Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 1st, '06

[JackSpratts]

"The First Amendment makes it clear no person or branch of government has the prerogative to usurp any American's right to speak or print what he or she believes is important and relevant truth. We believe honorable debate would focus on the issues raised by the reporting, not on attacks on the truth-tellers." – The American Society of Newspaper Editors


"This is an amazing case of simple piracy by a respected company. Virgin behaved in a surreal manner by downloading the song, cracking protection measures and then selling it from their own web site." – Herve Payan


"One thing I always wondered about. Since Macs are so easy to use, why does it require a 'genius' to fix one?" – snuf23


"I wish my grass was emo..... so it would cut itself." – joke making ‘net rounds


"It would be possible to use the cafe's computers to download in less than 15 minutes a file the equivalent size of the DVD version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its 19,000 illustrations, 629 audio and video clips and 100,000 articles. A standard broadband connection would typically take in excess of five hours." – Adrian Hosford


"The men who sailed under the skull and crossbones were ordinary folk, like America’s revolutionaries, standing firm against oppressive governments and economic systems." – Richard Burg


"They definitely take more ibuprofen than cocaine." – Doc McGhee


"The sad truth is, when we're gone, it's over." – Steven Van Zandt



















In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.



He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


Signed,


New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

















July 1st, ’06








Experts: Ruling Weakens Bush Spying Plan
AP

A Supreme Court ruling striking down military commissions seriously weakens the foundation of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program, critics said Friday.

A congressional resolution President Bush relied on in creating commissions is a key rationale for the National Security Agency to listen in on phone calls without first obtaining a judge's permission.

The court ''reinforces our view that the NSA operation was unlawful,'' said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. ''The Supreme Court cut away the administration's principal legal argument for the NSA operation -- the congressional resolution following Sept. 11.''

Enacted a week after the Sept. 11 attacks, the congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution cannot be seen as authorization for military commissions, the court ruled.

In January, the Justice Department invoked the resolution 92 times in a 42-page paper designed to quell the outcry that the White House had broken the law with its program of warrantless surveillance. A centerpiece in the administration's counter-attack against its critics, the DOJ entitled the white paper ''Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described By the President.''

Asked about the NSA program, a Justice Department official said after the ruling that ''I don't think the court had before it any other broader issues concerning the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, except it clearly did recognize that it activated the president's war powers.''

The official said the implications of the decision beyond military commissions is ''something that we are studying and will be studying.'' The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is under review.

In the aftermath of the high court's ruling, lawyers for the Bush administration asked a federal appeals court in Washington to order more briefing on the decision's effect on civil lawsuits filed on behalf of hundreds of detainees held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The NSA program faces a court challenge and the Supreme Court ruling ''gives new vigor to arguments that the administration does not have the power it says it has,'' said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Romero said the language in Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion against military commissions ''almost could have been speaking about the NSA litigation,'' providing useful material for the ACLU's lawsuit against the warrantless surveillance.

In the military commission case, the Supreme Court said the congressional resolution was insufficient.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution says that ''the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force'' to prevent future acts of international terrorism against the United States.

In Thursday's ruling Justice Kennedy wrote that ''trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order.''

''Located within a single branch, these courts carry the risk that offenses will be defined, prosecuted, and adjudicated by executive officials without independent review,'' Kennedy added.

It was the absence of any review that fueled the outrage against the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance.

The White House decided not to obtain orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before eavesdropping on phone calls.

The Supreme Court setback for the White House comes amid a full frontal assault by the administration against The New York Times for revealing the existence of the NSA program as well as another secret government initiative accessing a huge databank of bank records.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, responding to such criticism, said Friday that the Bush administration and some in Congress ''are threatening America's bedrock values of free speech and free press with their attempts to demonize newspapers for fulfilling their constitutional role in our democratic society.''

The ASNE said newspaper editors don't claim to be infallible. ''However, the First Amendment makes it clear no person or branch of government has the prerogative to usurp any American's right to speak or print what he or she believes is important and relevant truth. We believe honorable debate would focus on the issues raised by the reporting, not on attacks on the truth-tellers,'' it said.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Powers.html





One Year After Landmark Grokster Decision, File-Sharing Continues To Grow
John Boudreau

A year after the Supreme Court's landmark Grokster decision -- which set out to curb online theft of music and movies -- illegal-file sharing is as popular as ever even as Silicon Valley technologists and Hollywood moguls continue their awkward embrace.

The court's unanimous decision that Internet file-sharing services can be sued if they encourage people to use their sophisticated software to steal copyrighted material was hailed as a victory by the entertainment world.

But the ruling, which also detailed protections for technology companies, hasn't stopped the lawsuits and acrimony between the two sides. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) continues to file lawsuits against tech companies. And in just the last year, the association has filed some 6,000 suits against individuals it says are stealing material.

But changes are occurring, if for no other reason than the entertainment world needs the new distribution channels Silicon Valley can provide, while technology companies depend on content from rock stars and Hollywood to attract audiences.

``There are some people inside of record labels who admit that they are not doing the right thing in certain cases. There is some resistance'' to the digital era, said Ali Aydar, the first employee of Napster, the pioneering peer-to-peer music sharing network that eventually went bankrupt after battling the record industry. (A different incarnation of the formerly Redwood City-based Napster was launched in 2003 as a music subscription service.)

Aydar now works with Napster's co-founder Shawn Fanning at Snocap, a San Francisco company that has developed a technology to make file-sharing legal.

``But if you are able to show them how you can make them money, increase their exposure and respect their copyrights, then it's really a no brainer,'' he added.

Steve Jobs helped lead the way in showing a successful model of selling digital music through Apple Computer's popular iTunes online store, then sealing deals with entertainment companies to offer up TV shows. Hollywood has started to offer video through its own online sites.

And the industry has even found a common cause with file-sharing technology: In the spring, Warner Bros. agreed to offer video through BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based peer-to-peer technology company whose software code has been used by pirates to illegally trade movies and music.

``It was never BitTorrent's intent to circumvent copyrights,'' said Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent. ``That made us a partner, rather than an enemy.''

These early deals with Internet companies do not mean the entertainment industry has abandoned using its courtroom muscle as a weapon. Other file-sharing services have shut down since the Supreme Court's MGM vs. Grokster ruling. And the recording industry recently filed a lawsuit against XM Satellite Radio over its new device that allows people to store music.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing companies are not ``consuming all the digital oxygen in the marketplace,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the RIAA, whose members saw CD sales plummet 30 percent after Napster's 1999 launch. ``The legal marketplace is getting some traction, and that is a basis for our hope in the future.''

Technologists, though, don't see dragging file-sharing companies into court as the answer.

``Shutting down peer-two-peer networks was like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months,'' said Tom McInerney, co-founder of Guba.com, a video site that just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. to distribute TV shows and movies. ``It just led to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down.''

Meanwhile, file-sharing, most of which is illegal, continues to grow. Nearly 10 million users worldwide simultaneously clicked into peer-to-peer technology last month -- 12 percent more than May, 2005, according to BigChampagne, a Los Angeles research firm that monitors file-sharing.

``The social networking aspect of the Internet is continuing to blossom and no landmark court decision or watershed event changes that,'' BigChampagne Chief Executive Eric Garland said.

Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast, which makes Morpheus software and was a Grokster co-defendant, believes the two worlds can work together and create business models. Weiss pointed to a 2005 survey by U.K. research company, the Leading Question, which found people who illegally download music are voracious consumers of digital media -- so much so they are apt to spend more than four times more on legal downloads than those who never engage in piracy.

After years of legal skirmishes, StreamCast and the entertainment industry will be back in court next week, though Weiss said he is ``cautiously optimistic'' the two sides will eventually find common ground.

``Everyone in the peer-to-peer space and in the entertainment industry would like to find that magic solution,'' Weiss said.

He added, ``It's a shame we have to go through all this pain and suffering to get there.''
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/14908474.htm





RIAA Shifts Lawsuit Strategy
Thomas Mennecke

June 26, 2003, marked the day the Recording Industry Association of America began collecting evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual file-sharers. At the time, the effort was the main spearhead in a multifaceted campaign to stem the unchecked growth of file-sharing.

Anticipation of the lawsuits had been growing for over a year, as early attempts to hold P2P developers responsible for copyright infringement proved difficult. In 2003, Presiding Justice Steven Wilson disagreed with the entertainment industry’s assertion that StreamCast Networks and Grokster were responsible for the unlawful activities of their users.

"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."

The entertainment industry’s appeal in 2004 faired little better. The panel of three judges confirmed the lower court’s ruling, and maintained neither party qualified for secondary copyright infringement.

"This appeal presents the question of whether distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing computer networking software may be held contributory or vicariously liable for copyright infringements by users. Under the circumstances presented by this case, we conclude that the defendants are not liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and affirm the district court’s partial grant of summary judgment."

The entertainment industry, represented by the RIAA and MPAA, immediately appealed this decision to the United States Supreme Court. Unlike the two previous rulings, the entertainment industry finally received the decision they so desperately sought. In a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower courts, stating StreamCast Networks and Grokster could be sued for violating federal copyright laws.

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Justice David H. Souter wrote in court’s decision.

While all three rulings varied in their success for the entertainment industry, the common denominator maintained that users are responsible for their own actions. This gave the RIAA and MPAA the ammunition they needed to continue pursuing individuals who distribute copious amounts of files online. Yet three years and over 18,000 lawsuits later, the strategy of launching a continuous barrage of monthly lawsuits aimed at approximately 750 individuals is being retooled.

The problem with the current barrage of lawsuits is equivalent to being hit with a fire hose of information. With so many individuals being hit at once, it becomes counterproductive to the entertainment industry’s effort to educate the file-sharing populace. The growing perception over the years has developed into complacency. Who are these people? Do they live near me? Why should I care if some nameless, faceless individual on the other side of the continent was sued for sharing 5,000 songs on the FastTrack network?

This lack of focus is apparent when alleged file-sharing pirates come forward to the media and plead ignorance in the face of a $3,000.00 settlement. Often times such individuals are completely befuddled, unaware their actions were unlawful.

Realizing this, the RIAA has shifted their strategy away from once a month, en masse lawsuits. Replacing the old strategy is one that still focuses on individuals; however the number is spread out over the course of a month rather than an immediate date. In addition, the weekly lawsuits focus on specific geographic locations, working with local media outlets to catch the attention of the surrounding populace.

“We are currently filing lawsuits throughout the month in batches, in order to maximize efficiencies and expand the geographic reach,” an RIAA spokesperson told Slyck.com. “We are always looking for ways to make the program as effective, smart and targeted as possible. We need to be flexible in how we manage these litigations in order to handle them efficiently. The lawsuits are and will continue to be an essential part of a larger effort to encourage fans to enjoy music legally.”

This new strategy is already taking shape. Quite noticeably, there has been a lack of RIAA press releases articulating the usual monthly, en masse round of lawsuits. Conversely, there’s been an increase of local and specific news articles describing potential lawsuits against alleged P2P pirates. For example, the Palm Beach Post recently reported that local Boynton Beach resident Dorothy O'Connell (and several others) was sued for sharing files online. It’s a similar story in Evansville, Indiana, where the Evansville Courier Gazette published an article this week describing two local residents currently facing potential RIAA lawsuits.

The aim of the new RIAA strategy is to give a name and face to a previously ho-hum lawsuit campaign. It’s designed to summon a reaction that invokes a sense of relevance and vulnerability, not one that’s perceived as something happening in a far off land. There’s little question the previous RIAA strategy is far from the worldly success hoped for. Three years and 18,000 lawsuits later, more people are populating P2P and file-sharing networks than ever before. This new campaign will certainly bring more localized attention to the issues surrounding the great file-sharing debate, however which direction the local populace focuses this attention will only be realized with time.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1237





Virgin France Fined Over Piracy

French music retailer Virgin France has been fined 600,000 euros ($754,266; £414,147) for music piracy.

The firm, owned by Lagardere, was fined for illegally downloading Madonna's Hung Up to resell on its own website.

An industrial court found Virgin France unit Virginmega had ignored an exclusive deal reached by Warner Music France with France Telecom and Orange.

Under the ruling, Virginmega was told to pay 250,000 euros to each telecom firm and 100,000 euros to Warner.

Warner welcomed the decision, saying it had succeeded in protecting its rights and those of its artists.

'Surreal behaviour'

France Telecom's Herve Payan told the International Herald Tribune: "This is an amazing case of simple piracy by a respected company.

"Virgin behaved in a surreal manner by downloading the song, cracking protection measures and then selling it from their own web site."

Under the deal with Warner, the telecom firms signed an exclusive 500,000-euro deal to offer the Madonna single on their website or for download on mobile phones for one week in October.

According to the Paris court's ruling, after the tune was made available the Virgin store downloaded it, repackaged it and made it available on the Virginmega website.

Exclusives row

However, Virgin France said it had broken the exclusive agreement in the interest of consumers.

The judgement "confirmed the need to do everything to help build a balanced market for legal downloads", the firm said.

The group, and fellow French retailer Fnac, have recently attacked record firms for releasing top selling singles to mobile and internet firms under exclusive deals.

Similar deals in the US involving the Starbucks coffee chain have also prompted anger, with retailer HMV claiming such moves limit consumer access to music.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/5124720.stm





BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities
RichM

BitTorrent Inc. has signed an agreement with Global Netoptex Inc. (GNi) to provide IP transit for streaming videos at one gigabit per second, the companies said today. BitTorrent, the world's leading peer-assisted file distribution platform, is hosted at the 365 Main data center in San Francisco, where GNi also has operations.

By using transit agreements with Tier One providers, GNi provides BitTorrent with a single connection that peers with six networks to ensure consistent access to the fastest connections between two locations. GNi also acts as a network operations center (NOC) at the 365 Main Mission Critical Data Center in San Francisco providing 24/7 onsite technical support.

BitTorrent Inc. recently announced an agreement with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, which will use the the company's delivery system for the electronic sale of motion picture and television content in the United States. "With this announcement, Warner Bros. becomes the first major studio to provide legal video content via the BitTorrent publishing platform," the company said last month.

"BitTorrent is emerging as a key player for distribution of video content over the Internet and needs bandwidth providers that can keep pace with our growth," said Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent. "GNi's reliability and flexibility were key factors in our decision to work with them, so we can focus on the best user experience for our service."

GNi provides relable service for mission-critical applications, using multi-carrier/multi-homed Internet transit to maximize uptime and eliminate points of failure. The growing managed services provider also guarantees "five nines" network availability for clients including Symantec, HP, the Oakland Raiders and Southern Cross.

"We're excited about working with BitTorrent," said Derek Wise, president and CEO of GNi. "Their video distribution model presents some interesting challenges that allow us to demonstrate our innovative approach to delivering the best Internet services and support."

BitTorrent's open-source, peer-assisted protocol is crafted to overcome the obstacles of transferring large files over the Internet. Created in 2001, BitTorrent is enabling millions of users worldwide to publish, search and download popular digital content quickly, easily and securely. BitTorrent is a privately held company with headquarters in San Francisco.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...abilities.html





µTorrent Releases Upgrade

Popular bittorrent client µTorrent v 1.6 is now available from the web site.





Video Catching Up to Photos When It Comes to Sharing
David A. Kelly

For Robert Levitan, the revelation came after a summer hiking trip on Mount Washington in New Hampshire with his twin brother. During the five-day trip in 2004, he used his digital Canon Elph camera to snap 80 pictures and 6 video clips. After the trip, his brother asked him to e-mail copies of the video.

"I said no, I'll have to make a DVD," Mr. Levitan said. "The file sizes are too big to easily send via e-mail."

That got him thinking: Why couldn't someone just send video from a desktop or laptop computer to other people's computers?

It is a question that an increasing number of digital camera users may ask as they start using the increasingly sophisticated video abilities of digital cameras.

Luckily, consumers have an alternative to burning DVD's or uploading personal video to sharing sites like www.youtube.com or www.metacafe.com. A range of new services and companies are making it easier than ever to share digital video from cameras or camcorders.

Sharing by E-Mail

Many popular video-sharing Web sites do not allow you to share full-quality video, because of bandwidth limitations. Instead, they provide a compressed resolution and reduced-quality version of your video, optimized for online viewing.

Pando, which Mr. Levitan helped found, takes a different approach. It transmits video files (or any files) from one computer to another using easily downloadable peer-to-peer software that manages the file transfers and communication between the computers (the peers) in the background.

The whole process is wrapped into a simple, e-mail-friendly format so users can send links and initiate video transfers as easily as attaching and sending a digital picture.

"On a personal level, I needed this product after that camping trip," said Mr. Levitan, who was earlier a founder of iVillage, a collection of Web sites bought by NBC Universal this year for $600 million. "Normally you'd attach pictures or videos to an e-mail, but e-mail wasn't designed to handle sending very large files."

Pando's process is simple. Users register at www.pando.com, and download and install a small software program (available in a test version for both Mac and PC). After that, users simply open up Pando, hit the "send new" button, and select the files or folders they want to send, along with a short description of the package.

An e-mail message is sent to the recipients, who, once she has installed the Pando software, can click on a small attachment and start downloading the files. A strength of Pando is the ability to send large files — the service allows users to send up to a gigabyte at a time, which is enough for hours of video.

Pando does not compress or transcode video files, so there is no change in video quality. In addition, Pando can be used with any type of attachment — video files, digital pictures, documents, PowerPoint files. Pando seems to have answered a need, reporting more than 600,000 downloads of its software in six months.

Becoming a Broadcaster

Alternatively, you can become your own broadcaster with Pixpo. Pixpo allows consumers to maintain their videos on their own computer and broadcast them to selected friends or relatives.

"We allow users to create broadcasting channels that can be made public or kept private," said Robert Cooper, Pixpo's director of business. "Public ones are visible to anyone via your broadcast home page, while private ones can be viewed only by people you've e-mailed a link to."

Pixpo, available in beta testing, turns your PC (and in the future, your Mac) into a broadcasting center able to stream video. The service is free and has no limitations on the number of video clips or users involved in sharing. Resolution is optimized for Internet transmission, at 240 by 320 pixels, a compromise between speed and quality.

The advantage for viewing is that Pixpo streams the video over the Internet instead of sending the actual video files, which would require the receiver to have the right video software (known as a codec).

But since the files you are sharing remain on your PC, you need to have an always-on connection and leave your PC and Pixpo software running to provide round-the-clock access to your video.

Setup is easy: go to www.pixpo.com, download the software (currently a svelte 4.5 megabytes) and then create your broadcast channel by selecting the files you want to share, giving your channel a name and telling friends about it.

Of course, if 100 people show up at the same time to view your video, your computer connection probably will not support the load. Pixpo can help by storing highly requested video from your system in a cache, so multiple copies can be served simultaneously.

Outsourcing It

If you do not want people viewing video directly from your computer, you might consider a fee-based video hosting service like HomeMovie or Snapfish.

"We're positioning our services as video sharing for grown-ups, not 'ego-casting,' where people upload a two- to three-minute clip of themselves lip-synching," said Lars Krumme, a co-founder of HomeMovie.

HomeMovie's latest service, Afiniti 3.0, allows consumers to send in tapes for digitizing, upload saved files for sharing or connect their digital camera or camcorder directly to their computer and transfer new video or pictures. The service can also be used to download the video to iPods.

Users can have up to five hours of video content in their online account free. Up to 10 hours is $3.99 a month with no time limit for the clips — you can have one-minute clips or two-hour clips.

When you share video using HomeMovie (www.homemovie.com), the clips are uploaded from your computer to HomeMovie's servers. Invited friends and family members, who are given a password, can download the clips to their iPods, order DVD's or view the video online — all free.

You can tag movies or scenes with keywords, so that you can search for "vacation" video or "birthday" scenes. HomeMovie also offers a service that will encode a two-hour tape into digital files for $5.

An advantage of HomeMovie is that it provides basic video editing abilities, including combining clips into a longer movie, or the ability to remove unwanted scenes — particularly helpful when working with shorter clips from digital cameras.

However, there are no special transition tools, like dissolves or fades; the scenes simply cut from one to another. For other kinds of movie magic, you will need a video editing software package.

Mixing It Together

Of course, if you are recording video with a digital camera, you are probably also taking pictures, and may want to be able to upload both to one place for printing and sharing — at least that is the bet that Snapfish is making with its new video-sharing service.

Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) offers a 30-day free trial of its video-sharing abilities. Afterward, it's $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year for unlimited video sharing. The service was introduced in January, and Snapfish says thousands have already used it, and it is trying to integrate video and photo sharing as much as possible. Snapfish albums can have still pictures and video mixed together.

Any "family friendly" video up to 10 minutes can be uploaded to the site. A crucial part of the service is converting (known as transcoding) the video file — which can come in 13 different formats — into MPEG2, which can be easily uploaded and shared.

Snapfish lets visitors actually save the file they are viewing by right-clicking their mouse, but Ben Nelson, Snapfish's general manager, said viewing, not keeping, was the point of the service.

Unlike a snapshot, "printing a video isn't that easy," he said, "so the ability to share videos is a really important feature."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/te.../29basics.html





Senate Deals Blow To Net Neutrality
Declan McCullagh

A U.S. Senate panel narrowly rejected strict Net neutrality rules on Wednesday, dealing a grave setback to companies like eBay, Google and Amazon.com that had made enacting them a top political priority this year.

By an 11-11 tie, the Senate Commerce Committee failed to approve a Democrat-backed amendment that would have ensured all Internet traffic is treated the same no matter what its "source" or "destination" might be. A majority was needed for the amendment to succeed.

This vote complicates Internet companies' efforts to convince Congress of the desirability of extensive new regulations, especially after the House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept in a 269-152 vote on June 8.

Republican committee members attacked the idea of inserting Net neutrality regulations in a massive telecommunications bill, echoing comments from broadband providers like AT&T and Verizon, which warned the rules were premature and unnecessary. Alaska's Ted Stevens, the committee chairman, accused his colleagues of "imposing a heavy-handed regulation before there's a demonstrated need."

What's more, Republicans warned, adding the regulations would imperil the final passage of the broader telecommunications bill, which is the most extensive set of changes since 1996. "This is absolutely a poison pill," said Nevada Republican John Ensign.

Democrats had rallied behind an amendment, adapted from a standalone bill they offered in May, which would have barred network operators from discriminating "in the carriage and treatment of Internet traffic based on the source, destination or ownership of such traffic." That could have prevented Verizon from inking deals to offer high-definition video and prioritizing that on its network, for instance.

Without new rules prohibiting such practices, "we're giving two entities, the Bells and cable, the power to be able to cut deals, and that will change the relationship of entrepreneurs to the Internet and to the financial marketplace," said John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat.

The concept of network neutrality, which generally means that all Internet sites must be treated equally, has drawn a list of high-profile backers, from actress Alyssa Milano to Vint Cerf, one of the technical pioneers of the Internet. It's also led to a political rift between big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo that back it--and telecom companies that oppose what they view as onerous new federal regulations.

By a 12-10 vote, senators also rejected a second amendment that was broader. The amendment, proposed by Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye, included not just Net neutrality anti-discrimination language but also addressed topics such as video franchising and universal service.

Then, by a 15-7 vote, senators voted to send the broader telecommunications bill--called the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act--to the full Senate for a vote. Its fate there is hardly assured, though a Net neutrality amendment is likely to be offered in any floor vote.

In a statement after the votes, Verizon urged the Senate to act swiftly on the bill, claiming that delays in boosting video competition will cost consumers billions of dollars a year in higher cable bills.

But Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said Wednesday that he would seek to prevent a floor vote on the telecommunications bill because it did not include extensive Net neutrality regulations. "I will object to any further action on this telecommunications bill until it includes a strong net neutrality provisions that will truly benefit consumers and small business," Wyden said, a promise that has teeth because the Senate often works through unanimous consent.

The Republican-backed bill does include some Net neutrality regulations. It would, for instance, create an "Internet consumer bill of rights" to be policed by the Federal Communications Commission. That would permit punishment of network operators who interfere with their subscribers' ability to access and post any lawful content they please, to use any Web page, search engine or application (including voice and video programs), and to connect legal devices to the network.

Stevens defended those rules against Democrats who charged they were not extensive enough. If companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon got their way, Stevens warned, "our costs for individual access to the (Internet) will double."

All the Republican committee members except Olympia Snowe of Maine voted against the more regulatory Net neutrality amendment. All the Democrats voted for it. The amendment was sponsored by Snowe and Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota.
http://news.com.com/Senate+deals+blo...3-6089197.html





If we build it they will come:

It's Time To Own Our Own Last Mile
Robert X. Cringely

Bob Frankston is one of the smartest people I speak to. If you don't recognize his name, Bob is best known as the programmer who wrote VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, realizing the design of his partner, Dan Bricklin. Bob and Dan changed the world forever with VisiCalc, the first killer app. After a career at Lotus and eventually Microsoft, Bob would now like to change the world for the better again, this time by fixing the mess that we call the Internet.

The problem, to Bob's way of thinking, isn't the Internet per se, but the direction powerful political and business forces are attempting to take it. Part of this can be seen in last week's column on Net Neutrality, but Bob takes it further - a LOT further - to a point where it becomes logically clear that making almost any regulation specifically to hinder OR HELP the Internet can only make things worse. And by making it worse I mean inhibit in a severe way the growth of human knowledge, culture, and economic development. It's just a choice between freedom and totalitarianism, simple as that.

To Bob the issues surrounding Net Neutrality come down to billability and infrastructure. While saying they are doing us favors, ISPs are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event. Take WiFi hotspots, for example. Why should the telephone or cable company care about who connects to my WiFi access point? They are my bits, not the ISP's. I paid for them. If I can download gigabytes of pornography why can't I share my hotspot with someone walking down the street wanting to check his e-mail? Frankston's analogy for this is accusing someone of stealing your porch light by using it to read a street sign.

It isn't about service, it is about creating billable events, that's all. And billable events, by definition, are things we have others do because we are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves. So a Verizon or a Comcast does us a favor, they say, by licensing rights to a movie and allowing us to buy or rent it over the Internet. We could buy the rights ourselves, but who would know where to even go? And wouldn't Verizon, as a big buyer, necessarily get a better price? When you have a preferred or exclusive provider versus a competitive marketplace, prices are always higher, not lower. In this case the ISP isn't doing us a favor, they are forcing us to buy from them something that we might well be able to buy from someone else for a lot less.

But they need the money! After all, they spent billions bringing broadband to our homes in the first place. Don't they deserve to be paid back for that huge investment?

My Internet service isn't free, is yours? I'm paying Comcast every month and from what I can glean from the company's annual report, they seem to be making a profit from my business. Is it enough of a profit? Well they'd always like more, but the current return must be good enough because they keep my bits flowing.

To Bob Frankston's way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the infrastructure. The phone and cable companies own the wire outside our homes but we own the wire inside. (It didn't used to be that way, you know. There was a time when the phone company owned the wire in our walls even though we paid for its purchase and installation.) The Internet has been a huge success to date specifically because nobody much controls the electrons. This is as opposed to services like broadcasting where some perceived scarcity of spectrum allowed governments to determine who could give or sell us entertainment and information. The ISPs (by which I mean telcos and cable companies) would very much like to go back to that sort of system, where they, not you, are the provider and determinant of what bits are good bits and what bits are bad.

No thanks.

Frankston points out that we build and finance public infrastructure in a public way using public funds with the goal of benefiting economic, social, and cultural development in our communities. So why not do the same with the Internet, which is an information infrastructure? Well we did that, didn't we, with the National Information Infrastructure program of the 1990s, which was intended to bring fiber straight to most American homes? About $200 billion in tax credits and incentives went primarily to telephone companies participating in the NII program. What happened with that? They took the money, that's what, and gave us little or nothing in return.

But just because the highway contractor ran off with the money without finishing the road doesn't mean we can go without roads. It DOES mean, however, that we ought not to buy another road from that particular contractor.

The obvious answer is for regular folks like you and me to own our own last mile Internet connection. This idea, which Frankston supports, is well presented by Bill St. Arnaud in a presentation you'll find among this week's links. (Bill is senior director of advanced networks with CANARIE, which is responsible for the coordination and implementation of Canada's next generation optical Internet initiative.) The idea is simple: run Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers -- a cooperative. The cost per fiber drop, according to Bill's estimate, is $1,000-$1,500 if 40 percent of homes participate. Using the higher $1,500 figure, the cost to finance the system over 10 years at today's prime rate would be $17.42 per month.

What we'd get for our $17.42 per month is a gigabit-capable circuit with no bits inside - just a really fast connection to some local point of presence where you could connect to ANY ISP wanting to operate in your city.

"It's honest funding," says Frankston. "The current system is like buying drinks so you can watch the strippers. It is corrupt and opaque. We should pay for our wires in our communities just like we pay for the wires in our homes."

The effect of this move would be beyond amazing. It would be astounding. No more arguments about Net Neutrality, for one thing, because we'd effectively be extending our ownership and control of the wires all the way to the ISP interconnect. Of course you'd still have to buy Internet service, but at NerdTV rates the amount of bandwidth used by a median U.S. broadband customer would be less than $2.00 per month. Though with that GREAT BIG PIPE most of us would be tempted to use a lot more bandwidth, which is exactly the point.

There would be a community-financed Internet revolution and this time, because it would be locally funded and managed, very little money would be stolen. Dark fibers would be lighting up all over America, telco capital costs would plummet, and a truly competitive market for Internet services would emerge. In 2-3 years whatever bandwidth advantage countries like Korea have would be erased and we'd be back on track building even more innovative online industries.

This would be a real marketplace not a fake one. Today's system is a fake because it depends on capturing the value of the application -- communications -- in the transport and that would no longer be possible because with the Internet the value is created OUTSIDE the network.

"One example of the collateral damage caused by today's approach is the utter lack of simple wireless connectivity. Another is that we have redundant capital-intensive bit paths whose only purpose is to contain bits within billing paths," Frankston explains. "In practice, the telcos are about nothing at all other than creating billable events. Isn't it strange that as the costs of connectivity were going down your phone bill was increasing -- at least until VoIP forced the issue."

"We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don't put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don't create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues -- at least not so blatantly."

"I refer to today's carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted -- the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers -- it's hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks."

A model in which the infrastructure is paid for as infrastructure -- privately, locally, nationally, and internationally can create a true marketplace in which the incentives are aligned. Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we'd have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy.

So why not do it? Well the telcos and cable companies would hate it. Who made them gods?

My recent discussion with Bob Frankston started with talk about Microsoft and what that company might do to turn itself around. "Microsoft seems to confuse end-to-end with womb-to-tomb," Bob said. "Or at least BillG did the last time I tried to speak to him about it. The problem Microsoft has is that it hasn't really given people enough opportunity to add value to the computing. Ironically, Google's APIs and mashups go more in this direction and I do need to give Ray (Ozzie) some credit for joining in this trend. The challenge will be reconciling that with the monolithic platform company. .Net, a stupid name for a great idea, could do very well if liberated from Windows."

So what's a Microsoft to do? Concentrate less on womb-to-tomb and more on end-to-end by embracing the idea of community-owned networks. One billion dollars each in seed capital from Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Google would be enough to set neighborhood network dominos falling in communities throughout America with no tax money ever required. And they'd get their money back, both directly and indirectly, many times over.

Microsoft could go it alone, but the point would have to be to build a market, not to control the last mile, and I think the temptation to fall back on old habits would be less with a consortium involved.

But this leads us to the promised question of what else Microsoft might do as it moves forward into an uncertain future? Well the one thing they aren't doing (hardly any companies do) is to plan for that uncertainty. I have a plan.

Frank Gaudette, when he was Microsoft's first-ever chief financial officer, told me that he hated having all that cash lying around because it was a drag on earnings. In the money markets he could make at most a few percent per year. Investing in Microsoft's own products was yielding more than a 50 percent annual return. The problem was that Microsoft was making so much money then (and now, frankly) that they couldn't spend it all on their core business.

Where Gaudette saw a problem, I see opportunity: spend it on something else.

In a sense Microsoft is a lot like the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire's growth and economy was driven by conquering and plundering neighboring regions. Within the Empire they created a sort of safe economic zone where commerce could work and technology could be developed. However, that came at a price, as they tended to destroy everything outside the empire as it grew.

Same for Microsoft, whose leaders were greedy and made a number of good, shrewd business decisions. They were also ruthless. Over time they managed to destroy the surrounding software industry. Within Microsoft's world was a sort of safe economic zone. If you were not a threat to Microsoft or if you did something Microsoft didn't want to do (like make PCs) you were able to grow under the shadow of Redmond. When the emperor spoke, you listened.

It is too early to predict the fall of the Microsoft Empire. Does Microsoft have the leaders and generals who can lead the company into the future? Who knows? In the software world there is nothing else to conquer or plunder. In other markets it will be hard, if not impossible, for Microsoft to dominate whole industries as it has in the past. Microsoft now needs to act like a responsible company, work well with others, and grow through cooperation and teamwork. This will be hard for Microsoft. The Romans couldn't do it. The Romans neglected one of their "partners" and eventually that partner did them in.

Today's Microsoft is a great generator of cash. With some good product refreshes, this cash generation can continue for years to come. The BIG decision is what to do with the cash. Microsoft needs to develop new businesses. Microsoft could have a great future doing things that have nothing to do with computers. They could be making a great electric car, or great new medications, or any number of other things. Microsoft could create new industries that could have a huge benefit to the economy. Microsoft could change the world, again. Ten years from now Microsoft could be a huge holding company of which PC software is but one part. They don't have to gut the software unit, which is viable enough to be a great moneymaker for another 25 years if Microsoft manages it well.

Right now Microsoft is like a deer in the headlights. They are stuck on software and computer stuff. They can't move. There are much more interesting growth opportunities out there.

And you know there is a really simple way to proceed. Warren Buffett announced this week that he's giving $30+ billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to continue their good work of curing diseases so we'll be around to buy more computers. Buffet is the best builder of holding companies in the history of industry. The simple answer for Microsoft is to give Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway half of Microsoft's excess cash flow every year. This year that would be about $6 billion. With Berkshire's switch to international investing, they'd find productive places for that money.

Eventually Microsoft's value might be mainly in its Berkshire shares, which would in turn greatly increase the value of Buffet's gift to the Gates Foundation. It seems only fair.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060629.html





DoJ Reports on Criminal IP Enforcement
Fred von Lohmann

This week the Department of Justice issued a 100-page "progress report," [3mb PDF] measuring its activities in the intellectual property arena (copyright, trademark, patents, trade secrets) against the October 2004 Report [also a big PDF] issued by the DoJ's "IP Task Force" (this task force was headed by David Israelite, who then left DoJ to become head of the National Music Publishers Association).

This "progress report" is fascinating reading, describing the DoJ's current enforcement priorities in the intellectual property realm. Here are a few tidbits that caught my eye:

The feds have been staffing up on cybercrime generally, with more than 230 attorneys working either as CHIP Coordinators or directly assigned to CHIP Units. The number of CHIP Units around the country, moreover, has nearly doubled from 13 to 25 since 2004. (CHIP Units are specially-trained federal cybercrime prosecutors concentrated in a particular region.) CCIPS has also grown, with 35 attorneys, 14 of which are exclusively devoted to prosecuting IP crimes. (Based in Washington DC, CCIPS is DoJ's "brain trust" on cybercrime.)

Criminal prosecutions of IP offenses are way up, with 350 charged defendants in FY2005, as compared with 177 in FY2004.

The report mentions several high-profile copyright enforcement actions, including the colorfully named Operations Gridlock, Copycat, and Western Pirates. All of the featured copyright prosecutions involve commercial piracy or large-scale "release groups." (Notably overlooked was the federal indictment in Nashville of two Ryan Adams fans for uploading a few tracks from pre-release promotional CDs.)

The Attorney General has issued a guidance to all federal prosecutors instructing that "whenever possible, United States Attorneys should charge and convict offenders of readily provable violations of...core intellectual property statutes," including the DMCA, the anti-bootlegging statute (declared unconstitutional by a court in New York), satellite signal piracy, and the new law banning camcording in theaters.

Since 2004, the Civil Division has filed 13 amicus briefs on IP issues in the Supreme Court (the report identifies 9 of these cases, including the one in MGM v. Grokster siding with the entertainment industry) and "more than a dozen" amicus briefs in lower courts (the report identifies 5 of these cases, including 3 where the briefs opposed positions taken by EFF amicus briefs). The report does not mention how many amicus briefs were filed in previous years, but this appears to represent a newfound activism on the part of DoJ in attempting to shape IP jurisprudence.

The report details a wide variety of new international initiatives, including pressuring countries in treaty negotiations, developing an international "24/7 network" of law enforcement contacts for computer crime cases, and adding DoJ "attaches" in Asia and Eastern Europe.

The report endorses the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act, which would dramatically expand the scope of criminal copyright infringement, adding attempt liability, conspiracy liability, and asset forfeiture. As we've discussed previously, these proposals are an outrage, effectively allowing the feds to put people in jail without having to prove that any actual copyright infringement ever took place.

All of this suggests that we can expect to see a marked increase in criminal IP cases being brought by the DoJ, as well as increasing DoJ activism as amicus in civil IP cases.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004758.php





Fake Games and DVDs Seized In Raid On House
Paul Keaveny

A PIRATE computer game and DVD operation in Bolton has been smashed by Trading Standards officers.

More than 1,000 discs, along with a computer and a duplicator were seized when Trading Officers swooped on a council owned terraced house in Breightmet.

Half of the haul contained fake Playstation 2 games, including the most recent Lara Croft: Tomb Raider game. The rest was made up of a mixture of counterfeit films and music CDs, including many up-to-date titles yet to be officially released.

It is believed the fakes were being sold from the house.

A 31-year-old man was arrested and then released following questioning. Trading Standards is preparing to bring charges under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act and the Trade Marks Act.

Glen Phoenix, Bolton Trading Standards officer, said: "This was an important discovery that came from information supplied to us by Crimestoppers.

"Sometimes it seems like this is a victimless crime, but buying fake goods costs us all in the long run. Counterfeiting operations take money out of the economy and are also frequently linked to organised crime."

Four Trading Standards officers, two police officers and two officers from the Department of Work and Pensions took part in the raid on Friday morning at around 10am.

The 31-year-man will also be questioned relating to claims he is making for incapacity benefit.

Last week Trading Standards officers swooped on a house in Kearsley, arresting a 30-year-old man who was using eBay to sell counterfeit Microsoft Xbox 360 games that the company had said could never be copied.

More than 500 discs were seized, along with a computer and other equipment. The genuine games cost around £40 each in the shops, but the fake ones were being sold for as little as £5 each.

Last month, the Bolton Evening News revealed that another fake CD operation in Bolton is estimated to have cost the music industry nearly £900,000.

Trading Standards officers discovered about 1,000 CDs on sale on an auction website, with each CD containing between 60 and 120 albums. Individual albums normally retail at about £10.
http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk/ne...on_h ouse.php





Film Piracy Saga Is Pure Hollywood

A distributor believes her movies are being counterfeited. She writes a script, finds actors, hires a gumshoe and tracks down a suspect.
Richard Verrier

After six months on the trail of a suspected Russian pirate, Joan Borsten was closing in.

She had staked out the scruffy-looking young man she thought was strangling her film distribution business. Now he was in her sights. Borsten peered out through the curtained windows of a minivan as a private eye she'd hired snapped photographs using a telephoto lens.

Click. The suspected pirate appears with a customer (actually a friend of Borsten's) who'd just bought 80 counterfeited DVDs of titles Borsten owns.

Click. The buyer and the seller shake hands.

Click. The target jumps into his BMW SUV and drives off.

Could it be that he was getting away?

What happened next was the culmination of Borsten's tireless crusade to save her Malibu-based film distribution business from a suspected piracy ring with ties to Russia. With the help of a detective named Jake, an actress playing "Natalya" and Oleg Vidov, Borsten's real-life husband, who was once known as the Robert Redford of Soviet-era cinema, this 58-year-old grandmother masterminded an amateur sting operation.

"I don't think he had any idea of who he was going up against," Vidov said of the man they believed was running the piracy ring. "She is a street fighter."

Major Hollywood studios aren't the only victims of movie piracy. Ask the owners of Southern California's many small production and distribution companies, and they'll tell you their very survival depends on curbing counterfeiting. But saying it needs to be stopped is one thing. Doing it is another.

That's what sets Borsten apart. The Santa Monica native is a short, spirited woman who is fluent in five languages and harbors a passion for Russian fairy tales.

She and her husband used their actor friends and their knowledge of the Russian emigre community to infiltrate a world that often confounds even Hollywood's anti-piracy agency, the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Borsten owns the international distribution rights to a library of 1,200 Russian animated films, including "Little Locomotive From Romashkovo," "Tale About Czar Sultan" and "Vasila the Beautiful." She sells DVDs of these titles to small specialty stores that serve Russian communities around the country.

But in December, she noticed a sudden drop in Los Angeles-area orders to her company, Films by Jove. Worried, Borsten visited a bookstore in Studio City and posed as an American woman buying cartoons for her adopted Russian grandchild. She found half a dozen pirated versions of Films by Jove videos, including one of her favorites, "I'll Get You," a Russian Tom and Jerry-type series.

The videos appeared to be homemade. Each had the same make of case, photocopied color inserts, and poor picture and sound quality. They sold for $10 each, about half the normal retail price.

"I was shocked. There was no way that we were going to sit back and lose the second-largest market in the U.S. to a pirate operating out of a Hollywood pick house," Borsten said, using the industry lingo for a piracy operation. "I had to get to the bottom of it."

It wasn't the first time Borsten and Vidov had taken action to protect their business. During the last decade, they've been involved in numerous legal battles to protect copyrights on their film library, which includes a Russian-made feature-length version of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" and a series of animated folk tales with the voices of American, French and Spanish stars.

First, Borsten asked a Russian friend to visit other Russian video shops and bookstores in West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. The woman bought several bootleg videos of Film by Jove titles and reported that store owners had told her to come back in a few weeks, when they would receive a new supply.

Borsten suspected that the stores were buying from a single supplier. Next, she had to find him.

So she and Vidov, who is also her business partner, wrote a script featuring a character called Natalya, who is described in court records as an "unscrupulous hard-edged businesswoman looking for bootleg tapes at the cheapest possible price."

Vidov put out the word among Russian actors he knows and soon found an actress who was perfect for the part: "She has a really good range. She can play a peasant woman or a princess." And this "was the best role in Hollywood."

Embracing the role, "Natalya" chatted up store owners and soon came up with a cellphone number of the supplier of illicit cartoons. His name was Dmitry. Store owners said he was importing pirated movies direct from Moscow's notorious counterfeit market, the Gorbushka.

Next, Natalya called Dmitry. She said she and her husband, "Andre," were opening a Russian video store in Palo Alto and wanted to buy some cheap DVDs. Dmitry agreed to meet with Andre (in actuality another friend of Borsten's) in the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Dmitry popped the rear hatch of his black BMW, revealing six cartons containing CDs and DVDs. He also handed Andre a catalog of about 5,000 movies, including not only many Films by Jove titles, but also such mainstream Hollywood fare as "Shrek" and "Basic Instinct 2," according to a declaration filed in court.

The merchandise looked suspect to Andre. There were no liner notes or labels identifying the name or address of the distributors. When Andre complained that they weren't wrapped, Dmitry suggested that he buy a machine and wrap them himself. Andre bought 80 of the DVDs for $400.

Borsten was close, but not close enough. She still lacked the suspected pirate's last name and business address.

So she turned to Jake "Spy4hire" Schmidt, a veteran Hollywood private investigator and owner of Clandestine Investigation Agency. She had hired the stocky former U.S. Army intelligence analyst before in connection with another piracy case.

Film piracy isn't his specialty; he's more used to tracking down cheating Hollywood spouses.

But Schmidt liked Borsten: "She's an honest, hard-working lady who pays her bills on time." And besides, "She gets caught up in the intrigue of it all."

When Borsten got a tip from a client that Dmitry was operating out of an office on North La Brea Avenue near Sunset Boulevard, she notified Schmidt. He drove by the office and saw a sign on the door: Europe Plus Russia.

Schmidt also ran a check on Dmitry's license plate and got a last name: Fayerman.

Borsten wanted to make sure it all added up. She checked city records and found that a Dmitry Fayerman, 36, had a business license for Europe Plus Russia at the same La Brea Avenue address.

The man posing as Natalya's husband (whose real name is Andre Violentyev) set up another buy, this one at Fayerman's office. Schmidt and Borsten parked the minivan and waited.

Violentyev later stated in a sworn declaration that in the midst of the transaction, Fayerman explained that "legal" DVDs would have cost him a lot more.

Fayerman left in his BMW, and Schmidt and Borsten tailed him. But after a few minutes, they lost him in traffic. Schmidt was ready to give up, but Borsten would have none of it: "Just go for it, Jake."

And five minutes later they caught up with Fayerman on Fairfax Avenue and followed him onto the westbound Interstate 10.

Borsten and Schmidt tailed Fayerman to the Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Culver City, where Schmidt photographed him entering and then leaving half an hour later with a heavy briefcase. A clerk at the front desk told Schmidt that a flight crew from the Russian airline Aeroflot had recently checked in.

Two weeks later, court records state, Schmidt again spotted Fayerman at the Four Points, this time talking with someone who appeared to be a member of an Aeroflot flight crew that was staying at the hotel. The man handed over two heavy-looking bags.

"Inside the bags I could clearly make out long cylinder-type shapes, with three to four of these cylinder shapes in each bag," Schmidt said in a declaration. "The diameter of the cylinder shapes appeared to be consistent with the size of a DVD or compact disc."

For Borsten, things were starting to add up. A few of her clients had told her that they believed Fayerman was using smugglers to import pirated versions of DVDs manufactured in Russia.

Despite pledges by Russian President Vladimir Putin to crack down on the problem, the number of factories in his country that produce counterfeit DVDs and CDs and export them has ballooned from two in 1996 to 47 as of January, according to a recent report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a private coalition that represents U.S. copyright-based industries.

Many experts blame lax policing by the Russian government.

"They have to start enforcing their laws and busting up these optical disc manufacturers," said Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village), who thinks Russia should be required to crack down on piracy before it is allowed to join the World Trade Organization.

Berman, ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee on courts, the Internet and intellectual property, has previously asked Borsten to testify before Congress about piracy.

"This is a bread-and-butter issue for her and other small companies like hers," Berman said.

Armed with the fruits of her sleuthing, Borsten in May filed an $11-million federal copyright infringement suit against Fayerman and eight owners of stores she alleged had carried his goods.

Then she persuaded a judge to authorize a temporary restraining order against Fayerman and those stores and to approve the seizure of any counterfeit DVDs of her titles from his office.

On a sweltering June afternoon, with rush-hour traffic clogging La Brea Avenue, five federal marshals pulled up outside Europe Plus Russia. Schmidt, Borsten attorney Jeffrey Miles and two court-appointed Russian interpreters — who had been waiting across the street in a Russian cafe — joined the marshals as they confronted Fayerman. Borsten later joined them.

Served with the court order, a flustered Fayerman led the whole group into two stuffy rooms crammed floor to ceiling with DVDs and CDs and a plastic shrink-wrap machine.

Fayerman paced back and forth as the interpreters went through his merchandise, checking titles against a list of Films by Jove catalog. In addition to such Hollywood fare as "The Incredibles" and "Polar Express," they found 250 counterfeit DVDs of animated films only Borsten has the rights to sell in the U.S.

"I don't know what to say," she said as she helped her lawyer pack up evidence. "We're finding stuff here that we didn't expect to find. I'm kind of overwhelmed."

Fayerman denied that he had done anything wrong, and no criminal charges have been filed.

"I don't know about all this because I'm a legal company," he told a reporter who witnessed the raid.

But a few days later, Fayerman failed to appear at a U.S. District Court hearing to contest the restraining order. Then, last week, in a confidential settlement of Borsten's lawsuit, he agreed to pay her an undisclosed amount to cover her losses.

Fayerman acknowledged last week that he was wrong to sell copies of Borsten's titles, though he said he was unaware that she had the U.S. distribution rights. Speaking in broken English, he said, "I make settlement. I've gone out of business."

The offices of Europe Plus Russia have been emptied.

Borsten doesn't kid herself that her problems are over. In her experience, even when you triumph over one pirate, another one eventually comes to take his place. But when that happens, she'll be ready.

"I think we won a major skirmish," she said, "but there's still a bigger battle to be won."
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/c...coll=cl-movies





Official: FBI Breaks Up Movie Piracy Ring
Pat Milton

FBI agents carried out early morning raids Wednesday and broke up two international movie-piracy rings that siphoned millions of dollars from the motion picture industry over the last year, a federal law enforcement official said.

Hordes of agents rounded up more than a dozen members of the two large-scale rings in raids throughout the New York City area, the official said. Recording equipment was also seized.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because announcement of the arrests had not been made. Details were to be unveiled at FBI headquarters later Wednesday.

A second federal official said one of the movies the suspects were conspiring to profit from was "Superman Returns," the highly anticipated film being released this week.

Movie piracy has become a huge problem for the film industry with the advent of high-speed Internet access. The Motion Picture Association of America claims the U.S. movie industry loses more than $3 billion annually in potential global revenue because of physical piracy, or bogus copies of videos and DVDs of its films.

Videotaped copies of films in theaters often are digitized or burned off DVDs and then distributed on file-sharing networks.
http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/...ap2846823.html





Warner Bros. Sells Films Via Guba.com
Gary Gentile

Warner Bros. began selling its movies and TV shows over the Internet video site Guba.com Monday, marking the second deal the studio has made to distribute content over Web sites that have offered pirated video in the past.

Guba.com has featured mainly user-generated video clips for free or as part of a subscription, some of which were unauthorized clips from TV shows or movies.

The site has since agreed to start filtering copyright and obscene content and institute tougher security measures after talks with the Motion Picture Association of America, a group that represents Hollywood studios.

In May, Warner Bros. agreed to start selling its movies and shows using peer-to-peer technology developed by BitTorrent Inc., which has been used to trade pirated copies of movies.

Both deals are aimed at appealing to younger consumers who watch shows on computers or portable devices.

"Kids in the dorm rooms don't own TVs," said Tom McInerney, co-founder and chief executive of Guba. "They've got computers and that's their source of entertainment."

Guba is one of a growing number of Web sites that offer short videos contributed by users who record song parodies and other short video content. Such sites have become popular, but have not yet developed a business model to make money off of such videos.

McInerney said that ultimately people will only pay for top quality shows produced by professionals.

"Nobody is going to pay for a video of a dog doing a stupid pet trick," he said.

Rental prices start at $1.99 for unlimited viewing during a 24-hour period.

Viewers can also download permanent copies of shows. New movies such as "Good Night and Good Luck" will sell for $19.99, while older titles, such as "Rebel Without a Cause," will sell for $9.99.

New films will become available the same day the DVDs are released in stores.

TV shows will sell for $1.79 per episode.

Users will be able to stream the shows over a home network and transfer them to a portable device using Windows media software.

As with other services that launched recently, consumers will not be able to burn the shows on DVDs that will work on normal DVD players.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060626/...e/online_video





Hollywood Needs Hits From "Superman," "Pirates"
Bob Tourtellotte

One saves the world and the other robs it, but what Superman and pirate Captain Jack Sparrow share this summer is Hollywood's hope they will rescue it from the brink of a two-year losing streak at U.S. box offices.

Hollywood's summer season, which makes up as much as 40 percent of the roughly $9 billion annual domestic box office, hits its mid-point next week with the June 28 release of Warner Bros. "Superman Returns." Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" hits movie screens on July 7.

Each is an effects-filled adventure costing over $200 million, and each is the kind of movie that could rake in hundreds of millions of dollars at box offices.

But to do so, each needs a long run in theaters and that means delighting fans with a good story -- again, something Hollywood has not done well in recent summers.

"If we want the (box office) numbers to come out better than last year's performance, we need to be kicked into high gear," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations Co Inc. "It's a close race, and there is more pressure than ever for these movies to perform."

To date, summer ticket revenues are $1.37 billion, up a scant 1 percent from last year but down 8 percent from 2004. Hollywood has not had two straight down summers in revenues since 1995 and 1996, according to Exhibitor Relations.

Attendance, or the number of people in theaters, is two percent lower than 2005, 14 percent under 2004, and another dip this year would mark the fourth straight down year.

Hollywood's Creative Slump?

Opening ahead of "Superman" and "Pirates," was Adam Sandler in Sony Pictures' comedy "Click" which hit theaters on Friday. It typifies what is fast becoming a two-year creative slump in big-budget summer films tied to a lack of original ideas and too many sequels.

"Click" tells of a father who glimpses his future only to see he neglected his family. Even Sandler admits "there are similarities" to movies like classic "It's a Wonderful Life."

At rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates reviews, "Click" earned only 14 "fresh" scores out of a total 54, as of Friday.

Other star-driven movies like Sony's "The DaVinci Code," Twentieth Century Fox's "X-Men: The Last Stand," Universal's "The Break-Up" and Paramount's "Nacho Libre," earned mixed comments, at best, from critics, despite solid ticket sales.

Studio executives have long argued that young men, who make up the core audience for big-budget and star-driven summer movies, pay more attention to studio marketing than to reviews.

But the question is whether two years of many bad summer movies is causing audiences to turn toward other entertainment.

Fortunately for Hollywood, early reviews give "Superman Returns" a thumbs up. Time Magazine's Richard Corliss calls it "beyond super. It's superb." He credits "a beguiling subtext" injected into a "crowd-pleasing story."

At $200 million-plus, it represents a big risk to Warner Bros., but the studio is trying to revive a franchise that died nearly 20 years ago. "It deserves a budget and it deserves the scope we are bringing to it," said director Bryan Singer.

Reviews are not yet available for "Pirates," but other movies are getting good reactions in early screenings including comedies "The Devil Wears Prada" and "You, Me and Dupree."

Hollywood also has high hopes for cop thriller "Miami Vice," mystery "Lady in the Water," comedy "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," and thriller "Snakes on a Plane."

Individually, Hollywood's major studios are owned or controlled by conglomerates Time Warner Inc. <TWX.N>, The Walt Disney Co. <DIS.N>, Sony Corp <6758.T>, News Corp <NWS.N>, General Electric Co <GE.N> and Viacom Inc <VIAb.N>.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN23447614





What Makes Richard Brener Run?
Ross Johnson

IT was a typical June Friday in Hollywood, and the town was anxiously awaiting early word on the titans and turkeys of the summer movie season. Over at Chaya Brasserie, Richard Brener, a lanky 34-year-old development executive for New Line Cinema, was having his weekly lunch with his longtime friend Chris Bender, a writers' manager and producer who dreamed up the concept for the hit "American Pie."

Mr. Brener and Mr. Bender easily segued from standard industry gossip about the Anthony Pellicano scandal ("Too many lawyers, not enough Tom Cruise," Mr. Bender said) to box-office predictions for the weekend's release of "Nacho Libre," whose star, Jack Black, is also in a coming film championed by Mr. Brener at New Line.

"The houses look good in New York," Mr. Brener said of the first matinee turnout in Manhattan.

"It's going to do 30 million," said Mr. Bender, predicting the film's total opening weekend gross in North America.

"Naw, a shade under," Mr. Brener countered. (The final figure was $28.3 million.)

Then Mr. Bender got to the matter at hand, a pitch for a movie based on "Y: The Last Man," a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan Jr..

The basic idea, as is often the case in today's Hollywood, is quite simple: the movie begins with shots of all the world's men — presidents, airline pilots, farmers, doctors and the rest — dropping dead for an unknown reason. All except one, a slacker who spends the rest of the movie chasing a ticking clock as he hunts down the reason for the genetic apocalypse while trying to adjust to being the only man left with billions of women.

"There are 15 of these 'last man left' stories going around the town, but they're all comedies," said Mr. Brener, who shepherded last summer's hit "Wedding Crashers" to the screen. "This is a thriller and a love story. It could work."

Mr. Bender grinned and reached for his BlackBerry. He has sold projects like "Monster-in-Law" and "The Butterfly Effect" to Mr. Brener, and he smelled pay dirt. "Wait till Richard hears the part where the only ones left picking up the garbage are supermodels," he said to a reporter.

Slick, smart and dashing, young movie studio executives were the stuff of classic fiction in "What Makes Sammy Run?" and "The Last Tycoon" and grist for thousands of news articles about Robert Evans, Jeffrey Katzenberg and their ilk. But along came the 21st century, bringing MySpace, iPods and pornography on demand, even as corporate giants like Sony, General Electric, Viacom and Time Warner swallowed the studios.

Which raises a question: What's become of Hollywood's young swashbucklers — the production and development executives who cruise cultural waters in search of the next big movie idea — in the age of technology and conglomeratization?

Judging from the experience of players like Mr. Brener, senior executive vice president of production at New Line, a unit of Time Warner, it appears that the time-honored hunt-and-kill, schmooze-or-lose chase for books, scripts and ideas is still as frantic as ever, despite all the buzz about high-tech frontiers, branding, product placement, co-ventures and cross-promotion.

For the 30 or so hunter-gatherers who fill the upper middle management ranks at the major studios, the rewards remain enormous. Mr. Brener's gig brings with it a Land Rover LSE and a house in the Hollywood Hills, just above that of the author Gore Vidal, which he bought when he was 28.

But the risks are still considerable. Mr. Brener would as happily not be remembered as the force behind "The Real Cancun," a downright embarrassing effort to bring the elements of a quickie spring-break reality television series to the big screen. The film, budgeted at $8 million, took in a mere $2 million at the domestic box office in 2003 before it was yanked from release.

"People hate to admit they watch reality TV, and we wanted them to stand in line and pay for the privilege," Mr. Brener said with a shudder.

Even so, "somebody still has to find all these scripts and push them up the ladder," Mr. Brener said over lunch in West Hollywood. "But even though people say, 'They must love you at New Line,' all they love is my last movie."

The chiefs at New Line certainly love the fact that Mr. Brener had the acuity three years ago to buy the idea for "Wedding Crashers" from the little-known screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher. The film was budgeted at just $38 million but took in $209 million in North American theaters, or nearly half the $421 million that New Line's entire 2005 slate of 13 films grossed domestically.

As a result Mr. Brener made a big name for himself with his immediate boss, Toby Emmerich, who is president of New Line's production arm. "Richard's job is to hang out a shingle and get out in the community and be perceived as an individual who has taste," said Mr. Emmerich, who took charge five years ago after his predecessor, Michael De Luca, got kicked to the curb following a bad run.

"Not necessarily good taste or bad taste, but someone with a particular kind of taste," he continued. "Richard has to have a particular personality where people think, 'Oh, he'd like this.' "

To move through the world of Mr. Brener and his peers is to realize that while the players change, the game itself remains very much the same. Thirty years ago contemporaries of Mr. Katzenberg, Don Simpson and Jim Wiatt, the current chairman of the William Morris Agency, often swapped notes while huddled over questionable chow mein at the decidedly unglamorous Roy's on Sunset Boulevard. Nowadays Mr. Brener meets at similarly off-the-beaten-track spots with friends like Mr. Bender, the producers Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson or the agent Adriana Alberghetti. A currently favored meeting place is a back booth at the Dime, a rather spartan hangout on Fairfax Avenue.

Like many before them, this bunch came together when they were assistants or entry-level executives. "We've grown up together," said Ms. Alberghetti, who represented writers on Mr. Brener's films "Boiler Room," "Final Destination 2" and "Monster-in-Law."

Ms. Alberghetti is also married to Mr. Vinson — who, with Mr. Flynn, is making a film, "The Number 23," with Mr. Brener. She described the group's professional relations in terms that would ring true to the industry's past generations.

"When you're young, you think you have to know everyone," Ms. Alberghetti said. "But as you get older, you find you often get more accomplished by working with people you have a history with, because you get honest answers."

A Yale graduate who wears T-shirts and jeans to the office, Mr. Brener considers what he terms "legitimate" story proposals — those with an honest shot at being purchased by the studio — at the rate of 3 times a day, 5 days a week, 49 weeks a year. What counts, he said, is finding an idea that fits New Line's business model. The basic test: Can the movie pull in substantial crowds in the all-important first week of release?

In search of that opening weekend, Mr. Brener typically leans toward films in easily recognized genres with casts that appeal mostly to the younger of what he calls the four quadrants — younger males, younger females, older males and older females. Along with "Wedding Crashers" and the 1999 Adam Sandler vehicle "The Wedding Singer," he succeeded with horror films like the "Final Destination" trilogy and thrillers with young stars, like "The Butterfly Effect," with Ashton Kutcher.

Mr. Brener acknowledged that what passes for taste took some getting used to. "It used to bother me that all the actors in teen horror films don't emotionally process much when their best friend has just gotten his head chopped off," he said. "But people demand great deaths in horror films, and the recollection stuff just slows the story, right?"

Even with the baggage of clunkers and disappointments he has inevitably accrued over time, Mr. Brener has built a loyal following among actors and other creative talent. "Richard actually gets a joke, which is kind of surprising, considering the humor from most studio exec-y types," Jack Black said in a telephone interview from the set of New Line's coming "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny."

That Mr. Brener picked up the "Tenacious D" project before Mr. Black's price skyrocketed with the 2003 release of "School of Rock" also says something about his basic business strategy. "I try to be a very conservative guy in an unconservative business," he said.

As New Line evolved after Robert Shaye founded it in a Greenwich Village walk-up in 1967, the company began training its young executives to temper their instincts with increasingly elaborate business math.

"We are constantly remodeling a proposed film's profit-and-loss analysis," said Mr. Shaye, now New Line's co-chairman. "We track the marketing campaign to gauge its awareness, and we screen films to the point where we know exactly what's working and what's not for a preview audience."

For Mr. Brener, whose moves are closely monitored by Mr. Shaye, that means treating the boss's inclinations as second nature. "We don't like to pay an actor $25 million unless the project is right, and unless we have something good, we don't like to be in the summer tent-pole business, where you have to spend a fortune in ads to become a weekend's first choice," said Mr. Brener, sounding very much like the 67-year-old Mr. Shaye. "What we try to do is find a $2 million actor who's on his way to $10 million, and we pay him $5 million. That way, everybody's happy."

Yet happiness in Hollywood is famously fleeting, and those who want Mr. Brener's job know the rules. (After "The Real Cancun" crashed on its opening weekend, Mr. Brener said, a young colleague at New Line greeted him with a terse "You still here?" the following Monday.) Mr. Brener will turn 35 next year, an age at which he can no longer be considered young by Hollywood standards. Mr. Brener, who started at New Line as a temp 11 years ago, worries constantly about what he calls "the end game," a preoccupation that comes early for a set whose patron saint, Irving Thalberg, died at 37.

"I don't know if I want to be a producer," he said, noting that he sees many former studio wunderkinder struggling with the producer's life, which revolves around selling instead of buying.

For the moment, he said, his plan is to keep playing the game: "New Line is the only place I've worked, and I know all the angles here. And if I had to get another job, if I were to lose this one, it's a Catch-22: I know the best time to get one is when I have one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/movies/25john.html





Studio Bosses Face Unwanted Attention
AP

Studio bosses Brad Grey and Ron Meyer have scaled Hollywood's ruthless ranks to become two of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry.

On their way to the top, both enlisted the help of private eye Anthony Pellicano, who is now accused in a federal indictment of wiretapping celebrities and others to dig up dirt to help clients in legal disputes.

Federal authorities have looked into Pellicano's links to the two executives as part of their ongoing investigation. Neither has been charged, but the unwanted attention has come at a critical time.

Grey, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, is trying to revive the studio that struggled under previous leadership. Meyer, president of Universal, has been working to steer his company through a succession of corporate owners.

''It is a major distraction for them at a time when they have lots of other important business issues to deal with,'' media analyst Harold Vogel said. ''No one can be happy in being associated with this.''

Both executives have been questioned by the FBI and testified before a federal grand jury. They denied wrongdoing.

Grey, 48, declined further comment through studio spokeswoman Janet Hill. In April, he received a vote of confidence from executives of Viacom Inc., Paramount's parent company.

''I know it has been a stressful period for him, but professionally I haven't seen any difference,'' said ''Saturday Night Live'' creator-producer Lorne Michaels, who is working with Paramount on the film ''Hot Rod.'' ''All he's focused on is making Paramount the most successful studio in town.''

Meyer's camp said his relationship with Pellicano was more personal than professional.

The two men have been friends for more than a decade. Meyer once offered to pay for the schooling of Pellicano's autistic son and visited the private eye in prison while he served a 2 1/2-year sentence for possession of explosives.

Meyer refused a request for comment made through Kelly Mullens, his spokeswoman.

''This is not a distraction at all,'' she said. ''Mr. Meyer has been fully cooperative and we have no reason to believe he is under investigation.''

Fourteen people have been charged so far in the case, with six pleading guilty to a variety of charges, including conspiracy and wire fraud.

Federal prosecutors have said more charges would be filed before the start of trial in October. But the case has dragged as authorities try to decrypt audio files of telephone conversations seized from Pellicano's office.

''I think there has been an indication that prosecutors have their sights on Hollywood's higher-ups,'' said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former federal prosecutor.

''But Pellicano's clients are pretty insulated. Prosecutors have to prove his clients knew there were illegal methods being used,'' she said.

Among other things, Pellicano is accused of wiretapping Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone and paying two police officers to run names, including comedians Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon, through a government database.

Prosecutors have been interested in two lawsuits filed against Grey in which his attorney, Bertram Fields, used the services of Pellicano. Fields, one of the most feared litigators in Hollywood, has acknowledged being a subject of the wiretapping investigation and denied being involved in any illegal activity.

The first lawsuit was filed in 1998 by Shandling, who accused Grey, his former manager, of taking excess commissions and fees from the HBO hit ''The Larry Sanders Show.'' The federal indictment said a Los Angeles police officer took bribes from Pellicano to run Shandling's name through a government database.

Six months later, Shandling settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.

In a 2001 lawsuit, producer Vincent ''Bo'' Zenga claimed Grey reneged on a deal to equally share profits from ''Scary Movie.'' Prosecutors contend the same police officer conducted illegal background checks on Zenga and his attorney. The case is ongoing.

Meyer, 62, met Pellicano 11 years ago and the two men developed a friendship about the same time Meyer was hired as president of Universal.

Meyer sought Pellicano's help collecting money lent to businessman Bilal Baroody. In March 1999, Baroody's name was run through law enforcement computers, according to the indictment.

Grey and Meyer both built their reputations by spotting and grooming talent. Grey scouted comedians in New York before heading to Los Angeles and teaming with agent Bernie Brillstein to form a production company.

Grey was behind the ''The Larry Sanders Show'' and ''The Sopranos.'' He also produced films such as ''The Wedding Singer'' and ''Scary Movie.''

Before Grey was hired in early 2005, Paramount green-lighted what turned out to be a string of flops, including ''Aeon Flux,'' ''Elizabethtown'' and the remake of ''The Honeymooners.'' In its most recent quarter, profits at the studio fell 28 percent to $51.1 million.

Its fortunes could improve with the acquisition of DreamWorks, maker of the animated comedy ''Over the Hedge,'' which has grossed nearly $140 million in recent weeks.

Grey helped broker ''Mission: Impossible III,'' only to see the high-octane thriller sputter at the U.S. box office with just over $130 million.

Meyer co-founded Creative Artists Agency with several other talent agents in the mid-1970s. The talent agency became one of the most powerful in the nation, signing such A-list stars as Tom Cruise, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty.

Since Meyer took over at Universal, the studio has gone through three owners -- Canadian liquor distributor Seagram Co., French media company Vivendi and now NBC parent General Electric Co.

Once one of the most profitable studios, Universal has fallen to the middle of the pack. GE doesn't break out separate profit figures for the studio.

It has had several hits this year, including ''The Break Up,'' with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, that is approaching the $100 million mark. Last year, the studio released its remake of ''King Kong,'' which grossed about $550 million in theaters worldwide.

No matter how their studios perform, some observers believe the reputations of Grey and Meyer will suffer because of their association with Pellicano.

''They will have a cloud over their heads,'' Levenson said. ''It's a long-term stain.''
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...8IFFVS02.shtml





Pellicano Case Moves Beyond Hollywood
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

Until now the Pellicano wiretapping case has seemed the kind of down-and-dirty imbroglio that could only happen in Hollywood, where a private eye's underworld patois could impress movie people familiar with noir clichés, allured by real physical danger and accustomed to getting whatever they want.

But confidential F.B.I. records show that the scandal's tentacles have extended beyond show-business figures to reach people prominent in the rarified worlds of fine art and classical music. Among the government's most important witnesses, the F.B.I. records suggest, are Adam D. Sender, a prominent collector of contemporary art and a wealthy hedge-fund manager, and Jacqueline A. Colburn, an ex-wife of a renowned Los Angeles donor to the performing arts, Richard D. Colburn, who died in 2004.

Both Mr. Sender and Ms. Colburn have admitted that they hired Anthony Pellicano, the jailed private detective charged with wiretapping and conspiracy, and that they knew he was surreptitiously recording their legal opponents, the F.B.I. records show.

They each listened repeatedly to those recordings, they acknowledged to investigators, according to summaries of the F.B.I.'s interviews that have been seen by The New York Times. But neither has been charged publicly with a crime, defense lawyers note.

Mr. Sender's lawyer, Lawrence Barcella, described his client's position simply. "My view is, he got defrauded, he hired lawyers to help him out, he ended up in a situation that was not at all of his own making, and he cooperated with the government from the moment he was contacted. And he continues to be a victim in this whole thing."

Ms. Colburn could not be reached, and her lawyer declined to comment.

With prosecutors still struggling to produce the actual recordings they say Mr. Pellicano made of other people's conversations, witnesses like Mr. Sender and Ms. Colburn who can testify that they listened to such intercepted calls could be crucial to the government's case.

Mr. Sender, 37, was a star trader for the Connecticut hedge-fund tycoon Stephen A. Cohen before striking out on his own in 1998. In 2001 he formed Exis Capital and made money hand over fist, according to the newsletter Hedge Fund Alert; by late 2003 its assets under management had reached $1.5 billion.

Like Mr. Cohen, Mr. Sender also plunged into the art world, hiring his own curator and investing in works by the likes of Matthew Barney, Keith Haring, Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Christopher Wool. His purchases established him as a pacesetter for his class of young financiers turned collectors: he was one of the first fund managers, for example, to discover the artist Richard Prince. And his practice of lending his works to museums worldwide raised his visibility even more.

Mr. Sender has also shown a taste for the provocative: in 1999, as the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" exhibition was being assailed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for its inclusion of Chris Ofili's portrait of the Virgin Mary, which included elephant dung, Mr. Sender paid $43,700 for Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. And in 2005 Mr. Sender paid a record auction price of more than $1 million for another work by Mr. Ofili, "Afrodizzia."

When he turned 30 in December 1998, Mr. Sender treated himself to an extended vacation in Hollywood, where he met Aaron Russo, a movie producer best known for the 1983 comedy "Trading Places." Mr. Russo wined and dined Mr. Sender and persuaded him to invest $1.1 million in a startup film company, the summaries show.

Mr. Sender wired the money, but Mr. Russo refused to sign a contract or account for his expenditures, and Mr. Sender became suspicious, he later told the F.B.I. After his first lawyer failed to serve Mr. Russo with legal papers, Mr. Sender was referred by another art collector, the Los Angeles lawyer Alan S. Hergott, to Bert Fields, the noted entertainment lawyer.

Mr. Fields's wife, Barbara Guggenheim, is a prominent art consultant, and his clients have included Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art.

Mr. Hergott declined to comment. Mr. Fields's lawyer, John W. Keker, said his client had done nothing wrong and "didn't ask or solicit or know of anything that Anthony Pellicano did that was wrong."

"He is an innocent man, and he has been treated very unfairly in this investigation," Mr. Keker said. "He is not going to be indicted. There isn't any evidence on which to indict him."

Mr. Sender does not directly implicate Mr. Fields in any wrongdoing in the F.B.I. summaries, and says he met with Mr. Fields only once, in late March 2001. In that meeting, Mr. Sender said, Mr. Fields urged him to hire a private investigator, and suggested Mr. Pellicano. "According to Fields, Pellicano employed 'unorthodox methods,' " but "got the job done," Mr. Sender told the agents.

Mr. Sender soon met with Mr. Pellicano, who said that for a $25,000 retainer, he would serve Mr. Russo and "take on other tasks to ensure that Sender got his money back from Russo," the agents wrote.

Within days, prosecutors say, Mr. Pellicano had sources illegally run criminal checks and get phone records on Mr. Russo and his family. Sometime in April 2001, they say, Mr. Pellicano began wiretapping Mr. Russo's phone. And on April 21, court records show, Mr. Pellicano and two employees surprised Mr. Russo at a salon in an attempt to serve him with legal papers.

Mr. Sender told F.B.I. agents he learned of Mr. Pellicano's wiretapping when Mr. Pellicano revealed it to him, saying "You have got to hear this," before playing a "perfect" recording of Mr. Russo speaking on the phone with someone Mr. Sender knew.

Mr. Sender said he listened to more recordings, knowing that wiretapping was illegal, but thinking that it was "standard operating procedure" for private investigators, or at least "one of the 'unorthodox methods' to which Fields had referred," he told agents.

At Mr. Pellicano's insistence, Mr. Sender told agents, he did not discuss the wiretapping with anyone. But he believed that a junior associate at Mr. Fields's firm had a "wink-wink" or "tacit understanding" of what Mr. Pellicano was doing, F.B.I. agents wrote.

Mr. Sender said he met with the junior lawyer and Mr. Pellicano several times to discuss the "fruits of Pellicano's efforts," without explicitly acknowledging the information had come from wiretaps.

He said the junior lawyer's "lack of inquisitiveness about the origin of the information" signaled that he "already had the answer to that question," the agents wrote.

As for Mr. Russo, his lawyer, Richard L. Charnley, denied that his client had defrauded anyone. "Mr. Sender and Mr. Russo had a business relationship that didn't produce the desired results," he said. "Neither party was happy, and somebody filed a fraud suit. It happens all the time." He said the erstwhile partners had settled their underlying lawsuit more than a year ago.

Ms. Colburn, the 9th of 10 wives of Richard D. Colburn, a multimillionaire, was pregnant with their second child in December 1999. At the time, her husband — a benefactor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Opera, whose name is also on a performing arts school that aspires to be the West Coast's Juilliard — shared his Beverly Hills estate with some of his adult children. And his wife was at odds with them, she later told the F.B.I.

The lawyer Robert Nachshin urged her to sue for divorce, she told agents, but first to hire Mr. Pellicano. Mr. Pellicano asked her for a $50,000 retainer. When she balked, an associate of Mr. Nachshin's pressed her to pay Mr. Pellicano, Ms. Colburn told agents. Mr. Nachshin did not return two calls.

Once hired by Ms. Colburn, Mr. Pellicano quickly set about wiretapping her husband, Ms. Colburn told agents; she admitted repeatedly listening in the detective's office to intercepts of her husband's conversations. She said she knew wiretapping was illegal but never told Mr. Pellicano to stop.

In May 2000, Ms. Colburn filed for divorce. At the same time her husband cut off support to her and their daughter, citing "the actions of Pellicano" on her behalf, Ms. Colburn told the F.B.I.

It was Mr. Pellicano, not Mr. Nachshin, who brokered a settlement in October 2000. Ms. Colburn agreed in May 2003 to waive the lawyer-client privilege so F.B.I. agents could interview Mr. Nachshin. The summaries do not indicate that Ms. Colburn's lawyer knew of Mr. Pellicano's wiretaps. But days after Mr. Pellicano's 2002 arrest, Jude Green, the ex-wife of a financier, Leonard I. Green, called the F.B.I. to tell them about a conversation she had had with Mr. Nachshin, who was her divorce lawyer as of mid-2000.

She said Mr. Nachshin had warned her then that Mr. Green's lawyer, Mr. Fields, often hired Mr. Pellicano, meaning "that they should be concerned about their telephones being 'tapped,' " F.B.I. summaries show. Mr. Nachshin urged a sweep of all their phones, Ms. Green said.

But when the agent called Mr. Nachshin that same day, Mr. Nachshin insisted he had only done so "out of an abundance of caution," not because of Mr. Pellicano's involvement, the agent wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/movies/26pell.html





Film Rated PG to Warn Of ‘Thematic Elements’
Terry Mattingly

The Motion Picture Association of America is crystal clear when it describes why its "PG" rating exists—it's a warning flag.

"The theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance," the online explanation of the rating system states. "There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity.... The PG rating, suggesting parental guidance, is thus an alert for examination of a film by parents before deciding on its viewing by their children. Obviously such a line is difficult to draw."

Disagreements are a given. The Christian moviemakers behind a low-budget film called "Facing the Giants" were stunned when the MPAA pinned a PG rating on their gentle movie about a burned-out, depressed football coach whose life—on and off the field—takes a miraculous turn for the better.

"What the MPAA said is that the movie contained strong 'thematic elements' that might disturb some parents," said Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films, which is owned by Sony Pictures. Provident plans to open the film next fall in 380 theaters nationwide with the help of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which has worked with indie movies like "The Squid and the Whale."

Which "thematic elements" earned this squeaky-clean movie its PG?

"Facing the Giants" is too evangelistic.

The MPAA, Fuhr noted, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions. It's important that they used the word 'proselytizing' when they talked about giving this movie a PG....

"It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about."

Overt Christian messages are woven throughout "Facing the Giants," which isn't surprising since the film was co-written and co-produced by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are the "associate pastors of media" at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga. In addition to working with the mega-church's cable television channel, they created its Sherwood Pictures ministry—collecting private donations to fund a $25,000 movie called "Flywheel" about a wayward Christian used-car salesman.

"Facing the Giants" cost $100,000 and resembles a fusion of the Book of Job and a homemade "Hoosiers," or perhaps a small-school "Friday Night Lights" blended with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association movies that used to appear in some mainstream theaters. Sherwood Pictures used local volunteers as actors and extras, backed by a small crew of tech professionals.

Questionable content?

The movie includes waves of answered prayers, a medical miracle, a mysterious silver-haired mystic who delivers a message from God and a bench-warmer who kicks a 51-yard field goal to win the big game when his handicapped father pulls himself out of a wheelchair and stands under the goalpost to inspire his son's faith. There's a prayer-driven gust of wind in there, too.

But the scene that caught the MPAA's attention may have been the chat between football coach Grant Taylor—played by Alex Kendrick—and a rich brat named Matt Prader. The coach says that he needs to stop bad-mouthing his bossy father and get right with God.

The boy replies: "You really believe in all that honoring God and following Jesus stuff? ... Well, I ain't trying to be disrespectful, but not everybody believes in that."

The coach replies: "Matt, nobody's forcing anything on you. Following Jesus Christ is the decision that you're going to have to make for yourself. You may not want to accept it, because it'll change your life. You'll never be the same."

That kind of talk may be too blunt for some moviegoers, Kendrick said, but that's the way real people actually talk in Christian high schools in Georgia. Sherwood Baptist isn't going to apologize for making the kinds of movies that it wants to make.

"Look, I have those kinds of conversations about faith all the time and I've seen young people make decisions that change their lives," he said. "The reason we're making movies in the first place is that we hope they inspire people to think twice about their relationships with God.

"So we're going to tell the stories that we believe God wants us to tell. We have nothing to hide."
http://www.christianexaminer.com/Art..._Jul06_01.html





Christian Movie's Rating Worries Lawmakers
Sam Hananel

A Christian-themed movie about a football coach's faith in God is finding an audience in Congress - not so much for its inspirational message, but for the PG rating it received.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and other lawmakers are demanding explanations after hearing complaints that the movie "Facing the Giants" was rated PG instead of G due to religious content.

The Motion Picture Association of America claims the controversy arose from a miscommunication with the filmmakers. It says religion was not the reason for the rating.

"This incident raises the disquieting possibility that the MPAA considers exposure to Christian themes more dangerous for children than exposure to gratuitous sex and violence," Blunt said in a letter to MPAA Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman.

After meeting with MPAA officials, Blunt and a handful of other House members said they remain concerned about the subjective native of the ratings process.

"I'm not satisfied," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who attended the meeting with Blunt. "We probably will want to revisit this ratings process to have some commonality in the standards that exist for movies, videos and video games."

Blackburn said she wants the House Energy and Commerce Committee to hold hearings on the issue later this year.

Blunt also brought up a recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health that found that the MPAA standards on sex and violence in movies have been getting weaker.

"Mr. Blunt does continue to have questions about the process by which 'Facing the Giants' was rated and what that says about ratings creep in general," spokeswoman Burson Taylor said Friday.

An MPAA spokesman did not return calls seeking comment. But in a letter to Blunt earlier this month, the MPAA's Glickman insisted the rating for "Facing the Giants" was not based on religious content.

"Any strong or mature discussion of any subject matter results in at least a PG rating," Glickman said. "This movie had a mature discussion about pregnancy, for example. It also had other mature discussions that some parents might want to be aware of before taking their kids to see this movie."

A PG rating means parental guidance is suggested because the MPAA believes some material may not be suitable for children. A G rating means the MPAA has found the movie acceptable for all audiences.

Glickman said the movie's producers agreed with the rating and never appealed it.

The film's producers claim ratings officials changed their story after the controversy began.

"The first communication from the MPAA was that religion was a factor in the ratings," said Kris Fuhr, vice president of marketing at Provident Films, which is owned by Sony Pictures. "Since then, the MPAA has revised those factors to no longer include religion."

Fuhr says she is now satisfied with the rating and wants to move beyond the controversy to focus on marketing the film, billed as an inspirational drama about a high school football coach who relies on faith to battle fear and failure.

"He dares to challenge his players to believe God for the impossible on and off the field," the movie's Web site says.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFA ULT





Review

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgard, Bill Nighy
Gore Verbinski

Captain Jack Sparrow discovers he owes a blood debt to the legendary Davey Jones, Captain of the ghostly Flying Dutchman. With time running out, Jack must find a way out of his debt or else be doomed to eternal damnation and servitude in the afterlife. Making matters worse, Sparrow's problems manage to interfere with the wedding plans of a certain Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, who are forced to join Jack on yet another one of his misadventures.

In his Oscar nominated performance as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp swanned through the first Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) with enough wicked zest to make you forget the film was a bloated crock. The flab extends to the overlong (two hours and thirty minutes) sequel, but mostly in the dawdling setup. A pirate could braid his beard in the time it takes for producer Jerry Bruckheimer's floating franchise to cut loose from the shoals of plot incoherence and put a wind in its sails. But once it does, nothing can stop it. The second Pirates does more than improve on the original, it pumps out the bilge and offers a fresh start. Returning director Gore Verinski and screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott have wisely taken a cue from Depp and learned how to play fast and loose with the material. Lively is an odd word for something called Dead Man's Chest, but lively it is. You won't find hotter action, wilder thrills or loopier laughs this summer.

Where did they go right? Start with Depp who could have hit paydirt just by repeating himself as Capt. Jack, the skeeviest pirate on the high seas. How easy it would be to let the dreads, the mascara and the gold teeth do the acting for him. Instead, Depp builds on the role, investing his pirate prince with quick wit, erotic mischief and a sneaky sense of decency. Keith Richards, who will play Jack's father in the third chapter of the series, is only one of Depp's inspirations for a character that keeps springing surprises. Depp's Capt. Jack is a classic comic creation and also the most subversive hero ever in a Disney movie -- a debauched, bi-sexual narcissist with a devilish glint that suggests he'll never tell where he's stashed his drug kit. You can't take your eyes off him.

Issue a ration of rum to the other actors who have managed to scrape the barnacles off their performances. Keira Knightley as Elizabeth and Orlando Bloom as Will, her intended, are finally asked to do more than stand around and look pretty and oh so pleased with themselves. Will meets up with his father Bootstrap Bill (the excellent Stellan Skarsgard) and Elizabeth finds her own inner pirate when she dresses up as a lad to stow away on ship. "I'm looking for the man I love," she tells Jack, whose retort --"I'm flattered, sir" -- has a teasing kinkiness. When hottie fortune teller Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) comes on to Jack and Will with a question -- "Do you want to know me?" -- Jack shuts down her lascivious smirk with a quick, "They'll be no knowing here."

And there isn't. Dead Man's Chest has blockbuster fish to fry, which means nonstop action, including a cannibal cookout (Jack is garlanded with a necklace of severed toes), narrow escapes, cliff dangling, duels on a giant wheel, a fight for a harvested human heart and every trick the filmmakers could raid from Spielberg's Indiana Jones trilogy. Homage or ripoff? You be the judge. The important thing is that it works. And what works most devilishly is Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the squid-faced captain of the Flying Dutchman who bargains for the souls of those he captures. Davy and his crew of the undead have lived underwater so long they look like something out of an aquarium. I don't have a clue how the computer wizards accomplished the visual miracles -- just wait till you see the Kraken, a giant sea monster who sucks entire ships down into Davy's locker -- but Nighy's performance as the buccaneer Jack calls "fish face" brims over with mirth and menace. With slimy tentacles wiggling around his head, Nighy blows away every other villain this summer. Not since Disney killed Bambi's mother (Nemo's too) has the studio Walt built upped the jolt ante so high on PG-13 entertainment. Kids may wet their pants, but so what? It's the triumphant rogue in Depp that keeps this pirate ship afloat and actually makes the third voyage (coming next summer) a trip worth booking.
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/.../rid/10697901/





'Who Killed the Electric Car?': Some Big Reasons the Electric Car Can't Cross the Road
Manohla Dargis

A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries. Like Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" and the better nonfiction inquiries into the war in Iraq, this information-packed history about the effort to introduce — and keep — electric vehicles on the road wasn't made to soothe your brow. For the film's director, Chris Paine, the evidence is too appalling and our air too dirty for palliatives.

Fast and furious, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is, in brief, the sad tale of yet one more attempt by a heroic group of civic-minded souls to save the browning, warming planet. The story mostly unfolds during the 1990's, when a few automobile manufacturers, including General Motors, were prodded to pursue — only to sabotage covertly — a cleaner future. In 1990 the state's smog-busting California Air Resources Board adopted the Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate in a bid to force auto companies to produce exhaust-free vehicles. The idea was simple: we were choking to death on our own waste. The goals were seemingly modest: by 1998, 2 percent of all new cars sold in the biggest vehicle market in the country would be exhaust-free, making California's bumper-to-bumper lifestyle a touch less hellish.

Given that some companies, including G.M., were already creating prototypes for electric cars that could be mass produced, the mandate didn't seem unfeasible or unreasonable. Electric cars have been around about as long as the automobile and, believe it or not, Phyllis Diller. Mr. Paine's résumé is peppered with Hollywood credits, which may explain why, in addition to the usual expert talking heads, he has tapped so many celebrities and pseudo-celebrities.

Presumably Mr. Paine thinks audiences listen to the famous and almost famous, which is certainly the case with Ms. Diller, who delivers a nostalgic ode to the first electric vehicles while in front of an ornately framed painting of Bob Hope. Both the comedian and the filmmaker certainly know how to grab your attention.

Henry Ford and cheap oil helped keep electric cars off the road, leaving the fast-growing highway system to the spewing, sputtering internal-combustion engine. Oscillating between interviews and an array of punchy visuals, including industrial and nonfiction films, Mr. Paine lays out how the country's romance with gasoline-thirsty cars quickly turned into the craziest kind of love. By the 1950's, the zoom years of Jack Kerouac and James Dean, Los Angeles pedestrians who braved the city's streets could be seen covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, trying to filter the air. Many decades and smog alerts later, the state took bold action. What happened next, Mr. Paine explains, is a familiar story of corporate greed and governmental corruption, mixed in with flickers of idealism and outrage.

It's a story Mr. Paine tells with bite. In 1996 a Los Angeles newspaper reported that "the air board grew doubtful about the willingness of consumers to accept the cars, which carry steep price tags and have a limited travel range." Mr. Paine pushes beyond this ostensibly disinterested report, suggesting that one reason the board might have grown doubtful was because its chairman at the time, Alan C. Lloyd, had joined the California Fuel Cell Partnership. Established in 1999, this partnership is a joint effort of the federal and state agencies, fuel cell companies, car manufacturers like G.M. and energy peddlers like Exxon to explore the potential (note that word, potential) of vehicles powered by hydrogen-cell fuels.

Why would a company like Exxon back a zero-emission vehicle technology that — according to some of the authorities interviewed in the film, like Joseph J. Romm, an assistant secretary in the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration and author of "The Hype About Hydrogen" — is a long way from real-life roadways? The answers may not surprise you, particularly if you are predisposed to watching a film titled "Who Killed the Electric Car?," but they're eye-and-vein-popping nonetheless. As Mr. Paine forcefully makes clear, the story of the electric car is greater than one zippy ride and the people who loved it. From the polar ice caps to Los Angeles, where many cars truly are to die for, it is a story as big as life, and just as urgent.

"Who Killed the Electric Car?" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Revelations of big-business and government collusion may provoke shock, shock.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Opens today in Manhattan

Directed by Chris Paine; edited by Michael Kovalenko and Chris A. Peterson; narrated by Martin Sheen; produced by Jessie Deeter; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 92 minutes.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/2...es/28kill.html





Summer how-to

Build a Backyard Theater
Mike Haney

Want some real home theater bragging rights? Instead of buying a projector capable of casting a 14-foot image at 1080p (progressive) resolution—the highest high-definition there is—build one yourself. After all, the front projector’s innards are simple: an LCD lit by a superbright lamp, and a few lenses to magnify and sharpen the image. Retail models start at around $800 and use proprietary $400 lamps that burn out every few years. But cheaper lamps work equally well, and none of the other parts are very expensive. Why not put one together yourself?

That’s the logic that led Grayson Sigler to found Lumenlab three years ago. The company makes and sells kits for DIY projectors with $50 metal-halide lamps that last up to 10 times as long as those in commercial models. And Lumenlab’s forums are the hub of an 11,000-member community that trades tips and tricks, answers newbie questions, and posts photos of their beloved builds.

The tradeoff is that Lumenlab projectors are quite a bit larger than store- bought models, which use small LCD screens (the DIY version relies on a disassembled 15-inch computer monitor). Then there’s the considerable elbow grease. Stripping an LCD is delicate work, and you have to carefully construct your own case so the optics line up just right. But the finished box can be mounted anywhere and easily upgraded. Below is a breakdown of how PopSci photographer John Carnett built the one shown here. For an in-depth photo how-to, click here.

You could build a no-frills model with a basic enclosure for around $500. We added a few extra parts to make ours yard-friendly

Build Your Own Projector
Cost: $1,027
Time: 25 Hours
Easy | | | | | Hard

1. Order the Mega Kit from lumenlab.com, which includes everything except the enclosure and the LCD.
2. Consult Lumenlab’s forums for a list of the best 15-inch LCD panels for the project. Find deals at froogle.com.
3. Build a case, or browse the forums to find others who will make one for you.
4. Strip the housing and backlight from the LCD, taking care not to rip any cables.
5. Position your lenses in the case to create the correct focal length for the projected image.
6. Add fans, and wire up the electronics.
7. Attach a video source, such as a DVD player or computer, and hit “play.”

Click here for the in-depth photo how-to.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/d...cbccdrcrd.html





News From The North



The TankGirl Diaries


26.6.2006

Swedish Musician Union Launches a Sales Service For Its Members

Sydsvenskan reports how the professional union of Swedish musicians, Musikerförbundet, is opening a new payment service to help its members to sell their music directly from their homepages.

The union is tired to see its members being fooled in royalty payments by the record companies. "The Swedish musicians do not get as much as they should from the record companies", says Musikerförbundet's Jan Granvik. "It is very hard to keep track of the royalty money streams. The industry has built an unbelievably complex system, and the musicians are constantly cheated. They are an easy prey as they are the only ones in the business who do their work because it is fun - all the other parties are there just to make money."

The union is presently running an inspection on Swedish record company Mariann. A number of artists suspect they have been cheated in Mariann's royalty payments. Such inspections are rare though as they are costly to organize. Therefore Musikerförbundet has chosen a new strategy: the artists can now handle the selling of their music themselves.

The union invested 500,000 Swedish crowns (50,000 USD) to new software that can handle the sales of audio files, t-shirts and CDs so that the items are sold from the various homepages of the artists but the money transactions are handled centrally by the union itself. Both credit card and mobile phone payments are accepted. The money goes first to Musikförbundet which then passes it to the artists. The system will be immediately helpful for unsigned artists; most signed artists will not be able to use the service right away because they have given exclusive sales rights of their albums to their record labels. This does not worry Jan Granvik. "Only by setting up an alternative system can we attract a larger number of musicians."

Musikerförbundet hopes that their new service will help to turn things back into right track. "This is our way to face both the threat of illegal filesharing and the threat of unethical businessmen.", says Granvik.


26.6.2006

New Study: Downloading Not The Reason For Movie Industry's Problems

Svenska Dagbladet reports about a new large study on Swedish media consumers conducted by the University of Gothenburg (Göteborg). The results from the new study question movie industry's claims that filesharing is the reason behind the falling trend in the movie theatre audiences.

"A downloaded film does not offer the same experience as going to movies. The study shows clearly that most people think the movies are at best in movie theatres. I personally believe that the movies people download are those that they would not go to see in theatres anyway", says Rudolf Antoni, a doctorate on journalism and mass communication reponsible for the study.

The results show that 18 % of those who download films go to movies at least once a month while only 9 % of those who never download movies visit movie theatres as often. In other words, filesharers are twice as active moviegoers compared to non-filesharers. Downloading is most common among 15-29 old males, but even in this net-savvy consumer group the results are not particularly alarming for the movie industry: those who download movies go to movies approximately as often as those who never download them.

The study does not support the idea of downloading hurting DVD sales either. Those who download movies from Internet consume about twice the amount of DVDs compared to non-downloaders.

A total of 3000 Swedes were included in the study; answers were received from 65 % of those being polled. The study was done in 2005 when no online movie services were yet available to Swedes. Svenska Filminstitutet (Swedish Film Institute), a major organization supporting the production of Swedish movies, was one of the sponsors of the study.


28.6.2006

Pirate Movement Spreads to France and Italy

Political initiatives to set up official Pirate Parties following the Swedish model have taken place both in France and in Italy.

Here is the agenda of the French Pirate Party:

We, French Internauts, presently observe the confiscation, by a few partisan and powerful groups, of the French Internet Domain, therefore leading to a prejudice for the vast majority of Internauts.

With the upcoming promulgation of the law about Author Rights - EUCD - , these rights being now seen as the ennemy of the network and of the internauts, we demand the abrogation of the whole set of laws that define intellectual property on the French soil and encourage the internauts to forget these notions in their everyday lives.

The party also demands the legalisation of P2P networks for non-lucrative use as a natural consequence of the suppression of the author right.

The French Pirate Party plan 6 major reforms :

1. Total and unlimited liberty of speech
2. The end of the author rights as they exist in 2006
3. The right to browse anonimously on Internet
4. The legalization of P2P Networks when used in a non-lucrative purpose
5. The suppression of all taxes on empty hardware
6. Free Internet access to all

29.6.2006

Pirate Party Rules In A Large Online Election Poll

Demokrati.nu ('democracy now') is a Swedish online poll website charting the popularity of the various parties in the coming September 18 election. The site, sponsored by several Swedish magazines, certifies with both IP numbers and e-mail that people vote only once. Voters are allowed to change their earlier vote anytime they wish.

Now that over 6000 people have voted, Pirate Party has a clear lead with 33.7 % of the votes. The Pirates are followed by liberal-conservative Moderate Party (17.9 %), main government party Social Democrats (13.9 %) and populist right-wing party Swedish Democrats (13.9 %).

It is obvious that this type of online poll favors parties with active, net-savvy supporters and does not thereby represent the entire population. On the other hand, the sample of 6000 voters is already quite large and starts to give indications of the national trends.

The figures are certain to cause worries to the strategists of the established parties. To prevent a dramatic loss of votes - especially among 400,000 first time voters - four of the seven parliamentary parties have already bent to support Pirate Party's demand to legalize private filesharing in Sweden. But the voters may still not find the old parties credible enough - after all, those same parties forced a new stricter copyright law on Sweden just a year ago. Pirates, on the other hand, are street credible, generally considered cool, and they come with a sharp, modern agenda for a better information society. The additional merit in their agenda is the unconditional decriminalization of 1.3 million Swedish filesharers - which may be a big factor in this particular election.


30.6.2006

Another Large Online Poll Indicates Strong Support For Pirates

IDG.se, a major Swedish technology web portal with 1.2 million visitors, dedicated its 'Weekly Poll' to the coming September 18 election, asking how the readers plan to vote. A total of 5050 people participated in the poll, and the final results gave Pirate Party a convincing 39.4 % support. The combined support of Moderates, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats and Center Party (lumped together as 'Borgerligt Parti') was 36.2 %. The main government party Social Democrats got only 6.4 % support, and the combined support of the Greens and Left Party was 6 %. Together with demokrati.nu results, these figures are to cause even more worries to the established parties. The Pirates seem to enjoy strong popularity among the tech-savvy part of the Swedish population.


30.6.2006

Swedish Prosecutor: "Pirate Bureau is Like IRA and Pirate Bay Like Its Armed Wing"

The courtroom controversy between the Swedish filesharing activists and the officials behind the Pirate Bay raid is getting pretty tough. In a trial where service provider PRQ demands its confiscated servers back from the police - they contain e.g. their customer database and information needed to pay taxes - the State Prosecutor Håkan Roswall made the following statement: "I don't know how to put it, but you could say that Piratbyrån is like IRA and The Pirate Bay is like its armed wing."

A statement like this demonstrates well how hard it is for some Swedish officials to accept the fact that there can be a genuine political movement that campaigns for a copyright reform. The prosecutor is unwilling to return the servers to PRQ claiming they are needed as evidence, even if the time would already have allowed to copy all relevant data to other computers for evidence purposes. A more obvious motivation is to hinder the operation of Piratbyrån, the ideological headquarters of the Swedish copyright reform movement.

Starting from last year, the entertainment industry lobbyists have campaigned actively to hijack the new European data retention laws - motivated solely by the fight against terrorism - to serve their own commercial interests at the expense of the taxpayer.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...stpost&t=22742

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/





French Lawmakers Approve 'iTunes Law'
Laurence Frost and Nathalie Schuck

French lawmakers gave final approval Friday to legislation that could force Apple Computer Inc. to make its iPod and iTunes Music Store compatible with rivals' music players and online services.

Both the Senate and the National Assembly, France's lower house, voted in favor of the copyright bill, which some analysts said could cause Apple Computer Inc. and others to pull their music players and online download stores from France.

The vote was the final legislative step before the bill becomes law - barring the success of a last-ditch constitutional challenge filed last week by the opposition Socialists.

Currently, songs bought on iTunes can be played only on iPods, and an iPod can't play downloads from other stores that rival the extensive iTunes music catalog from major artists and labels - like Sony's Connect and Napster.

Apple described the original version of the copyright bill as "state-sponsored piracy" earlier this year, but a company spokesman was not immediately available to comment on Friday's vote.

In a statement issued after lawmakers hashed out the final compromise text last week, Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide "which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers."

The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores, but it toned down many of the tougher measures backed by lower-house lawmakers early on.

It also maintained a loophole introduced by senators, which could allow Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple and others to dodge the data-sharing demands by striking new deals with record labels and artists.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Is It Illegal To Describe The Sporting Event You're Watching?
Mike

A few years back, there was a service launched that would let anyone become their own sports announcer. It let web users broadcast their own audio commentary of a sporting event over the web. I can't remember when I read about it, and don't know if it's still around at all -- but the idea was certainly intriguing. There certainly are some people who just can't stand certain professional sportscasters, and the opportunity to open up sports commentary to just about anyone is an interesting idea. Of course, that doesn't fit with the way most organized sports view themselves. We've discussed in the past how ruthless Major League Baseball has been in claiming it owns nearly all aspects of a game. At the time, one of the questions was whether or not it would be illegal to sit in the stands and "broadcast" an audio description of the game to a friend using a mobile phone. Sports leagues may claim it's illegal, but it seems unlikely that the courts would agree.

This issue is only going to get a lot more legal attention in the near future. As amateur to amateur content becomes more common, it's going to hit organized sports in ways they don't seem to realize. Take a look at the World Cup, for example. Again, this is an organized sporting event that has been quite aggressive in trying to protect all game-related content -- going so far as to pre-warn random websites not to rebroadcast games. However, with the means of production and distribution now reaching the hands of just about everyone (for example a cameraphone and YouTube) some are starting to wonder whether organized sports will be able to cope. It certainly raises some questions about the boundaries of what can actually be presented. Where is the line? Can I call someone and describe what I'm seeing? What if it's a videocall? What if there are two people on the line? Or 200? Or 2 million? It becomes increasingly difficult to figure out what's okay and what isn't when it's no longer just a few big broadcast companies at the table. It also could destroy the idea that one broadcaster gets exclusive rights to an event. If individuals are able to broadcast their own content from a game, how long will it be until other professional sports broadcasters start to ask why they can't just show up and broadcast on their own, even without securing the "rights". If the events of a game are considered facts that are part of a news story -- what's to stop just about anyone, professional or amateur, from sending out their own version of the game?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060628/0156200.shtml





Downloading Empathy to Your iPod

Online Playlist Creators Search for Catharsis, Discover a Marketplace
Howard Parnell

Justine Saylors is an accidental DJ on a mission.

Six months ago, she was a grieving mom spending hour after hour on Apple's iTunes online music service, downloading songs to match her sorrow. Josh Groban's "Remember" became a particular favorite, with its "Bolero"-like refrain "Remember/I will still be here/As long as you hold me/in your memory/Remember me." It made her think of her son, Lance Kowalski, who died in October 2003 at the age of 13.

Saylors was deep in "the grief pit" nearly two years after her son's death, she wrote in a recent e-mail exchange with a reporter.

"I sat outside with my iPod blaring it over and over," she recalled. "My world revolved around him, and when he was gone it crushed me beyond belief. There are times still when I miss him so much, I find myself holding my breath."

Last summer the 44-year old Lake Oswego, Ore., resident discovered iMixes -- music playlists compiled by iTunes users, then uploaded and shared with other customers. Soon she was typing words and phrases such as "bereavement" and "death of a child" into the iMix search tool, then sampling and in many cases buying songs at 99 cents a pop from the lists that turned up.

By the time another October arrived, Saylors had amassed a sizable collection of some of the most heartbreaking music to be found on iTunes. And nearly all of it had been recommended not by professional critics or some sort of Amazonian collaborative filtering bot, but by people who -- judging from notes posted with their iMixes or just the song selections alone -- seemed to Justine to be much like herself: hurting, missing someone special, reaching out.

The result was a personal playlist of songs that Lance would sing along to, that were used in soundtracks of home movies taken in his final months, that were played at his funeral, and that she could cry to after.

Today, Saylors is herself one of the more visible iMix creators, and in recent months iTunes users have rated hers among the best of the more than 300,000 lists available on the service. In searching for a way to cope with her loss and create awareness of neuroblastoma, the pediatric cancer that claimed her son, she became part of a phenomenon that some researchers predict will dramatically change the online music business before the decade is out.

'Something Important Going On'

IMixes -- as well as playlists on other services such as Rhapsody, Musicstrands and Soundflavor -- are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme -- and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance.

Even late, lamented radio stations merit personal tributes. The old WHFS, an alternative-rock pioneer for decades on Baltimore-Washington area airwaves before changing to a Spanish-language format in early 2005, is the theme of more than a dozen current iTunes playlists.

But as personal and private as they can be, such playlists are expected to have a significant impact on online music distribution and sales, according to one recent study by market research firm Gartner Inc. and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. By the year 2010, the study predicts, 25 percent of online music-store transactions will be driven by people like Saylors.

Not that Saylors and others like her go into it thinking about driving transactions for Apple, said Harvard researcher Derek Slater, co-author of the study "Consumer Taste Sharing Is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture." And not that driving transactions is the only benefit the researchers see.

"Even if we're wrong in our prediction by however many percentage points, there is something important going on culturally here," said Slater, who also frequently writes on the subject in his blog, "A Copyfighter's Musings." Saylors and others like her may constitute a new breed of music "tastemakers," he argues.

"Instead of primarily disc jockeys and music videos shaping how we view music, we have a greater opportunity to hear from each other," he and Gartner researcher Mike McGuire wrote in their December study. "These [playlist] tools allow people to play a greater role in shaping culture, which, in turn, shapes themselves. In this way, recommendation tools encourage music fans to engage in expressive acts, becoming creators."

Rebecca Tushnet, a professor with Georgetown University Law Center, has studied and written about playlists and mix CDs from an intellectual-property perspective. Her conclusion: The creation of a playlist or mix CD of music composed by others is a creative act in itself, a form of free speech.

"It is an important means of self-expression," she says. "The motivation is an urge to say, 'This is who I am, and you can find out who I am by knowing what I love.'"
Anatomy of a Playlist

Saylors built her collection by cherry-picking from iMix playlists with names like "Long Drive From a Funeral." (Links to playlists will only work for iTunes users.) The list's compiler notes that "Long Drive" consists of "songs I recorded to listen to while driving back from my son's funeral. A weird assortment." Sample songs: "Melissa" by the Allman Brothers, "The Lady in Red" by Chris De Burgh, and "Vissi D'arte, Vissi D'amore" featuring Leontyne Price, from the album "20 Great Soprano Arias".

Saylors also found "Grief -- Love Carries You Through" (iMixer note: "On June 6th my twin girls, Riley and Dylan, were born too early to survive. In the last month with the help of other grieving parents, I have compiled these songs that touch my heart, comfort my soul and bring tears to my eyes." Sample songs: "Believe" by Brooks and Dunn, "Angels in Waiting" by Tammy Cochran, and "I Hope You Dance" by Lee Ann Womack) and "Born to Be an Angel -- In Memory of Nathaniel Joseph 03/24/05" (iMixer note: "This mix of songs is dedicated to my Angel. ... He was diagnosed with anencephaly, and could not live outside of my womb." Sample songs: "Godspeed" by the Dixie Chicks, "Who You'd Be Today" by Kenny Chesney, and "Glory Baby" by Watermark).

"I would literally try to find the biggest tear-jerkers," Saylors said.

Around the second anniversary of her son's death, she decided to try her own hand at iMixing. "The songs on the first list are all songs that I could relate to, and also some of the songs that Lance loved by the Back Street Boys," she said. Other tracks include "Slumber My Darling" by Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma and "Only Time" by Enya .

"But," said Saylors, "the one that really stands out is Van Morrison's 'Have I told You Lately,' because I used to sing that to Lance all of his life."

The result was "Missing My Son, Lance," with an iMix note that reads: "This is a list I have created in honor of the best person I have ever known and miss so, so terribly." The 45-song expression of parental grief quickly became one of the service's top 10 user-ranked iMixes, much to Saylors's surprise. "I was literally stunned," she recalled in late December.

'I Found You on iTunes'

Among those supporters was Carla Wessel of St. Petersburg, Fla., the mother of Nathaniel Joseph, who had posted her "Born to be an Angel" iMix last spring.

A month before Nathaniel's due date in early 2005, Wessel was told her son would not survive childbirth. A diagnosis of anencephaly meant Nathaniel's brain failed to form. "The head stopped above the eyes and ears," Wessel said in a recent phone call, explaining the cap worn by Nathaniel in hospital photos taken soon after delivery.

With weeks to prepare for the inevitable, Wessel turned to iMix and downloaded songs to help her get through. "I chose songs that had words that would be appropriate to the situation," she said. "And some people mentioned songs they liked, so I downloaded them."

Though she made the playlist for herself initially, she soon decided to post it for the benefit of others. "I can't write a song, I can't write a poem, but this helps," she explained. "Whenever I find something that has helped me, I share it."

On the opposite coast, in the opposite corner of the country, Saylors came across Wessel's playlist while compiling her own collection several months later. "I downloaded a few from her mix and rated it five stars. That is how Carla and I got in touch via e-mail."

And Wessel, in turn, encouraged Saylors to continue iMixing in memory of Lance.

"Seeing the attention it was getting, and the attention for pediatric cancer, it's been a trip," said Saylors. She has gone on to post "Missing My Son Lance" parts 2, 3, 4 and 5, drawing in part from suggestions offered by the scores of visitors who have signed the guestbook of Lance's memorial site since her first playlist was first published.

"I found you on iTunes," wrote Jerry of Nashville. "Your story made me hug my son just a little tighter tonight. May God bless and keep you wrapped in his loving arms."

"I found the site on iTunes," wrote Stuart of Boca Raton, Fla. "My eyes are filled with tears."

Wrote Matt of Shreveport, La., "I never thought in a million years something so powerful as your words and dedication to your son would be discovered on a music download service."

And this, say Slater and McGuire, is what they're getting at when they write of personal playlists "democratizing culture."

"Once they find others that have similar or at least interesting tastes, consumers might interact with each other," the two wrote in their December study. "Some of these interactions may be simple and fleeting, but others may help form stronger bonds.

"To the extent the tools can create bonds between people, the creation of these communities may have beneficial spill-over effects into the rest of our lives."
Benefits of Self-Expression

The current percentage of sales driven by playlists is hard to pin down, according to McGuire. But with some 10 million credit cards reported on account with iTunes last quarter and the number of individual playlists approaching 400,000, McGuire said, "it is still a relatively small amount." ITunes does not have information about iMixes' effect on sales, according to spokeswoman Amy Gardner.

What is clear though, McGuire said, is that personal playlists are having an impact. "I don't think they'd keep it up if they weren't," said McGuire, citing as further evidence Yahoo's purchase in recent weeks of the music playlist service Webjay and the hiring of its creator, Lucas Gonze.

Enabling users to essentially recommend music purchases to others underscores that music is something worth paying for online, according to McGuire. "Over the long haul, these kinds of tools continue to place value on the music for consumers."

Besides encouraging purchases rather than piracy, playlists also serve to surface obscure or forgotten songs. "We now have access to music far beyond what the typical Wal-Mart would carry," said Slater. "How do you navigate that range of music? By exploring playlists created by people who share your tastes."

"The [music] industry needs to take a look at playlists and really rethink its approach to distribution. Turning individuals into tastemakers can be a good thing," said Slater, who sees a day when playlist creators become licensed distributors. "I'm not saying it's easy, but I do think it's necessary and beneficial for the industry to pursue."

In addition to the economic upside, the researchers see cultural plusses, as well. "There is the benefit of allowing me or any individual a way to place a stamp on the culture," said McGuire.

"For example, I can create a playlist that expresses my distaste and disdain for the war in Iraq," he said. And that playlist may include tracks recognized as protest songs as well as songs that might not be recognized as such, but in the context of the list they take on new meaning -- "the way I order it, the works I put in there."

Tushnet uses song lyrics for further illustration. Her "favorite footnote" in her December 2004 Yale Law Journal paper "Steal This Essay" quotes from "Avenue Q" and the band Semisonic to make her point that playlists provide a unique emotional outlet: "Sometimes when someone/Has a crush on you/They'll make you a mix tape/To give you a clue" and "Got your tape and it changed my mind/Heard your voice between the lines."

"These folks just enjoy and are passionate about music and like to be the Lewis and Clark, if you will, about music among their friends," McGuire said. "It's a statement of self."

Slater concurs: "This is not just something people are throwing together haphazardly. Music is important to our identity, our shared experience of culture, whether mass culture or niche culture, but also to the way we see ourselves -- what are my tastes? What am I about? It's a process of identity forming at its core."

McGuire is following up the December study with more research into what motivates playlist publishers and consumers. "Of those who look for opportunities to publish their tastes in music, more than two-thirds said they did so simply because they 'wanted to share the music they like with their friends.' So they're not looking for fame [or] fortune," he said of creators like Saylors and Wessel.

As for those who look to playlists for recommendations, McGuire has found that 20 percent said they preferred consumer recommendations over a professional DJ's, and 35 percent said they preferred the recommendations of like-minded individuals. And while those numbers don't constitute a majority, said McGuire, "it is a healthy chunk of people."

McGuire describes his work as identifying the "early indicators" of change, and views these baseline numbers as strong ones. "By supplementing and augmenting traditional tastemakers," he says, playlist creators "are adding a digital spin to word of mouth." These "new mediators and tastemakers," he continued, can exert a very strong influence, and their influence can be much larger than their immediate circle of friends."

"This," according to Slater, "is potentially a watershed moment."

Playlist Therapy

For individuals such as Saylors and Wessel, though, the creation of a playlist marks a much more personal watershed moment. Among the things the two women have in common is that they listen to their own playlists often. It's a form of therapy, they say -- a step toward healing.

"There are times I can listen to them without tears, other times I listen to them when I'm in the grief pit and it allows me to cry," Saylors said. "Doing these iMixes got me through the holiday season."

Wessel listens to "Born to Be an Angel" periodically to check her state of mind.

"I make myself listen to it to put myself in that space," she said. "It's kind of a gauge for me to see where I am, to see what kind of shape I'm in. I can sit back and think about the blessing that I had. If I listen to it 10 times and haven't cried for 10 times, then I know I'm on a pretty good stretch."

And by sharing her gauge online, Wessel is doing her part to help others cope with personal tragedy. "A loss is a loss no matter what," she said, "and I think music can help all losses."

As for Saylors, playlists have helped her do more than get through the holidays. They have given her renewed purpose.

"Ive been obsessed with it, I guess," she said, shortly after publishing "Pediatric Cancer Survivor," a playlist commemorating one neuroblastoma patient's third year of remission. "I felt so bad since Lance died because I hadn't really done anything for the fight. I've been so grief-stricken."

But, she said, " I think since iTunes is so huge, people are seeing these Web sites about kids who are dying of cancer. So that's my goal, to get the word out. This is really one of the first things that's gotten me on a roll."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030100635.html





Arrests Made in '05 LexisNexis Data Breach

Five Men Charged With Aggravated ID Theft of Thousands of Personal Records
Brian Krebs

Federal authorities last week arrested five men in connection with a 2005 database breach at LexisNexis Group that the database giant said led to the theft of personal records on more than 310,000 individuals.

Some of the accused individuals, who range in age from 19 to 24, were also involved in the theft last year of revealing photos and other information from hotel heiress Paris Hilton's cell phone, and in using stolen or illegally created accounts at LexisNexis subsidiaries to look up Social Security numbers and other personal information on dozens of other Hollywood celebrities.

Copies of the indictments filed against two of the men and reviewed by a washingtonpost.com reporter indicate the government plans to charge all five suspects with "aggravated identity theft," which is defined as the use of a stolen identity to commit other crimes. Under a law passed in July 2004, persons found guilty of aggravated identity theft receive a mandatory two-year prison sentence in addition to any penalties for related crimes.

The indictment names Jason Daniel Hawks, 24, of Winston Salem, N.C.; Zachary Wiley Mann, 19, of Maple Grove, Minn.; Timothy C. McKeage, 21, of Woonsocket, R.I.; Justin A. Perras, 19, of New Bedford, Mass.; and Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, 21, of Laguna Beach, Calif. The men also face charges of conspiracy and computer fraud.

The government alleges that on two dates in January and March 2005, McKeage (known online by the hacker alias "Krazed") compromised a computer belonging to an officer in the Port Orange (Fla.) Police Department and used the department's credentials to access records at Accurint, a database service for law enforcement and legal professionals offered by Seisint, a Florida-based subsidiary of LexisNexis. The indictment charges that McKeage used that access to create even more user accounts, which he then allegedly shared with the other co-defendants.

The complaint also alleges that at that same time, Perras --- online alias "Null," --- gained access to an Accurint account belonging to a police department in Denton County, Texas, by impersonating a LexisNexis employee.

The government charges that the five men used the stolen Accurint accounts to look up sensitive data on a number of individuals. The victims are named only by their initials in the indictment.

But according to interviews washingtonpost.com had with at least three of the accused, the group accessed information on Hilton, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), and actors Laurence Fishburne and Demi Moore.

Perras said Friday that he admitted to U.S. Secret Service agents last February that all of the charges against him in the government's complaint were true. But he said no one in the group used the information obtained through Accurint for illegal purposes.

Reached by phone at the home of a friend in New Bedford, Mass., Perras said, "There was never any malicious intent. We were just a bunch of kids goofing around. No one was planning on stealing anyone's identities."

In May 2005, washingtonpost.com reported on the role of one of Perras's friends -- a minor -- in the hacking of Paris Hilton's cell phone. That individual -- whom washingtonpost.com is not naming because he is still a minor -- is currently serving an 11-month sentence in a Massachusetts juvenile detention center after pleading guilty to his role in the Hilton phone hack, among other charges.

Zach Mann, another one of the young men arrested last week, said he attended Central Lakes College in Minnesota last semester but said he doesn't plan to return to school next year, regardless of the outcome of his trial. In a phone interview with washingtonpost.com, Mann admitted that he looked up the personal information of several celebrities -- including Fishburne's. But he denied that anyone in the group ever tried to profit from any of the information they looked up using the stolen Accurint accounts.

But when asked whether he had any regrets or misgivings about his actions, Mann --- known in hacker circles by the online handle "Majy" --- was defiant.

"I'd do it safer, because way too many people involved were talking about it," Mann said. "I don't think what we did was that bad. We never used anyone's identity. Besides, don't you think it's wrong that a company like that has all this information that's available to anyone who's willing to pay for it?"

The five men are ordered to appear in a West Palm Beach, Fla., courtroom for a pre-trial hearing on July 12, and all are currently free on bond.

A spokesperson for the Secret Service declined to comment, referring inquiries to the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of Florida, which could not be reached for comment as of press time. LexisNexis officials did not return calls seeking comment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...063001222.html





Government Says Stolen VA Laptop Recovered
Hope Yen

The government has recovered the stolen laptop computer and hard drive containing sensitive data for up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson said Thursday.

Nicholson said law enforcement officials were still investigating to determine whether data from the equipment, which included names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, had been duplicated or utilized in any way.

So far, he said there have been no reports of identity theft stemming from the May 3 burglary at a VA employee's Maryland home.

"There is reason to be optimistic," Nicholson told a House committee at the opening of a hearing on one of the worst breaches of information security. "There is not a certainty, but we have to remain hopeful they have not been compromised."

Nicholson offered no immediate details on how the laptop was recovered. He acknowledged that the burglary "has brought to the light of day some real deficiencies in the manner we handled personal data."

"If there's a redeeming part of this, I think we can turn this around," he said.

Newly discovered documents show that the VA analyst blamed for losing the laptop had received permission to work from home with data that included millions of Social Security numbers and other personal information on veterans and military personnel.

"From the start, the VA has acted as if the theft was a PR problem that had to be managed, not fully confronted," said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. "They're trying to pin it on this one guy, but I think it's other people we need to be looking at."

The documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the data analyst, whose name was being withheld, had approval as early as Sept. 5, 2002, to use special software at home that was designed to manipulate large amounts of data.

A separate agreement, dated Feb. 5, 2002, from the office of the assistant secretary for policy and planning, allowed the worker to access Social Security numbers for millions of veterans.

A third document, also issued in 2002, gave the analyst permission to take a laptop computer and accessories for work outside of the VA building.

"These data are protected under the Privacy Act," one document states. The analyst is the "lead programmer within the Policy Analysis Service and as such needs access to real Social Security numbers."

The department said last month it was in the process of firing the data analyst, who is now challenging the dismissal.

VA officials have said the firing was justified because the analyst violated department procedure by taking the data home. They also said he was "grossly negligent" in handling sensitive information.

However, Filner noted that the employee had informed supervisors of the theft immediately after the crime, while supervisors waited nearly three weeks to inform the public on May 22. Nicholson himself was informed on May 16.

"The gross negligence in this case are the people above him," said Filner, the acting top Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee.

Veterans groups and lawmakers from both parties have criticized the VA for the theft and noted years of warnings by auditors that information security was lax. Some veterans also have filed suit in federal court, seeking $1,000 in damages — or up to $26.5 billion total — for privacy violations.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...w075415D98.DTL





FTC Laptops Stolen, Along With Personal Data

Computers were stolen from a locked vehicle, government agency says.
Jeremy Kirk

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is notifying 110 people that two laptop computers containing their personal data were stolen from a locked vehicle.

The information includes individuals' names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and "in some cases, financial account numbers," the regulatory agency said this week.

The laptops are password protected, and the FTC said it had no reason to think the data on the laptops, rather than the laptops themselves, was the target of theft.

Those affected include defendants in current and past FTC cases. The agency was sending letters to them with information about how to limit their risk of identity theft and offering a year of free credit monitoring.

Latest Incident

It's only the latest case in which sensitive information has been lost on government computers.

In May, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said personal data for 26.5 million veterans may have been compromised after a break-in at an analyst's home.

The analyst had violated a department security policy by taking home the sensitive data. The incident prompted calls for all government agencies to adhere more closely to the Federal Information Security Management Act.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp





Navy Finds Data on Thousands of Sailors on Web Site
Josh White

Navy officials discovered this week that personal information on nearly 28,000 sailors and family members was compromised when it appeared on a Web site, fueling more concerns about the security of sensitive information belonging to federal employees.

Five spreadsheet files of data -- including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of sailors and their relatives -- were found exposed on a Web site Thursday night during routine internal sweeps of the Internet for sensitive material, said Lt. Justin Cole, a spokesman for the chief of naval personnel. He said the material was removed from the Web site within two hours.

"It was information you don't want on a public Web site," Cole said. "But there was no indication it was being used for illegal purposes."

The potential security breach is one of several losses of important personal data reported in Washington in recent weeks, part of an unusual string of thefts and Internet hacks that have compromised information belonging to millions of federal workers. Five other agencies and the D.C. government have reported similar problems since the beginning of May.

The largest breach occurred May 9, when a Department of Veterans Affairs laptop computer and external hard drive were stolen from an Aspen Hill home, a theft that officials said included personal information on up to 26.5 million retirees and active-duty personnel. There was no indication the thief was targeting the information.

Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office said it removed from its Web site archival records with names and Social Security numbers on fewer than 1,000 government workers.

Earlier this week, the Agriculture Department reported that data on as many as 26,000 employees had been compromised by a hacker. A laptop containing data on 13,000 D.C. workers and retirees was stolen last week. The Energy Department said that similar data for 1,500 employees may have been accessed by a hacker in September, and Internal Revenue Service officials said a laptop containing names, Social Security numbers and fingerprints of 291 employees and applications was misplaced in May.

In the Navy case, officials are unsure how the information ended up on an insecure Web site, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is looking into whether the person who posted it was supposed to have access to the data. Cole said it is possible the information was posted inadvertently.

The Navy plans to contact the people affected and urge them to closely monitor bank and credit card accounts for fraudulent activity.

Congress is considering a measure that would pay for credit monitoring for those affected by the VA data loss. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) called yesterday for the Defense Department to provide immediate free credit monitoring for sailors who may have been affected by the Internet posting.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Markey said the incident "raises serious questions about the nature and adequacy of privacy protections afforded to active duty military personnel, their families, and military veterans."

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee, applauded the Navy's speedy response to get the information removed from public view.

Cole said sailors may contact the Navy Personnel Command call center to determine whether their names were on the compromised list: 866-827-5672.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062301493.html





Used Hard Drives Retain Data in eBay Sale

Utility scrambles to recover customer records mistakenly released on unscrubbed disks.
Sharon Fisher

Anybody with five bucks and a little patience may be able to score sensitive corporate data on eBay.

Organizations engaging in the common practice of disk drive recycling--selling unneeded disk drives directly or through a service--may find that company data winds up for sale on eBay's auction site, even if the drives have been wiped first.

Idaho Power found itself in that situation last week as it attempted to track down unscrubbed company disk drives that had been sold on eBay.

The drives contained confidential employee information, correspondence with customers, and memos that discussed proprietary company information, the company said.

The Boise, Idaho-based utility supplies electricity to approximately 460,000 customers in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.

Idaho Power said it hired Grant Korth of Nampa, Idaho, to recycle about 230 SCSI drives. Korth sold 84 of those drives to 12 parties, which have not been disclosed by the company, using the eBay Web site. The remaining 146 drives were returned to Idaho Power, the company said.

Korth declined to comment on the situation.

Search and Retrieval

Idaho Power has received assurance from ten of the 12 parties that bought drives over eBay that the hardware would be returned or the data on them would not be saved or distributed. The other two parties are still being tracked down, the company said.

An Idaho Power spokesperson said the company has hired a Seattle law firm, Blank Law & Technology, to launch an investigation to determine what information was on the affected drives and why they weren't scrubbed as required.

Typically, Idaho Power either destroys drives or scrubs them to Department of Defense standards, the spokesperson said. In this case, the salvage vendor was to have scrubbed the drives to DOD standards, he said.

The company said it will not know what regulatory penalties it may face until the investigation is completed.

In the meantime, Idaho Power has implemented a new policy that calls for drives to be destroyed rather than sold for salvage. That's the type of policy advocated by Simson Garfinkel, a postdoctorate fellow at Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society who has researched the issue.

"The resale value of a hard drive is really minuscule," he said. "These things are worth $5 to $20 each. I don't think anyone's buying them on the secondary market for extortion, but you never know."

Frances O'Brien, an analyst at Gartner, said the distribution of drives carrying unscrubbed data is commonplace. "It happens all the time," she said. Typically, a user either doesn't know to clean the drives or doesn't do it correctly, she said.

Aside from the financial concerns related to losing data, organizations that improperly recycle disk drives can run afoul of a number of federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, O'Brien said.

In addition, such incidents could lead to significant penalties in states like California and New York that have broad privacy regulations, said Robert Houghton, president of Redemtech, a Columbus, Ohio-based outsourcer.

When a company hires an outsourcer--which is a practice Gartner recommends--it needs to be aware of the outsourcer's methods for cleansing data, O'Brien said. "If everyone else is charging $20 and someone says they'll do it for $2," he said, "you've got to wonder why."
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125662,00.asp





OMB Sets Guidelines for Federal Employee Laptop Security
Brian Krebs

The Bush administration is giving federal civilian agencies 45 days to implement new measures to protect the security of personal information that agencies hold on millions of employees and citizens.

The new security guidelines, issued Friday by the White House Office of Management and Budget, cap a month marked by data thefts or disclosures at five different agencies that compromised Social Security numbers and other private data on millions of people.

To comply with the new policy, agencies will have to encrypt all data on laptop or handheld computers unless the data are classified as "non-sensitive" by an agency's deputy director. Agency employees also would need two-factor authentication -- a password plus a physical device such as a key card -- to reach a work database through a remote connection, which must be automatically severed after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Finally, agencies would have to begin keeping detailed records of any information downloaded from databases that hold sensitive information, and verify that those records are deleted within 90 days unless their use is still required.

OMB said agencies are expected to have the measures in place within 45 days, and that it would work with agency inspectors general to ensure compliance. It stopped short of calling the changes "requirements," choosing instead to label them "recommendations" that were intended "to compensate for the protections offered by the physical security controls when information is removed from, or accessed from outside of the agency location."

That careful distinction indicates that the administration is under pressure to respond to the recent string of data mishaps, but that it could not quickly pull all the political and financial strings usually tied to regulatory mandates, according to James Lewis, director of technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The encryption and authentication measures mean agencies are going to have to spend money that they weren't planning to spend, and so in that way it's probably easier for [OMB] to get a recommendation out than [a] command," Lewis said. "That said, this is more of an implied threat, because you usually don't threaten agencies with their inspector general unless you intend to lean on them."

"The safeguards that the White House is calling for are excellent," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training group based in Bethesda, Md.. However, Paller said, agencies are likely to become preoccupied with a document attached to the memo that spells out nearly a dozen new "action items" devised by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"The sad thing is that NIST grasped defeat from jaws of victory by crafting a document that requires agencies to spend a lot of time and tens of thousands of dollars in studies to figure out what to do next."

The new guidelines (viewable here as a PDF document) also drew a strong reaction from House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), whose panel has awarded government-wide cyber-security efforts a grade of D-plus or worse for the past four years in a row.

"I sincerely hope this action leads to both better results and better practices -- and if not, perhaps Congress will have to step in and mandate specific security requirements," Davis said in a statement.

The recent string of data incidents began May 22, when the Department of Veterans Affairs disclosed that a laptop and external hard drive -- including the unencrypted names, Social Security numbers and birth dates for about 26.5 million veterans -- were stolen earlier in the month from the home of a VA employee.

On June 5, the Internal Revenue Service said a missing laptop contained the Social Security numbers, fingerprints and names of 291 employees and IRS job applicants. Two weeks later the Agriculture Department revealed that a hacker had broken into its network and stolen names, Social Security numbers and photos of some 26,000 employees and contractors in the Washington area.

Then on Thursday the Federal Trade Commission -- an agency whose mission includes consumer protection and occasionally involves suing companies for negligence in protecting customer information -- said it lost a pair of laptops that contained Social Security numbers and financial data related to different law enforcement investigations.

That same day, the Navy said it was investigating how Social Security numbers and other personal data for 28,000 sailors and family members wound up on a civilian Web site.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062700540.html





Sale of Digital Security Firm Said to Be Near
Andrew Ross Sorkin and John Markoff

RSA Security, a pioneering digital security company, quietly put itself up for sale several months ago and is now near a deal with EMC or at least one other bidder, people involved in the auction process said last night.

A deal, possibly worth more than $1.8 billion, could be reached in a few days, these people said. The company has a market value of $1.46 billion.

RSA's board is expected to meet before the weekend to review final bids, these people said. They cautioned, however, that it remained possible that RSA could still decide against a sale.

It could not be learned last night who was competing against EMC, the data storage giant.

RSA, based in Bedford, Mass., makes physical security cards under the SecurID brand that are widely used in authentication systems at corporations around the world. The company is also active in developing antifraud technologies and a variety of encryption systems.

RSA takes its name from the initials of its three founders: Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman. The three, who are academic researchers, are leading figures in the field of cryptography who developed an important algorithm in a technology known as public key cryptography.

The company became a commercial success largely through the efforts of an early chief executive, Jim Bidzos, who became an outspoken advocate of commercial cryptography in the face of government opposition. He struck an early deal to use RSA technology in the Netscape browser.

Today, the company has $322 million in annual revenue and $40.5 million in net income.

RSA is widely known for sponsoring the RSA Security conference, a trade show and conference that has become the focus of the computer security industry.

Shares of the RSA closed yesterday at $19.36, up 15 cents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/te...rssnyt&emc=rss





Analysis Finds e-Voting Machines Vulnerable
Andrea Stone

Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes.

There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities.

The study, which took more than a year to complete, examined optical scanners and touch-screen machines with and without paper trails. Together, the three systems account for 80% of the voting machines that will be used in this November's election.

While there have been no documented cases of these voting machines being hacked, Lawrence Norden, who chaired the task force and heads the Brennan Center's voting-technology assessment project, says there have been similar software attacks on computerized gambling slot machines.

"It is unrealistic to think this isn't something to worry about" in terms of future elections, he says.

The report comes during primary season amid growing concerns about potential errors and tampering. Lawsuits have been filed in at least six states to block the purchase or use of computerized machines.

Election officials in California and Pennsylvania recently issued urgent warnings to local polling supervisors about potential software problems in touch-screen voting machines after a test in Utah uncovered vulnerabilities in machines made by Diebold Election Systems.

North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold did not return calls for comment. The company, a major manufacturer of e-voting machines, said earlier this month that security flaws cited in its machines were theoretical and would be addressed this year.

The new threat analysis does not address specific machines or companies. Instead, it "confirms the suspicions about electronic voting machines that people may have had from individual reports" of problems, Norden says.

Among the findings:

•Using corrupt software to switch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three systems. A would-be hacker would have to overcome many hurdles to do this, the report says, but none "is insurmountable."

•The most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attack by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digital assistant." Only New York, Minnesota and California ban wireless components.

•Even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited.

•Most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.

"There are plenty of vulnerabilities that can and should be fixed before the November election," says David Jefferson, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory computer scientist who served on the task force. "Whether they will or not remains to be seen."

The report said state election officials could improve voting-machine security if they conduct routine audits comparing voter- verified paper trails to the electronic record and ban wireless components in voting machines.

"A voting system that is not auditable contains the seeds of destruction for a democracy," says Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a chief sponsor of a bill to improve electronic-voting security.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...g_x.htm?csp=34





Voting Machine Technician Fired In Mishap

Leflore, Jackson had problems
AP

A voting machine technician has been dismissed due to problems with the Leflore County machines in last week's Democratic primary, officials say.

The touch-screen machines, made by Diebold, were being used for the first time in the Tuesday primary.

"The voting machines in Leflore County were not set up right," said David Blount, a spokesman for Secretary of State Eric Clark. "They were not set up for each voting precinct. That led to the problems we had. The technician, employed by Diebold, should have caught and corrected any mistakes. That's what they are for."

Edward Course, chairman of the Leflore County Election Commission, identified the technician as Lorenzo Millsaps of Canton. Millsaps could not be contacted for comment on Monday.

After the polls opened, reports came in that machines weren't working throughout the county. Some machines were down for several hours, which forced election workers to use paper ballots.

Jesse Ross, chairman of the county Democratic Executive Committee, declined to comment on the firing.

On Friday, Ross and others finished certifying primary results. The new touch-screen system was used in 77 counties in the state for the primary. Each county was assigned a Diebold technician, Blount said.

Millsaps had been in Leflore County as a technician since May 6, Course said.

Course said the machines in the county were set up in a "post-election mode" when polls opened on Tuesday. For the machines to work properly, he said, they needed to be set up in "election mode."

Although there were some common problems associated with the primary across the state, the only two counties with major voting machine problems were Leflore and Jackson, Blount said.

The problems with the machines in Jackson County were not related to human error, he said.

"The Diebold folks, over the whole state, have done a very good job," Blount said.

He said officials consider the accuracy of the new machines to be critical in gaining the public's acceptance and use of them and that's why Millsaps was fired.

"We want to hold people accountable. We are insistent that things work right." Blount said. "Overall, we were very pleased. We want to make sure it is right in every county."
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunhera...e/14804953.htm





U.S. Unprepared For Net Meltdown, Blue Chips Warn
Anne Broache

The United States has never experienced a massive Internet outage, but a coalition of dynamic chief executives said Friday that the nation must do more to prepare for that prospect.

The cautionary document (click here for PDF) was a product of the Business Roundtable, whose 160 corporate members include companies ranging from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems to General Motors, Home Depot and Coca-Cola. All told, the group's high-rolling membership counts $4.5 trillion in annual revenues, more than 10 million employees and nearly a third the total value of the U.S. stock market.

Experts remain divided on the likelihood that a "cyber Katrina" will occur, as the round table itself acknowledges. But many sectors of the economy continue to urge the government to be better prepared should such an event occur.

Without proper planning, myriad industries--from health care to transportation to financial services--could face devastation if a natural disaster, terrorist or hacker succeeded in disrupting Net access, they said.

"There is no national policy on why, when and how the government would intervene to reconstitute portions of the Internet or to respond to a threat or attack," the report said. Private-sector companies may have individual readiness plans, but they aren't prepared to work together on a wide scale to restore normal activity, the businesses said.

The report called for the government to take a number of actions:

• Set up a global advance-warning mechanism, akin to those broadcasted for natural disasters, for Internet disruptions

• Issue a policy that clearly defines the roles of business and government representatives in the event of disruptions

• Establish formal training programs for response to cyberdisasters

• Allot more federal funding for cybersecurity protection

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, which bears primary responsibility for coordinating responses to cyberattacks, receives on average $70 million per year, or about 0.2 percent of the entire U.S. Department of Homeland Security budget, the report noted.

The suggestions drew praise from the Cyber Security Industry Alliance. That organization, composed of computer security companies, has long been lobbying for additional actions by Congress and the Bush administration in the cybersecurity realm.

"A massive cyberdisruption could have a cascading, long-term impact, without adequate coordination between government and the private sector," said Paul Kurtz, the alliance's executive director. "The stakes are too high for continued government inaction."

Homeland Security has borne the brunt of the criticism for alleged inaction, though the agency did lead a mock cyberattack and response earlier this year. An analysis of that exercise is expected this summer.
http://news.com.com/U.S.+unprepared+...3-6087470.html





Congress Mulls Slew of Net Sex Rules
Declan McCullagh

When it comes to topics conducive to political speechifying, few compare to the volatile mix of the Internet, sex and children.

At a hearing before the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, politicians served up a dizzying slew of suggestions about what kind of new federal laws should be enacted.

The ideas were all over the map, and most were new. Only one or two have actually been turned into formal legislation so far, but politicians are vowing to take action in the very near future.

A child exploitation law is "one of the highest priority issues not just before this subcommittee, but the full committee," said Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee. "It is my intention to...see if we can't develop very quickly a comprehensive piece of anti-child-pornography legislation."

Following is a roundup of some of the proposals for new federal laws, rules or regulations that would target American businesses--if, that is, various members of Congress get their way.

Forcibly blocking off-color Web sites: Rep. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, lauded a U.K. approach that involves compiling a list of illicit Web sites and using it to cordon off access to them. Internet providers should, Stupak said, block "American predators from using U.S.-based platforms to access child pornography at any site worldwide."

Eavesdropping on what Americans are doing online: Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, suggested surveillance might do the trick. "One issue that keeps recurring is how these companies are monitoring communications that might reveal the contents are child pornography," she suggested.

Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, sounded a similar tone without endorsing the eavesdropping plan: "I don't think that people who are raping 2-year-old children on the Internet have any right to privacy."

Making certain hyperlinks illegal: One antigambling bill in Congress a few years ago would have required companies to delete hyperlinks to offshore gambling sites. Now the idea is resurfacing. "Who's able to link to which site...and how we filter that out" is key, said Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican. "Some ISPs are better than others."

Recording which customer is assigned which Internet Protocol address: Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the oversight subcommittee, said he wanted to learn "about Internet service providers' retention policies for IP addresses in particular." In one case, Whitfield warned, police could not find who had been assigned a "3-day-old IP address from an Internet service provider. That is unacceptable." (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been pushing for this as well.)

Dispatching "search and destroy" bots: The idea of disrupting peer-to-peer networks surfaced in 2002 in the House of Representatives, and Sen. Orrin Hatch said a year later that copyright holders should be allowed to remotely destroy the computers of music pirates. Now Rep. Walden has revived that idea, proposing that search and destroy bots be launched to scour the Internet for illicit content.

"If you could search for different things, you might be able to search for a known image, identify it and destroy it," Walden suggested. He dubbed the idea "technologically scan and destroy."

Restricting naughty Webcams: Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican and chairman of a consumer protection subcommittee, cited a New York Times article about an adolescent boy who charged customers to watch him perform erotic acts in front of his Web cam. "We've heard about one Web site that had 140,000 images of adolescents from their Web cam," Stearns said. We need "to do whatever we can in our power to protect the innocent."

Recording e-mail correspondents and Web pages visited: "Amazingly, even though we require telephone companies to keep records of telephone calls for 18 months...there is no federal law for Internet communications and there is no industry standard," said DeGette, the Colorado Democrat. "This is hindering investigations."

DeGette has been a leading proponent in the House of Representatives of data retention and already drafted legislation making it mandatory for Internet providers and Web sites.

Taking aim at search engines: Search engines were accused of selling sponsored links that relate to sex and minors. "I have serious concerns about the adequacy of efforts by the search engine providers," said Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat. Google was singled out for selling racy ads tied to the search term "pre-teen."

Rep. Chip Pickering, a Mississippi Republican, complained that Google fought a subpoena from the Justice Department in court and had a culture of liberalism. "Do you want to be known as the company where teenagers can have access to teen pornography and where your clients can go into child pornographic sites, feeling as they'll be protected and that information will not be given to the government?" Pickering said. (For its part, Google says it has a "zero-tolerance policy on child pornography." Nicole Wong, its associate general counsel, said that Google's system had blocked only "preteen" and it now recognized the hyphen.)

Letting government bureaucrats rate chat rooms: Video games and movies have ratings, so why not chat rooms, Rep. Stearns proposed. "Should chat rooms be set up with some sort of controls from the Federal Trade Commission, or should software be developed to categorize?" Stearns suggested. "Should manufacturers of computers provide that software? Sort of like a V-chip in a TV. You'd have this software program...that way it would be automatic."

Permitting the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to send subpoenas to Internet providers: This idea came from Gerard Lewis, Comcast's deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer, who testified at the hearing. NCMEC already receives federal tax dollars to forward reports of child exploitation to police. But the concept was shot down by DeGette, who said: "I don't think it would work."

Stupak said, however, that he wanted to give NCMEC the power to require Internet providers to preserve records in specific cases--a move that would effectively make it a quasi police agency. A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act currently requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity." (Also on Tuesday, Comcast said it would retain customer records for 180 days, up from 30 days.)

Targeting peer-to-peer networks: Politicians have been talking about enacting new laws targeting P2P networks since early 2003. Now it may happen. Government reports have talked about finding child pornography on P2P networks, and Stupak said he wants to find a way to pull the plug. "How to stop the peer to peer?" Stupak said. "I'd be interested in some suggestions...We have to find a way to block the peer to peer from person to person."

Granting Internet censorship power to federal bureaucrats: Under the current U.S. legal system, only a judge can decide what's legally obscene or pornographic. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a law that criminalized any computer-generated sex image that "appears to be" of a minor--which makes deciding what's legal and not even more tricky.

But Barton said the judicial process takes too long to rule in prosecutions of child pornography. "Why is it not possible to immediately terminate that site?" Barton said. "You have to have some agency of the government definitively say that is child pornography. Once that's established, why can't we immediately cut off that site? (That would avoid) waiting for a court to go out and convict the people operating the site."
http://news.com.com/Congress+mulls+s...3-6088627.html





Internet Providers To Combat Child Porn
Anick Jesdanun

Five leading online service providers will jointly build a database of child-pornography images and develop other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images.

The companies pledged $1 million among them Tuesday to set up a technology coalition as part of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They aim to create the database by year's end, though many details remain unsettled.

The participating companies are Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., EarthLink Inc. and United Online Inc., the company behind NetZero and Juno.

Ernie Allen, the chief executive of the missing children's center, noted that the Internet companies already possess many technologies to help protect users from threats such as viruses and e-mail "phishing" scams. "There's nothing more insidious and inappropriate" than child pornography, he said.

The announcement comes as the U.S. government is pressuring service providers to do more to help combat child pornography. Top law enforcement officials have told Internet companies they must retain customer records longer to help in such cases and have suggested seeking legislation to require it.

AOL chief counsel John Ryan said the coalition was partly a response to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' April speech identifying increases in child-porn cases and chiding the Internet industry for not doing more about them.

The creation of the technology coalition does not directly address the preservation of records but could demonstrate the industry's willingness to cooperate.

Plans call for the missing children's center to collect known child-porn images and create a unique mathematical signature for each one based on a common formula. Each participating company would scan its users' images for matches.

AOL, for instance, plans to check e-mail attachments that are already being scanned for viruses. If child porn is detected, AOL would refer the case to the missing-children's center for further investigation, as service providers are required to do under federal law.

Each company will set its own procedures on how it uses the database, but executives say the partnership will let companies exchange their best ideas - ultimately developing tools for preventing child-porn distribution instead of simply catching violations.

"When we pool together all our collective know-how and technical tools, we hope to come up with something more comprehensive along the lines of preventative" measures, said Tim Cranton, Microsoft's director of Internet safety enforcement programs.

Ryan said that although AOL will initially focus on scanning e-mail attachments, the goal is to ultimately develop techniques for checking other distribution techniques as well, such as instant messaging or Web uploads.

Representatives will begin meeting next month to evaluate their technologies, determining, for instance, whether cropping an image would change its signature and hinder comparisons. Also to be discussed are ways to ensure that customers' privacy is protected. Authorities still would need subpoenas to get identifying information on violators.

The companies involved said they are talking with other service providers about joining. But companies that do not participate still are required by law to report any suspected child-porn images, and many already have their own techniques for monitoring and identifying them.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Free Web Browser May Give You More Than You Asked For

Security firm Panda Software says that Browsezilla secretly visits pornographic Web sites if you use the browser.
Robert McMillan

A free Web browser that bills itself as a tool for privacy protection is, in fact, a click-fraud engine for pornographic Web sites, security vendor Panda Software warned today.

Browsezilla, whose name and Lizard-like mascot are reminiscent of the open-source Mozilla browser products, claims to help surfers cover their tracks when visiting pornographic sites. It does not use browser history or save data to a cache, and it allows users to save their bookmarks on a remote server, according to the product's Web site.

However, Browsezilla also secretly installs adware that boosts the page view counts on certain pornographic Web sites, according to J.J. Schoch, director of marketing with Panda. "It's being used deceptively to get more hits on their site," Schoch says. "This adware opens a series of adult web pages, although they are not visible to the user."

Why the Warning Was Issued

On its Web site, Panda describes itself as a provider of integrated security solutions to protect PCs from viruses, spyware, hackers, spam, and other Internet threats.

The company issued a press release warning about the browser, after noticing that Browsezilla was becoming more widely used. Although the browser has been adopted by users in a number of countries, it appears to be most popular in Italy, Schoch says.

Schoch adds that this is the first browser he has seen that downloads this type of click-generating software.

Panda is drawing attention to the matter because it believes the browser's creators are acting in a deceptive manner that ultimately could harm unsuspecting users, Schoch explains. "It's not going to wreck your computer, but it could taint somebody's reputation," he notes.

Users might already be wary of the software, even without Panda's warning. The Browsezilla download page features an "Adult links" section with hard-core pornographic images, a rarity in browser download sites.

The Browsezilla team called Panda's allegations "unsubstantiated" in a statement on the Browsezilla.com Web site, but the group shed little light on the situation when asked for further comment on Panda's press release.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/prin...,126226,00.asp





Study: Internet Partly To Blame For Your Lack Of Close Friends
Network World Staff

Increased use of the Internet, along with the number of hours people are spending at work, are factors contributing to a drastic decline in the number of close friends that Americans have.

The number of people who say they have no one to talk to about important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona. The average number of people who respondents said they discuss important matters fell from about three to two. The more insular population is increasingly reliant on family members as confidants, the researchers say.

"This change indicates something that's not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a professor of sociology at Duke.

New technology links people over greater distances, but cuts into face-to-face meeting time, the researchers said.

The study, which compares data from 1985 and 2004, was published earlier this month in the American Sociological Review. The data derives from the long-running General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972. Roughly 1,500 people were surveyed.

Researchers said that one reason that the survey might have turned up such a shift in social networks is that many respondents might have interpreted the questions differently in 2004 than they did in 1985. People might not consider e-mailing or instant messaging "discussing," for instance.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...t-friends.html





Old at 10, Slate.Com Sparks Media Soul – Searching

Not much has survived 10 years on the Internet, so Slate magazine's celebration of that milestone this month sparked self-congratulation, criticism and much soul-searching about the future of old and new media.

Slate has plenty of critics, the loudest of whom were invited to air their views online. This prompted descriptions such as ``shrill and superficial,'' ``liberal, contrarian and haughty,'' ``insufferable'' and just plain ``irritating.''

But whatever the critics say, Slate has survived and boasts usage figures comparable to the Web versions of The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and National Public Radio, according to Internet usage measurement firm Hitwise.

A big reason for its survival is what media columnist Jeff Jarvis, author of media Web log www.buzzmachine.com, calls ``two very good sugar daddies.'' Launched in June 1996 by Microsoft Inc., Slate was sold to The Washington Post in 2005.

Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University and blogs at www.PressThink.org, said Slate also succeeded in adapting -- going from weekly to daily to real-time, switching revenue models, and adding space for readers to talk back.

David Talbot, founder and editor for 10 years of Slate's longtime rival Salon, said newspapers and magazines were like ''oil tankers'' by comparison.

With circulation declining, major U.S. newspaper groups have announced rounds of job cuts in recent years, and the industry is immersed in endless debate about its future.

``The newspapers have lost one of their key bases now to Craigslist with the classifieds: you'd think that would be a huge wake-up call,'' Talbot said, referring to the free site that is now a one-stop shop for everything from apartments to dating.

'In-Your-Face' Newspapers?

``Newspapers' future is on the Web. They should be developing more opinionated writers,'' he said. ``Fox News showed where popular taste is. People want in-your-face, opinionated media.''

Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time Inc. from 1995 until the end of 2005, said the Internet had overtaken newspapers in their three traditional strengths -- timeliness, being publications of record, and classifieds.

``The most exciting thing that could happen is that newspapers and magazines become more publications of opinion,'' Pearlstine said at a media forum for Slate's 10th anniversary.

Jarvis said British newspaper The Guardian was leading the way with its two-month-old communal blog www.commentisfree.com, where the paper's journalists write articles in the chatty style of blogs and enter into debate with readers.

Jarvis said the new role for the journalist was to be the moderator, but even that is being overtaken by sites such as www.digg.com, where readers choose what tops the news by voting on stories. ``What's one year old is more interesting than what's 10 years old,'' Jarvis said.

Rosen said his journalism students at NYU still aspire to a career in traditional media, but he started teaching ``Blogging 101'' this spring to open their horizons.

Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff said the big challenge for print media apart from advertising was not the direct competition from the likes of Slate, but that nobody now relies on a single newspaper, Web site or TV channel. ``The idea of one source of information is laughable now,'' he said.

According to Hitwise, only four news sites boast a market share of more than 2 percent. Yahoo is top with 6 percent.

For Jarvis, that means advertising money spread more thinly and targeted at niche markets -- good news for ``citizen journalists'' and bloggers, including his 14-year-old son.

``My son gets checks for the blog he writes and it's plenty for him to buy an iPod,'' Jarvis said.

But Talbot said blogs and news sites like www.drudge.com, ranked No. 5, were entirely dependent on ``old media'' for the stories they link to ``like the birds that sit on hippos.''

``Without the old hippos, those birds would be out.''
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...EDIA-SLATE.xml





Waiting for the Dough on the Web
Richard Siklos

NOW and then, an executive whose brain I'm siphoning will turn the tables and pose a question. And lately, I've been getting a few versions of this: "You talk to a lot of the traditional media companies. Who do you think has got this Internet thing figured out?"

That is a tough but very pertinent question, given all the digital hurly-burly of the past decade or so.

Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation, for instance, get points for their speed and resolve to gain traction online. The company's moves have included the purchase last year of the teenage hangout MySpace.

Robert A. Iger at the Walt Disney Company is notable for being the first to put television shows, his from ABC, on iTunes and then to try streaming them on the Web, supported solely by sponsors.

Time Warner has the AOL paradox on its hands: it owns one of the top Internet destinations but is clouded by the service's daunting business challenges.

Viacom has made some small but clever acquisitions — Neopets and iFilm, for instance — and has a proven record for knowing what young people want and giving it to them on MTV and Nickelodeon.

Among newspaper companies, I'd posit that the Washington Post Company and Dow Jones — and, yes, The New York Times Company — stand out for their online strategies.

And, for cable television channels, CNN and MSNBC seem to have staked out prime real estate online.

But one could make a case that the amount of focus on — and hype about — Internet activities at media companies has some kind of inverse relationship to the amount of near-term revenue they represent for these companies.

We're still in the early innings, but given how much the Internet has already transformed the media and society, it's surprising how little money traditional media companies make directly from it.

Don't take my word for it. Flip through the financial statements of some of the biggest names to see what they say about their Web sales and profits. You won't find separately broken-out figures at Disney, Viacom, or Time Warner (aside from AOL).

Even at the News Corporation, the combined Internet operations, including the increasingly popular MySpace, don't merit being listed separately on the income statement. Rather, the company focuses on seven somewhat old-fashioned "industry segments," including cable network programming, television, newspapers and filmed entertainment. Online activities are lumped into a category called "other," which includes billboard companies in Russia and Eastern Europe, a record label in New Zealand, an Israeli technology company and a business that owns the broadcast and sponsorship rights to the 2007 Cricket World Cup.

In the nine months ended March 31, "other" represented not quite $1 billion of the News Corporation's total revenue of $18.5 billion, and posted an operating loss of $68 million at a company that showed total operating income of $2.84 billion. In other words, the Internet was a rounding error.

Some companies are starting to give glimpses of how they are doing online. For instance, the Tribune Company, which owns dozens of newspapers and television stations, said that digital media revenue would total $225 million this year — or 6 percent of its publishing revenue, a percentage that it said it expected to double by 2010.

Disney's chief financial officer, Thomas O. Staggs, recently told an investors' conference that the company was generating roughly $500 million in online advertising sales across its properties, which include ESPN.com. But this is at a company that, over all, is expected to generate revenue of $34 billion this year.

A while back, I paid a visit to Sumner M. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, at his home in Beverly Hills. While perusing his collection of saltwater fish — the world's largest such collection, he says — I ran by him my theory that strikingly little money is being generated online despite all the activity among the media cabal. "I'm expecting we'll have a $500 million business in three years' time," Mr. Redstone said. "That may not be a lot of money to you, but it is to me."

So maybe I was being a little cheeky. The optimist's view is that the spoils from this new frontier are still very much up for grabs. Only about 6 percent of all advertising spending in the United States went to the Internet in the first quarter of the year, according to Merrill Lynch. But it was clearly the fastest-growing category — up 38 percent year over year. And PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts that Internet ad spending over the next five years will more than double globally, to $51.6 billion.

The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits. Thanks to aggregators, file sharers, pirates and other disruptors, more value will leak away or be stolen than will be gained by these companies.

THIS is not to say that online will never be an important — if not central — financial contributor to media businesses of all kinds. For some companies, though, it could serve increasingly as a promotional or marketing outlet, or as a cut-rate but widely distributed version of what consumers can buy in conventional formats. (A case in point: if you are reading this on newsprint, the chances are that you paid for it one way or another. If you are reading it online, there is a decent chance that it is coming to you free. But, then again, it didn't cost very much to make it available to you digitally.)

For now, though, the question of who among the media companies has this Internet thing figured out remains open. But at this time of upheaval and gloom about media's prospects, it is funny to think about how much money there is still to be made in the good old offline world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/bu.../25frenzy.html





Pull my paycheck

No Cash? No Card? Just Stick In Finger

A Tampa Coast to Coast convenience store has installed a device that scans your fingerprint to process payment through a debit account.
Mark Albright

Customers can pay with cash, plastic or their index finger at a new Coast to Coast Family Convenience store here.

Taking a big step beyond the ease of the Mobil SpeedPass, Coast to Coast has installed what's claimed as Florida's first biometric payment system.

There are no cards or PIN numbers to remember. Just stick your finger in the scanner and be on your way.

While applications are available to process credit and store loyalty card transactions by fingerprint, this one is limited to processing only debit account transactions.

"People either love it or think it's a sign of the coming apocalypse,'' said Amer Hawatmeh, owner of the new convenience store at 110 E Bearss Ave. who signed up a few hundred customers for Pay By Touch. "But to me, it's the wave of the future.''

Pay By Touch is one of several speedier payment technologies racing to build enough retailer acceptance to ace out rivals and overcome consumers' rising concerns over identity theft.

It's all on the road to payment gurus' vision of a cashier-free future, in which customers just walk out the door while their transaction is automatically processed.

The big credit card companies, for instance, are deploying a card reader developed by MasterCard International that picks up a radio signal to record a transaction when a card is merely tapped on or waved around a reader at the checkout stand. Other wireless systems in use in other countries use built-in payment system prompts broadcast to and from a cell phone to activate vending machines.

Pay By Touch is a closely held San Francisco startup that uses finger-scan technology to authenticate payment account holders. Backed by $130-million in venture capital money, Pay By Touch recently paid $82-million to acquire BioPay LLC, its biggest finger-scan competitor that has won a following in Europe big enough to authenticate $7-billion worth of transactions to date.

Pay By Touch now has tests under way with several convenience stores, gas stations and supermarket chains around the United States, including Harris Teeter in the Carolinas, Farm Fresh in Virginia and Jewel Osco in Chicago.

"Finger scanning is new, so we want to get people used to it by building acceptance at high-frequency, high-traffic retail locations such as gas stations and grocery stores,'' said Leslie Connelly, spokeswoman for Pay By Touch. "We're also going into places where people who don't have a banking relationship cash paychecks.''

The company is a bit puzzled by customer privacy fears. After all, they say, how can using a unique fingerprint for identification be riskier to theft than a plastic card, key chain token or account number that's tapped into a computer or spoken over the phone?

The company pledges not to sell or rent personal information, or access to it. The fingerprint image recorded is not the same as those collected by the federal government or law enforcement.

It's similar to the finger-scan technology used at theme park gates. Those systems take measurements of patrons' hands and fingers and link them to a multi-day pass to prevent several people from using one person's pass.

The Pay By Touch computer records a multitude of point-to-point measurements and stores them in an encrypted form in an IBM data center. Images of both index fingers are kept in case a shopper's trigger finger is hidden by a bandage.

To create an account, you must let the store get a fix on you and your bank account by scanning in a sample check and a driver's license. You can also apply online and be assigned a PIN number. The number is keyed in the first time you buy something to link your fingerprint to the personal account information.

The shopper needs neither a card nor a PIN number after that. Just place a finger on the scanner.

Retailers are paying a minimal amount to test the system. But many retailers such as Coast to Coast are drawn to Pay By Touch because it can process debit account payments or eChecks, an Internet version of a paper check, without subjecting the store to interchange fees that cost the retailers 2 to 3 percent of the transaction.
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/06/20/Bu...rd_Just_.shtml





Murdoch Closer To Deal With Malone
Nic Hopkins

RUPERT MURDOCH said yesterday that he intends to sell some of News Corporation’s local US television stations within the next year and may use the sale to buy back an 18 per cent stake in the company owned by John Malone, the billionaire investor.

Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, parent company of The Times, would not give a deadline for closing a deal over Mr Malone’s stake, but said that the company was “a little closer to talking about that [with Mr Malone] more meaningfully”.

One solution could involve selling Mr Malone “a number of TV stations” in an effort to minimise his tax bill on the News Corp holding. However, it is understood that Mr Murdoch does not intend to sell all the stations.

Selling the stake for cash would result in a large tax bill for Mr Malone because of the 17 per cent rise in News Corp shares this year. News Corp owns the Fox television network in the US as well as many local television stations.

Mr Murdoch also said that free-to-air broadcasters were likely to see “shrinkage” in revenues because of declining spending by advertisers.

News Corp lowered its 2006 operating income forecast after a property sale in Britain was postponed for regulatory reasons. The company said that the sale, which was expected to generate $140 million, was scheduled to have closed in the 2006 financial year but would be delayed until 2007. As a result, News Corp lowered its projection for operating income growth from 12 per cent to about 8 per cent in the year to June 2006.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...&attr=Business





Save Some For The HoneymoonCam
Abby Ellin

ONLY two guests — both strangers —were in attendance on May 18, when Dawn Westman and Einar Ollander of Tarpon Springs, Fla., were married in the chapel of the Grand Princess, a cruise ship sailing the Mediterranean. But dozens were watching from home.

The audience included the bride's father and stepmother, who witnessed the event from their home in Worcester, Mass.; the bridegroom's mother in Tarpon Springs; and the bridegroom's brother in Gainesville, Fla. All awakened around 4 a.m. and flicked on their home computers so they could view the wedding couple walking down the aisle, live over the Internet.

"None of our friends or family were there in person," said the new Mrs. Ollander, 39, who, like her husband, had been married once before. "But they were able to watch it on the Webcam."

This Webcast concept perfectly melds America's couch-potato culture and its obsession with weddings. Now there is no need to rise, dress up and go. Observers can quickly take in a niece's ceremony and openly engage in catty commentary, all from the privacy of home. For the couples it offers a high-tech, low-cost way to have their "destination wedding" and connect with friends and family, too.

"I think big weddings are overblown and expensive," said Carol Angell Beauvais, who watched her cousin's Caribbean wedding last year from her den in Westport, N.Y. "You should save your money for a down payment on a house."

It would surprise few to learn that Nevada, land of drive-through weddings and Elvis impersonators, has rapidly embraced online ceremonies.

About 5,000 couples have made use of Webcams perched in the chapels at the Treasure Island and MGM Grand hotels in Las Vegas. "One of the reasons we chose Treasure Island was because of the Webcast," said Shauntea Tolliver, 29, of Beach Park, Ill., who married Ransley Denton, 33, on May 2. Only 10 people witnessed the wedding in person, but a gaggle of relatives in five states tuned in.

How do people let guests know of their Webcasting plans? Via electronic invitation, naturally.

Marc Finkel, the chief operating officer of Cashman Enterprises (www.cashmanpro.com), a Las Vegas photography and video service which began offering Webcasting three years ago, asks the bride and bridegroom to provide the names and the e-mail addresses of all guests. Mr. Finkel then sends digital invitations.

Two years ago, Larry Fair began noticing how few guests were present at ceremonies he witnessed on Honolulu's beaches. "Obviously not everybody could come," Mr. Fair said. So he and a partner established a business there called Live Internet Weddings that charges $400 over the cost of producing the wedding video itself to stream it live on the Internet. His company (www.liveinternetweddings.com) keeps it online for two weeks, in case people miss it live.

Stephanie Coontz, the author of "Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage" (Penguin), has considered this phenomenon and declared it a mixed bag. "We no longer have cookie-cutter marriages, and people are very interested in using their wedding ceremony to indicate how unique their marriage is going to be," she said.

Some tech-savvy suitors are even getting engaged via the Web. On May 20, James Lee, 27, a Yale medical student, proposed to Uschi Lang, 26, a student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, by Internet. Knowing that a round-the-clock Webcam had been set up in the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Mr. Lee stood outside it at 5 a.m. and held up three signs that read: "Uschi Lang. I love you. Will you marry me?"

Ms. Lang watched his proposal and "started crying," she recalled. "And of course said yes."

She was not the only one watching. They sent the link to their relatives in Seattle, China, Hawaii, Germany and Peru. And then, of course, there were the thousands of bloggers who mentioned the event on their Web sites. "I started realizing the implications," said Mr. Lee, who is undecided about doing a repeat performance when they marry. "In retrospect, it was a crazy thing."

For those who view a friend's wedding on the Web and wonder if they need to send a gift, Ms. Coontz has an answer: "My gift is watching it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25fiel.html





Beyoncé, Aguilera, Jackson, Simpson and Jewel: Seeking Another Turn in the Spotlight
Kelefa Sanneh

I can't get over you. Every time I see you, everything starts making sense. Here's an opportunity that you don't wanna miss. Call on me, anytime that you please. Listen, dear, I need you to hear: I cannot disappear.

By accident or by design, it's comeback season on the pop charts. Which means that right now five A-list (or formerly A-list) pop stars are clamoring for our attention. They are, in the order their pleas were quoted, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Janet Jackson and Jewel. And they are, all of them, telling us how much they missed us, in hopes that we'll tell them the same thing.

For Beyoncé and Ms. Aguilera, both of whom are returning after hit albums, the task is simple: they just have to prove they can still do what they did last time. That explains "Deja Vu" (Columbia), Beyoncé's new single, which is a sequel to her 2003 smash "Crazy in Love." Like that song, this one is a duet with her boyfriend, Jay-Z, who sounds uncharacteristically deferential whenever he's around her. (The two performed it at the BET Awards, broadcast on Tuesday night.)

This song too has a disco beat so fierce it's practically macho. And it starts with a knowing tease as Beyoncé summons the instruments one by one: "High-hat. 808. Jay." (Drums, a drum machine and a rapper boyfriend: what else do you need?) But the refrain doesn't give Beyoncé a chance really to show off, and Jay-Z's second verse in particular sounds a bit clunky. It's a fair-to-middling single from a singer who is the opposite of desperate: Beyoncé has already topped the charts this year with her keyed-up Slim Thug collaboration, "Check On It." One way or another, she'll do it again.

Listeners in search of the next "Crazy in Love" should be looking instead to Ms. Aguilera, the unpredictable former teen-pop star. Her 2002 album, "Stripped," included a garish club track ("Dirrty"), an inspirational ballad ("Beautiful," accompanied by a pro-gay video) and a feminist hip-hop collaboration ("Can't Hold Us Down," featuring Lil' Kim).

Ms. Aguilera's new single, "Ain't No Other Man" (RCA), comes from her forthcoming double-album, "Back to Basics." It's devastating: all hard drums and horn blasts, with Ms. Aguilera delivering a series of nimble vocal runs and roaring ad-libs. (The song was produced by the pioneering hip-hop producer DJ Premier.) The period-piece video, directed by Bryan Barber, casts Ms. Aguilera as Baby Jane, a jazz singer tearing up a Harlem speakeasy. And for now her only problem is a happy one: How on earth will she top this?

Ms. Simpson, on the other hand, is a hugely successful singer with nothing in particular to top. Her 2003 album, "In This Skin," sold almost three million copies, and yet it's hard to think of a Jessica Simpson song everyone knows. What everyone knows of course is that her marriage to Nick Lachey was chronicled on a reality show, "Newlyweds," and that its demise has been chronicled in the tabloids.

Maybe that's why she has returned with "A Public Affair" (Sony), the first single from the forthcoming album of the same name. The title hints at scandal, but the lyrics are cheerfully inane. It's a bubbly, nostalgic synth-pop song and a canny move: instead of giving fans yet another glimpse into her (somewhat) real life, she has giving them a giddy daydream. "All the girls stepping out for a public affair," she sings, and in the music video she is to be flanked by Christina Applegate, Eva Longoria and Christina Milian, a singer recently dropped by Island Def Jam Records. (Come to think of it, she could use a comeback single too.)

Ms. Jackson is also changing the topic, although she has less choice. After committing the unpardonable sin of showing Super Bowl fans her nipple (who knew the anti-nipple lobby was so powerful?), she paid the price: her 2004 album, "Damita Jo," was a commercial failure. Like every album she has made since "Control," this one was full of playful songs and hard (sometimes ominous) beats. And maybe one day more listeners will realize that, like every Janet Jackson album since "Control," this one was also pretty great.

For now though she's making amends, or trying to. Her new single is "Call on Me," featuring Nelly, and the idea isn't a bad one: Get back on the charts by recording a thug-love duet. But why is the song — which hasn't yet caught on at radio — so bland? "I can meet you anywhere," she coos, and he replies that he too has a flexible schedule. Why don't these two stop making plans and get down to business?

For a singer like Ms. Jackson, recovering from a perceived failure is tricky. Do you stick with what you're good at? Or do you change to match a changing audience? Another slumping singer, Jewel, has figured out that she may not have to choose.

Jewel's 2003 album, "0304," was a disastrous attempt to turn a folky songwriter into a playful dance-pop star. And so she's back with "Goodbye Alice in Wonderland" (Atlantic), a return to the breathy, strummy sound that made her a star. And when does it hit shops? Um, two months ago. It hasn't, in other words, made much of an impact.

But in an alternative universe, the album's lead single, "Again and Again," isn't a three-month-old dud, it's a new "debut." And that alternate universe is called Nashville, where Jewel's rustic songs don't seem out of place, and where her boyfriend, the rodeo star Ty Murray, is a bona fide celebrity. The country channel CMT gave the "Again and Again" video a premiere on June 22, and if the strategy is a success, Jewel might pull off a neat trick: winning a new audience by being her old self.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/ar...ic/29sann.html





With Online Music, It's a Buyer's Market

Shared, Often Eclectic Tastes Determine What Will Sell
Yuki Noguchi

For years, old recordings have piled up in the archives at Verve Records, including beloved jazz tracks that had no market big enough to justify pressing new discs. But thanks to the Internet, music lovers are rediscovering iconic titles like Ella Fitzgerald's "Sunshine of Your Love" and Quincy Jones's "Body Heat" -- rekindling enough popular demand to prompt Verve to reissue them through a project called Verve Vault.

"The demand for music has never been as big as it is today. We get all kinds of questions from customers worldwide, looking for a track name or an album, or asking, 'Why haven't you put that out yet?' " said Jon Vanhala, vice president of new media and strategic marketing at Verve. So far, about 2,700 albums have been brought back through the Vault, with more than 5,000 scheduled to follow.

Because the Internet has changed how people discover and share music, the rules of marketing it and the hierarchy of who determines what's hot have also changed. As radio-music listenership declines, the industry finds itself spending more time courting a broader field of tastemakers who, through Web sites, are popularizing songs that never get radio play. The primary tool in this transition is the playlist -- a sequence of tracks posted on blogs or shared on music purchase sites such as iTunes.

"I listen to way more music than I ever have in my life," said Robert Burke, a North Carolina quality assurance manager by day who spends nearly all of his free time searching through new music online, then compiling tracks in playlists with various themes, like rock songs that include a tuba, Top 20 bands from the 1980s with mullets, artists who sample riffs from Miles Davis, and so on.

"I kind of started it because I've always collected music, and I've become pretty obsessed with it since then," said Burke, whose blog on Yahoo Radish, Playlistradish.com, has published thousands of his playlists for the consumption of others.

With legions of new bands popping up online every day, fans need guidance just to keep up, said Oliver Wang, founder of Soul Sides, another high-traffic music blog.

In the online world, friends' recommendations or an endorsement from bloggers such as Wang and Burke, as well as podcasts such as "The Nashville Nobody Knows" and "Accident Hash," can yield significant marketplace results.

A duo called Gnarls Barkley, for example, found a huge following online. The band's songs, including "Crazy," were well established online before getting radio play. Its songs have been listened to on the band's MySpace social-networking site more than 6 million times. Transatlantic online exchanges made the British band Arctic Monkeys famous in the United States before any album came out here.

"Word of mouth benefits [independent labels] in particular, and we're only starting to see the benefits," said Kevin Arnold, founder and chief executive of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, which disseminates music from 2,500 labels to digital music services.

To court the online tastemakers, the alliance last fall launched Promonet -- a system that maintains a master playlist of new releases for reviewers, Arnold said.

Digital music services themselves have become engines of recommendation. Music stores such as iTunes, EMusic, and Yahoo Music give users the ability to check out others' playlists, so people with similar tastes can find each other and discover new music. Additionally, services such as Rhapsody, Napster, Livefm, Pandora, AOL and Yahoo all have Internet-radio options with algorithms that register a person's taste and, based on the listeners preference, stream in similar, new music.

"I've found a few bands that way," including one called the Magic Numbers, said Alex Kilfoyle, 23, a Washington electrical engineer.

"When I started college, I was listening to rock and classic rock, and that's it," said Kilfoyle, who swaps music recommendations with old college friends through instant messaging, online chats and checking out each others' playlists on iTunes. A program called Hamachi also allows them to listen to music saved on each others' computers. Because of his friends, he said, his musical taste has evolved to "eclectic -- a lot of everything."

Ian Rogers, 33, grew up in Goshen, Ind., where there was no record store.

"I drove five hours to Chicago to see a punk rock band," he said. He'd pore over reviews in Maximumrocknroll magazine, then have his mother write checks so he could send off for albums without having listened to them, said Rogers, who is now director of product marketing for Yahoo Music.

The effort and cost involved in buying made him feel almost obligated to like what he could get, he said. "You end up consuming what's marketed to you. With the Internet, you consume exactly what you want."

To adjust to that shift, radio stations are experimenting with "send us your playlist," or by-request music shows, said Mike McGuire, an analyst with the research firm Gartner Inc. "It greatly complicates how you promote acts and content," which is why forward-thinking labels like Warner Music Group's all-digital label Cordless Recordings are spending more time and promotional money on finding bloggers, he said.

While consumers say the diversity and availability of more content is unequivocally good, some bemoan the lost art and distinction of having the great, comprehensive record collection.

In the past, a music aficionado had to invest time and money sifting through racks in the hunt for, say, a little-known ska band. Now, entire CD racks and vinyl-record collections can fit into several gigabytes of computer memory -- and people who never invested their resources in acquiring music can simply rip off a playlist, or type in a search to find that same, small-time ska band. It's yet another blow to brick-and-mortar record stores, which with the rise of digital music have already lost CD sales.

"The fun of collecting is gone," said Michael Crowley, who said he spent his childhood hunting for bootlegged copies of obscure acts in hidden-away record shops run by edgy people with nose rings. "They're not that fun if you can download them with a few mouse clicks," said Crowley, a Washington journalist who wrote about the rock snob's demise by digital music for the New Republic.

Crowley admits that he now relies more on music blogs and friends' playlists to keep up with trends in music, making him more of a follower than a leader in the online world. Still, he said, the ability to copy music can't stand in for taste. "Taste is something you have to cultivate."

Richard Carlisle toes a harder line. The self-described vinyl-record purist has sold records for 30 years and owns Orpheus Records in Arlington. He's never put an iPod to his ears and spends no time on the Internet surfing for new music. "I have a vested interest in people not using an iPod," he said. "I guess you could call it a sour-grapes phenomenon."

But online trends still affect his business; a customer recently came in asking for an album from an indie-rock band he'd never heard of -- Neutral Milk Hotel -- which had become popular online. Since then, he's sold roughly 30 of those albums.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062301716.html





Beatles in Vegas Against Long Odds
Allan Kozinn

IT'S the Beatles! Live in Las Vegas! This week, and for the foreseeable future!

Well, O.K., it's not actually the Beatles performing live. After all, two of the Fab Four, John Lennon and George Harrison, are no longer among us. And although their surviving partners, both musical (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and marital (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), are expected to be in the audience at the Mirage on June 30, when Cirque du Soleil opens "Love," its ambitious fantasy tribute to the band, there won't be so much as a Beatle cameo or a new song.

Still, Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian acrobatic troupe, and Apple, the company the Beatles started in 1967 to oversee their creative interests, have joined forces for this $150 million production, and they are billing it as "a timeless, three-dimensional" Beatles experience that, as one of its principals describes it, will "make the audience feel as though they are actually in the theater with the band."

Promised too is a new soundtrack. Apple has given the show's two music directors — Sir George Martin, who produced the Beatles' original recordings, and his son Giles, who has worked with Elvis Costello and Kate Bush — free run of the band's session tapes. Most Beatles fans would rather the tapes were mined for previously unreleased songs and upgrades of the standard albums. But as Giles explains, "Apple's idea was that Cirque shouldn't just be performing to a CD." He adds, "It had to be something more unusual, a new way of hearing this music."

What the Martins produced was a 90-minute soundtrack in which classic Beatles songs are remixed in surround sound, sometimes combining standard versions with outtakes, and even creating mash-ups, or versions in which riffs, vocal lines, guitar solos or sitar drones from one song are interposed on another. Next month the pair will return to London to remix the music again for a soundtrack album.

What's truly odd about all his, to longtime Beatles watchers, is Apple's enthusiasm for such innovation. For much of the last 36 years, Apple — whose four directors are the band members and their heirs — has been a barricaded fortress from which volleys of lawsuits are regularly launched. Its response to requests to use Beatles recordings in theatrical productions and films has generally been a firm no. And in its zeal to protect the Beatles' name, work and trademarks, Apple has sued everyone from the producers of the late-1970's hit "Beatlemania" to Apple Computer. So what's going on here? Isn't the soundtrack to "Love" akin to what Apple so vehemently opposed in 2004, when Danger Mouse created "The Grey Album," a mash-up of Jay-Z's "Black Album" and the Beatles' "White Album"? For that matter, aren't these mash-ups exactly what Internet-based Beatles fan groups have done, often brilliantly, though necessarily flying well below Apple's radar, on underground collections like "Mutation" and the three volumes of "Tuned to a Natural E," which can be found on various download sites?

Could it be that in allowing Cirque du Soleil to base a series of fantasy tableaus on Beatles music, and in letting the Martins take such liberties with the recordings, a usually cautious company is diving headlong into the 21st century? Has it awakened to an era in which promiscuous remixing has made the notion of a "definitive text" seem quaintly academic?

On the other hand, when Apple sics its lawyers on unauthorized use of the Beatles' music, is it really protecting the integrity of the group's work and image, or is it saying "We own the Beatles name and music, and therefore only we can compromise its integrity?"

WHEN the Beatles started Apple, they described it as the antithesis of the corporate entertainment world: a haven where musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists of all kinds could find support for their projects. Along with the Beatles' last four albums, the company released a magnificently eclectic catalog and a handful of films. But the open-door policy didn't last long: a parade of hucksters and freeloaders quickly drained the company's resources.

When the Beatles went supernova in 1970, Apple absorbed the immediate shock.

Sir Paul, hoping to extricate himself from the partnership, at first sued to have the company dissolved, but later reconsidered its usefulness. And for the next 19 years a tangle of lawsuits — the Beatles against one another, and the Beatles and Apple against EMI Records — were about all that Apple produced.

Those suits were settled in November 1989, and the terms were not made public. One detail leaked out, though: EMI would maintain its ownership of the recordings the Beatles made for the company between 1962 and 1970 but could not release anything without Apple's approval. At first Apple exerted this control vigorously, refusing to release anything on CD beyond the standard British albums, released in 1987.

Gradually Apple began to relent. Two popular early-1970's compilations, known as the "Red" and "Blue" albums (officially, "1962-1966" and "1966-1970") were reissued on CD in 1993. More recently Apple and EMI have collaborated on new compilations, like "1," a collection of Beatles No. 1 hits, as well as "The Capitol Versions," two boxed sets (so far) of the group's recordings in the configurations that Capitol (EMI's American arm) released in the 1960's.

Meanwhile Apple undertook archival projects, including "The Beatles at the BBC" and "The Beatles Anthology," a multimedia autobiography that included a 10-hour video, a book and six CD's of unreleased recordings. The reissue of the Beatles' cartoon film, "Yellow Submarine," in 1999, brought with it a fully reconceived soundtrack album, "Yellow Submarine Songtrack," and in 2003 Apple addressed the Beatles' mixed feelings about Phil Spector's production of the "Let It Be" album by releasing the stripped-down "Let It Be ... Naked."

But those were in-house projects. Proposals from outside continued to find their way into the dustbin at Apple's London offices, until Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's founder, discovered the secret weapon: friendship with a former Beatle, in this case George Harrison. In 2000 they began discussing a a collaboration using the Beatles' music. After Harrison died, in November 2001, Apple kept the project going. It expects "Love" to run for at least 10 years, packing 2,000 people into the theater twice a night, five nights a week, with ticket prices ranging from $69 to $150.

If the shows sell out, it would be like the Beatles filling Shea Stadium nearly 10 times a year, without having to tune up. Or even turn up.

IN the world of Beatles obsessives, the response to "Love" has been a shrug. A Las Vegas spectacular? Isn't that a little ... Fat-Period Elvis? And a soundtrack of mash-ups?

Beatles fans just want the Beatles. They want things they haven't seen or heard, and they want the music they have heard to sound better than it does on the available CD's. They want Apple to remaster the classic albums, and they want those albums in surround mixes. Some fans would like to see the recordings available for download. (In court papers filed during the company's lawsuit against Apple Computer, Neil Aspinall, the Beatles former road manager who now runs Apple's daily operations, said a remixing project was under way, and that the group's recordings wouldn't be made available online until that process was finished. He said nothing about when that might be.)

They also want Apple to release projects that have long sat on its shelf, like the revamped video of the Beatles' 1965 Shea Stadium concert, and an expanded, bonus-packed DVD of the group's last film, "Let It Be." And how about a collection of the promotional films the group made in the 1960's? Or DVD's of Beatles concerts that were televised in Paris, Munich and Tokyo? Or the CD version of the 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl concerts? Or the fabled 27-minute outtake of "Helter Skelter" and the avant-garde "Carnival of Light" collage, created for a London "happening" in 1967? For Beatles fans an extravaganza like "Love" looks like an unnecessary sideshow.

But they are in for a tremendous surprise.

A couple of weeks ago Giles Martin stopped in New York on his way to London, and invited me to hear his "Love" mixes on a five-channel surround system at Magno Studios. I was knocked out by some, but I was absolutely floored by the pristine quality and fine definition of the sound. With the compression of the original 1960's productions stripped away, voices and instruments seem real, as if they were in the room. The new mixes wrap you in the group's arrangements and let you hear long-buried interplay that illuminates the Beatles' brilliance. This is a level of detail that simply hasn't been heard outside the Abbey Road studios until now.

On "Yesterday" you can hear Paul McCartney's pick hitting the strings of his guitar and the strings snapping against the neck. The guitar solo and the orchestral strings on "Something" had similar clarity and presence, and in the surround version of "I Am the Walrus" the whole kaleidoscope of textures — including an extraordinarily crisp drum sound — made the song quirkier than ever.

The mixes of "Revolution" and "Come Together" are incomparably more powerful than the familiar versions. Mr. Starr's childlike "Octopus's Garden" gets a fantastic restructuring that begins with the string introduction to "Good Night" and then places Mr. Starr's vocal, unaccompanied, in a foggy ambience (using effects from "Yellow Submarine" and drums from "Lovely Rita") before the full band kicks into the more familiar arrangement. And a juxtaposition of the drum figure from "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the vocal line from "Within You, Without You" creates a link between those mystical songs, recorded nearly nine months apart.

The new recordings were made under the close watch of Apple. Sir Paul, Mr. Starr, Ms. Ono and Mrs. Harrison occasionally dropped in on the Martins to hear the mixes. "It was a little terrifying," said the younger Mr. Martin, who is 36, born a few months before the Beatles broke up. (His father is 80.) "When Ringo came in, the first thing he said was, 'Have you done "Octopus's Garden" yet?' Paul said he liked what he heard, but that we could go even farther out than we have, and we've gone pretty far. And we were very concerned that Yoko and Olivia feel we were treating John's and George's songs well, but they were both very pleased."

Why do these recordings sound so immensely better than the standard CD's? The Martins made the "Love" soundtrack directly from the original unmixed master tapes of the Beatles' sessions. Because of the way recordings were made in the 1960's, the Beatles' music as we know it, both on LP and CD, come from tapes that were several generations removed from those session tapes, and electronically processed to make up for the limitations of 1960's audio technology. When the Beatles' CD's were released, in 1987, these processed tapes were used for all but two of the albums. (Sir George Martin remixed "Rubber Soul" and "Help!")

At the time CD mastering was in its infancy and yielded a sound that seems harsh when compared with more recent CD's, which often rely directly on the session tapes. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds and even the Monkees have seen their catalogs remastered to take these improvements into account. But not the Beatles. Their CD's, priced at top dollar and running only about 30 harsh-sounding minutes apiece, look more squalid every year.

Collectors endlessly debate what the ideal series of remastered Beatles albums would be. Until 1999 the answer seemed clear: upgraded versions of the British albums and singles in their original stereo and mono mixes (there are often notable differences in instrumentation, edits or vocal takes), along with the handful of variant mixes released in Japan, Australia, Germany and other countries.

But the release of the "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" in 1999 made some listeners reconsider. Produced by Peter Cobbin, they were updated remixes of the session tapes. The resulting version of "Nowhere Man" was telling: in the original stereo mix, the vocals are on one channel, the instruments are on the other. Mr. Cobbin spread the sweetly harmonized vocals that open the song across the stereo image, to stunning effect. Maybe, listeners began to argue, an upgraded Beatles catalog should take the flexibility of modern mixing into account.

The "Yellow Submarine" and "Beatles Anthology" DVD's added another complication. Some of the surround mixes were so revelatory that tech-savvy fans, knowing how long it takes Apple to do things, began creating their own surround mixes. Even though these amateur remixers don't have access to the session masters, their versions are often surprisingly effective.

Apple should, of course, get in there with its own surround series, now that it has dangled teasers in "Yellow Submarine," the "Beatles Anthology" and "Love."

But if the Beatles really want to be revolutionary — and counteract Apple's reputation for slowness and litigiousness — they should take a truly bold step: release the component tracks of their unmixed session tapes on DVD's, with a Creative Commons copyright license that would allow fans to create their own remixes, mash-ups and recompositions for noncommercial use.

Not that they'd be the first to move in that direction. Two years ago David Bowie offered the component tracks for songs from his "Reality" album for download on his Web site and even offered prizes — including a car — to fans who created the most original mash-ups. Wired magazine has offered unmixed tracks by several bands for similar use.

The Beatles, though, could be the first major group to open its archives freely. And if Apple was really meant to be, as Paul McCartney described it in 1968, "a kind of Western Communism," what could be a more natural expression of that ideal?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/ar...1e3&ei=5087%0A





Iron Man Slows, and So Does the Industry
By Jeff Leeds

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. THERE are pockets of the country where a lurching 45-foot black bus festooned with demonic imagery would be an unwelcome sight. This is not one of them. When the Ozzfest 2006 motor coach, a rolling advertisement for Ozzy Osbourne's annual tour of hard-rock and heavy-metal bands, parks outside a shopping mall, a clutch of teenagers gathers outside hoping to score free tickets to the shows.

The bus is ostensibly part of a nationwide beauty contest designed to generate publicity, but judging from its reception here that hardly seems necessary. A woman in her 30's breathlessly dials her cellphone to tell her husband she has seen the bus. "The whole family loves Ozzy," she says. "They all pray to Ozzy." And they, like the multitudes of Mr. Osbourne's fans nationwide, worship at the box office.

Back in 1971 Mr. Osbourne prophetically declared himself the Iron Man. At 57 he finds himself with fans both older than he is and, thanks in part to his recent television stardom, a decade younger than his kids. Now in its 11th year, his tour, which begins again Thursday in Seattle, remains one of rock's biggest juggernauts. Generating almost $20 million a year in ticket sales — in addition to a lucrative mini-industry of souvenirs, merchandise and related CD's and DVD's — Ozzfest ranks among the top-selling tours in the nation.

But this year the Iron Man and his tour are confronting an uncomfortable reality: rust. Mr. Osbourne, who broke more than half a dozen bones in an accident a few years back, plans to play just 10 of this year's 26 dates. "Ozzy needed to take time out," said Sharon Osbourne, his wife and manager. (Mr. Osbourne was in tour rehearsals last week and unavailable for comment, his spokesman said.) "It just becomes like a routine. The thing is, you never want to get like that. He's got to be as excited as everybody else." But it is increasingly unclear how many more years a man of his age can stay with the tour in any capacity. "It's a worry to me," Ms. Osbourne acknowledged.

She's not the only one. The $3-billion-a-year concert industry is worrying right along with her, about Ozzy and all his contemporaries too.

This summer, a remarkable number of the projected best-selling tours are led by people eligible for AARP membership. Tom Petty is 55. Jimmy Buffett is 59. Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend are both 61. Madonna, whose tour is the hottest so far this year, is a youthful 47.

Last year, according to the concert trade journal Pollstar, 6 of the 10 highest-grossing tours starred artists in their late 50's or 60's, among them the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, the Eagles and Elton John. Those six alone accounted for more than $470 million in domestic ticket sales — about 30 percent of the total for the year's 50 biggest tours.

But keeping those guys on the road gets harder every year, with more canceled performances and more Bengay.

U2, Metallica and Prince, who made it big in the 80's, still seem to be going strong. After them, though, it's a precipitous drop-off to the next tier of younger performers. The Dave Matthews Band, Coldplay and Radiohead are often discussed as successors; the punk veterans Green Day and the dance-rock upstarts the Killers are also sometimes mentioned. None of them, however, can draw mass audiences at premium prices the way the older acts do. All of which has a great many people nervously counting down the years.

"Eventually," said Randy Phillips, chief executive of the concert promoter AEG Live, "we're going to run out of headliners."

Accounting for the shallow talent pool, some industry executives cite the effects of MTV, which lets fans see performers without ever leaving their couch. Others blame a recording industry more focused on disposable hits than long-term career development, or a universe of digital singles that can keep fans from establishing deep connections with an artist over a long career. Whatever the case, John Scher, the New York music promoter and entrepreneur, says that unless the industry's dynamics change, many of the nation's big summer music venues "will be plowed over and be made into housing projects."

MANY fans — and rival concert organizers — attribute Ozzfest's staying power to its mix. A daylong affair featuring 20 bands, it combines established rock acts that have older fans with up-and-coming metal talent that sways a fervent younger audience.

It's designed to serve as its own farm team. Smaller bands play on a second stage, usually in the parking lot. The greenest of them pay as much as $75,000 for this chance, in the hope of someday graduating to the highly lucrative main event. This year's headliner, System of a Down, is receiving about $325,000 per show, according to several people close to the tour.

Charlie Walker, president of the music division of Live Nation (the company that coordinates the tour with Ms. Osbourne), says the strength of the other headliners on this year's tour, including Disturbed and Avenged Sevenfold, shows that the system has worked. "The torch has been passed to these younger bands, and they're carrying their weight," he said. But the numbers are already slipping: roughly 431,000 fans purchased tickets last year, down from almost 575,000 in 2001, according to data from Pollstar, and tickets to shows Mr. Osbourne is skipping generally go for less than those he intends to play. As an incentive this year the tour is offering four tickets for the price of three in most markets.

Much of its competition now comes from smaller package tours of metal bands, some of which came up through the Ozzfest ranks.

That's yet another reason many predict a major realignment in the concert industry. As stars able to fill a stadium — or sell $250 premium tickets, as Sir Paul did last year — pass from the scene, the business may coalesce around medium- and small-scale shows.

For bands that would mean more days on the road, and more theaters and clubs than stadiums and arenas. For promoters it would mean relying on smaller individual paydays to make the bottom line. Promoters may also be forced to rely more on tours with ensemble casts. One frequently mentioned example is the Vans Warped Tour, a punk-oriented outing featuring up-and-comers, stalwarts and skateboarding, which has lasted 12 years without any huge star to anchor it. But perhaps as a result that tour can't charge nearly as much as Ozzfest. So bands get paid less and have to play more. "It's very exhausting," said Kris Roe of the Ataris, a rock band that has played the full tour twice. "You just try to adapt."

Many are also pinning hopes not on cross-country tours but on stationary multi-day festivals like the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Tennessee; such events are already a tradition in Europe. But would there be enough local interest to stage such events in every market? Even 20 festivals a year might not offset the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales from the classic-rock set, Mr. Scher said.

Bill Silva, a longtime Los Angeles promoter who is an organizer of events at the Hollywood Bowl and other places, said: "It feels to me like a lot of people have their heads in the sand. More people are focused on the fact that they're having a hard time selling tickets this summer than are focused on the fact that they may not have anything to sell tickets to in 10 years."

OZZFEST has tried to prepare for the post-Ozzy era by turning itself into a multifaceted communal affair. Away from the stage fans can wander a vast, circuslike concession area called the Village of the Damned, where they can get a tattoo or body piercing and play carnival games to win CD's. This year, in nine markets, they can also watch fire-breathers, "human oddities" and other sideshow performers. And they can patronize the tour's sponsors, like FYE, the music retailer, and Sony PlayStation.

"It's not about Ozzy anymore," said Josh Grabelle, president of Trustkill Records, an independent metal label and a partner in a competing tour, Sounds of the Underground. "It's about hanging out with your friends, barbecuing and drinking beers."

Organizers are also trying to reach fans where they live. That's where the black Ozzfest bus, bearing the picture of a woman with a bouquet in her hand and a demonic red glow in her eyes, comes in. Eddie Webb, a rock radio D.J., and Dave Moscato, who will be onstage introducing bands once the tour gets under way, are riding it cross-country, soliciting entrants for the first Miss Ozzfest beauty contest. To ensure that they find suitable candidates, the two young men are armed with a binder listing the location of every Hooters restaurant and strip club on their journey. Along the way they are making pit stops at record stores and tattoo shops to hand out posters and encourage potential fans.

"A lot of the bands these kids listen to, you won't hear them on the radio," Mr. Moscato said. "We have to go to the street level to tell kids, 'Ozzfest is transforming, and we have been listening to you.' It's growing with our crowd, rather than forcing it down their throat."

Is it working? On the streets of San Bernardino, a stay-at-home mother with pink hair, a Black Sabbath T-shirt and a car bearing an "Osbourne family" decal seems excited. But other fans have doubts. "Last year was really good," said Wynter Shaw, 22, a fan who posed for the Miss Ozzfest cameras in West Hollywood. "This year I wouldn't pay to see it. Ozzy's not playing all the dates. It seems really commercial to me."

Barbara Molina, 17, a clerk at a Hot Topic store, comes from a multigenerational Ozzfest family. Her aunt and uncle have attended regularly, she says, but this year may be a different story: "I don't know if they're going to go anymore, because Ozzy's not going to be on it." As for herself, Ms. Molina says she can't afford tickets, the cheapest of which run $35 or $40 in big markets. But at least she has her memories: it was at Ozzfest that she got her first tattoo, a handsome Celtic knot on her hip.

UNTIL anyone comes up with a better model, or a new roster of proven performers, the industry's war horses are doing their best to keep going. In part that means reining in old excesses. Even the members of Kiss, who with an average age of 56 are preparing to tour Japan, know better than to rock and roll all night. "They actually go to sleep instead of stay up for three months or drink themselves into a coma," said Doc McGhee, the band's manager. "You just can't do that day in and day out, not as you get older." As it stands, he added, "they definitely take more ibuprofen than cocaine."

Keenly aware of the toll that regular touring can exact on their aging bodies, many established stars have sought ways to retain their energy. Aerosmith has made regular use of a nutritionist, for example. According to contract riders posted on the Smoking Gun Web site, James Taylor, 58, wants his band's hospitality room stocked with packets of Emergen-C powder (lemon or lime, preferably). The Beach Boys, led by Mike Love, 65, require a licensed masseur qualified in either Swedish or Oriental deep-tissue massage. Mr. Osbourne himself has requested an ear, nose and throat specialist to administer a B-12 shot.

Steven Van Zandt, 55, a longtime member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, said he decided decades ago to build a workout regimen into his road life. "We brought all this gym equipment, and when we get to a hotel, we turn one of the hotel rooms into a gym," he said. "You need it more than you did when you were young." Mr. Springsteen, he noted, "has a special diet, you cut down on meat-eating," and sometimes wears kneepads to protect his joints while performing his famous knee slides across the stage.

Mr. Van Zandt said he believes his generation of musicians has more energy, and an "obligation" to perform up to the standards of rock's pioneers. "I saw this coming, 20, 25 years ago, and we talked about it. The sad truth is, when we're gone, it's over."

These efforts don't always work. In March, Aerosmith canceled the latter part of its North American tour when Steven Tyler, 58, had to undergo surgery. (The cause was never disclosed.) And health issues from Keith Richards's head injury to Ron Wood's substance abuse have bedeviled the Rolling Stones' tour this year.

Still, the news isn't all bad. Writing on his blog last week, Pete Townshend, 61, told his fans, "I began this diary wishing to speak about how doing all this makes me feel old." But he continued: "In many ways, despite the years I carry, it all seems easier today. Flying home on a Lear jet is an indulgence that no one really deserves, but six hours in the back of a van trying to sleep with amplifiers falling on your head, is not an option any more."

As for Mr. Osbourne, if he is heading toward retirement, he has his own way of staying young. This year the Iron Man is playing some of his dates on Ozzfest's second stage: out in the parking lot, closer to the most rabid fans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/ar...c/25leeds.html





The Original Ray's of Comedy
Allen Salkin

DID you hear the one about the East Coast-West Coast Friars Club war?

The punch line is that it's true. Two once-related branches of the century-old fraternal organization of entertainers, a group that has counted as members the most famous jokesters ever, from Milton Berle to Whoopi Goldberg, from Will Rogers to Robin Williams, are locked in a bitter legal and financial battle rivaling the infamous bicoastal rap war of a decade ago, except this one is being fought with roast-quality insults and expensive lawyers instead of rap songs and bullets.

The East Coast side has been headed for the last 11 years by the comedian Freddie Roman, out of the club's opulent six-story town house on East 55th Street in Manhattan.

The West Coast posse is led by Darren Schaeffer, an entrepreneur who benefited from his father's pharmaceutical fortune. He bought the financially-strapped club in 2004, changed the name to the Friars of Beverly Hills and transformed it from a nonprofit organization to a commercial one. At stake is the right of the Los Angeles club to used the name Friars in association with celebrity roasts and other events it is host to.

Despite the Friars Club motto, "Prae Omnia Fraternitas," or "Before all things, brotherhood," sides are being drawn.

"I'm in the Freddie Roman posse," said Susie Essman, who has been a member of the New York Friars Club since 1995.

As a star on the HBO comedy series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which is taped in Los Angeles, she said she stays in a hotel when she's working in Los Angeles and has never considered joining the West Coast club. "With their pharmaceutical money, who trusts them?" she said. "I trust comedians."

Jack Carter, 80, the veteran stand-up comic and a Los Angeles Friar, is in the Schaeffer posse. "All they have in New York City is the names of rooms," Mr. Carter said by telephone from his home in Southern California, referring to the New York club where most of the rooms are named after celebrities. "All the talent is in L.A. There's no one left in New York anymore except Stewie Stone." (Not that Mr. Carter is dissing Mr. Stone, an old friend with whom he performed recently on the Florida condo circuit.)

The bicoastal wrangling began after Mr. Schaeffer bought the club in Los Angeles, but it escalated in May 2005, when the New York Friars, officially known as Friars National Association, filed a trademark infringement suit in Federal District Court in Los Angeles over the use of the name Friars. The New York club, which was founded in 1904, holds the rights to control most uses of the name Friars Club, according to a licensing agreement devised when the Los Angeles club was started in 1947. Despite a court-brokered mediation session in April, no settlement has been reached.

But underlying the legal feud is a cultural rift between the coasts. The New York club, based in a city with deep roots in stand-up comedy and stage performance, has benefited from a sense of nostalgia that has not transferred to Los Angeles, where the Friars fell on hard times once the club's founding generation — a group who honed their craft in the fraternal glow of footlights — began to dim.

"The people who were driving it, like Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra, are gone and there's nobody there to carry the torch," said Eddy Friedfeld, 44, a New York Friar who helped write "Caesar's Hours," the autobiography of Sid Caesar, the longtime Los Angeles Friar. "Maybe the heart of the Friars was always in New York."

Red Buttons, 87, a longtime member of the Los Angeles club, put it this way: "There isn't much action out there for guys of my era. There's nobody left of our gang."

The New York club now has about 1,300 members, most of whom pay about $2,000 annually in dues, Mr. Roman said. Members include famous people like Jerry Seinfeld, and not-famous lawyers, writers and real estate brokers. (Two-thirds of the members must work in show business.) The sponsorship of two existing members, a background check and an interview process is required for admission. There are no initiation fees for performers, but those who aren't in the entertainment industry must pay $6,000. Mr. Roman said the club received about $5 million in membership dues and restaurant profits last year, spending about the same amount on overhead.

The Los Angeles club, which was down to around 200 members in 2003, now has about 700 members who pay $200 a month for a regular membership and $600 for a platinum membership. Both include access to the restaurant and amenities like Miltie's card room, an Xbox game room, and Groucho's cigar room, said Annie Teegardin, director of special events. There is a $2,500 initiation fee that has been waived for about 150 people, including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Leelee Sobieski, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It is hoped that they will attract paying customers. Fees are also sometimes waived that for those who rent its facilities for weddings and bar mitzvahs, Ms. Teegardin said.

"It is basically just a catering hall now," said Mr. Roman, a New York Friar since 1968, when the two clubs were on better terms. "Out there it was George Jessel, Jack Benny and all the New York guys that moved out there," he said of earlier days. "It was a nice relationship between the two clubs."

While such luminaries gained their greatest fame from the movies, it was their stage roots in New York that made them feel they were all in the same boat, said Rick Saphire, a longtime talent manager. "It was truly a fraternity," he said. "Many of them came up the same route. They worked their way through vaudeville and radio. They commiserated with each other."

At the top of the Los Angeles heap was Mr. Berle, the former abbot (a ceremonial title) of the New York Friars who helped the Los Angeles Friars move to their current home in 1961.

Decades of boozy good times reigned at both clubs. The comic Bobby Ramsen attended a Friars testimonial dinner for Frank Sinatra in California in the mid-1970's. "On the dais was Don Rickles, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Donald O'Connor, June Allyson, Cyd Charisse, Tony Martin, Jack Carter and Bob Newhart," he said. "Milton was the toastmaster and they were very exciting nights and they were packed."

Times started changing in mid-1980's when memberships grew older. In 1987 the lawyer Gloria Allred forced the Los Angeles club to allow her and other women to be members; it was Mr. Berle who eventually sponsored her. " 'You think it's because you're a women?' " Ms. Allred recalls him saying. " 'Wrong,' he said. 'It's to lower the average age of the club because the average age of the club is dead.' " The New York club opened its membership to women the following year.

When Mr. Roman became the dean of the New York club in 1995, he instituted a program to attract younger members by offering to waive the initiation fee and grant six months without dues. It worked. Under that program, which still exists, Ms. Essman joined, as did Cory Kahaney, a competitor on the NBC show "Last Comic Standing 3"

Meanwhile, efforts in Los Angeles to recruit younger members through cocktail parties and toasts for personalities like the kittenish weatherwoman Jillian Barberie failed, said Zoë Yeoman, who was on the Los Angeles Friars board from 2000 to 2004. "Once we started losing our celebrity membership you ended up with a club with stockbrokers and lawyers and real estate developers — the sycophants who had the good fortune to be able to pay for entree," she said.

And with the club's cracked upholstery and mismatched china, those members soon lost interest. Ms. Teegardin said, "It looked like a really, really run-down Sizzler."

Mr. Schaeffer plans to turn it all around. After plunking down just under $500,000 for the club and investing $10 million in renovations, he wrote in an e-mail message that he plans "to have the best private club on the West Coast." (His father, Irwin, was president of the Los Angeles Friars Club from the mid-1990's to 2004.) Mr. Schaeffer wants to bring back the club's former glory, even if he has to broadcast past events throughout the club on plasma screens to resurrect the old mood, he wrote.

Mr. Roman, who said the New York club has spent "tens of thousands" of dollars on lawyers already, said his main worry is that Mr. Schaeffer's efforts might hurt the Friars Club brand. "I just don't want them to hurt us in the future," he said.

In the eyes of West Coast partisans, however, the future of the New York club is perilously trapped in its past. Mr. Carter pointed out that the subject of the most recent New York roast was Jerry Lewis. The jokes were funny ("Why are you so bloated?" the comic Jeffrey Ross asked. "You look like you drowned four days ago."), but perhaps too prescient. Mr. Lewis had a heart attack on the airplane back to San Diego after the show.

"You're in trouble when you have to roast a guy who's going to have a heart attack on the way home," Mr. Carter said. (A spokesman for Mr. Lewis said that he is out of the hospital and doing well.)

Still, for many comedians, the past is what makes the Friars Club relevant. "I became a member over 20 years ago," the comedian Richard Lewis, who lives in Los Angeles and was unaware of the bicoastal contretemps, wrote in an e-mail message. "I joined mainly because I love the astonishing history behind it, the food is the greatest and the several million anecdotes that one can hear, on a daily basis, remind me that I haven't been the only performer screwed in show business."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25FRIARS.html





Has String Theory Tied Up Better Ideas In Physics?
By Sharon

Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli didn't suffer fools gladly. Fond of calling colleagues' work "wrong" or "completely wrong," he saved his worst epithet for work so sloppy and speculative it is "not even wrong."

That's how mathematician Peter Woit of Columbia University describes string theory. In his book, "Not Even Wrong," published in the U.K. this month and due in the U.S. in September, he calls the theory "a disaster for physics."

A year or two ago, that would have been a fringe opinion, motivated by sour grapes over not sitting at physics' equivalent of the cool kids' table. But now, after two decades in which string theory has been the doyenne of best-seller lists and the dominant paradigm in particle physics, Mr. Woit has company.

"When it comes to extending our knowledge of the laws of nature, we have made no real headway" in 30 years, writes physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, in his book, "The Trouble with Physics," also due in September. "It's called hitting the wall."

He blames string theory for this "crisis in particle physics," the branch of physics that tries to explain the most fundamental forces and building blocks of the world.

String theory, which took off in 1984, posits that elementary particles such as electrons are not points, as standard physics had it. They are, instead, vibrations of one-dimensional strings 1/100 billion billionth the size of an atomic nucleus. Different vibrations supposedly produce all the subatomic particles from quarks to gluons. Oh, and strings exist in a space of 10, or maybe 11, dimensions. No one knows exactly what or where the extra dimensions are, but assuming their existence makes the math work.

String theory, proponents said, could reconcile quantum mechanics (the physics of subatomic particles) and gravity, the longest-distance force in the universe. That impressed particle physicists no end. In the 1980s, most jumped on the string bandwagon and since then, stringsters have written thousands of papers.

But one thing they haven't done is coax a single prediction from their theory. In fact, "theory" is a misnomer, since unlike general relativity theory or quantum theory, string theory is not a concise set of solvable equations describing the behavior of the physical world. It's more of an idea or a framework.

Partly as a result, string theory "makes no new predictions that are testable by current _ or even currently conceivable _ experiments," writes Prof. Smolin. "The few clean predictions it does make have already been made by other" theories.

Worse, the equations of string theory have myriad solutions, an extreme version of how the algebraic equation X2 4 has two solutions (2 and -2). The solutions arise from the fact that there are so many ways to "compactify" its extra dimensions _ to roll them up so you get the three spatial dimensions of the real world. With more than 10 raised to 500th power (1 followed by 500 zeros) ways to compactify, there are that many possible universes.

"There is no good insight into which is more likely," concedes physicist Michael Peskin of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

If string theory made a prediction that didn't accord with physical reality, stringsters could say it's correct in one of these other universes. As a result, writes Prof. Smolin, "string theory cannot be disproved." By the usual standards, that would rule it out as science.

String theory isn't any more wrong than preons, twistor theory, dynamical triangulations, or other physics fads. But in those cases, physicists saw the writing on the wall and moved on. Not so in string theory.

"What is strange is that string theory has survived past the point where it should have been clear that it wouldn't work," says Mr. Woit. Not merely survived, but thrived. Virtually every young mathematically inclined particle theorist must sign on to the string agenda to get an academic job. By his count, of 22 recently tenured professors in particle theory at the six top U.S. departments, 20 are string theorists.

One physicist commented on Mr. Woit's blog that Ph.D. students who choose mathematical theory topics that "are non-string are seriously harming their career prospects."

To be fair, string theory can claim some success. A 1985 paper showed that if you compactify extra dimensions in a certain way, the number of quarks and leptons you get is exactly the number found in nature. "This is the only idea out there for why the number of quarks and leptons is what it is," says Prof. Peskin. Still, that is less a prediction of string theory than a consequence.

If fewer physicists were tied to strings might some of the enduring mysteries of the universe be solved? Might we know why there is more matter than antimatter? Why the proton's mass is 1,836 times the electron's? Why the 18 key numbers in the standard model of fundamental particles have the values they do?

"With smart people pursuing these questions, more might have been answered," says Mr. Woit. "Too few really good people have been working on anything other than string theory."

That string theory abandoned testable predictions may be its ultimate betrayal of science.
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleA...tevenwrong.php





'Blue Pill' Prototype Creates 100% Undetectable Malware
Ryan Naraine

A security researcher with expertise in rootkits has built a working prototype of new technology that is capable of creating malware that remains "100 percent undetectable," even on Windows Vista x64 systems.

Joanna Rutkowska, a stealth malware researcher at Singapore-based IT security firm COSEINC, says the new Blue Pill concept uses AMD's SVM/Pacifica virtualization technology to create an ultra-thin hypervisor that takes complete control of the underlying operating system. ADVERTISEMENT

Rutkowska plans to discuss the idea and demonstrate a working prototype for Windows Vista x64 at the SyScan Conference in Singapore on July 21 and at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas on Aug. 3.

The Black Hat presentation will occur on the same day Microsoft is scheduled to show off some of the key security features and functionality being fitted into Vista.

Rutkowska said the presentation will deal with a "generic method" of inserting arbitrary code into the Vista Beta 2 kernel (x64 edition) without relying on any implementation bug.

VM Rootkits: The Next Big Threat? Click here to read more.

The technique effectively bypasses a crucial anti-rootkit policy change coming in Windows Vista that requires kernel-mode software to have a digital signature to load on x64-based systems.

The idea of a virtual machine rootkit isn't entirely new. Researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Michigan have created a VM-based rootkit called "SubVirt" that is nearly impossible to detect because its state cannot be accessed by security software running in the target system.

Now, Rutkowska is pushing the envelope even more, arguing that the only way Blue Pill can be detected is if AMD's Pacifica technology is flawed.

"The strength of the Blue Pill is based on the SVM technology," Rutkowska explained on her Invisible Things blog. She contends that if generic detection could be written for the virtual machine technology, then Blue Pill can be detected, but it also means that Pacifica is "buggy."

Read more here about Microsoft's moves to hardens Vista against kernel-mode malware.

"On the other hand—if you would not be able to come up with a general detection technique for SVM based virtual machine, then you should assume, that you would also not be able to detect Blue Pill," she added.

"The idea behind Blue Pill is simple: your operating system swallows the Blue Pill and it awakes inside the Matrix controlled by the ultra thin Blue Pill hypervisor. This all happens on-the-fly (i.e. without restarting the system) and there is no performance penalty and all the devices," she explained.

Rutkowska stressed that the Blue Pill technology does not rely on any bug of the underlying operating system. "I have implemented a working prototype for Vista x64, but I see no reasons why it should not be possible to port it to other operating systems, like Linux or BSD which can be run on x64 platform," she added.

Blue Pill is being developed exclusively for COSEINC Research and will not be available for download. However, Rutkowska said the company is planning to organize trainings about Blue Pill and other technologies where the source code would be made available.

Rutkowska has previously done work on Red Pill, which can be used to detect whether code is being executed under a VMM (virtual machine monitor) or under a real environment.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.asp





Buffett Beefs Up Gates Foundation
Donna Gordon Blankinship

With Warren Buffett's announcement that he will be sending about $1.5 billion every year to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity has a new, happy challenge: how to distribute twice as much money each year.

In a letter dated Monday, Buffett told Bill and Melinda Gates that the first donation of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock would go to the foundation next month.

The foundation, which has assets of $29.1 billion, spends money on world health, poverty and increasing access to technology in developing countries. In the United States, it focuses on education and technology in public libraries.

The money from Buffett, 75, comes with a significant catch. The letter says Buffett wants all his money to be distributed in the year it is donated, not added to the foundation's assets for future giving. The foundation gave away $1.36 billion in 2005, so the Buffett commitment would effectively double its spending.

Buffett said he plans to give away 12,050,000 Class B shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock to five foundations, which also include the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation named in honor of his wife and 350,000 shares for the three foundations run by each of his children.

The gifts would be worth nearly $37 billion, which represents the bulk of the $44 billion that Buffet's stock holdings are worth today. Five-sixths of the shares will be earmarked for the Gates Foundation.

In his letter to the Gates Foundation, Buffett said he admired the foundation and wanted to "materially extend it future capabilities." Until now, all the money given away by the Gates Foundation has come from the couple.

A statement issued Sunday by the Gates Foundation and signed by Bill and Melinda Gates spoke of their relationship with Buffett over the past 15 years and his influence on their philanthropy.

"Warren has not only an amazing intellect but also a strong sense of justice. Warren's wisdom will help us do a better job and make it more fun at the same time," they said. The couple said they were "awed" by Buffett's decision.

The Buffett pledge also requires that Bill and Melinda Gates remain alive and active in the policy-setting and administration of the foundation. Buffett plans to give each foundation 5 percent of his total pledge each year in July.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, announced earlier this month that he would be stepping back from his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft Corp. in July 2008 so he can spend more time on the Seattle-based foundation. The foundation followed his announcement by saying Melinda Gates would also be taking a more active role in their philanthropic work.

Buffett, the world's second-richest man, said in an interview with Fortune magazine that the timing of the two announcements - one week apart - was just "happenstance."

Buffett's gift is "really significant," not just for its size but for its potential to encourage other giving, said Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector, a nonprofit coalition of about 550 charities, foundations and corporate giving programs that includes The Gates Foundation.

"I'm sure there are lots of young, wealthy individuals who have made their fortunes and who are watching this very carefully," she said. "These business leaders are icons."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





Microsoft To Showcase Business Technology
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp.'s best-known business software is for creating spreadsheets, documents and presentations, but the company is hoping to convince corporations that it also can be the one-stop shop for sophisticated communications technology.

At an event Monday in San Francisco, it plans to showcase a slew of planned products designed to more closely link virtually all workers' communications, from e-mail and instant messaging to videoconferencing and even traditional telephone calls.

The idea is that a worker could, for example, receive an e-mail and, instead of responding in print, easily set up a conference call with all the recipients. Those people might even see the e-mail header on their phones, much like you see caller ID today.

When strung together, the so-called Unified Communications products also are designed to help employees immediately get in contact, whether the person they want to reach is sitting at a computer, driving home or on a business trip.

Microsoft has been working on early iterations of such technology for the past several years, and some, such as Live Communications Server 2005, are already on the market. The new products and updates are due to be out by mid-2007.

Microsoft's new software relies on technologies such as broadband Internet access and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The Redmond company also is partnering with companies including cell phone maker Motorola Inc. to provide the hardware for the offerings.

Currently, many businesses rely on separate companies for things like traditional phone calls and voice mail, e-mail and instant messaging.

One challenge for Microsoft and other companies seeking to bundle such capabilities is that some of those services, such as instant messaging, are available for free.

But Zig Serafin, general manager for Unified Communications at Microsoft, said the software maker is hearing from more companies concerned about the security and reliability of free downloads.

Although he conceded that it could be several years before companies start using some of these advanced technologies, Microsoft's goal is to demonstrate that such technologies can evolve into one linked offering, rather than several separate ones.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





10K Cantenna
demi0urgos

As they (don't) say in Italy

Boofisima!

That's right, Double Biquad luv! Twice the copper, twice the pleasure.

Preface:
Ahhh, the art of the Cantenna. There's nothing like finishing off a reliable DIY 2.4GHz antenna to fill oneself with pride. When $10 of shopping nets you a $100 antenna plus lunch, you begin to appreciate junkfood in a new way. As a project approaches, each Pringle tastes sweeter and sweeter (or saltier and saltier, so many flavors!)

Alas, there are many cans. They come in many shapes and many sizes. Not all are well suited for cantennas. Thus, the world of the Beer Cantennas is lonely, with few examples.

Ladies and gents, kids of all ages, THAT HAS CHANGED! I sumbit my latest, greatest invention. An invention that utilizes cans of any shape or size! An invention that revolutionizes the way we do wireless! A tool that will turn the world of cantennas INSIDE OUT!

Behold! The Beerquad!

Biquads aren't new. Just googling for biquad nets lots of results.

The hard part is making a reflector that is 123 X 123mm, or, for a double, 246 X 123mm (or 110 X 110mm for use with a dish, see Google links.) For a biquad, 14oz Guinness cans are perfect. For a Double Biquad, the Labatt's Blue at 25oz was a TIGHT fit (practice your cutting!)

Alas, I am not the authority for wireless works. This is, literally, my first antenna of any shape or size. Compared to other double biquads, it rates on par (others are around 45dB SNR, mine peaked at 48dB with sustained of 46dB. Without a side by side comparison, though, these numbers are meaningless.)

My project was an answer to the fact that, indeed, beercans aren't used for cantennas, and that's just wrong. All garbage is created equal, some pieces more equal than others. Beer cans? Beer cans can be a symbol of taste and pride. Besides, they can be made to look damn cool.

So the following isn't the worlds best guide to how to make a biquad, it's merely an example of how to make a beerquad.

I'm Labattman!
I really like how this turned out. I was split between whether I should keep both logos or just go for one, but since this is a double biquad, it made sense to go for double theme. I'm glad I did because it looks great, and I didn't have to drill or solder through the logo.

Cementing this much aluminum to acrylic isn't easy, and was almost as hard as drinking 25oz of beer before it went flat (a task I failed.) People interested in trying this, you need to find a good way to vice the two surfaces together. When cured, you'll see where the contact failed. Adjust, and make another.

Turning the world of Cantennas inside out!

The reflector is 244x122mm so it's quit large for, say, a laptop mount. I'm going to do it anyway because it's 1337! This IS a stand alone unit. I won't be using this with a dish.

Note where the antenna would intersect itself. I have a little jog there to prevent problems

There aren't many tricks to my application. For the brushed aluminum, I used a Dremel and a steel brush (I wanted to use the brass brush, but it didn't live long.) For the element, I was especially careful in preventing the wire from touching itself. Otherwise, I pretty much followed the instructions from Engadget.

It works fantastic. I haven't had a Pepsi (Labatt's?) challenge with anyone else's equipment, but my readings with netstumbler look typical.

I have 3 more to build, all Guinness. Two for my dishes, and another standalone. All of these are single biquads.

Fun stuff!

UPDATE:
I just made a mounting system out of 3 PVC joints and some thumb screws. Pictures later. I SHOULD be writing my final essay.
http://demi0urgos.livejournal.com/5924.html





Wi-Fi Pioneers Offer Cheap Router
BBC

A Spanish firm is to sell subsidised routers as part of a plan to turn domestic wi-fi networks into public hotspots.

Fon will sell wi-fi routers, which allow people to surf the net wirelessly, for $5 (£2.75).

The company, which has financial backing from Google and Skype, aims to create public wi-fi networks street by street across the US and Europe.

"Wi-fi is universal in cities, but access isn't," said Juergen Urbanski.

Mr Urbanski said Fon was aiming to have 50,000 working hotspots worldwide by September, 150,000 by year-end and one million hotspots by the end of 2007.

To date, 54,000 people worldwide have signed up to become "foneros," up from 3,000 in February, according to the company.

'Social movement'

The company is hoping to create a "social movement" as well as a business.

The router offer is designed to overcome obstacles to helping consumers quickly set up hotspots using Fon software.

In exchange for receiving a router, users must agree to share their wireless connections with other Fon users for 12 months, the company said.

Users register their router with Fon via a PC which then lets other people access their wi-fi network safely - if they can pick up the signals from outside their homes.

'Changing economics'

"We are changing the economics of wi-fi," Mr Urbanski said during a conference in San Francisco. "We are just piggy-backing on the back of existing wi-fi connections."

But Fon faces challenges - from technical limitations to legal obstacles.

Current wi-fi networks have a limited operating range and Fon will need an army of "foneros" if the public hotspots they are advocating take off.

They will also face a challenge from firms planning to offer free, ubiquitous wi-fi in cities such as San Francisco.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and broadband carriers are also unwilling to allow a user's private broadband connection to be used publicly.

Mr Urbanski said Fon was seeking to win over carriers who lease the underlying internet connections by arguing its strategy could expand the market for wi-fi by giving customers a way to roam away from home, making them more loyal subscribers at home.

"The reality is that we are all talking with... many of the large ISPs in the United States."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/5116960.stm