Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 1st, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"MS should swallow real hard, ante up half of what they blew on Longwind, and buy an OS X license from Apple." – Anonymous


"I think it's fair to characterize these people as broadband hogs." – BT rep


"If we even think this parrot is a copyright violator we’re clipping his wings but good." – MPAA


































Gag Me

Another ISP insulted its customers this week with the hoary "bandwidth-hog" moniker. This time it’s British Telecom using the old excuse to wring out more profit without having to invest in their network. Like a cheap slumlord who chops up apartments into smaller and smaller flats in order to squeeze in more and more tenants, BT is shrinking each piece of the bandwidth pie to bring in more subscribers without the bother of increasing system capacity. It’s a shortsighted approach and not without peril as they turn their backs on many of the very people who were the coveted early adopters BT needed to get its new services off the ground in the first place. The new limit is 40 gigabytes per month, even though the paid-for speed allows its customers many times that amount. All this and calling their clients names too.

Choking the customer has been going on for some time, but for many people it started several years ago when broadband users first received the notorious letters telling them they were being throttled or dropped for "wasteful usage" by Cablevision’s Optimum Online unit (OOL), the carrier that was once one of the most coveted because of it’s sheer speed and hands-off approach by executives. The impact was immediately felt on peer-to-peer networks worldwide when reduced upload speeds slowed the transfers of non OOL users. Those speeds had been very fast, in many cases exceeding the download speeds offered by other ISPs. What was once a fast transparent transfer of near 100 percent efficiency became choppy and choked in the world of 15-1 ratios.

OOL has since relaxed the limit as technology improved and competition from more aggressive telcos drained customers, but they haven’t eliminated it entirely, and while "suffering" under a larger gig limit might be suffering a surfeit of riches, it’s still a limit, and not everyone can get that service in any event. Other cable providers have much lower thresholds and stricter controls. Even after a recent raise for instance Canadian provider Rogers limits customers to 100 gigabytes. Regardless, OOL users who may brag about swag amounts miss a larger point. Limits are limits and they don’t work in our favor.

As a rule telcos like SBC (ATT) have no limits but do have slower speeds than what cable offers, BT however is a glaring exception: Slower speeds and limits.

We’re reinventing what it means to produce and distribute our culture in the era of peer-to-peer, and we’re this close to breaking the stranglehold of these massive media empires, and for this to work, for it to realize it's full potential, many bits will be sacrificial, passing through PCs on their way to somewhere else, facilitating the sharing process without ever taking up residence on our drives. Or at least they would be, before bandwidth shaping, two tier Internet protocols and gig limits entered the corporate equation.

Take waste for instance. A brilliant program, targeted, secure and easy on the CPU. By optionally grabbing open bandwidth from generous mesh members it bypasses the restrictive firewalls of others less auspicious, enabling normally locked-out users the full measure of a wonderful trading experience. But there is a cost. Those doing the donating can max out their bandwidth in service to a mesh while never getting a byte for themselves - but Waste releases them when the bandwidth is needed so that cost is actually low - and it’s a big reason why the program works so successfully. Now however we’re seeing the results of ISP throttling on these meshes. Some users with artificial gig limits have had to reduce their participation in larger communities or abandon them entirely. The situation with BitTorrent is worse, even if its size camouflages the extent of the problem. You can’t leave BT running continuously if your important upload ratio results in a shutoff notice from your provider, even though it’s those 1+ ratios that really make that system so effective.

As ISPs continue to suffocate their customers, the burden of keeping these P2P networks operational falls to fewer and fewer users. At some point it just won’t make sense to stay on them any longer and the best users will simply disappear into their own tightly controlled private spaces. With nothing but hit or miss transfers on the global systems or none in places like Australia when providers dial in their so-called "smart monitors" that stop all P2P traffic, our glowing era of alternative grass roots cultural distribution will dim.

Since even large gig limits are hit relatively fast when one is a good P2P netizen, they're contrary to both the function and spirit of peer-to-peer and a free and open Internet, and do little but stunt the net's true potential as the people's voice. It’s a practice that should end.


Family Therapy

I spent a day reading an unprecedented public display of emotional outbursts by Microsoft employees, furious at managerial incompetence and leaders more interested in "Tuscan villas" than creating programs that work.

I know many computer users are angry at MS for their arrogance, rip-offs, DRM, lack of security and monopolistic hegemony, but until this week I had no idea it's this bad in Redmond. No idea.

The raw pain in the thread goes on and on, and as irate as I am with Gates and Ballmer, it's more than a little pathetic for the rank and file. The poor fools were believers...but from the looks of things not anymore.

Like watching a powerful family tear itself to pieces. In this case however not the worst thing in the world. Blog of the year stuff. Totally riveting.


















Enjoy,

Jack






















April 1st, ’06






Two Years In Prison For Downloading Latest Film
Roger Boyes

GERMANS risk two years in prison if they illegally download films and music for private use under a new law agreed yesterday. Anybody who downloads films for commercial use could be jailed for up to five years.

The measures, some of the toughest in Europe, were announced after an aggressive campaign by the film industry in Germany, the largest market in the EU and one of the most computer-literate populations.

According to film industry estimates, Germans download more than 20 million films a year. Many expect the next James Bond film, Casino Royale, to be widely available in Germany weeks before its official release in November.

The law, which comes into effect on January 1, 2007, has infuriated consumer groups. They claim that it will turn consumers into criminals and harm the Government’s efforts to create a knowledge-based economy.

Patrick von Braunmühl, of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, said: “This sends a completely wrong signal to society. It criminalises consumers and will deeply disturb internet users.

“It can’t be that everyone has to be worried now about the police knocking on the door and impounding the family computer because their 16-year-old son has downloaded a few songs.”

Brigitte Zypries, the Justice Minister, defended the law. “The aim is not now to slap handcuffs on downloaders in the school playground,” she said. But if someone downloaded a film before it reached the cinemas it was obvious that they were responding to an illegal offer and breaking the law, she said. Frau Zypries has ruled that it will still be legal to copy a legitimately bought DVD for limited private use.

Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, said: “There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.”

Enforcement will be left to the state prosecutor. Authorities hunting internet pirates will be able to pass on details to film and music producers who can then inform the police.

Many Germans watch the latest Hollywood film at home before it has reached the cinemas; parents’ evenings sometimes end with a showing of an illegally copied film in the school gym.

The German music industry also claims to be suffering from piracy. The recording industry suffered a fall in turnover in 2005 for the seventh year in a row to €1.7 billion (£1.2 billion). Sales have fallen almost 45 per cent since 1998. The German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates that the equivalent of 439 million music CDs were copied illegally in Germany last year.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...100973,00.html





145 Targeted In Operation Tracker

File Sharers Exposed in Software Crackdown Following Recent Court Orders
Press Release

Up to 145 of the 150 individuals identified following a recent Court Order for illegally sharing software over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been targeted by the Federation Against Software Theft.
All have been written to by The Federation demanding that they settle in full and pledge not to undertake this illegal activity again. This is the first such campaign of this nature in the UK and represents a major step forward in enforcement of software copyright infringement.

In January, 10 Internet Service Providers were ordered by the High Court to hand over customer details following a 12-month investigation into the covert sharing of software by PC users.
Although most file sharers used false names and email addresses, the ten ISPs handed over full personal details, including names, addresses and dates of birth etc. This followed his Honour Judge Raynor's confirmation that there was "an overwhelming case" for ordering such customer details to be released.

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, Senior Legal Counsel at The Federation, commented: "Traditionally most software owners have relied on notice and take-down procedures and have failed to bring civil or criminal proceedings against the infringers. This is the second strand of an ongoing strategy, bringing these actions to a head when we see software being misused."

John Lovelock, director general at The Federation, added: "We are making an example of the perpetrators to stop them from stealing and passing on the intellectual property of our members for good, and to send a very strong message to end users that they can be found at any time during activities of this nature and we will continue to monitor and search for our member products being illegally shared. This is not a one-off-wonder."

Targets were identified by software title by investigators, working covertly for The Federation on a project codenamed Operation Tracker. They are IT forensics experts, who assisted The Federation in cracking down on the suppliers and P2P file sharers of unlicensed software.

Notes to editors:
- The individuals concerned are breaking copyright law by uploading software onto the web for others to illegally share and download.
- Penalties for illegal communication to the public of copyright works, including software, are punishable by up to two years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
- The ten ISPs that were the subject of the order included Tiscali, BT, Telewest and NTL.

About The Federation

The Federation Against Software Theft became the world's first software anti- piracy organisation when it was set up in 1984 to lobby Parliament for changes to the copyright law.
Today The Federation's key remit is enforcement. In particular, it tackles software theft using the sanctions of the copyright legislation, extending from under-licensing (buying fewer licences than the number of copies of the software being used at any one time), to the problem of misuse of the internet. It represents any software publisher member whose intellectual property is being abused, regardless of their size. Often, The Federation will consider attempting to resolve these issues without action. However, it is now committed to criminal prosecutions where the misuse is both flagrant and serious.
The Federation's own legal expertise is reinforced by its Legal Advisory Group (FLAG), which consists of 25 law firms engaged in IT/IP and operating in the UK and overseas.
The Federation has 160 members from the software publishing industry (including resellers, distributors, audit software providers and consultants).
http://www.itnews.it/risorse/EuroNews,Zj0xMzU0NjEx





FAST rushes to punish P2P activity

Over 140 File Sharers Fined By Illegal Software Industry Watcher
laura hailstone

Around 145 individuals, identified following a recent Court Order for illegally sharing software over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, have been targeted by the Federation Against Software Theft.

In January, 10 ISPs were ordered by the High Court to hand over customer details following a 12-month investigation into the covert sharing of software by PC users.

Although most file sharers used false names and email addresses, the ten ISPs handed over full personal details, including names, addresses and dates of birth.

Of the 150 identified, 145 have been written to by The Federation demanding that they settle in full and pledge not to undertake this illegal activity again.

This is the first such campaign of this nature in the UK and represents a major step forward in enforcement of software copyright infringement, said The Federation.

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, senior legal counsel at The Federation, said: “Traditionally most software owners have relied on notice and take-down procedures and have failed to bring civil or criminal proceedings against the infringers. This is the second strand of an ongoing strategy, bringing these actions to a head when we see software being misused.”

John Lovelock, director general at The Federation, added: “We are making an example of the perpetrators to stop them from stealing and passing on the intellectual property of our members for good, and to send a very strong message to end users that they can be found at any time during activities of this nature and we will continue to monitor and search for our member products being illegally shared. This is not a one-off-wonder.”
www.itweek.co.uk/2153000





GAPP Punishes 14 Chinese DVD/CD Counterfeiters

China's General Administration of Press and Publication has punished fourteen companies that were involved in illegally duplicating disks.

Of the fourteen, six have had their business licenses revoked and eight have been ordered to cease production of the disks.

The six enterprises who have lost their business licenses include Chongqing Three Gorges Disk Development Co., Ltd; Henan Xianda Disk Co., Ltd; Shandou Nanmei Electronic Industry Co., Ltd; and Anyang Fengjin Multi-media Technology Co., Ltd.

The eight companies who have been told to stop manufacturing the bootleg disks include Guangzhou Huanyu Audio and Video Company and Beijing Dabaike Disk Co., Ltd.

GAPP says it has checked 48 disk manufacturers in 18 provinces and cities of the country since January this year.

A representative from GAPP says that they will continue to keep an eye on the existing problems of the disk reproduction industry and conduct further investigations on the above mentioned enterprises.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=3741





DReaM spells nightmare for this CD

EMI Releases Brazilian DRM CDs That Totally Hose Their Customers

Brazilian mega-star Marisa Monte's new CDs from EMI ("Infinito Particular" and "Universo ao Meu Redor") come with DRM that can't be uninstalled, and requires you to "agree" to a contract that isn't published in Portuguese. Even if you disagree, the malware is installed. The DRM blocks you from playing the CD on Linux and MacOS, and from loading it onto an iPod. This, just as the Brazilian government has launched a Computers for All initiative to distribute 1,000,000 Linux PCs, seems particularly contemptuous of the Brazilian people. Ronaldo sez,

When you insert the CD in your computer, it automatically opens a window with the "License Agreement" of the CD. This is a very large contract in Portuguese, but it is very difficult to read. The agreement is opened in window programmed in flash, so it is impossible to cut and paste the text into another program. In some computers, when you try to scroll down the contract using the arrows, the text slides completely out of control, making it impossible to read.

After taking some time to read the agreement, the first thing that called my attention is that the text says that a full copy of the contract is available at the address "www.emimusic.info/". That is NOT TRUE. If you go to the "Brazil" link at the page, there is no copy of the agreement whatsoever at the website, contrary to what the agreement itself expressly says.

The text of the agreement says that the CD will install software in your computer in order to make the cd playable. However, it says that the user must acknowledge the fact that "certain files and folders might remain in your computer even after the user removes the digital content, the software and/or the player".

Additionally, it says the following: "This contract has been originally drafted in English. The user waives any and all rights that he or she might have under the laws of his or her own country or province, in regard of this contract drafted in any other language".

Finally, my favorite part. There are two buttons below the agreement. The first reads "Accept the Agreement" the second reads "Reject it". After reading all the above, I decided to reject it, and pressed the "reject" button. Immediately a screen with the word "Initializing" appeared, the proprietary software was installed, and the music started to play in my computer using the proprietary EMI player, as if I had "accepted" the whole thing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/24...s_brazili.html





DRM Has Deep Flaws

DRM won't protect the music and film industries from illegal file sharing, researcher says.
Jeremy Kirk

Digital rights management (DRM) technology has deep flaws despite the hope of content providers that encrypted files will deter illegal file sharing, a computer security researcher said Monday.

DRM is a catch-all term for a variety of methods used to limit content sharing. Techniques include digital encryption of songs and encoded limits on the number of times content can be accessed. But DRM technologies are far from foolproof, and the ones developed so far have been easily circumvented by adept hackers, said Ian Brown, a senior research manager at the Cambridge-MIT Institute in England.

DRM won't protect the music and film industries, which have spent the last decade lobbying for new laws to protect their content but neglected trying to find better ways to monetize their offerings, he said. Bands such as U2 and the Grateful Dead use their music more as a promotional tool, relying on touring and merchandise for revenue, he said.

"It's the business models that need changing, not the technology," said Brown, whose doctoral thesis in part covered DRM technologies. He spoke at the Changing Media Summit in London.

DRM technology is simple but making it work is difficult, Brown said. The data has to be decrypted to be used, and the "analog hole" remains--the ability for determined bootleggers to use a microphone or regular video camera to record content for posting on file-sharing networks.

So-called "watermarks"--instructions regulating the usage of the file that are invisible to the users--can be removed by a determined programmer, allowing them to post a file to a P-to-P (peer to peer) network, Brown said. The algorithms used for watermarks are still "primitive," Brown said.

DRM technologies may be most effective for time-based events where encryption would only have to hold for a short period, such as the broadcast of a live sports event, Brown said.

Closely Watched

The progression of DRM technology is closely watched. Music and film industry officials argue that DRM is crucial to preserving revenue in the face of piracy. Consumer advocates say DRM technologies can be too restrictive for consumers who legitimately paid for content and want to share it on several devices.

"Fundamentally, it's an anti-user technology," Brown said. "It's a technology that allows content owners to provide data to their customers with restrictions on how they can use it that aren't justified by copyright law.

Microsoft is incorporating features into its next-generation OS, Windows Vista, to take advantage of DRM capabilities of TPM (trusted platform module) chipsets. TPM chip sets have the capability to store the keys, passwords, or certificates attached to DRM-enabled files and only allow decoding by authorized users.

France is debating legislation that would require companies developing DRM technologies to provide enough information so other companies can make interoperable systems. Apple Computer has lashed out at the measure, saying it will encourage music piracy.
http://pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125227,00.asp




The DRM _Has_ To Go.
Anonymous

I consult to a number of Fortune 500 companies on security issues. I've advised them that purchasing and deploying an OS with embedded DRM is an ironclad guarantee of insecurity -- since DRM is designed as a deliberate back door in the OS.

So the fact that it's been delayed really doesn't affect them: they're not going to buy it anyway, because they don't want to compromise the security of their operations in order to deal with OS features they don't need, don't want, and which are being rammed into Vista to appease the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

So while those features may help turn Vista into an entertainment platform, they will also lose you corporate seats. By the thousands. Because those people have been paying attention to things like the Sony DRM debacle and they now understand, very clearly, that DRM is a threat.

Over at ZDNet, Microsoft employee John Carroll makes the case that his company’s monopolistic tactics over the past decade have in fact benefited our industry, and cites Internet Explorer as an example. Without preinstalling Internet Explorer, he says, how would anyone download Firefox? How would open-source markets grow?

So let me stop here and say, on behalf of Firefox users everywhere: thank you.

I also have a note here from the pop-up ad industry. They would like to thank Microsoft for allowing their market to boom while the IE team sunbathed in Maui for the past four years.

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that many people, I among them, never really took issue with the idea of preinstalling a browser on Windows. It would be pretty silly to buy a computer today that couldn’t access the Internet. We take issue with how Microsoft flagrantly strong-armed OEMs to leave out or marginalize competing browsers, such as Netscape. As far as I know, Netscape also allowed people to…download things.

John’s argument falls flat in other places, too. He points to AOL Instant Messenger’s lead over MSN/Windows Messenger as further evidence that preinstallation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But of course, the value in that space isn’t in the software; it’s in the network. AIM inherited much of its network from AOL. And how did AOL build such a massive network in the first place? Well, the fact that it negotiated prime placement on the desktop for years certainly didn’t hurt. People don’t seek out AIM because it’s a better client.

John concludes that “the mere notion that such consumers are somehow so skewed by the mere inclusion of a software default that competitors can’t gain traction is RIDICULOUS…”, but capitalizing a word does not an argument make. I can see how that notion might seem ridiculous to someone with John’s level of technical literacy. How about the tens of millions of people out there who have never downloaded and installed a piece of software in their lives, even in our broadband world? Believe me, they’re out there. We’re pursuing them every day, one at a time, with SpreadFirefox.

One of the most fundamental problems we’ve encountered in evangelizing Firefox is that many people don’t even know what a browser is. If they know the term at all, they think it’s a search engine, which is understandable; the concept of the independent “browser” in a Web world is just a bit too meta for many. So you can imagine convincing someone to download an “alternative” to a product he didn’t know he used, in a genre of software he never knew existed. John’s blithe dismissal of the difficulty suggests to me that he’s never had to do that before. And that’s fine, except his entire argument is predicated on that perspective.

I think the main problem here is that John, like many techies I know, sees everything in bits and bytes: people couldn’t easily download software in the past; now the bandwidth constraints are gone; therefore, the competitive barrier to entry is gone. It reminds me of some of the things coming out of the Linux camps: Linux is technically superior to Windows; therefore, people will switch to it. These kinds of arguments ignore an entire spectrum of barriers facing “regular people” that we developers never contend with, and I think our industry would do well to empathize with them.

Though I disagree with John’s understanding of the past and present, I agree with him that eventually there will be no distinction—for any audience—between software that happens to be on your computer already and software you procure manually. But we’re not there yet.
http://blakeross.com/2006/03/28/gratitude/





Global Gaming Crackdown

How governments from Beijing to the Beltway could shackle your freedom.
Chris Suellentrop

Last fall, a group of World of Warcraft players in China committed mass suicide. They wanted to draw attention to the latest restriction on their liberty: The same government agency that censors newspapers and bans books had just mandated a system of disincentives to limit the number of hours per day they spent playing online games. Hardcore Warcrafters decided they would rather pull the plug than, er, pull the plug.

But Fox News and CNN weren't on hand to cover the protest because it took place in the game. The players' digital representations martyred themselves; their fleshy masters kept breathing. These were virtual suicides in response to a crackdown in a virtual universe.

Still, virtual isn't the same as unreal. If the Chinese government can monitor World of Warcraft players, then Azeroth (where the game takes place) is in some sense a little bit totalitarian, too. And it wasn't the first time Beijing intervened in a massively multiplayer game: A few years earlier, a Chinese court ordered a game company to restore virtual biochemical weapons someone had pilfered from a player.

Other governments are taking an interest in MMORPGs as well. Players in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual property. More than half of the 40,000 computer crimes investigated by South Korea's National Police Agency in 2003 involved online games.

American gamers aren't likely to face dictatorial decrees to limit their play time, but within the next few years the courts will begin to examine how laws relating to taxes, copyright, and speech will apply in virtual worlds. In the near future, the IRS could require game developers to keep records of all the transactions that take place in virtual economies and tax players on their gains before any game currency is converted into dollars. "It's utterly implausible that it won't happen," says Dan Hunter, who has coauthored law review articles like "The Laws of the Virtual Worlds." A trickier issue is whether an avatar can be defamed: Will we see potion merchants suing for in-game slander, much like eBay sellers have litigated over negative feedback?

In the United States, virtual worlds could eventually have the same legal status as another lucrative recreation industry: pro sports. The NHL isn't exempt from federal legislation like labor, antitrust, and drug laws. But inside the "magic circle," on the field of play, sports leagues are given great latitude to make judgments, even though jobs, endorsement contracts, and the value of team franchises hang in the balance.

For example, the government lets referees police behavior in a hockey rink that would normally be the purview of local prosecutors. (Try high-sticking your mail carrier to experience the difference.) But the government still reserves the right to get involved. It should be the same in games. If your thief character picks the pocket of a nearby avatar, the local district attorney won't prosecute. But if you hack into the player's account to loot his virtual goods, you end up in the slammer.

But don't surrender your in-game civil rights without protest. In January, in the aftermath of the public outcry (and virtual die-ins), the Chinese government announced that adults could play MMORPGs for as long as they like. If the IRS doesn't let US players off so easy, will they respond with a virtual Boston Tea Party?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/law_pr.html





TorrentSpy Says MPAA Can't Reinterpret The Supreme Court On File Sharing
from the try,-try-again dept

When the Supreme Court ruled in the Grokster case, they laid down a very specific case for when a service provider might be liable for the actions of its users. That was only if the service provider took "affirmative steps" to induce copyright violations. This seemed odd and likely to cause trouble pretty quickly. It basically suggested that a new company that came along and did exactly what Grokster had done, but avoided proactively encouraging people to download unauthorized material, would be perfectly fine. However, the entertainment industry immediately tried to expand what the decision meant and eventually just pretended the Supreme Court said that file sharing and things like torrent tracking sites were illegal -- when it actually said nothing of the sort.

The MPAA recently went after a bunch of BitTorrent search engines -- which seemed to stretch the Supreme Court ruling again. After all, these are just search engines, and there are tons of legitimate uses for them. At least one is now fighting back. TorrentSpy has filed a motion to dismiss the case, noting that they don't promote any kind of infringement and they don't host or link directly to any files copyrighted by the MPAA. In other words, they're making a case that all they are is a search engine for torrents, and if the industry is worried about people putting up torrents that infringe on copyrights, it should go after those actually responsible, rather than the search engines.

Services like TorrentSpy were exactly what it looked like the Supreme Court was trying to carve out as being legitimate -- so it's good to see them standing up for themselves, rather than just giving in to another entertainment industry lawsuit. If they win and get the case dismissed, it could set up some of the boundaries as to just how far the entertainment industry can go.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060327/1717242.shtml





Thai Paper Shuts Down Over Alleged Insult
Rungrawee C. Pinyorat

A Thai newspaper said Thursday it was shutting down for five days, after it was forced to apologize over an alleged insult to the country's revered king.

The move came as nearly 2,000 demonstrators gathered outside the headquarters of a Thai media group and blocked the building's entrances, demanding to meet with the writer who allegedly insulted King Bhumibol Adulyadej. They dispersed after being told of the plan for suspending publication.

Kom Chad Luek newspaper had earlier acknowledged that it failed to print in full a reference to the king made by anti-government protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul, thus leaving his remarks in a form that might upset the monarch.

The newspaper would punish itself by temporarily suspending publication, said Thepchai Yong, a senior editor of The Nation Group, the newspaper's publisher. "The chief editor has already resigned," he added.

The newspaper originally agreed to stop publishing for three days, but agreed to two more days, April 8-9, after further pressure from the protesters.

It would not stop immediately because it has a responsibility to publish the results of the general election to be held Sunday, Thepchai said.

The demonstrators are backers of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who have rallied to his support in the face of demonstrations demanding he step down for alleged corruption and abuse of power. But their complaint did not directly relate to that dispute. Members of the anti- and pro-Thaksin camps both pledge their devotion to the 78-year-old monarch.

Thepchai said, however, that the protests against the newspaper were political in nature. The Nation Group's newspapers have been strongly critical of Thaksin.

"Some groups have tried to politicize the problems by bringing in the monarchy," Thepchai said. "This issue has to stop before some people or groups use this issue to incite further chaos."

Protesters against Kom Chad Luek have been demonstrating outside the newspaper's headquarters for several days, and about 200 police on Thursday set up barricades near the entrance to The Nation Group building on Bangkok's outskirts, said police Col. Satchaphong Woranantakun.

In an attempt to quell the protest, the newspaper on Thursday submitted a formal letter of apology to the king through the office of his private secretary.

Daily demonstrations for and against Thaksin have been held in the Thai capital in the past few weeks, with the anti-Thaksin groups calling for the king to intervene by appointing an interim prime minister.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-30-09-00-51





Iran Cracks Down on Bloggers
AP

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- On his last visit to Iran, Canadian-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan was detained and interrogated, then forced to sign a letter of apology for his blog writings before being allowed to leave the country. Compared to others, Derakhshan is lucky.

Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.

In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy. But increasingly, they are coming under threat of censorship.

The Iranian blogging community, known as Weblogistan, is relatively new. It sprang to life in 2001 after hard-liners -- fighting back against a reformist president -- shut down more than 100 newspapers and magazines, and detained writers. At the time, Derakhshan posted instructions on the internet in Farsi on how to set up a weblog.

Since then, the community has grown dramatically. Although exact figures are not known, experts estimate there are between 70,000 and 100,000 active weblogs in Iran. The vast majority are in Farsi but a few are in English.

Overall, the percentage of Iranians now blogging is "gigantic," said Curt Hopkins, director of an online group called the Committee to Protect Bloggers, who lives in Seattle.

"They are a talking people, very intellectual, social, and have a lot to say. And they are up against a small group (in the government) that are trying to shut everyone up," said Hopkins.

To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world -- second only to China, Hopkins said.

It also is one of a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative. The software that Iran uses blocks both internationally hosted sites in English and local sites in Farsi, the study found.

The filtering process is backed by laws that force individuals who subscribe to internet service providers to sign a promise not to access non-Islamic sites. The same laws also force the providers to install filtering mechanisms.

The filtering "is systematically getting worse," said Derakhshan, who was detained and questioned during a visit to Iran last spring, just before the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But is the government threatened because the tens of thousands of Iranian blogs are all throwing insults at it, or calling for revolution? Not quite.

The debates on Iranian weblogs are rarely political. The most common issues are cultural, social and sexual. Blogs also are a good place to chat in a society where young men and women cannot openly date. There are blogs that discuss women's issues, and ones that deal with art and photography.

But in Iran, activists say all debates are equally perceived as a threat by the authorities. Bloggers living in Iran understand that better than anyone else.

"I am very careful. Every blogger in Iran who writes in his/her name must be careful. I know the red lines and I never go beyond them," said Parastoo Dokouhaki, 25, who runs one of Iran's most popular blogs. "And these days, the red lines are getting tighter."

Dokouhaki doesn't directly write about politics. She sticks mostly to social issues, but in Iran, that is also a taboo subject.

"I write about the social consequences of government decisions and they don't like it, because they can't control it," said Dokouhaki.

Outright political bloggers have an even tougher time.

Hanif Mazroui was arrested in 1994 and charged with acting against the Islamic system through his writings. He was jailed for 66 days and then acquitted.

"It's normal for authorities to summon and threaten bloggers," said Mazroui. The government continued to harass him and three months ago, he was summoned once again by the authorities and told never to write about the nuclear issue. Soon after his release, he shut down his weblog.

"They kept pressuring me," he said.

Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist and blogger, was arrested and charged with insulting the country's leader, collaborating with the enemy, writing propaganda against the Islamic state and encouraging people to jeopardize national security.

He had been in jail for 60 days when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He appealed, and was released on bail. Although his sentence has been reduced to three years, he still faces charges of insulting the leader and writing propaganda.

Another, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been in prison since February 2005. He was first arrested in November 2004 for speaking out against the arrest of three colleagues. According to the Committee to Protect Bloggers, Saminejad's website was hacked into by people linked to the Iranian Hezbollah movement.

After his release, he launched his blog at a new address, which led to his second arrest in February 2005. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and then given an extra 10 months for inciting "immorality."

Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals.

Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the government has just launched a competition for the best four blogs. The subjects: the Islamic revolution and the Quran.

"The government has observed carefully and learned that blogs are important ... and they want to capitalize on that," she said. "They want to lead the movement, they want to control it."
Tools Iran Uses to Block the Net

OpenNet Initiative's 2004 study delivered these findings about Iran's efforts to block internet material the government deems inappropriate:

Iran used U.S. commercial software to block both English-language sites hosted overseas and Farsi-language sites originating inside Iran.

A total of 499 sites were blocked out of 1,477 tested in November 2004, and 623 sites were filtered out of a total of 2,025 tested in December 2004.

Many kinds of sites were blocked, including pornographic sites, women's rights sites and sites with homosexual material. Also blocked were "anonymizer" tools that allow users to surf the internet anonymously, along with many weblogs.

Iran has laws that provide a back-up system to the filtration process. Individual subscribers to internet service providers must sign a document promising not to access non-Islamic sites. All providers must install filtering mechanisms for websites and e-mail.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservic...l?tw=rss.index





Beats the Sneaker Set

New Data Transmission Record - 60 DVDs Per Second

As the world’s internet traffic grows relentlessly, faster data transmission will logically become crucial. To enable telecommunications networks to cope with the phenomenal surge in data traffic as the internet population moves past a billion users, researchers are focusing on new systems to increase data transmission rates and it’s not surprising that the world data transmission record is continually under threat. Unlike records where human physical capabilities limit new records to incremental growth, when human ingenuity is the deciding factor, extraordinary gains are possible. German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/5396/





Agency Exempts Most of Internet From Campaign Spending Laws
Adam Nagourney

The Federal Election Commission ruled unanimously Monday that political communication on the Internet, including Web logs, setting up Web sites and e-mail, was not regulated by campaign finance laws.

The commission, in a 6-to-0 decision, also ruled that paid political advertisements placed on Web sites were covered by the 2002 campaign finance law, which includes restrictions on spending and contributions and bars corporations and unions from using their treasuries to purchase Web advertisements.

The decision marked a significant step in the rapid evolution of the Internet — and, in particular, Web logs — as a force in American politics. It is the latest chapter in the conflict between First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression and efforts by Congress to regulate campaign spending.

The commission ruling came two years after it had decided that all Internet activity was exempt from the campaign finance laws. That ruling was challenged by Congressional sponsors of the law, and a federal judge upheld that suit, ordering the commission to write rules to apply the 2002 law to the Internet.

The commission ruled that the law applied to paid political advertisements, but offered a broad exemption for all other Internet political activity, conducted by individuals or groups, even in direct coordination with a candidate.

"The commission established a categorical exemption for individuals who engage in online politics," Michael E. Toner, the chairman of the commission, said in an interview. "The agency has taken an important step in protecting grass roots and online politics."

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos, the largest political Web log in the country, heralded the decision. "It looks like we got everything we wanted," Mr. Moulitsas said. "It's fantastic that the F.E.C. was as responsive as it was."

The original court ruling sparked fear by bloggers — many of whom are explicit in rallying their readers to contribute, work for and vote for specific candidates — that their work would be counted as contributions to the candidates, and thus fall under the contribution limits. The law limits individual contributions to $2,000 and includes a ban on any union or corporate donations.

The commission's ruling was broad and categorical. It said that activity on the Internet was exempt, whether done by an individual or by a group. As part of the ruling, the commission ruled that bloggers would be eligible for the same exemption from the campaign finance law that is now given to newspapers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/politics/28fec.html





Oklahoma City Threatens To Call FBI Over 'Renegade' Linux Maker

Our mistake is YOUR problem
Ashlee Vance

New year, new job? Click here for thousands of tech vacancies.

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.

"Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???," Taylor wrote to CentOS. "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma."

Few people would initiate a tech support query like this, but these are dangerous times, and Taylor suspected the worst. (Er, but only the world's most boring hacker would break into a site and then throw up a boilerplate about how to fix the hack.)

CentOS developer Johnny Hughes jumped on the case and tried to explain the situation to Taylor.

"I feel sorry for your city," he replied in an e-mail. "CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website. . . . Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly."

That response didn't go over so well.

"Get this web site off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!," Taylor responded, clearly excited about the situation and sensing that Bin Laden was near.

Again, CentOS jumped in to try and explain some of the technical details behind the problem. It pointed Taylor to this page, saying it was the standard page for a web server and noted that it provides instructions on how to fix the problem. The CentOS staffer suggested that Taylor contact his service provider or have an administrator look into the issue.

That response didn't go over so well.

"Unless this software is removed I will file a complaint with the FBI," Taylor replied.

Later he added,

"I have four computers located at City Hall. All of these computers display the same CentOS page when attempting to bring up Tuttle-ok.gov. Now if your software is not causing this problem, how does it happen??? No one outside this building has complained about this problem. This is a block of public access to a city's website. Remove your software within the next 12 hours or an official complaint to the FBI is being filed!"

And later,

"I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

After a few more exciting exchanges, CentOS managed to track down the problem for Taylor. It turns out that hosting provider Vidia Communications is running CentOS on some of its servers and had not configured the Tuttle web site properly. CentOS informed Taylor of the situation, and, a day later, Taylor had calmed down.

"The problem has been resolved by VIDIA who used to host the City website," he wrote. "They still provide cable service but do not host the website. The explanation was that they had a crash and during the rebuild they reinstalled the software that affected our website."

"I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages. My initial contact with VIDIA disallowed any knowledge of creating the problem."

Er, so despite the fact that CentOS went out of its way to figure out the problem for Tuttle, Taylor still places the blame on CentOS for not fixing the problem - that it didn't create - sooner. In addition, Taylor didn't really start off the whole process on the best foot despite Tuttle being a town "Where People Grow - Friendly!" Grow friendly, threaten to bring in the FBI at the drop of a hat - what's the difference?

As of this writing, one Tuttle web site still had not been fixed, although you can find the charming Tuttle man Taylor over here.

Taylor has yet to respond to our request for comment.

It seems that Tuttle has quite the hacking epidemic on its hands. The Tuttle Times newspaper's web site, for example, has had its Forum section cracked. Click at your own risk to see it or have a peek at our screen grab.

To see the full transcript of the web server war, travel over here. It's classic reading.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/



Letters

Oklahoma Man Asks Reg To Turn Off The Internet

Make these Linux meanies stop!

Jerry Taylor, the now famous city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who last week threatened to call the FBI to stop Linux maker CentOS from helping him configure a web server has presented The Register with a massive request. Taylor wants us to shut down the internet.

For those of you who are not up to speed with this popular story, here's a brief recap.

Taylor went to Tuttle city's web site, hoping to make some changes. Upon arriving at the site, he discovered the boilerplate Apache web server configuration page and mistook this for a possible hack attempt on Tuttle. Instead of contacting a server administrator about the problem, Taylor initiated a tirade with a CentOS support staffer in which he repeatedly threatened to have the FBI investigate the Linux maker for attacking Tuttle's municipal web site.

Eventually, CentOS showed Taylor that it had nothing to do with the web site other than providing the operating system software for the web server. The fury of Tuttle's e-mails made plenty of you laugh as our story was picked up by Slashdot, Digg and others.

It would seem that we made too many of you laugh.

Taylor - who once proclaimed to the CentOS staff, "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity" - has asked us to put a halt to the publicity.

Taylor declined to respond to this reporter's request for comment but did write to a member of El Reg's marketing team.

“I do not follow instructions that show up when a website that I am not familiar with appears on my computer and I do not think anyone with experience would do so either. Once the Centos site appeared on four computers at one site I contacted our web service provider. The web service provider did not know what could cause the problem and had never heard of "CentOS". I then contacted the internet provider's local office and was told that they did nothing to cause the problem. I checked the building's server and found nothing relating to CentOS on the server. I was then left with only the web page email address to contact. I asked for the strange website to be removed because it blocked my City web site and I could not post public information. I only got help after threatening to contact the FBI.

Now I am being flooded with emails from CentOS users that after knowing the answer say the problem was simple. I think this is unjustified and would like for this to stop. Your website should provide useful information and be a credit to the IT world. I do not believe it should be used to incite the users. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.”

So stop, now. Please.

It should be noted that Taylor failed to thank many of you for improving Tuttle's web site.

About 100 of you noticed the spelling error in Taylor's bio page where he wrote, "I am please [sic] to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." That line now reads "I am pleased to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." The site, however, continues to misspell Heisman - or Hiesman according to Tuttle - despite being the home of Heisman Trophy winning football star Jason White. Plenty of you noticed this mistake, and we guess Taylor will fix the problem soon.

The fact that Taylor cannot handle the abuse of Linux fan boys may be surprising given that he has faced off against a tiger in tong-to-fence combat - a story captured by The Tuttle Times - note the granddad's pride and joy sweater. (In an unrelated item, you can find a Tuttle police officer preparing for a party here.)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_email/




Debit Cards Go RFID

Citizens Bank has a new contactless debit card. It’s called the PayPass. There's no swipe, no signature and no PIN number for transactions under $25.

"The new technology allows you to get through the checkout faster, which we think is a big benefit," said Lisa Stanton, Citizens vice president. "It also allows you to avoid making a trip to the ATM to get cash." Citizens is targeting low-cost transactions like picking up a few things at the drug store.

"If you go to CVS and charge $75, then you will have to sign," Stanton said. In addition to CVS, the merchants that accept PayPass include McDonald's, 7-Eleven and Regal Cinemas. The cards have a tiny transmitter and antenna inside. The mag stripe's still there, so you can still use them the old-fashioned way.

But what about identity theft?

PayPass comes with fraud protection and if it's stolen, you’re not responsible for the unauthorized charges. "The thieves don't know how to create this chip and antenna right now, so the counterfeiting is much less likely to occur," Stanton said. So far, Citizens is the only bank in Southern New England offering the new card, but Bank of America is testing the technology. All Citizens Bank debit cards issued after February first have the new technology. Other customers will be getting the new cards in mail.
http://www.turnto10.com/consumerunit...05/detail.html





Federal Agency Putting War Documents Online

Iraqi memos made public after months of arguing with intelligence officials
AP

The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web’s power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded.

Republican leaders in Congress pushed for the release, which was first proposed by conservative commentators and bloggers hoping to find evidence about the fate of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, or possible links to terror groups.

Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto. The idea of the government’s turning over a massive database to volunteers is revolutionary — and not only to them.

“Let’s unleash the power of the Internet on these documents,” said House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. “I don’t know if there’s a smoking gun on WMD or not. But it will give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war.”

The documents’ value is uncertain — intelligence officials say that they are giving each one a quick review to remove anything sensitive. Skeptics of the war, suspicious of the Bush administration, believe that means the postings are either useless or cherry-picked to bolster arguments for the war.

The documents — Iraqi memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audiotapes and videotapes — have spurred a flurry of news reports. The Associated Press, for instance, reported on memos from Saddam Hussein in 1987 ordering plans for a chemical attack on Kurds and comments from Saddam and his aides in the 1990s, searching for ways to prove they didn’t have weapons.

No information about insurgency
Hoekstra said it took months of arguing with intelligence officials before he and John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, agreed to make the documents public. None contains current information about the Iraqi insurgency, and U.S. intelligence officials say they are focusing their limited resources on learning about what’s happening on the ground now.

There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time — so far, about 600 — on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.

Regardless of what they reveal, open-government advocates like the decision to make them available.

It’s a “radical notion,” said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. That “members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. ... That is a bold innovation.”

Cheers from bloggers
Champions of the Internet as a “citizen’s media” embraced the step, too.

“The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important,” said Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger at Instapundit.com and author of “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”

“It’s kind of like a swarm. It’s a lot of individual minds looking at it from different angles. The stuff that’s most interesting tends to bubble to the top,” he said.

A self-described Iraqi blogger translated one of the documents for the American blog pajamasmedia.com — a Sept. 15, 2001, memo from the Iraqi intelligence service that reported about an Afghan source who had been told that a group from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had visited Iraq.

Select information publicized?
Some remain doubtful, suspecting that the administration only releases information that puts President Bush and his arguments for war in a good light. The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction after the war, and the Sept. 11 commission reported it found no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaida.

“I would bet that the materials that they chose to post were the ones that were suggestive of a threat,” said John Prados, author of the book, “Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.”

Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute, dismissed the documents: “The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it’s not there.”

One of several conservative blogs devoting attention to the release, Powerline.com, set up a separate page to catalog its findings and news reports on what the documents reveal.

“These documents are going to shed a lot of light on a regime that was quite successful in maintaining secrecy,” said John Hinderaker, one of three men who run the site. “Before the first Gulf War, Saddam was perilously close to getting nuclear weapons and people didn’t know it. The evils of the regime will be reflected.”

But he also cautioned the optimistic. “When you’re dealing with millions of pages of documents,” he said, “it’s a big mistake to think you can pull out one page or sentence out of a document and say ’Eureka, this is it.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12042529/





Oversight? What Oversight?

Homeland Security Group To Meet Away From Public Eye
Anne Broache

A new advisory committee in the Homeland Security Department is free to disregard a law designed to keep meetings open and proceedings public, according to a departmental notice.

The newly created Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council is charged with sharing information aimed at protecting the nation's infrastructure, cybercomponents included. Michael Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, cited security reasons when he signed off on exempting the council from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA.

The decision, which many private-sector players had strongly recommended, was released in a departmental notice published Friday.

The council, which plans to meet at least quarterly, will bring together various federal agency employees and private-sector representatives to discuss the Department of Homeland Security's infrastructure protection plan, which remains in draft form. The fields represented range from agriculture and energy to information technology and telecommunications. Participants include the U.S. Telecom Association, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign.

If those participants are required to comply with FACA, it could leave them seriously hindered in sharing "sensitive homeland security information," the department said.

The 1972 law generally requires such groups to meet in open sessions, make written meeting materials publicly available, and deliver a 15-day notice of any decision to close a meeting to the public. The last is a particular point of concern for Homeland Security officials, who anticipate that private emergency meetings may need to be scheduled on short notice.

The private sector, fearing that sensitive data will get to the wrong hands, has continued to resist sharing important information with the feds, the Department of Homeland Security said, citing government auditors' findings from late 2003.

Making the meetings public would amount to "giving our nation's enemies information they could use to most effectively attack a particular infrastructure and cause cascading consequences across multiple infrastructures," another departmental advisory council warned in August.

One privacy advocate said he didn't buy the excuses. "The public has an extremely strong interest in knowing whether DHS and the relevant industries are doing enough to protect facilities, and whether there might be company negligence that contributes to any possible security vulnerabilities," David Sobel, a general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in an e- mail interview.

Michael Aisenberg, government relations director for VeriSign, dismissed such worries, saying he predicted only a limited number of the council's meetings would actually be closed to the public.

"But there are families of data and information that are much more appropriately handled in confidence, at least in the early phases of an exploit or event," he said, praising the exemption as highly valuable and long overdue. "There were no tools in place to allow DHS or any other agency to have meetings with collective groups of government and industry that would not be covered by the FACA."

Homeland Security said in Friday's notice that it recognized "the important principle of transparency as a foundation for public confidence in government" and planned to make the council's meetings public whenever "feasibly consistent with security objectives." It said it also planned to issue public notices of all meetings, closed and open alike, "unless exigent circumstances arise" and that it would maintain a publicly available Web site with meeting agendas and periodic reports.
http://news.com.com/Homeland+securit...3-6053795.html





Lucent Talks Raise Issue of Security
Vikas Bajaj and Andrew Ross Sorkin

As merger talks between Lucent and Alcatel continue to advance, attention is turning to the role Lucent's fast-growing work for military and intelligence agencies may play in securing government approval for the trans-Atlantic deal.

With a long history of contributing to military efforts like ballistic missile technology and submarine sonar, the famed Bell Labs unit of Lucent is widely expected to become a focal point when the deal is presented to regulators in Washington for approval.

Though the companies have said that they are discussing a "merger of equals," experts say the deal will probably be treated as an acquisition of an American company by a foreign entity because Alcatel of France is one and a half times the size of Lucent and the combined company will probably be based in Paris.

An Alcatel spokesman said yesterday that the company's board would meet on Thursday, but declined to comment further. People close to the negotiations said the deal could be finished as early as this week, though they said a formal announcement might be pushed into the weekend.

National security concerns related to Bell Labs are among the unresolved issues being discussed by executives, these people said. Options said to be considered include completely spinning off the division, which has about 9,000 employees, or separating a unit that does classified work, using a corporate structure frequently employed in the military industry. But they said the companies hoped that none of those remedies would be necessary.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, overseen by the Treasury Department, reviews deals that give foreigners control over operations involving classified matters, export-controlled information, American infrastructure regarded as vital or a sole-source supplier to the Defense Department.

The committee starts with a 30-day formal review, which can be expanded into a 45-day investigation, and if the matter is still unresolved, the deal could be forwarded to the White House for a presidential decision.

Bell Labs was created by American Telephone and Telegraph in 1925 as a wide-ranging research and development center for new technologies in conjunction with its equipment subsidiary, Western Electric, which evolved into Lucent, based in Murray Hill, N.J.

The unit, whose researchers helped develop groundbreaking technologies like the transistor and the Unix computer system, was called upon by successive administrations to aid the military during World War II and the cold war.

"It was the equivalent of the national laboratories," said Narain Gehani, a 23-year Bell Labs veteran who wrote "Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel" (2003, Silicon Press).

After the 1984 breakup of A.T.&T., Bell Labs' involvement in military work started tapering off and fell off more sharply when it became part of an independent Lucent in 1996. A year later, Lucent sold one of its last military businesses, a unit that made submarine surveillance systems based in Greensboro, N.C., to General Dynamics for $284 million.

In recent years, however, Lucent has given new emphasis to government business, largely as a source of lucrative and stable military and intelligence communications contracts, after many of its commercial customers went bankrupt or severely scaled back spending on equipment.

At a November meeting with Wall Street analysts, for instance, Lucent executives said its business running communications networks for governments had grown 50 percent in 2005 and 100 percent in 2004. It highlighted a $100 million contract to rebuild and modernize Iraq's communications system and a $242 million contract to modernize a United States Army network.

But when asked to quantify the company's business with the government, a spokesman said yesterday that Lucent did not break that information out.

Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said, "Compared with the cold war, Lucent's activity today has much less of a military cast."

But he also noted that the Bush administration's drive to modernize the military into a more agile and responsive force was greatly benefiting Lucent and other communications vendors. "The technologies which Lucent is engaged in are at the cutting edge of military innovation," Mr. Thompson said.

Some of the work has a decidedly futuristic focus, like an $11.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop high-speed wireless networks that can be quickly assembled to allow troops to communicate with one another on battlefields.

Several former Lucent and Bell Labs officials said that over the years a small Bell Labs team based in Whippany, N.J., had been dedicated to classified projects and that even senior executives were not fully aware of the group's work because they lacked the requisite security clearances.

Former Bell Labs researchers say the government is financing an increasing share of the basic research done at the labs, because scarce corporate dollars are reserved for commercial product development.

"Unlike the rest of the company, in research, the major funding comes from the government," said Robert W. Lucky, who worked at Bell Labs for three decades before leaving in 1992. He sits on the Defense Science Board, which advises the Pentagon.

Mr. Lucky and other experts said that they expected that Bell Labs' close ties to the government would mean extra scrutiny especially from an increasingly protectionist Congress, but that the merger would ultimately be approved.

So far, the Alcatel-Lucent talks have not given rise to the kind of concerns voiced after the Bush administration approved a deal for a company owned by the government of Dubai to manage some terminal operations at six American ports.

A spokesman for Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said yesterday that the two deals were not comparable, because Alcatel was not a government-owned entity. (The French government owns 4.8 percent of Alcatel's shares.)

Charles Walston, the spokesman, said Mr. Lautenberg was looking to see whether the deal was truly a merger of equals, "and whether Lucent has a lot of control and if it is structured such that Bell Labs would be autonomous."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who took a leading role in opposing the ports deal, issued a brief statement that said, "The Bell Labs are some of the premier research institutions in the country, and we should watch this proposed merger carefully."

Harry L. Clark, a lawyer at Dewey Ballantine who specializes in getting federal approval for foreign transactions, said the "political dimension" could play a role. "For a century, Bell Labs has been a crown jewel of American research," he said.

Scott Shane and John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/te...gy/28labs.html





Breakthrough In Split Second 3D Face Imaging

Face recognition technology that could revolutionise security systems worldwide has been developed by computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University. The new specialist software can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds.

Similar systems that have been trialled have proved unworkable because of the time it takes to construct a picture and an inaccurate result.

The ground-breaking invention, by experts in the University’s Materials and

Engineering Research Institute (MERI) was tested by Home Secretary Charles Clarke on a recent visit to Sheffield. It could be used for tighter security in airports, banks, and government buildings and ID cards.

The breakthrough comes days after MPs backed the compromise plans for identity cards, meaning from 2008 people applying for a new passport will also get an identity card, with their biometric details stored on a central register.

The new technology works by projecting a pattern of light onto the face, creating a

2D image, from which 3D data is generated. Biometric features are extracted by a ‘parameterisation’ process, giving a digital mapping of a face that would form part of a fool-proof security system. MERI’s Professor Marcos Rodrigues said:

“This technology could be used anywhere there is a need for heightened security.

It is well suited to a range of applications including person identification from national databases, access control to public and private locations, matching 3D poses to 2D photographs in criminal cases, and 3D facial biometric data for smart cards such as ID and bank cards. We have developed a viable, working system at the cutting edge of 3D technology.”
http://www.shu.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news_fu...um=PR958&db=06





New Vote Machines Ignite Feud In Emery

Software flaw? County clerk threatens to resign over issue
Glen Warchol

After 23 years as Emery County clerk, Bruce Funk will decide this morning whether he will resign because he cannot endorse an election on Utah's new voting machines.

"In no way could I feel comfortable with these machines," Funk said Monday. "I don't want to be part of something that put into question the results that come out of Emery County."

Earlier Monday, state Elections Director Michael Cragun and other state officials and engineers from Diebold Elections Systems met behind closed doors with the Emery County Commission. Their goal was to address Funk's concerns about some of the machines' computer memory that made him suspect they were not new or that something already had been loaded into their memories.

Funk invited in representatives of Black Box Voting, a Washington state-based nonprofit voter rights group, to inspect the machines earlier this month. Black Box has yet to issue a final report on the machines that are slated to replace Utah's punch card system of voting at a cost of $27 million.

By the end of the Monday meeting, Diebold engineers convinced the county commissioners the discrepancies in the machines' memory are the result of testing and of additional printing fonts.

But Diebold told the commissioners that allowing unauthorized people access to the machines had violated their integrity.

It could cost upwards of $40,000 to fly in technicians to retest them.

Joe Demma, chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, the state's chief elections officer, was plainly incensed with Funk for allowing Black Box to probe the machines.

"The problem is that instead of asking us or Diebold, Bruce Funk allowed a third party to put the warranty in jeopardy," Demma said in a telephone interview from Emery County. "If I sound frustrated, it's because I am frustrated. We don't know what they did to the machines. If Bruce would have just asked, we could have saved this forty grand."

Diebold's $40,000 estimate is exaggerated to frighten other clerks from questioning the machines' integrity, Funk said. "What they are really saying is, 'We don't want anyone else to think of doing this.' "

Commissioner Ira Hatch said Emery County will go forward with the Diebold machines.

"We've decided we are going have Diebold come and go through these machines and see if they are compromised," he said, adding the company may be able to work with them on reducing the cost.

As for Funk, Hatch said, "We are going to give him the option to get back on board and get on with the elections. He's not too prone to do that. He's talking about resigning."
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3646075u





Can you say ''hysterical''?

Massive Credit Card Fraud Via Various Illegal MP3 Download Sites
Side-Line

It seems that going for the cheapest illegal way is not always the smartest thing to do.

Over the past few weeks Side-Line has been inundated by e-mails from readers from all over the world including the USA, UK, Belgium, France, Holland etc telling they have been the victim of fraudulous use of their credit cards after having entered their credit card to buy illegal download albums for just one dollar, the so-called 'MP3-1dollardeals', from illegal MP3 websites. These sites, mostly based in Russia, are acting online as being from the UK, USA, Germany etc under over 40 domain names (including the popular MP3sugar, Audio Store, Allmp3, ...).

It appears that they have now started picking victims amongst their clients (believed to be several millions) at random to use their cards for other means. As the Russian authorities are not active in fighting piracy it is to be believed that these sites will continue exercising their business. Several label owners have in the meantime confirmed to Side-Line that those sites are 100% illegal and stealing music from the smallest indie band to the biggest major act. Through MP3 websites such as MP3sugar and Audio Store the Albanian and Russian mob have found another quick mean to get rich apart from selling drugs and prosituting youngsters. Rumour has it that a blacklist is circulating among the CC companies holding domainnames from illegal sites where customers will not be covered in case of fraud. The sums taken from the cards go from just a 'lousy' 1000 US$ to over 3000 US$.

So far the 'MP3-1dollardeals'. If you have been purchasing illegal downloads, be sure blocking your card right now, your credit card company will most probably NOT cover the costs after fraud as the news about the abuse is spreading quickly now.
http://www.side-line.com/news_commen...=13066_0_2_0_C





Red-faced in Redmond

Vista 2007. Fire The Leadership Now!
Who da'Punk

2007.

It certainly sounded like Microsoft leadership committed to us, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders that Vista would be out in 2006.

Slip!

We should have asked for more details around the "or else" part of that commitment.

I was upset at missing the back-to-school market. Now we're missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it. What percentage will upgrade to Vista? Well, I guess that's the little dream that I need to give up on. Vista's deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest. So not only did we miss last year's opportunity, we're missing this year's opportunity, too. With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.

Personally, I've been holding off of buying a laptop and a new mega-big-iron PC until Vista is done. I'm super- excited to get Vista Ultimate on that new PC and be able to hook Media Center up to my Xbox 360. And now I'll wait.

In my afternoon daydream, after Allchin's email went out, I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, "You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight."

Sigh. Well, I'd settle for the version: "... When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We reward success. We do not reward failure, especially sustained failure that has directly affected this company, its future, and its stock price. You will not receive any incentives this year. You will not receive a bonus. You will not get a raise. You will not be awarded stock."

People need to be fired and moved out of Microsoft today. Where's the freakin' accountability?

In the meantime, the discussion of how you'd sell Vista in 30-seconds to a non-techy consumer hasn't come up with much Abbie-understandable reasons other than "cooler games!" Sure, Abbie probably spends a lot of time with solitaire and minesweeper, so that's good. But most of it focuses either on issues so deep and technical that the average consumer is going to shrug and say, "Hell, I don't think I need any of that!" or on issues that make you think that XP is a ticking time-bomb of unstable code ready to explode 1s and 0s over anyone who looks at it wrong. And as for Alpha Geeks and super-users, it sounds like LUA is going to be a daily pain in the patootie.

The good news? Well, we've got plenty of time to conjure up reasons why Vista is going to be better than XP in a way that anyone can understand and agree with. Plus $500 million to spend doing it.

Oy. Oy. Oy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Buy An OS X License From Apple
Anonymous

You know, I've pondered for years what MS would do in this situation, when it became clear that the OS was a complete train wreck.

Apple was able to buy NeXT, but MS has killed off all of their viable replacements. OS/2, BeOS, PenPoint? All strangled by MS's anti-competitive (and illegal) tactics.

So, here's the way out: MS should swallow real hard, ante up half of what they blew on Longwind, and buy an OS X license from Apple. That would be about $10B up-front, and a hefty royalty. MS would have to assume the burden of making it run on all the crapbox PCs out there, which have had all the quality squeezed out of them, due to MS's having sucked up the lion's share of the profit from all PCs for the last 20 years or so.

The benefit is that MS could finally ship a securable OS, and the users wouldn't have to lose countless hours trying to work around the malware. Meanwhile, the only semi-competent part of the company, the Mac Business Unit, would take the lead in Apps development.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Scary
Anonymous

I am one of those lame testers that were "removed" approximately a month ago to pave the way for the full transition of BVT/FVT to IDC.

While I was employed for the past 11 months testing the code produced by Windows Core, I came across a staggering discovery, and that was that the majority of our tests when they failed spectacularly were deemed "Approved by Component Developer".

This was just shocking to me at first to pass packages and updates for GDR that were incapable of being removed or broke compatability with such things as Winlogon if the machine had not yet been activated. Now that was a fun issue that was thankfully repaired after a major complaint that I filed.

So, this really does not surprise me that everything started to slip. I have seen what Vista and Longhorn Server (as of the last build I tested) have been so am confident that I will not be upgrading my personal computers to it any time soon.

It is just scary to see things like the ability to access the "Help Viewer" through the Login screen to gain full control over the system (Yes, it was still there as of 5283).

As a hint, it involves a URL and EXPLORER.EXE and you can gain Admin Rights.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Rogue's Gallary at Microsoft
Shuttle 999 to oblivion

Here is a short list of the chief villians and idiots and their sins. They've made MS a much less successful company in the last 10 years.

[1] Steve Balmer - Prancing Public Buffon Antics, Customer Defocus, No Technology Depth - Fire him and get a real President with vision.
[2] Jim Allchin - .Net / Managed Code Fiasco, Longhorn Reset, Longhorn Basics Unfunded Mandates - Fire him and revoke his options before he retires.
[3] Brian Valentine - Ugly WAR Team Tyranny, COSD techno Luditism, Physical Violence & random Furniture tossing - Fire him immediately before he assaults someone.
[4] Will Poole - Open MPAA/RIIA Bedfellow & DRM Moron, Windows Client Lack of Vision, wasteful DMD Codec Wars - Fire him immediately before he dorks something else.
[5] Craig Munde - Billions wasted on WebTV, Tigre Media Servers, UPNP Community Alienation and ineffectual Politicking in WA DC. - Fire him retroactively and get back the BILLIONS he's wasted.
[6] Chris Jones - Semi-talented Wunderkid VP wannabe, an example of good old boy insider promo, Mr. Cut-Cut-Cut if it's not done by 8/05, Oh wait - we're slipping again! - Should be made an IC Program Manager somewhere useless like MSN or RedWest.
[7] Jawad Khaki - Perennial GM/PUM humiliation & Burnout, Random High Priority Demands, Warring with BrianV, Entire Org underleveled and underappreciated - Fire him and get a decent people manager
[8] Longhorn Basics Teams - Random Unfunded Mandates, Arbitrary and last minute Decisions on Quality and Security requirements, destroyed the ability of the product teams to deliver on their planned commitments - Put them in stocks in the village square for and let all the product teams beat them like dogs.
[9] WinSE - Minimial actual development, chronic pushback on produc teams, weekly security cluster fucks, nastiest possible working environment at WAR teams. - Fire them all and outsource Sustaining Engineering to actual engineers (in India or wherever).

I'm sure you can add to this list of rogue and also add to their voluminous sins. The real problem is that "partner" class players at Microsoft are "made men" and are not launched when they do major damage. Instead, they are just moved so they can do more of the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overpaid Zeros
Anonymous

To those saying “stop pointing fingers, suck it up, take personal responsibility” I’ve got two words. F-YOU. And the brain-addled, arthritic goat you rode in on. I have been sucking it up. For five years. I’ve been working my ass off to build a product and I’ve seen GMs, PUMs, VPs and other overpaid zeros walking around with their heads up the asses. No leadership, no decisions, no goals, no hard choices, no accountability. I've watched at least 40 man-years of dev time down the ol’ crapper in my org because of worthless management. Now I spend my days adding SAL annotations, fixing PREF*** bugs, and changing comments in the code so we don’t call some third-world country by a politically incorrect name in some obscure header file that hasn’t had an edit since we were all using SLM. By the time we ship, the damn place will have had another coup and changed its name again, so who cares?

I’m willing to be accountable for my mistakes, but first I want to see some GMs held accountable for theirs. I’ve made lots of mistakes in my career, and I’ve been accountable by making up for them with even more successes. But now every good thing I do is craptulized by someone farther up the management chain. We are working hard, but can’t make a difference because we don’t have any coordination or direction. The managers who should provide that are MIA. Off buying villas in Italy, I guess. So Mr. Just-Suck-It-Up, what do you propose I do? Stage a dev coup and tell my PM team that I’m calling the shots now, so they can forget about those last few DCRs? That should look good on my September review, considering my boss the GM used to be the GPM. Or maybe I should march into Amitabh’s office and tell him I’m firing all his flying-monkeys and bulk resolving their PREFIX bugs. Should I go over to building 9 and tell the Shell team to dump Glass and just go back to the XP shell in the name of shipping?

Pardon me, I need to get back to adding some more ecounts to the code.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03...rship-now.html





Windows Is So Slow, but Why?
Steve Lohr and John Markoff

Back in 1998, the federal government declared that its landmark antitrust suit against the Microsoft Corporation was not merely a matter of law enforcement, but a defense of innovation. The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation.

Eight years later, long after Microsoft lost and then settled the antitrust case, it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation — at Microsoft.

The company's marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers — and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.

In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and "widgets," an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.

So what's wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft's past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.

Windows runs on 330 million personal computers worldwide. Three hundred PC manufacturers around the world install Windows on their machines; thousands of devices like printers, scanners and music players plug into Windows computers; and tens of thousands of third-party software applications run on Windows. And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one — compatibility, in computing terms.

As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

Microsoft certainly understands the problem, the need to change and the potential long-term threat to its business from rivals like Apple, the free Linux operating system, and from companies like Google that distribute software as a service over the Internet.

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Last Monday afternoon, James Allchin, the longtime engineering executive who leads the Vista team, held a meeting with 75 Windows managers and senior engineers to discuss the status of Vista. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Allchin met with a handful of his lieutenants and told them of the decision to push back the consumer introduction, a move that was announced publicly later that day, after the close of the stock market.

Brad Goldberg, a general manager of Windows program management, who attended the Tuesday morning meeting, said he was not surprised, because he had been involved in the decision. "But it's a different place than Microsoft a few years ago would have wound up," he said.

Like other Microsoft executives, Mr. Goldberg bristles at the notion that little innovative work has come out of the Windows group since XP. In the last five years, he said, Microsoft has released two versions of the Windows Tablet PC software intended for pen-based notebook computers, and four versions of Windows Media Center. To combat viruses plaguing Windows, much of the engineering team focused for 18 months on fixing security flaws for a downloadable "service pack" in 2004.

"The perception that nothing new has come out of the Windows group since XP is just so far from the truth," Mr. Goldberg said.

But last Thursday, Microsoft reorganized the management of its Windows division. Steven Sinofsky, 40, a senior vice president, was placed in charge of product planning and engineering for Windows and Windows Live, a new Web service that lets consumers manage their e-mail accounts, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site.

Mr. Sinofsky, a former technical assistant to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, was one of the early people in the company to recognize the importance of the Internet in the 1990's. He comes to the Windows job from heading Microsoft's big Office division, where he was known for bringing out new versions of the Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other offerings — on schedule every two or three years.

The move is seen as an effort to bring greater discipline to the Windows group. "But this doesn't seem to do anything to address the core Windows problem; Windows is too big and too complex," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Vista delay, Microsoft executives said, was only a matter of a few more weeks to improve quality further, not attributable to any single flaw and done to make sure all its industry partners were ready when the product was introduced. Vista will be ready for large corporate customers in November, while the consumer rollout is being pushed back to January 2007.

Mr. Allchin conceded in an interview that the decision was "a bit painful," but he insisted it was the "right thing." Mr. Allchin, 54, will continue to work on Vista until it ships and then retire, as he said he would last year.

Microsoft will not say so, but antitrust considerations may have played a role in the decision that Mr. Allchin called the right thing to do. As part of its antitrust settlement, Microsoft vowed to treat PC makers even-handedly, after evidence in the trial that Microsoft had rewarded some PC makers with better pricing or more marketing help in exchange for giving Microsoft products an edge over competing software.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft met with major PC makers and retailers to discuss Vista. Hewlett-Packard, the second-largest PC maker after Dell, is a leader in the consumer market. Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers, whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.

Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified because he was told the information confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.

Vista was also held up because the project was restarted in the summer of 2004. By then, it became clear to Mr. Allchin and others inside Microsoft that the way they were trying to build the new version of Windows, then called Longhorn, would not work. Two years' worth of work was scrapped, and some planned features were dropped, like an intelligent data storage system called WinFS.

The new work, Microsoft decided, would take a new approach. Vista was built more in small modules that then fit together like Lego blocks, making development and testing easier to manage.

"They did the right thing in deciding that the Longhorn code was a tangled, hopeless mess, and starting over," said Mr. Cusumano of M.I.T. "But Vista is still an enormous, complex structure."

Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple.

Remember that Steven P. Jobs came back to Apple because the company's effort to develop an ambitious new operating system, codenamed Copland, had failed. Mr. Jobs convinced Apple to buy his company Next Inc. for $400 million in December 1996 for its operating system.

It took Mr. Jobs and his team years to retool and tailor the Next operating system into what became Macintosh OS X. When it arrived in 2001, the new system essentially walked away from Apple's previous operating system, OS 9. Software applications written for OS 9 would run on an OS X machine, but only by firing up the old operating system separately.

The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows.

"Microsoft feels it can't get away with breaking compatibility," said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. "All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that's a very painful thing."

It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft's Windows.

And Apple, which makes operating systems that run only on its own computers, does not have to work with the massive business ecosystem of Microsoft, with its hundreds of PC makers and thousands of third-party software companies.

That ballast is also Microsoft's great strength, and a reason industry partners and computer users stick with Windows, even if its size and strategy slow innovation. Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/te...gy/27soft.html





The sleeping giant goes on the offensive

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Is Ready To Take The Offensive.
Telis Demos

When Microsoft (Research) went public in 1986, there was no 3-D videogaming, no enterprise software, and no Google (Research).

Two decades and $285 billion in market cap later, CEO Steve Ballmer is facing a stagnant stock price and more competition than ever. His strategy? Take the offensive.

Microsoft is about to roll out new versions of Windows and Office. On the day he unveiled a bold $500 million marketing campaign to challenge IBM (Research) in the corporate tech market, the affable and energetic Ballmer, 50, bounded into FORTUNE's offices to discuss what Sony's troubles mean for the Xbox 360 game system, the future of advertising and why his kids shun iPods.

You guys took some heat for Xbox shortages over Christmas, but now Sony says its PlayStation 3 will be delayed until November. Did you pop a cork?

We weren't unhappy. In every other generation, the first guy to ten million consoles became the No. 1 seller. Did we just get an even better opportunity to be the first guy to ten million? Yeah, of course we did.

What might get your stock moving?

We've got companies like AT&T (Research) and Verizon (Research) driving this Internet television stuff very aggressively. If you can get a few bucks a month on a lot of televisions around the world, that's a pretty darn big opportunity. Same thing for Windows Mobile, where we're a negligible player but we have real market traction for the first time. The stuff we announced today has quite a nice growth profile. Frankly, our competition in the business market is more absent than not.

Did Time Warner (Research) made a mistake by selling a stake in AOL to Google instead of to you?

AOL is not making any investment in the future of the media and advertising business. [AOL would respectfully disagree.] It ceded that to Google. The argument I made is that some media company--as opposed to just Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo--should've cared enough to make the bet as well. Will anybody be selling newspaper ads in ten years? Or will they all get sold out of these online marketplaces? Even TV advertising. Who is better to deliver an ad, a computer that knows about you and can target you, or an ad sales guy who's walking around?

Do you have an iPod?

No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

Think you can you crack the iPod market?

It's going to take an innovative proposition. In five years are people really going to carry two devices? One device that is their communication device, one device that is music? There's going to be a lot of opportunities to get back in that game. We want to be in that game. Expect to see announcements from us in that area in the next 12 months.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...3041/index.htm





Attacks on Unpatched IE Flaw Escalate
Brian Krebs

More than 200 Web sites -- many of them belonging to legitimate businesses -- have been hacked and seeded with code that tries to take advantage of a unpatched security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser to install hostile code on Windows computers when users merely visit the sites.

In an update to its Security Response Web log, Microsoft security program manager Stephen Toulouse said the attacks Redmond is seeing against the IE flaw "are limited in scope for now and are being carried out by malicious Web sites."

I have to call Microsoft out on both counts, and I think some of what I've uncovered so far about these attacks should make it clear that the situation is serious and getting worse by the hour.

According to a list obtained by Security Fix, hackers have infected at least 200 sites, many of which you would not normally expect to associate with such attacks (i.e., porn and pirated-software vendors). Among the victims are a regional business council in Connecticut, a couple of vacation resorts in Florida, a travel-reservation site, an online business consultancy, an insurance company, and a site featuring things to do at various cities across the country.

On Friday, hackers broke into the Web site of shipping company DLPromotionFreight.com and planted code that attempted to use the flaw to steal user names and passwords stored by IE. Yaniv Zahavi, chief technology officer for Intermakers Inc., the Plantation, Fla., company that manages the site, said it appears that only a handful of customers browsed the site during the few hours the attack code was present.

Security Fix learned the location of one Web site being used as a virtual drop box for user name and password data stolen from people who'd visited the network of hacked sites (the SANS Internet Storm Center has a great post detailing exactly what one of these data-dump reports looks like). One of those victims was Abdel Marriez, a truck driver from Astoria, N.Y. The malicious program stole credit card information and credentials he used to access his e-mail online.

Marriez said he couldn't understand how the code could have landed on his computer, since he said he is fastidious about ensuring his Norton anti-virus program has the latest updates from Symantec. After this experience, he said, he plans to change browsers.

"IE and me are through, that's it," Marriez said.

That same password-stealing program landed on the Windows PC belonging to Reaz Chowdhury, a programmer for Oracle Corp. who works out of his home in Orlando, Fla. Chowdhury said he's not sure which site he browsed in the past 24 hours that hijacked his browser, but he confirmed that the attackers had logged the user name and password for his company's virtual private network (VPN). Chowdhury also uses Norton anti-virus, which did not pick up any signs of infection. He said he won't rely on his anti-virus program to clean things up.

"It's really not worth the risk," Chowdhury said. "I'm going to reinstall [the operating system] just to be sure."

Both of these situations illustrate the dangers of relying on only anti-virus software. That is not to say anti-virus software is useless. It is a necessary element of protection for any Windows PC, and for better or worse will remain so for the foreseeable future. But there is a window of time between the creation of a new virus or worm and the availability of new anti-virus "definitions" that identify the intruder as malicious.

Microsoft says Windows users should "take care not to visit unfamiliar or untrusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code" and that people who want to use IE should either disable "active scripting" or download the IE7 beta2 preview.

Instructions for disabling active scripting are under the "workarounds" section of this Microsoft advisory (which incidentally is three clicks away from Microsoft.com homepage). Microsoft warns, however, that this may cause problems loading some Web sites.

Indeed, I tested this solution as Microsoft recommends and found I could no longer access my Web mail. Turns out I also needed to add it to my list of "trusted sites," though Microsoft's advisory doesn't really make that clear. See this non-Microsoft site for a decent tutorial on how to set up your trusted-sites list.

Rather than download a "beta" (read: potentially unstable) version of IE or wait around for Microsoft to issue a fix, a far better idea would be to ditch IE altogether (or only use it only when absolutely necessary). I use Mozilla's Firefox for everyday browsing, but your mileage may vary. There are other options, of course, such as Opera and Netscape, to name a couple.

What amazes me is how many Windows users seem to blindly equate Internet Explorer with access to the Internet -- in much the same way that many America Online users are unsure whether they can use someone else's browser once they've signed on to their account. Even after you tell people that they may have just been whacked with a virus due to a flaw in IE, they still use it.

Case in point: One guy I contacted to tell him his site was serving up this exploit code went to check his home page and then told me his browser just crashed on him. I had to ask: "Don't tell me you just visited the site in IE?" He had. I could only shake my head and sigh.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...lorer_f_1.html





P2P Worm Identified
Jason L. Miller

A new worm is catching the attention of computer security agencies. W32/Inject-H spreads via peer-to-peer networks, acting as a backdoor Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to exploit Windows-based computers.

Running continuously in the background, the worm/trojan becomes a server that allows remote access and control over the computer via IRC.

Sophos says W32/Inject-H installs itself in the registry and advises P2P file sharers to download its virus identity (IDE) file.

IRC is a common protocol used in many file-sharing applications like Napster.
http://www.securitypronews.com/news/...dentified.html





Paint rainbows all over your blues

Ophcrack 2.2 Password Cracker Released

Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds.

We mentioned it in our RainbowCrack and Rainbow Tables article.

Changes:
(feature) support of the new table set (alphanum + 33 special chars - WS-20k)
(feature) easier configuration for the table set (tables.cfg)
(feature) automatic definition of the number of tables to use at the same time (batch_tables) by queriying the system for the size of the memory
(feature) speed-up in tables reading
(feature) cleaning of the memory to make place for table readahead (linux version only)
(feature) improved installer for windows version
(fix) change of the default share for pwdump4 (ADMIN$)

Get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ophcrack
http://www.darknet.org.uk/2006/03/op...cker-released/





Skype, Zennstrom, Friis Et Al Sued for RICO Violations
Andy Abramson

Anyone can sue anybody, and a lawsuit does not imply guilt but I've been informed that in documents fled in the U.S. District Court's CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA (Western Division - Los Angeles) CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 2:06-cv-00391- FMC-E that back on January 20th StreamCast Networks, best known for their Peer to Peer technology, called Morpheus, filed a RICO suit against Skype Technologies SA, Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, BlueMoon OU (the company that reportedly did a lot of the development work on Skype) alleging RICO violations. RICO stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwa...zennstrom.html





Why the Media Centre PC is Destined for the Home Office
Asher Moses

The forthcoming update to Intel's Viiv will see the media centre PC move from the living room to the home office. Asher Moses explains why.

Before anyone mentions it, no, we haven't been smoking any particularly potent herbal products lately, nor were we repeatedly beaten over the head with a two by four on the way to work this morning. Hear me out.

Thus far, every play to bring the PC into the living room has revolved around plonking an entire machine down in the lounge, right next to your existing home theatre equipment. In our opinion, this method was doomed from the outset.

The only moderate success of Windows Media Center-equipped PCs has highlighted the fact that most consumers aren't interested in having an all-singing, all-dancing computer in their lounge room. We're not interested in editing word documents, manipulating spreadsheets, browsing the Web or playing games in a three metre interface from the couch (as opposed to sitting directly in front of the screen like we normally do when interacting with a PC). Rather, we'd simply like to watch/record TV, view DVDs and play other audio/video files on-demand through a simple, intuitive interface.

This is where the genius of Viiv comes in. Shortly, Intel will release a range of "digital media adapters", which connect to your existing home theatre components (e.g. your TV, stereo system, etc) and can stream content wirelessly from any Viiv-certified PC. Bingo!

The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.

As a result, the PC in your home office will likely act as a digital media hub, distributing content wirelessly throughout your house to various media adapters. And since the Windows Media Center Edition operating system used by all Viiv-enabled machines is virtually identical to Windows XP when it's not in media centre mode, you can go about your regular office-related tasks -- word processing, web browsing, etc -- while others are seamlessly streaming content in the lounge.

Such multi-tasking makes dual-core processors a necessity, which explains why Intel requires all vendors of Viiv machines to adopt a dual-core processor before gaining certification.

Suddenly, the logic surrounding some manufacturers' decisions to offer Viiv machines in an office-like tower form factor -- for example, the Acer Aspire e650 -- is beginning to make sense.

What do you think? Will the PC pull out of the lounge room, leaving your home office machine to act as both a media hub and a productivity workhorse? Have your say below!



Brad
Location: Mokane, MO
Comments: This article reinforces the old saying "If you can't do, teach . And if you can't teach, become a journalist".

Viiv is nothing more than a hardware DRM solution for Microsoft and Media Center is just WinXP Pro with a few new programs.

I built a Via Epia ITX box that looks nearly identical to my home theater equipment that uses no fans and runs ubuntu Linux and MythTV. I paid a fraction of the cost a Intel/MS solution would and I can do anything with my media unlike this DRM from hell system. Plus I built it three years ago.

It would be nice if C/Net would hire someone with any amount of technical ability.
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/pcs/...0061467,00.htm



No kidding. It's about divergence.
shotgunefx

I think I used my DVD player once to play a CD (my stereo was apart).

Maybe at some point convergence works, but right now you get things that are so-so at a lot of things and excellent at none. Cell phones are a good example.

I don't want or need a shitty camera built in. What's the point? The quality sucks, bad resolution, bad picture quality, maybe an LED for a shitty flash. I rather carry my small digital camera instead. Having one company as your gate keeper is perilous too. Take the cell phone example. I got a LG PM-325 from Sprint. I used the camera twice before realizing unless I paid X dollars a month for "Picture Mail", there was absolutely no way to retrieve them from the phone.

The future downside is that if they every do make the ultimate device that does everything, you're fscked if it get's stolen. There goes your media, your pictures and probably tons of other stuff that you wouldn't want other people to have access to. Carrying your life in your pocket might be convienent, but also dangerous.
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/28/0929236.shtml