P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 08-07-09, 06:57 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 11th, '09

Since 2002


































"People in the traditional media world are terrified." – Ken Auletta


"The agreement also calls for all [web radio] pureplays to pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000." – Barry Levine


"I’m not saying the shareholders should take their money and run, but this is the beginning of the end of Microsoft as we knew it." – Jean-Louis Gassée


"I would prefer if we could avoid having this type of service but the current Stasi regimes make it necessary." – Peter Sunde


"Internet piracy appears to become more and more sexy." – Viviane Reding



































July 11th, 2009




'Stasi Regimes' Fuel Demand for Web Anonymity: Pirate Bay Source
David Landes

Internet users looking to remain anonymous when surfing the web are eagerly awaiting the expected weekend launch of Ipredator, a new service from the developers of The Pirate Bay.

Plans for the service, which takes its name from Ipred, the term commonly used to refer to a controversial new anti-file sharing law, were announced in early April shortly after the new law took effect.

Since then, more than 170,000 users have signed up for the chance to join the new virtual private network (VPN) service, which will allow them to keep their identity hidden when surfing the internet.

Ipredator's early popularity took Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde by surprise.

“Those are impressive figures and they scare me,” he told the TT news agency.

“I would prefer if we could avoid having this type of service but the current Stasi regimes make it necessary.”

Around 13,000 people have beta-tested Ipredator, and this weekend the service is expected to go live, allowing those who have already signed up to pay about €5 ($7) per month for the chance to keep their IP-addresses hidden using the service.

In addition to Sunde, Pirate Bay veterans Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij are also involved with the scheme, as are a number of others who have agreed to help with Ipredator.

The service is being offered in cooperation with Trygghetsbolaget, a company based in Lund in southern Sweden, which is responsible for the commercially available Relakks VPN service.

“One of the reasons we want to work with them is that we can’t have our own customer service centre,” said Sunde, who added that the site’s servers will be kept in Sweden to minimize the chance of them being monitored by Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt - FRA), an agency tasked with observing cross border web traffic.
http://www.thelocal.se/20568/20090709/





P2P Collection Costs Man Huge Fine, Suspended Sentence
enigmax

A man who downloaded 12,591 music tracks, 426 movies and 16 full TV-series has been sentenced in France. The police searched the 55 year-old’s house in connection with an unrelated matter and stumbled across his collection. The man was sentenced to 33,000 euros ($46,200) in damages and a 2 month suspended jail sentence.

A 55 year old man from Vannes, France, is counting the cost after a police search on his property turned up his pirate media collection.

Back in 2006 the police, who were conducting a search linked to an unrelated fraud case, stumbled across the man’s sizable pirate media collection which included 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software.

During the April hearing the retired IT expert said in his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use. He also told the court that he believed he had been acting within the law.

Unfortunately for the man, the legal system wasn’t sympathetic. A court in Vannes has just handed him a 2 month suspended jail sentence coupled with 33,000 euro (apprx $46,200) in damages.

Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.

In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.

In January 2007, a court in Nantes also sentenced a file-sharer to two months suspended prison sentence for being caught in possession of 400 downloaded movies.
http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-collecti...ntence-090704/





RIAA Seeks Web Removal of ‘Illegal’ Court Recordings
David Kravets

nessonThe Recording Industry Association of America on Monday demanded a federal judge order Harvard University’s Charles Nesson to remove from the internet “unauthorized and illegal recordings” of pretrial hearings and depositions in a file-sharing lawsuit headed to trial.

“Enough is enough. For the past five months, this court has repeatedly warned defense counsel regarding his insistence on engaging unauthorized and illegal recordings of counsel and proceedings in this case,” RIAA attorney Daniel Cloherty wrote U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Massachusetts. Cloherty urged the court to sanction Nesson, the founder of the 12-year-old Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

“The idea that a court is being asked by them to order educational material to be removed from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society website seems a questionable intrusion both on my liberty and the public interest,” said Nesson in a telephone interview. “I certainly don’t agree that I am violating any law.”

The case concerns former Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum, who Nesson is defending in an RIAA civil lawsuit accusing him of file-sharing copyrighted music. Jury selection is scheduled in three weeks, in what is shaping up to be the RIAA’s second of about 30,000 cases against individuals to reach trial.

The labels, represented by the RIAA, on Monday cited a series of examples in which they accuse Nesson of violating court orders and privacy laws by posting audio to his blog or to the Berkman site. Among them, they include:

* In a 2008 deposition of his client, “a surreptitious recording,” that included “confidential communications between the attorneys involved in the case.”

* A January telephone conversation between the judge and RIAA lawyers “without the prior consent of participants.”

* The July 1 deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey, which Nesson was also simultaneously twittering.

* The July 2-3 deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse, which Nesson is accused of videotaping.

Judge Gertner, in February, issued an order in response to RIAA complaints about unauthorized recordings. “The parties are advised that any such recording without permission of participants, as well as the broadcast of such communications, runs afoul” of state law. On June 16, Gertner said such taping was a “violation of the law.”

Still, Nesson took Monday’s court filing in stride. At one point, he said he had been “unaware” of the Massachusetts law requiring all parties of a communication consent to its recording.

“I have to say I was completely unaware of this Massachusetts law. When I dug into this thing, I am amazed to what it purports to be,” said Nesson, who is defending the Tenenbaum case for free.

He labeled as “gobbledygook” the felony privacy law that is punishable by up to five years in prison.

“That is so outrageously unconstitutional that I would prefer myself to honor the United States Constitution and take my chances that recording a conversation with a judge in a federal case and opposing lawyers is somehow in violation of a Massachusetts statute that makes me a felon,” Nesson said.

Nesson, who has attempted but so far failed to get the upcoming trial and pretrial proceedings webcast, said the lawsuit’s proceedings should be in the public domain.

“I’m opening it up,” he said. “That’s what I founded the Berkman Center to fight for.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/nesson/





EU Plans Overhaul Of Internet Download Rules
Marcin Grajewski

The European Union needs new rules for Internet downloads that would make it easier for people to access music and films without resorting to piracy, the bloc's telecoms chief said.

Mapping out priorities of the EU's executive arm for the next five years, EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding said it should consider new laws that would reconcile the interests of intellectual property owners and Internet surfers.

"It will therefore be my key priority to work... on a simple, consumer friendly legal framework for accessing digital content in Europe's single market, while ensuring at the same time fair remuneration of creators," she told a seminar on Thursday (July 9).

Current laws are ill-devised, she said, because they appear to force people, especially the young generation, to become Internet pirates, or download content illegally.

"Internet piracy appears to become more and more sexy, in particular for the digital natives," she said, quoting a survey that showed that 60% of people aged 16-24 downloaded audiovisual contented in the past months without paying.

"Growing Internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should a wake-up call for policy makers," she told the seminar, organized by the Lisbon Council thinktank.

Reding is expected to seek the telecoms portfolio again in the next Commission after the five-year term of the current one ends late in 2009.

She said her other priority was to speed up the digitalization of books, with 90% of books in European libraries no longer commercially available.

The Commission should also seek to encourage payments with the use of mobile telephones by proposing common rules for them.

"The lack of common EU-wide standards and rules for 'm-cash' leaves the great potential of 'm-commerce' and the mobile web unexploited," she said.

The Commission will work to popularize video-conferencing to cut the number of business trips, which would lower emissions of gases responsible for global warming.

"If businesses in Europe were to replace only 20% of all business trips with video conferencing, we could save more than 22 million tonnes of C02 per year," she said.

She also urged European Union countries to accelerate the switchover from analog to digital television to free up airwaves for other applications such as mobile broadband.

"I call on EU governments not to wait until 2012, the deadline for the switchover," she said. "They should bring these benefits to citizens now."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...be4a72cdaf2199





Judge Rules P2P Legal, Sites To Be Presumed Innocent
enigmax

After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a “3-strikes” regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn’t breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise.

The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. Most recently the ‘Coalition of Creators and Content Industries’ - which includes the likes of Promusicae and SGAE - had demanded a “3-strikes” regime for illicit file-sharers, but after they failed to provide viable and attractive authorized alternatives, ISPs lost patience and called off government-mandated talks.

The Coalition quickly backtracked, suggesting they would accept some type of throttling instead, but that fell largely on deaf ears too. Then new Coalition president Aldo Olcese said that the solution would be to go after the country’s 200 torrent sites instead, but this could also prove problematic. Time and again Spanish courts have ruled that sites that link to infringing content are not illegal, providing profits aren’t made directly from any infringement.

But of course, wealthy operations like SGAE aren’t put off by such rulings and instead go after eDonkey and BitTorrent sites privately, often demanding that they are forced to close via injunction in advance of a full court hearing to assess their legality.

One such case involves the eD2K link site elrincondejesus.com. On May 13th the site received a complaint from none other than every Spanish sharing site’s nemesis, SGAE. Alleging Elrincondejesus “abused” its members copyrights, the site’s owner was summoned to appear in court on June 5th.

At this hearing various things would be discussed, but SGAE hoped to get an early decision to suspend the operations of Elrincondejesus immediately, in advance of the full hearing which would happen at a later date.

On his site, the owner commented: “As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now). I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

There would be a month long wait for the court’s decision but today it came.

The judge dismissed SGAE’s request for an immediate shutdown of Elrincondejesus.

“P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law,” said Raul N. García Orejudo, a judge in Barcelona. Although some activities are barred, those do not concern P2P he said, noting that there has to be a presumption of innocence.

Speaking with Elmundo.es, attorney Carlos Almeida-Sanchez said: “This is the first time a court clearly states that P2P itself does not violate any rights.”

On possible infringements of the Intellectual Property Act, the court said:

“Adding a work or video recording to Emule, that has previously been converted to a compatible computer file, is not an act of reproduction,” adding that “Copying is not a profitable use, or collective use [such as broadcasting in a store], as these two terms refer to the subsequent use made of the work once downloaded, after the copy.”

Additionally, the Intellectual Property Act describes distribution as needing something tangible, as in distribution via a website for example, which in this case (as it’s P2P) does not exist.

However, the court order recognizes the possibility that public distribution may have occurred but this is difficult to prove, since any sharing could’ve taken place with just one person.

The full trial will take place at a later date.
http://torrentfreak.com/judge-rules-...nocent-090707/





ISPs Should Prove Need to Control Web Traffic, CRTC Hears

Consumer group tells commissioners it is their responsibility to ensure Internet access is fair an equal
Julian Beltrame

The federal regular has an obligation to Canadians to ensure efforts by Internet providers don't unjustly discriminate against certain classes of users when they manage their networks, consumer groups said Monday.

In a presentation that drew a line in the sand between end users and the big Internet service providers, the Consumers' Association of Canada, representing several public interest groups, told CRTC commissioners it was their responsibility to ensure access is fair and equal.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission called the week of hearings to determine under what conditions providers such as Bell, Rogers Communications, Telus and Quebecor can control the flow of traffic on their networks.

The issue not only involves the speed on the Internet, but also raises concerns about anti-competitive practices and privacy, since certain management practices allows providers to discern the content being shared by users.

NDP digital affairs spokesman Charlie Angus said the hearings were critical because of the Internet's importance in the new economy.

“It sets a really bad signal if it's the telcoms that get to decide what's in the fast lane and what's in the slow lane,” Mr. Angus said.

Providers say they need to be able to “manage the flow of traffic, particularly during peak hours, in order that the relative few users that require a lot of bandwidth can't clog up the pipeline and slow traffic for everyone else.”

The one-week hearings began with testimony by two network managing firms that argued that providers need to ensure the vast majority of users are not disadvantaged by the few.

“An unmanaged network is not neutral,” said Don Bowman, chief technology officer with Sandvine Inc., a Waterloo, Ont. network management firm.

“Certain bandwidth-hungry applications introduce delays into the network that prejudice” others.

But John Lawford, representing the consumers association and several public interest groups, questioned whether providers are using high-bandwidth peer-to-peer file sharing as a scapegoat for their failure to expand networks to meet demand.

Peer-to-peer is used to distribute large files, including software, academic files, movies, television programs and music, from computer to computer over the Internet.

Mr. Lawford said one service provider estimated peer-to-peer at about 3 per cent of network traffic, although it is growing.

“If 3 per cent is causing a problem, how finely tuned is your network?” Mr. Lawford asked. “Are we getting in Canada a good enough Internet, and the answer is no.”

Mr. Lawford said he is not opposed to all network traffic management, but providers must first justify why it is necessary and receive permission from the CRTC.

And he said some forms of control, such as deep packet inspection (DPI) that allows providers to detect the types of content on the Internet, is a violation of privacy laws and open to abuse. He said providers can measure the traffic without resorting to such intrusive means.

The hearings continue until next Monday.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1208289/





Zip.ca Chief Airs His Concerns to the CRTC
Matt Hartley

Rob Hall isn’t afraid to place his online video service Zip.ca in direct competition with Canada’s largest cable and telecommunications companies. All he wants is a level playing field.

But Mr. Hall, chief executive of Ottawa’s Momentous.ca Corp., Zip.ca’s parent company, worries that the Web traffic-management habits of Canada’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) could make such a fair fight impossible.

That’s because ISPs such as Bell Canada Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. employ so-called traffic-management or "throttling" technologies that sniff out and slow down certain forms of Internet data -- usually peer-to-peer applications used to transfer large files such as movies -- that the companies say congest their networks.

Now, Mr. Hall and other online media companies worry ISPs may use their technology to slow down traffic coming from Zip.ca or a VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) provider, for example, while placing their own online media and VoIP services in the digital fast lane to gain a competitive advantage.

"We have huge concerns," Mr. Hall said in an interview. "Are they allowed to throttle us to the point where we can’t stream a video, and prefer their own traffic? We worry that they will use their market power to either hurt our offering in favour of their own or somehow choke us off in favour of their own."

Tuesday, Mr. Hall brought his concerns before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in Gatineau, Que., on the second day of the regulator’s hearings into the traffic-management practices of Canadian ISPs.

"Any rules the CRTC puts on this need to be fair and apply to everybody equally," he said.

Zip.ca, which already operates a mail-order DVD rental business, recently announced plans to launch a digital movie download service in conjunction with California-based Sonic Solutions.

There is concern in the online community that the technology ISPs use to detect peer-to-peer traffic -- a process known as deep-packet inspection -- may be used to covertly look into what content online services such as Zip.ca are distributing to their customers.

Rogers, which is planning to roll out its own online on-demand video service this year, does not favour its own video content when it manages online traffic, said Ken Engelhart, the company’s vice-president of regulatory.

"Our only goal in network management is to ensure the fastest possible Internet speeds for all our customers," he said. "We ignore the origin and destination of the content."

A spokeswoman for Bell said the telecom giant offers a variety of online video services, but said that only peer-to-peer traffic that uses up a "large amount of bandwidth is slowed down, not stopped and only during peak hours."

During Tuesday’s hearings, Jacob Glick, Canada privacy counsel for Google Inc., suggested the CRTC adopt a three-part test ISPs would need to pass before being allowed to throttle Web traffic. The test would allow Web providers to manage the congestion on their networks without harming online innovation, he said, speaking on behalf of the Open Internet Coalition, a consortium of consumer groups and technology companies that includes Google, Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc.

The hearings continue Wednesday and are set to wrap up on Monday.
http://www.vancouversun.com/business...429/story.html





Competition Could Clear Internet Congestion: Small ISPs

Researchers argue strict guidelines needed to stop 'discrimination'
CBC News

How internet service providers manipulate online traffic speeds wouldn't be an issue if there were more competitors offering customers different service options, a group representing smaller ISPs argued Thursday.

"When you increase competition in the market, the whole [internet traffic management], net neutrality debate will go away," said Christian Tacit, counsel for the Canadian Association of Internet Providers. "I really do think this will take care of itself, as will the congestion issues."

He was speaking during the fourth day of hearings in Gatineau, Que., by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which is developing guidelines for internet service providers on how they should manage internet traffic, especially at times of congestion.

In particular, the CRTC is trying to determine whether practices such as throttling — selectively slowing down certain applications such as peer-to-peer file transfers — should be allowed.

On Thursday, it heard from CAIP as well as two individual ISPs, Execulink and Primus, who argued that they should be allowed to apply a full range of traffic management practices to their retail customers, as those practices would allow different competitors to distinguish themselves from one another and provide more choice for the consumer in a competitive environment.

For example, Primus gives priority to time-sensitive applications such as video and voice services at specific times and network locations where congestion is detected on its network, said Matt Stein, vice president of network services for the ISP. That contrasts with the strategy applied by Bell, which throttles peer-to-peer traffic during set hours of the day that it deems peak traffic periods, he said.

However, Tacit said that to date, competition has been limited. CAIP noted that based on CRTC numbers, dominant carriers account for 95.5 per cent of the revenues from residential internet subscribers in 2007.

Tacit blamed the lack of competition for internet congestion. In a "duopolistic" environment, he said, Bell and Rogers can make more money by constraining supply.

He said there isn't true competition in the marketplace, because many smaller ISPs buy their network access wholesale from Bell, which:

* Applies its own traffic management — including throttling P2P applications — to those ISPs' retail customers alongside its own retail customers.
* Provides access to a pooled network whose infrastructure is owned by Bell so the ISPs cannot do their own network upgrades to boost capacity.

Tom Copeland, chairman of CAIP, said that limits the extent to which smaller ISPs can distinguish themselves, and the CRTC should create new rules to address those problems and boost competition.

The smaller ISPs argued that wholesalers such as Bell should not be allowed to impose their traffic management practices on other ISPs customers, because that interferes with their responsibilities and ability to compete.

"To manage a network requires the ability to diagnose problems and modify configurations. Much of this ability can be lost when the wholesaler (and competitor) technically modifies the traffic," Keith Stevens, chairman of Execulink Telecom, told the CRTC. "It's the duty and right of every ISP to manage their network."
Competition not enough: CIPPIC

Meanwhile, experts brought in by public interest advocates were skeptical that retail competition would be enough to protect internet users and companies that rely on the internet from practices that they allege are discriminatory.

Strict rules are needed to bar the targeting of practices such as throttling at particular applications or protocols except under very special circumstances, they told the CRTC, speaking on behalf of the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Research Centre (CIPPIC) and the Campaign for Democratic Media.

Competition is necessary, said David Fewer, acting director of CIPPIC, "but it's not sufficient to address the problem."

Andrew Odlyzko, a researcher who heads an internet traffic study at the University of Minnesota, told CBC News that he knows of cases in the past where increased competition led to increased discrimination.

David Reed, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, said he is concerned that without strict rules, people or companies that develop new internet tools or applications will have to make deals with individual ISPs in order to get started, and that could be a barrier to innovation.

Steve Anderson, co-founder of the Campaign for Democratic Media and the Save our Net Coalition, said more competition will certainly help, but is something that could take years to happen.

"We need rules now," he added.

The hearings continue until July 13.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...allstream.html





Justice Deptartment Eyeing Telecom Probe: Report

The U.S. Justice Department has begun looking at big telecom companies such as AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications to try to determine if they have abused their market power, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Monday.

The journal, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the Antitrust Division's review was in its very early stages and was not yet a formal probe of any specific company.

The report said that a probe could concern exclusive agreements between phone companies and handset makers or whether phone operators are "unduly restricting" services third parties companies can offer on their network.

The Department of Justice declined comment and the country's biggest operators, AT&T and Verizon, said they had not been given notice of any formal probe.

Lawmakers have recently raised questions about whether large wireless carriers were hurting smaller rivals by entering into exclusive agreements with the makers of popular phones. Deals like AT&T's pact with Apple Inc for exclusive rights to U.S. iPhone sales are at the center of some lawmaker concerns.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said he was not aware of any formal probe by the Department of Justice but declined comment on any informal proceedings. Siegel defended the practice of exclusive agreements between carriers and phone makers, saying they spurred competition and development of new features.

Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said that his company, which is the biggest U.S. mobile service, had no notice from the Justice Department about any probe into handset exclusivity. Verizon Wireless is a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc.

The Justice Department's top antitrust official Christine Varney had said in May that the DoJ would be "aggressively pursuing" companies that abuse their power to crush competition.

Consumer groups said on Monday that they were hopeful that Varney's comment and the latest report were positive signs the government was looking at their concerns.

"There are definitely some things in the marketplace that we believe as consumer advocates should trigger scrutiny from the anti-trust authorities," said Ben Scott, policy director for consumer advocacy group Free Press referring to handset deals and the blocking of certain applications from phones.

It has been a long standing practice for carriers to forge exclusive deals with phone makers giving them a head start in luring customers with a particularly attractive handset.

The iPhone has made this trend a bone of contention among consumers because of the devices' widespread popularity and the fact that AT&T has been the sole U.S. provider selling it since 2007. Exclusivity deals often end after about a year.

However, network operators argue that consumers could end up losing out if they were unable to forge exclusive agreements with phone makers. Such deals give carriers incentives to shoulder a hefty part of the price of a cellphone in exchange for getting consumers to sign on to a longer term contract.

John Taylor, a spokesman for Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service which has an exclusive agreement to sell Palm Inc's high-profile Pre phone, declined comment on the reported probe.

But he also defended exclusive handset agreements as pro-competitive. "We think that without these exclusivity arrangements carriers are less likely to risk the investment necessary to develop and promote devices like these," he said.

The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, plans to review the deals.

According to a copy of the written responses to questions from Senator John Kerry obtained by Reuters in mid-June, Genachowski said he would "promote competition and consumer choice." Senator Kerry encouraged the idea of a review.

"This is the kind of healthy oversight we want to see." Kerry said in an emailed statement. "As the future of communication continues to move out of the ground and into the airwaves it is important that we ensure the wireless market remains competitive and consumers are protected."

Other lawmakers have also raised questions about the pricing of text messages.

"The federal government seems to be taking these complaints seriously and looking for a way to give consumers relief," said Joel Kelsey policy analyst for Consumers Union advocacy group.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington and Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5654LK20090707





West Virginia Sues Comcast Over Cable Box Tying

The attorney general of West Virginia has filed suit against Comcast, alleging that subscribers need a company-provided cable box to receive premium services, which constitutes illegal bundling.
John Timmer

For many cable TV customers, their service is indistinguishable from the cable box that provides it. Although it is possible to purchase this hardware from third parties, most service providers push their customers into renting the box from them, which ensures an additional revenue stream that easily surpasses the volume pricing they pay for it. Not surprisingly, a number of consumers have objected to this practice, filing lawsuits against the cable companies. But efforts to divorce the service from its receiver may have gotten a big boost last week when the state of West Virginia filed a similar suit, alleging it's an illegal tying of services.

The suit was filed last week in the Circuit Court of Marshall County by the state attorney general. Although it specifically targets Comcast, the details of the suit could clearly apply to just about any cable TV service provider. Although Comcast allows the use of CableCard hardware or third-party devices for some of its packages, premium service apparently requires the rental of Comcast-provided hardware. The AG alleges that these practices run counter to both state antitrust law and consumer protection legislation.

Although there are clearly some cases where renting cable hardware makes more sense than purchasing, the average cable box quietly goes about its business for years after the rental fees add up to more than the hardware was worth.

The practice at issue here is the requirement for the use of Comcast hardware in order to receive some of its premium services. A spokesperson from Comcast declined to comment on this case in particular, but told Ars that her company does not view the cost of the hardware as a separate charge from the fee for the premium service. From that perspective, there's nothing bundled here, so there can't be any illegal tying.

More generally, the spokesperson noted that Comcast is complying with the FCC's order and is deploying boxes that rely on the CableCard standard, and that tens of thousands of its customers are already accessing its services through TiVo boxes and other third-party hardware.

Regardless of Comcast's policy, the history of lawsuits here suggests that the FCC's promotion of the CableCard standard hasn't left consumers satisfied with their ability to use the hardware of their choice to receive cable service (it can be difficult even to locate third-party cable boxes, for one thing). So far, however, those suits haven't done much to simplify the policies and market approaches, which can vary among service providers and geographic regions. That's why the entry of a governmental entity may represent a significant shift. The West Virginia AG could establish a statewide precedent that will apply to all service providers.

At publication time, the West Virginia attorney general's office had not responded to our request for comment.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/r...-box-tying.ars





Connecticut AG: Cablevision, MSNBC Agreement Is Anti-Competitive
Lynn Doan

Conn. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has asked the Federal Communications Commission today to investigate an agreement between Cablevision and MSNBC TV that gives the cable provider exclusive rights to air the channel in its service areas.

Blumenthal described the agreement as "anticompetitive" Thursday, saying it prevents cable competitors, like AT&T's U-verse, from carrying MSNBC in Cablevision's service areas, which include the Norwalk, Bridgeport and Torrington areas. The partnership could also violate a federal law that prohibits cable companies from coercing program providers into such agreements, he said.

Cablevision said in a statement Thursday that such agreements are common in the industry and described its pact with MSNBC as "perfectly appropriate and legal."

AT&T Connecticut said in a statement Thursday that it appreciated Blumenthal's "desire for a level playing field."
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-b...,4470414.story





$25 grand minimums

Music Labels Reach Royalty Deal With Online Stations
Claire Cain Miller

Internet radio, once on its death bed, may survive after all.

On Tuesday, after a two-year battle, record labels and online radio stations agreed on new royalty rates for streaming music online. Many of the music sites had argued that the old rates were so high they were being forced out of business.

“This is definitely the agreement that we’ve been waiting for,” said Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, one of the most popular Internet radio sites.

The conflict began in March 2007, when the federal Copyright Royalty Board ruled that all so-called webcasters needed to pay a fee, set to increase to 0.19 cent a song next year, each time they streamed a song. Webcasters said the fees would eat up most of their revenue, which mostly comes from online advertising.

The new agreement treats sites differently depending on their size and business model. It applies to the period from 2006 through 2015 for big sites and through 2014 for small sites. The sites in question often provide customized streams of music, but listeners do not get to directly choose which songs they hear, and they are not permitted to store the music on their computers.

Webcasters with significant advertising revenue, like Pandora or AOL Radio, will pay the greater of 25 percent of revenue or a fee per song, starting at .08 cent for songs streamed in 2006 and increasing to .14 cent in 2015.

Webcasters also agreed to give more detailed information about the songs they play and how many people listen to them to SoundExchange, the nonprofit organization that collects and distributes digital royalties on behalf of artists and labels. They must also retain records of activity on their Web servers for four years.

Small sites with less than $1.25 million in revenue will pay 12 to 14 percent of it for the right to stream music.

In a statement, John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange, said that the original, disputed rates had been “appropriate and fair,” but he called the agreement “an experimental approach” that will give “webcasters the opportunity to flesh out various business models and the creators of music the opportunity to share in the success their recordings generate.”

Under an agreement reached in January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting made a single royalty payment of $1.85 million that covers the online streams of the nation’s public radio stations through 2010. Simulcasters — FM and AM radio stations that also stream music over the Web — on agreed Feb. 16 to pay 0.15 cent a song this year, increasing each year to reach 0.25 cent in 2015.

Many of the streaming music sites had argued that all sites should pay a percentage of revenue rather than a per-song fee. They noted that satellite radio stations pay a cut of their revenue, while broadcast stations pay nothing to artists and labels.

Under the new agreement, though, almost all Internet radio stations will pay the new, lower per-song fee, because that will be more than 25 percent of revenue. Webcasters make money from selling ads on their Web sites and in their music streams, as well as from subscriptions and affiliate fees they earn when a listener clicks to buy a song they hear from a digital music store.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to look at this and say, ‘I’m really happy, I got everything I want,’ ” Mr. Westergren said, but he added that he was relieved that the new per-song fee was low enough that Pandora and similar sites would be able to survive.

“Under the circumstances, my clients are satisfied with this deal,” said David D. Oxenford, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine in Washington, who represents a group of small Internet radio stations. “It’s better than the alternative that was on the table.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/te...t/08radio.html





Experimental Fees Settle Royalty War for Internet Radio
Barry Levine

SoundExchange has announced "innovative, experimental new terms" to settle the war between Internet radio stations and music rights holders. It has taken more than two years for SoundExchange to work out an agreement after a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2007. Pandora founder Tim Westergren proclaimed, "The royalty crisis is over!"

The war between Internet radio stations and music rights holders has reached a settlement, at least for a few years. On Tuesday, SoundExchange, which represents many rights holders, announced "innovative, experimental new terms" for "pureplay" webcasters.

Pureplay webcasters are those whose primary business is streaming music and other sound recordings.

More Than Two Years

The issue has been the amount of royalties owed by webcasters for streaming music and other protected sound recordings, and it was propelled to a war footing following a decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in 2007 that set new rates for Internet radio. Webcasters immediately protested the new rates, saying the costs would force many of them out of business.

The agreement gives these webcasters options as to how they will pay, including what SoundExchange described as a "discount" on per-stream rates, in exchange for revenue sharing for most services and more rigorous reporting requirements.

According to the new agreement, pureplay webcasters who sign this agreement will pay rights holders through SoundExchange a minimum percentage of all their U.S. revenues, up to 25 percent, as well as a minimum royalty.

John Simson, SoundExchange's executive director, said the agreement took more than two years, and it shows "both sides can address the business concerns of the webcasters while giving artists and copyright holders the potential to share in the revenue growth of webcasters."

'Royalty Crisis is Over'

The agreement sets up three rate classes -- large pureplay webcasters, small pureplays (up to $1.25 million in total revenues), and pureplays that offer "bundled, syndicated or subscription services."

Larger pureplays will pay the greater of either a per-performance rate or 25 percent of total revenue, and will provide more extensive reporting of their use of sound recordings. Small pureplays can pay the greater of a percentage of revenue or a percentage of expenses, and can avoid the comprehensive playlist reporting in certain cases in exchange for an additional "proxy fee." The agreement for small pureplays will last through 2014, and for others through 2015.

Bundled services will pay per-performances fees, as set by an agreement earlier this year between SoundExchange and the National Association of Broadcasters. The agreement also calls for all pureplays to pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000, which can later be applied to royalties.

Sonal Ghandi, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, called the new agreement "a good compromise on both sides." She said both the webcasters and SoundExchange seem to have arrived at a middle ground.

"This settles it," she said, at least for the next few years.

On his company's blog, pureplay webcaster and Pandora founder Tim Westergren wrote that he has been waiting for more than two years for the moment "when I could finally write these words: The royalty crisis is over!"

Over-the-air radio stations that also offer their programming on the Net are covered by an agreement that SoundExchange concluded earlier this year with the National Association of Broadcasters, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and others.
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtm...d=020001U6AVC0





Pandora to Limit Listeners to 40 Hours of Music Per Month! Damnit!!!
Greenimp

Hi, it’s Tim -

I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack.

I’m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining.

First, I want to let you know that we’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful.

While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might.

We hate the idea of capping anyone's usage, so we've been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We've come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you:

Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn't a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You'll be able to keep listening as much as you'd like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable - the same price as a single song download.

Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one. If neither of these options works for you, I hope you'll keep listening to the free version - 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you're really careful about hitting pause when you’re not listening. We’ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and we’ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours you’ve already used each month.

We’ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the "per song per listener" royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can't ignore...but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come.

Please don't hesitate to email me back with your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Tim Founder

This is a one-time account message.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/c...ours_of_music/





Google Music Service Helps Curb Baidu's Lead In China Market

Google's music service in China, which lets users download Michael Jackson, U2 and Beyoncé songs for free, may have helped increase its share of the world's biggest Internet market, research company IResearch said.

The service, which Google introduced at the end of March, had 22.4 million visits in April, according to a report IResearch posted on its Web site Thursday. Baidu.com's share of the Chinese search market in the first quarter was more than triple that of Google's, the Shanghai-based researcher estimates.

Google began offering downloads of licensed music with EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Sony, Universal Music Group and other record companies to compete against Baidu, which offers a search service that helps users find music on nonaffiliated third-party Web sites.

More than 99 percent of online music in China is pirated, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. China had more than 316 million Internet users at the end of March, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Bertelsmann and K.K.R. Plan Venture to Sell Music Rights
Carter Dougherty

Less than a year after Bertelsmann, the German media giant, exited the music business, it is taking a novel approach to get back in.

The company said Wednesday that it would form a joint venture with the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to license and administer music rights.

The new company will combine Bertelsmann’s existing BMG Rights Management unit with the financial muscle of K.K.R., which will own 51 percent of the joint venture, with Bertelsmann holding the rest.

And while BMG’s indirect competitors will be the music publishing titans of the world, like EMI, Warner Music, Universal and Sony — companies that market the massive catalogs they own — BMG is counting on signing artists who are seeking someone who will administer their intellectual property without actually owning it.

“Our financial strength combined with BMG’s sector expertise will create a unique platform for building up a global music-rights management business,” Johannes P. Huth, the European head of K.K.R., said in a statement.

In August, Bertelsmann sold its stake in the music company SonyBMG to Sony for $900 million. As part of the deal, it retained the rights to 200 European artists, who, with 100 signed since October, form the core of BMG Rights Management, which is based in Berlin.

Founded last October, BMG Rights Management is a relatively new business that acts as an agent for artists — songwriters and performers — whose intellectual property can be licensed for uses outside of traditional recording. For example, the music can be broadcast through various media or used in movie productions.

Its stable of artists includes Toby Gad, a German songwriter living in New York who has worked with artists including Beyoncé and Hannah Montana, and 2Raumwohnung, a popular German group.

In the statement Wednesday, Bertelsmann said the new partners would try to create “a major music rights management business over the medium term through organic growth and acquisitions.”

K.K.R. will put $50 million up front into the new company, drawing on its European investment funds, and another $200 million over five years as investment opportunities arise, according to Philipp Freise, a director of K.K.R. in Europe and member of its global media team.

“We both want to broaden BMG’s global reach faster than originally anticipated,” Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s chief financial officer, said.

“In this way we will be able to actively participate in the expected market consolidation.”

Hartwig Masuch, BMG’s chief executive and a veteran of its music publishing business, will keep that title in the new company.

BMG has offices in six European countries, including Germany, Britain and Italy, and is now turning its gaze across the Atlantic to begin signing artists there. “With this joint venture, the main point now is to get active in the United States,” said Tobias Riepe, a Bertelsmann spokesman.

Though its first priority is acquiring a stable of artists, another possibility for expansion would be for BMG to acquire control of music catalogs in its own right from other owners, or artists who sell them, Mr. Riepe said.

The music world, for example, is now abuzz with speculation about what will happen to the catalogs controlled by heirs of Michael Jackson. The recently deceased pop superstar had his own music catalog, and a 50 percent interest in the Sony/ATV collection, which includes songs from The Beatles — assets the family could try to sell.

There is much speculation that EMI, the British music giant controlled by Terra Firma, a private equity firm, could sell some of its music rights to ease its financial difficulties.

Bertelsmann is heavily indebted — to the amount of 6.7 billion euros ($9.4 billion) — as a result of the decision by its controlling family, the Mohns, to buy out Albert Frère, a major shareholder, in 2006. Though it has been able to refinance its debts smoothly despite the financial crisis, it is searching for ways to raise revenues without major capital investments, leading it to a focus on services like BMG, rather traditional publishing.

Bertelsmann owns Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, and many analysts have conjectured that the company would use the punishing economic environment to snap up weaker rivals, particularly in the United States. But its executives appear unwilling to risk big expenses to build out its competitive position.

Instead, it will use other people’s money to strengthen Bertelsmann’s existing business.

“With access to meaningful investment capital, we expect the partnership with K.K.R. to contribute significantly to accelerating the development of the business,” said Mr. Rabe, who will be chairman of the venture. “We complement each other perfectly for this venture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/bu...l/09music.html





Radiohead Manager Founds New Label With Profit-Sharing Twist
Ani Vrabel

Radiohead created quite a stir with its fill-in-the-blank, pay-what-you-want price tag on In Rainbows. Now the band's manager, Brian Message, has launched a new record label, Polyphonic, which promises to feature similarly creative distributions.

The label is a result of a collaboration of Message's company, ATC Music, MAMA Group and management firm Nettwerk, and aims to provide inventive methods of release for both new and established artists to keep them from turning to more traditional labels. Polyphonic hopes to provide artists with 50 percent of their profits, and their shares will increase as music's success does.

"We will do whatever is most effective to get an artist noticed," said Adam Driscoll, the co-CEO of MAMA Group, which provided most of the initial $20 million funding for the project. "Giving an album away for free may get one million people listening to a new artist."

There is currently no word on what artists will be signed to Polyphonic.
http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...rofit-sha.html





Risk Pays Off For Colchester Native And Musician Jonathan Coulton
Eric R. Danton

Shortly before the birth of his daughter in 2005, Jonathan Coulton did the responsible thing and quit his job at a software company to take another shot at rock stardom.

Coulton, 38, a Colchester, Conn. native, had deferred that particular dream nine years earlier, when his attempts at living what he calls "a bohemian life" as a singer and songwriter (and, inevitably, barista) were making it difficult to pay his rent in New York.

"It was too much hard work, and I wasn't really working that hard at it," Coulton says by phone from home in Brooklyn.

This time, though, with a baby on the way, he was serious.

"It felt like it was important to set an example to her," says Coulton, who graduated from Bacon Academy in 1989 and Yale in 1993. "You start thinking a lot about how they're going to learn from you how to be a person, and I didn't want her to watch me toiling away at this software job and every 8 months saying, 'I should really quit this job.' That's not a good lesson to teach somebody. I felt it would be a lot better if I were at least a person who had taken a chance."

His chance paid off, thanks to a novel approach that took advantage of the Internet just as it was becoming a dominant source for music: starting in September 2005, Coulton posted a new song on his website every week for a year. The fifth such tune was a straight-faced acoustic cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot's booty jam "Baby Got Back."

"I think I might have had a very different journey if that had been song No. 51," Coulton says. "But I got lucky and early on, that attracted some attention, and that began that process of letting the Internet know who I was."

The Internet soon spilled into live audiences, which led in due course to "Best. Concert. Ever.," a live album and DVD that Coulton released last week on What Are Records? Recorded at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in February 2008, the show includes Coulton's wry takes on pop- and geek-culture with such songs as "Ikea," " Tom Cruise Crazy" and "Code Monkey."

A live album, though, seems like an outdated concept for a musician who established himself and his fan base online. So what gives? The truth is, Coulton says, it was a challenge that was wholly different from writing and recording songs in his apartment.
"The live show is a new thing for me," he says. "It's all new, but the live show was something that I really had to learn how to do. I had never had an audience before 2005, and when I realized there were enough people out there to support a habit of going out there and selling tickets and performing, I had to learn to play some of these songs on guitar."

The performance aspect was only a small part of going on tour.

"I had to learn to write a set list, to talk to the audience, how to actually get booked to play a live show," he says. "How many T-shirts do you bring? How do you get there? How do you find a cheap motel to stay in? I wrapped up everything I learned about playing a live show into this one thing."

Coulton is still new enough at performing that he hasn't played yet in Connecticut, a fact he is keen to change.

"It is my intention to actually play Toad's Place sometime this year," he says. "It's a very thrilling prospect to me to return, as it were, to the scene of the crime, just a couple hundred feet from where I lived when I was in college. I saw so many bands at Toad's, it's bizarre to even consider playing there."
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,3479658.story





Woodstock Concert's Undercover Lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 Years After Summer of Love
Jim Farber


Love in 1969: Nick and Bobbi Ercoline were immortalized on the cover of the original
'Woodstock' album in 1970, as well as on the movie poster.


Of all the images snapped during the original Woodstock weekend, one stands above all: a young couple huddled together in a blanket, standing alone in a sea of people lying on wet ground.

It's an enduring image of love, care and protection that earned iconic status through its placement on the cover of the original "Woodstock" album in 1970, as well as on the movie poster.

Forty years later, the couple in the photo - Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both 60 - remain together. They married two summers after the fabled weekend, and they still live less than an hour's drive from the original concert site of Bethel, N.Y., and within spitting distance of where they both grew up.

Nick Ercoline works for the Orange County, N.Y., Department of Housing. Bobbi is a resident nurse at the elementary school in their hometown of Pine Bush.

The 40th anniversary of the ultimate hippie be-in, this Aug. 15-17, has thrown the Ercolines into the spotlight again - something they never expected or sought.

They say they remember nothing of the original shot, taken by Burk Uzzle. "We weren't striking a pose," Nick says. "We were as surprised as everybody to see that photo on the album cover."

They discovered it while at a friend's house listening to the album and passing around the gatefold jacket. First, Nick recognized the famous yellow butterfly staff in the left corner. "It belonged to this guy Herbie," Nick says. "We latched on to him that day because he was having a very bad experience. He was tripping pretty heavily and he had lost his friends. After I saw that staff I said, 'Hey that's our blanket.' Then I said, 'Hey, that's us.'"

Bobbi, then 20, wasn't overly impressed. "Woodstock was over and done with at that time," she says. "It didn't seem like a big deal. The only thing was that then I had to tell my mother I had gone. She didn't know. But by then, she didn't mind."

The two had arrived in the middle of the weekend, a rare feat given that all main roads were closed by then. "We were local kids, so we knew the back roads," Nick says. "About 5 miles away we abandoned this big white 1965 Chevrolet Impala station wagon."

The two didn't realize the impact their photo had until Woodstock's 20th anniversary, when the world's media began seeking them out. In fact, their memories of the original event have more to do with the scene than the music, because they were too far away to hear or see much.

"I remember the rain, the lack of toilets and the body odor," Bobbi says.

"I also remember an orange haze from the glowing lights of the stage. It was everywhere, lighting up the sky."

The pair had met only three months earlier, over Memorial Day weekend, at the bar where Nick worked. "This waiter brought this beautiful blond in one day and said, 'This is my girlfriend; keep an eye on her,'" Nick explains. "Every night she stood in front of me and we got friendlier and friendlier. Then one weekend he made the mistake of leaving her home while he went to the shore with the guys and he never told her. That was the end of that. And the beginning of this."

Despite all the time gone by, Nick says they still get recognized. "We were in Germany, and right when we walked into the hotel they knew who we were."

As to why their photo was chosen, Nick has a theory. "It's peaceful, which is what the event was about," he says. "And it's an honest representation of a generation. When we look at that photo I don't see Bobbi and me. I see our generation."
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...r_lovers_.html





That Casey Kasem Show Was More Than Just Reaching for Stars
Mike Hale

The Casey Kasem we know was a creation of the baby boom: “American Top 40,” his signature show, went on the air in 1970, and Mr. Kasem had his biggest impact in the ’70s and early ’80s, counting down hits by Grand Funk Railroad and the Bay City Rollers. The ratings were sagging when Mr. Kasem first left the show in 1988 (he would return a decade later), and when he announced his sudden retirement this weekend from the radio franchise he helped create, it felt like the end of an era that had actually ended 10 or 20 years ago.

The funny thing was, Casey Kasem sounded old-fashioned from the start. In the mid-’70s, when I was an “American Top 40” devotee, you already could be mocked for listening to him. His this-land-is-your-land patriotism and weekly shout-outs to Armed Forces Radio were out of tune with the times; his practiced sincerity and his adherence to the Billboard pop charts were uncool; and couldn’t he have made up a better name? (That last part, of course, was unfair to the man born Kemal Amin Kasem.)

After Mr. Kasem’s departure from the countdown business, it would be easy to say that he was always comfort food, that his popularity was based on nostalgia and an appeal to Middle -American values.

That might have been true in recent years. But back in the day — before the Internet, even before “Entertainment Tonight” — there were better reasons to listen to Casey Kasem. For one thing: as bizarre as it now seems, millions of people didn’t know what the No. 1 song was each week until they heard that drumroll on “American Top 40.” It was appointment listening, as much of a weekly communal experience as “All in the Family” or “M*A*S*H.”

And the show stood out for other reasons. As square as it was, by playing the entire Top 40 it gave many people a greater variety of music than they could get from listening to their local radio stations for a week.

It also pioneered a genre that wouldn’t come into its own for another decade or two: celebrity gossip. The tidbits of biography and trivia that Mr. Kasem and his team, including the writer Don Bustany, sprinkled through the show might have been corny, but at the time there was practically nowhere else to hear them. (To my mind, they helped make up for the excruciating dedication letters Mr. Kasem read every week, though I’m sure those had their fans, too.)

All of these functions became less important, or even irrelevant, with the advent of nightly entertainment news and then the Internet. The profile of “American Top 40” shrank, though it benefited from a burst of publicity when Ryan Seacrest took over as host in 2004. (Mr. Kasem continued to preside over several spinoffs.) The show now has an odd double life, as a going concern with Mr. Seacrest and as a nostalgist’s curio: Mr. Kasem’s original 1970s and ’80s countdowns are available in syndication.

So what kept Mr. Kasem counting down the hits for nearly 40 years and continues to keep his creation on the air? Mr. Kasem is known for being a perfectionist — clips of his profane outbursts when things didn’t go right in the studio are popular on YouTube — and I suspect that a related feeling, a demand for order, may explain his show’s longevity. The welter of information and choices we now confront, a condition that has affected the music and radio industries more profoundly than most, may be democratizing, but it can also be demoralizing, and the Top 40 is something to hold on to — a life preserver in the digital sea.

Which was true even in the show’s heyday. A college friend of mine — who went on to become a world-champion video-game player when video games were still six feet tall — listened to Mr. Kasem each weekend and wrote down the Top 40 songs, in longhand. We all thought this was incredibly nerdy and weird. We were also jealous: we wished we had that set of notebooks with every Top 40 list for the last 10 years. It was so weird it was cool.

It was also valuable information. As Mr. Kasem might say, it was something that would help you keep your feet on the ground while you were reaching for the stars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/ar...c/08kasem.html





Ken Roberts, Announcer Whose Voice Graced the Heyday of Radio, Dies at 99
Bruce Weber

Ken Roberts’s voice was so comforting, it was said he had a golden throat. Welcome in millions of American homes, its resonant urbanity helped housewives and their families while away many an afternoon and evening.

He was a good-looking man, too: tall and dark, with a resemblance to Errol Flynn — according to his son, anyway. But not many people actually knew of him, and even fewer would have recognized him if he had knocked on the front door.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the heyday of radio, this was the lot of the announcer, the man who introduced serials and other narrative shows — always live on the air — and read advertisements and moderated game show panels. And like few others, Mr. Roberts was ubiquitous, the voice of dozens of shows, a star without a name or a face.

He died of pneumonia on June 19 in Manhattan at 99, having had a stroke five years ago, his son, the actor Tony Roberts, said.

In the 1950s Ken Roberts made the transition to television, appearing on game shows, serving as the original announcer for “Candid Camera” and lending his voice to a popular program starring Jan Murray, “Dollar a Second,” for which he also did on-air commercials for the show’s sponsor, Mogen David wine.

But his most enduring television legacy was as the announcer for two long-running daytime soap operas, “The Secret Storm” and “Love of Life.”

Mr. Roberts’s radio credits include comedies, dramas, game shows and variety shows. It was not unusual for him to be on the air half a dozen times a day. He announced several seasons of “The Shadow,” including 1937-38, when Orson Welles played the lead character, Lamont Cranston. He was the host and announcer for the game show “Quick as a Flash,” in which historical events or current events were dramatized, and contestants were asked to identify them.

He was the announcer for the comedy “Easy Aces”; the soap opera “This Is Nora Drake,” about a young woman with a surfeit of suitors; the hospital drama “Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern”; the quiz show “What’s My Name?”; and the quiz show parody “It Pays to Be Ignorant.”

He did stints on “The Milton Berle Show,” “The Victor Borge Show,” “The Sophie Tucker Show” and “The Fred Allen Show.” He could be heard on weekly drama presentations like “The Philip Morris Playhouse” and “The Mercury Summer Theater” and mystery series like “The Adventures of Ellery Queen.”

“I saw him as one of the leading lights of radio,” said Jim Cox, the author of several books on radio history. What was remarkable about Mr. Roberts’s voice, Mr. Cox said, was that it was without any regional accent and yet distinctive, authoritative yet reassuring.

“It didn’t sound Yankee, Southern, Western or anything else,” Mr. Cox said. “There was nothing in it to irritate anybody. It was one of those voices you just naturally liked to hear.”

Mr. Roberts’s voice might not have sounded ethnic, but his roots were. Born Saul Trochman in Manhattan on Feb. 22, 1910, he was the son of Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former Fanny Naft, came from what is now Ukraine; his father, Nathaniel Trochman, an insurance salesman and an English tutor for other Eastern European immigrants, hailed from Latvia.

Young Saul, who grew up in the Bronx, went to law school for a year and worked briefly as an unpaid intern in the law office of Fiorello La Guardia. He left, according to family lore, because he couldn’t afford the bus fare and the firm wouldn’t give it to him. But he wasn’t interested in law, anyway; he wanted to be an actor.

And apparently he wanted to get out from under his parents’ roof; he wed twice before he was 23. The first marriage, which lasted two weeks, was annulled; the second ended in divorce after a few months.

“We jokingly said he did it to get out of the house,” Tony Roberts said in an interview last week. “In those days you needed a reason.”

A subsequent marriage lasted nearly 50 years, until the death of his third wife, Norma. In the late 1990s he married again. Besides his son, Tony, of Manhattan, he is survived by his wife, Sydell; a daughter, Nancy Roberts, of Fire Island, N.Y.; a granddaughter, two stepchildren and four step-grandchildren.

His son and most printed sources say Mr. Roberts got his start in radio with a New Jersey station in the late 1920s. But in an interview with Leonard Maltin for the book “The Great American Broadcast,” Mr. Roberts said his first job was in 1930 at WLTH in Brooklyn, where in addition to announcing, he played piano and read poetry on the air, answered the telephone and swept the floor. He changed his name, his son said, so it wouldn’t sound so Jewish.

Mr. Roberts was also a labor leader. In 1935 he founded the American Guild of Radio Announcers and Producers, which eventually became part of the American Federation of Radio Artists, a forerunner of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, known as Aftra.

“My father’s voice did sound to me as though it came from God,” Tony Roberts said. “He had no accent; he spoke in perfect tones and complete sentences.”

And what advice did the voice of God impart?

“Initially?” Mr. Roberts said. “ ‘Don’t be an actor.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/ny...05roberts.html





Michael Jackson Hailed as Greatest Entertainer, Best Dad
Bob Tourtellotte

Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder and Usher sang emotional farewells Tuesday to Michael Jackson, who was hailed as "the greatest entertainer that ever lived" and described by his tearful 11-year-old daughter Paris as "the best father you could ever imagine."

Some 18,000 fans, family members and friends took part in a public memorial for Jackson in the Los Angeles sports arena where the singer had rehearsed the day before his death for a highly anticipated series of comeback concerts.

Jackson's brothers, each wearing a single sequined glove in homage to his signature look, carried the singer's golden casket into the downtown Staples Center.

Carey performed Jackson's 1970 ballad "I'll Be There," Usher's voice cracked as he sang "Gone Too Soon" and the King of Pop's three children made a rare public appearance without veils used for years by Jackson to shield them from the media.

But it was Jackson himself who loomed larger than life, shown in old concert footage, music videos and news clips, singing, dancing his moonwalk and surrounded by adoring crowds.

"The more I think about Michael, and talk about Michael, the more I think that 'King of Pop' is not good enough," said Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, who signed The Jackson 5 to a recording contract in 1968. "I think he is simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived."

The two-hour memorial focused on Jackson's musical achievements, overshadowed in the last 10 years by the darker side of the singer's life, including his humiliating 2005 trial and acquittal on charges of child sex abuse.

Jackson's sudden death from cardiac arrest in Los Angeles on June 25 at the age of 50 stunned fans across the world and sent sales of his biggest hits from albums such as "Thriller" and "Off the Wall" back to the top of music charts.

President Barack Obama, on a visit to Russia, said he was "one of the greatest entertainers of our generation, perhaps any generation," and added: "I think like Elvis, like Sinatra, like The Beatles, he became a core part of our culture.

The memorial focused on Jackson's 45-year musical career in which he was awarded 13 Grammys, his charity work for childrens' groups and his role in opening the mainstream pop and celebrity world to African-Americans.

It was broadcast live on U.S. national TV networks and Internet company Akamai, which handles 20 percent of the world's Web traffic, said it was the most widely viewed event on the Web since the inauguration of Obama in January.

Gordy was among the few who referred obliquely to Jackson's recent troubles. "Sure there was some sad times and maybe some questionable decisions on his part, but Michael Jackson accomplished everything he dreamed of," said Gordy.

"Nothing Strange" About Daddy

Jackson was on the eve of a comeback after his career collapsed in the 1990s. The exact cause of his death is still awaiting toxicology results amid reports of abuse of prescription drugs, including the powerful narcotic Diprivan.

Civil rights leader Al Sharpton, who has lashed out at media coverage of the bizarre aspects of Jackson's life, had a message for the singer's three children.

"Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with," he said.

The children, Prince Michael, 12, Paris and Prince Michael, 7, joined the family on stage for a mass chorus of Jackson's inspirational hits "We Are the World" and "Heal the World."

Paris, in tears, took the microphone to say: "Ever since I was born my daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine and I just wanted to say I love him, so much."

Jackson's family and close friends held a brief private ceremony earlier Tuesday at a Los Angeles cemetery before the memorial and were reported afterwards to have gathered at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

But the destination of the singer's body remained unknown with speculation that he could yet be laid to rest at his beloved ranch, Neverland, in central California.

Police had estimated more than 250,000 people would gather at the arena but the orderly crowds were much smaller than expected.

Police, security, escorts and sanitation for the memorial are expected to cost cash-strapped Los Angeles city council nearly $4 million and the city council Tuesday launched a website asking for fans to make donations toward the costs.

(Additional reporting by Jill Serjeant, Alex Dobuzinskis and Jim Finkle; Editing by Mary Milliken and David Storey)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...5615KN20090708





European Publishers Call on E.U. to Protect Copyright
Eric Pfanner

Leading European newspaper and magazine publishers on Thursday called on the European Commission to strengthen copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online.

The publishers said widespread use of their work by online news aggregators and other Web sites was undermining their efforts to develop an online business models at a time when readers and advertisers are defecting from newspapers and magazines.

“Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it,” the publishers said in a letter to Viviane Reding, the European media and telecommunications commissioner. “Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism.”

The petition echoes other recent calls from publishers for greater copyright protection as they try to move beyond a business models based largely on advertising and try to generate more revenue from users. Only a handful of newspapers or magazines, including The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, have had success charging readers to use their sites.

The initiative grew out of a campaign in Germany, led by Axel Springer, which publishes the tabloid Bild, to strengthen copyright law in that country. German publishers want to create a so-called neighboring right for publishers, similar to protections that already exist for music publishers and other content owners.

The right would give publishers greater control over secondary use of their work that generates revenue.

Publishers have not said publicly what they would do with such a right, but executives say one possibility would be to try to get business users to pay for access to online content. Under such a practice, businesses would have to pay for special licenses; fees would be collected by a new organization modeled on the “societies” that gather royalties on behalf of musical copyright owners. Private individuals would be allowed access to news sites without such a license.

The letter presented Thursday to Ms. Reding also stopped short of specific proposals. Instead, publishers want stricter enforcement of existing legislation, said Heidi Lambert, a spokeswoman for the European Publishers Council, a trade group that has endorsed the petition.

European publishers have been leading an effort to get Google and other Internet companies to adopt a new technology that manages the relationship between online publishers and search engines. The system, called the Automated Content Access Protocol, would allow publishers to set the terms of search engines’ and aggregators’ use of their content.

Publishers say the system, championed by the publishers’ council and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, would make it easier to create profitable Web sites. Critics say, however, that it would create unnecessary new hurdles for users.

Google did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for Ms. Reding, said she had not yet reviewed the document and could not comment on it. But he referred to a speech she gave Thursday in Brussels, in which she said that a top priority for developing the digital economy in Europe was the creation of “a simple, consumer-friendly legal framework for accessing digital content in Europe’s single market, while ensuring at the same time fair remuneration of creators.”

The petition has been signed by executives of News Corp., Axel Springer, Gruner + Jahr, Lagardère, Independent News & Media, the Daily Mail & General Trust, Burda Media and the Espresso Group, among others. Neither the International Herald Tribune nor its parent, The New York Times, is among the signatories.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/te...copyright.html





A Goldman Trading Scandal?
Matthew Goldstein

Did someone try to steal Goldman Sachs’ secret sauce?

While most in the United States were celebrating the Fourth of July holiday, a Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was being held on federal charges of stealing secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution. Authorities did not identify the firm, but sources say that institution is none other than Goldman Sachs.

The charges, if proven, are significant because the codes that the accused, Sergey Aleynikov, tried to steal are the secret sauce to Goldman’s automated stock and commodities trading business. Federal authorities contend the computer codes and related-trading files that Aleynikov uploaded to a German-based website help this major financial institution generate millions of dollars in profits each year.

The platform is one of the things that gives Goldman an advantage over the competition when it comes to the rapid-fire trading of stocks and commodities. Federal authorities say the platform quickly processes rapid developments in the markets and using secret mathematical formulas, allows the firm to make highly-profitable automated trades.

The criminal case has the potential to shed a light on the inner workings of an important profit center for Goldman and other Wall Street firms. The charges also raise serious questions about the safeguards that Wall Street firms deploy to protect these costly-to-build proprietary trading systems.

The criminal case began to unfold on the evening of July 3, when Aleynikov was arrested by FBI agents at Newark Airport after returning from Chicago. Aleynikov apparently had just started a job with another big firm in Chicago after leaving his previous employer in New York in early June.

It appears that the financial institution allegedly victimized by Aleynikov had alerted federal authorities that its former employee might be up to no good. On July 4, Aleynikov was processed on a “theft of trade secrets charge” in a criminal complaint. As of this morning, he was still being held at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Brooklyn.

A Goldman spokesman declined to comment on the incident. Calls to Aleynikov’s home in New Jersey, which he shares with his wife, were not returned. A spokeswoman for the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan did not comment.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in charging Aleynikov, says he began working for the major financial institution in May 2007 as a computer programmer and left in early June. That matches the description of a man named Serge Aleynikov on the social networking site LinkedIn (the difference in spelling of the first name could not be immediately explained).

The biographical information for Aleynikov on LinkedIn says he joined Goldman in May 2007 and was vice president for equity strategy. The bio says he was responsible for “development of a distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading platform.”

The case against Aleynikov may explain why the New York Stock Exchange moved quickly last week to stop reporting program stock trading for its most active firms. Goldman was often at the top of the chart — far ahead of its competitors. It’s possible Goldman had asked the NYSE to stop reporting the number after it discovered that someone may have infiltrated the proprietary computer codes it uses.

Here’s the way the criminal complaint describes the Goldman trading platform: “The Financial Institution has devoted substantial resources to developing and maintaining a computer platform that allows the Financial Institution to engage in sophisticated high-speed, and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets. Among other things, the platform is capable of quickly obtaining and processing information regarding rapid developments in these markets.”

Federal authorities appear to believe Aleynikov may have had help. The German website that Aleynikov is accused of uploading the stolen information to is registered to a person in London.

While the case is still unfolding, there is more information to unearth about Aleynikov. For instance, it appears that he and his wife are competitive ballroom dancers–there are videos of them on YouTube.com.

Many questions remain. Which Chicago firm hired Aleynikov? The job he took in Chicago, according to the criminal complaint, paid nearly three times more than his $400,000 salary at Goldman.

Also there’s more to learn about anyone who might have been helping him and the fallout the case may have for Goldman. When he was arrested, Aleynikov told the FBI he “only intended to collect ‘open source’ files on which he had worked, but later realized that he had obtained more files than he intended.”

Quick, get this guy a good lawyer.

One question investors need to ask is whether this incident will have any impact on Goldman’s second-quarter earnings. The alleged wrongdoing by Aleynikov took place at the beginning of June–although it’s not clear if it had any material impact on automated trading.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...ading-scandal/





BT Decides Not to Adopt Internet-Based Ad System
Eric Pfanner

Amid rising concern about privacy, BT Group, the British telecommunications company, said Monday that it would not adopt a technology that lets advertisers tailor their pitches to consumers based on interests revealed by their Internet use.

The news was the latest in a series of setbacks for Phorm, the company that developed the technology, causing its stock to plunge more than 40 percent.

Phorm’s approach has been hailed by advocates as a way to improve the effectiveness of advertising. But the technology has raised concerns because it mines actual data supplied by Internet service providers, rather than building consumer profiles from partial Web browsing patterns, something that many Web companies already do.

Though Phorm says its system renders the data anonymous and has safeguards against security breaches, privacy advocates claimed vindication in the decision by BT.

“It’s a huge victory for privacy,” said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, a civil liberties organization based in London.

BT said it was discontinuing use of Phorm because of budget limitations caused by investments in other technology, not because of privacy concerns.

“We continue to believe the interest-based advertising category offers major benefits for consumers and publishers alike,” BT said in a statement. “However, given our public commitment to developing next-generation broadband and television services in the U.K., we have decided to weigh up the balance of resources devoted to other opportunities.”

Phorm said it continued to “look forward to creating the conditions necessary for British I.S.P.’s to move to deployment” but added that it was focusing on “faster-moving overseas opportunities.” Among other markets, the company has been testing its system in South Korea.

Britain is not the only place where such behavioral targeting has raised concerns. In the United States, Congress has been studying the issue, with privacy advocates calling for new rules to govern advertisers’ use of ad-tailoring systems, not just the kind employed by Phorm.

In an effort to head off legislation, American advertising trade organizations published principles last week by which they aimed to regulate behavioral monitoring programs. Under the guidelines, which the groups hope to have in place by early next year, advertisers would disclose which ads involved the use of behavioral tracking, and consumers would be given the chance to opt out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/te...07private.html





Should Local Governments Back the iPhone?
Sharon Machlis

Boston will soon have an official iPhone app [1] allowing residents to send photos of neighborhood nuisances to City Hall and request action, the Boston Globe reports this morning, "making the filing of complaints quicker and easier for iPhone users."

Cool, yes. But fair?

Everyone else out there with other smart phones will still be relegated to the telephone complaint hotline or a multi-page Web form.

Admit it, Apple fans: If a city paid $25K to develop an application that only worked on a Microsoft product -- one that required a hefty monthly fee to use -- would you think that was a great advance?

I'm all in favor of government using technology ease info sharing with the citizenry. But the government picking a closed platform that requires users to fork out hundreds of dollars annually to one specific company? Not so much, unless apps for other major platforms are also in the works. Otherwise, if you're an activist in Boston and you want the convenience of snap-'n-send photos to report problems in the city, you need to get an iPhone. ... even though BlackBerry is the current smartphone market leader [2]. And the iPhone data plan may not be the most cost-effective for consumers compared to, say, the Palm's Pre.

Actually, the app was the idea of a city tech worker who uses a BlackBerry. But he told the Globe the city decided on an app for the iPhone "mostly because of its sex appeal -- because it's new and it's hot." That's fine if the goal is to serve a growing segment of the populace, but it seems more like trying to get a little reflected Apple cool. Which in itself is still OK -- but not when the outcome is encouraging residents to look into a specific (and costly) platform.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/shoul...ack_the_iphone





Sony to Enter Netbook PC Market with New Vaio

Sony Corp said on Tuesday it plans to launch a new Vaio laptop that will sell for around 60,000 yen ($629) in Japan in August, making an entry into the fast-growing netbook market.

Netbook PCs are smaller and cheaper than traditional notebook computers and optimised for simpler computing tasks such as Web browsing and email.

Pioneered by Taiwan's Asustek in 2007, other global brands such as Acer Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc have pushed out their own lines since then.

Sony, the last major PC maker to enter the netbook segment, hopes the new product's design and high-resolution display will help the consumer electronics giant establish a presence in the market, a company spokeswoman said.

The new Sony machine, equipped with Microsoft Corp's Windows XP operating system and Intel Corp's Atom processor, will have an LCD display with a resolution of 1,366-by-768 pixels, compared with the 1,024-by-600-pixel displays that are widely used in other netbooks.

Sony declined to unveil its sales target for the new netbook model, but the company aims to boost its overall Vaio PC sales to 6.2 million units in the year to March 2010 from 5.8 million units a year earlier.

Global netbook PC shipments in 2009 are likely to more than double from a year earlier to 26.4 million units, according to research firm IDC.

Sony shares closed down 2.3 percent at 2,355 yen, underperforming the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index, which fell 1.2 percent.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Chris Gallagher)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56613520090707





Judge Will Not Allow Taser Footage Online

Surveillance video will be seen during an inquiry into the death of Howard Hyde, who collapsed while struggling with guards at a correctional facility in Nova Scotia
Oliver Moore

Surveillance videos of a mentally ill man being tasered by police and dying 30 hours later in a struggle with jail guards, images described as “disturbing” by a lawyer for his relatives, need to be understood in context and can't be posted online, a judge ruled yesterday.

The videos, which are central to an inquiry into Howard Hyde’s death in a Dartmouth jail late in 2007, can be screened in court. And they will be shown fleetingly to the public as proceedings are streamed on-line at www.hydeinquiry.ca, with the tasering expected to be seen Tuesday. But they can’t otherwise be displayed, provincial court judge Anne Derrick decided.

The ruling was a blow to family members of the 45-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had wanted to be able to disseminate the video images.

But whether the decision will be enough to squelch the spread of this material remains to be seen.

“It’s difficult to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” said Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law.

“Once it’s streamed, it’s relatively trivial for someone to capture that stream and go ahead and post it.”

Prof. Geist also noted, though, that courts can issue specific rulings against using material streamed on-line, which would be enough to prevent its appearance in law-abiding venues.

The power of images to sway public opinion was highlighted after the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who was tasered five times by Mounties at the Vancouver airport only weeks before the Hyde incident.

Police initially confiscated amateur video of Mr. Dziekanski's death. Paul Pritchard went to court to get his property back and then sold it to the media. His video undermined police descriptions of the incident and caused an uproar that reverberated beyond Canada's shores.

At the time, an RCMP spokesman said that the video did not tell the whole story.

Judge Derrick made a similar point while reading her nearly hour-long decision on Monday.

“Filming of the inquiry proceedings will capture the witnesses' testimony about the video surveillance and any submissions that will be made on what inferences should be drawn from it,” she said.

“[Posting] of the images will not. Directly [posting] the video surveillance will send images to the internet without any context. Context is crucial.”

The decision pleased Joan Jessome, president of the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union, who worries people won't understand the footage unless it is explained to them.

“They're left to assume what it means, rather than knowing and hearing the evidence from the people that were involved,” she said. “And they will be the correctional officers that will be called on to testify. It's better to be seen in the right context than to assume what it means.”

But a lawyer for Mr. Hyde's sister and brother-in-law said the decision mean members of the public could miss key nuances in the videos.

“In essence, they'll be taking a picture of a picture, so there'll be some viewing of it ... but the quality will not be as sharp,” said Kevin MacDonald. “It's difficult, you know, to view the subtleties. There are some subtleties on this video that you really have to focus on to catch. I think that will be lost.”

Mr. Hyde, a musician whose history of mental illness was known to the authorities, had been involved in earlier encounters with the police and reportedly was afraid of them. He was arrested after allegations of a domestic assault and taken to police headquarters. A fracas broke out there and police tasered him twice.

Mr. Hyde was taken to hospital and then to a Dartmouth correctional facility. He died 30 hours after his arrest.

His death was ruled accidental last year by Nova Scotia's chief medical officer, who blamed excited delirium due to his paranoid schizophrenia. Judge Derrick's inquiry, aimed at delving more deeply into the situation, began in February. It will not make findings of guilt.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1207933/





Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U. Over Kindle Use
Marc Beja

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students.

The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device’s menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups.

In a lawsuit filed last week, a journalism student was also named as a plaintiff.

“While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me,” said the student, Darrell Shandrow, in the groups’ statement. “These texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.”

In a statement to the Library Journal, a university spokeswoman, Martha Dennis Christiansen, did not answer any specific questions pertaining to the lawsuit.

“Arizona State University is committed to equal access for all students. Disability Resource Centers are located on all ASU campuses. The centers enable students to establish eligibility and obtain services and accommodations for qualified students with disabilities,” she said. “These efforts are focused on providing the necessary tools so that all students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their academic pursuits.”

The complaint asked the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate similar practices at Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/art...ver-kindle-use





Gaze-Tracking Software Offers New Approach to Computer Security
Gus G. Sentementes

Bill Anderson calls it his "aha" moment — a flash of insight from which he drew a career-altering connection between decades-old research and his job as a computer security expert.

At the time, nearly two years ago, Anderson had a comfortable job as vice president at an established computer security company. But while reading "Consciousness Explained," a book by philosopher Daniel Dennett, Anderson learned about one scientist's research into variations in the way the human eye reads and processes text and images.

"This obscure characteristic ... suddenly struck me as (a solution to) a security problem," said Anderson, 42, who has a doctorate in cryptology. "I said, 'Holy cow. No one has thought of using this to protect the contents of a screen.' It was just some obscure research."

Anderson quit his job at SafeNet, raised $1.2 million in seed money from friends and family and plunged full time into developing his idea — a software program that allows only an authorized user to read text on the screen, while everyone else sees gibberish.

With the help of a couple of software developers, he tested and revamped the software over the course of several months. He immersed himself in the Baltimore area's startup scene, turning to chief executives, attorneys, serial entrepreneurs and other experts for guidance. Along the way, he won some early recognition, including a recent Innovator of the Year Award from the Maryland Technology Development Corp. and some funding from the state Department of Business and Economic Development.

Now, 18 months after he launched Oculis Labs, Anderson has three pending patents and two products ready to be pushed into the market by his four-person company. Venture capital firms and angel investors are courting him — even in the toughest startup investment climate in a decade.

He hopes he can land a defense-related government contract for his most powerful product, Chameleon, in the next few months. His first contract probably would make his company more appealing to venture capitalists, who "really want to wait until there's some traction, and the traction is revenue," said Mark Esposito, director of emerging company services for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Good companies get to be funded in bad times as well as good economic times. They may be hungrier and there's a more robust set of entrepreneurs out there."

Anderson was hungry but said he was also motivated by fear that another company would develop his idea first.

Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader's eyes to show only that one person the correct text. After a 15-second calibration period in which the software essentially "learns" the viewer's gaze patterns, anyone looking over that user's shoulder sees dummy text that randomly and constantly changes.

To tap the broader consumer market, Anderson built a more consumer-friendly version called PrivateEye, which can work with a simple Webcam. The software blurs a user's monitor when he or she turns away. It also detects other faces in the background, and a small video screen pops up to alert the user that someone is looking at the screen.

"There've been inventions in the space of gaze-tracking. There've been inventions in the space of security. But nobody has put the two ideas together, as far as we know," Anderson said.

He's pitched Chameleon to federal government agencies, including the defense and intelligence communities. The high-end Chameleon product would cost more than $10,000, making it appeal mainly to large government agencies that have a need for a high degree of security.

The specialized equipment that tracks a viewer's eyes already exists, and a number of manufacturers make such monitors. Anderson also found companies that make portable gaze-tracking equipment that are the size of a long, squat brick and which can be positioned on a laptop or under a desktop monitor to track a user's eyes with his software.

For PrivateEye, Anderson said he's gotten interest from a top computer maker for the software, which could be licensed, bundled and sold to consumers as part of a computer's security offering. It is available for download from Oculis' Web site, starting at $19.95.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_12743292





Researchers: Social Security Numbers Can Be Guessed
Brian Krebs

Researchers have found that it is possible to guess many -- if not all -- of the nine digits in an individual's Social Security number using publicly available information, a finding they say compromises the security of one of the most widely used consumer identifiers in the United States.

Many numbers could be guessed at by simply knowing a person's birth data, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon University said.

The results come as concern grows over identity theft and lawmakers in Washington push legislation that would bar businesses from requiring people to supply their Social Security number when purchasing a good or service.

"Our work shows that Social Security numbers are compromised as authentication devices, because if they are predictable from public data, then they cannot be considered sensitive," said Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and a co-author of the study.

A Social Security Administration spokesman said the government has long cautioned the private sector against using a Social Security number as a personal identifier, even as it insists "there is no fool proof method for predicting a person's Social Security Number."

"For reasons unrelated to this report, the agency has been developing a system to randomly assign SSNs," which should make it more difficult to discover numbers in the future, Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said by e-mail.

Introduced in the 1930s as a way to track individuals for taxation purposes, Social Security numbers were never designed to be used for authentication. Over time, however, private and public institutions began keeping tabs on consumers using the numbers, requiring people to present them as proof of identity, such as when applying for loans, new employment, or health insurance.

Concern over the privacy of those numbers has grown in the wake of hundreds of data breaches reported by businesses, governments and educational institutions, breaches that have exposed millions of consumer records -- including SSNs.

In recent years, a number of states have passed legislation to redact or remove the numbers from public documents, such as divorce and property records, and bankruptcy filings. In addition, legislation introduced this year by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would prohibit the display, sale, or purchase of Social Security numbers without consent, and would bar businesses from requiring people to provide their number.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon set out to see if they could discover people's numbers by first exploiting what is publicly known about how the numbers are derived.

The Social Security number's first three digits -- called the "area number" -- is issued according to the Zip code of the mailing address provided in the application form. The fourth and fifth digits -- known as the "group number" -- transition slowly, and often remain constant over several years for a given region. The last four digits are assigned sequentially.

As a result, SSNs assigned in the same state to applicants born on consecutive days are likely to contain the same first four or five digits, particularly in states with smaller populations and rates of birth.

As it happens, the researchers said, if you're trying to discover a living person's SSN, the best place to start is with a list of dead people -- particularly deceased people who were born around the time and place of your subject. The so-called "Death Master File," is a publicly available file which lists SSNs, names, dates of birth and death, and the states of all individuals who have applied for a number and whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration.

CMU researchers Acquisti and Ph.D student Ralph Gross theorized that they could use the Death Master File along with publicly available birth information to predict narrow ranges of values wherein individual SSNs were likely to fall. The two tested their hunch using the Death Master File of people who died between 1972 and 2003, and found that on the first try they could correctly guess the first five digits of the SSN for 44 percent of deceased people who were born after 1988, and for 7 percent of those born between 1973 and 1988.

Acquisti and Gross found that it was far easier to predict SSNs for people born after 1988, when the Social Security Administration began an effort to ensure that U.S. newborns obtained their SSNs shortly after birth.

They were able to identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of people born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts. For people born recently in smaller states, researchers sometimes needed just 10 or fewer attempts to predict all nine digits.

Records of an individual's state and date of birth can be obtained from a variety of sources, including voter registration lists and commercial databases. What's more, many people now self-publish this information as part of their personal profiles on blogs and social networking sites. Indeed, the researchers tested their method using birthdays and hometowns that CMU students published on social networking sites, with similar results.

Privacy and security experts praised the Carnegie Mellon study, saying it should be a wake-up call to policy makers and industry leaders, many of whom have resisted switching to a more secure consumer authentication system due to the sheer cost of changing the current system.

"We can't pretend anymore that SSNs can be kept secret," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and chief counselor for privacy during the Clinton administration. "This report puts a nail in that coffin. We'll need new approaches, and it will cost money for the government and the private sector to build the new approaches."

Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said the findings suggest that businesses using SSNs as a password are being negligent, and should find other ways of verifying the claims to identity that are being made by their customers.

"Sure, the study says that if you were born in a big state on a busy day you're probably still safe," from having identity thieves guess your entire SSN, Anderson said. "Still, I think many people would find it unacceptable that a system continues in use which in effect exposes tens of millions of Americans to fraud and other kinds of harm."

Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego based nonprofit, cited another potential problem. She said many businesses have errantly rely upon or have moved to redact all but the last four digits of a person's SSN, the very digits that are most unique to an individual.

"Because of the way the SSN has been designed, asking for the last four numbers of the SSN puts people at risk because those are the only numbers that are unique to you and cannot be guessed easily by someone who might want to use your identity," Foley said.

The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, Carnegie Melon Cylab, and the Berkman Faculty Development Fund provided support for the research. The study, which will be presented July 29 at the BlackHat 2009 security conference in Las Vegas, is available at this link.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...070602955.html





For Symantec and McAfee, ‘Arms Race’ for Security
Ashlee Vance

The two leading makers of computer security software, Symantec and McAfee, are like preachers who conduct dueling tent revivals.

They boast and frighten and denounce each other while trying to convince the crowd that their particular brand of salvation will ward off the devil — in this case, malicious e-mail viruses and evil Internet worms.

The stakes are huge: millions of global followers willing to donate a steady sum every year for protection against online threats.

Recently, the competition between the two has become fiercer, as both have tried to get their software tied to more new personal computers, Web sites and Internet service providers. McAfee has been particularly aggressive, using a string of deals with large PC makers in a bid to usurp Symantec’s leadership position.

“It’s like an arms race,” said Albert A. Pimentel, the chief financial officer of McAfee, who goes by the pugilistic nickname Rocky. Security companies must constantly persuade customers and partners to renew subscriptions or switch from a competitor with similar products.

For years, McAfee served as a self-defeating also-ran, cleaning up the scraps left by Symantec. The company, based in Santa Clara, suffered from a decade of legal and accounting problems that left it in poor competitive shape, and employee morale low.

Things, however, have changed in the last two years since David G. DeWalt left his post as head of sales at the storage company EMC to run McAfee, succeeding George Samenuk, who stepped down in a stock-option backdating scandal. Under Mr. DeWalt, the company has expanded well beyond antivirus software, acquired some niche security players and increased sales to consumers and large businesses.

McAfee is poised to overtake Symantec next year in sales to the business market if current trends hold.

Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif., remains the overall security market leader, with just about double the market share of McAfee, according to the research firm Gartner.

In the consumer market, Symantec holds an even larger lead, with 52 percent share and $1.8 billion in revenue last year, compared with 18 percent of the market and $624 million in revenue for McAfee. A host of smaller players like Trend Micro, CA and Kaspersky Lab round out the field.

“It is really Symantec and the seven dwarfs,” said Enrique T. Salem, the chief executive of Symantec.

In a bold and somewhat risky bid to raise its stature with consumers, McAfee has tried to win over PC makers with something they all like: lots of cash. In the last year, it spent $55 million, more than any of its rivals, to get McAfee security software preloaded onto new computers. It now counts Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Sony and Lenovo as partners.

“We are shipping on twice as many computers as the year prior,” Mr. DeWalt said.

Up to 40 percent of all computers bought by consumers this year will include McAfee’s software, the brokerage firm Jefferies & Company estimates.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer seller, has an exclusive deal with Symantec on its consumer PCs. Mr. DeWalt said that deal should come up for bids within the next year, and Symantec will have to fight to keep it.

“They didn’t have much competition back then, but they will this time,” he said.

Mr. Salem shrugs off Mr. DeWalt’s tough talk. “I love the rhetoric and the chest-pounding,” he said.

“We need to be on as many computers as possible without being irrational,” Mr. Salem said. If McAfee bids too high, Symantec will walk away from the deal and direct its money toward building some of its other, nonsecurity products, he said.

But, in another breath, Mr. Salem boasts that Symantec has won eight out of the nine PC deals up for bid so far in 2009. Symantec, for example, has chipped away at parts of Dell not covered by McAfee, like gaming PCs.

The payments that both companies make to partners have their own byzantine accounting, and critics complain that the companies are not being straightforward with shareholders.

Quite often, the deals with the PC sellers require the security companies to make upfront payments. Both parties then share revenue over the lifetime of the deal, as some people extend their subscriptions beyond the initial free trial period and begin paying annual fees for the software.

McAfee incurs larger upfront costs than most for its deals while waiting months before it can begin booking subscriptions as revenue. Investors must guess at how many of the trials will turn into actual sales as they weigh the business value of McAfee’s payments.

Thus far, it is difficult to tell exactly how successful the payments have been.

Gartner shows McAfee gaining just 0.5 percentage points of market share in the consumer security software market in the last year, with Symantec losing about 4 percentage points.

Mr. DeWalt says McAfee will begin showing more significant market share gains and higher deferred revenue totals as the trial and payment process plays out. “We haven’t seen the full impact of them yet,” he said.

McAfee says that the upfront payments are small when compared with the total potential value of the PC deals and that conversion rates have been strong to date. In addition, the company says it has tried to explain the deals to Gradient and characterizes the firm as shaping its research in a sensationalistic way that is meant to attract short-sellers, who sell borrowed shares of a company’s stock, hoping to buy it back later at a lower price.

As with many technology companies, McAfee’s shares fell in the last year, but at $41 last week, its share price is about the same as prerecession levels.

Executives from McAfee and Symantec say the partner deals are minor items. McAfee makes more money selling corporate security products than consumer products. At $6.2 billion a year in revenue, Symantec is one of the largest software companies in the world.

In addition, both companies are in a part of the market that has done well in the global technology spending slump. According to Gartner, the security software market grew 19 percent last year. McAfee has proved particularly resilient to the downturn, with revenue rising 22 percent last year to $1.6 billion, largely on the back of a more diverse product mix.

One long-term risk for both companies is the popularity of free basic security software packages offered by some vendors, including Symantec’s PC Tools brand. In addition, Microsoft, which dominates the overall PC software market, has just released a test version of free security software.

McAfee and Symantec argue that true deliverance from malicious software requires more commitment — and more money. Both companies try to persuade customers to buy whole suites of security software, including firewalls and online backup services.

“Last year, we saw a 500 percent increase in malware,” said Mr. DeWalt.

That’s a lot of demons to ward off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/te...g/06virus.html





Microsoft Warns of Serious Computer Security Hole
Jordan Robertson

Microsoft Corp. has taken the rare step of warning about a serious computer security vulnerability it hasn't fixed yet.

The vulnerability disclosed Monday affects Internet Explorer users whose computers run the Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 operating software.

It can allow hackers to remotely take control of victims' machines. The victims don't need to do anything to get infected except visit a Web site that's been hacked.

Security experts say criminals have been attacking the vulnerability for nearly a week. Thousands of sites have been hacked to serve up malicious software that exploits the vulnerability. People are drawn to these sites by clicking a link in spam e-mail.

The so-called "zero day" vulnerability disclosed by Microsoft affects a part of its software used to play video. The problem arises from the way the software interacts with Internet Explorer, which opens a hole for hackers to tunnel into.

Microsoft urged vulnerable users to disable the problematic part of its software, which can be done from Microsoft's Web site, while the company works on a "patch" - or software fix - for the problem.

Microsoft rarely departs from its practice of issuing security updates the second Tuesday of each month. When the Redmond, Wash.-based company does issue security reminders at other times, it's because the vulnerabilities are very serious.

A recent example was the emergency patch Microsoft issued in October for a vulnerability that criminals exploited to infect millions of PCs with the Conficker worm. While initially feared as an all-powerful doomsday device, that network of infected machines was eventually used for mundane moneymaking schemes like sending spam and pushing fake antivirus software.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16036/cont...tguid=RlgBwBQn





PC Invader Costs Ky. County $415,000
Brian Krebs

Cyber criminals based in Ukraine stole $415,000 from the coffers of Bullitt County, Kentucky this week. The crooks were aided by more than two dozen co-conspirators in the United States, as well as a strain of malicious software capable of defeating online security measures put in place by many banks.

Bullitt County Attorney Walt Sholar said the trouble began on June 22, when someone started making unauthorized wire transfers of $10,000 or less from the county's payroll to accounts belonging to at least 25 individuals around the country (some individuals received multiple payments). On June 29, the county's bank realized something was wrong, and began requesting that the banks receiving those transfers start reversing them, Sholar said.

"Our bank told us they would know by Thursday how many of those transactions would be able to be reversed," Sholar said. "They told us they thought we would get some of the money back, they just weren't sure how much."

Sholar said the unauthorized transfers appear to have been driven by "some kind computer virus." Security Fix has been communicating with a cyber crime investigator who is familiar with the case. What follows is a description of the malicious software used, a blow-by-blow account of how the attackers worked the heist, as well interviews with a couple of women hired to receive the stolen funds and forward the money on to fraudsters in Ukraine. This case also serves as an example of how e-mail scams can be used to dupe unknowing victims in serving as accomplices in their plan.

According to my source, who asked not to be identified because he's still investigating different sides of this case, the criminals stole the money using a custom variant of a keystroke logging Trojan known as "Zeus" (a.k.a. "Zbot") that included two new features. The first is that stolen credentials are sent immediately via instant message to the attackers. But the second, more interesting feature of this malware, the investigator said, is that it creates a direct connection between the infected Microsoft Windows system and the attackers, allowing the bad guys to log in to the victim's bank account using the victim's own Internet connection.

Many online banks will check to see whether the customer's Internet address is coming from a location already associated with the customer's user name and password, or at least from a geographic location that is close to where the customer lives. By connecting through the victim's PC or Internet connection, the bad guys can avoid raising any suspicions.

This might be enough to fool retail banks that serve regular online banking users, but Bullitt County's bank, like many other commercial banks, use even more rigorous authentication schemes. For instance, some technologies adopted by commercial bank Web sites will use special Javascript programming techniques to look at various aspects of the customer's system -- including screen size, browser version, operating system, and a myriad other variables -- to create a unique "fingerprint" of their customers' computers. In such cases, even if criminals have hijacked a victim's Internet connection, a bank using this approach should still be able to detect that the customer is connecting from a different computer because the fingerprints won't match.

Also, the process of creating and approving outgoing wire transfers from the county's account could not be completed without two different authorized users signing off on the transaction. In the case of Bullitt County, that checks-and-balances system was designed to be carried out by the county treasurer and a local judge.

Finally, if for whatever reason the bank's system noticed that either account was being used from a PC with an unknown fingerprint, that login attempt would fail, and that user would be prompted to check their e-mail account for a special, one-time passphrase that would need to be re-entered along with the username and password, in order to gain access to the account.

According to the investigator, the attack against Bullitt County's bank account went down like this:

- The attackers somehow got the Zeus Trojan on the county treasurer's PC, and used it to steal the username and password the treasurer needed to access e-mail and the county's bank account.

- The attackers then logged into the county's bank account by tunneling through the treasurer's Internet connection.

- Once logged in, the criminals changed the judge's password, as well as e-mail address tied to the judge's account, so that any future notifications about one-time passphrases would be sent to an e-mail address the attackers controlled.

- They then created several fictitious employees of the county (these were the 25 real-life, co-conspirators hired by the attackers to receive the stolen funds), and created a batch of wire transfers to those individuals to be approved.

- The crooks then logged into the county's bank account using the judge's credentials and a computer outside of the state of Kentucky. When the bank's security system failed to recognize the profile of the PC, the bank sent an e-mail with the challenge passphrase to an e-mail address the attackers controlled.

- The attackers then retrieved the passphrase from the e-mail, and logged in again with the judge's new credentials and the one-time passphrase. Once logged in, the crooks were able to approve the batch of wire transfers.

When asked to comment on this version of events, County Attorney Sholar said he was limited in what he could say, because the FBI had asked him not to discuss details of the case. But he did say that "We know there were initiations and approvals for wire transfers that were both generated and sent to the bank by computers that were physically located outside of the state of Kentucky."

The Role of the Money Mules - Scammed Into Serving

With the help of the cyber crime investigator, I was able to reach two of the 25 so-called "money mules" who were hired to act as intermediaries in this scam. Both were females under the age of 35 who initially were contacted after placing their resumes on Careerbuilder.com. Each received e-mails from a company calling itself Fairlove Delivery Service. Both women agreed to speak with Security Fix on the condition of anonymity.

Both were hired by Fairlove to edit documents for grammar and flow, and promised a pay of $8 for each kilobyte of data they processed (see the initial Careerbuilder scam e-mail here). The documents they were hired to edit often were full of grammatical errors and faulty or missing punctuation. Both money mules said it appeared that whoever wrote the letters was not a native English speaker.

It's not clear whether the cyber scammers first enlisted the mules as text editors in order to test their trustworthiness, or because they really needed their help making their scam letters look more believable. What is clear from looking at copies of the letters they were asked to edit, is that they were editing missives that would be sent to recruit and scam other mules. Have a look at some of those yet-to-be-edited messages sent to our anonymous mules, viewable at this link here.

The first person I spoke with, a 34 year-old woman from Miami, had been editing texts e-mailed to her by Fairlove representatives for a couple of weeks. Shortly after she inquired about when she would be paid for her work, she received an e-mail asking if she'd be interested in a position as a "local agent," for the company. The Fairlove representative who contacted her via e-mail said something about how the company often had trouble getting money to its clients overseas as quickly as they needed it, and desperately needed help speeding up that process (at least they were honest on that claim). A description of the local agent job position, as sent to this woman, is available here.

Last Thursday, she received a deposit of more than $9,900, with instructions to wire all but about $500 (her 5 percent "commission") via Western Union to a bank account in Ukraine. The woman said she began to grow suspicious that "something wasn't right about the whole thing," and only wired $3,000 of the money. After being contacted by Security Fix about the scam, she learned from her bank that her account was frozen. Her bank assured her if she could come in and produce the e-mails showing she'd been caught up in a scam, they might be able to work something out.

The second woman I spoke with, a 27-year-old single mom, also from Florida, was not so lucky. She had more than $9,700 transferred into her checking account from Bullitt County's bank by the fraudsters on Monday. She pulled nearly all of that amount out of her bank almost immediately, wiring nearly $9,200 to the scammers in the Ukraine. Shortly after that, her bank reversed the initial $9,700 deposit at the request of Bullitt County's bank. Her bank now says she is on the hook for that amount: her checking account balance is now almost $9,000 in the red.

Here are a couple of observations and tips so you don't get scammed, however obvious they may be:

- Avoid responding to job offers sent via e-mail. If you use job search Web sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, at least be aware that criminal gangs use these sites also, to recruit the desperate, unwary, and the greedy.

- If you get in bed with a company that you haven't even researched on Google, expect to regret that decision: A search on Fairlove Delivery Service returns little but page after page of complaints from other job searchers scammed by these criminals.

- Avoid clicking on links in e-mails that you are not expecting, and be particularly wary of any e-mail that warns of dire consequences unless you act or respond immediately. The malware used to infect Bullitt County's computers was part of a huge Zeus/Zbot spam campaign that has been ongoing for the past several weeks now, variously disguised as alerts about greeting cards, package tracking numbers, and security updates from Microsoft.

- The last time I wrote about money mule scams, some readers wrote in to say, in effect: "The mules were stupid: They should have just taken ALL of the money." These readers miss the fundamental point about these scams that the bad guys understand all too well: it's all about the timing. The bank will always recall the deposit. It's just a matter of when.

- Be extremely wary -- nay, run away from -- any transaction in which the other party asks you to convert a revocable transaction into an irrevocable one. Hard cash sent via Western Union, Moneygram and other wire transfer services, is an example of an irrevocable transaction: Once it's done, there's no undoing it. On the other hand, checks can be canceled, and deposits can be reversed.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sec...d_part_ii.html





Official: NKorea Believed Behind Cyber Attacks
AP

South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces in South Korea committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. Web sites, a lawmaker's aide said Wednesday.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the U.S. Independence Day holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems.

On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South ''were behind'' the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the information. He refused to allow the name of the lawmaker he works for to be published.

The National Intelligence Service -- South Korea's main spy agency -- said it couldn't immediately confirm the report.

Earlier Wednesday, the agency said in a statement that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack.

The agency said it believed the attack was ''thoroughly'' prepared and committed by hackers ''at the level of a certain organization or state.'' It said it was cooperating with the American investigative authorities to examine the case.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

South Korean media reported in May that North Korea was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service.

An initial investigation in South Korea found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries.

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.

Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. Police officer Jeong Seok-hwa said that could take several days.

Some of the South Korean sites remained unstable or inaccessible on Wednesday. The site of the presidential Blue House could be accessed, but those for the Defense Ministry, the ruling Grand National Party and the National Assembly could not.

Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. The alleged attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites, she said.

South Korea's Defense Ministry and Blue House said Wednesday that there has been no leak of any documents.

The paralysis took place because of denial of service attacks, in which floods of computers all try to connect to a single site at the same time, overwhelming the server that handles the traffic, the South Korean agency said in a statement.

The agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors, said spokeswoman Ahn.

------

Associated Press writers Wanjin Park in Seoul and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...er-Attack.html





Cyber Attacks May Not Have Come from North Korea
Clare Baldwin and Jim Christie

Cybersecurity analysts raised doubts on Wednesday that the North Korean state launched recent attacks on U.S. government and South Korean websites, saying industrial spies or pranksters could be the villains.

More than two dozen websites in the United States and South Korea, including that of the U.S. State Department, were attacked in recent days.

South Korea's spy agency has said North Korea may be behind the attacks, while the U.S. government has said it is too soon to make such claims -- and Internet security experts agree.

The implications of a state-sponsored attack are severe, said SecureITExperts' Mark Rasch, who led the U.S. Department of Justice computer crimes unit from 1983 to 1991.

"There's no difference between dropping a logic bomb and dropping a TNT bomb in the law of war," he said, but added that while North Korea could have been behind the maneuvers, they did not appear to be coming from computers physically located in the reclusive Asian country.

"This is not something that your average 'script kitty' can do. On the other hand it doesn't require it to be state-sponsored," Rasch said.

The relatively simple "denial of service" attacks aim to overwhelm computers with requests for information. They are designed primarily to disrupt systems rather than penetrate and obtain data, analysts said. They are also difficult to trace.

The attacks could have been a "shot across the bow" by North Korea, the computer equivalent of its recent missile launches, but could also have been conjured up by hackers looking to make quick money or secure bragging rights.

They also could mask malicious activity like inserting spyware or malware computer programs that could later be activated, analysts said.

Mercenaries For Hire

The attacks began on July 4th, the U.S. Independence Day holiday.

But Rodger Baker, Stratfor's director of East Asia analysis, pointed out the date is also close to the anniversary of the death of North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung and North Korean missile launches, which might lend some credence to speculation that the country was behind the attacks.

Other analysts shied away from pinpointing North Korea and said the attacks could be financially motivated.

"There's a trillion dollars in economic losses sustained due to hacking every year, not just financial data theft but also industrial espionage," Core Security Technologies' Tom Kellermann said.

"You're seeing a massive community of mercenaries for hire who are leveraging their computer skill sets, particularly in this global recession, the laid off IT professionals et cetera that are leveraging their attack capabilities and their technological experience to break in and out of systems."

Analysts struggled to explain why North Korea would launch such an unsophisticated attack. Despite its financial strains, the country has a cyber warfare unit and a "hacking academy," Kellermann said.

"In our experience, state-sponsored events are under the radar," said Mandiant executive Mike Malin.

"If you were going to launch a sophisticated attack, you wouldn't warn people with this kind of attack. This woke up all the network defenders and you lose the element of surprise," said James Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

(Editing by John O'Callaghan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...5680C220090709





PCs Could be Hit Next in Web Attack: South Korea
Jon Herskovitz

Cyber attacks slowing U.S. and South Korean websites could enter a new phase on Friday by attacking personal computers and wiping out hard disks, a South Korean government agency and web security firm said.

North Korea was originally a prime suspect for launching the cyber attacks, but the isolated state was not named on a list of websites from five countries where the attacks may have originated, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said.

The attacks targeting dozens of government and business sites in South Korea and the United States did not cause major damage or security breaches, experts said, but the KCC warned a new phase at 1500 GMT on Friday could cause severe damage to PCs.

Leading South Korean web security firm Ahnlab, which has closely examined the attacks, said the new phase would target data on tens of thousands of infected personal computers.

"The affected computers will not be able to boot and their storage files will be disabled," said Lee Byung-cheol of Ahnlab.

Almost all of the websites that were out of service this week, including the South's Defense Ministry, were up and running while Lee said the damage to Internet locations was dwindling due to better safeguards.

Five Countries Named

The KCC said host websites believed behind the original attacks were based in Germany, Austria, Georgia, the United States and South Korea. The location of the hackers behind the attacks was still unknown, it said.

South Korean MPs briefed by the National Intelligence Service said although websites in North Korea were not on the list, Pyongyang was still considered a suspect, Yonhap news agency said.

Internet access is denied to almost everyone in impoverished North Korea, a country that cannot produce enough electricity to light its cities at night. Intelligence sources say leader Kim Jong-il launched a cyber warfare unit several years ago.

Some analysts have questioned the North's involvement, saying it may be the work of industrial spies or pranksters.

The attacks will likely be seen by the North's leadership as a victory for Kim Jong-il -- even if Pyongyang was not involved -- because they added a new dimension to the threats posed by the state, which rattled regional security with a nuclear test in May and ballistic missile tests last week.

The attacks saturated target websites with access requests generated by malicious software planted on personal computers. This overwhelmed some targeted sites and slowed server response to legitimate traffic.

The so-called "distributed denial of service" hacking attack spreads viruses on PCs, turning them into zombies to simultaneously connect to specific sites, unbeknown to owners, experts said.

U.S. officials would not speculate on who might be behind the attacks but noted that U.S. government websites face attacks or scams "millions of times" a day.

(Additional reporting by Rhee So-eui and Christine Kim; Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...56709E20090710





China Tightens Web Screws After Xinjiang Riot
Ben Blanchard

China clamped down on the Internet in the capital of China's northwestern region of Xinjiang on Monday, in the hope of stemming the flow of information about ethnic unrest which left 140 people dead.

The government has blamed Sunday's riots in Urumqi -- the deadliest unrest since the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations -- on exiled Muslim separatists.

Some residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang's regional capital, said they had been told there would be no Internet access for 48 hours.

"Since yesterday evening I haven't been able to get online," store owner Han Zhenyu told Reuters by telephone.

"No Internet here. Friends said they cannot log on, either," said a mobile phone seller who gave only his surname, Zhang.

The websites of the Urumqi city and Xinjiang regional governments were also down.

But the government appears to have thrown the net even wider, with users in capital Beijing and financial hub Shanghai complaining social networking site Twitter has also been blocked.

Fanfou.com, a domestic competitor of Twitter, was still accessible, though searches for key words such as "Urumqi," "Xinjiang" and "Uighur" gave no results.

China has previously shut down communications in parts of Tibet, where ethnic unrest had erupted or was feared, and ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, as the government seeks to control the release of news through only official state media.

Yet in China, where a computer-savvy youth has embraced the Internet with enthusiasm, the government has not been able to control all the information seeping out of Xinjiang.

"The incident has largely subsided, but armored cars were still in town this morning," one user, who said he was in Urumqi, wrote on Fanfou.com.

Several popular sites showed images claiming to be from the riots -- including one of a badly-mutilated body whose head had been almost hacked off.

Reuters has not been able to verify the authenticity of the pictures, many of which, like the one of the dead body, were removed after only a short time on the Internet.

Still, other Internet users took to the Web to express their anger over the riots.

"Resolutely smash the splitist forces and terrorists!" wrote on person on sina.com.cn, underneath a news report showing pictures of palls of black smoke enveloping Urumqi.

Yet the censor has also been working fast to remove most of the comments about the violence in Xinjiang, apparently to prevent ethnic hatred from spreading or Internet users questioning government policies toward regions populated by ethnic minorities.

By early afternoon, the bulletin board on Shanghai site pchome.net had numerous comments about the unrest, but they all vanished a few hours later, and replaced with the line: "This posting does not exist."

(Additional reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison and Yu Le in Beijing; Editing by Benjamin Kang Lim and Sanjeev Miglani)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5651K420090706





Some PC Makers Voluntarily Supply Web Filter in China
Joe Mcdonald

Several PC makers were including controversial Internet-filtering software with computers shipped in China on Thursday despite a government decision to postpone its plan to make such a step mandatory.

Beijing's decision this week to delay the requirement that the filtering software — known as Green Dam — be preinstalled or supplied on disk with all computers sold in China averted a possible trade clash with the United States and Europe. But the move by some makers to include the software anyway could reignite complaints by Chinese Web users.

Also Thursday, a government newspaper said regulators will revive the plan to make Green Dam mandatory at some point, a move that would disappoint opponents who hoped the government would drop the effort.

Taiwan's Acer — the world's No. 3 PC maker — Sony and China's Haier said they were shipping Green Dam on disks with computers for sale in China. China's Lenovo, the No. 4 producer, said it would offer the software preinstalled or on disk. Taiwan's Asus said it was preparing to supply Green Dam disks with PCs. Taiwanese laptop maker BenQ said the system was on the hard drives of its computers.

Acer was supplying Green Dam because disks were already packed with PCs before the government postponed the plan, which had been due to take effect Wednesday, said a company spokeswoman, Meng Lei. Lenovo also said it was going ahead with plans made before the Green Dam order was postponed.

Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard, the world's top PC manufacturer, said it was working with the U.S. government to get more information and declined to comment further. No. 2 Dell said it was not including Green Dam with its PCs.

Chinese authorities said the software is needed to shield children from violent and obscene material online. But experts who examined it said Green Dam also would block material the government deemed politically unacceptable.

Sony said it does not know how long it will continue to supply the software.

An official of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quoted Thursday by the China Daily said regulators will revive the plan to make Green Dam mandatory.

"The government will definitely carry on the directive on Green Dam. It's just a matter of time," the unidentified official was quoted as saying.

Beijing operates extensive Internet filters to block access to material considered obscene or subversive. Still, Chinese Web users were outraged by Green Dam, which would have raised screening to a new level by putting it on every computer.

Green Dam already is in use in Chinese Internet cafes, and manufacturers say it has been supplied since early this year with PCs sold under a government program to subsidize appliance purchases in the countryside.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12742073





Democrats Say C.I.A. Deceived Congress for Years
Scott Shane

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta’s disclosure in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

A White House statement released on Wednesday said the proposed expansion of briefings would undermine “a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters.” Democrats have complained that under President George W. Bush, entire programs were hidden from most committee members for years.

The question of the C.I.A.’s candor with the Congressional oversight committees has been hotly disputed since Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to disclose in a 2002 briefing that it had used waterboarding against a terrorism suspect. Ms. Pelosi said the agency routinely misled Congress, though she later said she intended to fault the Bush administration rather than career intelligence officials.

Since then, Republicans have called Ms. Pelosi’s complaint an unwarranted attack on the integrity of counterterrorism officers and have demanded an investigation. Democrats have rebuffed the demand.

In a statement Wednesday night, a C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, noted that the agency “took the initiative to notify the oversight committees” about the past failures. He said the agency and Mr. Panetta “believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/us...s/09intel.html





Spammers Shorten Their URLs
Brad Stone

Shortened URLs are great for character-conscious Tweeters, marketers who want to track Web site visitors, and even perhaps an opportunity for venture capitalists who are investing in companies such as Bit.ly.

But they are also providing a boon to spammers.

MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, said today the presence of shortened URLs in spam had skyrocketed over the last few days and now appears in more than 2 percent of all spam.

The company says that the dozens of new URL-shortening services are allowing spammers to evade anti-spam tools that aim at Web domains known for sending spam. The services also inadvertently help spammers trick Internet users who would normally be wary of domain names like, say, Spammy.ru.

Spammers have long relied on redirecting services to mask their URLs. However, the URL-shortening services, which are free and require no registration, save them from having to register for a redirect site and, in some cases, solve a distorted-word puzzle (commonly called a “captcha”) to mask their domain name.

Matt Sergeant, an anti-spam technologist at Message Labs, said the culture of Twitter — with people urgently retweeting links, often without even clicking on them — is sure to contribute to the spam problem in the months ahead. “The entire trust model of clicking on the URL is completely broken,” he said. “You can’t trust any URL on there.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...heir-urls/?hpw





Dell Launches Digital Forensics Service for Police

Dell Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of personal computers, launched a package of hardware, software and services on Tuesday designed to help police convict more criminals as digital evidence proliferates.

The company said its digital-forensics package would help police reduce backlogs that can be as long as two years as it would allow multiple analysts to work simultaneously on the same data while preserving an audit trail of evidence-handling.

The package, launched with partners including Intel, gives customers tools to build and host their own datacentre, meaning they can have the convenience of so-called cloud computing while keeping control of it themselves.

James Quarles, Dell's head of public-sector marketing in Europe, told Reuters that customers remotely accessing criminal evidence in parallel from such datacenters could gain a crucial time advantage, for example when legally constrained as to how long they could hold terrorism suspects without evidence.

Dell reorganized its operations at the end of last year to group them around customer segments, one of which was the public sector, instead of around geographical regions, and said on Tuesday this had helped its new digital-forensics push.

Josh Claman, head of Dell's European public-sector business, said in a blog the new product "embodies everything we wanted to achieve when we decided to restructure the way Public Sector customers' needs are addressed." (en.community.dell.com/blogs)

Dell made about $15 billion in sales to the public sector last year, including hospitals, government, education and defense -- about a quarter of its total revenue.

The company cited estimates by research firm IDC that the U.S. digital-forensics market would be worth $630 million this year, up from $252 million in 2004, while the international market would be worth $1.8 billion by 2011.

Apart from chipmaker Intel, partners in Dell's offering include data-storage gear maker EMC Corp, business-software maker Oracle Corp, security-software maker Symantec Corp and privately held digital-forensics specialist AccessData.

Dell will present the new service to Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by David Holmes and Hans Peters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5660RN20090707





Inquiry Begun on Hacking Cases at Murdoch Papers
John F. Burns and Alan Cowell

Britain’s most senior police officer said Thursday he had ordered a preliminary inquiry into reports by The Guardian newspaper that Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary paid about $1.6 million to settle court cases involving allegations that its reporters worked with private investigators to hack into the cellphone messages of numerous public figures.

Among those whose cellphones were tapped or hacked into were the former deputy prime minister and at least one other cabinet minister, The Guardian reported.

The Guardian’s report was denied by Mr. Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns the Fox Broadcasting Company in the United States as well as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. Bloomberg News quoted Mr. Murdoch as saying on Wednesday that he was not aware of any payments made to settle legal cases in which the company’s reporters in Britain might have been involved in criminal activity.

“If that had happened, I would know about it,” he said.

On Thursday, Sir Paul Stephenson, the head of Scotland Yard, said he had assigned an assistant commissioner, John Yates, to “establish the facts” about the case “and look into the detail,” according to the Press Association news agency, quoting Sky News, which is also part of Mr. Murdoch’s media empire.

“I think we have got a track record of doing exactly what we are supposed to do,” Mr. Stephenson was quoted as saying. “If we need to investigate, we will investigate. We will do the right thing and do what we have to do to investigate crime wherever it exists.”

Mr. Yates is a senior officer named in April as the head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard. He achieved prominence earlier when he conducted a lengthy, but inconclusive, inquiry into allegations that the ruling Labor party traded honors for political donations.

The Guardian report could not be independently verified. The newspaper cited an unnamed “senior source” at Scotland Yard as saying that staff members at News International, the Murdoch subsidiary that owns four major newspapers in Britain, including The Times of London, The Sunday Times and two tabloids, The News of the World and The Sun, had used private investigators to hack into “thousands” of cellphones to obtain confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized telephone bills. It cited another source “with knowledge of the police findings” as saying that the investigators had tapped “two or three thousand” cellphones.

The Guardian article, citing those sources, said that the targets of the hacking included John Prescott, who was deputy to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a cabinet member, Tessa Jowell, as well as lawmakers from all three of Britain’s major political parties. Accessing stored phone messages covertly is illegal in Britain, except for the police or intelligence agencies acting with a warrant.

“I find it staggering that there could be a list known to the police of people who had their phone tapped,” said Mr. Prescott on Thursday. “I’m named as one of them. For such a criminal act not to be reported to me, and for action not to be taken against the people who have done it, reflects very badly on the police and I want to know their answer.”

The Guardian said Scotland Yard files also showed that the newspapers had used private investigators to approach government agencies, banks, phone companies and other agencies that, the paper said, were conned into handing over confidential information on politicians, actors, athletes, musicians and television presenters, all of whom are named in the files. The Guardian said the files named 31 reporters working for The News of the World and The Sun in connection with the operation.

In the past few months, Britain has been rocked by scandals related to the use of expense accounts by members of Parliament, but The Guardian did not explain how or if the information it obtained was used, or if it had any relation to the scandals.

The Guardian article caused an immediate uproar, with demands from politicians and others for the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to order a police investigation and to explain why earlier police inquiries had not resulted in any action against the Murdoch-owned papers.

Simon Hughes, a prominent lawmaker for the Liberal Democrats, an opposition party, who was among those named by the paper as having had their cellphone messages tapped, said that if The Guardian’s story was accurate, those responsible should be “severely punished.” He told the BBC that The Guardian’s revelations amounted to “a very big warning bell” of the damage that could be done by exploiting the possibilities of “the new data-centered age.”

The Guardian cited no sources for its claim that News International, the Murdoch subsidiary, had paid £1 million, about $1.6 million, in damages and legal costs to three people involved in professional soccer in Britain, including about $1.1 million to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.

The Guardian said the financial settlements in Britain were accompanied by clauses that prevented the people receiving the money from speaking about the cases. Such confidentiality clauses are common in many settlements. It said the settlements arose from disclosures that emerged from a trial of two private investigators working for the Murdoch-owned News of the World who served brief prison terms after being convicted in 2007 for hacking into cellphone messages.

One of the men convicted, Clive Goodman, was found to have accessed more than 600 messages on cellphones used by members of the royal family. The other man, Glenn Mulcaire, a former professional soccer player, admitted that he had hacked into the cellphone of Mr. Taylor, head of the soccer association, as well as those of the model Elle Macpherson and Max Clifford, a public relations agent.

In documents submitted to the High Court in London during the trial of Mr. Goodman and Mr. Mulcaire, executives of News International said The News of the World’s editors and reporters had not been involved in any way in the phone tapping.

But the controversy stirred by The Guardian could reach into the highest ranks of Mr. Murdoch’s empire. Several senior executives at News International or The News of the World were named by The Guardian as having denied knowledge of the tapping during the Goodman-Mulcaire trials.

John F. Burns reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/wo...10britain.html





Court: IP Addresses Are Not 'Personally Identifiable' Information
Wendy Davis

In a ruling that could fuel debate about online privacy, a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information.

"In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision.

Jones issued the ruling in the context of a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers against Microsoft stemming from an update that automatically installed new anti-piracy software. In that case, which dates back to 2006, consumers alleged that Microsoft violated its user agreement by collecting IP addresses in the course of the updates. The consumers argued that Microsoft's user agreement only allowed the company to collect information that does not personally identify users. Microsoft argued that IP addresses do not identify users because the addresses don't include people's names or addresses. The company also said that it did not combine IP addresses with other information that could link them to individuals.

Last month, Jones sided with Microsoft and dismissed the case before trial.

But some say that Jones's decision about IP addresses is inconsistent with other recent opinions about the issue. Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, points out that the European Union considers IP addresses to be personal information. Last year, the EU said that search engines should expunge users' IP addresses as soon as possible.

Additionally, a court in New Jersey ruled last year that Internet service providers can't disclose users' IP addresses without a subpoena, on the theory that people expect their IP addresses will be kept private.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, criticizes the Microsoft ruling as "a silly decision." "The judge didn't understand the significance of the IP address or the reason that it was collected," he says.

Rotenberg adds that the judge prematurely dismissed the case, arguing that more facts were needed to determine whether IP addresses were personally identifiable.

Today, industry observers say that IP addresses can be combined with other information to determine people's identity. In addition, even when IP addresses have been anonymized, it's possible to associate the account with a specific individual, given enough other information. The most famous example occurred in 2006, when AOL released search logs showing queries made by more than 650,000 members. The members' IP addresses had been changed, but the queries themselves contained enough clues to people's identities that The New York Times was able to find and profile one "anonymized" user, Thelma Arnold, within days. At the time of that incident, many companies took the position that IP addresses were not personally identifiable information.

Jules Polonetsky, co-chair and director of the think tank Future of Privacy Forum, adds that many sites with older privacy policies maintain that they don't collect personally identifiable information, but log IP addresses. "For many years, people just threw around the term 'personal information,'" he says. "They didn't pay attention to account IDs in the hands of third parties, IP addresses -- other types of information that, with some effort, could become identifiable."

Polonetsky says that companies today are rewriting privacy policies to more carefully define their terms, adding that many in the industry now view IP addresses as more sensitive than completely random data.
http://www.mediapost.com/publication...art_aid=109242





Nothing Wins The Justice: Video Games, The First Amendment, and Obscenity
Nikhil B. Baliga

Censorship. Just say that word in front of hard core gamers, particularly on a forum which grants anonymity, and you’ll likely get a stream of profanity laden rants against “fascists” and “Christians” wiping their collective asses with the First Amendment. Indeed, with every new violent game, whether the game is a great one or a repulsively stupid one, the back and forth is largely the same. What gets lost in the discussions of censorship, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), and fragile young minds is what the law and the courts have come to decide about the rapidly growing video games industry. This column will attempt to address these issues by examining case law and legal opinion on video games and the government’s power to regulate and censor them.

Are Video Games Protected By The First Amendment?

What well intentioned, but usually ill informed, video game advocates often assume is that video games are constitutionally protected free speech. While there can be no doubt that video games are speech, the Supreme Court has stated that not all speech is constitutionally protected.[1] The early years of video games were rife with decisions that equated the rather primitive games of the time equalto pinball machines and board games, which do not receive First Amendment protection.”[2]

This would change in the last decade as the level of interactivity and graphics increased. The courts would address these questions most prominently in the case American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick.[3] In AAMA, the plaintiffs, the creators of several arcade games, sued to prevent the enforcement of an Indianapolis ordinance that forbade an unaccompanied minor to enter an arcade with five or more machines that were deemed “harmful to minors."

The court reasoned that recognized forms of free speech, like literature, have long had violence as a central theme, whether it was Homer’s Odyssey, Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Stoker’s Dracula. Video games with violent story lines and themes, therefore, should not be held to a different standard than works of literature. Additionally, it rejected that video games should be held to a different standard because of their interactivity.

All literature … is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader's own.[4]

The court went on to describe how the arcade version of House of the Dead echoed “age-old themes of literature” including “self-defense, protection of others, dread of the ‘undead,’ [and] fighting against overwhelming odds.” [5] Why, then, should House of the Dead be afforded less protection than books or movies? The court couldn’t find a reason and sided with the plaintiffs, preventing the enforcement of the ordinance.

The decision in AAMA would later be expanded in Interactive Digital Software Association v. St. Louis County [6] which explicitly stated that “the first amendment shields video games as they would [paintings, poems, and music],” and that “[the court] is obliged to recognize that violent video games are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.” [7]

What Is Obscenity Law?

All in all, it would seem that the court has sided with the video game industry: Modern video games, with their stories, characters, and themes, are protected by the First Amendment like movies and books would be. However, not all movies and books are afforded the same protection. Specifically, speech meeting the definition of “obscenity,” among other types of speech, are not protected by the First Amendment. [8] While merely possessing obscene materials is not a crime[9], producing, selling, importing, transporting, or mailing obscene materials are federal offenses and the material can be seized.[10]

The legal definition of obscenity was defined by the Supreme Court in Miller v. California[11] a case that led to what is known as the Miller Test. The Miller Test had the work in question judged on three different criteria:

“(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”[12]

Only if all three criteria are met can the work be deemed “obscene.” Recently, the statute involving production and distribution of obscenity was found unconstitutional in a federal district court on privacy grounds. However, the ruling was reversed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the law to remain on the books.[13]

Additionally, a law passed in 2003 criminalized the possession, receiving, and/or distribution of visual descriptions (i.e. cartoons and drawings) that “depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct”[14] essentially putting such works in the category of “obscenity” but with the same penalties afforded to those convicted of possession, receiving, and/or distribution of child pornography.[15]

Recently, this law was used to indict a man who bought manga (Japanese comic books), which included drawings of sex with minors, imported from Japan.[16] The court found no issue with the statute, provided the material “passed” the Miller Test, and allowed the indictments to stand. This generated a stir with the prominent Comic Book Legal Defense Fund because unlike a previous case[17] the images in question were not digitally morphed nor were the charges coupled with those for real child pornography.

How Does Obscenity Law Apply To Video Games?

This question is a tough one for the very good reason that no video game developer or publisher has ever been prosecuted for obscenity related to video games. As we have seen, if the medium of video games are held to the same standard as literature and film then, presumably, they can also be held to be obscene.

One of the reasons for the lack of obscenity prosecution against video game developers and publishers is that the courts have limited obscenity to sexual content only. In fact, the courts have gone so far as to specifically reject calls to alter the definition of “obscenity” to include violent content in video games. [18]

The other major reason is the vast majority of video games sold in the United States have only small amounts of sexual content thanks to the Electronic Software Rating Board (ESRB).[19] The refusal of major retailers, such as Walmart and Gamestop, to stock games rated “Adults Only” by the ESRB creates a financial handicap; almost ensuring that no game will be produced by a major developer that will test the boundaries of the Miller Test for obscenity.[20]

Of course, these factors do not completely eliminate the possibility of an obscenity prosecution against video games. In Japan, there is a genre of erotic games, known as eroge, which can range from high school dating sims to games with very dark themes including sexual slavery, impregnation, and rape. Although somewhat popular there, in American and Europe eroge has recently made headlines when it was discovered that one title, Rapelay, was being sold through Amazon Marketplace (which sells items through third party sellers). While not the only eroge game available on Amazon, it did have a rape “theme” that included enslaving a woman and her two young daughters, both underage with the younger about ten years old, and raping them until they came to “enjoy” it.[21]

As stated earlier, there is a precedent where the indictment importer of sexually charged manga, including sex with underage children, was allowed to withstand constitutional scrutiny. Therefore, it is quite possible that a U.S. Attorney could bring an obscenity indictment against the developers or distributors of a game like Rapelay. On the other hand, whether Rapelay, or a similar game, could pass the Miller Test to the satisfaction of a jury is another story that, hopefully, we won’t have to see any time soon.

Special thanks to Julie Bruffee and Will Ruggerio who contributed to this article.
http://gametopius.com/index.php/vide...4-nwtjobcenity




Net Filtering a $33m Waste: Child Groups
Fran Foo

CHILD rights groups have come out in force to criticise the Rudd Labor government's controversial plan to censor the internet, saying the scheme will divert around $33 million away from more effective ways of tackling online child pornography.

In a joint statement with lobby group GetUp, both Save the Children Australia and the National Children's & Youth Law Centre believe the resources could be better spent on law enforcement agencies battling to eradicate child pornography on the internet.

GetUp national director Simon Sheikh said the mandatory filter won't work on most of the content it is intended to block, and that would be money down the drain.

“Protecting children online is crucial but the government's command and control approach will miss the vast majority of content it intends to stop," he said.

"Around $33 million each year will be wasted on a futile and fundamentally flawed scheme.”

Mr Sheikh estimates the sum could fund 300 extra police officers to fight online child pornography.

National Children's & Youth Law Centre director James McDougall echoed his sentiments.

"The tens of millions of dollars that such a scheme will cost should instead be diverted to appropriate child protection authorities and police to prevent the abuse of children," Mr McDougall said.

"It should go towards effective community-based education strategies that give children and parents the skills to protect themselves."

Save the Children child rights specialist Annie Pettit said it would be better to educate children about the dangers of the internet.

"Educating children about safe internet use is a more effective and sustainable way of protecting them from cyber crime than the proposed internet filter," Ms Petit said.

“Teaching children how to recognise and steer clear of inappropriate online content is a more proactive and powerful way to shield them from internet crime."

GetUp, internet users, privacy advocates and even Young Labor NSW are against the proposed filter, currently on trial by nine ISPs including Optus and Unwired.

The trial results are expected to be handed to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy in late August or early September. The original deadline was by early August.

Senator Conroy told itnews.com.au that since ISPs didn't have a uniform start and completion date, the report would take another six to eight weeks.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Legal Challenge to Web Child Abuse Inquiry

Claim that hundreds were convicted through flawed credit card evidence
Sandra Laville

One of Britain's biggest online paedophile inquiries is to be challenged in the court of appeal amid allegations from campaigners that hundreds of men have been wrongly convicted in a mass miscarriage of justice.

For more than two years a small group of experts have claimed that Operation Ore, the police inquiry into thousands of British men, was tainted because the database at the centre of the investigation contained evidence of widespread credit card fraud. Their allegations will be tested for the first time in the appeal court within weeks, when a judge examines a test case that could expose a huge miscarriage of justice, lawyers say.

The single judge will decide whether the case should go to a full appeal.

Chris Saltrese, the solicitor representing the convicted man, Anthony O'Shea, said: "If his appeal is successful the convictions of others for the same offence will fall too. We are talking in the hundreds and we say this is a huge miscarriage of justice."

An estimated 39 men have killed themselves as a result of being arrested and prosecuted during the Ore inquiry, and the details of every individual who was convicted or cautioned have been placed on the sex offenders register.

Senior officers in Ceop, the child exploitation and online protection unit, who co-ordinated the inquiry, have been anticipating the test case for some time. They are adamant that Ore was an extremely successful operation, which led to more than 2,600 British men who downloaded images of child abuse, or attempted to, being brought to justice. The vast majority of them pleaded guilty.

Operation Ore began in 2001 after the conviction in America of a couple behind Landslide Inc, an online trading company that provided access to adult pornography and child abuse images.

US investigators passed the names of 7,100 Britons on the Landslide database to the national criminal intelligence service, a forerunner of Ceop.

The last prosecutions in Ore took place earlier this year.

O'Shea's case is one of an estimated 200 or more involving men who were convicted of incitement to distribute indecent images of children. A father of two, he was jailed for five months in 2005 for two counts of incitement to distribute indecent photographs of children and three of attempted incitement to distribute indecent images. A lesser charge than possession, incitement was used in those cases where someone's details were on the Landslide database but there were no images found on the suspect's computer or in his home.

O'Shea's home was raided in 2002 but no images were found. Saltrese said his case was that he accessed adult pornography but that his legal team would produce evidence that his credit card had been fraudulently used to access a paedophile site within Landslide.

At the time the card was used O'Shea was at a festival in the south-west of England, Saltrese said.

Ceop says its figures suggest that 161 individuals were convicted of incitement, with 68% pleading guilty. But Saltrese, who represents dozens of those convicted, believes the figure could be much higher. A separate campaign group says that it is dealing with the cases of more than 80 men.

"I have clients who have lost everything: their jobs, their homes, their marriages, their children and their health," Saltrese said.

He and his experts have been able to get a copy of the Landslide database – which was never disclosed in full to the defence teams in Ore cases.

"It is absolutely riddled with fraud," he said. "We are not just talking about isolated incidents here. In some cases clients did make a complaint to their credit card companies that they had been the victims of fraud, in others they didn't, but that is kind of by the by – even if they hadn't made a complaint we say the evidence against them is unreliable."

But other experts who worked closely with the police during the Ore inquiry and with defence teams strongly dispute the case put by Saltrese and his team.

Professor Peter Sommer, a leading expert in computer crime, said: "There were very high levels of correlation between people having subscribed to that website and people being found in possession with child abuse images.

"In the incitement cases they did not just use the details on the database as a reason to prosecute. They went to the individual's bank to confirm that transactions had taken place, they checked whether the individual had ever complained that his card had been used fraudulently. They did not charge everyone they investigated."

He said that although the defence teams were not allowed access to the whole database, experts had been given access to parts of it. "I am not saying there may not be individual cases where the convictions might be unsafe but to say there was widespread fraud and a widespread miscarriage of justice does not to my mind stand up."

Brian Underhill, the computer expert who travelled to America to copy the Landslide database for the police as part of the Ore inquiry, told the Guardian: "It's been two years since the allegation of widespread credit card fraud was put forward and I have yet to see a fragment of tangible evidence to support the allegation."

Ceop said that Operation Ore had involved an unprecedented number of cases, each of which was tested several times to ensure the validity of the intelligence and evidence before a prosecution was brought.

It said in a statement: "No evidence of widespread or endemic fraud has ever been found in relation to cases pursued to prosecution as part of Operation Ore. The veracity of any evidence to contradict this should be tested in the criminal justice environment.

"To the best of our knowledge all incitement cases included additional evidence to support the prosecution beyond simple, single credit card details.

"At the time of Operation Ore, individuals were suspected of subscribing to a website offering child abuse images. Those who had would have provided personal data to a registration page ... name, postal address, email address, a personal password and their credit card details ... The IP address of the subscriber may have been captured by the system.

"We would have expected that once a defendant had raised the possibility of being a victim of credit card fraud, inquiries would be undertaken in order to ascertain if that was correct."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/ju...uiry-challenge





Woman Accused of Targeting Girl, 9, with Craigslist Ad
Laurie Segall

A Long Island, New York, social worker is facing two misdemeanor charges after allegedly posting a sexually suggestive ad on Craigslist that gave interested parties the home phone number of a 9-year-old girl.

The sexually suggestive ad allowed parties to get a number for a 9-year-old girl.

According to prosecutors, Margery Tannenbaum posted the ad to get revenge after an argument between her daughter and the girl, who attend the same school in Hauppauge, New York.

On Thursday, Tannenbaum was arraigned on charges of aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a minor. She pleaded not guilty and will appear in court later this month.

Officials told CNN affiliate News 12 in Long Island that the Craigslist ad read "I need a little affection... I'm blond, I'm cute and I'll be waiting."

Interested parties were directed to an e-mail address where they were given the girl's name and home phone number. Callers were unaware they were trying to reach a 9-year-old.

According to Suffolk County authorities, the mother of the girl intercepted calls before her daughter answered. She said she received 22 calls in one day, in all around 40 calls from various men who saw the ad, including some seeking an escort service. After Craigslist was issued a subpoena, authorities said they were able to track the account to Tannenbaum.

In court documents read aloud by Suffolk District Attorney Tom Spota, the 9-year-old's mother described one of the phone calls she received from a man responding to the ad.

She said, "This is her mother. Can I help you?" The male replied, "Oh. Hot lady lives with foxy mamma?"

The caller hung up after the girl's mother told him the "hot girl" he was referring to was 9 years old.

When asked about the case, Tannenbaum's attorney, Tad Scharfenberg, said, "I think this has been blown out of proportion to what the actual alleged act was."

He described Tannenbaum as "a well-loved woman by both family and friends," and said she was a classroom mom at her daughter's school.

"She's never been in any trouble for anything before," Scharfenberg said. "She's just really upset by the whole thing. Her biggest concern has always been that this not materially affect the victim or her child. She wants to make sure the way it's being handled doesn't make that worse."

In an interview with News 12, the victim's mother said she was "horrified."

"It's scary to think that someone would take any issue and attack your child."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/03/...irl/index.html





Domain Bids Start Internet Porn Row
Andrew Colley

A BIDDING war for the rights to operate adult-theme generic top-level domains (GTLDs) is expected to stir debate over internet red light districts.

The world's peak internet regulator rejected a US internet name registry's proposal to establish one such district under the top-level domain .xxx in May 2006 after it attracted protests by both porn industry groups and Christian lobbyists.

But Australia's top-level-domain registry operator AusRegistry has confirmed it has been approached by several parties seeking support for bids to register several adult-themed GTLDs, including .xxx, when the peak names regulator starts accepting them next February.

AusRegistry chief Adrian Kinderis said the registry had been approached by several entities willing to put up the $185,000 fee to register adult-themed names, including .xxx.

Under the new bidding process, non-community-based bids, known as open bids, will go to auction if two or more entities seek control of the same name.

Some of the names could be worth millions to the operators, Mr Kinderis said.

"Steering away from the likes of .sex, I think some names like .adultweb, which would legitimately be going up against .com, could be going for tens of millions of dollars at auction."

Previously the names regulator, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), had limited the availability of TLDs to country codes such as Australia's .au and a handful of others including .org, .com and .net.

In 2005, it opened a process to consider the creation of a number of special TLDs including a plan to allow the US-based ICM Registry to operate .xxx.

ICANN's board rejected the proposal on the grounds that ICM could not demonstrate sufficient adult industry support for the plan. But the new approval process could be looser.

ICANN is finalising its rules for the GTLD applications, but under current plans the bids will not be subject to any decision by its board.

Sectors of the adult entertainment industry and Christian lobbyists are in a rare alliance opposing the creation of internet red light districts.

Christian groups fear it would make it easier for children to find porn on the web.

But Robbie Swan, of Australia's Eros Association, said: "We think the opposite will happen -- once governments are able to corral all adult industries under one domain, they can easily blacklist it."

The EROS Association has already begun lobbying ICANN to block creation of the domains.

Former communications minister Senator Helen Coonan also opposed the creation of the .xxx TLD.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Lights, Camera, Lots of Action. Forget the Script.
Matt Richtel

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread — “vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts.

The industry’s interest in scripted scenes has waxed and waned in recent decades because of changes in technology. In the early 1970s, movies with loose story lines, like “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door,” won a mainstream audience, and others tried to copy their success, selling plot-centric movies to couples watching at home with the VCR technology introduced in 1975.

The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy, said Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.

Mr. Fishbein said plot came into vogue again in the late ’90s with the boom of the DVD. Big studios, he said, figured plots would make their films more appealing to women and encourage couples to bring them into their homes — whether on disc or pay-per-view.

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video.

Mr. Fishbein estimated that pornographic DVD sales and rentals in the United States generated $3.62 billion in 2006 but had fallen as much as 50 percent since then. He says the slump has made some companies reluctant to share sales figures, so his estimates are getting rougher.

The big studios, like Vivid and Digital Playground, have turned to a subscription model, charging monthly fees for access to their Web sites and advertising the frequency with which they add new clips.

Mr. Joone said that of Digital Playground’s 60 productions this year, roughly 30 had little or no plot, up from about 10 two years ago. At Wicked Pictures, which averages one production a week, one-third are essentially just sex, twice as many as a few years ago, said the company’s president, Steve Orenstein.

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” Mr. Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

In lieu of plot, there are themes. Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses.

“It’s almost like we’re back to the late ’70s or early ’80s when the average movie was eight minutes and just a sex scene,” Mr. Hirsch said, sounding wistful.

Some in the industry would prefer their sex with a little more character development.

Ms. Samson, for example, said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles, like the character she played in the 2006 movie “Flasher.”

She said she played a psychotic who, because of the way her mother treated her, “had an obsession with flashing and doing things in public.”

“I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson, whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.

“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/bu...ia/08porn.html





Little People Call for U.S. to Ban 'Midget'
AP

Little people are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to ban the use of the word "midget" on broadcast TV.

The group Little People of America said today the word is just as offensive as racial slurs.

The request was prompted by an April episode of NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice" that the group said was demeaning.

In the episode, contestants created a detergent ad called "Jesse James and the Midgets." The contestants, including Joan Rivers, suggested bathing little people in the detergent and hanging them to dry.

Calls to the FCC and "Celebrity Apprentice" host Donald Trump were not immediately answered today. NBC Universal representatives didn't immediately respond to e-mail messages, and the telephone rang unanswered at their Los Angeles office.
http://www.freep.com/article/2009070...o+ban++midget+





US Food Giant Sues Swedish Filmmaker
David Landes

A Swedish documentary filmmaker has been sued for defamation by US-based banana producer Dole Foods for a new film featuring a Los Angeles lawyer’s fight for Nicaraguan fruit workers.

The film, Bananas!*, depicts the “David versus Goliath” story of efforts by lawyer Juan Dominguez to represent fruit workers who allege they became sterile after Dole sprayed them with a banned pesticide.

“I still never believed that things would go as far as them suing me. Dole came with all these threats before they even saw the film,” said filmmaker Fredrik Gertten to the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

Gertten’s American attorney, Richard J. Lee, criticized Dole’s actions.

“My clients and I believe that this suit is without merit and represents the latest in a continued line of intimidating harassment by a multinational corporation aimed squarely at a small, independent film and its filmmakers,” he said in a statement.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in a Los Angeles Court, Dole claims that Gertten “refused to make any meaningful changes to the film, and persisted in publicly screening it and touting its accuracy in the face of court rulings that the story was false and amounted to ‘extortion’”.

Gertten thinks that Dole’s threat has helped boost interest in the film, but at the same time it requires “huge amounts of energy and costs money”.

The suit follows Dole’s earlier but unsuccessful efforts to block a screening of the film on the sidelines of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“Almost every night I have a conference call with different people and my lawyers in the United States,” Gertten told DN.

In addition to Gertten, the suit also names his production company – WG Film AB in Malmö – and producer Margarete Jangård.
http://www.thelocal.se/20576/20090710/





Analyst Admits to Being ‘Dead Wrong’ After Disney’s ‘Up’ Is Big Earner
Brooks Barnes

A mea culpa, of a sort, came Wednesday from the Wall Street analyst who was the most prominent (but not the lone) prerelease naysayer about “Up,” the Disney-Pixar movie that over the weekend became the studio’s second-highest grossing film ever in North America, after “Finding Nemo.”

“Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. “The recent success of Pixar’s ‘Up’ (well ahead of our forecasts) has renewed investor confidence in Disney’s creative capabilities,” he added. “Up” has so far sold $265.9 million in tickets in North America and $35.4 million overseas, where it has only begun to arrive in theaters.

But Mr. Greenfield stuck with his sell recommendation for the company’s stock, saying he believed the next 12 to 18 months would be “substantially more difficult for Disney than investors are currently anticipating.” He listed industrywide troubles with broadcast television and difficulty cutting more costs in the theme park unit.

Pixar has had an unbroken string of box-office successes since its “Toy Story” revolutionized animated films in 1995, but it has also drawn skepticism from analysts with its risky choices of material. In 2007, there were worries that audiences would not want to see a film about a rat in a kitchen. The next year, concerns were raised about whether audiences would sit still for a film starring two robots that had almost no dialogue for the first half-hour. But both “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” were not only sizable successes, they each won an Oscar for best animated film.

This time around, analysts cited concerns that the lead character of “Up,” a grouchy old man, would not resonate with young audiences, and worried about the absence of major female characters and the lack of interest from retailers.

Since the film’s release, other analysts have been heaping praise on Disney for allowing its Pixar unit to pursue “Up” despite the film’s commercial risk. “Continued affirmation of the Pixar acquisition as financially and strategically sound,” said Anthony J. DiClemente of Barclays Capital in a research note.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/bu...09analyst.html





United States Box Office
Issued Tue Jul 7, 2009

Title/Distributor Wknd. Gross Total Gross # Theaters Last Wk. Days Released
1 TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE..
PARAMOUNT $42320877 $293355885 4234 1 12
2 ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS
TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX $41690382 $66732868 4099 0 5
3 PUBLIC ENEMIES
UNIVERSAL $25271675 $40141080 3334 0 5
4 THE PROPOSAL
WALT DISNEY STUDIOS $12857482 $94335111 3099 2 17
5 THE HANGOVER
WARNER BROS. $11268413 $205038233 3070 3 31
6 UP
WALT DISNEY STUDIOS $6521389 $264816694 2656 4 38
7 MY SISTER'S KEEPER
WARNER BROS. $5788327 $26518582 2606 5 10
8 THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3
SONY PICTURES $2534228 $58508070 1908 7 24
9 YEAR ONE
SONY PICTURES $2323843 $38304392 2240 6 17
10 NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE...
TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX $2043288 $167706959 1419 9 45
11 STAR TREK
PARAMOUNT $1769967 $249838139 1148 8 59
12 AWAY WE GO
FOCUS FEATURES $1098212 $6077303 506 10 31
13 WHATEVER WORKS
SONY CLASSICS $960061 $1911001 353 19 17
14 KAMBAKKHT ISHQ
EROS ENT. $768542 $768542 100 0 3
15 ANGELS & DEMONS
SONY PICTURES $492347 $131324373 370 12 52
16 CHERI
MIRAMAX $388994 $1023909 140 17 10
17 LAND OF THE LOST
UNIVERSAL $306025 $47622470 385 11 31
18 TERMINATOR SALVATION
WARNER BROS. $296372 $122678310 311 13 46
19 X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE
TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX $296352 $178341745 303 20 66
20 IMAGINE THAT
PARAMOUNT

http://www.reuters.com/news/entertai...R-US-BOXOFFICE





Media Players Plot Survival in Sun Valley
Robert MacMillan

The global recession, shrinking advertising sales and fears that the Internet could render big media empires obsolete provide an ominous backdrop for executives at this week's Sun Valley conference.

Herb Allen's boutique investment bank Allen & Co has organized this retreat in the affluent mountain resort town in south-central Idaho every summer for 27 years, inviting guests such as Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone and Barry Diller.

But never before have the media elite been harder pressed to find ways to survive and grow, whether through acquisitions or alliances that they forge over hikes, horseback rides and after-dinner drinks at this historical meeting ground for media and technology deal makers.

"People in the traditional media world are terrified," said Ken Auletta, a New Yorker magazine media writer and author of several books about the media industry, who will chair a panel on new media at this week's conference.

"They're in the analog world, and the world is becoming digital," he said. "They're insecure about what's going to happen to their businesses."

This year's conference from July 7-12 will feature panel discussions, including likely themes from globalization to President Barack Obama's handling of the financial crisis.

But the real action will be deal action. Last year, Sun Valley was about Microsoft Corp's failed bid to buy Yahoo Inc.

This year, the drama may lie with Time Warner Inc, Viacom Inc and CBS Corp as their executives stroll with a passel of rich money managers like Time Warner investor Vivi Nevo and Yahoo shareholder Gordon Crawford.

Time Warner Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes plans to spin off AOL before the end of the year, and speculation is growing on whether he will also ditch the struggling Time Inc magazine unit -- the kinds of decisions that guests are known to make as they linger by the duck pond or knock back a beer.

Chatter also is surfacing over whether Bewkes is in a buying mood. Variety's Peter Bart last month named the DreamWorks Animation movie studio as a target, and Viacom, which distributes DreamWorks movies through its Paramount division, as a rival suitor.

Paramount is already in talks to combine its DVD manufacturing and distribution operations with a rival studio such as News Corp's Fox or Sony Corp's Sony Pictures to cut costs, a source told Reuters last week.

Putting Faith, And Stock, In Media

Bankers expect dealmaking in Hollywood to heat up this summer, as media companies look for new growth opportunities and ways to cut costs as they grapple with slowing DVD sales and tight corporate advertising budgets.

"I would not be surprised if there was a big CBS story. They're a traditional company that is in one of the most challenged sectors in traditional media today," said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, part of media consulting and research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.

Media watchers will make hay with whomever Murdoch lunches, particularly as the News Corp chief stakes his new-media credentials on rehabilitating MySpace, which has lost the title of world's biggest online social network to Facebook.

MySpace's new management team is expected to show up, although it is unclear if Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old chief of Facebook, will. Twitter Chairman Evan Williams is on the guest list, as are Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Dell Inc chief Michael Dell.

"Some Internet companies are feeling pretty good about themselves ... and have some currency they can use to buy some companies," Vorhaus said.

They will have to act soon. Media stocks like News Corp, Time Warner, Walt Disney Co and Viacom, have rallied 50 percent to 80 percent since hitting big lows in March.

But just after Sun Valley comes quarterly earnings season, and analysts are expecting big profit drops for many media companies as advertising budgets keep shrinking.

U.S. ad spending likely will fall an average of 1.7 percent a year to $174 billion in 2013 from $189 billion in 2008, with revenue declines likely to hit TV ads, the music business and publishers, according to a study from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

At the same time, U.S. digital ad spending will be a quarter of total industry revenue by 2013, the report said.

Against that backdrop, content companies are likely to discuss partnerships with distributors such as Time Warner and Comcast Corp's TV Everywhere online video project.

Those companies hope these projects will let them adapt to the Internet age without sacrificing the billions of dollars that their traditional businesses bring them.

"There's been a lot of deep cost-cutting at all of these companies. The question is going to be how do they repair their business model after the cuts," said Miller Tabak analyst David Joyce.

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan; Additional reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Anupreeta Das in New York and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5641EW20090706





At Sun Valley, Sun Might Set On Moguls
Robert MacMillan

As reporters waited for the media industry's hotshots to arrive at their annual Sun Valley summer camp on Tuesday, the big question was "When is Rupert coming?"

Such a question is borne out of years of habit. Sun Valley has given media chieftains such as News Corp's Rupert Murdoch a place to relax and at the same time pull off deals that alter the way people consume news and entertainment.

But this week's gathering raises the idea that the giants who built today's media conglomerates might soon be swept aside by rising Internet stars, such as the fresh-faced founders of social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Murdoch and his peers like Viacom Inc's Sumner Redstone still control vast swaths of global communications, affecting how people think and live. The long foreseen, but sudden onslaught of the Internet on media consumption habits, however, has led some media experts to say this will change.

"I don't think you're going to have those anymore," former Viacom Chief Executive Tom Freston said, referring to the media moguls who built their companies through the 1970s and '80s. "Bigness isn't that great an asset anymore."

The market in recent years has not approved of many of the moves of major media conglomerates, whether they be Murdoch's acquisition of The Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, or AOL's disastrous acquisition of Time Warner.

Media kings sometimes become distracted by the desire to constantly enlarge their empire, said Jonathan Knee, a longtime media banker at Evercore and co-author of a book to be published in December called "Curse of the Mogul."

"Most of them started out running very targeted, generally locally focused, highly efficient, highly profitable franchises, and the curse is that they started to enjoy the glamour and the excitement of the industry too much and lost their way," Knee said.
Indeed, Time Warner Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes is slowly pulling the conglomerate apart, undoing for investors' benefit a merger strategy that was destroying its value.

The Internet has played its own role. Many big media companies have been trying for more than a decade to adapt their businesses to the Web. They have largely failed so far at creating sustainable strategies to adapt to a new medium without hurting their traditional businesses.

Too Late?

Time Warner, Walt Disney Co, CBS Corp and others attending Sun Valley this year are looking for ways to succeed, but it may be too late to preserve their image as all-powerful corporations run by omnipotent leaders.

Instead, as media and technology executives flock to this Idaho conference sponsored by Allen & Co, it is becoming clear to some that Internet kingpins -- operating as smaller moguls -- may be tomorrow's media leaders.

"Will there be a new breed of media moguls? Absolutely," said Richard Rosenblatt, chief of Demand Media, a network of social websites. "But, they will appear smaller, will be known for their sites and technologies, not personalities, and you won't see them coming."

Rosenblatt's vision reflects the rising stars of several hot companies at the conference this year, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Small is an idea that applies not just to the personalities, but to the companies themselves.

"I think you'll just have different kinds of moguls," said Blake Krikorian, co-founder of Sling Media. "I also think what will change is you're not going to have 100 vice presidents making $1 million each a year."

Predicting the "Autumn of the Patriarch," as Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez put it, also has something to do with the ages of the personalities who defined what it was to be a mogul. Redstone is 86 and Murdoch is 78.

At the same time, it would be premature to say their reigns are ending. They command their presence at Sun Valley in part because they still are wily enough to strike the right deal or buy the right start-up to keep their kingdoms alive.

Rosenblatt pointed to their experience as a reason that they will keep their clout for at least a little while. "They have vaults of quality content that can be repurposed, they have distribution that can be pointed to areas on the Net and most importantly, they have done it before," he said.

The odds of a mogul's survival, or at least his successor's, will depend on his ability to see media and technology through a different lens.

"Search, and now discovery mechanisms in social networks like Facebook and Twitter are allowing total control in people's worlds," said Christopher Schroeder, CEO of Healthcentral.net and former chief of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. "No one needs one-stop shops any more."

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/reute...56806T20090709





Big Media Seek 21st Century Business Models
Yinka Adegoke

Media moguls at this week's Sun Valley conference have spent as much time discussing how to reconfigure business models disrupted by the Web as they have worrying about the weak economy.

With difficult credit markets and an unclear future, talk of dealmaking has been at a minimum this year. Yet there has never been a more important time for media conglomerates and their financiers to act and adapt to the Internet age.

The mood at the conference was described as "somber" and "very bearish" by executives. While the recession was a key reason, the other was the uncertainty over how future profits can be made from distributing news and entertainment online and across devices like smartphones.

"We're not using long-form content on the Web because it's not clear to us that's the way people want to consume content, said David Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications Inc, which owns the Discovery Channel.

"But also the business model isn't there yet, so we're taking it slow," he said in an interview on the sidelines of the event organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

In the late-night bar at the Sun Valley Lodge, from which the press was banned, most of the discussions were around the issue of free versus paid content, said one senior executive who asked not to be named as his conversations with other executives were private.

The challenge is how media companies can keep alive the lucrative cable business model at a time when consumers are increasingly used to getting content for free online. Cable operators pay affiliate fees to cable networks for their programing, and both share advertising revenue.

Plans such as Time Warner Inc's "TV Everywhere" and Comcast Corp's "On Demand Online" seek to preserve that business model by offering cable shows on the Web to authenticated, paying cable TV subscribers.

"Authentication is an interesting intermediate step and is something that we're looking at," said Zaslav.

The conversations about TV Everywhere are heating up. Google Inc CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed to reporters that he has had early talks with Time Warner about the possibility of getting paid cable shows up on YouTube. But he did not elaborate.

TV vs Print and Music

Television studio executives do not want to repeat the experience of their colleagues in the hard-hit newspaper and music businesses, and are worried that consumers will expect TV shows, movies and all professional programing to be free.

Hulu.com, owned by News Corp, NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co, offers broadcast TV shows and movies for free on the Web, but there has been talk at Sun Valley among executives of introducing a paid content model.

Wired editor Chris Anderson argues in his book 'Free' that many companies, with media at the forefront, could build bigger and better businesses around the notion of giving away their content for free.

Many executives in Sun Valley would not agree. 'Free' -- supported by advertising -- is not a new concept. After all, broadcast TV is free but its dominance has been eroded by cable channels and its future as an advertising outlet is bleak.

Newspapers owned by News Corp and others are fervently examining news-bundling pricing models to seek ways to get users to pay to read news online. One consideration may be to bundle different properties along vertical lines, such as business and sports news, for a monthly fee.

Far from free, what media moguls would want to preserve on the Web and mobile platforms is the dual-revenue stream from subscriptions and advertising.

"The big thing for these guys is how do you come up with that dual revenue streams online," said Jeremy Alliare, chief executive of Brightcove, an online video company that partners with many major media companies. "Cable TV is a part of that but I think it's a broader industry discussion."

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Tiffany Wu and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5696EJ20090711





Japan’s Master Animator to Be Honored in U.S. Visit
Michael Cieply

When the schedule of events for the 40th Comic-Con International fan convention is announced on Thursday, it is expected to include something quite rare, even for a gathering that has pretty much seen it all: an appearance by Hayao Miyazaki.
Mr. Miyazaki, regarded by many as the world’s greatest maker of animated films, does not seem to crave publicity. He was a no-show at the Oscars in 2003, when his “Spirited Away” won for best animated feature.

And he has not been quick to visit this country. “I think he has an image of the United States as a culture that isn’t that helpful to the world,” offered Duncan Williams, chairman of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yet the very private Mr. Miyazaki, in an extraordinary step, has agreed to address a room full of 6,500 admirers at the San Diego comics, fantasy and film convention on July 24. That is a prelude to his planned appearance the next day in Berkeley, where Mr. Williams’s center will present Mr. Miyazaki with its Japan Prize, awarded annually to a person who has brought the world closer to Japan.

July 28, should find Mr. Miyazaki in Beverly Hills, Calif., to be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The night before, he will be in Hollywood for the United States premiere of his “Ponyo,” about a 5-year-old boy and a goldfish princess in a world gone awry.

In part Mr. Miyazaki’s surprise tour is a promotional event: already a hit in many countries, “Ponyo,” in an English-language version, with Tina Fey and Matt Damon among those providing the voices, is set for release by Walt Disney Studios on Aug. 14. (Disney handles his films in many territories worldwide.)

But his arrival is also a cultural moment.

At the age of 68, with almost 20 features to his credit, Mr. Miyazaki has become a beacon for those who believe that animation has a special power to tell stories with universal appeal.

“He celebrates the quiet moments,” said John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in enumerating traits that make Mr. Miyazaki “one of the most original” filmmakers ever.

Mr. Lasseter, a friend of Mr. Miyazaki for more than 20 years, said he routinely looked to the master’s work, which has often combined computer animation with traditional techniques, for inspiration in directing or producing computer-animated films like the “Toy Story” installments, “Cars” or “Up,” all from Pixar.

Mr. Miyazaki visited the United States in 1999, when Disney’s unit Miramax Films released his “Princess Mononoke.” The film took in about $2.4 million at the domestic box office, but had $157 million in ticket sales in the rest of the world.

According to Mr. Lasseter, Mr. Miyazaki has seldom traveled outside of Japan since, preferring to remain at the headquarters of Studio Ghibli, his production company, in suburban Tokyo.

This time around Mr. Lasseter coaxed Mr. Miyazaki out with an assurance. “If you come over, I’ll be by your side the whole time,” Mr. Lasseter recalls telling him.

An e-mailed query to a representative for Mr. Miyazaki in Japan drew no response.

At Comic-Con Mr. Miyazaki and Mr. Lasseter are expected to appear as part of an animation presentation that will give a glimpse not only at “Ponyo,” but also at a series of coming Disney films, including “Toy Story 3,” “Beauty and the Beast 3-D” and “The Princess and the Frog.”

Mr. Miyazaki will not be the only revered figure at this year’s convention. It is expected to include an appearance by James Cameron, who is scheduled for a July 23 presentation about 3-D filmmaking and his coming “Avatar,” for 20th Century Fox. Also on hand will be Peter Jackson. He was a producer of the forthcoming "District 9" for Sony Pictures; director of "The Lovely Bones," to be released by Paramount Pictures; and has been working as a writer and producer of "The Hobbit" for New Line Cinema and MGM.
Still, Mr. Miyazaki, with his roots in both manga and anime (comic books and animated films), may have unusually wide appeal among the 125,000 or so fans who often spend their time at Comic-Con burrowing into esoterica and personal obsessions like the state of steampunk (fantasy set in a steam-driven world) or what kind of action figures toymakers would make if nobody stopped them — both subjects of presentations last year.

“Probably a third of the convention will care” intensely about Mr. Miyazaki’s presence, said Mark Evanier, an author and Hollywood writer-producer who plans to conduct a number of panel discussions at this year’s gathering. (Convention tickets have long been sold out.)

Oddly, the cult around Mr. Miyazaki has yet to create a box office hit in the United States. His previous feature-length film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” was nominated for an Oscar in 2006, but took in less than $5 million here, while selling more than $230 million in tickets abroad.

Mark Zoradi, president of Disney’s motion picture group, said the company was trying to expand Mr. Miyazaki’s audience here by releasing “Ponyo” more widely than it has his past films, in 800 theaters, and by promoting it on the Disney Channel, Disney.com and elsewhere.

Yet Mr. Miyazaki and his work, according to Mr. Williams of Berkeley, have become a primary portal for those who would learn more about Japan.

New scholars, said Mr. Williams, whose center has already sold out its Miyazaki appearance, used to talk about studying an economic competitor.

“Today, no student says that,” Mr. Williams said. “They talk about growing up with Japanese manga, Japanese anime.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/mo...9miyazaki.html





Michael Moore's New Documentary Gets a Name
AP

Michael Moore's latest documentary now has a title -- and a theme that resonates with recession-weary audiences.

Moore's look at the consequences of big business will be called ''Capitalism: A Love Story.'' The documentary is due in theaters Oct. 2.

Overture Films says ''Capitalism'' examines the disastrous effects of corporate profiteering.

Regarding the ''Love Story'' mentioned in the title, Moore jokes that he felt it was time to make a ''relationship movie.'' He said it would make a great date flick because it has ''lust, passion, romance and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...ael-Moore.html





Music and Musicians Still Echo 35 Years Later
A. O. Scott

A partial list, in alphabetical order, of the reasons to see “Soul Power” might go as follows: James Brown, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, B. B. King, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners and Bill Withers. A partial list, as I say, of performers captured with remarkable sonic brilliance and visual immediacy on an outdoor stage in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), in 1974.

If you have any knowledge of these musicians, you will by now have stopped reading and gone off to order tickets to this extravagantly entertaining documentary, assembled by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte from a trove of hundreds of hours of footage captured by some of the world’s finest cinéma vérité camera operators some 35 years ago.

The number of people who say they were at Woodstock has long since grown beyond any plausible estimate of attendance, and the release of “Soul Power” may lead to a rash of unlikely, passionate claims to have been in Zaire when this monumental and now half-forgotten concert went down. It’s not too late. And if for some reason you think of James Brown and Bill Withers as dusty names in the annals of popular music, this movie will help you complete your education.

But beyond — or rather by way of — the sheer pleasure it affords, “Soul Power” offers a vivid glimpse of a fascinating moment in musical history, racial politics and global pop culture. The Zaire ’74 festival was originally conceived as a companion to the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Just before the concert was scheduled to begin, and too late for postponement, Mr. Foreman injured his eye. The bout was pushed back six weeks, but the show went on.

Both events were recorded on film, though it took a long time for the images to see the light of day. “When We Were Kings,” Leon Gast’s unforgettable account of the Ali-Foreman fight, was released in 1996 and included only glancing mention of the concert. Mr. Levy-Hinte’s film complements Mr. Gast’s, though its approach is a little different. There are no ex post facto talking-head interviews with witnesses and interpreters (though George Plimpton does show up drunk at a party). Instead the music and the musicians speak for themselves.

Not only them of course. Mr. Ali is there, vain, shrewd and witty as ever, cooling his heels and running his mouth, expounding on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and presenting himself, hyperbolically and in sly earnest, as a global ambassador of freedom and justice. The promoter Don King is also on hand, spinning rhetorical webs that link his own commercial interests with the causes of liberation and self-determination. He sometimes has a point, though Brown makes it more succinctly and with a bit more credibility when he observes that “you can’t get liberated broke.”

Financed by a group of Liberian investors and authorized by the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a corrupt and brutal strongman with a touch of theatrical flair and unusual fashion sense, Zaire ’74 may not stand up very well as the expression of a political cause. But the preparations, in New York and in Kinshasa, illuminate the complexities and contradictions of organizing a modern media spectacle in a third-world country, and suggest that some of the perks and stresses of show business are pretty much the same wherever you go.

And the music itself tells a deeper and more exalted story. Various strands of African, African-American and Caribbean musical expression collide and commingle, providing enough research material for a course in ethnomusicology. The beats of Ms. Cruz and her salseros bounce off the rhythms of Zairean dancers, while the sounds of Memphis and Philadelphia both echo and feed the songs of Mali and South Africa.

Manu Dibango walks the streets of Kinshasa, performing a call and response with a group of children. Other children are shown doing marching exercises, which look like versions of the crisply choreographed stages moves executed by the Spinners. At the end Brown, a musical cosmos unto himself, sums it all up and breaks it all down.

A tremendous amount of work clearly went into the Zaire ’74 festival and into winnowing its bounty into a feature film. (I’m hoping for a DVD boxed set that lets the viewer live through the whole three-day lollapalooza in real time.) And the intense labor of the performers is also in evidence. You understand the effort and practice involved in making something that seems so spontaneous, natural and free. “Soul Power,” as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.

“Soul Power” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some swearing and sexual references.

SOUL POWER

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.


Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte; based on an original concept by Stewart Levine; directors of photography, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young; edited by David Smith; produced by Mr. Levy-Hinte, David Sonenberg and Leon Gast; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/movies/10soul.html





Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips
Brian Stelter

When motion pictures were invented at the end of the 19th century, most films were shorter than a minute, because of the limitations of technology. A little more than a hundred years later when Web videos were introduced, they were also cut short, but for social as well as technical reasons.

Video creators, by and large, thought their audiences were impatient. A three-minute-long comedy skit? Shrink it to 90 seconds. Slow Internet connections made for tedious viewing, and there were few ads to cover high delivery costs. And so it became the first commandment of online video: Keep it short.

New Web habits, aided by the screen-filling video that faster Internet access allows, are now debunking the rule. As the Internet becomes a jukebox for every imaginable type of video — from baby videos to “Masterpiece Theater” — producers and advertisers are discovering that users will watch for more than two minutes at a time.

The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 — dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard — are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule.

Some are specifically introducing new shows this month with the knowledge that TV networks generally show repeats and reality shows over the summer.

Yet TV networks get much of the credit for the longer-length viewing behavior. In the past two TV seasons, nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20-plus minutes at a time. By some estimates, one in four Internet customers now uses Hulu, an online home for NBC and Fox shows, every month. “Dancing With the Stars,” the popular ABC reality show, draws almost two million viewers on ABC.com, according to Nielsen.

“People are getting more comfortable, for better or for worse, bringing a computer to bed with them,” said Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv.

Ms. Kaplan’s firm distributes dozens of Web series. A year ago all but one of the top 25 shows on her Web servers clocked in at under five minutes. Now, the average video hosted by Blip is 14 minutes long — “surprising even to us,” she said. The longest video uploaded in May was 133 minutes long, equivalent to a feature-length film.

Dave Beeler, a producer of “Safety Geeks: SVI,” about a threesome who make the world more dangerous as they try to protect it, said the “fallacy that anyone post-MTV has no attention span” is being refuted by the success of original video Web sites.

While online video is not going to replace television anytime soon, it is now decidedly mainstream. About 150 million Internet users in the United States watch about 14.5 billion videos a month, according to the measurement firm comScore, or an average of 97 videos per viewer. Although the Web lacks a standard for video measurement, comScore says average video durations have risen slowly but surely in the past year, to an average of 3.4 minutes in March.

To be sure, many of the most-watched videos are still as short as a song. But YouTube, the dominant video destination, recently recognized the trend and added a “Shows” tab to its pages, directing users to long-form TV episodes and movies. Jon Gibs, a vice president for media analytics for Nielsen, said online video — projected by eMarketer to be a $1 billion business in 2011 — is at a pivotal point.

“Historically it has been very much a clip-based experience online,” he said. “We believe we are moving into a transition period where more of that viewership is going toward long-form video.”

Much of the video innovation is coming from people who — empowered by inexpensive editing equipment and virtually no distribution costs — are creating content specifically for an online audience.

“On the Web, producers have this delicious freedom to produce content as long as it should be. They’re starting to take advantage of that,” Ms. Kaplan said.

What took so long? Tom Konkle, Mr. Beeler’s production partner on “Safety Geeks,” suggested that the shorter-is-better rule reflected limitations in Internet speed and server space. As computer power has improved, the video experience has too.

“A few years ago, three minutes ‘watching’ your computer felt like a novelty; now, it’s as familiar as your television set,” he said.

Two years ago when the comedian David Wain was stitching together the first episode of his series “Wainy Days,” he called Rob Barnett, the founder of the video distribution site My Damn Channel, and asked whether a nine-minute video would seem drawn out. Mr. Barnett deferred to the creator, and an hour later Mr. Wain called back with his mind made up: he would slice the first episode into three parts.

“I bet you, if this phone call happened today, we’d go with a nine-minute piece,” Mr. Barnett said. “I think it comes down to quality winning out over minutes and seconds.”

In short, the storytelling is superseding the stopwatch. “If there’s good storytelling and good production values, people are willing to engage with the content,” said Eric Berger, a senior vice president of Crackle, the Sony video site.

More than anything else, the longer viewing spans may speak to the maturation of the medium itself. Mr. Konkle said that the first kinetoscopes, in the 1890s, were about 30 seconds long, because the format required outrageously long strips of film.

“It was also accepted as fact that 30 seconds made for a good kinetoscope. This is what filmmakers thought the audience could handle,” Mr. Konkle said, drawing a parallel to the early days of online video. “It probably felt like a giant dangerous leap to short films of three minutes.”

Blockbuster movies now, of course, are measured by the hour, not the second; the most popular one last year, “The Dark Knight,” clocked in at two and a half hours.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/bu...a/06video.html





VideoLAN Releases VLC 1.0.0: Your Media Will Never Be the Same
Matt Asay

VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."

Your media will never be the same.

In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.

This is, in part, a natural result of VLC's open-source heritage. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, VLC attracts a diverse array of developers with disparate media interests. Those interests translate into a media player that really can play every obscure media format I've ever thrown at it. (And in my hunger for Arsenal videos, I've found many different video formats that Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. didn't know what to do with.)

Here are a few of the features now available in VLC 1.0.0:

* Live recording
* Instant pausing and frame-by-frame support
* Finer speed controls
* New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
* New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats
* New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
* Video scaling in full screen
* RTSP Trickplay support
* Zipped file playback
* Customizable toolbars
* Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
* Better integration in Gtk environments
* MTP devices on Linux
* AirTunes streaming

I regularly use VLC to transcode media files, including files I originally streamed from the Web:

If you don't have VLC, I encourage you to download it and give it a try. It really is an amazing media player, one that has far more tricks up its sleeve than the proprietary media player that came with your computer.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10280845-16.html





HTML 5 Drops Open-Source Video Codec
David Meyer

HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, the Google employee who maintains the burgeoning web-coding standard has announced.

Ian Hickson wrote on Monday that he was reluctantly dropping the open standard due to opposition from Apple, and said the rival H.264 codec could also not be specified due to opposition from other browser vendors. This means HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for web development.

One of the key features of HTML 5 is its native handling of rich media such as video and audio through the and tags, which mean web developers do not have to rely on proprietary products such as Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight.

However, "there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship", Hickson wrote on the website of the Web Hypertext Application Technology (WHAT) Working Group, the coalition of companies working to develop HTML 5.

"I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML 5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like IMG and image formats, and plugin APIs, or web fonts and font formats," Hickson wrote.

Hickson said that Apple will not implement Ogg Theora for Quicktime video due to "lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape", although he acknowledged that he may have oversimplified the situation in that assessment. ZDNet UK has approached Apple for confirmation and clarification of this, but had not received an answer at the time of writing.

Google has implemented both H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. However, Google cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, the Linux version of Chrome, and has indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube, according to Hickson.

Opera and Mozilla — the latter of whom has built Ogg Theora support into its recently released Firefox 3.5 — will not implement H.264 due to patent and licensing issues, and Microsoft has "not commented on their intent to support at all", Hickson wrote.

Hickson suggested two future scenarios: one where Ogg Theora support and use increases to the point where Apple's concern regarding patents is reduced, in which case Theora becomes the de facto codec for the web; and one where the relevant H.264 patents expire and that standard becomes freely available, in which case H.264 becomes the de facto technology.

"The situation for audio codecs is similar, but less critical, as there are more formats," Hickson wrote. "Since audio has a much lower profile than video, I propose to observe the audio feature and see if any common codecs surface, instead of specifically requiring any. I will revisit this particular topic in the future when common codecs emerge."

Hickson noted in his post that he was "incredibly sorry" about the state of video codecs in HTML 5. "This is a terrible situation for the spec to be in," he wrote. "I wish we had good answers instead of this quagmirish deadlock."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-318208.html





Apps a Nail in Coffin of Broadcast Mobile TV
Tarmo Virki

For years it was the talk of the wireless industry: beaming television to the world's four billion cellphones would be the icon of the digital age. Now, just three letters are hastening the demise of that vision.

App. Short for "application," the programs people download from online stores to run on their portable phones have enabled consumers to choose for themselves which moving pictures to take in when they are on the go.

As Facebook and Twitter disrupt business models for mainstream media -- and on the platform that's a lifestyle statement for young adults -- the one-size-fits-all approach of broadcast mobile TV got stuck before it even properly took off.

"It is a financial disaster," said John Strand, a consultant who has followed the mobile industry closely for more than 12 years. "It's a nice product, but the customers won't pay for it."

One way to see why not is to watch young Brazilian footballers knocking a soccer ball around in the Helsinki Cup. A youth tournament currently playing in the Finnish capital, it's hardly a world event in the conventional sense.

But the video clips they are uploading from their phones will run on their parents' mobiles or PCs back home.

"It's even easier than with still images, and a much nicer and expressive way to tell them the news from over here," said David da Silva, spokesman for the team from Brazil.

The service they are using comes from a Web site which offers users the chance to send video from cellphones to their own TV channels on the Web. A small venture, it is one of thousands of offerings from the likes of Apple, Nokia, RIM and many others letting users drive their mobile entertainment.

BBC World and Al Jazeera English have recently launched apps for consumers to watch real-time news on their iPhones, through a London-based company, Livestation.

"This is mobile TV 2.0 -- completely reinvented and redesigned, and I think it's going to overtake the old models very very rapidly," said Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Livestation.

Perhaps the best illustration of the fast-shifting outlook is the history of forecasts for the market. Strategy Analytics now expects the mobile TV broadcasting market to total $280 million next year. Only three years ago the firm forecast the market to reach $5.4 billion in 2010.

"We've downgraded our forecast a fair bit to reflect the slower-than-anticipated rollout of services and limited momentum from carriers and broadcasters," said Strategy Analytics analyst Nitesh Patel.

"Application and widget stores and mobile internet access have taken priority over mobile broadcast."

Satisfaction

It's an important distinction, says Andrew Bud, Chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), a London-based trade association for the mobile media industry. He talks about mobile TV -- which is broadcast -- as opposed to mobile video, which you load onto your device.

"Mobile TV is all about real-time, linear transmission ... where the timing of the programing was set by the broadcaster and the consumer would dip in and dip out," he said.

"Mobile video is much more about video-on-demand. It gives the consumer much more freedom. It's also a little less stressful on the mobile networks."

A survey by KPMG and the MEF found that nearly 40 percent of consumers had at one time watched a piece of mobile video on their handset: 52 percent of them said the experience was satisfying, against 38 percent of a much smaller number of users who said they had tried broadcast mobile TV.

The biggest problem for mobile TV is that it emerged in 2004-2006, just when the media industry started to change.

Cellphone makers and mobile operators have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure. Phones and networks are in place in many countries, and watching it is very popular in countries such as South Korea where the service is aired for free.

But even there the wide take-up has not created a flourishing business, and in the United States it has been a hard slog. Telecoms group Crown Castle International closed down its effort to launch a broadcast mobile TV network in 2007.

Technological strain has been a factor restricting the growth of broadcast television on mobiles, enabling swift-moving plug-ins to fill the gap.

"A lot of the discussion around mobile TV centered around the vexed question of broadcasting spectrum and special technical standards and it all got very tangled -- problems that haven't been fully resolved, especially in Europe," said MEF's Bud.

Others have included the lack of a clear business model, fights for broadcasting rights, numerous different technologies competing for the leading position and a lack of affordable phone models.

Snacking

The moving pictures coming slowly onto cellphones are testing demand for different experiences: Samsung and Sony Ericsson have launched movies, the offerings for Apple's iPhone include TV shows and Nokia has worked with "Heroes" creator Tim Kring to develop new content for launch in Europe's summer.

"Consumers are hungry to snack on their favorite content, be that the latest championship soccer goals or 'Desperate Housewives'," said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

"Old-fashioned broadcasters who are wedded to the old broadcast model have the biggest challenge because those days are over; consumers expect their favorite content when they want it, on whatever platform is most convenient -- TV, PC or a mobile phone," he said.

Samsung has launched a service allowing its customers to buy or rent movies and TV series to download to their mobile phones, with 24-hour rental prices starting from 2.49 pounds ($3.55), and movies from 4.99 pounds.

The breadth of the offering, which includes over 500 blockbusters from top studios Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal, makes it competitive with other mobile media.

Sony Ericsson has unveiled a more limited offering -- PlayNow arena with movies -- a bundled movie service for selected handsets, allowing consumers to watch up to 60 movies a year on their mobile phone.

"We won't see major business in just taking TV programs to cellphones," predicted Andrea Casalini, Chief Executive of Italian firm Buongiorno, which sells mobile content like games, music, video in 57 countries and says it is the world's largest mobile entertainment firm.

"There can be big business in new formats -- in making shorter programs, shot for cellphone screens, and also in using interactivity."

(additional reporting by Matt Cowan in London and Eva Lamppu in Helsinki; Editing by Sara Ledwith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...56801M20090709





We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
Miguel Helft

SUCCESS in Silicon Valley often emerges through trial and error. Willingness to buck popular trends can help, too.

Just ask Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra, the co-founders of Chegg.com, a company that rents textbooks to college students.

When the two entrepreneurs started Chegg, then called CheggPost, in 2003, they envisioned a sort of Craigslist for college campuses, a network of university-based Web sites where students would buy and sell everything from used mattresses to textbooks. Like most Internet start-ups of that time, the plan was to make money from advertising.

It didn’t turn out that way. CheggPost gained some traction on a handful of campuses but didn’t take off. Still, the experience offered a few valuable lessons.

Mr. Rashid noticed that a majority of the traffic on the site was from students looking for used textbooks. With textbooks being the largest expense for students, after tuition and room and board, and with their cost soaring, that wasn’t surprising.

Yet the Craigslist model didn’t work. When classes ended in the spring, sellers couldn’t find many buyers online and sold their used books to the college store, often for pennies on the dollar. By the time students migrated back to campus in the fall, willing online sellers were few and far between.

So, in 2007, Mr. Rashid and Mr. Phumbhra went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea of renting books. At the time, Silicon Valley venture capitalists were focused on content, social networks and other businesses that could be supported by advertising, so finding investors wasn’t easy.

“People thought we were crazy,” Mr. Rashid said.

Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company’s revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million. This year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone, Mr. Safka said.

Based on that kind of growth, the company was able to raise $25 million in December from some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The textbook business was wildly inefficient,” said Mike Maples Jr., managing partner at Maples Investments, a fund that invests in young start-ups; it was one of Chegg’s first outside investors.

With demand for good deals on textbooks running high, Chegg’s success comes in large part from being able to address those inefficiencies. While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of “market maker,” gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. That provides liquidity to the market, said Yannis Bakos, associate professor of management at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

“The model is clever,” Professor Bakos said. “If they execute well, it will be an accomplishment.”

E-commerce was all the rage with investors during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Of course, many start-ups failed. In recent years, most of the successful ideas in e-commerce have been refinements or variations of models that had been tried before.

In the case of Chegg and some budding competitors, the inspiration was Netflix.

“We benefit from the comfort zone that people have with renting things online from Netflix,” said Colin Barceloux, the co-founder of BookRenter.com, a Chegg rival that is also based in Silicon Valley.

Alan Bradford, a senior at Arizona State University, read about Chegg in a campus newspaper in 2008 and calculated that his bill for books that semester would have been $334 with Chegg, far less than the $657 he paid. Since then, he has ordered about a dozen textbooks from Chegg.

“Nobody likes paying for textbooks,” he said.

CHEGG is shorthand for “chicken and egg,” a reference to what Mr. Rashid called students’ quandary after graduation: they need experience to get a job, but can’t get experience without having a job.

Before the company grew relatively flush from investors’ cash and hundreds of thousands of customers on more than 5,000 campuses, it had to resort to creative bootstrapping.

Chegg began renting books before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Mr. Rashid’s American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system.

But as the orders multiplied, Mr. Rashid said, so did the traffic on his credit card, leading American Express to suspect fraud and threaten to suspend the account. He said he persuaded American Express not only to keep the card active, but also to issue a couple of dozen more so Chegg could spread out the orders.

There is plenty of secret sauce to Chegg’s business, including logistics and software to determine the pricing and sourcing of books, as well as how many times a given book can be rented. The savings can vary from book to book. A macroeconomics textbook that retails for $122 was available on Chegg for $65 for one semester; an organic chemistry title retailing for $123 was offered for $33. (Round-trip shipping can add $4 to a book.)

Those kinds of savings are turning students into fans, Mr. Safka said. “Word of mouth,” he said, “has put wind in the company’s sails.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html





Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley
Claire Cain Miller

BROOKE HAMMERLING (publicist) and Erin McKean (entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to unveil Ms. McKean’s new Web site, Wordnik.

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

Notably, none are journalists.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

While public relations is just one arrow in the marketing quiver for most companies, it plays an especially crucial role in a region where dozens of start-ups are born each month. Without money for advertising, these unknown companies have to promote themselves to potential users, investors, employees and partners.

“Few tech companies with absolutely no P.R. have built a user base successfully,” said Margit Wennmachers, a co-founder of OutCast Communications, a P.R. agency in San Francisco that opened in 1997. “They need P.R. to put the booster under that rocket ship.”

In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial. Ms. Hammerling, the latest example of the omnipresent start-up pitchwoman, is the doyenne of who-you-know P.R.

She arrived in Silicon Valley from the East Coast in 1997, just when the dot-com craze was reaching a crescendo and P.R.’s pivotal role in the start-up world was being cemented. And the evolution of her own tactics has run parallel to the ever-changing marketing forays that make this area a singular hotbed of promotional experimentation.

Dena Cook, Ms. Hammerling’s business partner at Brew Media Relations, recalls the boom years when start-ups sent P.R. firms handsome checks that the firms had to return because they didn’t have room for new clients. For start-ups that did corral a P.R. adviser, it often didn’t matter if they had a solid business; Ms. Cook says a regional newspaper once ran a glowing article about one of her clients the same day the company went out of business.

At the time, tools of the trade were largely limited to press releases and pitch letters, embargoes and exclusives and, of course, the legendary and often criticized parties. Those events included martinis and Champagne, lobster and shrimp, Tori Amos and Aerosmith, all to celebrate companies that had yet to make a cent.

In those days, it took about six months to bring to market a new product or a start-up, Ms. Wennmachers recalls. First came East Coast tours with analysts and monthly publications, followed by visits to weeklies, then dailies.

But the rise of blogs and social networks — and companies’ ability to post information on their own sites — transformed all this. Gradually, deadlines disappeared, as even monthly magazines offered Web sites that published stories by the minute.

“Now the best ideas bubble up, which is great for start-ups,” Ms. Wennmachers says. “It’s no longer, ‘if you can’t get so-and-so to do a story, you can’t make it.’ ”
For new companies’ trying to get the word out, there’s a healthy measure of liberation in all of this. For publicists, the era of e-mail, blogs and Twitter has the potential to turn the entire idea of P.R. professionals as gatekeepers on its head.

Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of Spark PR, another influential firm in San Francisco, acknowledges that the advent of social networks has upended all the traditional marketing and promotional practices that once helped make Silicon Valley, well, Silicon Valley. But she says that publicists will continue to play indispensable roles.

“You absolutely have to be aware of power users who put things up on Facebook, Flickr, Yelp,” Ms. Burke says. “P.R. is important because it’s pretty intensive to figure out who they are.”

Exactly, Ms. Hammerling says.

“I think it’s key to have a personal face, to not be filtered. Does that mean we lose our value? Absolutely not,” she says. “As the world has exploded into so many ways of communication, we’re helping them navigate it.”

MS. BURKE says that when her firm began representing Flickr, the photo sharing site, in 2004, she never issued a press release for it, even when it was acquired by Yahoo. Flickr would publish news on its company blog, a few more blogs would pick it up “and two days later, BusinessWeek would call,” she recalls.

Some business people say that because journalists would rather hear stories directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their companies — rather than from publicists’ faking excitement — the role of publicists becomes less crucial. Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a real estate Web site, says he has never hired a P.R. person. “Besides,” he says, “with the real-time Web, there’s no time to vet every message through three layers of spin.”

Indeed, irritation has been rising among tech reporters forced to field as many as 50 canned pitches a day from publicists representing start-ups desperate to break through.

Recent missives from the influential tech bloggers Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble have attacked the P.R. industry as being out of touch. Rafe Needleman, an editor at CNET, has started a blog called Pro PR Tips that gives publicists elementary guidance, such as “Before you press ‘send’ on your bulk e-mail press release, make sure the site you’re pitching is actually live.”

In response to dissatisfied clients and huge shifts in the media landscape, a new breed of publicist is emerging, says Brian D. Solis, a P.R. guy who writes a blog called PR 2.0. His firm, FutureWorks, has a broad definition of “writer,” a category that includes those in mainstream media as well as the tens of thousands of bloggers and Twitter users who have developed avid followings by writing about niche topics.

“Mommy bloggers are the new TechCrunch; they’re such an influential crowd,” Mr. Solis says.

Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, Mr. Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.

Despite all these new channels, Ms. Burke says it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers, she says, Sparks PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.

AS with so many professions in the digital era, public relations boils down to a juggling act, an effort to weigh and exploit the varied strengths of old media and new.

Ms. Hammerling, at 35 years old one of the ubiquitous presences on the Silicon Valley publicity scene, has navigated these waters for years. In 1999, she got a job at MobShop, a group shopping Web site, where she got a taste of P.R. in boom-time Silicon Valley. She no longer had trouble getting reporters to call her back; instead she had trouble getting them to stop calling.

“I didn’t have to pitch; I just had to pick up the phone and say no,” she recalls. “Everybody wanted you. How do you say no to that when your competition is absolutely saying, ‘Yes, we’ll be in Fortune and on the cover of Fast Company’?”

Then, in 2001, after getting “more press than I’ve ever seen,” she says, MobShop died. “It shows that P.R. can’t be the end-all and be-all,” she says. “Everyone knew who they were, but at the end of the day, they couldn’t make any money.”

Many other small P.R. shops that had sprouted up went out of business or were acquired. Ms. Hammerling moved back to New York, where she eventually joined the Zeno Group, an offshoot of Edelman. There, she focused on getting to know journalists and making sure that she was at every tech conference and party.

One day in 2005, she went into her managers’ office to tell them she wanted to focus more on her relationships with the media and less on writing press releases and handling administrative tasks.

“There are no stars in P.R.,” she says one boss told her — the job should be about behind-the-scenes teamwork, not individual personalities. “That literally hit me like a ton of bricks,” she says. She quit. (Citing firm policy, Zeno declined to comment on Ms. Hammerling’s tenure.)

Ms. Hammerling then hired a financial manager, persuaded some of Zeno’s clients to come with her and started a new firm in New York that she named Brew (her childhood nickname).

From the get-go, she focused on one-on-one communication and relationships with hundreds of writers and pundits. Over the years, her contact list swelled to the point that her stories now overflow with dropped names. There are the e-mail messages from Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, and the time she handled a client’s crisis from her BlackBerry while traveling to St. Barts to join the former Hollywood überagent Michael Ovitz and his family on his yacht. Or the time she was in her bikini at a Mexican resort, checking her e-mail at the hotel’s computer, when Ron Conway, a veteran tech investor, walked in.

Or the purportedly secret poker party she threw in her suite at a recent tech conference: “All my friends were there — Arianna was there, the Twitter boys were there,” referring to Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founders.

“Arianna told me I was a great hostess, and I thought I was going to die,” she said, putting on a Greek accent to imitate Ms. Huffington: “I’m Greek, I know what it’s like to be a hostess.” (She would repeat this story several times in the weeks a reporter spent following her around.)

Though Ms. Hammerling may be known in the Valley more for whom she knows than for the clients she represents, she shares something else with Ms. Huffington: an astute understanding of how valuable strategic name-dropping can be. It is the currency she uses to make sure people know she is someone worth knowing, and it has paid off.

“I will listen to her pitch on some little fledgling start-up I have no interest in, in part because of the coterie of connections she brings with her,” says Dennis Kneale, the media and technology editor at CNBC.

Ms. Hammerling’s connections have been crucial for Brew in finding and serving clients, says Ms. Cook, her business partner: “Without question, that allows us to play at a different level, because we’re not just doing P.R. and media relations; we’re connecting people at the highest level, helping deals get done.”

Ms. Hammerling landed Brew’s most successful client, NetSuite, through her relationship with Mr. Ellison, who was a co-founder of the business software company. While dating an R.E.M. band member she met Bono, lead singer of U2, and then Roger McNamee, Bono’s investment partner. When Mr. McNamee personally invested in Wordnik, he called Ms. Hammerling.

All of which gives rise to a series of Brooke-isms: how many executives and reporters are “dear friends,” how she “worships at the altar” of a NetSuite board member and likes a team of venture capitalists so much that “I just want to put them in my pocket.” Yet by most accounts, the relationships she builds are real and deep.

“She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified to avoid the professional risk of offending Ms. Hammerling.

Her job is all-consuming. This last spring, she held bicoastal 35th birthday parties for herself in New York and San Francisco. The guest lists were filled with clients and reporters.

“They’re my real friends,” she says. “My job has become my life and my life imitates my work, but I love that.”

Her effervescent personality and proximity to the people she works with have sometimes set tongues wagging in Silicon Valley. “That prejudice is something we all suffer through,” she says. “When smart women interact with smart men, there is always a dynamic there.”

She ponders the issue further.

“I had to struggle when I was younger to be taken seriously and not just be considered to be a cute girl,” she adds. “If I gain 100 pounds and my skin broke out and I had glasses and frizzy hair, would I be as effective at my job? Yes, because of the relationships I built.”

If there’s a madness in her lifestyle, there’s still a method behind what she does. And time spent perched on her shoulder offers some insights into how the publicity game is shifting.

MS. HAMMERLING’S presentation on Erin McKean’s start-up, Wordnik, is a case study in how relationships still matter in the Valley (as they do elsewhere). But it also shows how the Web’s amplification of many voices, and not just those of professional writers, has transformed P.R.

Ms. McKean — the former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary and author of a blog about dresses and sewing — is an unlikely tech entrepreneur, and Ms. Hammerling is her guide through Silicon Valley. As they discuss whom to pitch Wordnik to, each name that came up elicits a knowing squeal from Ms. Hammerling.

A tech blogger? “A dear friend,” she says.

The writers of DailyCandy? “They are all my friends.”

Barbara Wallraff, who writes Word Court, a syndicated column about language? “I love her, love her,” Ms. Hammerling says, her voice rising.

Biz Stone, of Twitter? “I was just talking to Biz on the plane and he’s excited about Wordnik; I’ll ping him.”

Executives from Amazon.com, a potential partner for Wordnik? “We could get in front of the top guys there,” Ms. Hammerling responds with a coy smile.

“It didn’t matter what name we came up with, Brooke knew them, or knew somebody who knew them,” Ms. McKean says later. “If she is not the mayor of the town, then at least she runs the post office and knows where everybody gets their mail.”

In the end, Ms. McKean and Wordnik’s advisers and investors decide to talk to a handful of bloggers who focus on language and to only one tech blogger, Caroline McCarthy at CNET, because, as Ms. Hammerling notes, “she could have fun with it, as opposed to writing a business story.”

Ms. Hammerling plans to approach one journalist, Quentin Hardy at Forbes, not because she wants him to write about Wordnik in the magazine but because she hopes he’ll mention it on his personal Twitter and Facebook feeds.

“I don’t know if this is a Forbes story at this point,” she says. “I see it more of Quentin as an influencer, Quentin the person.” Wordnik hasn’t announced how it will make money, and its backers are worried that some reporters and writers will pick apart that fact. So the group decides that Wordnik will be presented as a “project” instead of as a “company.”

A few weeks later, Ms. Hammerling sets up a phone call with Ms. McKean and Mr. Adelson, the Digg C.E.O. He advises her on building mobile sites, offers to share Digg’s research on user-generated content and asks her to call back when she’s ready for partnerships.

When Wordnik went live last month, Mr. Adelson tweeted about it. Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, later tweeted to his then 759,310 followers that Wordnik was “truly amazing.” Most of the other tweets and blog posts described Wordnik as “an ongoing project,” adopting the language the P.R. team had decided on.

BY 6:30 p.m. on the day Wordnik went live, Brew’s staff had calculated that 1.43 million people had seen tweets about it. CNET and a handful of blogs also wrote about the site. None of the coverage was in print, and most wasn’t by professional journalists.

The publicity sent 40,000 people to Wordnik’s Web site to perform 170,000 searches the following week and caught the attention of reporters at USA Today and The Wall Street Journal who hoped to write articles. A couple of media companies have contacted Wordnik to talk about potential partnerships and mentioned that they read the tweets of Mr. Adelson or Mr. Rose.

Ms. Hammerling says the approach she took with Wordnik accounts for about a third of Brew’s pitches and is becoming more common. Today, she says, people want to broadcast on Twitter. Tomorrow, the medium could change. But the core of her job won’t, she says:

“It will morph, but it’s still about relationships.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05pr.html





RepRap Has Made it to the Finals of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. See the Main and Builders' Blogs for More News.

What is RepRap?

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend...

The RepRap project became widely known after a large press coverage in March 2005, though the idea goes back to a paper on the web written by Adrian Bowyer on 2 February 2004.

RepRap Version 1.0 "Darwin" can be built by anyone now - see the Make your own RepRap link there or on the left, and for ways to get the bits and pieces you need, see the Obtaining Parts link.

Replication

Not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 60% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere. This is an interesting coincidence: we can make 60% of our proteins; the other parts are evolved to be cheaply available everywhere...

The primary goal of the RepRap project is to create and to give away a makes-useful-stuff machine that, among other things, allows its owner cheaply and easily to make another such machine for someone else.

To increase that 60%, the next version of RepRap will be able to make its own electric circuitry - a technology we have already proved experimentally - though not its electronic chips. After that we'll look to doing transistors with it, and so on...
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome?dummy=true





Google Takes Aim at Microsoft with New PC Platform
Alexei Oreskovic and Edwin Chan

Google Inc is planning a direct attack on Microsoft Corp's core business by taking on the software giant's globally dominant Windows operating system for personal computers.

Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said on Tuesday it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers.

Netbooks are low-cost notebook PCs optimized for Internet surfing and other Web-based applications.

"It's been part of their culture to go after and remove Microsoft as a major holder of technology, and this is part of their strategy to do it," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. "This could be very disruptive. If they can execute, Microsoft is vulnerable to an attack like this, and they know it," he said.

Google and Microsoft have often locked horns over the years in a variety of markets, from Internet search to mobile software. It remains to be seen if Google can take market share away from Microsoft on its home turf, with Windows currently installed in more than 90 percent of the world's PCs.

The news comes as executives from the world's biggest technology and media companies, including Google and Microsoft, gather in Sun Valley, Idaho for an annual conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

A spokesman for Microsoft had no immediate comment.

Key to success will be whether Google can lock in partnerships with PC makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, which currently offer Windows on most of their product lines.

HP, the world's largest PC brand, declined to confirm if it would sell PCs running on the new operating system.

"We are looking into it," said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak, referring to the operating system. "We want to understand all the different operating systems available to customers, and will assess the impact of Chrome on the computer and communications industry."

Google's Chrome Internet browser, launched in late 2008, remains a distant fourth in the Web browser market, with a 1.2 percent share in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to dominate with nearly 70 percent.

Fast And Lightweight

The new Chrome OS is expected to work well with many of the company's popular software applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps.

It will be fast and lightweight, enabling users to access the Web in a few seconds, Google said. The new OS is based on open-source Linux code, which allows third-party developers to design compatible applications.

"The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said in the blog post. The Chrome OS is "our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."
Google said Chrome OS was a new project, separate from its Android mobile operating software found in some smartphones. Acer Inc, the world's No.3 PC brand, has already agreed to sell netbooks that run on Android to be released this quarter.

The new OS is designed to work with ARM and x86 chips, the main chip architectures in use in the market. Microsoft has previously said it would not support PCs running on ARM chips, allowing Google an opportunity to infiltrate that segment.

Charlene Li, partner at consulting company Altimeter Group, said Google's new OS could initially appeal to consumers looking for a netbook-like device for Web surfing, rather than people who use desktop PCs for gaming or high-powered applications.

But eventually, the Google OS has the potential to scale up to larger, more powerful PCs, especially if it proves to run faster than Windows, she said.

Google did not say how much it would charge for the operating system (OS), but Enderle expects Google to charge at most a nominal fee or make it free, saying the company's business model has been to earn revenue from connecting applications or advertising.

Microsoft declines to say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but most analysts estimate about $20 for the older XP system and at least $150 for the current Vista system.

Li added: "A benefit to the consumer is that the cost saving is passed on, not having to pay for an OS."

"It's clearly positioned as a shot across the bow of Microsoft," she said.

(Additional reporting by Kelvin Soh in Taipei; Writing by Tiffany Wu, editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5670VT20090708





In Chrome, Hints of a Real Rival to Windows
Miguel Helft and Ashlee Vance

If at times you’re frustrated with your PC — and who isn’t? — Google says it is working on a solution.

Many people easily lose patience with PCs that are slow to start up and prone to crashing, vulnerable to virus attacks and constantly in need of fiddly updates. Hoping to turn that irritation to its advantage, Google is developing an operating system — the underlying software that handles the most basic functions of a computer.

With the software, Google is mounting a blunt challenge to the dominance of Microsoft, whose Windows operating system runs about 95 percent of PCs. Google promises that its Chrome operating system, which will be available on computers in the second half of next year, will put an emphasis on speed, simplicity and security.

Google faces enormous hurdles. Computing giants like I.B.M. and Sun Microsystems have spent years trying to dethrone Microsoft, with little to show for it.

But if it gains traction, Google’s plan could undermine not only Windows but also Microsoft’s other multibillion-dollar franchise, Office. Google is trying to put the Web browser at the center of people’s digital lives, relegating complicated operating systems like Windows to a secondary role.

“I’m not saying the shareholders should take their money and run, but this is the beginning of the end of Microsoft as we knew it,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a venture capitalist who has battled Microsoft in posts at Apple and his own computer company, Be.

A spokesman for Microsoft, Frank Shaw, declined to comment on Google’s announcement or the competitive threat.

The new software’s primary mission will be to run Google’s Chrome browser, which will serve as a quick on-ramp to Web sites and online applications like Gmail and Facebook.

“We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds,” Sundar Pichai, a vice president for product management, and Linus Upson, an engineering director, said in a blog post announcing the project late Tuesday. “We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better.”

The plan is part of Google’s bet that a huge shift in computing is under way. In Google’s view, Web connections will become so fast and browsers so powerful that most of the programs that currently run on PCs will be replaced by online applications. That would eliminate the need to install, upgrade and back up software.

Analysts say advances in technology make that vision more realistic today than when the browser company Netscape unsuccessfully championed it a decade ago.

But Microsoft still has many advantages. It has been able to keep its software partners churning out games, media software, tax preparation software and other applications that rely on Windows. And it puts time and money into making sure that a vast array of devices like printers and cameras work well with its software.

While Google’s new software will be free, other free products have failed to dent Microsoft’s armor. A handful of companies offer the free Linux operating system as an alternative to Windows, but Linux has not gained enough market share to weaken Microsoft. (The Chrome operating system will have Linux at its core, and like Linux it will be open source, meaning outside programmers will be able to modify it.)

What’s more, Google’s operating system remains in its earliest stages of development, and there is no guarantee that the company can deliver on its promises. Other software projects from Google, like its Android operating system for mobile phones, have had only limited success in the market so far.

Yet with Google’s latest effort, some argue that the right company has hit on the right idea at the right time.

“Google has a reasonable stab at redefining the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Canonical, which makes a version of Linux called Ubuntu.

Rather than buying bulky desktop computers, consumers have been turning recently toward small, low-cost laptops known as netbooks, which serve as little more than gateways to the Web. Google says its operating system will be initially aimed at netbooks, which are generally not powerful enough to handle the latest version of Windows.

Google’s fundamental business model, too, may play to its advantage. The company says it believes that making Chrome free to PC makers will be worthwhile because more people will spend more time online, using Google’s search service and its other Web-based applications like Google Docs, a Web rival to Microsoft Office. That will help Google make more money from advertising, which accounts for nearly all of its $22 billion in annual revenue.

That approach essentially reverses some of the dynamics used by Microsoft to crush Netscape. At the time, Netscape charged $50 for its Web browser, and Microsoft undermined its leadership by making its own browser, Internet Explorer, free. Now it is Microsoft that faces free rivals to both Windows and Office, its two biggest cash cows.

Under its model, Google could even afford to pay computer makers to install its software on their machines, essentially subsidizing their cost.

“If hardware is free and software is free, the only way you make money is off of services, and that is Google,” said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft, while slow to act, has not stood still. It is in the process of creating many of the same online applications as Google, although it has been less willing to make them free.

In addition, Microsoft has blunted the popularity of Linux on netbooks. When they first appeared two years ago, the vast majority of netbooks came with Linux. Today, Microsoft’s older Windows XP software sits on more than 90 percent of netbooks in the United States, according to NPD, a market research firm.

But neither of those efforts can deliver the level of profits that Microsoft has enjoyed as it dominated the world of computing for the last two decades.

“There are answers for Microsoft, but all of them entail a significantly less profitable business model,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/te.../09google.html





Google Says Operating System to Be on Millions of PCs
Brian Womack and Greg Miles

Google Inc.’s planned Chrome operating system will be on millions of personal computers and may eventually lure users away from Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said.

“We don’t have numbers, we know it will be millions,” Schmidt said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg Television. “It’s certainly possible” the software will gain share from Microsoft, he said. “It’s certainly also possible that Microsoft will change its strategy to address that.”

Google, grappling with a slowdown in online advertising, aims to drive more users to its sites including the search engine, the world’s most popular. The operating system will be free and is slated to be installed first on small laptops, called netbooks, next year.

“We make money as people adopt the Internet and broadband and use these new powerful operating systems,” Schmidt said during the interview in Sun Valley, Idaho, at the Allen & Co. media conference. “We know that they eventually do more searches and click on more ads.”

Getting into operating systems and attracting users won’t be an easy task for Mountain View, California-based Google, said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco. Microsoft commands more than 90 percent of the market.

“An operating system is a pretty difficult thing,” Sinha said. “We know this because there aren’t too many people who make operating systems.”

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment.

YouTube Optimism

Google is looking to diversify beyond Internet-search ads, which account for more than 90 percent of sales. The company reported its first sequential decline in revenue since going public in 2004 during the first quarter.

YouTube, which has been a money-loser for Google, may start helping its parent’s bottom line, Schmidt said. Google acquired the top U.S. video-sharing site in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

“I’m much more optimistic about YouTube crossing profitability than I was, say, a year earlier,” Schmidt said. “We’ve done a good job of managing YouTube’s costs, and revenue is now growing fairly nicely.”

He said display ads, those that show pictures and videos, may be the next big source of revenue. Last year, Google bought display-ad company DoubleClick for $3.2 billion, its largest acquisition.

“It’s probably our next billion-dollar business,” Schmidt said. “We’re not a huge player in that space today.”

Google may make more acquisitions, Schmidt said. “I suspect they won’t be large ones because of the costs and investing involved, unless some amazing opportunity comes along.”

‘New Normal’

Schmidt also said the worst of the financial crisis is now past, though the business world will operate under new rules.

“The reality of the new normal is sinking in,” he said at a news conference earlier yesterday. “You run your inventories tight. Credit is not readily available. CEOs have adapted.”

Google climbed $4.01 to $414.40 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have advanced 35 percent this year.

Schmidt said Microsoft’s new Bing Internet search engine may lure more Web surfers in the future.

While Google isn’t losing many users to Bing, Microsoft’s product shows that the search market is competitive, he said.

Microsoft unveiled Bing on May 28 and released it the following week, bolstered by a TV and Web ad campaign. The company increased its share of the U.S. Web-search market to 12.1 percent in the week ended June 12 from 8 percent in May, according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia. Google had a 65 percent share in May, followed by 20 percent for Yahoo! Inc.

Schmidt, who serves on Apple Inc.’s board, said he was kept apprised of CEO Steve Jobs’s health. Jobs, 54, got a liver transplant earlier this year.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to comment.
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=2...=aS9HjgvX8DuI#





ANALYSIS-Google-Microsoft War May Bring Down PC Prices

* Microsoft could cut prices to respond to Google-analysts

* Google's move could help margins at PC vendors

Gabriel Madway

Google Inc's (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) bid to compete with Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Windows operating system may help lower the cost of personal computers at a time when prices are already being pinched by inexpensive netbooks.

Google said it will offer its just-announced Chrome operating system for free when it is launched in the second half of 2010, a move that could force Microsoft into a price war.

Although Windows is the dominant operating system -- installed on 90 percent of the world's PCs, Microsoft won't take Google's challenge lightly, analysts said. Its new Windows 7 operating system will be available in October.

"Microsoft's strategy is likely to be to compete on price," said Brent Williams, an analyst with the Benchmark Co. "Now there's a competitor with the muscle and the brand recognition. Google is that company."

Google said Chrome OS, which is based on the open-source Linux code, is being designed for all PCs but will debut on netbooks. It makes sense for Google to initially target the stripped-down, Web-centric netbooks, one of the only segments showing any growth in a PC market that is contracting.

Netbooks generally sell for $300 to $400, but prices are dropping as new offerings flood the market and wireless carriers offer subsidies with the purchase of a data plan.

Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu noted that while the prices on nearly all PC components have been falling, "the one thing that has not been coming down is the cost of the operating system. This is going to put some pressure on Microsoft."

Microsoft doesn't say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but analysts estimate it gets $20 to $40 for the older XP system used in the vast majority of netbooks, and at least $150 for the current Vista system.

Wu said price competition could ultimately give a bump to PC makers' margins.

"I think overall it should improve the profitability for PC vendors. It's really a question of how much they pass on to the customers," he said.

Rewriting The Rules

Between 20 million and 30 million netbooks are expected to be shipped this year, and the devices continue to rewrite the rules for the PC industry.

Even as heavyweights such as Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Dell Inc (DELL.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) roll out new netbooks, analysts expect new players, including Taiwan-based equipment manufacturers and carriers such as AT&T Inc (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), to release branded netbooks running on either Intel Corp's (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) x86 chip platform or ARM (ARM.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) chips.
Google said Chrome will work on either architecture.

The company said its Chrome team is working with PC makers including HP, Lenovo (0992.HK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Acer (2353.TW: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Asustek (2357.TW: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), and chipmakers such Qualcomm (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Texas Instruments (TXN.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to design and build devices.

Dell did not return a call seeking comment. Microsoft has not commented on Google's move.

Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar was skeptical that Chrome poses any near-term threat to Microsoft, but he expects the company to react nonetheless. "I think Microsoft will be flexible in pricing to respond to any challenge," he said.

"Over time I think that Linux will gain traction, and as more carriers jump on this netbook opportunity, Google might provide them a way to differentiate their platform. But this is just the first stage of a marathon," he added.

Gartner analyst Michael Silver said Google's move does present some risk to Microsoft, but he was doubtful the software giant would cut the price of Windows any time soon.

"Microsoft is a bit limited because what they do for one they have to do for everybody .... If they see it as a threat they'll respond. But netbooks have been shipping with Windows XP for a while and have actually been doing quite well compared with Linux, even though they're more expensive."

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...41881720090708





"Windows 7 is the Same as Ubuntu"
Christopher Dawson

Obviously, this isn’t true. Their underlying architectures are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than the 7 UI, etc., but to an average 17-year-old, there just wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two operating systems.

The other day, I posted a blog titled “Windows 7: Good enough to pay for?” I described how I’d installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my son’s computer for his take on the OS after living with Ubuntu 9.04 (and 8.10 before that) for a few months. It’s summer break, so he basically spends every waking moment when he’s not actually interacting face-to-face with friends on the computer. No better time to have a kid do some serious testing, right?

I asked him last night about his initial impressions of Windows 7 and, in typical teenage fashion, as he was bouncing between Meebo windows and browser tabs, he said it was “nice.” I managed to extract from him that his favorite feature was that he was able to use his Zune with it, something that had never worked terribly well with Ubuntu. Otherwise, he said, “Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu; there just really isn’t anything different about them.”

Of course there isn’t. He lives in a web browser. The underlying OS is irrelevant. He has no need for Office 2007 and I expect his next portable music player will be platform independent.

For some, Windows 7 may, indeed, be good enough to pay for, especially if they are power-users of Windows-only software. For my oldest son, if he gravitates to any machine, it’s to my Mac because it’s so easy for him to create and share video content. For the average student, though, the old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux debate may finally be dead. For someone who “hated Linux” a year ago to now happily switch between Windows 7 and Ubuntu in a completely transparent way certainly signals an end to that age-old flame war.
http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2770





The Pirate Bay’s Founders Sail On
Ernesto

For more than five years the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet has been been operated informally by a small group of friends. This will soon change as Global Gaming Factory takes over the ship to explore seas unknown. TorrentFreak caught up with Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde to review the past week’s events and to look ahead to the future.

pirate bayFounded in 2003, the initial goal of the Pirate Bay founders was to build the first Scandinavian BitTorrent community. However, with an increasing interest from users in other parts of the world, they decided to expand their horizon and made the site available in multiple languages a year after it was launched.

From then on The Pirate Bay quickly became the largest BitTorrent tracker on the entire Internet, responsible for the communication between millions of BitTorrent users at any given time of the day. Up until today they have continued to do so in a rather unorganized fashion, but that is all about to change.

This Monday the relatively unknown Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced that it will acquire The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Provided that the shareholders agree and that GGF manages to raise the necessary funding to complete the sale, The Pirate Bay will be in new hands. Undoubtedly, this announcement resulted in a tidal wave of media coverage.

It’s been nearly a week since the sale to GGF was announced so TorrentFreak took the opportunity to catch up with departing Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde to look back at the last few turbulent days and to find out what the future holds for him.

TF: Were you surprised by the negative responses to the sale?

Peter: Not really surprised, but overwhelmed anyhow. The pressure of this thing has been enormous, and not a lot of people think it’s fair for us to take a break from things. I can appreciate that a lot of people put their support and hopes in us and we’re really happy that we’ve made an impact that allows people to do that. At the same time, we’re only human and can’t keep up with everything. The Pirate Bay needs to change or it will die by itself.

TF: Hundreds of media outlets have covered the news, but it is not entirely clear what is actually being sold to GGF. Can you enlighten us?

Peter: GGF is buying the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist). They also get a copy of the code and the database. The database includes no logs (there’s never been any logs) and there’s no personal details stored anywhere.

TF: GGF’s future plans for the site are still very vague, but they announced that “illegal downloading” will he halted once they own the site. What’s your opinion on this?

Peter: Well, that depends on how you look at it. GGF aren’t stupid, they know that if they only allowed pre-scanned content the site is worthless. Illegal downloading? Well, torrents aren’t illegal, it could potentially lead to copyright being broken though. But don’t underestimate them. They have had a hard time in the media, which they’re not used to being in. It’s all new for them - all of a sudden BBC, CNN, all local media in Sweden and so on just hammer them with questions. It’s probably hard to answer in the beginning. But they’re not as stupid as they’ve been portrayed.

TF: How do you think The Pirate Bay will look like a year from now?

Peter: No idea really. A guess would be an updated logo, new skin for the site, some changes in features but still the same basic concept.

TF: Will you or any of the other Pirate Bay co-founders be involved in the Pirate Bay site once it’s sold?

Peter: As it looks right now, no.

TF: Will the old Pirate Bay team still be working on (new) BitTorrent related projects?

Peter: We’re working hard on other things right now, especially with The Video Bay and some of our personal projects.

TF: The money generated by the sale will go to an unnamed foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about the foundation that receives the money? Are they working on any interesting projects?

Peter: The foundation is interested in more political means than technical. Having money will make it work quite hard, but there’s nothing to present yet. A lot of projects are in the pipe-line though.

TF: What does the BitTorrent community need the most to continue being the mainstream P2P protocol?

Peter: More trackers, less centralized systems and more people standing up for the community.

—–

For the founders of the site the sale is certainly the end of an era and they deserve credit for all the work they’ve done thus far. We will watch closely to what happens with The Pirate Bay in the future but BitTorrent is here to stay with or without it.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...ail-on-090705/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

July 4th, June 27th, June 20th, June 13th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 28th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 1 26-02-09 04:25 PM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 14th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 2 15-02-09 09:54 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 24th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 21-01-09 09:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 19th, '07 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 1 16-05-07 09:58 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 9th, '06 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 5 09-12-06 03:01 PM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 12:17 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)