinosaur in this regard, so buying a $10 DVD at the Virgin Megastore and playing it on my computer works fine until downloading or streaming movies becomes easier.

While watching shows online works for me, I know it is not for everyone. Shows don’t appear until the next day, a deal killer for the truly obsessed. And it is hard to find live sports events (or delayed for that matter) online, particularly if it is a big game.

Besides, movies and sports events have more appeal when viewed on a large screen — that’s what big-screen TV is made for. No one is going to mistake their 13-inch laptop screen for a 50-inch high-definition plasma. I recently watched David Lean’s eye candy “Lawrence of Arabia” on Hulu and ached to experience it on my brother-in-law’s home theater in his den.

Speaking of him, I asked him recently if he would ever watch his beloved San Francisco 49ers football team, or any show for that matter, on a magazine-size laptop. He looked at me, incredulous. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Does anybody really do that?”

Mr. Wurtzel is probably smiling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/te.../04basics.html





Viacom and NBC Universal Are Latest to Trim Jobs
Tim Arango and Brian Stelter

The downturn in the media industry got even deeper Thursday, as more than 1,000 people who work at Viacom and NBC Universal lost their jobs.

Viacom, the big media company controlled by Sumner M. Redstone, said Thursday that it would cut nearly 7 percent of its work force, or 850 jobs, and freeze salaries for its top managers. NBC Universal, meanwhile, said it was laying off 500 employees, including several longtime correspondents for NBC News.

Viacom’s cuts are intended to save $200 million to $250 million in 2009. The cuts at NBC are a result of the company’s plan, announced in October, to shave $500 million, or roughly 3 percent, from the budget in 2009.

“This kind of message is never easy, but it is the right step to make, and the right time to make it,” Jeffrey A. Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, wrote in a memo in October. “We have no choice but to respond quickly to the external economic forces that are affecting the entire world economy.”

The cuts at Viacom and NBC Universal, which is owned by the General Electric Company, are part of a swirl of cost reductions across the media industry, from magazines to newspapers to television, amid both the economic downturn and more fundamental shifts, as advertising flows from traditional media to the Internet.

Executives at the Walt Disney Company, the News Corporation and the CBS Corporation have all said they are eyeing cost savings.

Most employees who are losing their jobs at Viacom, which includes MTV, VH1 and the Paramount movie studio, were notified Thursday, but they will be paid for the rest of the year before severance payments begin, a Viacom spokesman said.

At NBC, the cuts included correspondents from NBC News, among them Mark Mullen, who served as the Beijing bureau chief during the Summer Olympics; the “Dateline NBC” West Coast correspondent John Larson; and the Dallas-based correspondent Don Teague.

At Universal Studios, the chairman, Marc Shmuger, and the co-chairman, David Linde, wrote in a memo that the head count would be reduced by about 3 percent. Additionally, the studios will be “scaling back on travel, overtime, consultants, premieres, conferences, newspaper marketing and general administrative costs,” they wrote.

In a memorandum sent Thursday morning to employees, Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s president and chief executive, and Thomas E. Dooley, the chief financial officer, wrote: “Saying goodbye to friends and colleagues is always difficult, particularly when we have shared so much. Those of you who will be leaving should be proud of your contributions, which we will always respect and appreciate.”

Viacom said it would take a pretax charge of $400 million to $450 million to its fourth-quarter earnings.

In a statement Thursday morning, Mr. Dauman said, “We are moving rapidly to adapt to the challenges presented by the current economic environment. The changes we are making in our organization and process will better position Viacom to navigate the economic slowdown and generate sizable efficiencies that will help us to drive our businesses as the marketplace stabilizes and conditions improve.

Mr. Dauman and Mr. Dooley are among the more than 1,000 senior managers who will not receive a salary increase in 2009. But they could still receive a bonus, which has been a larger part of their compensation. In 2007, Mr. Dauman received a salary of $2 million, which was raised to $2.5 million this year. His bonus last year was $7 million, and his target bonus for 2008, according to a regulatory filing, is $9.5 million.

Mr. Dooley, who is also among the handful of executives whose salaries are disclosed, received $1.6 million in salary in 2007, which was raised to $2 million in 2008. His bonus last year was $5.6 million, and his target bonus for 2008 is $7.6 million.

In a research note about Viacom published Thursday, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said “the near-term advertising environment is fraught with risk in this weak macroeconomic environment and the company has repeatedly proven in the past six months that it has relatively little visibility into near-term advertising trends.”

The cuts at NBC extended to CNBC, the business news network, which will cut several dozen positions, according to an employee who requested anonymity to speak about the employment status of colleagues.

CNBC confirmed Thursday that “The Big Idea,” hosted by the advertising guru Donny Deutsch at 10 p.m., will be placed on hiatus. The program has struggled to find an audience for the last four years. Mr. Deutsch will remain at CNBC, where he will produce monthly specials and appear on programs like NBC’s “Today” show, a spokesman said.

In a move also related to cost pressures, CNBC’s vice president for long-form programming, Josh Howard, told employees on Wednesday that he was leaving. “Producing quality long-form programming is an expensive undertaking, and in this economic environment not all news organizations can continue to afford to do it,” Mr. Howard said in an e-mail message to staff members.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/bu...05layoffs.html





U.S. Media Thrive Worldwide, But Not U.S. Image
Tim Arango

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials, including at least once with President Bush’s former top strategist, Karl Rove, to discuss ways that the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas.

One of the central ideas was using “soft power” by spreading American television and movies to foreign audiences, especially in the Muslim world, to help sway public opinion.

There were few tangible results from the meetings — lesser ways of supporting the war on terrorism like public service announcements and packages of free DVDs sent to American soldiers.

But since then, the media companies have gotten what they wanted, even if the White House has not. In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular, has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured.

The television program “CSI” is now more popular in France than in the United States. Hollywood movies routinely sell far more tickets overseas than at home. A Russian remake of the TV show “Married With Children” has been so popular that Sony, the producer of the show, has hired back the original writers to produce new scripts for Russia. Even in the Muslim world, American pop culture has spread.

But so far, cultural popularity has not translated into new friends. The latest data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, released in June, shows that the image of the United States remained negative in the 24 countries in which Pew conducted surveys (although in 10 of those the favorability rating of the United States edged up slightly).

Joseph S. Nye Jr., the Harvard professor who coined the phrase “soft power” in 1989 to refer to the ways beyond military muscle that America influences the world, said that “what’s interesting about the last eight years is that polls show a decline in American attractiveness.”

He added: “But then you ask the follow-up questions and you see that American culture remains attractive, that American values remain attractive. Which is the opposite of what the president has said — that they hate us for who we are and what we believe in.”

Jeffrey Schlesinger, the head of international television at Warner Brothers, had a simpler explanation for the popularity of American entertainment.

“Batman is Batman, regardless of if Bush is in the White House or not,” he said.

And Batman will still be Batman with Barack Obama in the White House. The issue of America’s image abroad was a campaign platform for the president-elect, who said in a foreign policy speech in April, “We all know that these are not the best of times for America’s reputation in the world.”

With the curtain closing on the Bush presidency, pollsters are left to wonder about the long-term effects on America’s standing. Steven Kull, the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said that before the election, his data suggested a slight improvement in America’s image abroad after a long decline. “It’s turned a corner, but it’s not anywhere near positive territory,” he said.

Mr. Kull says he was surprised to find that in pre-election polling, less than half of those polled in 22 foreign countries — 46 percent — said relations between the United States and the world would improve under a President Obama.

“It’s not just about not being Bush, and that there will be a clean slate,” Mr. Kull said. “There were all these underlying issues that were amplified during the Bush era, and they are not simply going to go back in the trunk.”

Bryce Zabel, a television producer who was chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences at the time and a participant in the 2001 meetings with the White House, argued then that the United States needed to regard itself like a consumer brand.

“Products like Coca-Cola are far more effectively branded around the globe than the United States itself,” he wrote in a memo that was circulated around Hollywood. “The American entertainment and communications industry has the technological and creative expertise to improve relations between our country and the rest of the world.”

Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Mr. Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II.

“They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda,” she said. “Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us.”

For Hollywood, a much more important development was happening globally, as rising standards of living around the world resulted in more money spent on entertainment. Big, comfortable multiplexes being erected in countries like Russia and Mexico were helping draw moviegoers.

In 2003, the domestic box office brought in $9.2 billion for American studios, and foreign countries generated $10.9 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. In 2007, domestic was $9.6 billion, while international rose to more than $17 billion.

The growth overseas has surprised even some American media executives. “It was something that, two or three years ago, was thought to have gone into a slower growth position,” Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, said to a gathering of investors in June about the international appeal of American television. “And then it came roaring back over the last couple of years.”

The foreign interest in American entertainment has been particularly pronounced in television. In many countries, particularly in Europe, American television shows, once relegated to late night, are being shown in prime time.

“Let’s say, at the beginning of the decade, more or less all over Europe you saw on the big channels almost no U.S. series on prime time,” says Gerhard Zeiler, the chief executive of the RTL Group, Europe’s largest television broadcaster. “Now, all over Europe you have a lot of American series in prime time.”

According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, part of the executive branch of the European Union, the number of hours of American programming on major European networks in 2000 was about 214,000. In 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that figure grew by nearly 50,000 hours, to more than 266,000 hours.

“Increasingly a lot of that money is coming from television,” said Barry M. Meyer, chairman and chief executive of Warner Brothers. “The demand for American-produced television shows is stronger than it has ever been.”

American culture is blossoming even in the Middle East, where polls consistently show starkly negative views of the United States. Viacom started MTV Arabia last fall and introduced Nickelodeon Arabia in July on satellite services — endeavors that entail lessons in cultural sensitivity.

Much of America’s programming is beamed to Middle Eastern audiences from two satellite channels, MBC2 and MBC4, owned by the Saudi-financed Middle East Broadcasting Center. In prime time recently on MBC4 was “8 Simple Rules,” the ABC sitcom that starred the late John Ritter, and the gossip shows “The Insider” and “Inside Edition.” Oprah Winfrey’s show is also popular.

Amahl Bishara, an assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University who recently spent two years in the West Bank studying the media there, said she noticed that MBC2, which carries American movies, was particularly popular.

“There’s an acute understanding of the difference between the U.S. government and the American people,” she said. “And they look at U.S. entertainment as just that, entertainment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/bu...ia/01soft.html





"Four Christmases" Ends Bond's UK Box Office Reign

James Bond's month-long dominance of the UK box office came to an end over the weekend as seasonal comedy "Four Christmases" took over the No. 1 spot.

The story of a San Francisco couple forced to visit their in-laws over the festive season, starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, took 2.3 million pounds ($3.44 million) on its opening three days, according to Screen International on Tuesday.

The record-breaking "Quantum of Solace," with Daniel Craig in his second outing as 007, slipped to second place, adding 1.5 million for a 5-week British total of 47.6 million pounds.

Clint Eastwood's new film "Changeling," a tale of corruption and deceit in 1928 Los Angeles, was new at three while espionage drama "Body of Lies" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe slipped two places to fourth.

"My Best Friend's Girl," with Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs and Dane Cook in a love-triangle comedy was down at five from three.

Also falling two places, to sixth, was "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," while comedy newcomer "What Just Happened" came in at seven with Robert de Niro and Bruce Willis laying bare the off-screen horrors of Hollywood.

"Zack and Miri Make a Porno" slipped three places to eight while zombie-rich horror thriller "Quarantine" was down one at nine.

The week's biggest faller, down from six to 10, was video game spin-off "Max Payne."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

($1=.6692 Pound)
http://www.reuters.com/article/james...4B15ZS20081202





Recession-Hit Americans Flocking to Movies
Sue Zeidler

True to form and in keeping with past recessions, Americans are flocking to the movies, the chief executive of the largest U.S. theater chain said on Wednesday.

"We're approximately two-thirds of the way through the quarter, and we are having a very good fourth quarter this year compared to last year as an industry," Regal Entertainment Group's CEO Mike Campbell told Reuters.

Movie theaters are seeing double-digit growth in box office revenue and high single-digit growth in attendance so far this quarter on the appeal of films like "Twilight," "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," and "Bolt," according to Campbell.

He said the movie industry has done well during all the recessions in the past 50 years. "It is still the most affordable out of home entertainment option," he said.

Regal owns 549 theaters operating 6,754 screens and competes with Sumner Redstone's privately held National Amusements.

National Amusements is facing a debt squeeze, and analysts have said it would make sense for Redstone to sell the chain to raise money. They value the chain at about $500 million to $700 million.

Asked if Regal would want to buy National Amusements, Campbell said their domestic theater assets would be a good fit with its business, and his company would look at the assets if they went up for sale.

But he added that Regal would have to tap capital markets to finance a deal, and limited access to credit in the current environment would make any acquisition difficult.

(Additional reporting by Jui Chakravorty Das and Gina Keating, editing by Tiffany Wu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...4B35W220081204





Got Their Musical Mojo Working
A. O. Scott

In “Cadillac Records,” Darnell Martin’s rollicking and insightful celebration of Chicago blues in its hectic golden age, Jeffrey Wright plays the singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. This feat is made even more impressive and interesting when you reflect that in the same movie season Mr. Wright has portrayed another notable real-life African-American, the former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in Oliver Stone’s “W.” The man is equally credible as a statesman and a bluesman. If that’s not range, what is?
Much more than racial typecasting or clever mimicry is at work in these performances. Mr. Wright can hardly be said to bear a strong physical resemblance to Muddy Waters or Mr. Powell — or, for that matter, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he played in the HBO film “Boycott,” or to the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, so brilliantly impersonated in “Basquiat.”

Rather, Mr. Wright, as protean and serious an actor as any working in American movies, seems to be writing his own version of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s collection of essays on various styles of African-American manhood.

In each case, whether playing a former soldier or a tormented artist, Mr. Wright directs our attention away from the familiar, public face of the character in question toward a private zone where ambition struggles with anxiety, and where what seems to be at stake is nothing less than the integrity and viability of the self. And so, in his Muddy Waters, we see pride, ambition and uncertainty cohabiting with musical genius, sexual appetite and stubborn professionalism.

“Cadillac Records” is by no means Mr. Wright’s film alone, and his work is enriched by the skill and verve of a prodigious ensemble. The film is not — thank goodness — another dutiful musical biopic, but rather the group portrait of a remarkable, volatile constellation of artists, including Little Walter (Columbus Short), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) and Willie Dixon, the bassist and songwriter who narrates in the mellow, countrified voice of Cedric the Entertainer.

These musical innovators are gathered together — promoted, exploited and given shiny new Caddies with heavy strings attached — by Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), a Jewish entrepreneur in postwar Chicago who sees “race music” as a potential gold mine. That it also turns out to be an agent of wholesale cultural transformation — an old song observes that the blues had a baby, and they called it rock ’n’ roll — does not faze him in the least.

Few subjects are as encrusted with legend, hyperbole and sheer bunk as the history of American popular music, and there will no doubt be pedants who will object to some of the liberties “Cadillac Records” has taken with the literal truth. At times Leonard Chess seems so stressed out by running the record company bearing his name that you wish he had, say, a brother to share the burden. The real Leonard Chess did, but for now Phil Chess will have to join Nesuhi Ertegun, brother of Ahmet, in the ranks of music industry siblings neglected by Hollywood.

In any case, Ms. Martin, who wrote as well as directed “Cadillac Records,” does not need to lean too heavily on the historical record, or on the dreary conventions of pop-culture hagiography, because she has a clear and complicated set of ideas about her characters and a deep appreciation of the music they made. It is, sadly, all too rare for a movie about important musicians to pay intelligent attention to the sounds and idioms that make their lives worth dramatizing in the first place.

But in “Cadillac Records” you hear most of the important advances and developments that defined urban blues in the 1940s and ’50s. When Muddy Waters, newly arrived in Chicago from Mississippi, plugs his guitar into an amplifier, a new sonic mutation occurs. Then Chuck Berry comes along, playing in a speedier, country-inflected style that makes him the first major star to cross from the R&B to the pop charts.

“Cadillac Records” would be worth seeing for the music alone. Mr. Wright’s renditions of Muddy Waters’s signature songs are more than respectable, while Ms. Knowles’s interpretations of Ms. James’s hits — “At Last” and “I’d Rather Go Blind,” in particular — are downright revelatory.

And so, it should be said, is Ms. Knowles’s performance. In her previous film roles she has seemed guarded and tentative, as if worried that her charisma would melt from too much emotional heat. Here, playing a needy, angry, ferociously talented and fantastically undisciplined woman, she is as volcanic and voluptuous as an Italian movie star. Or, more to the point, a real soul diva of the old school.

The music is also a window into history, and “Cadillac Records” is an uncommonly astute treatment of race in America at the end of the Jim Crow era. Its dense, anecdotal narrative is built around the sometimes uneasy friendship between Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters, his first big star. Chess is devoted to his artists, but he also profits from their art, and Mr. Brody shows him to be neither a paragon of racial enlightenment nor a predator.

“His job is to make money off you,” Howlin’ Wolf says to Muddy Waters, who is hurt by what he sees as Chess’s double-dealing. “You’re from Mississippi. I thought you would have known that.”

The rivalry between those two bluesmen is another source of intrigue in “Cadillac Records,” which sustains a remarkable number of dramatically important relationships, any one of which could have been a movie in its own right. Muddy Waters is also a mentor to Little Walter — a troubled, reckless, brilliant harmonica player — and a steadfast (if unfaithful) husband to Geneva (Gabrielle Union). Chess, meanwhile, though he is married (his wife, Revetta, is played by Emmanuelle Chriqui) is nearly undone by his passion for Etta James.

So much passion, so much pain, so much tenderness and violence. If you dig up an album from the heyday of Chess Records, you’ll find all that and more. And “Cadillac Records” is nearly as good as one of those albums, which is saying a lot. This movie is crowded and sprawling, and if it rambles sometimes, that’s just fine. Like those big, boxy Caddies (and like Howlin’ Wolf, if he did say so himself), it’s built for comfort, not for speed. It hums, it purrs and it roars.

“Cadillac Records” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has smoking, swearing, sex and mayhem in excess, which is just the right amount.

CADILLAC RECORDS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Darnell Martin; director of photography, Anastas Michos; edited by Peter C. Frank; music by Terence Blanchard; production designer, Linda Burton; produced by Andrew Lack and Sofia Sondervan; released by TriStar Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

WITH: Adrien Brody (Leonard Chess), Jeffrey Wright (Muddy Waters), Gabrielle Union (Geneva Wade), Columbus Short (Little Walter), Cedric the Entertainer (Willie Dixon), Emmanuelle Chriqui (Revetta Chess), Eamonn Walker (Howlin’ Wolf), Eric Bogosian (Alan Freed), Mos Def (Chuck Berry) and Beyoncé Knowles (Etta James).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/movies/05cadi.html





New DVDs: Douglas Fairbanks
Dave Kehr

In 1940 the fledgling Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art published the first two volumes in what was meant to be a series of monographs on film history: a study of the director D. W. Griffith, written by the library’s founding curator, Iris Barry, and an appreciation of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, written by the British journalist Alistair Cooke.

It’s no coincidence that MoMA chose to begin its version of film history with these two figures: if Griffith was the first modern filmmaker, then Fairbanks was a plausible candidate as the first modern movie star. With his boundless energy and incandescent smile, Fairbanks counts among the earliest major performers to emerge, not from the one- and two-reel films that had been the norm in the nickelodeon days, but from the feature-length film as it began to develop around 1912.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, we may find it hard to identify with nickelodeon stars like Dustin Farnum and Francis X. Bushman. Their personalities seem remote and restricted, their gestures too broad and too big, the emotions they express too heavy and pious, still smothered in Victorian values. But in Fairbanks we recognize a contemporary: a bright, open-faced young man who moves quickly and naturally, who lives in a world of speed and mass communication that is recognizably our own, who aspires not to the tragic martyrdom of the Victorians but to immediate pleasures and ordinary happiness.

This is the performer whose development is traced in “Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer,” an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren’t the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks’s later career — several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International — but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality.

In “His Picture in the Papers,” the earliest (1916) film in this collection, Fairbanks plays Pete Prindle, the mildly rebellious son of a Kellogg-like health-food magnate. Pete hopes to get some publicity for his father’s appallingly bland product line by performing a stunt — any stunt — that will get the family name mentioned in the New York press.

The film still has the frantic pace and slapstick humor of a two-reel comedy, but Fairbanks is already taking advantage of the extended feature format (in this edition, the movie runs 62 minutes) to develop his personality in asides that have no direct bearing on the plot. When he goes to visit his fiancée, he’s so eager to get to her second-story apartment that he climbs right up the front of her building, an early manifestation of a careerlong aversion to taking the stairs.

For Fairbanks, a dedicated amateur gymnast, such moments of physical exuberance came naturally. On “His Picture” he was teamed for the first time with the director John Emerson and the screenwriter Anita Loos (the future author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and their collaboration extended through eight more films, three of which are included here: “The Mystery of the Leaping Fish,” a bizarre short with Fairbanks as a drug-addled detective named Coke Ennyday; the western comedy “Wild and Woolly”; and the Ruritanian adventure “Reaching for the Moon.”

Working with Emerson and Loos, Fairbanks (who contributed substantially to his own scripts, often under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) elaborated the character audiences came to call “Doug”: an energetic striver, of middle- or upper-middle-class origins, whose romantic notions and passionate enthusiasms (for the cowboy life in “Wild and Woolly,” or a fantasy of royal origins in “Reaching”) are first presented as comic but ultimately allow him to save the day.

This pattern reaches one of its high points in “A Modern Musketeer,” a 1917 feature that was one of 11 films Fairbanks made with Allan Dwan, the great master of early film form. Long available only in an incomplete print, the movie was restored in 2006 with footage found by the Danish Film Institute and makes its first appearance on DVD with this set.

In it Fairbanks plays a Kansas go-getter whose obsession with Alexandre Dumas drives him to ever more preposterous acts of romantic gallantry. In the end he is able to unleash his inner swashbuckler when, during a visit to the Grand Canyon, he is called on to rescue a young woman (Marjorie Daw) from the clutches of an outlaw gang.

Dwan’s early command of match-cut editing — the apparently seamless presentation of action across a series of shots — is shown off to tremendous advantage here: Fairbanks seems to cut through space like an arrow in flight, a pure line of strength and beauty.

“A Modern Musketeer” begins with a winking prologue in which Fairbanks presents himself in full costume as D’Artagnan, tugging at his false mustache and adjusting his wig to assure his audience that Doug could indeed be found somewhere beneath the shrubbery. Fairbanks was testing the waters for what would be the next development in his career, the transition to period adventure films that began with “The Mark of Zorro” in 1920.

With “Zorro,” Fairbanks inverted his successful formula. No longer was he an ordinary individual who dreamed of being a hero, but a hero (Zorro, the masked scourge of corrupt officials in Colonial California) who disguised himself as an average guy (Don Diego, the foppish son of a landowner). The reversal, of course, only made the fantasy seem more potent: “Zorro” began a line of superheroes with secret identities that remains very much (perhaps too much) with us today.

The Flicker Alley set offers “Zorro” in a glisteningly sharp print made from a source close to the camera negative, and the other titles in the box have been mastered with consummate care, even when the source material is not perfect. The movies are presented with period-accurate color tinting and accompanied by appropriate scores performed by some of the leading figures in silent-film music, including Philip Carli, Robert Israel and Rodney Sauer, the leader of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

A 32-page booklet offers an essay by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta, the authors of “Douglas Fairbanks,” a new pictorial biography that the University of California Press is releasing next week. This one’s a keeper. (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/mo...eo/02dvds.html





Five Best CD and DVD Burning Tools
Adam Pash

The internet has made it easier than ever to share media and data with friends, family, and co-workers, but that doesn't mean burning your own CDs and DVDs is a thing of the past. Blank optical discs are dirt cheap, they work virtually everywhere, and if you bought your computer sometime in the last 5 years, chances are you've got the necessary hardware to quickly burn anything you want to a disc in just a few minutes. Now all you need is the right authoring tools. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite CD and DVD burning tools, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a closer look at your favorites, then cast a vote for the burning tool you like best.

InfraRecorder (Windows)

InfraRecorder is a free, open-source CD and DVD burning application for Windows. InfraRecorder covers almost any of your optical needs, including support for burning disc images, copying discs, creating quick audio CDs, writing video DVDs, erasing discs, and more. InfraRecorder is lightweight and decidedly bloat-free, and it's even available as a portable app you can carry on your thumb drive to satisfy your burning needs no matter where you are.

ImgBurn (Windows/Linux)

ImgBurn is a free CD and DVD Swiss Army knife for Windows (it also runs on Linux under Wine). ImgBurn can write data from a variety of formats, burns audio CDs, ISOs, and video DVDs, including regular DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray DVD. As an added bonus, ImgBurn can read a disc to an image on your hard drive and build a disc image from files on your computer. It's fast, easy to use, and doesn't cost a penny. Incidentally, this app is still actively developed by the same developer who built the once very popular DVD Decrypter.

K3b (Linux)

K3b (which stands for KDE Burn Baby Burn) is an open-source burning application for Linux. Like the rest, K3b supports common tasks like burning audio CDs, data discs, disc images and disc copying. For movie lovers, K3b can even rip your DVDs to your hard drive in either of the popular DivX or Xvid formats. If you're running Linux, K3b is easily one of the most popular options for burning anything to your optical discs.

CDBurnerXP (Windows)

CDBurnerXP is a free authoring software for Windows. Despite its name, CDBurnerXP works with Windows Vista, 2000, 2003 Server, and XP; it also burns to CD and DVD, including HD and Blu-ray. It's got a small footprint, and like most of the other options, burns data discs, audio CDs, and ISOs without a hitch. CDBurnerXP is light, fast, and free, requires .NET 3.5.

Nero (Windows/Linux)

Nero 9 is a shareware optical media authoring tool for Windows that's long been the go-to favorite for robust, user-friendly CD and DVD burning for a price. Detractors complain that Nero is slow and bloated (and the 370MB download, 2GB free space requirement, and long install time doesn't inspire confidence to the contrary), but fans argue that you can install only what you need from Nero and that its simplicity more than makes up for the bloat. Nero 9 is an $80 shareware, Windows only, requires .NET 3.0. Linux users can give Nero Linux a go for $25.

This week's honorable mentions go out to Windows-only applications BurnAware Free (original post) and Ashampoo (original post), followed by Linux-only Brasero (the Gnome counterpart to the KDE-focused K3b) and Mac OS X-only Toast. Whether or not the CD or DVD authoring tool that's the apple of your eye made the short list, let's hear more about it in the comments.
http://lifehacker.com/5100069/five-b...-burning-tools





Ars Ultimate Home Theater PC Guide: 1080p HDMI Edition
Brian Won

A PC in your entertainment center

TiVo and its brethren get credit for introducing the average consumer to the concept of the digital video recorder (DVR) and opening the door to bigger and better things. The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is the computer enthusiast's answer to all the things that a DVR generally does, with the potential to do everything a full-fledged computer does. The concept had a bit of a slow start until Microsoft's release of Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005, which gave the very familiar Windows a living room interface and the hardware support that HTPCs needed.

No matter what operating system you use for your HTPC, the same general concepts exist: recording and time-shifting TV are the device's most basic functions; playback and recording of DVD and Blu-ray are secondary but (perhaps) no less critical, followed by distribution of audio content and, in more ambitious setups, serving up digital media in its capacity as the whole home network's media storage center. And don't forget the ability to do mundane things like browsing the web from ten feet away on a shiny new 1080p HDTV.

The newest evolution in the HTPC is the continuing development of HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). HDMI allows a protected connection that carries both audio and video over a single cable, and in the current version, 1.3a, HDMI is finally established enough that it now just works. . . most of the time. When the last update was published, HDMI for content-protected video was working fairly well in the HTPC arena, but HDMI for content-protected audio was not yet working very well. That has changed in the past few months, as AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel have all made substantial improvements in getting full-blown HDMI working. Things are now solid enough to make HDMI a vital part of the HD-capable HTPC.

It has been over three and a half years since the HTPC has gone mainstream. Today, the HTPC front-end is fairly well established, with a slick interface and a compact, living-room-friendly form factor, and it's reliable enough that you rarely notice it's there. Toss in working HDMI for both audio/video signals, and it's possible to fit an HTPC in your entertainment center with even fewer cables strewn about than ever before.

Going beyond the DVR

Though it has made great strides in the past few years, the HTPC is still fundamentally a geek endeavor. An off-the-shelf DVR is almost certainly going to be cheaper, use less power, and be easier to setup than an HTPC. Using an Xbox 360, PS3, AppleTV, or something else as a Media Center Extender to get content to your TV will also be cheaper (and probably easier). If you can skip recording and just playback recorded content, the Western Digital WD TV is cheap and effective. As Mythtv.org points out, lots of solutions exist, almost all of them cheaper than building your own HTPC.

You get lots of potential for additional capability with an HTPC, capabilities like massive amounts of storage space: There's nothing stopping you from building an HTPC with a few terabytes of hard disk space, assuming you're willing to deal with the cost and power consumption. You won't find that in an off-the-shelf DVR. (Of course, with an off-the-shelf DVR, you can call technical support when it breaks; or, more appropriately, when your family's DVR breaks and they live 300 miles away, they can call tech support so you can continue watching The Office, uninterrupted.)

Have a standard-definition DVR already and want to go high-definition (HD)? Sure, it would be cheaper to buy an HD-capable DVR, but what if you want Blu-ray, too? A Sony PlayStation 3 might be able to do the Blu-ray part, but with only 80GB max, it's severely lacking in space. Hence, for those with needs desires beyond the average DVR user, the HTPC starts to make sense.

The fact that you can do it all in one box with an HTPC is the real reason for building one. The HTPC can handle DVR duties, HD playback, and even gaming (now that finding fast yet quiet video cards for 1920x1080 gaming is no longer the chore it once was).
Evolution in the HTPC: proper HDMI support

The biggest change since the last update is the ability to implement the fully protected content path in an HTPC necessary to play HD content (both audio and video).

On the video hardware side, HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection), AACS (Advanced Access Content System), and the other mechanisms for the Protected Video Path have worked for the last generation or two of computer hardware. To get full-resolution protected content output on your monitor or TV, both the video source (the video card in your HTPC) and the display (monitor/TV) must support HDCP. Today, most do.

To play protected audio has been a bit more difficult until very recently, as no current video or sound card (no matter which hardware it has) supports the Protected Audio Path needed to get compressed multichannel audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA) from your Blu-ray to your speakers via HDMI. The fix, as Anandtech and others discovered, is to let your HTPC decompress the multichannel audio, and send it over HDMI as uncompressed 8-channel LPCM. The hangup then became that hardware did not incorporate enough bandwidth to accommodate uncompressed 8-channel audio over HDMI, or if it did, the drivers or something else didn't work.

Redemption (or at least a workable fix) finally arrived in summer, 2008. AMD's Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards, NVIDIA's GeForce 8200/8300 chipset, and Intel's G45 chipset all support 8-channel LPCM and actually work. Technically, Intel's G965 and G35 chipsets also support 8-channel LPCM, but the drivers never made it a pleasant experience.

ASUS's brand-new soundcard, the Xonar HDAV 1.3 would also work if you really needed to get an existing system with only video-over-HDMI to contain audio, but one look at the price of the Xonar HDAV 1.3 (almost $200), plus the thought of cramming another card into an already-crowded HTPC case, makes it a less than ideal solution for a new build.

Anandtech has considerable discussion on this in several recent articles, including one on 8-channel LPCM over HDMI and two more on chipsets with integrated video.

Three approaches to the HTPC

As a freshening of the last installment of our HTPC guide, the approach we take to the HTPC is unchanged. We focus on a three-box setup, all of which are equipped to deal with 1080p HD content. In a new twist for this update, we now focus on HDMI support for the entire content stream, both video and audio. This is actually fairly easy to do once you know what to buy, but that does mean a little preparation and research before breaking out the credit card.

To remind people, building an HTPC generally is not an inexpensive endeavor: we deliberately choose to go for a fairly powerful setup to emphasize the differences that might otherwise be blurred with an off-the-shelf HD DVR. A mid-range Athlon X2 and just about any off-the-shelf hard drive can handle a few HD streams in Linux without breaking a sweat, which is a significant improvement from where things were just three years ago.

Many people now have a Home Media Server (aka, the back-end in the last update) sitting in a study or closet somewhere with far more storage than most would want to stick in a little box in their A/V stack, and instead they use a very lightweight front-end HTPC. So there's no longer a single, do-it-all box sitting next to the TV in the most ambitious HTPC setups, and this means quite a few more areas of expansion that we can address.

This gives us three systems in the HTPC System Guide:
All-in-one HTPC: this is what most people traditionally think of as the classic HTPC: a single box that sits next to your TV and plugs neatly into your TV, network (wired or wireless), and antenna/cable. This normally has at least two tuners in it, so you can watch and time-shift content at the same time as you record something else in the background. It also has enough space for most of your video files, and probably your pictures, music, DVD ripping, and whatever else you need to do.

The other two HTPC options come in the form of a one-two punch:
Lightweight front-end: this sits by your TV like a traditional HTPC does, except it offloads the storage and heavy lifting to the back-end. It streams all of the content off of the back-end, so the front-end can be very compact, low power, and unobtrusive. No tuners, only minimal storage, for minimal footprint in more ways than one. In fact, a media center extender might work here for those willing to explore the option.
Back-end: in a two-part setup, this does the heavy lifting, containing the tuners and all of the media. Since it's out of the living room, it can be much bigger with significantly more emphasis on storage and performance, without costly burnt offerings at the altar of low-noise components. Cramming a stack of 1TB hard drives in a low-cost software RAID5 may be an exercise in overheating in the living-room-friendly chassis of an all-in-one box, but it's cake in most good quality conventional chassis.

These three options, taken together, represent the spectrum of HTPC in its late 2008 incarnation.

Software essentials

There are several good media center front-ends out right now. The most familiar package for many will be Windows Vista Home Premium, which includes Windows Media Center. The familiar Windows MCE interface on top of Windows itself means that the learning curve is essentially zero for most users. For the back-end, regular versions of Windows or the new Windows Home Server (WHS) are easy enough to use to store data, although WHS had a few initial bumps that left a modestly sour impression on early adopters.

MythTV is the next major front-end. It's in the process of being ported to Windows, but for now, consider it Linux-only. It has excellent front- and back-end support, and is fairly easy to setup. Hardware support is also pretty good, but like all Linux-based media center software, the lack of high-definition acceleration support from Intel (Clear Video), AMD (UVD), and NVIDIA (Pure Video) means that you have to use a considerably more powerful processor to play back HD than you do in Windows. Such acceleration under Linux is coming soon since the last update, but only AMD has made any serious headway so far.

If you want to explore the home media server concept without paying Microsoft for two different operating systems, though, MythTV is definitely worth considering. Numerous flavors of MythTV are available to fit your needs, too—KnoppMyth, MythBuntu, and more. In fact, MythTV is worth checking out even if you are already familiar with Windows.

Additional Windows-based front-ends exist, including Beyond TV and MediaPortal, but they don't yet have the penetration that Windows MCE does. The application is somewhat more evolved in terms of support for front-end/back-end and multiple drives, but our experience is somewhat limited with BeyondTV (and almost non-existent with MediaPortal) at the moment, so while we know it's capable, we're reluctant to pass judgment on just how capable.

SageTV supports both Windows and Linux, and it supports the front-end/back-end concept pretty well from what we've seen. Much like MythTV, getting the back-end and front-end talking to each other looks almost painless. It's hard for us to say much more than that; we liked what we saw, but haven't used it much.

Many other media center software packages exist—we've doubtless skipped a few—but these are some of the major ones for the PC. Less-popular ones include J. River Media Center, Freevo, GBPVR, and Orb. Front-ends such as XBMC and Apple's Front Row are somewhat beyond the scope of this article.

• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. Cost: $92.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
• MythTV. Cost: free. [Product Page]
• BeyondTV. Cost: $99.99 (12/1/2008) [Product Page]
• SageTV. Cost: $79.95 (12/1/2008) [Product Page]

It's not about the Benjamins

As mentioned previously, you'll probably end up spending quite a bit more than what a plain ol' DVR would cost, even an HD-capable one. Maybe you'll be able to recycle a second system into something acceptable for the living room. You might decide that the HTPC concept stands on its own merit.

More than likely, though, building an HTPC will be an exercise in geek pride. Not just recording over-the-air HD or serving files to every computer in the house, but the ability to do it well and without compromise. Instead of being stuck with 500GB inside your DVR—maybe more with an external drive plugged in, cluttering the shelf—you have a few terabytes of storage available. If you elected to use software RAID in Linux or Windows, or the chipset RAID part of your motherboard, you gain some fault tolerance (good luck finding that in an off-the-shelf DVR).

Much like the Green System Guide, the HTPC doesn't boil down to saving money. Rather, it comes down to performance and capability: the knowledge that you can get things done exactly the way you want.

All-in-one system

The all-in-one HTPC does everything with a case that blends into your living room, be it a single box or one of many sitting on your home theater rack. It offers reasonable storage capacity, fairly decent performance, and ease of upgrading in several directions, such as adding a discrete high-performance video card for gaming or a quad-core CPU for heavy-duty encoding.

We do leave one important decision up to the builder, despite our constant harping about 1080p capability: Blu-ray. A BD-ROM drive is reasonably affordable, but most lack any writing ability whatsoever, even to CD-RW. Going to a Blu-ray writer is considerably more expensive, and we're not sure if it should be a mandatory component quite yet. Weigh the cost and benefits yourself, then make the call.
Motherboard
Zotac GF8300-A-E

We use the motherboard's onboard video and audio in the HTPC, which means we must be particularly careful in its selection if we want proper HDMI support.

In the previous update, AMD 780G-based boards were the choice, owing to superior video performance and a competitive feature-set. In the past six months, NVIDIA and Intel have released updated products in this area, with the NVIDIA GeForce 8200/8300/9300-chipset being the best choice at the moment. The key reason is NVIDIA's implementation of HDMI on the GeForce 8200/8300, which has proper uncompressed 8-channel LPCM output (which is particularly critical for Blu-ray discs). Intel's G45 chipset has proper support, but their implementation is not as good (1080p/24 output is/was broken), while AMD's integrated video chipsets are missing LPCM entirely at the moment.

Aside from 8-channel LPCM over HDMI, the motherboard is expected to provide enough connectivity for the rest of the system. Not all HTPC builders need all of the features most motherboards have, but enough memory slots, enough SATA ports, Firewire (particularly if your cable box supports Firewire out), S/PDIF out, decent fan control, and enough expansion slots are checkboxes on the list. If you're a Windows builder, you will be able to take advantage of the integrated graphics' hardware acceleration for HD video (AMD UVD, NVIDIA PureVideo, Intel Clear Video) on higher-end chipsets, which will let you get by with a slower CPU if you so choose. AMD UVD support finally arrived in Linux last month, too, although we have yet to experiment with it.

Intel builders will want to look at the Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H, Asus P5Q-EM HDMI, and their competition. They are very good boards, merely handicapped by Intel's less complete driver support and the fact that AMD processors give more for the money in HTPC territory. HTPC builders going far beyond the minimum specifications needed for 1080p playback and into quad-core territory will definitely want to go Intel, as Anandtech has found that most current AMD Socket AM2+ microATX boards may not handle 125W and 140W TDP AMD processors, such as the Phenom 9750 and 9850, without risking overheating and permanent board damage.

Most NVIDIA GeForce 8200/8300 boards aren't quite as flexible as the board we chose, although they are still very good. The Gigabyte GA-M78SM-S2H and Asus M3N78-VM both lack Firewire, while the MSI K9N2GM-FIH lacks S/PDIF. If you prefer to use AMD-based boards—perhaps 8-channel LPCM support over the onboard HDMI is not important or you simply prefer them—the Asus M3A78-EM and Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H are both excellent, feature-packed choices with HDMI, Firewire, S/PDIF out, etc.

The Zotac GF8300-A-E has four DDR2 sockets, six internal SATA, one PATA, Firewire, four USB 2.0 ports plus headers for eight more, DVI outputs with an adapter for HDMI, and a coaxial S/PDIF out. One PCI-e x16 and one PCI-e x1 slot for the tuner cards, plus two PCI slots round out the package. About the only drawbacks are having to use an adapter for HDMI, which is trivial, plus lousy placement of the main ATX power connector.

Cost: $84.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Processor
AMD Athlon X2 5200+ Retail

Your choice of operating system will dictate the processor you go with here—specifically if your OS of choice supports your video chipset's onboard HD video acceleration, be that AMD's UVD, NVIDIA's PureVideo, or Intel's Clear Video. At this time, chipset onboard HD acceleration seems to be limited to Windows; Linux drivers for AMD supposedly support UVD now, but Intel and NVIDIA seem to be lagging.

This breaks the CPU needs of the all-in-one HTPC box into two options: the hardware-assisted route, where a dual-core CPU as slow as 1.5GHz would do the trick per SilentPCReview, or the software-only route that a Linux-based front end is going to have to take, which needs something along the lines of an Athlon 64 X2 5200+. AMD's energy-efficient Athlon X2 4450e or 4850e would be a better choice for Windows users whose MCE of choice can use HD acceleration. For unassisted playback, the 4450e and 4850e's respective 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz clockspeeds might prove a bit weak, so we stick with a faster processor.

Intel builders have similar choices: the hardware assisted route, where a dual-core CPU as slow as 1.2GHz would do the trick, or the software-only route, where a Core 2 Duo E7200 or older should work fine. The Pentium Dual-Core E2200 is about as slow as we would go on the low-end as the price/performance doesn't make too much sense with anything older and hotter-running. On the faster side, the Core 2 Duo E8500 or Core 2 Quad Q9400 offer much more flexibility, particularly if heavy-duty media encoding is expected to be a regular task for your HTPC setup.

Remember, if you plan to run an OS/hardware combo with support for GPU-based hardware acceleration, you can get away with a considerably slower dual-core part. Just make sure you're running a fairly modern dual-core part; older, slower CPUs are often outclassed by their more modern brethren in all aspects, particularly power consumption, which is very important in keeping your HTPC low-noise and living-room friendly.

The AMD Athlon X2 5200+ is one of AMD's cooler-running processors. At 2.7GHz, 2x512KB cache, and a thermal design power (TDP) of just 65W, it's not quite as good as the current Intel chips, but it's competitive, and the ability to pair it with a modern chipset such as the NVIDIA Geforce 8200/8300 or AMD 780G convinces us to make it the processor of choice. We go with the retail box for the longer warranty.

Cost: $66 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Heatsink
Scythe Ninja Mini

The retail heatsink is perfectly adequate, but for lower noise, the Scythe Ninja Mini or some of the other aftermarket heatsinks available do a better job. If your chassis has appropriately placed fans already, it may be possible for you to run your Ninja Mini without the included fan, further lowering noise.

Cost: $20.99 (4/27/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Memory:
4GB DDR2-800

Since the last installment, memory has only gotten cheaper (!). 4GB is unnecessary for a HTPC, but at this price, it's almost impossible to say no to 4GB. A lighter-weight OS and MCE front-end such as Mythbuntu can get by with 1GB or even 512MB, but didn't we mention just how cheap memory is?

We stick with DDR2 that requires the JEDEC-standard 1.8v for optimal compatibility and lowest power dissipation. Keep in mind that for the lowest prices on memory, you may be dealing with minute-to-minute sales and rebates.

Cost: $28.26 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Video
None—onboard

Six months ago, chipset integrated graphics (IGP) had a clear choice: the AMD 780G was faster and more capable than its counterparts. Today, NVIDIA's GeForce 8200/8300/9300 and Intel's G45 chipset now give an array of choices to HTPC builders who don't need much from their GPUs aside from hardware acceleration of high-definition content and multichannel audio support over HDMI. AMD's 780G and faster 790GX lacks 8-channel LPCM over HDMI support, which excludes them from the HTPC despite being excellent choices otherwise.

Superior 3D performance used to be the AMD 780G's other major advantage from its competition, but NVIDIA's faster GeForce chipsets have caught up. As gaming is not an emphasis for the HTPC, we stick with onboard video. If your HTPC does need to game on a casual basis, the midrange AMD Radeon HD 4670 and NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT are excellent choices. Higher-end, the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800GTX+ are both very good. As a plus, AMD's Radeon 4000-series cards support 8-channel LPCM over HDMI.

Cost: n/a
TV tuner
Two Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 HD tuners

Not much has changed in the land of HD tuners. The key sticklers remain compatibility. Check sites like LinuxTV.org and its ilk for Linux compatibility, which is essential for many MCE front ends. If you're Windows-centric, then quite a few more cards should work for you.

We go with two Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 tuners, which take advantage of the PCI-e slots on our motherboard and are widely supported in multiple OSes. With two tuners on each card, this gives tremendous flexibility to watch live TV and record one, two, or three shows in the background. If you're hooked into cable, don't forget to check if your cable box supports (and if your cable company enables it) FireWire out; that may let you plug the cable box directly into your system via FireWire, allowing you to dispense with a separate tuner card.

Alternative tuners include the Hauppauge Nova-T-500 for DAB signals outside the USA. For in the USA, the SiliconDust HD Homerun is very popular, as is the Dvico FusionHDTV 7, AverMedia AverTV HD A180, and the PCI version of the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800, the WinTV-HVR-1600.

The Hauppauge HD PVR USB is also worth looking at if you need high-definition video recording from component video sources. It's not exactly a tuner, but the capabilities it has are worth noting.

Cost: $94.99 each ($189.98 total) (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Sound:
None—onboard

Onboard sound is fine for a HTPC, particularly with the motherboard's IGP supports handling compressed multichannel audio into uncompressed 8-channel LPCM for passthrough via HDMI. If you won't be using audio over HDMI, almost all motherboards with onboard sound support 7.1 analog out, and many support S/PDIF out.

If you need more, cards such as the Bluegears b-Inspirer and Auzentech X-plosion 7.1 are good choices, although they lack the ability to handle HDMI. The newly released Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 is the only card that does this at the moment. Gaming enthusiasts may want to look at Creative's venerable X-fi XtremeGamer, although the Asus Xonar cards handle EAX reasonably well too.

Cost: n/a
Communications
Network card—none (onboard)

The average HTPC doesn't move, so the standard onboard gigabit Ethernet is just fine. If you need wireless, a cheap 802.11g or more capable 802.11n card is easy to set up. Keep in mind the bandwidth needed to stream HD content, especially 1080p flavors, requires a solid wireless signal if you are going that route.

Cost: n/a
Hard drive
Two Western Digital Greenpower 1TB (WD10EADS)

Boot and storage drives are both the same size here. We could go for a smaller boot drive, but with physical space at a premium inside the typical HTPC chassis and hard disks being cheap, we elect to splurge, because the additional space is likely to be very useful somewhere down the line. Not to mention the price of 1TB drives has also plunged, like memory, to very affordable levels.

Somewhat less extravagant would be the Western Digital WD6400AAKS, a very fast 640GB two-platter drive courtesy of its use of some the highest-density platters available today. Alternative 1TB recommendations include the Samsung F1 1TB, Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB (ST31000333AS), Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB, and Hitachi 7K1000.B 1TB, all of which pack the latest, fastest 333GB/platter, 7200rpm designs from their respective manufacturers. If even more space is needed, Seagate's 7200.11 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) is surprisingly affordable, although we would hold off until this drive is a little more mature before buying.

Western Digital's GreenPower 1TB drive has a 5400rpm spindle speed, 333GB/platter design, 32MB cache, three-year warranty, and relatively low power and noise for a desktop 3.5" drive, making it ideal for HTPC use. The slower 5400rpm spindle speed hurts performance in access time-dependent areas, but most HTPCs never see very stressful use, and the WD10EADS is plenty fast to start with, so this should not be an issue.

Cost: $114.99 each ($229.98 total) (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Optical drive
LG GGC-H20L

With the emphasis on HDMI in this installment, adding a Blu-ray drive is essential. To keep things affordable we settle for a Blu-ray reader only, although if you can justify the high cost of the drive as well as the media, the LG GGW-H20L or Lite-On DH-4B1S are both excellent.

The cheapest Blu-ray option around is the Lite-On DH-4O1S, but it's a reader only, which is a bit limiting in the All-in-One HTPC. If Blu-ray is not necessary, there are plenty of excellent choices in DVD-RW drives. The Pioneer DVR-216D, Samsung SH-S223F, LG GH22LP20, and Optiarc AD-7200S are all viable choices.

LG's GGC-H20L supports Blu-ray reads up to 6x, DVD reads/writes up to 16x, CD reads/writes up to 40x, has a 4MB cache, as well as an SATA interface.

Cost: $149.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Case
Antec Fusion V2

We looked at the Silverstone LC17, Silverstone GD02, Thermaltake Bach, Lian-Li PC-V800B, and quite a few others before we decided on the Antec Veris Fusion V2. We checked out the lower end too, such as the In-win BT566T before making our decision.

While far from perfect, the Antec Fusion offers two 3.5" bays for hard drive, one 5.25" exposed, a VFD, IR receiver, and potential for very low noise cooling via its side-mounted 120mm fans. The 120mm fans are very well positioned to pull air off of the CPU heatsink, which is something low-noise builders will want to take advantage of. The factory Antec Tri-cool 120mm fans are good enough for this use as well, which minimizes additional costs. The standard-size ATX power supply also helps, and the included 430W unit makes it a very good value compared to higher-priced offerings from Silverstone, Ahanix, Lian-Li, and others. There are some newer flavors of the Veris Fusion since the last update, but we prefer the original (and prefer to provide our own remote).

430W is serious overkill for this system, so the Sparkle SPI250EP 250W is probably more appropriate, but the fact that Antec's included 430W unit is already pretty low noise and fairly efficient means we stick with the included PSU. If you're using a chassis other than the Fusion that does not include a power supply, then we would strongly consider the Sparkle SPI250EP, Seasonic S12II 330W, or Antec's own Earthwatts EA380.

Builders may wish to look at chassis other than the Antec Fusion V2, particularly very-low-noise builders and those seeking to put more than two hard drives into their all-in-one HTPC. Budget builders may also want to look at something cheaper, but once you factor in the price of a power supply, the Antec Fusion is a pretty good deal.

Swapping out the stock fans in the Fusion to the Scythe S-flex SFF21D fans will help bring the noise down from the relatively low stock levels into very-low-noise territory, as would a power supply swap to the Enermax Modu82+ 425W. Doing both of these upgrades, though, means you're not using a lot of stock parts in the Fusion, and hence makes the Fusion somewhat less attractive on the value front. Individual builders should evaluate their needs here, particularly since the living room is not a super quiet place, which makes swapping out to the lowest-noise components unnecessary for most HTPCs.

Cost: $173.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Input devices
Gyration GO 2.4 Optical Air Mouse and Compact-size Keyboard

If you need serious range because your living room is 100 feet long or you just have a lot of RF interference, the Adesso Wireless SlimTouch Mini and Gyration GO PRO 2.4 are both reported to have a 100 foot/30meter range.

In the more pedestrian range, the Gyration GO 2.4 lineup is pretty decent, as is Logitech Cordless Desktop S510, Logitech Cordless Desktop S520, and the Logitech Cordless Mediaboard Pro. All should work fine in Linux, although we're not 100% sure about the various idiosyncracies of the S520 and Linux. The Logitech MX5500 is also excellent, but not all features work in Linux.

Cost: $98.92 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Microsoft Remote Control

As far as media center remotes go, the Microsoft Remote is actually quite good, and is liked by most. The Snapstream Firefly, Soundgraph Imon, and quite a few others, are pretty good too. If you need a little more integration, the Logitech Harmony 550 and its brethren are very useful as well.

Many components now come with remotes, including many TV tuners and even some of Antec's cases. You may want to give the included remote a shot before picking up another, although we've found we still prefer the Microsoft one.

Cost: $29.97 (4/27/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Total price: $1,073.07, not including shipping and handling (12/1/2008, no OS)

Lightweight front end

Much like the all-in-one, the lightweight front end is intended to sit in your living room, feeding content from the big server in the closet or the study to your home theater. It's fairly low noise and blends in unobtrusively, and probably takes even less power than the all-in-one because it has less hardware inside.

The key differences that result from this are the small, single hard drive and the absence of any tuners; all of the storage takes place on the back end, as does the tuning and encoding. While we do keep the optical drive in the lightweight front-end, a variation could omit the DVD drive and hard drive entirely. We won't be quite that ambitious here, but we do keep the possibility in mind. Our take on the lightweight front end doesn't get quite as low-power as it could, in large part because we intend for it to support 1080p in all operating systems—this means we include enough CPU power to decode 1080p without assistance from the video card to support current Linux-based HTPC front ends that do not yet support PureVideo/UVD/ClearVideo.

For the Lightweight Front End, take the all-in-one specification and make the following changes:
Video
Tuners—none

We put the tuners in the back end, allowing us to slim things down in the front end. The case now holds the motherboard, CPU, memory, power supply... and, depending on your ambition, the hard drive and optical drive. Not much else, which allows it to run very cool and very quietly.

Cost: n/a
Hard drive
Seagate Momentus 5400.5 160GB 2.5" SATA

With no need for massive storage, the hard drive's primary raison d'être in the lightweight front end is to hold the OS. You could do this over a network boot or even with a few gigabytes of flash memory, but we go the conventional route here with a regular mechanical drive.

Incidentally, solid-state disks (SSD) may not yet be a good idea, mostly due to the lack of benefits for the HTPC. Even cheaper SSD's such as the OCZ Core V2 are substantially more expensive, and are generally equal, at best, in write performance (which is critical for a HTPC). Most importantly as far as the HTPC is concerned, SSDs save very little additional power (per Techreport and others).

2.5" laptop drives tend to run cooler and consume less power than their 3.5" desktop counterparts. The Seagate Momentus 5400.5 (ST9160310AS) offers excellent performance for a laptop drive, 160GB of space, 8MB of cache, a 5400rpm spindle speed, sub-12ms seek time, and a three-year warranty.

Cost: $56.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Case
Antec Fusion V2

We keep the existing recommendation because it's already reasonably low noise and it's fairly well-built. We feel compelled to note that with no add-in PCI or PCI-e cards and only a 2.5" laptop drive, you could potentially move to a much smaller chassis, particularly if you shifted from the standard-sized 5.25" optical drive to a slim unit such as the Samsung SH-S082H.

The challenges of going to something this small add up when you realize you don't know how quiet or well-built many of the components are. Finding low-noise, high-quality ATX and SFX power supplies is much easier than looking for quiet 1U or FlexATX units. A few do exist, such as the SFX form-factor Seasonic Eco Power 300W and FlexATX form-factor Sparkle SPI220LE, but be aware of their drawbacks, particularly the fact that both actually tend to be noisier than many of their ATX counterparts at loads typically seen in a HTPC, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid.

For actual case recommendations, the Foxconn DH153C, Chenbro PC40523, HEC 7K09BB, and several others are smaller and more compact than most of the cases in the primary all-in-one HTPC recommendation. They carry compromises such as smaller, noisier fans, and even with a PSU swap to a suitable lower-noise unit, their relatively poor internal airflow may find them to be more noisy than we'd like them to be.

Cost: $173.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Total price: $708.10, not including shipping and handling (12/1/2008, no OS)

It may look just like the all-in-one HTPC box, but the lightweight front end ends up being a little more than half the cost. It's still more than a comparable media center extender, but it's also much more capable and flexible. For example, install a powerful discrete video card like an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT 512MB, and you could have a formidable gaming setup in your living room.

Heavy-duty back end

The back-end does all of the heavy lifting in this setup, but because it sits out of the way in the closet, it can be bigger, a little more noisy, and store a lot more data without having to cram everything into a tiny chassis in your living room. We also don't have to worry about content protection very much, as the back-end is just storing and crunching media rather than actually talking directly to your TV.

If you have an existing PC that's perfect for this role, you may not even want to build a new one. The case may be big and beige, but if you've got enough SATA ports on the motherboard, internal 3.5" bays for the hard drives, and a suitable power supply, why not reuse an existing box? There are many approaches to this; using the recommendations below may be a useful way to modify an existing system rather than building an entirely new one.
Motherboard
Asus P5Q-EM HDMI

The key features we look for on the back end motherboard are at least six SATA ports—preferably in RAID to give us additional configuration options—passive cooling, and onboard video. This restricts us to slightly higher-end choices, but the price difference between the P5Q-EM HDMI and the cheaper P5Q-VM is pretty small, so it's not a significant issue. Losing on chipset RAID support and HDMI are also very minor negatives.

We go Intel in the back end as we don't need the higher integrated video performance of the competing AMD or NVIDIA chipsets. For users wishing to go for maximum processing power with quad-core chips, Intel's quad-cores are faster and cooler than the AMD competition, although that is somewhat diluted by the fact that AMD has continually slashed the prices on their quad-cores. AMD users still have plenty of options if going Intel doesn't appeal to them; the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H offers both onboard video and six SATA ports, but it has only two PCI-e slots (one x16 and one x1) and lacks chipset RAID5. The Asus M3A78-EM is similar, but offers four DIMM slots instead of two.

The Asus P5Q-EM HDMI is based on the Intel G45/ICH10R offering, including four DDR2 sockets, one PCI-e x16, two PCI-e x1, and one PCI slot, six SATA 3.0Gbps ports with RAID0/1/0+1/5 support, HDMI, DVI, VGA, FireWire, six USB 2.0 ports (plus headers for six more), and onboard Ethernet.

Cost: $134.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Retail

We could go lighter on the processor if your encoding requirements don't happen in real time, or we could go much heavier (Core 2 Quad Q9400 anyone?) to do simultaneous encodes if you demand that much performance. The 45nm Core 2s are very energy-efficient compared to their older 65nm siblings, so we feel they're worth the additional cost.

AMD users can look at the Athlon X2 4450e on the low-end, which is the latest, most energy-efficient version of the Athlon 64 X2. Somewhat higher end, the X2 5200+ in the all-in-one recommendation is a pretty good choice, and for massive encoding jobs where quad-cores help, one of the cooler-running AMD Phenoms such as the 9550 should be an excellent choice. If you choose to run a higher-end chip like the Phenom 9850 or 9950, you'll want to make sure your motherboard supports it; some AMD 780G boards have trouble with 125W and 140W TDP Phenoms.

The Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 has a 3.16GHz clock speed, 6MB of L2 cache, and runs both cooler and slightly faster than its older 65nm brethren, such as the Core 2 Duo E6850. The retail boxed version comes with a three-year warranty and a heatsink/fan that's decent enough to let us skip an aftermarket heatsink.

Cost: $174.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Memory
4GB DDR2-800

Since the last installment, memory has only gotten cheaper (!). 4GB is unnecessary for a HTPC, but at this price, it's almost impossible to say no to 4GB. The back-end is supposed to do heavy lifting anyway, the low price is just another excuse for 4GB. A lighter weight OS such as Mythbuntu can get by with 1GB or even 512MB, but didn't we mention just how cheap memory is?

We stick with DDR2 that requires the JEDEC-standard 1.8v for optimal compatibility and lowest power dissipation.

Cost: $28.26 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Video
None—onboard

Onboard video is fine. It won't even be used most of the time, as the back end can be remotely managed. If you're buying a motherboard for the back end that doesn't have onboard video, then pick up whatever's cheap and works; both NVIDIA and AMD have plenty of cheap low-end PCI-e cards.

Cost: n/a
Two Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 HD tuners

We can use the exact same tuners from the all-in-one HTPC here in the back-end.

We go with two Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800s, which take advantage of the PCI-e x1 slots on our motherboard and are widely supported in multiple OSes. If you're hooked into cable, don't forget to check if your cable box supports (and if your cable company enables it) FireWire-out; that may let you plug the cable box directly into your system via FireWire, allowing you to dispense with a separate tuner card.

Alternative tuners include the Hauppauge Nova-T-500 for DAB signals outside the USA. For in the USA, the SiliconDust HD Homerun is very popular, as is the Dvico FusionHDTV 7, AverMedia AverTV HD A180, and the PCI version of the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800, the WinTV-HVR-1600.

The Hauppauge HD PVR USB is also worth looking at if you need high-definition video recording from component video sources. It's not exactly a tuner, but the capabilities it has are worth noting.

Cost: $94.99 each ($189.98 total) (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Sound
None—onboard

Onboard sound more than does the job—which will probably comprise of sitting there and doing exactly nothing most of the time.

Cost: n/a
Communications
None—onboard

Gigabit Ethernet is onboard, and should prove more than adequate for serving files. We don't recommend wireless for streaming HD, as 802.11g or even 802.11n is hard-pressed to do this without a strong, consistent signal. You can try it if you like, as it does work, it's just not as reliable as a nice run of Cat5e.

Cost: n/a
Hard drive
Three Western Digital Greenpower 1TB (WD10EADS)

One drive for boot, two more drives for data. Feel free to add or subtract drives as you need to, set them up in RAID (chipset RAID with the ICH10R, software RAID via the OS, or whatever you feel like...), etc. Since the last update, almost every major drive maker has updated their product lines to higher density 333GB/platters, for improved performance and reduced power consumption.

We recommend keeping the OS drive separate to prevent occasional hiccups in recording and playback, as the data drive needs to be constantly accessed. Modern drives now are more than fast enough to prevent this in a single-disk setup, but start talking multiple HD streams and it could be an issue, so we avoid it entirely by going to multiple disks.

1TB for a boot disk is probably excessive, but since hard drive space rarely goes to waste in a HTPC, we think it's a viable choice. Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) is also an attractive option, although it appears to need a little additional firmware development at the moment. Smaller drives such as the Western Digital WD6400AAKS may be more suitable for builds that need less space.

Shop around for drives; if you're not building a high-end hardware RAID5 off of an Areca ARC-1220 or 3ware 9650SE-8LPML, then you probably don't need to worry too much about nearline drives, and, as a result, pretty much anything will work. The Seagate 7200.11 1TB (ST31000333AS), Hitachi 7K1000.B 1TB, Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB, and Samsung F1 1TB are all excellent choices. All work fine for light use like they'd see in the HTPC Back-End. If you must go nearline (be it for the higher MTBF, or because you do plan to go high-end RAID), the nearline versions of the drives mentioned here would be the Seagate ES.2 1TB, Western Digital RE3 1TB, and Hitachi E7K1000.

We go with the Western Digital Greenpower 1TB (WD10EADS) because of its low noise, low power consumption, more than adequate performance, 32MB cache, and three-year warranty. The WD10EADS is an update over the previous WD10EACS with 333GB/platter rather than 250GB/platter for improved performance and reduced power consumption, and the performance of the slower Greenpower drives is still more than adequate for the Back-end.

Cost: $114.99 each ($344.97 total) (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Optical drive
LG GGW-H20L

In the all-in-one, Blu-ray is a substantial chunk of the budget, so we make it optional.

With someone spending substantially more money on what would probably be a front-end/back-end setup, the extra cost to go Blu-ray as an additional 1080p source is significantly less of a hit. Being able to write to Blu-ray is nice too, although it's still a luxury for most given the high cost of writable media. Lite-On has some excellent choices in the form of the DH-4B1S BD-writer and the DH-4O1S BD-ROM if you don't like the options from LG, such as the GGC-H20L.

Unlike its cheaper GGC-H20L sibling that only reads Blu-ray, the LG GGW-H20L is a 6x Blu-ray burner, 16x DVD-writer, 40x CD-writer, has 4MB cache and a SATA interface.

Cost: $224.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparision shop for this item]
Pioneer DVR-216D

The more mundane task of ripping DVDs could probably be handled by the Blu-ray drive, but using a separate DVD drive that's just over a tenth of the cost probably makes more sense. Plus, the Pioneer DVR-216D is an excellent reader.

Pioneer's DVR-216D supports DVD reads and writes up to 20x, CD reads up to 40x, has a 2MB cache as well as a SATA interface. Its competition, such as the Samsung SH-S223F, LG GH22LP20, and Optiarc AD-7200S, are also appropriate choices.

Cost: $26.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Case
Antec NSK6580

Boring and mundane, but it holds up to five 3.5" drives with grommeted mounts in addition to three 5.25" devices. Add in a 92mm fan or two in the front to keep the drives cool, and the Antec NSK6580 does everything we need it to do for a pretty good price. We go for the black version in this update as it happened to be cheaper, but check the silver version as well in your shopping.

The included Antec Earthwatts 430W PSU makes this case an excellent value, as the cost of going to a separate PSU such as the Corsair VX450 or Enermax Modu82+ 425W would be substantial for a box that doesn't need to be ultra-low noise.

If you have ambitions beyond a handful of hard drives, the Chenbro SR10769BK, Lian-Li PC-V1200Bplus II, and quite a few other chassis can hold more drives and keep them properly cooled. The Chenbro SR10769BK, in particular, takes up to eight 3.5" drives with optional hotswap available, although for home use we'd definitely swap the fans out from the stock high-flow/high-noise Delta units to something more ear-friendly.

Cost: $88 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Nexus Real Silent 92mm fan

Low noise, low-flow, the Nexus Real Silent 92mm provides more than enough airflow to keep the hard drives cool in the NSK6580 with 27cfm of air at 19.2dBA. With only three drives, we only specify one, but if you intend to fully populate your NSK6580 with five drives, you might want to consider two.

Cost: $9.99 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Mouse
Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse USB

Since we expect the back end to be controlled via remote most of the time, buy whatever you like for a mouse. Optical mice are cheap enough that we buy one of those, but that's about it.

Cost: $9.95 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Keyboard
Logitech keyboard

If you find it comfortable, then buy it. Logitech, Microsoft, and other name-brand units are all pretty decent. Keep in mind the important nature of personal preference in this decision and the fact you probably won't be using it too often.

Cost: $6.90 (12/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Total price: $1,241.01, not including shipping and handling (12/1/2008, no OS)
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/...00812-htpc.ars





MPAA: Opposition to Selectable Output Control "Astonishing"
Matthew Lasar

The Motion Picture Association of America met with the Federal Communications Commission late last week to blast its opponents, who are leery of granting Hollywood the right to limit output on HDTVs and other devices. Michael O’Leary and Frank Cavaliere of the MPAA told FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein that critics of a proposed waiver on selectable output control (SOC) are living in the past. The duo responded to charges by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) that SOC could hobble millions of HTDVs. Broadcast lobbyist Eddie Fritts of the Fritts Group also attended the meeting.

"At its core, the position of CEA is that technology should be frozen in time, and any new services that require advanced technology should be banned," the MPAA told Adelstein on November 25. "This position is quite astonishing, coming from an organization that in the past has advocated in favor of technological innovation."

As Ars has reported, CEA has been on the war path, trying to stave off the MPAA's bid to obtain FCC permission to work with cable and satellite companies to block analog output of pre-DVD release movies. Current agency policy forbids SOC use against either analog or digital transmission. But MPAA argues that analog is insecure, and that broadcast over it would "facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets."

Not one iota

CEA met with the FCC on November 18 and warned that 20 million HDTVs could be affected by an SOC waiver. "The MPAA has not demonstrated why it should be permitted to disable the features and functionality of a consumer's lawfully-purchased HDTV set," three CEA Vice Presidents told the FCC. The advocacy group Public Knowledge filed around the same time, and argued that the disability count could get higher if you include DVRs "and other consumer electronics devices that rely on analog connections." These also will be "effectively turned off, even if the TVs also have digital inputs."

At the November 25 meeting, MPAA all but called both groups a pack of worrywarts. "To be clear, the MPAA's waiver would not affect the continuity of consumers' existing services or their ability to view and record any program presently available for recording," they argued. "Rather, grant of the waiver will provide consumers with entirely new home viewing options without affecting by one iota any of the other programming options they currently enjoy."

O’Leary, Cavaliere, and Fritts also tried their hand at a historical analogy that strikes Ars as pretty weak. Ten years ago CEA strongly boosted the DVD, they observed, for which millions of consumers bought DVD players, setting aside their VCRs. "At that time, there was no concern expressed by CEA that 'lawfully purchased' VCRs would be 'disabled,'" the MPAA noted. "Nor did Public Knowledge suggest then that VCRs would 'be effectively turned off.'"

It's unclear why anyone would suggest those things, of course, since DVD players do not physically limit the output of other devices. More reasonably, MPAA protests that various electronic device makers are not subject to the SOC ban, and can cut deals with studios to stream early run content over AppleTV, PlayStation 3, and other systems through what's called a Multi-Channel Video Programming Distribution agreement. "By contrast, 60 million plus consumers do have the necessary connections and equipment by virtue of their MVPD subscriptions for the new service for which we are seeking the waiver," their filing concluded. "This competitive disadvantage for MVPDs and their customers can be eliminated if the waiver is granted."

But Public Knowledge, which has been following this proceeding for months, quickly filed a response to MPAA's latest comments, noting that various studios plan to roll out early-run movies without SOC. "MPAA has presented no evidence that analog or protected digital outputs are the source of copyright infringement or that the waiver would have any effect on infringement," PK's Jef Pearlman concluded, "while there is significant evidence that neither is true."

The FCC told Ars on Monday that the MPAA's SOC request won't appear on the agenda of the agency's next Open Commission meeting, scheduled for December 18. But, judging from the trade association's aggressive lobbying, the big studios aren't giving up on this prize yet.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tonishing.html





Hoping to Draw Market Share With Touch Screens
Jenna Wortham and Matt Richtel

This holiday, cellphone makers and carriers are pushing some shiny new toys: phones with touch-sensitive screens like the one on the Apple iPhone.

The companies are hoping to duplicate the blockbuster success of the iPhone with models that, in their glassy minimalism, end up looking a lot like it. These include the G1, powered by Google’s Android software; the Instinct from Samsung; the LG Dare; and, most recently, Research in Motion’s much-anticipated BlackBerry Storm.

But with consumers keeping a close watch on their bank balances, analysts and industry experts say most touch-screen phones will have trouble getting onto the list of this season’s must-have gadgets.

The surge of touch screens has its roots in the introduction of the iPhone on AT&T’s network in June 2007, which left rival carriers scrambling for comparable offerings.

“What you’re seeing right now is the first wave of competitors spurred by the media juggernaut for the iPhone,” said Ed Snyder, a telecommunications industry analyst with Charter Equity Research. Mr. Snyder said that when the iPhone hype hit, “no credible cellphone executive could not get a touch-screen phone started.”

Since its introduction, the iPhone, which is available only through AT&T in the United States, has helped AT&T steal customers from other carriers. Wireless service operators are now concentrating on retaining current subscribers as much as they are trying to reel in new ones, said Charles Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Part of that strategy, Mr. Golvin said, is offering perks like exclusive “presales” of hot new models to subscribers.

Phone shoppers say carriers and contracts have a big influence on their decisions about phones. “I’m pretty sure my next phone will be a touch screen,” said Vernon McIntosh, 40, a personal trainer from New York who is an AT&T customer.

Mr. McIntosh was in a Verizon store last week and said he was choosing between an iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm. “But I’m not eligible for an upgrade at AT&T,” he said. “It might be cheaper to switch contracts.”

To help drum up excitement for the release of the Storm, Verizon Wireless rolled out a teaser campaign in early October that zeroed in on the phone’s distinctive feature: a palpable clicking sensation when the screen is pressed.

The Storm, which costs $200 after rebate with a new two-year contract, also has built-in appeal for the existing base of BlackBerry fanatics, and it appears to be a hit. When the Storm went on sale Nov. 21, people lined up outside Verizon stores to get their hands on it, and many stores quickly sold out.

An employee at a Verizon Wireless store in Midtown Manhattan said Friday that none of the company’s stores in Manhattan had the Storm in stock, but that people were still streaming in to place orders. The earliest those customers can expect their phones to ship is Dec. 15, the employee said.

Nancy Stark, a spokeswoman for Verizon, said she could not provide figures on sales or inventory for the Storm, although she did say it had been the company’s “fastest-selling phone to date.” Verizon’s next touch-screen models are the $350 HTC Touch Pro, available now, and the $249 Samsung Omnia, which is for sale online and will be in stores next week.

Touch-screen phones do have their critics. Mr. Snyder says the bigger screens are a drain on battery life, and the phones require users to look at the screen instead of getting to know the phone’s buttons by feel.

“You’re getting all these extras so you can look at the phone and stand still, when you bought the phone so you could move,” he said. “Only a niche of users are going to be willing to spend money to have the extra capability.”

“The hype surrounding the touch-screen technology far exceeds its impact,” Mr. Snyder said.

Dave Perry, a business developer who was shopping in a Verizon store in Manhattan last week, said he liked the user-friendliness and big screens of touch-screen phones. “But there are drawbacks: the accuracy of typing and reliability of the screen,” he said.

“I don’t necessarily think the technology is where it needs to be,” Mr. Perry said, adding that the occasional problems and slow responses from the devices were “not something I’m willing to wait for.”

Touch-screen phones remain a fraction of the overall mobile phone market, but sales have been soaring. In the 12 months through September, sales of the phones in North America grew 130 percent, in contrast to 4 percent growth in the overall phone market, according to comScore M:Metrics, a market research firm.

As of September, M:Metrics data shows, more than 2.6 million people in North America had some model of the iPhone. The second-most-popular touch-screen model was the LG Voyager, which was available through Verizon Wireless and had 851,000 users.

Mr. Golvin said it was unlikely that touch-screen phones would take over the industry.

“There’s no question that it’s a very fast-growing segment of the market,” Mr. Golvin said. “It’s become one of the form factors that some consumers want.”

But Mr. Golvin said there had been similar frenzies for flip phones and candy-bar-style phones when they were introduced. “And yet today, there are still plenty of people who prefer a flip phone.”

Touch-screen technology first appeared in devices like the Treo that were aimed at professional users, and the screens were best activated with thin plastic styluses. Since the advent of the iPhone, more touch screens are activated with the fingers, and the phones themselves are aimed at mainstream users.

The phones also tend to cost several hundred dollars, which could hurt sales in an economic downturn. For its part, Sprint is fighting the barrage of high-end phones from its competitors with a new marketing campaign that emphasizes the money-saving value of its phones and plans.

Ev Gonzalez, director of device marketing for Verizon Wireless, said the company recognized that touch-screen technology was not for everyone. In fact, he said, touch screens are likely to show up on a limited number of the company’s devices.

“There are consumers who are looking for straight phone services,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “Where the touch screen is not needed, we won’t provide it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/te...y/01phone.html





Maybe Canadians Have More Friends
Alex Mindlin

Canadian Internet users are far more likely than Americans to use a social networking Web site, according to September figures released by the research firm comScore. That number is consistent with Canadians’ generally heavy use of sophisticated Internet features like online video.

“We joke that it’s because of those long winter nights up there,” said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore.

But it also reflects the broader truth that the popularity of such Web sites, and which services are at the top, can vary sharply in neighboring countries.

“One site may catch on in a certain country, and another may catch on elsewhere,” said Mr. Lipsman. “Often it’s whichever one gained prominence in the early phase of the game.”

For example, Google’s Orkut service, which has a third of Facebook’s traffic in the United States, is the dominant social networking site in both India and Brazil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/te...t/01drill.html





James Boyle's "The Public Domain" -- a Brilliant Copyfighter's Latest Book, from a Law Prof Who Writes Like a Comedian
Cory Doctorow

Jamie Boyle, of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, has a new book out, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle ranks with Lessig, Benkler and Zittrain as one of the most articulate, thoughtful, funny and passionate thinkers in the global fight for free speech, open access, and a humane and sane policy on patents, trademarks and copyrights. A legal scholar who can do schtick like a stand-up comedian, Boyle is entertaining as well as informative.

I've got a copy on its way to me, but while I'm waiting, I'm delighted to discover that Jamie talked his publisher, Yale University Press, into offering the book as a free, CC-licensed download. And right there, in the preface, I'm hooked:

Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a “Sealed Crustless Sandwich.” In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way:

A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed be- tween the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is pre- vented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.

“But why does this upset you?” I asked; “you’ve seen much worse than this.” And he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms. The U.S. Olympic Committee has an expansive right akin to a trademark over the word “Olympic” and will not permit gay activists to hold a “Gay Olympic Games.” The Supreme Court sees no First Amendment problem with this. Margaret Mitchell’s estate famously tried to use copyright to prevent Gone With the Wind from being told from a slave’s point of view. The copyright over the words you are now read- ing will not expire until seventy years after my death; the men die young in my family, but still you will allow me to hope that this might put it close to the year 2100. Congress periodically considers legislative proposals that would allow the ownership of facts. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole array of legally protected digital fences to en- close their work. In some cases it effectively removes the privilege of fair use. Each day brings some new Internet horror story about the excesses of intellectual property. Some of them are even true. The list goes on and on. (By the end of this book, I hope to have convinced you that this matters.) With all of this going on, this enclosure movement of the mind, this locking up of symbols and themes and facts and genes and ideas (and eventually people), why get excited about the patenting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? “I just thought that there were limits,” he said; “some things should be sacred.”

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, [url=http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/]Download The Public Domain[/ur], The Public Domain on Amazon
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/30...s-the-pub.html





Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web
Brad Stone

Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings.

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Supporters of this idea say such programs will help with the emergence of a new “social Web,” because chatter among friends will infiltrate even sites that have been entirely unsociable thus far.

For example, a person might alert his Facebook friends to the fact that he is watching a video on CBS.com and invite them to join him there to watch together and discuss the video as it plays.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

MySpace, Yahoo and Google have all announced similar programs this year, using common standards that will allow other Web sites to reduce the work needed to embrace each identity system. Facebook, which is using its own data-sharing technology, is slightly ahead of its rivals.

The effort is particularly important for Facebook, which once represented the seemingly boundless promise of the Web 2.0 boom. It desperately wants to make certain the other Web companies do not supplant it and become the most popular hub for online socializing.

Facebook, with 120 million members worldwide, has also been under extra pressure to get its revenue to match its media hype and membership growth. Responding to reports that Facebook was looking for more capital after raising $235 million last year, Ms. Sandberg said she would not rule that out. “There is a lot of interest in investing in us and we are always open to the right financing at the right price,” she said.

The most immediate challenge confronting Facebook is to create an enduring stream of advertising revenue.

A survey last week from the research firm IDC suggested that social networks were a miserable place for advertisers: just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.

“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?” Ted McConnell, a general manager at Procter & Gamble, asked last month at an industry conference.

This is where Facebook Connect could help. No money changes hands between Facebook and the sites using Connect, and executives are wary of discussing how it could bring in revenue. But there are some obvious possibilities.

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

“It’s becoming very clear that advertisers don’t know how to advertise on Facebook,” said Charlene Li, an independent consultant and social media analyst. “But if you take a group of Facebook friends and put them on a travel site where they are spending more time and generating more ad dollars in a focused area like travel, that is an opportunity ripe for getting revenues back and sharing it.”

Facebook executives argue that Connect will naturally increase traffic on the site and increase ad revenue as a result. Ms. Sandberg said the company had no plans to explore any other advertising potential with Connect.

That reluctance is partly born of experience. Last year, Facebook was lambasted for its Beacon advertising program, which some thought failed to properly warn users that their actions on other sites were being shared on Facebook. Some users’ purchases on e-commerce sites, for example, were broadcast to their friends, in some cases spoiling gift plans.

As a result, Facebook executives have been exceedingly circumspect with Connect, introducing it slowly and pitching it as a privacy tool. They argue that it allows users to set their privacy settings once on Facebook and then apply them on other sites.

Facebook has also taken other precautions. According to staff members at the political advocacy group MoveOn.org, which led the charge against Beacon, Facebook executives gave them an early briefing this summer about Connect.

For now, Facebook is also carefully authorizing each partner in the Connect program and reviewing how it will use data on Facebook members and discuss the feature publicly. It plans to allow Web sites to register themselves for Connect, without having to seek approval, in the next few weeks.

“They so desperately want to avoid another Beacon,” said an executive with a company that plans to use Connect but has been waiting for a green light from Facebook for months. This person did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Facebook.

When asked about the potential promises and pitfalls of Connect, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said: “We want to make the experience as lightweight and easy to use as possible. But we also have to make sure that people understand what’s going on and have control over it.”

Executives at the social network MySpace, which has similar goals, are more outspoken in discussing their identification system.

“There are so many important issues to get right,” said Jason Oberfest, a vice president at MySpace. “Consumers need to understand where their data is going and how it’s being used.”

“Then, if we can get the privacy issues right, if it’s totally clear to the user what is happening, there is potential for advertising,” Mr. Oberfest added. “But certainly not without a lot of testing and consideration.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/te...1facebook.html





An Amicus Brief: Issues in the Cyberbullying Case That Affect You
Pamela Jones

I was trying to figure out how to explain to you all that is involved in the case of the U.S. v. Lori Drew, the cyberbullying case that so many lawyers are expressing concerns about. I felt I needed a lawyer to explain it, but where would I find one who felt like doing some unpaid work, and over the Thanksgiving holiday to boot?

Then I had a brainstorm. I could show you the amicus brief submitted in the case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Public Citizen, which was also signed by "14 individual faculty members listed in Appendix A who research, teach and write scholarly articles and books about internet law, cybercrime, criminal law and related topics at law schools nationwide". Appendix A is at the very end. If you look at the list, you'll see that it's some of the finest and most knowledgeable lawyers and law professors specializing in cyberlaw. The brief was written by Jennifer Granick of EFF and Philip R. Malone of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society's Cyberlaw Clinic.

I think when you read it, it will turn your hair white. It did me. In fact, I don't think it's overstating it a bit to say that unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer. At a minimum, I'd feel I'd need to avoid signing up for membership at any website, particularly MySpace. Why particularly MySpace? The Times Online has their statement:
MySpace, which is a division of News Corporation, owner of The Times, said in a statement that it “respects the jury's decision and will continue to work with industry experts to raise awareness of cyber-bullying and the harm it can potentially cause.”
If it respects this decision, I don't feel safe there. I didn't even want to visit its web site to try to find its terms of use. But according to this article, MySpace gets to be the one that decides if we've violated their terms:
MySpace users agree that the social networking site has the final say on deciding whether content posted by users violates a long list of regulations contained in the agreement.
There is no recourse. They make the law and if you mess up, you go to jail. You used a computer, after all, didn't you, and their server isn't yours, and if they say you have violated their terms, you have. I'd also never upload anything to YouTube, and I wouldn't use anyone's blogging software. I'd definitely stay out of the Cloud, because I don't own those computers either, leaving me open to Computer Fraud & Abuse Act allegations, which is what Drew was charged with. In short, it'd be time for me to just pack up and leave, if this verdict stands. If you think EULAs were bad, imagine after this ruling if they can be tied to the CFAA. Do you think it'll be long before folks are tossed in jail for defining fair use in ways a copyright owner doesn't like? Would Microsoft hesitate to criminalize its EULA terms? You think? You trust?

The case is not yet done, in that there is a motion that the judge took under advisement and said he will rule on this coming Monday. And there are other developments, as reported by St. Louis Today:
Drew lawyer H. Dean Steward has filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing repeatedly that prosecutors in Los Angeles over-reached and that Drew could only be prosecuted if she both read MySpace's terms and knowingly and intentionally violated them. Wu has appeared to lean towards granting that motion in court, although he has declined prior chances to do so. Steward has also filed a motion for a new trial, which could lead to a federal appeals court tossing out the case.
Wu is the judge, the Honorable George H. Wu. There are some serious issues, legal issues, raised by the case, in other words. The legal issues are not about who is or isn't morally awful; the legislative branch can always write new laws to address a new issue that they realize someone needs to write a law for. The legal issues raised are what happens to everyone who uses a computer if the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act is applied to actions that were not contemplated as covered by the legislators when they drafted the act. Here's the analysis by the US Departmenet of Justice of the CFAA, dated long before this case. More reactions:
"The statute was never intended to cover this kind of conduct," says Michael Scott, professor of law at Southwestern School of Law, Los Angeles. "Lori Drew did not do the key acts that the prosecution alleged, but rather a third party did, so it seems strange that the person who pulled the trigger is not prosecuted but the one standing next to her is."

Or at least criminalize it before you prosecute anyone. Andrew Grossman goes to the heart of the matter, in the Christian Science Monitor:
"What happened to Megan Meier was a tragedy, not a crime," says Andrew Grossman, senior legal policy analyst in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "This case should never have been brought. The strongest evidence for the prosecution had nothing or little to do with the charges. This verdict is a loss for civil liberties and leaves all Internet users at risk of prosecution under federal law. It is a prime example of overcriminalization."
And that's why it'd be time to get off the Internet and go back to a typewriter. Really. You read a great deal about judges and how they shouldn't be allowed to be activists and use their positions to create law. But the amicus brief raises a serious question: what about prosecutors? Is society in safe hands if prosecutors get to broadly interpret a law retroactively in creative and aggressive ways to make it apply to activities that have nothing to do with what the law was written to address? How about web sites? If violating a web site's terms of use is criminalized by the CFAA, have we not given private companies the ability to write the criminal laws? Do you feel safe if they are allowed to arbitrarily decide what is or isn't criminal? And then change it whenever they feel like it, without notice to you? Here's a question for you, from AlmostLegally:
At my office, the company I work for says “don’t send personal email from your work computer.” But if I do, is that a federal crime?

For example, Groklaw has terms of use. I ask you not to post comments about politics and not to troll or spam or personally attack anyone. If you violate those terms, should I apply the CFAA to you and send you to jail? One year for each misdemeanor and a $100,000 fine, because you violate something I made up to suit myself? On what basis should I be given such power? Have we lost our minds? I surely don't want any such powers.

Note that's one of the concerned comments in the New York Times article I linked to at the very beginning, a comment by Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, again:
"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law," Grossman told The Times. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

Did you ever think you could be criminally prosecuted for not abiding by a web site's terms of use? Neither did I. And that raises another question. Do I now have a responsibility to police you and make sure you are abiding by my 'laws'? Does anybody know? And there's another point that the brief raises: can you retroactively define something as criminal and put people in jail for conduct they had no notice was criminal conduct before they did it?

The law is not supposed to surprise or ambush you. The law draws a line in the sand, as drawn by the legislators, who draw it where they think they need to to accomplish something very specific. They don't write laws that say, "Don't do bad stuff." If they did, it'd be likely found unconstitutional, on the grounds of vagueness, because who knows what "bad stuff" is if it isn't defined?

Did you know that YouTube's Terms of Use say not to do "bad stuff"? I didn't either, never having read it, because like the majority of you, I rarely read terms of use. But the brief tells us that it says that. If we apply the CFAA to that web site's terms of use, is it now a crime to do "bad stuff"? Actually, yes, if you use a computer to do it, whatever it is that someone someday might conceivably define as "bad stuff". Who gets to define "bad stuff"? Google? Some prosecutor somewhere you don't even live? A blogger mob? An enemy who can't sleep without inventing new and mean ways to ruin your life? Does the CFAA not empower such conduct?

Do you actually want a world like that? In some ways, it's worse than lawlessness, worse than the old Wild West. Why worse? Because in the West in the old days, might made "right". That's clear enough, and you knew where you stood. Practice shooting, or move East where there were laws. But if the law is vague or retroactively redefined just to get you, because someone in power decides you deserve it, you have laws but you can't rely upon them, because they are not necessarily fairly applied or reliably defined, so you are in constant danger of having a law used just to get you personally, because someone doesn't like the way you part your hair.

Like that never happens in real life.

The entire point of the rule of law is that it's dependable and predictable and it applies equally to everyone. You don't wake up to a knock on your door, and find the police have defined you mysteriously as a criminal without warning. I'm not talking about this case's specifics now. Everyone agrees that bullying is not a good thing, and I sympathize with prosecutors. I've known some, and I liked them all. They are men and women, in my experience, who care deeply about the victims of crime, and that's a beautiful quality. But the rule of law is beautiful too, but only if it's dependable, fair, and applied without favoritism. Not to mention Constitutional. Anonymous speech is protected under the US Constitution, as the brief points out. PCWorld quotes some more lawyers:
If the charges against Drew are upheld, it will be a serious blow to anyone who wants to remain anonymous on the Internet, said Brock Meeks, a CDT spokesman. "Everybody that is sympathetic to this case and saying finally we've got something to nail her on here, they're not looking hard enough at the fact that the Justice Department blundered by using this anti-hacker law," he said.

The charges suggest that anyone who uses a fake name to sign up for a Web service like Yahoo or Gmail could be charged with a federal crime, Meeks said. "If that's a federal crime, then I'm certainly guilty of a federal crime and there are probably a million other people out there who are probably also guilty."

Is it not Kafkaesque if you can be dragged into court on a whim in any location in the world, if the computer you are alleged to have misused is located there, even if it's half a country or even a world away from where you reside and they can put you in jail for a crime that wasn't defined as a crime at the time of your conduct in question? It'd be one thing if you were given a notice that this was the new interpretation; but if you just wake up to find out you are a retroactive criminal, you might as well be in a Kafka novel, because there is absolutely no way to ever know what the definition of criminal conduct will be tomorrow or when it can retroactively be applied to you. Drew, according to reports of the testimony at trial, never read the terms of use. Yes, but she should have known, said the prosecutor. She must have. How do you know? Should the law guess? We can be put in prison because although there is no proof we knew something, we might have or could have or must have?

If you think I am overstating what the brief is saying, feel free to say so, but do read it. At least then, you'll know what the uproar is all about. I know from some of your comments that you think the verdict was all about Lori Drew. I don't think so. I think it's about us.

Update: I remembered reading a detail about the case in one of the first articles about it, if not the first, namely that Megan was underage when she opened her MySpace account, and that her mother allowed her to do so, despite it being a violation of the web site's Terms of Use, and I found it now, from the St. Charles Journal:
MySpace has rules. A lot of them. There are nine pages of terms and conditions. The long list of prohibited content includes sexual material. And users must be at least 14.

"Are you joking?" Tina asks. "There are fifth-grade girls who have MySpace accounts."

As for sexual content, Tina says, most parents have no clue how much there is. And Megan wasn't 14 when she opened her account. To join, you are asked your age but there is no check. The accounts are free.

As Megan's 14th birthday approached, she pleaded for her mom to give her another chance on MySpace, and Tina relented.

She told Megan she would be all over this account, monitoring it. Megan didn't always make good choices because of her ADD, Tina says. And this time, Megan's page would be set to private and only Mom and Dad would have the password.
If only the parents would have the password, it means to me that they were the ones who set it up. And at the time of the suicide, Megan was still not yet 14, the age limit MySpace sets for opening an account. "This time" is referring to an earlier account that the parents had shut down, so they apparently allowed her to have an account even earlier, or she just opened it herself. Either way, it was a violation of the web site's terms of use:
Tina Meier was wary of the cyber-world of MySpace and its 70 million users. People are not always who they say they are.

Tina knew firsthand. Megan and the girl down the block, the former friend, once had created a fake MySpace account, using the photo of a good-looking girl as a way to talk to boys online, Tina says. When Tina found out, she ended Megan's access.
So the girl herself set up a fake account as well as violating the terms of use by opening an account when she was underage. Excuse me for pointing this out, but shouldn't this mother also be prosecuted for violating MySpace's Terms of Use, now found a violation of a criminal statute, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act? Before you answer, remember that Drew was found not guilty of intent to cause harm. If not, I'd like to hear your arguments. That same article, by the way, tells us about an incident that makes me wonder just what exactly caused the suicide:
Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, was a rainy, bleak day. At school, Megan had handed out invitations to her upcoming birthday party and when she got home she asked her mother to log on to MySpace to see if Josh had responded.

Why did he suddenly think she was mean? Who had he been talking to?

Tina signed on. But she was in a hurry. She had to take her younger daughter, Allison, to the orthodontist.

Before Tina could get out the door it was clear Megan was upset. Josh still was sending troubling messages. And he apparently had shared some of Megan's messages with others.

Tina recalled telling Megan to sign off.

"I will Mom," Megan said. "Let me finish up."

Tina was pressed for time. She had to go. But once at the orthodontist's office she called Megan: Did you sign off?

"No, Mom. They are all being so mean to me."

"You are not listening to me, Megan! Sign off, now!"

Fifteen minutes later, Megan called her mother. By now Megan was in tears.

"They are posting bulletins about me." A bulletin is like a survey. "Megan Meier is a slut. Megan Meier is fat."

Megan was sobbing hysterically. Tina was furious that she had not signed off.

Once Tina returned home she rushed into the basement where the computer was. Tina was shocked at the vulgar language her daughter was firing back at people.

"I am so aggravated at you for doing this!" she told Megan.

Megan ran from the computer and left, but not without first telling Tina, "You're supposed to be my mom! You're supposed to be on my side!"
Am I the only parent who notices that this child was left alone on the Internet, with admonitions to stop but delayed enforcement? And can you *prove* in a court of law that it was not the mother's failure to support her, as the child apparently viewed it, that actually caused the death? This child had tried to kill herself before, the article points out, an attempt that had nothing to do with the cyberbullying. No doubt that's why the local authorities didn't prosecute, since they said there was no way to actually say what exactly caused the suicide:
"We did not have a charge to fit it," McGuire says. "I don't know that anybody can sit down and say, 'This is why this young girl took her life.'"
Incidentally, Megan's mother was quoted in that article saying this:
"I don't feel their intentions were for her to kill herself. But that's how it ended."
That is what the jury found, actually, that Drew had no intention of causing a suicide. She didn't set up the account, according to testimony at trial, or send the messages. But if the mother recognized that there was no intention to cause the suicide, why did she not tell the court that and prevent the prosecutor from going after Drew for intent to cause the suicide?

Update 2: Orin Kerr, one of Drew's attorneys, has posted his summary of what happened and what happens next:
The jury agreed that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website, and that Drew directly or indirectly did so, but it acquitted Drew of having violated Terms of Service in furtherance of the tortious act. That is, the jury ruled that Drew is guilty of relatively lower-level crimes for violating MySpacs Terms of Service (for being involved in the setting up of a fake MySpace account). It acquitted Drew for any role in inflicting distress on Meier or for anything related to Meier's suicide. The maximum allowed penalty for the misdemeanor violations are one year in prison for each violation, although the majority of federal misdemeanors result in a sentence of probation.

The next step in the case is that the trial judge will rule on whether there was enough evidence for the jury to find that Drew violated the Terms of Service intentionally, or whether the TOS violation was only negligent or reckless or knowing. If the judge agrees that there was enough evidence for the jury to find that Drew violated the Terms of Service intentionally, the case will go on to sentencing for the crime of having violated MySpace's Terms of Service.

After sentencing, if that happens, the sentence will be followed by an appeal before the Ninth Circuit on the legal question of whether it is in fact a federal crime to violate the Terms of Service of a website. For those not following my coverage of the case, I am one of Drew's attorneys, and yes, if there is an appeal, I will be very heavily involved in it.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...81128005538214





Google’s Gatekeepers
Jeffrey Rosen

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site.

‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’

In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity on YouTube in Turkey, and that the press was reporting that the Turkish government was blocking access to YouTube for virtually all Turkish Internet users. Apparently unaware that Google owns YouTube, Turkish officials didn’t tell Google about the situation: a Turkish judge had ordered the nation’s telecom providers to block access to the site in response to videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which is a crime under Turkish law. Wong scrambled to figure out which videos provoked the court order and made the first in a series of tense telephone calls to Google’s counsel in London and Turkey, as angry protesters gathered in Istanbul. Eventually, Wong and several colleagues concluded that the video that sparked the controversy was a parody news broadcast that declared, “Today’s news: Kamal Ataturk was gay!” The clip was posted by Greek football fans looking to taunt their Turkish rivals.

Wong and her colleagues asked the Turkish authorities to reconsider their decision, pointing out that the original offending video had already been voluntarily removed by YouTube users. But after the video was taken down, Turkish prosecutors objected to dozens of other YouTube videos that they claimed insulted either Ataturk or “Turkishness.” These clips ranged from Kurdish-militia recruitment videos and Kurdish morality plays to additional videos speculating about the sexual orientation of Ataturk, including one superimposing his image on characters from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” “I remember one night, I was looking at 67 different Turkish videos at home,” Wong told me recently.

After having many of the videos translated into English, Wong and her colleagues set out to determine which ones were, in fact, illegal in Turkey; which violated YouTube’s terms of service prohibiting hate speech but allowing political speech; and which constituted expression that Google and YouTube would try to protect. There was a vigorous internal debate among Wong and her colleagues at the top of Google’s legal pyramid. Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of global public policy, took an aggressive civil-libertarian position, arguing that the company should protect as much speech as possible. Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, took a more pragmatic approach, expressing concern for the safety of the dozen or so employees at Google’s Turkish office. The responsibility for balancing these and other competing concerns about the controversial content fell to Wong, whose colleagues jokingly call her “the Decider,” after George W. Bush’s folksy self-description.

Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called I.P. blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored YouTube access. But last June, as part of a campaign against threats to symbols of Turkish secularism, a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government shouldn’t be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to YouTube in Turkey.

THE ONGOING DISPUTE between Google and Turkey reminds us that, throughout history, the development of new media technologies has always altered the way we think about threats to free speech. At the beginning of the 20th century, civil libertarians in America worried most about the danger of the government silencing political speech: think of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for President, who was imprisoned in 1919 for publicly protesting American involvement during World War I. But by the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court started to protect unpopular speakers more consistently, some critics worried that free speech in America was threatened less by government suppression than by editorial decisions made by the handful of private mass-media corporations like NBC and CBS that disproportionately controlled public discourse. One legal scholar, Jerome Barron, even argued at the time that the courts should give unorthodox speakers a mandatory right of access to media outlets controlled by giant corporations.

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.

In response to the rise of online gatekeepers like Wong, some House Democrats and Republicans have introduced a bipartisan bill called the Global Online Freedom Act, which would require that Internet companies disclose to a newly created office in the State Department all material filtered in response to demands by foreign governments. Google and other leading Internet companies have sought modifications to the bill, arguing that, without the flexibility to negotiate (as Wong did with Turkey), they can’t protect the safety of local employees and that they may get kicked out of repressive countries, where they believe even a restricted version of their services does more good than harm. For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of last month, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.

Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil”?

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get.

THE HEADQUARTERS OF YOUTUBE are in a former Gap building in San Bruno, Calif., just a few miles from the San Francisco International Airport. In the lobby, looming over massage chairs, giant plasma-screen TVs show popular videos and scroll news stories related to YouTube. The day I arrived to interview the YouTube management about how the site regulates controversial speech, most of the headlines, as it happens, had to do with precisely that topic. Two teenagers who posted a video of themselves throwing a soft drink at a Taco Bell employee were ordered by a Florida judge to post an apology on YouTube. The British culture secretary had just called on YouTube to carry warnings on clips that contain foul language.

The volume of videos posted on YouTube is formidable — Google estimates that something like 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute. YouTube users can flag a video if they think it violates YouTube’s community guidelines, which prohibit sexually explicit videos, graphic violence and hate speech. Once flagged, a video is vetted by YouTube’s internal reviewers at facilities around the world who decide whether to take it down, leave it up or send it up the YouTube hierarchy for more specialized review. When I spoke with Micah Schaffer, a YouTube policy analyst, he refused to say how many reviewers the company employs. But I was allowed to walk around the office to see if I could spot any of them. I passed one 20-something YouTube employee after another — all sitting in cubicles and wearing the same unofficial uniform of T-shirt and jeans. The internal reviewers were identifiable, I was told, only by the snippets of porn flickering on their laptops.

The idea of a 20-something with a laptop in San Bruno (or anywhere else, for that matter) interpreting community guidelines for tens of millions of users might not instill faith in YouTube’s vetting process. But the most controversial user flags or requests from foreign governments make their way up the chain of command to the headquarters of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., where they may ultimately be reviewed by Wong, McLaughlin and Walker.

Recently, I spent several days talking to Wong and her colleagues at the so-called Googleplex, which has the feeling of a bucolic and extraordinarily well-financed theme camp. As we sat around a conference table, they told me about their debates as they wrestled with hard cases like the dispute in Turkey, as well as the experiences that have informed their thinking about free speech. Walker, the general counsel, wrote for The Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate and considered becoming a journalist before going into law; McLaughlin, the head of global public policy, became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society after working on the successful Supreme Court challenge to part of the federal Communications Decency Act. And Wong, a soft-spoken and extremely well organized woman, has a joint degree in law and journalism from Berkeley and told me she aspired to be a journalist as a child because of her aunt, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.

I asked Wong what was the best analogy for her role at Google. Was she acting like a judge? An editor? “I don’t think it’s either of those,” she said. “I definitely am not trying to pass judgment on anything. I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country, and that’s not a judge role, more an enabling role.” She stressed the importance for Google of bringing its own open culture to foreign countries while still taking into account local laws, customs and attitudes. “What is the mandate? It’s ‘Be everywhere, get arrested nowhere and thrive in as many places as possible.’ ” So far, no Google employees have been arrested on Wong’s watch, though some have been detained.

When Google was founded, 10 years ago, it wasn’t at all obvious whether the proprietors of search engines would obey the local laws of the countries in which they did business — and whether they would remove links from search results in response to requests from foreign governments. This began to change in 2000, when a French Jew surfed a Yahoo auction site to look for collections of Nazi memorabilia, which violated a French law banning the sale and display of anything that incites racism. After a French judge determined that it was feasible for Yahoo to identify 90 percent of its French users by analyzing their I.P. addresses and to screen the material from the users, he ordered Yahoo to make reasonable efforts to block French users from accessing the prohibited content or else to face fines and the seizure of income from Yahoo’s French subsidiary. In January 2001, Yahoo banned the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its Web sites.

The Yahoo case was a landmark. It made clear that search engines like Google and Yahoo could be held liable outside the United States for indexing or directing users to content after having been notified that it was illegal in a foreign country. In the United States, by contrast, Internet service providers are protected from most lawsuits involving having hosted or linked to illegal user-generated content. As a consequence of these differing standards, Google has considerably less flexibility overseas than it does in the United States about content on its sites, and its “information must be free” ethos is being tested abroad.

For example, on the German and French default Google search engines, Google.de and Google.fr, you can’t find Holocaust-denial sites that can be found on Google.com, because Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France. In the wake of the Yahoo decision, Google decided to comply with governmental requests to take down links on its national search engines to material that clearly violates national laws. (In the interest of disclosure, however, Google has agreed to report all the links it takes down in response to government demands to chillingeffects.com, a Web site run by Harvard’s Berkman Center that keeps a record of censored online materials.)

Of course, not every overseas case presents a clear violation of national law. In 2006, for example, protesters at a Google office in India demanded the removal of content on Orkut, the social networking site, that criticized Shiv Sena, a hard-line Hindu political party popular in Mumbai. Wong eventually decided to take down an Orkut group dedicated to attacking Shivaji, revered as a deity by the Shiv Sena Party, because it violated Orkut terms of service by criticizing a religion, but she decided not to take down another group because it merely criticized a political party. “If stuff is clearly illegal, we take that down, but if it’s on the edge, you might push a country a little bit,” Wong told me. “Free-speech law is always built on the edge, and in each country, the question is: Can you define what the edge is?”

INITIALLY, GOOGLE’S POLICY of removing links to clearly illegal material on its foreign search engines seemed to work. But things changed significantly after Google bought and expanded YouTube in 2006. Once YouTube was available in more than 20 countries and in 14 languages, users began flagging hundreds of videos that they saw as violations of local community standards, and governments around the globe demanded that certain videos be blocked for violating their laws. Google’s solution was similar to the one the French judge urged on Yahoo: it agreed to block users in a particular country from accessing videos that were clearly illegal under local law. But that policy still left complicated judgment calls in murkier cases.

In late 2006, for example, Wong and her colleagues debated what to do about a series of videos that insulted the king of Thailand, where a lêse-majesté law makes criticisms of the king a criminal offense. Wong recalls hearing from an employee in Asia that the Thai government had announced that it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P. address. Soon after, a Thai government official sent Wong a list of the U.R.L.’s of 20 offensive videos that he demanded Google remove as a condition of unblocking the site. Some of the videos were sexually explicit or involved hate speech and thus clearly violated the YouTube terms of service. Some ridiculed the king — by depicting him with his feet on his head, for example — and were clearly illegal under Thai law but not U.S. law. And others — criticizing the Thai lêse-majesté law itself — weren’t illegal in Thailand but offended the government.

After an extensive debate with McLaughlin and Walker, Wong concluded that since the lêse-majesté law had broad democratic support in Thailand, it would be better to remove the videos that obviously violated Thai law while refusing to remove the videos that offended the government but didn’t seem to be illegal. All three told me they were reassured by the fact that Google could accommodate the Thai government by blocking just the videos that were clearly illegal in Thailand (and blocking those for Thai users only), leaving them free to exercise their independent judgment about videos closer to the line. The Thai government was apparently able to live with this solution.

Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly pressuring telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon to block controversial speech at the network level. Europe and the U.S. recently agreed to require Internet service providers to identify and block child pornography, and in Europe there are growing demands for network-wide blocking of terrorist-incitement videos. As a result, Wong and her colleagues said they worried that Google’s ability to make case-by-case decisions about what links and videos are accessible through Google’s sites may be slowly circumvented, as countries are requiring the companies that give us access to the Internet to build top-down censorship into the network pipes.

IT’S NOT ONLY FOREIGN COUNTRIES that are eager to restrict speech on Google and YouTube. Last May, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s staff contacted Google and demanded that the company remove from YouTube dozens of what he described as jihadist videos. (Around the same time, Google was under pressure from “Operation YouTube Smackdown,” a grass-roots Web campaign by conservative bloggers and advocates to flag videos and ask YouTube to remove them.) After viewing the videos one by one, Wong and her colleagues removed some of the videos but refused to remove those that they decided didn’t violate YouTube guidelines. Lieberman wasn’t satisfied. In an angry follow-up letter to Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, Lieberman demanded that all content he characterized as being “produced by Islamist terrorist organizations” be immediately removed from YouTube as a matter of corporate judgment — even videos that didn’t feature hate speech or violent content or violate U.S. law. Wong and her colleagues responded by saying, “YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view.” In September, Google and YouTube announced new guidelines prohibiting videos “intended to incite violence.”

In addition to Lieberman, another outspoken critic of supposed liberal bias at YouTube and Google is Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist and blogger. Malkin became something of a cause célèbre among YouTube critics in 2006, when she created a two-minute movie called “First, They Came” in the wake of the violent response to the Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons. After showing pictures of the victims of jihadist violence (like the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh) and signs declaring “Behead Those Who Insult Islam,” the video asks, “Who’s next?” and displays the dates of terrorist attacks in America, London, Madrid and Bali.

Nearly seven months after she posted the video, Malkin told me she was “flabbergasted” to receive an e-mail message from YouTube saying the video had been removed for its “inappropriate content.” When Malkin asked why the video was removed, she received no response, and when she posted a video appealing to YouTube to reinstate it, that video, too, was deleted with what she calls the “false claim” that it had been removed at her request. Malkin remains dissatisfied with YouTube’s response. “I’m completely flummoxed about what their standards are,” she said. “The standards need to be clear, they need to be consistent and they need to be more responsive.”

I watched the “First, They Came” video, which struck me as powerful political commentary that contains neither hate speech nor graphic violence, and I asked why it was taken down. According to a YouTube spokesman, the takedown was a routine one that hadn’t been reviewed by higher-ups. The spokesman said he couldn’t comment on particular cases, but he forwarded a link to Malkin’s current YouTube channel, noting that it contains 55 anti-jihadist videos similar to “First, They Came,” none of which have been taken down. (“First, They Came” can now be found on Malkin’s YouTube channel, too.)

The removal of Malkin’s video may have been an innocent mistake. But it serves as a reminder that one person’s principled political protest is another person’s hate speech, and distinguishing between the two in hard cases is a lot to ask of a low-level YouTube reviewer. In addition, the publicity that attended the removal of Malkin’s video only underscores the fact that in the vast majority of cases in which material is taken down, the decision to do so is never explained or contested. The video goes down, and that’s the end of it.

Yet even in everyday cases, it’s often no easier to determine whether the content of a video is actually objectionable. When I visited YouTube, the management showed me a flagged French video of a man doubled over. Was he coughing? Or in pain? Or playacting? It was hard to say. The YouTube managers said they might send the item to a team of French-language reviewers for further inspection, but if the team decided to take down the video, its reasons would most likely never become public.

AS THE LAW PROFESSOR TIM WU TOLD ME, to trust Google, you have to be something of a monarchist, willing to trust the near-sovereign discretion of Wong and her colleagues. That’s especially true in light of the Global Network Initiative, the set of voluntary principles for protecting free expression and privacy endorsed last month by leading Internet companies like Google and leading human rights and online-advocacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology. Google and other companies say they hope that by acting collectively, they can be more effective in resisting censorship requests from repressive governments and, when that isn’t possible, create a trail of accountability.

Google is indeed more friendly to free speech than the governments of most of the countries in which it operates. But even many of those who are impressed by Wong and her colleagues say the Google “Decider” model is impractical in the long run, because, as broadband use expands rapidly, it will be unrealistic to expect such a small group of people to make ad hoc decisions about permissible speech for the entire world. “It’s a 24-hour potential problem, every moment of the day, and because of what the foreign governments can do, like put people in jail, it creates a series of issues that are very, very difficult to deal with,” Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department, told me. I asked Wong whether she thought the Decider model was feasible in the long term, and to my surprise, she said no. “I think the Decider model is an inconsistent model because the Internet is big and Google isn’t the only one making the decisions,” she told me.

When I pressed Wong and her colleagues about who they thought should make these decisions, they said they would be happiest, of course, if more countries would adopt U.S.-style free-speech protections. Knowing that that is unlikely, they said they would prefer that countries around the world set up accountable bodies that provide direct guidance about what controversial content to restrict. As an example of his preferred alternative, Andrew McLaughlin pointed to Germany, which has established a state agency that gathers the U.R.L.’s of sites hosting Nazi and violent content illegal under German law and gives the list to an industry body, which then passes it on to Google so that it can block the material on its German site. (Whenever Google blocks material there or on its other foreign sites, it indicates in the search results that it has done so.)

It is striking — and revealing — that Wong and her colleagues would prefer to put themselves out of business. But it is worth noting that even if Google’s suggestion were adopted, and governments around the world began to set up national review boards that told Google what content to remove, then those review boards might protect far less free speech than Google’s lawyers have. When I raised this concern, McLaughlin said he hoped that the growing trends to censor speech, at the network level and elsewhere, would be resisted by millions of individual users who would agitate against censorship as they experienced the benefits of free speech.

There’s much to be said for McLaughlin’s optimism about online free-speech activism. Consider recent experiences in Turkey, where a grass-roots “censuring the censors” movement led more than 400 Turkish bloggers to shutter their Web sites in solidarity with mainstream sites that were banned for carrying content that, among other things, insulted Turkey’s founding father. In America, and around the world, the boundaries of free speech have always been shaped more by political activism than by judicial decisions or laws. But what is left out of McLaughlin’s vision is uncertainty about one question: the future ethics and behavior of gatekeepers like Google itself.

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

WU’S FEARS THAT violations of privacy could chill free speech are grounded in recent history: in China in 2004, Yahoo turned over to the Chinese government important account information connected to the e-mail address of Shi Tao, a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned as a result. Yahoo has since come to realize that the best way of resisting subpoenas from repressive governments is to ensure that private data can’t be turned over, even if a government demands it. In some countries, I was told by Michael Samway, who heads Yahoo’s human rights efforts, Yahoo is now able to store communications data and search queries offshore and limits access of local employees, so Yahoo can’t be forced to turn over this information even if it is ordered to do so.

Isolating, or better still, purging data is the best way of protecting privacy and free expression in the Internet age: it’s the only way of guaranteeing that government officials can’t force companies like Google and Yahoo to turn over information that allows individuals to be identified. Google, which refused to discuss its data-purging policies on the record, has raised the suspicion of advocacy groups like Privacy International. Google announced in September that it would anonymize all the I.P. addresses on its server logs after nine months. Until that time, however, it will continue to store a wealth of personal information about our search results and viewing habits — in part to improve its targeted advertising and therefore its profits. As Wu suggests, it would be a catastrophe for privacy and free speech if this information fell into the wrong hands.

“The idea that the user is sovereign has transformed the meaning of free speech,” Wu said enthusiastically about the Internet age. But Google is not just a neutral platform for sovereign users; it is also a company in the advertising and media business. In the future, Wu said, it might slant its search results to favor its own media applications or to bury its competitors. If Google allowed its search results to be biased for economic reasons, it would transform the way we think about Google as a neutral free-speech tool. The only editor is supposed to be a neutral algorithm. But that would make it all the more insidious if the search algorithm were to become biased.

“During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of the operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect their own products against competitors,” says the Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. “That dynamic is tiny compared to what people fear about Google. They have enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.”

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a sometimes evil world — Wong and her colleagues at Google seem to be working impressively to put the company’s long-term commitment to free expression above its short-term financial interests. But they won’t be at Google forever, and if history is any guide, they may eventually be replaced with lawyers who are more concerned about corporate profits than about free expression. “We’re at the dawn of a new technology,” Walker told me, referring not simply to Google but also to the many different ways we now interact online. “And when people try to come up with the best metaphors to describe it, all the metaphors run out. We’ve built this spaceship, but we really don’t know where it will take us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/ma...0google-t.html





Hogan's Litvack Discusses Google/Yahoo
Nate Raymond

Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government.

Sanford "Sandy" Litvack (right) left Hogan & Hartson in September to consult for the department's antitrust division on a possible court challenge to the Web giants' agreement. The companies abandoned the deal in November after the Justice Department informed them it would seek to block the deal.

"We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day," says Litvack, who rejoins Hogan & Hartson today. "We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement."

The agreement, announced in April, would have given Yahoo the ability to use Google to sell advertising along the side of Yahoo pages. (Google's ads would have replaced ads previously sold by Yahoo's own platform.) The proposal came amid Microsoft Corporation's $44.6 billion hostile takeover bid for Yahoo. Microsoft abandoned that deal a month after the proposed Google-Yahoo deal became public, and as the Department of Justice and state regulators began looking into the Google pact for possible antitrust violations.

The never-filed government complaint would have charged that the agreement violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, Litvack tells the Am Law Daily in one of his first interviews since the companies canned the venture. Section 1 bans agreements that restrain trade unreasonably. Section 2 makes it unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade.

"It would have ended up also alleging that Google had a monopoly and that [the advertising pact] would have furthered their monopoly," Litvack says.

The complaint would have sought a preliminary injunction to stop the agreement from going forward. "The fact that we filed a lawsuit would not by itself have stopped them," he says. "We would have had to get an injunction from the court, and we would have sought that."

Five firms were involved in the negotiations, Litvack says. Google was represented in the negotiations by Clearly Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Yahoo turned to Latham & Watkins, Hunton & Williams, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Litvack acknowledges that Microsoft Corporation and other companies lobbied the department to block the agreement, both publicly and and in private meetings. Litvack insists, though, that Microsoft's lobbying had no bearing on his recommended course of action or on the division's ultimate decision. Microsoft was represented by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

The Department of Justice said in a November 5 press release that its investigation showed Google was "by far the largest provider" of Internet search and advertising, as well as Internet search syndication. The agreement with Yahoo, had it gone forward, would have accounted for 90 percent of those markets, the release said. Litvack says by publicizing Google's current market share in the press release the department "may or may not be" trying to put the company on notice for possible future antitrust actions.

"[The department is] making it clear to the parties and to the world that this is how the division viewed these particular aspects of Google's business," Litvack says. That said, Litvack says the change in administration may mean a shift in how the division handles future antitrust matters.

When the case closed November 5, Litvack says "there was some talk about my staying to do some other stuff, but I decided to come back" to Hogan & Hartson. He's happy to be back, he says, but does regret that he won't get to go to court in what would have been the highest-profile antitrust case in years.

"Of course I was looking forward to it," he says. "We felt pretty good about it, we felt pretty confident. Yeah, I would have liked to have done it."
http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawd...s-litvack.html