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Old 04-04-07, 11:16 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 7th, '07


































"Things will never be the same." – Phil Leigh


"Comcast and I are not on speaking terms." – Frank Carreiro


"We don’t have to obey the laws of physics anymore." – Kevin Cunningham


"The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The [RIAA] wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. They’re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are." – Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato


"These f*cking [RIAA] idiots are going after a campaign that the label signed off on." – Recording industry source


"Ironically, with its numerous pirated downloads available, the whole [NIN] album has not leaked yet. According to a source, the only leaks are the ones Reznor approved himself." – Michael Paoletta


"They said there wasn't a limit - for downloading - but that I was downloading too much, about 550 gigs [a month]. I backed off to about 450 gigs, but they still suspended us." – Cameron Smith


"The [copyright] rules for running it through your 3-D scanner are pretty much the same as running it through your photocopier." – Jessica Litman


"Josh gave up his freedom for 224 days because he believes that a free and independent press cannot exist without a trusting relationship between a journalist and his information sources." – Lucie Morillon


" 'What the Dead Know,' like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes." – Janet Maslin


"The energy that reaches Earth from sunlight in one hour is more than that used by all human activities in one year." – Ashton Partridge


"April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet." – Tony Long





































April 7th, 2007






EMI Drops DRM
Jeff Leeds

EMI Group, the British music giant, broke ranks with the music industry’s biggest corporations yesterday by announcing a deal to sell songs online through Apple’s music service without copy protection.

The move by EMI, which ranks last among the four music companies in sales of new music in the United States, represents a significant change of course at a time when the music industry is straining to bolster digital sales as the business of selling the two-decade-old compact disc format continues to erode.

Like the industry’s other major companies, EMI, home to groups like the Rolling Stones and Korn, had long insisted on the sale of its music online with electronic locks to reduce piracy.

The shift means that consumers who buy music by EMI acts may have an easier time navigating the current jumble of incompatible software in the digital music world. Consumers who buy the unprotected music from the iTunes store will be able to play the music on a variety of devices — not just iPods — and be able to burn unlimited play lists of songs.

The unprotected music will come at a higher price, $1.29 a song, though Apple said the songs would have better sound quality. Standard-quality versions of the same songs, with copy protection, will still be available for 99 cents. But to entice more consumers to buy full albums, Apple will sell albums from EMI artists — without the antipiracy software and in the higher quality — for the regular price, which is generally $9.99.

Many analysts viewed the deal, announced in London by EMI’s chief, Eric L. Nicoli, and Apple’s chief, Steven P. Jobs, as a first step in a broader shift toward all music being sold without antipiracy software. Some expressed hope it could also jumpstart digital sales for the music industry. Since the start of the year, the slide in plastic CD sales has accelerated, down more than 20 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

“Things will never be the same,” said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media, a Florida-based research company.

But others suggest that the partnership is a more isolated instance of two companies joining up amid overlapping agendas. EMI has been working to right itself after a management shake-up and a series of setbacks, including two profit warnings this year. Apple, for its part, has been trying to resolve complaints from European consumer advocates, who say its system should be made to work with rivals’ hardware and software.

Apple may yet have more headaches looming, however. European Commission officials confirmed yesterday that the company — and the major record companies — are facing an antitrust inquiry over the pricing of songs on the iTunes service.

Jonathan Todd, spokesman for Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s competition commissioner, said in Brussels that Apple and several of the major music companies, including EMI, Warner and Universal, were being investigated over concerns that the sale of music through iTunes flouts the union’s antitrust regulations.

Mr. Todd said the commission last week sent a formal “statement of objections” to Apple and the record companies contending that iTunes was breaching competition rules by preventing consumers in one country from downloading songs more cheaply from the Apple Internet store in another country. He said this violated antitrust rules because prices differed across the 27-member bloc, limiting consumer choice.

The use of copy protection software has meant in practice that songs purchased from iTunes can be played only on the company’s iPod. Apple has declined to share its proprietary protection software with competing companies, effectively locking them out of the iPod. As a result, some music labels have considered dropping their demand for protection software altogether to allow rival music services to sell music that could play on Apple’s device.

While some of EMI’s rivals have been testing sales of music in unprotected form, the company’s move did not appear to prompt any immediate retreat from antipiracy software. A spokesman for Warner Music Group declined to comment but referred back to comments made in February by the company’s chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., who said, “There is no reason to conclude that music is the one content category that should not or cannot be protected simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available,” referring to CDs.

Representatives for the two bigger music companies — the Universal Music Group of Vivendi and Sony BMG, a partnership between Sony and Bertelsmann — declined to comment yesterday.

Mr. Jobs, however, was unequivocal in his prediction that the industry would eventually reduce its use of copy protection. He said that he expected more than half of the songs on iTunes would be available in unprotected versions by year’s end.

Apple executives predicted the new structure would lead to a surge in sales, but if it did not, the company might benefit by soothing tensions with European authorities. Critics ranging from Norway’s principal consumer rights group to lawmakers in France have taken Apple to task — and to court — for making music purchased from iTunes compatible only with the iPod.

Some of the Europeans most critical of Mr. Jobs and iTunes praised the move yesterday. “Today marks the beginning of a new era — an era where the entertainment industry works with the customer and not against them,” Torgeir Waterhouse, a senior adviser in Norway’s Consumer Council, said in a statement.

The music companies had resisted freeing up their digital tracks from restrictions because they were afraid consumers would make copious copies that would deprive the companies and their recording artists of revenue.

But peer-to-peer Internet services that freely trade music files have flourished anyway, with 5 billion downloads last year, compared with 509 million songs downloaded from official digital music services, according to NPD Group.

Mr. Nicoli said early market tests showed EMI that consumers overwhelmingly preferred to purchase tracks without copy protection, even at a higher cost. Unrestricted tracks outsold the others at a rate of 10 to one, Mr. Nicoli said.

Mr. Jobs emphasized how much the music labels had benefited from sales over iTunes. The service, he said, “has brought more than $1 billion in revenues to the record companies at no addition cost to them.”

To some in the music industry, though, EMI’s move only punctuated the fact that the industry has failed to build a more robust digital business after years of watching its sales base crumble.

“This appears to be the final acknowledgment on the record companies’ part that the guiding principles of their digital distribution strategies have been fundamentally flawed,” said Ken Hertz, a longtime music industry lawyer who represents artists including Beyoncé and the Black Eyed Peas.

Mr. Hertz said injecting higher prices into iTunes would drive more consumers to download music from unlicensed free services. “The consumer’s conscience, which is all we had left, that’s gone, too.”

Thomas Crampton contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/te...y/03music.html





Apple Stokes a Digital Music Standards War

Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard
Arik Hesseldahl

A few months ago I was at a big family dinner at Capsouto Frères, a fancy French bistro in Tribeca. One of the partygoers runs a small computer and electronics shop and considers himself an authority on computers and consumer electronics. His opinions on Apple (AAPL) and its products bug me (to put it simply).

I held my tongue as he chattered on about all the supposedly fascinating things he was doing with his Microsoft (MSFT) Windows machines. We barely know each other, and he had no idea what I write about for a living. But when the subject turned to the iPod, he gave me an opening I couldn't resist. "Oh those iPods," he said dismissively. "People are always bringing them into the shop with complaints, and they don't even play standard MP3 songs like all the others."

"Absolutely not true," I said, breaking my silence. "I don't know where you got that idea, but it's patently false."

A Popular Misconception

His convoluted explanation, as best I could understand it, was that he thought iPods played some "Apple-only" format, which he called ACC (it's actually AAC, as in Advanced Audio Coding, and it isn't "Apple-only"). I explained that the iPod plays every major digital audio format save two, Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Ogg Vorbis.

He had somehow gotten it into his head that all online music stores, save iTunes, sell MP3s on which there are no copy restrictions. Noting that he was vastly misinformed, I told him that in in fact no online music store sells unprotected MP3s—the exception being eMusic.com—while Napster (NAPS) and Yahoo! Music (YHOO), for instance, sell heavily protected WMA files, which are compatible with a wide range of portable players, but not the iPod. Where he got his set of ideas, I don't know.

I was reminded of our conversation earlier this week when Apple announced a deal with British recording label EMI Group (EMIPY) to sell music on iTunes that has been shorn of its digital rights management (DRM) copyright protections (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/3/07, "Will the Apple-EMI Deal End DRM?"). And guess what? The newly unprotected catalog of EMI songs (sans the Beatles, for now), which will sell for $1.29 a track, will be encoded as 256-kilobit AAC files.

Loosening the DRM Stranglehold

The accord marks a fundamental change in the digital music landscape, a feat Apple is pulling off with increasing regularity of late. If I were an employee of Microsoft and involved with its confusing digital-music efforts, built around its highly DRM-protected WMA format, I'd be sweating right now.

But one of the truly remarkable aspects of the pact is how Apple is pulling it off. Having floated the rhetorical trial balloon for selling unprotected music files via iTunes in his landmark essay "Thoughts on Music," Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs in hindsight appears to have been deliberately ambiguous about the file format he preferred. It's now clear why. He didn't mean selling unprotected MP3s, but unprotected AAC songs. The decision will have important long-term effects, especially as more labels follow EMI's lead.

Using AAC is brilliant for several reasons. First, for Apple, whose stated market aim is to do everything in its power to sell more of its highly profitable iPods (and beginning in June, presumably profitable iPhones), the choice of AAC means more non-Apple devices will be able to play songs purchased on iTunes.

Before the EMI deal announcement, the AAC-formatted songs sold on iTunes were encoded in Apple's DRM technology called FairPlay (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/25/06, "Apple, Tear Down This Wall"). When FairPlay is no longer an obstacle, other players that support AAC can give their owners a ticket to the iTunes party.

Opening iTunes to New Players

AAC-format supporters include some notable names, including Microsoft's Zune. So come May, the 16 people who own one will be able to buy EMI tracks from iTunes and presumably play them on that device. Sony's (SNE) PlayStation Portable also supports the format, as do a few of its Walkman-branded MP3 players. I can find one player each from SanDisk (SNDK), Creative Technology (CREAF), and Sharp (SHCAY) that include AAC support. Palm (PALM) and Research In Motion (RIMM) both support AAC via software that runs on the Treo and BlackBerry Pearl smartphones. IPod sales, which are crucial to Apple's bottom line are unlikely to get much competition from these devices, as none are as good at the stripped-down interface, and none can touch the iPod's inherent status factor.

Having stripped the iPod-only restrictions, at least from the EMI catalog, on iTunes means there is even less shackling an iTunes customer to the iPod than before, which may help Apple fight off the antitrust complaints of European regulators.

But the real target is Microsoft. What we now have is a good old-fashioned standards war heating up, and it is pitting the old foes Apple and Microsoft against each other once again. Saying Apple has the upper hand is giving Microsoft more credit than it deserves.

Spurned Plays for Sure Partners

All of those companies that have been "partners" of Microsoft—Samsung, Creative, Archos, and SanDisk, to name a few—have been treated pretty poorly by Redmond recently. Before the Zune, Microsoft had a branding program called "PlaysForSure" that was intended to indicate wide-ranging compatibility. Buy a song on Napster, or Yahoo, or MTV Networks' (VIA) URGE, or any one of a score of other online music stores, and they were guaranteed to play on devices with the PlaysForSure brand. (Some people had another phrase for it, which I won't reproduce here, but the third word rhymed with "bit.")

Those partners were all left holding the bag as Microsoft walked away from PlaysForSure, when it launched the Zune and the companion Zune Marketplace. Now these same members of Microsoft's gang, at least those lucky enough to have players on the market that support AAC, will be only too proud to brag on their packaging that they are, at least in some limited way, compatible with iTunes.

In turn this will make Microsoft's WMA format—and all its expensive licensing terms—a lot less attractive. The next generation of non-Apple MP3 players heading to market will be notable for two things: AAC support, and maybe, just maybe, a lack of WMA support.

Finally, Compatibility

Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become "iPod compatible," and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will no doubt be fine with the longer list of online music rivals, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.

If more labels follow EMI's lead, and the other online music stores of the world are offered the same conditions on DRM-free music as Apple, Microsoft will have completely failed to corner the digital-music market, and by this time next year, there will be talk of it pulling the plug on its WMA-based efforts entirely. Or it will be forced by market forces to follow Apple's lead entirely rather than, as it has with the Zune and Zune Marketplace, copy it poorly. Think of it: Microsoft labeling its second Zune player as "compatible with iTunes."

All of this will of course, be lost on my annoying relative. But then, just as some people deserve Windows, they also deserve to remain oblivious.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...404_499334.htm





Microsoft Set to Unlock EMI Songs

The software giant is on the verge of a deal similar to Apple's with EMI to sell tracks without anti-piracy protection
Jonathan Richards

Microsoft has hinted that it may be close to reaching a deal with EMI to sell songs without anti-piracy protection via its Zune platform.

The comments from Jason Reindorp, head of marketing for Zune, come in the same week that EMI announced a deal with Apple to sell songs without the protection, known as ‘digital rights management’ (DRM), through iTunes stores.

Mr Reindorp said: “We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content.

“This does open things up a little bit. It potentially makes the competition more of a device-to-device or service-to-service basis, and will force the various services to really innovate.”

EMI declined to comment on the speculation, though it reiterated that iTunes was just one of a number of digital music stores from which it anticipated selling DRM-free tracks “in the coming weeks".

An EMI spokesman said: “Negotiations with other platforms, such as Zune, are ongoing.”

Zune, a competitor device to the iPod, which has not yet been released in the UK, is struggling to make inroads against the iPod, which retains about 70 per cent of the market for MP3 players, although Microsoft has said it is on target to sell 1 million Zunes by the middle of the year.

On Monday, EMI announced that customers would be able to buy premium quality tracks without DRM software attached from iTunes for 99p, while standard sound quality would still be available with DRM for 79p.

Those who have purchased standard tracks with DRM will be able to upgrade their music for 20p per track.

EMI’s decision – which will put pressure on other major labels to follow – was prompted by the disappointing growth in digital music sales, and complaints from customers that they could not play music bought from iTunes on other devices.

Several labels have experimented with removing DRM, which was implemented to prevent rampant copying, but EMI has been the first to make its entire online catalogue DRM-free.

Edgar Bronfman, the chief executive of Warner Music, has previously dismissed the argument to remove DRM as being “completely without logic or merit”.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle1618585.ece





EU Launches Antitrust Probe Into iTunes

European Commission confirms it has opened antitrust probe into Apple's iTunes
Constant Brand

The European Commission confirmed Tuesday it had opened an antitrust probe into Apple's iTunes and the way it sells music online in coordination with major music companies.

The commission alleged distribution agreements Apple has signed with the record labels to sell their music on the iTunes online stores in EU countries "contain territorial sales restrictions which violate" EU competition rules.

People can only download singles or albums from the iTunes store in their country of residence, the commission said.

"Consumers are thus restricted in their choice of where to buy music and consequently what music is available, and at what price," it said in a statement. "For example, in order to buy a music download from the iTunes' Belgian online store a consumer must use a credit card issued by a bank with an address in Belgium."

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said Monday the company wanted to operate a single store for all of Europe, but music labels and publishers said there were limits to the rights that could they could grant to Apple.

"We don't believe Apple did anything to violate EU law," he said. "We will continue to work with the EU to resolve this matter."

The cost of buying a single song across the 27-nation bloc varies among the available iTunes stores in EU nations.

For example, downloading a single in Britain costs $1.56, in Denmark $1.44, while in countries using the euro such as Germany and Belgium, a single costs $1.32.

The "statement of objections" EU regulators sent to Apple does not allege the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is in a dominant market position.

Apple has two months to answer questions issued in the letter, the commission said. If found guilty of violating EU competition rules, Apple could face hefty fines, which in theory could total up to 10 percent of the company's worldwide annual turnover.

The EU investigation comes amid moves by European consumer rights groups in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Nordic countries to force Apple to change the rules it imposes on its online music store customers.

The groups are demanding Apple lift limits preventing consumers from playing their downloads on digital players other than Apple's iPod. In February, Norway, which is not a member of the EU, declared those limits illegal and gave Apple until Oct. 1 to change its compatibility rules or face legal action and possible fines.

The EU investigation does not deal with these concerns, however.

Apple has said it is willing to open iTunes to players other than iPods if the world's major record labels moved to change their anti-piracy technology.

Apple and EMI announced a deal on Monday that would allow EMI's music to be sold on iTunes minus anti-piracy software that limits its use on some players. The move is expected to be watched and likely followed by other record labels.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3003016





Apple to Work With EU on Antritrust Charge
AP

Apple, accused by European Union regulators of restricting consumers' choices by forcing them to buy music from the iTunes online store in their country of residence, said Tuesday that it did not do anything wrong and would work to resolve the issue.

"Apple has always wanted to operate a single, pan-European iTunes store accessible by anyone from any member state, but we were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us," Apple said in a statement. "We don't believe Apple did anything to violate EU law. We will continue to work with the EU to resolve this matter."

Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, EMI and Warner Music Group said they had also been contacted by the EU.

Sony, the world's biggest maker of video-game console, cut the price of its PlayStation Portable a second time to attract younger players and win sales from Nintendo's DS hand-held player.

The suggested retail price will drop 15 percent to $169.99 from $199.99, the company said.

Sony has sold seven million PSPs in the United States, fewer than the 9.9 million DS units sold by Nintendo, according to the market researcher NPD Group. Nintendo cut the price of the DS player to $129.99 from $149.99 in August 2005.

Qualcomm filed additional patent infringement complaints against Nokia in two U.S. courts.

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in Texas and Wisconsin, Qualcomm said in a statement. The Wisconsin suit concerns speech-encoder patents. The Texas suit concerns patents for downloading applications and other digital content over a wireless network.

Qualcomm previously filed two other patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. against Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland. Similar cases are pending in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and China.

U.S. telephone companies have been told by the Federal Communications Commission that they must require customers to provide a password to access their records by telephone. The telecommunications industry's customer data policies attracted the FCC's scrutiny after the practice of impersonating a customer to access phone records was alleged during a scandal.

Greenpeace International placed Apple last in its rankings of major electronics makers for their environmental friendliness, while Chinese manufacturer Lenovo Group moved to the top of the list. The environmental group ranked 14 companies according to their efforts to limit the use of hazardous chemicals in production and in ensuring that goods that become broken or obsolete are recycled.

A Chinese Web site will offer what its producer describes as the country's first show to focus on gay issues and the first with an openly homosexual host. The weekly, hourlong Internet TV show "Tongxing Xianglian," or "Connecting Homosexuals," will debut Thursday on www.phoenixtv.com.

Comcast, the largest cable systems operator in the United States, said that it was buying a New Jersey cable operator for about $483 million in cash. Patriot Media is five years old. Its customers generate twice as much cash flow as the average subscriber, a Comcast spokeswoman said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/.../techbrief.php





SoundExchange Files With CRB To Uphold Proposed Royalty Rates
FMQB

SoundExchange has filed with the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) to oppose the motion to reconsider royalty rates for Internet broadcasters. The organization asks that the motions be dismissed, on the grounds that "no new material facts or fresh evidence has suddenly materialized to give the CRB valid reason to revisit its decision."

"Just because you don't like the outcome of a fairly played game doesn't mean you should ask the referee to order the game replayed," said John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, in a statement. "Yes, Internet radio is important to the music community, but that doesn't mean that artists and record labels don't deserve fair compensation for their works."

Yesterday, NPR filed its own motion with the CRB, on behalf of itself and all its member stations, asking for a rehearing on the increased royalty rates.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=381405





Piracy Move on China Seen as Near
Edmund L. Andrews

After months of prodding China to crack down on pirated copies of American movies, music and software, the Bush administration appears ready to escalate the dispute into a legal confrontation.

In recent weeks, administration officials have strongly hinted that they are close to filing a formal trade complaint against China at the World Trade Organization, saying that China has failed to prosecute all but a small fraction of the ubiquitous and visible street trade in bootlegged American entertainment.

“The United States has made it clear that formal W.T.O. consultations will be necessary without concrete actions by China in this area,” the office of the United States trade representative warned this week in its annual trade report to Congress.

The administration went on to complain about “inadequate” enforcement of intellectual property rights — copyrights, patents and trademarks — in movies, music, books, pharmaceuticals, software and many other areas.

The China Copyright Alliance, an industry coalition that includes Hollywood studios, independent movie and television producers and the recording industry, has been pushing the administration for months to file a formal legal complaint. Administration officials have made it clear they are preparing to do so.

“We’re all going to run out of patience at some point, and that’s going to be sooner rather than later,” said Susan C. Schwab, the United States trade representative, in a speech on Feb. 22.

Bloomberg News, citing industry executives who said they had been briefed by the administration, said Ms. Schwab was likely to file two complaints against China as early as next week.

Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the trade representative, refused to comment on administration plans. But industry executives have been expecting a formal complaint.

“It’s a sign of growing impatience, including within the business community,” said William A. Reinsch, president of the National Council on Foreign Trade, an association that represents companies on international trade issues.

Industry executives said they had been waiting for the Bush administration to file two separate complaints. One addresses what American companies say is China’s reluctance to use criminal laws for people caught selling DVDs with pirated material on them.

A second complaint would be about expanding “market access” for American products in China.

If the United States files the twin actions, it would be the third time this year that the Bush administration has sought to pressure China for its trade practices, signaling a tougher policy after taking a largely conciliatory approach for six years.

On March 30, the United States announced it would reverse more than 20 years of practice and impose potentially steep tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods on the ground that China is illegally subsidizing some of its exports.

In February, the administration leveled a complaint with the world trade group that China subsidizes a number of industries in violation of trade rules.

The growing American trade deficit with China, which reached a record $232.5 billion last year, has been denounced by Democrats as the cause of hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. Many Democrats elected last fall campaigned for a tougher policy on trade with China, and Democrats have threatened to pass legislation to retaliate. Any new legal actions against China over intellectual property could be an effort to preempt those.

Chinese authorities have made moves in recent days to head off a legal confrontation. On March 26, China’s National Anti-Piracy and Pornography Office announced that it had raided a storage facility in Guangzhou, after receiving information from the Motion Picture Association, and seized what it said were about 1.6 million pirated copies of movies and television shows.

This week, the Chinese Embassy in Washington announced that China’s Supreme Court had issued a “new judicial interpretation” that would lower the threshold under which prosecutors are allowed to charge people under criminal laws against piracy.

Until this week, prosecutors could impose administrative penalties only on people caught with fewer than 1,000 illegal DVDs. Now the threshold will be just 500 DVDs

But those moves are not enough to satisfy the movie industry or the recording industry. Nor are they likely in themselves to make a serious dent in the open sales of bootlegged music and software. In big cities like Shanghai, vendors sell pirated goods along major thoroughfares like the Nanjing Road as well as along bridges, small roads and alleyways.

Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told a Congressional hearing in February that movie producers were worried that pirated copies of American movies would not only lead to lost sales in China but be exported around the world and even back to the United States.

“We have walked a long way down the China road, looking and hoping for improvement,” Mr. Glickman testified. “We may be nearing the end of that course and deciding on whether to take another.”

The broader issue is how China reacts to any legal complaint that the United States might bring. It is unclear whether the W.T.O. would agree with the United States, and it is even less clear what kind of punishments it would allow even if it did rule against China.

If the new complaints are filed, under the trade organization’s rules, the United States would formally ask for “consultations” with China. After 60 days, it would be allowed to ask for an independent panel of the World Trade Organization to consider the dispute. That process often takes years to complete.

David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/bu...s/07trade.html





Chinese Police Seize Fake CDs, DVDs at Factory

Chinese police seized nearly 2 million fake CDs and DVDs when they raided a factory in the country's largest crackdown on entertainment industry pirates, the official New China News Agency said.

The high-tech operation could use 30 machines spread over 11 warehouses to churn out more than 300,000 fake discs in one night, the news agency quoted a top anti-piracy official as saying.

The factory was in Guangzhou, capital of southeastern Guangdong province, near Hong Kong.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=2&cset=true





No tube for you

Thai Web Crackdown Blocks YouTube
Thomas Fuller

Thailand's military-appointed government has blocked access to YouTube and several other Internet sites in a crackdown on material that denigrates the country's monarch, officials said Wednesday.

"We have blocked YouTube because it contains a video insulting to our king," said Winai Yoosabai, head of the censorship unit at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.

Thailand's ban of the popular video-sharing Web site came after YouTube's owner, Google, refused to remove the video clip, the communications minister, Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, said.

The clip, crude and amateurish and lasting less than a minute, depicts the king with a pair of feet being placed over his head, a highly insulting gesture in Thailand.

Insulting King Bhumibol Adulyadej is a serious criminal offense. Last week a Swiss man convicted of vandalizing images of the king and Queen Sirikit was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Since the military government came to power with the overthrow last September of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, it has banned Web sites, instructed the news media to minimize reporting about Thaksin and has at times blacked out broadcasts of international news channels like CNN and the BBC. Reporting in newspapers remains lively and apparently uncensored, except for criticism of the monarchy.

Sitthichai told The Associated Press that the government will continue its crackdown. "It's not about freedom of expression," he said. People who create Web sites insulting the monarchy "are abusing their rights and clearly don't mean well for the country."

But the government also appears to have broadened its crackdown to sites critical of the September coup, including www.saturdayvoice.com, run by a group demanding that coup leaders transfer power to a democratically elected government.

For the technologically savvy in Thailand, accessing YouTube is still possible.

Users could bypass the ban by calling a dial-up number in a foreign country or using "anonymizer" Web sites that mask the underlying codes of the censored Web sites, said David Bicknell, a Bangkok-based telecommunications consultant.

Google, which is based in California, did not immediately respond to e-mail queries for comment.

Pornnapa Wongakanit contributed reporting from Bangkok.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/04/news/thai.php





Tokyo Requests YouTube Delete Candidates' Speeches

Tokyo's election commission Thursday asked the popular video sharing website YouTube to take off clips of candidates for the local governor's race, saying it gave some of them unfair advantages.

The election commission said it wanted to "ensure fairness" among candidates ahead of Sunday's election in the world's largest metropolis.

"We made the requests via e-mail and fax to the YouTube office in the United States," said commission official Hiroyoshi Yone.

"The site has allowed only certain candidates' speeches to be viewed freely on the site, with which we cannot ensure the fairness of the election," he said.

But the commission has not received any reply from the operator of the US website, he said.

Japanese election law limits the broadcasting of speeches, which are aired only on public broadcaster NHK.

Soon after the race kicked off last month, the speech by one fringe candidate, street musician Koichi Toyama, 36, has become a popular attraction on YouTube due to his eccentric, confrontational approach.

YouTube, which was bought in November by Google, has faced trouble in Japan before.

In February, it agreed to post a copyright infringement warning in Japanese under pressure from media and copyright protection bodies.

This week Thailand's military-installed government banned YouTube entirely after it failed to block a video considered insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a revered figure in the country.
http://www.physorg.com/news95008106.html





Turkey to Block 'Insulting' Web Sites
AP

A parliamentary commission approved a proposal Thursday allowing Turkey to block Web sites that are deemed insulting to the founder of modern Turkey, weeks after a Turkish court temporarily barred access to YouTube.

Parliament plans to vote on the proposal, though a date was not announced. The proposal indicates the discomfort that many Turks feel about Western-style freedom of expression, even though Turkey has been implementing widespread reforms in its bid to join the European Union.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the commission also debated whether the proposal should be widened to allow the Turkish Telecommunications Board to block access to any sites that question the principles of the Turkish secular system or the unity of the Turkish state -- a reference to Web sites with information on Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

It is illegal in Turkey to talk of breaking up the state or to insult Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey whose image graces every denomination of currency and whose portrait hangs in nearly all government offices.

Ataturk is held to be responsible for creating a secular republic from the crumbling, Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Several prominent Turkish journalists and writers, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, have been tried for allegedly insulting Ataturk or for the crime of insulting "Turkishness."

European calls for free speech have angered some nationalist Turks, who view the recommendations as interference in their internal affairs.

Last month, Turkey blocked access to the popular video-sharing site YouTube after a complaint that some videos insulted Ataturk. The ban was lifted two days later.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/interne....ap/index.html





Forget YouTube: Go To These Sites If You Want Hard Core Copyright Infringing Content
Michael Arrington

YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void.

Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh.

And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even give statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated.

Its not clear if the MPAA and networks just aren’t focusing on these smaller video sharing sites yet, or if DMCA notices are simply being ignored. These sites aren’t hiding out and trying to evade the law - they’re funded by well known venture capitalists and, in Veoh’s case, copyright holders. And GoFish is actually a public company.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/04...nging-content/





YouTube’s Favorite Clips
Dan Mitchell

ON YouTube, copyrighted video clips of movies and TV shows are far less popular compared with noncopyrighted material than previously thought, according to a new study.

On their face, the results could have serious implications for YouTube’s owner, Google, and the media companies, most notably Viacom, with which it has been negotiating. But not everyone agrees.

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

Google is in negotiations with big media companies in hopes of reaching agreements that would allow YouTube to feature clips of movies and television shows. Viacom, owner of MTV Networks, is suing Google over the showing of copyrighted material like clips from “The Daily Show” and “South Park” on the site.

“This finding,” writes Henry Blodget on his Internet Outsider blog, “is the opposite of consensus, which assumes that Big Media videos account for a small percentage of total videos, but a large percentage of views.” It means, he adds, that Google has “a lot more leverage in the YouTube-Big Media negotiations than was commonly thought” (internetoutsider.com).

But the consensus might not have been so far off after all, writes Adario Strange on the Epicenter blog at Wired News (blog.wired.com/business). The study is flawed because it examined only those videos that YouTube removed after receiving a complaint from a copyright holder, he writes. It “fails to take into account the vast number of copyrighted videos that slip under the radar daily, existing on YouTube sometimes for months before any removal request is made.”

How large that number is, however, remains unknown. Far from this giving Google a leg up in its negotiating power, Mr. Strange says just the opposite may occur. “None of this will slow the Viacom lawsuit,” he writes. “In fact, the report’s finding may even bolster the company’s claims. Vidmeter found that Viacom was the leader in terms of pirated content on YouTube.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/te.../07online.html





Push Comes to Shove for Control of Web Video
Richard Siklos

FOR now, the biggest news in the exploding realm of online video is not much more than a news release. Still, the recent announcement from the News Corporation and NBC Universal of a new online video venture shows a big change in how traditional media companies are trying to confront their digital futures without looking like dinosaurs dodging comets.

At the same time, the companies’ tactics are a striking attempt to shift the old-fashioned way that most audiences have obtained their media into the wide-open digital maw.

Last year, Google’s acquisition of YouTube, the Internet’s most-visited video Web site, was a clear signal for media companies. Ever since, they have been scrambling to find ways to make money and to keep as much control as possible over their output.

YouTube, of course, has very little revenue right now, but its huge popularity and implied money-making potential were reflected in the $1.65 billion that Google paid for it. (And as far as proven Internet concepts go, media companies are not smitten by the economics of Apple’s iTunes, either, even though many networks including NBC and Fox, owned by the News Corporation, are selling shows on it.)

Inevitably, the control-hungry media giants have asked themselves these questions: Why should we let savvy intermediaries like Google or Apple hog the relationships with consumers or advertisers? And why should we allow them to create valuable new businesses in the process? NBC Universal and the News Corporation spent months trying to recruit other players like Viacom and Walt Disney to fight back, but they have set out alone, leaving an open invitation for others to join their merry band. They’ve agreed to pool all their video content on the Web to create what is effectively a syndication service that will distribute it to other established Web sites and through a new online site they plan to unveil this summer.

Neither the company’s name nor its management team is in place — details, shmetails — and clearly this gambit faces big hurdles when you consider both the track record of media joint ventures and big media companies’ ability to create breakout Internet plays.

But the big news from these strange bedfellows — NBC is owned by the square-jawed General Electric and the News Corporation pumps with the pulsing rebel heart of Rupert Murdoch — is that they have deals in place to distribute their video fare via four of the Web’s biggest destinations: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, and MySpace, also owned by Mr. Murdoch’s company.

Most of the joint venture’s offerings will be current and past TV shows supported by advertising, though some content will be user-created clips and movies for paid download. It’s notable that the planned service intends to offer only TV shows that are already available via Web sites like NBC.com and Fox.com, and movies that can be downloaded elsewhere. Indeed, the Web is full of places to find TV shows — including sites like AllofTV.net and Alluc.org — and they can be viewed with no ads or distracting promotions.

So what’s the big deal? Advertising, apparently. Video is the fastest-growing segment of the fastest-growing medium — the Internet, of course — but online video grabs a tiny fragment of the $60 billion spent annually on broadcast and cable TV ads. Skeptics rightly point out that it is far from clear whether putting video onto the Web adds any revenue to the media companies’ coffers — although plenty of media executives swear that it does — or whether it will cannibalize TV viewing.

And while video is clearly the next big thing online, it is uncertain how much appetite there is for TV shows and movies on computer screens. Will the main attraction be existing fare distributed online, or new sources of original content like, say, the new video clips from The Onion, the satirical newspaper?

So let’s look at what this News/NBC venture is really about. It’s clearly trying to sop up advertising dollars by creating a one-stop shop for advertisers to buy shows they already know from companies they already know. It’s also about putting those shows and ads in front of a huge audience available at Web destinations where people already spend a lot of time, like AOL and Yahoo.

Mostly, though, it’s about the control and the split — the amount of money that the media companies get to keep versus what they will share with the big Web sites.

Several people involved in News/NBC say that 90 percent goes to the new company and 10 percent to the Web sites. News/NBC will have to share some of its take with the other media companies that provide their content to the service.

Media companies are also talking to YouTube about displaying their content. When the talk turns to revenue, the proposed split by YouTube, according to one media executive involved in such negotiations, is roughly 70 percent to the content owner and 30 percent to YouTube. (The executive requested anonymity because the talks are confidential.)

But more important than the cold numbers is Google’s insistence that it handle the ad business for video. YouTube has the image of a happy-go-lucky site where anyone can put up videos they like, but it has serious ambitions to take advantage of Google’s proven mastery of unobtrusive, relevant ads in text and make a few dollars in video.

It all comes down to control. The site’s terms of use warn users not to “post advertisements or solicitations of business.” That means that NBC and Fox, which want YouTube’s huge young audience, still post clips there but, for now, ad-free. (Certainly advertising does appear elsewhere on the site, including a product placement for chewing gum last week on the much-discussed Web drama, “lonelygirl15.”) In general, YouTube’s advertising game plan is a very different from Google’s core search business — roughly the equivalent of Google telling people that their Web pages will be included in its search results, but only if they contain no ads on them.

Most strikingly, the News/NBC venture represents a nod to the truisms that, even in the age of consumer choice, proximity matters and audiences are still sheep. For all the Web’s efforts at personalization, from bookmarks to RSS feeds to widgets, having these shows on AOL or Yahoo might still make a big difference in ensuring a broad audience. One Web executive who has worked on the new venture even coined a horrific new oxymoron when he summed up the strategy to me: “exclusive ubiquity.”

THAT’S no different from how media have been marketed and distributed for decades. Nothing makes a song a hit like radio play, nothing matters more to the success of a film than how it does on opening weekend, and nothing ensures the popularity of a new channel like where it sits on the cable dial. And who wins the nightly news ratings can be determined as much by the preceding shows on the schedule than the mix of the news or the anchor’s hair.

Putting your video where people will actually see it on the Web is the equivalent of basic cable distribution or a wide opening at the theater. At least that’s what the folks behind News/NBC are betting on, hoping that more big media companies will climb aboard and give the venture the heft to continue to dictate terms.

The only problem is that, for now, the two-year-old YouTube is far and away the most popular site for video online. And rival start-ups like Joost, from the guys who created Skype, are coming up fast. Clearly, the last breathless press release on the subject has yet to be written.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/bu.../01frenzy.html





Verizon Admits That Their Unlimited Data Plan is Limited to 5GB Per Month
Ryan

Back in August of 2006 I wrote about a guy who had his unlimited Verizon EVDO Wireless Data Service canceled because buried deep into the Terms of Service (TOS) they mentioned some things that were unacceptable. Some of these things included downloading/streaming music and videos…which is what the Internet is all about these days.

At the time Verizon didn’t explicitly state that their unlimited service really was limited, but I was looking at the service once again yesterday for someone and decided to see what the terms look like 7–months later. Now they explicitly come out and say that their unlimited plan can only be used for up to 5GB a month otherwise your usage will be considered unacceptable and your service will be terminated (the bold text points out the important things):

Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games; (ii) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine–to–machine connections or peer–to–peer (P2P) file sharing; or (iii) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections. This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services and/or redirecting television signals for viewing on laptops is prohibited. A person engaged in prohibited uses, continuously for one hour, could typically use 100 to 200 MBs, or, if engaged in prohibited uses for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, could use more than 5 GBs in a month.

For individual use only and not for resale. We reserve the right to protect our network from harm, which may impact legitimate data flows. We reserve the right to limit throughput or amount of data transferred, and to deny or terminate service, without notice, to anyone we believe is using an Unlimited Data Plan or Feature in any manner prohibited above or whose usage adversely impacts our network or service levels. Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice. We also reserve the right to terminate service upon expiration of Customer Agreement term.


So all the service is really good for is viewing websites and sending emails since you cannot download or upload anything. They say that sending emails is okay, but what about if you constantly have large attachments in your email which results in high bandwidth usage? Does that fall under the download/upload restriction that can terminate your account, or is that considered acceptable use since it is an email?

One of the other restrictions that they mention is that you must have another Internet service as well since you cannot use it as a substitute or backup of a dedicated Internet connection. Even if all you do is check emails for work, you must have another Internet connection as your primary source for access.

So why would anyone use the service? Many people use it because their employers pay for it, and I’m sure they never inform their employees about what they can and can’t do with it. For that reason, a lot of people are “inappropriately” using the service which is good news for Verizon because they can terminate your account whenever they want. I look at it as Verizon’s way to cover their own back since they can sell the service to as many people as they possibly can, and then when their network starts to see a pattern of overall heavy usage, they can just terminate the people who use their accounts the most. This will maximize their revenue while keeping the network usage to a minimum.

I definitely understand their reasoning for limiting the service to only 5GB of bandwidth per month, but what boggles my mind is how they can advertise this as unlimited when they explicitly say that any usage over 5GB will cause your account to be terminated?
http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2007/04...5gb-per-month/





Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs

The telecom giant is warning customers to avoid excessive bandwidth consumption or risk being disconnected for up to a year.

Man your PCs. The bandwidth hogs are revolting and Comcast is the recipient of their virtual torches and pitchforks.

Customers across the country have been contacted by the telecom giant with a warning to curb excessive bandwidth consumption or risk a one-year service termination. Comcast, however, is refusing to reveal how much bandwidth use is allowed, making it impossible for customers to know if they are in danger of violating Comcast's limit.

The move has driven customers to sign up with other service providers.

"Comcast and I are not on speaking terms," said Frank Carreiro, a West Jordan, Utah resident who had his Internet service terminated by Comcast in January.

Carreiro said he received a message from a Comcast Security Assurance representative in December, who warned him that he was hogging too much of the company's bandwidth and needed to cut down. When Carreiro contacted customer service about the call, they had no idea what he was talking about and suggested it was a prank phone call. Unconvinced, Carreiro contacted Comcast several more times, but was again told there was no problem.

A month later, he woke up to a dead Internet connection. Customer service directed him to the Security Assurance division, which Carreiro said informed him he would now be without service for one year.

Carreiro said he told Security Assurance that customer service had cleared him of any wrongdoing, but Security Assurance reportedly told him that customer service is not kept abreast of bandwidth issues for security purposes. Comcast also refused to tell Carreiro how much bandwidth he would have been allowed to use to avoid service termination.

"It was a very frustrating experience," he said.

Carreiro has since switched to DSL service from Qwest, which became available in his neighborhood in late February. Again connected to the Web, he has taken his fight to the blogosphere with an online journal (http://comcastissue.blogspot.com) detailing his troubles.

Admitted "Internet junkie" and Chattanooga resident Cameron Smith also had his service cut off in January for one year. "They said there wasn't a limit - for downloading - but that I was downloading too much, about 550 gigs. I backed off to about 450 gigs, but they still suspended us."

Smith has since switched to DSL service from BellSouth AT&T. "I don't like it," he said, but it is the only other high-speed option available in Chattanooga and he refuses to ever return to Comcast again.

Smith also pondered the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against Comcast, but has been delayed by funding issues. "If I could afford it, then I would do it in a heartbeat because it's a bait-and-switch with their customer service," he said.

As of press time, repeated calls to Comcast were not returned, nor were messages left for Comcast Security Assurance or e-mails sent to that department's manager, Jay Opperman.

In a February statement regarding Carreiro's case, Comcast said that "customers who are notified of excessive usage typically consume more than 100 times the average national Comcast bandwidth usage" and apologized for "for any miscommunication that this customer may have received about this process."

What About the Others?

Several other top U.S. service providers admitted to monitoring network traffic and contacting bandwidth hogs, though none were aware of any customers who had actually been denied service.

"We do not disconnect customers," said Mark Harrad, senior vice president of corporate communications at Time Warner Cable. But the company does "employ various network-management tools to ensure excessively high users are not allowed to degrade the online experience of other customers."

Harrad said that "excessive use varies" depending on whether it is a peak traffic period, how many "top talkers" are online at the same time and what is occurring with regular network traffic patterns. "It is not so much an issue of exceeding a speed limit as a pattern of behavior over time," he maintained.

At Verizon, "it is in our terms and conditions that you cannot generate excessive amounts of Internet traffic and you cannot host any kind of server," said Bobbi Henson, director of media relations.

But Verizon does not have any "set measurements" on how much is too much, Henson said. "We look at it in the aggregate. We will monitor - the network - and if we see an issue, we'll try to rebalance the traffic before pulling a customer's service."

Henson is not aware of any incidents when Verizon has had to notify a customer about excessive use or cancel their service because of bandwidth issues.

Cox Communications provides data on its Web site ( www.cox.com/policy/limitations.asp ) about how much bandwidth a user is allowed to use under the company's three service plans.

"Cox does not spend a large amount of time enforcing byte caps, however, we do communicate with customers when their usage is so egregious as to impact the performance of the network for others," said David Grabert, director of media relations.

Having clear guidelines posted online "makes for fair and clear dialogue when issues arise," Grabert said.

Blame Video

Across the country, consumers are spending a significant amount of their time online viewing video content, according to a March report from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) that examined what users are doing with their bandwidth.

Of the more than 2,000 adults CEA surveyed in late 2006 and early 2007, researchers found that 70 percent were accessing content via online streams. Of that 70 percent, 49 percent connected to the Web for news content, 33 percent went online for movie downloads and 28 percent were gaming, the report said.

"Some of these people who are bandwidth hogs are - Comcast's - best broadband customers," said Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at D.C. think tank Progress & Freedom Foundation. By angering this base, "you're just given your competitors a way to step in" and steal customers.

"What mystifies me is why no one is willing to propose tiered pricing" for broadband, he said. "Obviously, one potential reason is that it is wildly unpopular with people. There is something about the all-you-can-eat, buffet-style pricing that people just love. I think with broadband, we've just already become accustomed to the idea that is should be offered at a flat rate."

Update: Comcast sent us the following response soon after this article was published:

"More than 99.99% of our customers use the residential high-speed Internet service as intended, which includes downloading and sharing video, photos and other rich-media. Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience, and to address any excessive or abusive activities usage issues that may adversely impact that experience."

"The customers who are notified of excessive use typically and repeatedly consume exponentially more bandwidth than an average residential user, which would include, for example, the equivalent of sending 256,000 photos a month, or sending 13 million e-mails every month (or 18,000 emails every hour, every day, all month). In these rare instances, Comcast's policy is to proactively contact the customer via phone to work with them and address the issue or help them select a more appropriate commercial-grade Comcast product."
http://www.physorg.com/news94981460.html





For AT&T Chief, Nagging Questions About Broadband Strategy
Matt Richtel

Edward Whitacre Jr., the chairman and chief executive of AT&T, is captivating several hundred employees in an Atlanta auditorium with a pep talk about the rosy future of the world's largest telephone company. His demeanor is commanding, but cut with a practiced avuncular charm.

Then he opens the floor to questions and, for just an instant, is tripped up. The first question, from a man near the front row, is about whether AT&T's much-debated strategy for deploying broadband on the cheap will give consumers what they need.

Whitacre begins to answer, pauses, chooses another path, then stops and smiles. "Where did you get this question?" he finally responds, feigning exasperation with fine comedic timing, prompting an eruption of appreciative laughter.

It is a moment that sums up the new state of affairs for Whitacre and AT&T. In December, the company closed on an $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth, capping a string of multibillion-dollar takeover deals, and leaving the company ready and needing to compete through execution, not acquisition.

Wall Street is thus far charmed, having endorsed the acquisition strategy by sending the stock on a steady two-year rise to $39 from around $20. And Whitacre, never a shrinking violet, has the swagger of a man whose grand plan has worked.

But there are nagging questions. Is AT&T's broadband strategy flawed? Is its foray into television in shambles and destined for failure? Has the revenue growth from acquisition obscured more fundamental, underlying vulnerabilities?

"Mr. Whitacre is a very, very smart man," said Dave Burstein, editor of DSL Prime, an online newsletter that follows the broadband industry. "He knows what he's doing. He's making good short-term decisions, and risking the long run."

Whitacre has plenty of promoters, who credit him with transforming Southwestern Bell, the smallest of the seven Bells when he took it over in 1990, into SBC, the telecommunications giant that swallowed AT&T and took its name. For his part, the 65-year-old Whitacre - a native Texan and company man who started as a facilities engineer with Southwestern Bell in 1963 - says the heaviest lifting may at last be done.

"I've always been trying to put all the pieces together," he said. "We've got them now." The drama for AT&T is what happens now that it has all those pieces in place, and now that it seems, at last, Whitacre is sated.

In late 2005, a year before the company closed on the BellSouth deal, it completed the $16 billion acquisition of AT&T. A year before that, Cingular Wireless, jointly owned by SBC and BellSouth, closed on a $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless. In the late 1990s, Whitacre's company acquired Pacific Telesis, Southern New England Telecommunications and Ameritech.

The new AT&T has 66.5 million land-based telephone lines, 61 million wireless subscribers and 12 million broadband lines. It sells local phone service in 22 states and has 302,000 employees. AT&T's $245.5 billion market capitalization by far surpasses that of the next largest phone company, China Mobile, at $170 billion, and is double that of the nearest American competitor, Verizon Communications, at $109.6 billion.

But there is potential downside for AT&T, too, analysts said, particularly when it comes to its closely linked broadband and television strategies. Some analysts say that AT&T has set itself up poorly to compete in those areas, which are considered essential to the telecommunications product bundle.

In the case of TV, the strategy is called U-verse, and it entails delivering programming over the Internet. But the service has been plagued by delays and glitches and, even now, takes, on average, more than six hours to install in a home.

"If it cannot be called a complete failure, it's at least struggling," said Phillip Swann, president and publisher of TVPredictions.com, a Web site that tracks the television technology industry. He said that if things did not pick up soon, AT&T might have to get back into the acquisition game to buy a TV distributor, like a satellite or cable company. Whitacre declines to comment about such a purchase. But he and other executives say that U-verse needs a chance to flourish and, they say, it is an essential piece of the company's overall strategy.

The television initiative is tied in closely with AT&T's strategy for deploying a high-speed fiber optic network, which will deliver the TV programming. That strategy is called "fiber to the node" because it brings high-speed fiber optic cables within 4,000 feet of individual homes. Then it delivers the last part of the digital signal over conventional copper wires.

That strategy stands in contrast to "fiber to the premises," a strategy being pursued by Verizon, which entails connecting fiber optic cables directly to individual residences.

Verizon's version of fiber to the premises allows it to give customers data speeds of 100 megabits, while AT&T's can deliver around 25 megabits. On the other hand, AT&T's concept is projected to cost $5.1 billion - $15 billion less than it says it would cost to lay fiber to the premises. The question of which strategy is ultimately superior depends on how much bandwidth customers will need in the future.

"It's an outstanding question for everybody in the industry," said John Stankey, the president of the network operations support group at AT&T. "The question for us is whether we're investing enough. The thing I go home thinking about at night is: What is the amount of bandwidth the customer is going to need in the future?"

For Whitacre, the answer is that AT&T's strategy is the right one, unequivocally.

It's a "no-brainer," he said. He asserts that as technology improves, AT&T will be able to increase its speeds from 25 megabits without facing the expense of laying fiber to every household. "I have no doubt that the bandwidth will be plenty large," he said.

Eric Dash contributed reporting.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/27/business/att.php





City Opposes AT&T Cabinets

Danbury says phone company's new equipment is a safety hazard
Mark Langlois

Danbury is joining Bridgeport and Stamford to fight AT&T's installation of hundreds of metal cabinets on city telephone poles across the state.

The cabinets -- an estimated total of 60 in Danbury, 60 in Stamford, and 150 in Bridgeport -- are being attached to telephone poles next to city sidewalks.

They are part of a $336 million expansion of the company's equipment so it can start offering television services.

The cabinets are hung at pedestrian-level, and city officials say they may be a safety hazard to walkers and bicyclists using the sidewalks. They may also block the view of passing motorists.

"I have a bad feeling about it," said Liz Shannon of Danbury, who owns a house with other family members at 29 Coal Pit Hill Road in Danbury. The three-family house is next to the Lions Way intersection.

A cabinet was installed on a telephone pole between Shannon's house and Lions Way. "We think it creates a possible traffic problem," she said. "It's bigger than we thought it would be."

The cabinets measure about 25 by 61 by 55 inches.

"You've got some very sharp edges here," said Public Works director Antonio Iadarola, inspecting a cabinet on Rose Hill Avenue near Beaver Street.

The cabinet narrows the walkway on Rose Hill because it blocks 18 inches of the sidewalk on one side, Iadarola said, and the telephone guy wire blocks the other side. That leaves only about 57 inches for people to walk through.

Iadarola said when he contacted AT&T about this, senior counsel George Moreira told the city in a legal memo that the state Department of Public Works is in charge of AT&T and it doesn't give any city the right to control these installations.

Moreira couldn't be reached for comment Monday.

Seth Bloom, a spokesman with AT&T, said the company wants to work with cities and towns to find alternatives if the pole AT&T picks creates a hazard.

"This is the first rollout across the country," Bloom said. "This will be full TV to compete with the cable television providers."

Bloom said the rollout will take several years to complete, but the service will be offered on a limited basis later this year.

Danbury wasn't given a chance to discuss the installation of the cabinets with AT&T before they put them in, Iadarola said, and he suggested a simple step like walking the site with someone from AT&T might have led the company to pick different poles and create a safer situation.

City sidewalks have been broken during the installations, and the city is liable for injuries caused by the boxes once they're installed.

"We're always liable, because it's in our right of way," Iadarola said.

Iadarola said every other utility, such as Connecticut Light & Power, Yankee Gas and others, tell the city when it's coming to town, and that gives the city time to makes arrangements for traffic control, pedestrian detours and other safety precautions.

"We had a sidewalk blocked by a backhoe on the corner of Sandpit and Germantown Road when they installed the cabinet there," said Fran Lollie, permit inspector with Public Works.

"We had a lady complain, and who blames her? She couldn't use the sidewalk. Who wants to walk downhill on Sandpit?"

Iadarola is cooperating with public works officials in Bridgeport and Stamford, who have similar worries. Danbury plans to hire a lawyer to work with those cities to fight how the cabinets are being installed.

The appropriation will be discussed at the Common Council meeting tonight.

"We have the same problems," said Melanie Howlett, associate city attorney for Bridgeport, where the same size boxes on the same kind of telephone poles are appearing along sidewalks.

Howlett said she wouldn't discuss the strategy for fighting the cabinets because it is pending litigation. She also said she worked for the state Department of Public Utility Control for 14 years.

"I believe if you have a problem with a regulated industry, you go see the regulators," Howlett said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1042265





Online Odyssey Stoking Interest In New NIN Album
Michael Paoletta

Trent Reznor could have just given a few interviews to explain Nine Inch Nails' new album, "Year Zero." But instead, he's utilizing a multifaceted Internet scavenger hunt, and in some cases, his own rabid fans, to help gradually build the story of the project, due April 17 via Nothing/Interscope.

Dystopian, apocalyptic themes are pervasive on the album, echoing topics the group has explored since 1989's classic "Pretty Hate Machine." Neither Reznor, his manager nor Interscope reps would speak to Billboard about the campaign, which has encompassed everything from cryptic phrases on T-shirts to Orwellian Web sites to MP3s found on USB drives in bathrooms at NIN concerts. But a source with knowledge of the project says Reznor may very well perceive it all not as a marketing campaign, but as "a new entertainment form."

Indeed, the source says the campaign forms the body of the "Year Zero" experience: "It is the CD booklet come to life. It precedes the concept album and the tour. And it will continue for the next 18 months, with peaks and valleys. No one has assembled the full story yet. The new media is creating the story as it goes."

"Year Zero" came to life in early February when Web-savvy fans discovered that highlighted letters inside words on a NIN tour T-shirt spelled out "I am trying to believe." Savvy fans added a ".com" to the five words and, voila, located a thought-provoking, eerie Web site. Other associated sites created by 42 Entertainment, where a dark future reigns supreme, were soon discovered. Within days, the blogosphere was rich with anxious NIN fans sharing their experiences on message boards.

According to one post, a male fan, allegedly by happenstance, found a USB drive in a bathroom stall during a NIN concert at the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal. This flash drive (yes, Reznor's idea) contained an MP3 of album track "My Violent Heart." Additional USB drives were purportedly found in Barcelona and Manchester, England; they included MP3s of album tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight," respectively.

Excited fans then began swapping and sharing these music files online. Another Web posting alleged that all this activity resulted in entertainment blog Idolator and other sites receiving e-mail from the Recording Industry Association of America, demanding that they remove the MP3s from their sites. An RIAA representative confirms this, a move that boggles the minds of many. "These f*cking idiots are going after a campaign that the label signed off on," the source says.

Ironically, with its numerous pirated downloads available, the whole album has not leaked yet. According to a source, the only leaks are the ones Reznor approved himself. And whether he realizes it or not, Reznor may be building a new option for presenting music that augments the existing CD/tour scenario. "It's not about slapping something on top of an existing experience," the source says. "It must be its own entity. Make the experience as immersive as possible for fans."
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/..._id=1003565585


Ironically x 2 – Pirates will out: The whole album has leaked and is being traded in its entirety. – Jack





Of note

Is 'Making Available' Copyright Infringement?
Ray Beckerman

In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America began a massive litigation campaign on behalf of the four major record companies against end users of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, alleging widespread infringement of their sound recording copyrights. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000-25,000 suits have been brought to date, with hundreds of new complaints filed monthly.

While at first blush this battle might appear to be a simple fight between record companies and some alleged music file-sharers, it is actually much more significant because the litigation campaign rests upon a legal argument about the Copyright Act that, if accepted, would represent a major expansion of the present boundaries of U.S. copyright law. This theory could have an enormous impact on the Internet as we know it.

The argument is that even if a defendant has never copied or distributed a file illegally, the fact that he or she possesses a computer with a shared-files folder on it that contains copyrighted files "made available" over an Internet connection, this in and of itself constitutes infringement of the "distribution" rights of the sound recording copyright holder under Section 106(3) of the Copyright Act.

A motion to dismiss in the case, Elektra v. Barker, 05 CV 7340, scheduled to be argued Jan. 26 in the Southern District of New York, might represent either the death knell of this theory or the enthronement of it as a binding rule of law.

RIAA Research Behind Claims
The roots of the "making available" issue lie not in the RIAA lawyers' draftsmanship skills but in the limited investigation upon which the lawsuits are predicated. The RIAA's research begins and ends with its investigator, Tom Mizzone, who works for "antipiracy" company MediaSentry. Armed with proprietary software, Mizzone uses a pretextual P2P file-sharing account on Kazaa, Gnutella, iMesh, LimeWire and other P2P software providers to locate shared-file folders that contain recordings whose copyrights are owned by the Big Four.

Mizzone takes a screenshot, downloads a few of the songs and, through another proprietary process, determines the dynamic IP address assigned to the screenshot. Then the RIAA, armed with a court order, goes to the Internet service provider to get the name and address of the owner of the Internet-access account to which the dynamic IP address had been assigned at the time the screenshot was taken.

The RIAA then closes its investigation and simply sues the owner of the account identified by the ISP.

In its complaints, which are virtually identical in all 20,000-plus cases, it alleges, in conclusory terms, that the defendant is using an "online digital distribution system" to "download, distribute and/or make available for distribution" plaintiffs' recordings.

Since it does not know of any downloads or distributions, the RIAA can allege none except in conclusory terms. The one thing plaintiffs can allege with specificity is, in essence, "Here is a list of songs that someone with your Internet account was making available at a certain time and date."

The Players, the Arguments
The defendant in Barker is a Bronx nursing student. She moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), arguing chiefly that the complaint failed with respect to "downloading" and "distributing" because it does not allege any specific acts of downloading or distributing. (The motion cites Marvullo v. Gruner & Jahr, 105 F.Supp.2d 225, 230 (S.D.N.Y. 2000); DiMaggio v. International Sports Ltd., 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13468 (S.D.N.Y. 1998); Brought to Life Music, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1967 (S.D.N.Y. 2003); Lindsay v. The Wrecked and Abandoned Vessel R.M.S. Titanic, 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15837(S.D.N.Y. 1999); and Stampone v. Stahl, 2005 WL 1694073 (D.N.J. 2005).)

In addition, the motion argues that merely "making available," without actual dissemination, is not a copyright infringement. (Barker cites Arista Records, Inc. v. MP3Board, Inc., 2002 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16165 (S.D.N.Y. 2002); National Car Rental System, Inc. v. Computer Associates International, Inc., 991 F.2d 426, 434 (8th Cir. 1993) (citing 2 Nimmer on Copyright § 8.11[A], at 8-124); and In re Napster, Inc., 377 F.Supp.2d 796, 802 (N.D.Cal. 2005).)

The RIAA, in opposition, argues that "making available" would indeed constitute a violation of plaintiffs' right to "distribute" granted by 17 USC 106(3), relying chiefly upon the decision of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199 (1997), in which a chain of libraries had distributed a number of concededly unauthorized copies of the subject work to its various branches and included them in card catalogs, but kept no circulation records, thus making it impossible for plaintiff to prove actual dissemination.

In reply, Barker distinguished Hotaling as being limited to its unusual set of facts.

Upon learning of the RIAA's argument that merely "making available" is in and of itself a copyright infringement, several organizations sought, and were granted, leave to file amicus curiae briefs in support of Barker's motion.

The Computer & Communications Industry Assn. and U.S. Internet Industry Assn. filed a joint amicus brief arguing that the "distribution" right set forth in the Copyright Act is a specific, defined term and that the RIAA's proposed expansion would, if adopted by the court, "sweep into the reach of copyright law many activities not now covered by copyright law," making the boundaries of the distribution right "indeterminate and unpredictable, creating chilling effects on members of amici and virtually every other participant on the Internet."

As an example, they argued: "Companies routinely include in their Web pages hyperlinks that enable persons to navigate easily to other sites throughout the Web by use of browser software. Indeed, the Web is a collection of hyperlinks. Even though the use of hyperlinks makes content located elsewhere available to a Web user, it does not constitute a distribution of that content under section 106(3)."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also submitted an amicus brief in support of Barker's motion, emphasizing an entirely different argument. EFF essentially assumed, for purposes of argument, that the complaint had adequately alleged Internet transmissions, and it argued that the "distribution right," as opposed to other rights under the Copyright Act, can never be implicated by mere ephemeral transmissions but relates solely to the dissemination of physical, tangible, material "copies" and "phonorecords." Picking up on the question raised by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Agee v. Paramount, 59 F.3d 317 (2d Cir. 1995) -- whether "disseminations must always be in physical form to constitute 'distributions' " -- EFF argued in the affirmative based primarily on the language of 17 U.S.C. 106(3), its legislative history and the reasoning of Agee.

The MPAA came into the picture with an amicus brief supporting the RIAA.

And the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in, submitting a "Statement of Interest," in which it confined itself to rebutting EFF's argument. DOJ specifically disclaimed having any "interest" in the RIAA's "making available" argument, pointing out that it had never prosecuted anyone under the copyright laws for "making available."

Barker filed additional papers, one responding to the EFF's amicus brief, one responding to the DOJ's statement of interest, each pointing out that it was not necessary to reach the "ephemeral transmission vs. tangible physical object" issue because the RIAA had not pleaded any instances even of "ephemeral transmissions" with sufficient specificity to satisfy normal copyright infringement pleading standards.

Ready for Argument
The motion is fully briefed and is scheduled for oral argument this week before Judge Kenneth Karas.

I am not aware of any other cases attacking the sufficiency of the RIAA's complaint in which all of the principally affected industries and interests have weighed in as amicus curiae. It is indeed unusual for a case at the district court level to receive this level of attention, thus accentuating the importance of the issues at stake.

While Elektra v. Barker would appear to be just a procedural pleading standards case, it is more than that because the RIAA does not actually possess more information to allege, so there is no possibility of curing the problem by repleading. Nor has it asked for leave to replead if defendant's motion is granted.

Since the RIAA uses a single, standard complaint in all of its litigations, the decision could affect huge numbers of litigants. As the CCIA and USIIA persuasively argue, there is almost no scenario under which the court's holding would not have far-reaching consequence to the technology and Internet world, regardless of which way the motion is decided.

And if the RIAA loses and the case is dismissed, it will no doubt appeal. The issues -- including possibly a revisiting of Agee in the context of Internet transmissions -- would then come before the 2nd Circuit, or possibly up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

About the author: Ray Beckerman is a member of Vandenberg & Feliu in New York and the author of the blog The Recording Industry vs. The People, which tracks file-sharing litigation. He is one of the attorneys representing defendant Tenise Barker in Elektra v. Barker.
http://www.hollywoodreporteresq.com/..._id=1003535810





Judge Denies RIAA Motion to Compel Ms. Lindor's Son to Turn Over His Desktop Computer

Orders limited deposition as to other devices
Ray Beckerman

The Magistrate has denied the RIAA's motion, in UMG v. Lindor, to compel Ms. Lindor's son to turn over his desktop computer, reasoning that Plaintiffs have offered little more than speculation to support their request for an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer, based on than his family relationship to the defendant, the proximity of his house to the defendant's house, and his determined defense of his mother in this case. That is not enough. On the record before me, plaintiffs have provided scant basis to authorize an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer.

The Court did, however, provide that the RIAA could take a limited deposition of Mr. Raymond to ascertain whether he had any other devices in his custody, possession, or control at the time the screenshot was taken, and whether he'd hooked them up to his mother's internet connection:

March 30, 2007, Order Denying RIAA Motion to Compel

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...compel-ms.html





JO's Investigation of the Pirate Bay Raid is Done
Andreas G

The web hotel PRQ and The Pirate Bay was the target of one of the most talked-about raids of the 21st century in Sweden. During the raid the police didn't just confiscate Pirate Bay's servers but also a load of other unrelated servers; a total of 186 servers were confiscated from PRQ's server rooms. This led to that a big number of companies and a lot of small and large websites lost their servers and in many cases their primary livelihood. Both the police and the prosecutor were charged for official misconduct, but none of the charges led to an investigation. The judge came to the conclusion that during the circumstances it was justified to confiscate all of the servers.

Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has since then been investigating if there have been any irregularities. There were quite a lot of rumors going around that MPA, IFPI and other lobby organizations, but also the American embassy, was trying to steer ministers and other high officials to pressure the police and prosecutors to act against The Pirate Bay.

The report that have been published clearly states that IFPI, MPA and the American embassy had contacted the current Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and the Secretary of State Dan Eliasson in an attempt to make them force the police into action. Although, JO has come to the conclusion that none of the two have done anything to wrong nor have they tried to influence the police or prosecutor. Eliasson wrote the following in his reply to the American authorities;

"(a)ccording to the Swedish constitution, it is not possible for the Government or the Ministry to intervene in a specific case. I can however assure you that I follow closely the actions taken by the police and the prosecutors in respect of copyrights infringements on the Internet and I will not, if necessary, hesitate to initiate further measures to improve their effectiveness"

JO also says that the police could've acted a lot faster when it comes to the confiscated servers. It took them over a week before they decided to give back some of the servers that was not related to Pirate Bay (from May 31 to 2-8 June). JO adds though that the decision to remove the servers was correct as it, according to the police, would take a lot longer to investigate them in place than at the station.

JO did not buy the explanation that they had to remove the servers because otherwise someone could've come in from the outside and delete material. JO though that they could just as well have unplugged the TP cable, but the time argument was enough to not charge anyone for misconduct.
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,6020.html





Hamachi 1.0.2

Create a Zero Configuration Network

Verdict: Excellent tool for setting up your own private and secure network in seconds.

These days owning more than one computer is the norm. They're just so cheap, so we often have one in the living room, one in our home office and the kids usually have their own machine too.

However, we don't all have the same operating system, but we do want to be sharing our music, files and network games around the house.

How many of us really know how to configure our machines so they can talk to each other, without having to spend hours attempting to get them to talk or spending money employing someone to do it for us?

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application that resides on all the computers you want to connect within your network.

It's based on peer-to-peer technology, which 'just works' out of the box. However, this is closed peer-to-peer, which means that only people within your network can connect to your machine(s).

If the computers you want to join your local network are situated outside your home, they can join too, which means you can have your own file sharing or game network between people within your local neighbourhood.

Note that Linux and Mac OS X versions are available to download on the Hamachi homepage.
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/download/hamachi-102.aspx





µTorrent 1.7 Beta 1085
Firon

Yes, a public beta after all these months. The biggest thing is probably full Vista support. Test away!

--- 2007-04-05: Version 1.7 (build 1085)

- Change: Tooltips over status bar and toolbar are now native tooltips instead of custom-drawn
- Fix: Bandwidth Allocation selection bug fixed
- Fix: Modal dialog boxes now give focus on close to the proper window (add button in RSS now gives focus back to RSS window, for example)
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=21979





WiPeer

The Freedom to Share – No Strings Attached
WebBlurb

What is WiPeer ?

WiPeer enables sharing files directly among computers, playing multi-player games, chatting, and collaboration over both Wi-Fi and home/office networks.
Who needs WiPeer ?

- You are visiting your friends and would like to transfer photos of a shared trip from your laptop to theirs. Wouldn't it be great if you could share your files with them directly from one computer to the other?

- You are sitting in a boring lecture. You and your friends all have laptops, but your university has not installed an access point in the lecture room. Wouldn't it be great if you could play a game of Chess or Reversi against them, or even gossip with them about yesterday's football match?

- You are stuck in an airplane for a long flight and you are looking for something to do. If you could only play a game of Chinese checkers with other passengers...

- You have a home network, or even a small office network, and you'd like to share files among your computers without having to set up a dedicated server. There has to be a simple way of doing this.
http://www.wipeer.com/





Uni-Verse

P2P & Collaboration Tools for Researchers
paolo

• LionShare — LionShare
LionShare is a secure P2P file sharing application for higher education, enabling legal file sharing for Penn State university and beyond.. Find and share legal academic content in a secure P2P environment. LionShare 1.1 is available for download now.
(tags: p2p, Java, academia, papers, research)

• The Bibshare Project Website
Bibshare is a new framework for bibliography management that allows writers to use the same bibliography collection(s) regardless of the word processing system they use at any moment.
(tags: bibliography, academia, researcher)

• Bibster
Bibster is a Java-based system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata (e.g. from BibTeX files) in a peer-to-peer network. Probably abandoned.
(tags: distributed, bibliography, p2p, java, semantic_web, research, academia)

• Complore-Come Xplore.
Complore is a vision to connect people from diverse backgrounds through collaboration and networking and provide them a common platform to collectively explore their areas of interest. Thus complore provides people to think and work as a team.
(tags: academia, research, bibliography)

• Connotea: free online reference management for clinicians and scientists
Similar to Citeulike.org, but I prefer citeulike. An effort of "Nature". Big plus: it is Free software available under under GPL licence!
(tags: bibliography, academia, research, papers, Social_software, folksonomy)

• CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatica
(tags: academia, papers, research, bibliography, folksonomy, web2.0, Social_software)

• BibblyWiki - Harness the power of TiddlyWiki to organize your library, bibliography and book notes!
An online tool for keeping a bibliography. I still have to udnerstand how it works in practice.
(tags: bibliography, research, papers, academia)

• getCITED: Academic research, citation reports and discussion lists
getCITED is an online, member-controlled academic database, directory and discussion forum. Its contents are entered and edited by members of the academic community.
(tags: academia, papers, research)

• Computer and Information Science Papers CiteSeer Publications ResearchIndex
An aggregator of papers. The first really complete. Not too up to date at the moment.
(tags: academia, research, papers)

• Google Scholar
Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
(tags: academia, bibliography, research, papers)

• Rexa Search Engine
Community of people that share academic resource (papers)
(tags: papers, academia, research)

• Getting Things Done in Academia
Advice for graduate students on creativity, scholarship, communication, and time management

All links at source – Jack.

http://www.gnuband.org/2007/04/03/links_2007_04_03/





Cut-and-Paste Is a Skill, Too
Jason Johnson

I have a confession to make: Today I plagiarized multiple documents at work. I took the writing of others and presented it to my supervisor as if it were my own. It was an open secret that my entire report, written "by Jason Johnson," had been composed by others and that I had been merely an editor. Instead of a reprimand, I was rewarded with a post-briefing latte.

But on some level, it still felt wrong. Before coming to work at my current company, I spent most of the past 15 years as an educator, advising students from second-graders to college seniors that taking the work of others and presenting it as your own is morally wrong and intellectually dishonest. I've fretted over proper citations and labored with students over the highly subjective art of paraphrasing.

Now I watch my former teaching colleagues grade papers not simply by marking a dangling participle here or an incomplete thought there, but by Googling phrases from their students' work, searching for the suspected source of yet another cut-and-paste job. I wonder if that's really what teachers should be doing. As kids today plagiarize more and more from the Internet, the old-fashioned term paper -- composed by sweating students on a typewriter as they sat elbow-deep in reference books -- has no useful heir in the digital age. It's time for schools and educators to recognize the truth: The term paper is dead.

Students' work today looks more like the slick work report I had "written" than any original academic achievement. The problem isn't due to a dramatic decline in young people's moral character, nor the rise of the Internet and its endless bounty. The problem is that schools have relied too long and too heavily on the paper as the most significant method of evaluating students. But that's going to have to change.

Internet plagiarism is growing at a rapid pace, according to recent studies and the anecdotal evidence I hear from my former colleagues in education -- and there's no end in sight.

Research papers -- of varying lengths, written without the instructor's direct supervision -- are an academic staple. They've been a successful way for teachers and professors to evaluate students because they allow the students to create something that tangibly displays their skills and knowledge without using any class time. But despite all its attractive qualities, the paper is an extremely weak link in academic assessment, largely for the same reasons that it has been successful -- the work is done outside the classroom.

Schools have responded by upping their use of academic integrity pledges and search engines such as TurnItIn.com, which checks student work against a large database of previously written material. But the rise of such measures hasn't reduced plagiarism at all; in fact, students and teachers are more likely to spar over plagiarism than ever before.

Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.

Enterprising young scholars can also upload their completed homework assignments, and the site will broker a sale to someone who is stumped while using the same textbook. For a fee of $1, for instance, user "brittanymarie" from "calloway country high school" can get the answer to this burning query: "During the process of transcription, DNA serves as the template for making what?" The people behind StudentofFortune, not so far removed from their school days themselves, say this isn't cheating -- it's just a chance for students to "ask their colleagues for help on difficult problems."

The proliferation of sites like these leaves teachers with an even more vexing problem: how to test what students really know. The time-honored paper now teaches students a very different skill set, one that appears to be unintentional and largely unrecognized -- but one that's much closer to what I do at work these days. One university professor, writing anonymously on his "concernedprofessor" blog, notes that students today create "hyper-plagiarism which becomes harder and harder to catch. While these chimera-esque papers can, most of the time, be easily spotted through the mixing of language styles, clever students can pass these off throughout their academic careers with little worry."

My transfer from education to the world of business has reminded me just how important it is to be able to synthesize content from multiple sources, put structure around it and edit it into a coherent, single-voiced whole. Students who are able to create convincing amalgamations have gained a valuable business skill. Unfortunately, most schools fail to recognize that any skills have been used at all, and an entire paper can be discarded because of a few lines repeated from another source without quotation marks.

The most obvious choice for teachers and schools is to simply change the way they assess students. Schools could turn to in-class assignments as a more reliable way of evaluating what students know and how well they can express it. The problem with this is that it takes up valuable teaching time, and in-school resources for such assignments, from libraries to technology, vary greatly.

Nevertheless, the educational system needs to acknowledge what the paper is today: more of a work product that tests very particular skills -- the ability to synthesize and properly cite the work of others -- and not students' knowledge, originality and overall ability.

I envision a time when TurnItIn.com's database contains millions of essays on Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre." At that point educators may finally understand that no high school student will be able to write another original word on the subject.

So let's declare "The paper is dead" before the database makes the declaration for us. And let's recognize what the paper has become, so that we can declare, "Long live the paper!" jjohnsoned@gmail.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...301612_pf.html





School Ends Program to Equip Students with Personal Computers

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) -- One of the first high school laptop computer programs in the country will be phased out over the next three years.

The Liverpool School Board agreed to end the program because teachers complained the machines had become a distraction in class, with some students downloading music and games.

Liverpool initiated its voluntary computer leasing, rent-to-own program seven years ago. About 1,550 of the high school's 1,962 students were enrolled in the laptop lease program, said Maureen Patterson, assistant superintendent for instruction.

Administrators said they wanted to put control of technology back in the hands of teachers. Too much emphasis was placed on the technology and not on how laptops could be used as a tool within the lesson, they said.

The school will continue to train students to use computers and other technology, Patterson said.

The school board on Monday unanimously adopted a 2007-2008 school budget that did not include money for the program.

Incoming juniors and seniors will be able to continue leasing laptops from the school for the next two years but the program will not be available to incoming 10th-graders next year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Record Industry Refuses to Address Real Problems
Thomas Nolan

The RIAA is spending millions of dollars trying to stop time.

One of the most important things I have taken away from economics class is that consumer markets dictate themselves. Demand for goods and services change with factors like consumer preferences, expectations and incomes; fluctuating prices of related goods and, most relevantly, changes in technology.

With the information age causing rapid change worldwide, almost every industry has been revolutionized. The entertainment industry is no exception.

Music is now almost completely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection; technology has changed the market. Because of this, music is now demanded at a much lower price than it was when compact disks and audio tapes were the best solution for audio entertainment. Physical storage devices are now almost completely obsolete.

And record companies are hopelessly trying to recover a lost market.

The RIAA is threatening legal action against music listeners who engage in peer-to-peer "piracy." The association is trying to convince consumers to observe the rules it has dictated for the music industry, which involve paying high prices based on outdated technology. In other words, the association is trying to force the status quo on the market, even though technological advances have made obtaining music much more convenient. If the RIAA has its way, consumers will continue to pay high CD prices for music, negating the accessibility that the Internet has given to music listeners. Obviously, that isn't going to happen.

Piracy is crime driven by technology and economy. It will never go away as long as there is no legal alternative. And the issue is about accessibility more than anything.

Truth be told, if the RIAA wants to punish those responsible for music sharing, it should turn its lawyers toward whoever developed the Internet.

The record industry is changing; so its major players must change accordingly. Record companies will inevitably fail, but that's economics. Candle makers struggled when the light bulb was invented. Technology has provided a better way of doing things, and that's the way it is.

That is not to say record companies have to accept free music sharing. I think steps should continually be taken to eliminate illegal music sharing, but no improvements will be made until record companies have provided a reasonable, legal alternative. People are naturally listening to more music, and a dollar per song is just more than they are willing to pay. This is evidenced by the fact that many music listeners are willing to risk the possibility of landing an overblown RIAA lawsuit by using peer-to-peer music sharing networks.

The solution? Record companies will have to develop cheaper downloading services that will allow users to take advantage of the accessibility that the Internet has to offer. Record companies might not make as much, but the market demands what the market demands.

If the RIAA wants to make an attempt to stop consumers from downloading music illegally that will be taken seriously, it will have to change its strategy toward developing an answer. The association's current strategy just displays a futile resistance to change.
http://www.purdueexponent.com/index....&story_id=5166





Get Your Hands Off My Music!
Patrick Pineyro

With the RIAA coming down hard on university students who download music illegally, the whole issue of the condition of the "music industry" has now become quite relevant to millions of people like us around the country. Thought I will never admit it in a court of law, I haven't exactly spent hundreds on the hundreds of albums I enjoy having on my computer.

But what's the reason why sharing music is a good thing? The fact that music is an art form, first and foremost, not an industry.

Of course, getting hundreds of albums for free hurts the bottom line of the big record companies and radio stations around the country. Sure, it's sort of like stealing. But in the blatantly capitalist music industry, a plethora of subpar artists makes it big, while the truly relevant musicians trudge along in the underground, figures straight out of Dostoevsky.

So where does file sharing come in? For one thing, having an unlimited availability of choices creates a competitiveness that will only help music as an art thrive. The downloaders get to pick and choose which artists are viable, as opposed to MTV stuffing low quality pish-posh down a our throats. To their credit, MTV did provide a generation with great music, playing bands like Van Halen, The Police, Nirvana, Radiohead, etc.

But the internet changed the world dramatically. File sharing has become something people see as a right, not a privilege. So with increased competition, the music industry will inevitably have to move to other sources of revenue. People will still buy CD's of bands that they are loyal to, and if not, they will still buy their merchandise. Concerts are still pretty fun, too. Sure, you can see the Mona Lisa on Wikipedia, but isn't it way better to go see it at the Louvre and bask in all its glory, enjoy its subtleties?

While all these things are good in theory, I still have to accept the fact that hard-working artists like Metallica and Sheryl Crow are getting shorted thousands of dollars. But what do the little guys say? One band probably very few people have heard of, The Books, explicitly plead fans not to steal their music. They privately fund their own music, and barely make ends meet as it is. I felt bad reading this, so I bought some vinyls and a t-shirt.

But it's hard to assume that little-known artists in general wouldn't support the idea of file sharing. For one, it makes their music easily accessible to an infinite number of new fans who will end up buying coffee mugs and concert tickets if the music sounds good enough.

In the end, the fact remains that file sharing will be a highly disputed issue with arguments working for both sides. Let's just hope America has enough sense left to stop putting dollar signs all over the beautiful, untouchable things of humanity.
http://media.www.thehurricaneonline....-2819161.shtml





Congress Flunks P2P Test
Roy Mark

Congress still has knotted knickers over illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, once again showing how utterly out of touch lawmakers can be in a rapidly changing digital world.

So when Hollywood began bleating about the high rate of online piracy at colleges and universities, Congress decided to do something about it.

Our lawmakers seem utterly baffled that the widespread theft of copyrighted music didn't immediately cease following the 2005 Supreme Court Grokster decision ruling P2P services that induce users to infringe are illegal business models.

Of course, these are the same people who are still scratching their heads over why the CAN-SPAM Act has failed to staunch the tide of unsolicited e-mail. They are the same lawmakers whose attempts to curb pornography on the Internet are routinely rejected by the courts as violating the most basic of free-speech rights. And they are the same people whose campaign coffers are regularly filled by the entertainment industry.

As is the case when Congress tries to do something about a problem it can't control, troubled logic becomes epidemic. It started this time with the bashing of college officials as being soft on intellectual property theft.

What got Congress riled up this time is a study by the University of Richmond's Intellectual Property Institute claiming more than half of all college students download music and movies illegally. Another report from the research firm NPD said college students get more of their music from illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) services than the rest of the population.

Therefore, Congress reasoned as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) whispered in its ear, colleges and universities are running a virtual bazaar in stolen music and movies.

"Unfortunately, many schools have turned a blind eye to piracy," Hollywood Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, admonished administrators at a recent hearing. "Current law isn't giving universities enough incentive to comply."

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, complained campus piracy is still "rampant and widespread" and "too many schools do little or nothing about it. That's an unacceptable response."

Berman and Conyers, in their new turns as committee chairmen, seem as in the dark as their Republican predecessors. And not because campus piracy isn't a problem -- it is. But because colleges and universities are not to blame.

When the graduating classes of 2007 began college, schools were already incorporating copyright-infringement issues as part of basic orientations. Student codes of conduct had already been written to expel infringers. Systems administrators were already shaping bandwidth by type of traffic to limit possible illegal P2P activity.

The schools are hardly paying mere lip service to campus piracy, willingly facilitating the RIAA's thousands of copyright-infringement lawsuits filed against students over the last few years.

What Congress can't seem to grasp is this one simple truth: colleges and universities can't do much about the piracy because large chunks of the illegal activity takes place off campus. At most colleges and universities, the majority of students connect to the Internet using non-school computers and Internet service providers.

Lawmakers, though, must think every college student is using school systems to swap music files. After all, that's what the RIAA told them at the last campaign fundraiser.

But not to fear, at least one lawmaker has a solution. Rep. Ric Keller, a Florida Republican, proposed this week to allow colleges and universities to apply for expensive filtering funding from the government. The systems can cost more than $1 million up front and require licensing fees of $250,000 or more annually.

There's no real proof any of these systems work with any great efficiency. So as Rep. Keller would have it, millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on filtering technology that may or may not work to use on systems that most students don't use in the first place to swap tunes.

That knots my knickers.
http://www.internetnews.com/commenta...le.php/3669056





Your tax dollars at work – against you

New Bill Lets Colleges Use Federal Funds to Fight P2P
Nate Anderson

Representative Ric Keller (R-FL) feels that colleges in America are teaching students more than literature, history, and computer science. They are also dens of thievery, places where students learn to steal "billions of dollars in intellectual property from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance." Rep. Keller is talking about illegal file-swapping, of course, and his new bill (HR 1689) could give schools more money to combat the P2P scourge.

The bill is called the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007." It amends the Higher Education Act, a bill that supplies federal money to universities, allowing that money to be used for programs that reduce illegal downloading of copyrighted content.

The goal is to free up university money that would otherwise be spent on bandwidth costs and to keep networks more secure by keeping out viruses that may attach themselves to P2P files. The bill notes that "computer systems at colleges and universities are intended primarily to aid in educating and increase research capability among students and faculty;" clogging a campus network with BitTorrent traffic does not fall under the school's educational mandate.

The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen.

There's no guarantee that the bill will make it to a vote, of course. It has already been shunted to the House Committee on Education and Labor, and might languish there until the end of this Congressional term except for the fact that the HEA needs to be reauthorized, and soon. The HEA expires this summer, and Congress will certainly find a way to extend it yet again or fully reauthorize it, since few things look worse than cutting massive student aid programs.

Campuses have come under plenty of scrutiny in the past few weeks, with the RIAA and the MPAA calling schools out for high levels of illicit P2P usage. Individual representatives in Congress have also taken an interest in the issue; can it be long before the carrot of additional funds for security is supplemented with the stick of penalties for not addressing the problem?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...fight-p2p.html





MPAA Names its Top 25 Movie Piracy Schools
Ken Fisher

The MPAA may be gearing up for an RIAA-inspired assault on US colleges and universities. Last week the group announced its support for the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act (2007)," and MPAA head Dan Glickman said that his organization would work with school administrators to put an end to movie piracy on campuses, which Glickman says costs the industry $500 million annually.

Most telling, the group has heard the call of Representative Howard Berman and has compiled a list of the most piracy-ridden schools in higher education. This is a page straight out of the RIAA playbook. Here they are, the schools that made the MPAA's "dishonor roll" and the number of students identified as making unauthorized use of copyrighted materials:

Editor’s note: Outstanding work all, with my special emphasis for a few true standouts - Jack.

Columbia University - 1,198 - #1!

University of Pennsylvania - 934
Boston University - 891
University of California at Los Angeles - 889
Purdue University – 873 - Top 10 with both the RIAA/MPAA. Highest Ranking Overall!

Vanderbilt University - 860
Duke University - 813
Rochester Institute of Technology - 792

University of Massachusetts – 765 - Top 10 with both the RIAA/MPAA

University of Michigan - 740
University of California at Santa Cruz - 714
University of Southern California - 704
University of Nebraska at Lincoln - 637
North Carolina State University - 636
Iowa State University - 586
University of Chicago - 575
University of Rochester - 562
Ohio University – 550 - #1 with the RIAA!

University of Tennessee - 527
Michigan State University - 506
Virginia Polytechnic Institute - 457
Drexel University - 455
University of South Florida - 447
Stanford University - 405
University of California at Berkeley - 398

A number of schools have the dubious distinction of being on both the MPAA and the RIAA list. The overachievers are: Ohio University (#1 RIAA/#18 MPAA), Purdue University (#2, #5), University of Nebraska at Lincoln (#3/#13), UMASS (#6/#9), Michigan State (#7/#20), North Carolina State (#9/#14), University of South Florida (#11/#23), Boston University (#15/#3), and the University of Michigan (#18/#10). In all, 10 schools appear on both lists, and Purdue University wins the Gold Medal for highest overall ranking between the two combined.

Whether or not the MPAA will get into the trenches and follow the RIAA's pre-litigation strategy is not yet clear, and historically the MPAA has been less eager to wage a public campaign against file sharing. But like Santa, the MPAA is making a list and checking it twice... the question is, are they merely humoring Representative Berman or planning something more aggressive?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...y-schools.html





More Web Regulation Doesn't Make Any Sense
Michael Geist

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has faced seemingly continuous criticism for years, however in May 1999 it released a decision that generated near-universal praise.

The New Media Decision, which adopted a hands-off regulatory approach to new media (the CRTC's press release overstated the ruling by headlining that the "CRTC Won't Regulate the Internet"), was widely regarded as the right decision at the right time.

Since that ruling, a remarkable array of new media services – including podcasting, Internet streaming and online video sites – have emerged outside of the traditional broadcast regulation model. Despite the success, recent submissions to the CRTC suggest that a growing number of stakeholders are increasingly wary of their unregulated counterparts and may be gearing up for a fresh look at Internet regulation.

The issue began to percolate last June, when Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda asked the CRTC to conduct a six-month consultation on the effects of changing technology on the radio and television industries. The CRTC report, which was quietly released in mid-December, went almost unnoticed, yet submissions from broadcasters, copyright collectives and labour unions all point to an increased regulatory role for the CRTC.

The underlying theme of many stakeholder submissions is that unregulated new media represents a threat to the current regulated Canadian content model. For example, SOCAN, a copyright collective, implausibly argues, "Canadians have fewer Canadian programming choices available to them when they use new technologies than they do when they access conventional television and radio stations."

Based on that analysis, SOCAN argues for a reversal of the new media decision, stating that "there is no reason why those who use new technologies to broadcast content should not be subject to the Broadcasting Act's Canadian Content requirements – including Internet service providers, other new media, satellite radio and mobile television broadcast undertakings."

SOCAN is by no means alone in promoting more Internet regulation in the name of Canadian content. ACTRA, which represents more than 21,000 performers, argues that the CRTC should be "the catalyst for the commission to review its New Media Decision as early as possible."

The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting go even further, maintaining that "Canadian broadcasting policy should recognize new delivery systems such as MP3 players, satellite radio receivers, and interactive Web clients as part of the new Canadian broadcasting system. If the commission is unable or unwilling to regulate their content, it should be charged with ensuring that a percentage of the revenue they generate from the distribution of these services is circulated into the system."

While the CRTC is unlikely to join Viacom in seeking a slice of YouTube's revenues, both the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and the Canadian Conference of the Arts buck Industry Minister Maxime Bernier's emphasis on telecommunications deregulation by pointing to that industry as a potential source of revenue for Canadian cultural funding.

The broadcaster perspective surprisingly also envisions greater regulatory involvement. Although the Canadian Association of Broadcasters does not call for the re-consideration of the new media decision (it actually seeks lighter regulation for all broadcasting media), it expresses concern about the implications of Internet video – particularly streaming video from U.S. broadcasters – for the Canadian market.

The CAB seeks to recast Canadian broadcast history by maintaining that "from its very beginnings, a separate rights market has been a central objective of the Canadian broadcasting system and an underpinning of Canadian broadcasters' ability to support Canadian content."

According to the CAB, a core goal of Canadian broadcast policy has been the reliance on cheap and profitable U.S. content in order to subsidize the creation of unprofitable Canadian content.

With the growing popularity of Internet streaming, the CAB fears that U.S. broadcasters will simply stream their programming into Canada and thereby diminish the value of those programs on Canadian television networks. Indeed, all the major U.S. networks already freely stream some of their prime-time programming within the U.S., and last month NBC and News Corp., the owner of the Fox Network, unveiled plans for a YouTube competitor.

In response, the CAB seemingly wants the CRTC to erect barriers to Internet streaming, concluding that "all reasonable public policy measures and instruments will be needed to maintain the integrity of a separate and distinct Canadian program rights market."

While the CAB is right that the Internet is erasing the distinction between geographic markets and that U.S. broadcasters are likely to stream on a global basis in the near future, the likely impact on Canadian content is precisely opposite of what it suggests.

Rather than reducing the production of Canadian content, Internet streaming and new media create incentives for more Canadian productions since profitability in the emerging environment will depend upon original content that can be distributed across all platforms, old and new.

If Canadian broadcasters are unable to rely on cheap U.S. programming, they will be forced to compete by investing in their own original content. This will dramatically alter Canadian content production from one mandated by government regulation to one mandated by market survival.

It is increasingly clear that the blossoming of new media is a threat to old business models, not to Canadian content. Eight years after the CRTC's new media decision, it still stands as the right decision at the right time.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/198334





Mortimer is dead

Warner’s Digital Watchdog Widens War on Pirates
Laura M. Holson

Hollywood studios spend millions every year trying to get people to watch their movies. At Warner Brothers Entertainment, Darcy Antonellis is trying to get them to stop watching — illegally, that is.

Ms. Antonellis oversees the studio’s growing worldwide antipiracy efforts as Hollywood’s attention shifts from bootleg DVDs made in China to the problem of copyrighted television and movie clips showing up on sites like YouTube and MySpace.

While producers and celebrities garner most of the attention in Hollywood, technology executives like Ms. Antonellis are at the forefront of the industry as they try to protect the studio’s control over its content.

With movies like the “Harry Potter” series and “Ocean’s 11” franchise and television series like “Friends,” Warner has one of the largest libraries in Hollywood. As a result, it can exert more influence over its relationships with online partners, making it one of the most-watched studios both inside and outside the industry.

“People want to be more interactive and have a voice,” said Ms. Antonellis. “We need to consider all the opportunities.”

Piracy may seem like the biggest threat to Hollywood, but Ms. Antonellis suggested instead that changing consumer behavior will have a greater impact on the entertainment business.

Movie studios, like their peers in music and television, are in the midst of a significant and frightening shift as almost every form of media is becoming ubiquitous on the Internet. And through sites like YouTube, viewers have grown accustomed to seeing whatever they want to see, free.

“People thinking it is O.K. to take this stuff for free on a worldwide basis has a bigger impact than anything,” said Ms. Antonellis.

Many entertainment companies are growing impatient watching companies like YouTube distribute clips of movies and television shows free. At the same time they are concerned that YouTube earns advertising revenue from Web sites that offer pirated movies for sale on the site. Even while negotiating with YouTube, NBC Universal and Fox announced their own joint video service, and Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, which owns YouTube.

Missteps made today could have grave consequences for the future, particularly when it comes to consumers’ willingness to pay for movies and television shows online, she believes. To illustrate the point, she tells of her niece’s fish, named Mortimer, who one day leaped from his bowl, flopped on the table and gasped for air.

“Mortimer took the leap to freedom,” she said. “He said, ‘I’m free, but I’m dead,’ ” said Ms. Antonellis.

Warner and other entertainment companies are moving cautiously ahead, but their interests are divided. All want to share their content online with consumers but are, at the same time, imposing constraints that risk alienating a younger, Web-oriented audience.

On the piracy front, Ms. Antonellis said Warner has created four small teams that range from a two-person operation to nearly a dozen people in a larger group.

The teams are based in Burbank, London and Hong Kong, and most have dual roles in piracy and other Warner operations, like the legal department. Ms. Antonellis said she wanted the teams to understand both areas because “you can’t hand down policies in a vacuum. It doesn’t work.”

Warner’s emphasis shifts depending on where piracy is most rampant. As well as cracking down in countries like China, where pirated DVDs are sold on street corners for as little as $1 on the same day a movie is released, the company also works with the United States Trade Representative’s office to monitor pirated movies.

Like many studios, Warner can trace the origin of movies that have been copied using camcorders, but they are particularly aggressive on this front. Russia is particularly difficult to police because of the vast amount of money available to finance the making and sale of black market DVDs.

Recently the Hollywood studios took their case to Washington, with celebrities like Will Smith and Clint Eastwood in tow, to educate legislators on the damaging impact of piracy on their business. Ms. Antonellis was there; she is the piracy liaison for Warner to the Motion Picture Association of America, the industry’s lobbying group.

For her part, Ms. Antonellis and her team review all the deals Warner seeks, particularly those online and for distributing content over mobile phones. She has considerable sway; Warner deal makers rely on her expertise to tell them how a deal should be structured.

When it comes to YouTube, Time Warner is in a delicate position. In 2005, Google spent $1 billion for a stake in America Online, a division of Time Warner, and expanded its strategic alliance. Google bought YouTube last year.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Antonellis is conservative in her comments about the media companies’ negotiations with YouTube.

“Clearly the lawsuit has sent out a message,” she said of Viacom’s suit. “We are hopeful that social networks such as YouTube will put in place proper systems which will reflect our intellectual property and will facilitate legal offerings.”

Ms. Antonellis is the rare Hollywood executive who never planned on a studio career. The 44-year-old former college tennis pro hoped to become a journalist until, as she put it, she learned writing was not her gift. She had an aptitude for math, though. After her freshman year at Temple University, two hours from her hometown, Newark, Ms. Antonellis decided to sign up for the electrical engineering program instead.

She did not abandon her interest in news, though. She graduated in 1984 and headed to New York City where she got an engineering internship at CBS working with Chris Cookson, the chief technology officer of Warner Brothers Entertainment who was then an executive in the technical operations department of CBS. In 1988 she moved to Washington where Mr. Cookson appointed her director of Washington operations for the CBS news bureau.

“We’re the folks behind the curtain who make the broadcast look as seamless as possible,” said Ms. Antonellis.

If anything prepared Ms. Antonellis for a career in Hollywood, perhaps it was the two months she spent in Kuwait during the gulf war as director of technical operations for CBS News. Then she worked for well-known and demanding bosses, among them the news anchor Dan Rather. She was a skillful negotiator, bartering with locals for a generator to light the set. And she was quick to adapt, dressing like a military officer because women were not allowed to drive.

In Washington she was exposed to other divisions: sports, news magazines, even soap operas, which were sometimes filmed in the studio.

“One day the elevator door opened and a pot-bellied pig walked out,” said Ms. Antonellis, who has won two Emmy Awards for her technical prowess. “I thought, ‘O.K., we are doing a story on a pot-bellied pig. Do we bring him to the green room? Do we have to worry about him eating all the crudités?’ ”

She left Washington in 1991 and moved back to New York and worked in operations and engineering for CBS Sports, covering three Olympics, including the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. That same year Mr. Cookson recruited her to Warner to help with the studio’s transition to a digital world.

“We share here a belief and understanding in new technology and that consumers want to experience our movies and television shows differently,” Mr. Cookson said. “Darcy really understands the whole equation.”

Ms. Antonellis believes that the next three months will be most critical for Hollywood as the need to offer legal movies and television shows to consumers intensifies. When asked about criticism that studios aren’t moving quickly to offer content online, she pointed to a deal Warner made last year with BitTorrent, a movie-swapping site that approached the Motion Picture Association of America about selling movies legally.

“We were criticized for not being aggressive enough,” she said. “At the same time, we can’t be faulted for being radical in our approach.”

Indeed, Warner spends millions in research to understand what consumers want. And the results can be surprising. In Britain, Warner recently found that consumers there were more interested in watching feature films, as opposed to television programs, on portable devices because their commutes were twice as long.

“If we don’t encompass the last piece in our thinking — how consumers want to use content — then we are going to miss it,” said Miss Antonellis. “Just think how consumer behavior has evolved in the last two years.”

Last year Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and a director of the Walt Disney Company, announced a deal with Disney to offer movies on Apple’s video iPod. Despite that, many of Disney’s competitors remained holdouts. At the heart of the debate are the standards governing digital rights management, commonly called D.R.M. Studios want stricter rules on copying, while Mr. Jobs supports a more liberal approach, particularly with music.

“There may be opportunities down the road but we have to come to some agreement about what the offerings will be,” said Ms. Antonellis of Warner’s and Apple’s discussion. “The term D.R.M. is steeped and mired in its legacy definition. Today, call it something else. I don’t care what you call it. Get rid of it. But we need to make this work so we can get a deal.”

Ms. Antonellis may have to rely not only her technical expertise but the valuable communication skills she learned at CBS.

“Part of my responsibility is to take technology-based ideas and take it out of the techie space,” she said. “If executives look at me like I have three heads, then I’ve failed as an executive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/bu.../02warner.html





Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead
Marc Wagner

Yeah, I know it's a little early to declare the DRM 'witch' to be dead but EMI and Apple may very well put the first nail in her coffin!

Music piracy was born in the early 1970s. The cassette tape recorder was new and the Dolby B encoding (for reducing background 'hiss') was even newer. The 'state of the art' was long-playing records — made of vinyl, LP's had their own shortcomings but when new they produced surprisingly high-quality recordings. (Nearly as good as reel-to-reel tape – and far more accessible to consumers.)

Seeing the appeal of cassettes, record companies embarked on a two-tiered approach to selling music. The serious listener still bought LP's for their quality but portability made the cassette a superior choice for the 'on-the-go' consumer so the industry also sold pre-recorded cassettes of their record library. By and large, these pre-recorded cassettes were of clearly inferior sound quality.

It didn't take long to figure out that two or three people could share the cost of two LP's and a blank cassette and, using Dolby B encoding, make high-quality recordings of these brand new LP's while spending less than they would have on pre-recorded cassettes. Was this legal? Nope. But this kind of 'casual piracy' was tolerated by the music industry because they knew that high-quality reproduction was pretty-much limited to first-generation copies. With the development of the CD, in the 1980's, digitally-recorded music could be copied over-and-over with no loss of quality. Still, piracy remained 'in-check' in large part because distribution of digital music remained friend-to-friend.

Fast-forward twenty years and friends are still sharing the cost of music with their friends. The CD remains the gold standard for audio (as is the DVD for video) and the MP3 is the CD's 'lower-quality' sibling. Only now, the "CD-player" is a computer and copying a recording is as simple as copying a data file. If distribution were still friend-to-friend, the impact of this 'casual piracy' would still be small but today distribution is often peer-to-peer between computers connected to the Internet (and taking place largely without human intervention).

Unscrupulous peer-to-peer software vendors are turning their unwitting 'customers' into large-scale pirates subject to federal prosecution. What's worse, shortsighted recording companies are going after those same unwitting 'customers' instead of the real culprits — those making money off of the piracy of music (and video). Rather than embracing the distribution technology (and using it to their advantage to cut costs), the recording industry turned to DRM (digital rights management), a catch-all approach which does nothing to deter those 'pirates for profit' — yet makes enemies out of lots of paying customers.

In Steven Jobs' open letter of 6 February 2007, entitled Thoughts on Music, he points out that over 90% of the music sold today is on CD and therefore DRM-free already. So, how much impact can DRM have in stopping wholesale piracy?

NOT MUCH. After all, if most music sold is already DRM-free, piracy via peer-to-peer networks will continue to run rampant.

Is it really worth it to the recording industry to alienate so many customers by continuing to force DRM technology on us?

PROBABLY NOT. Defeating DRM today is no more difficult than defeating copy-protection schemes for software (and VCR tapes) was in the 1990's — but unlike those tools, simply possessing DRM-defeating tools is a felony, even if used legally. Forcing customers to commit a felony to use their own music in a legal fashion is not good for business. For most of us, all DRM does is alienate us by keeping us from playing our music wherever and whenever we want.

Well, things may be changing: EMI, Apple partner on DRM-free premium music. Finally, a major player in the recording industry (EMI) has decided to partner with Apple to sell DRM-free music via iTunes (granted at a premium price). To sweeten the pot for the premium price, Apple and EMI will distribute DRM-free music which was recorded at a higher bit-rate of 256Kbps.

Thanks EMI (and Apple) for recognizing that customer needs and desires are legitimate. It's time for the rest of the members of the RIAA to come on board. And its time for your congressmen and mine to repeal those portions of the DCMA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which criminalize the use of DRM-circumventing technologies when doing so does not infringe upon the copyright holder.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4770





Hoping to Move Guitar Notations Into the Legal Sunshine
Bob Tedeschi

IF budding guitarists fail to master “Stairway to Heaven” in the coming months, they can no longer blame the music publishers.

Because of an agreement in March between MusicNotes, an online music publisher and the Harry Fox Agency, which represents 31,000 music publishers, guitar tablature — a popular system for teaching and learning guitar — will enter the legitimate business realm for the first time.

Last year popular sites like Olga.net, MxTabs.net and others — where users post tablature, usually called “guitar tabs,” for rock songs — suspended operations after the music publishing industry threatened them with copyright infringement lawsuits. Under the new initiative, MxTabs, which is owned by MusicNotes, will share an undisclosed portion of advertising revenue with music publishers, who in turn will give a portion to artists.

The effort could face a chicken-or-egg problem, in that publishers may balk if they do not see enough potential for advertising revenue, and advertisers may balk if publishers do not free enough of their music to attract a big audience. Advertising analysts suggest the revenue could be significant, but even a little is better than none.

“It’s a huge opportunity, in that this is a revenue stream publishers haven’t had before,” said Gary L. Churgin the chief executive of Harry Fox Agency. “In a sense, the sky’s the limit.”

The initiative is still in the early stages, and Mr. Churgin has not yet formally asked publishers if they would like to participate. Artists are even less familiar with the agreement.

Still, Mr. Churgin said, he has not yet encountered resistance. “We’re a step and a half away from knowing how much it will be embraced,” he said. “But the informal feedback we’ve gotten since the announcement has been enthusiastic.”

Irwin Z. Robinson, chief executive of Famous Music, Viacom’s music publishing division, said: “This gives us, for the first time, the opportunity to get something that’s been given away or stolen for all these years. I’m very positive about it.”

Mr. Robinson, whose company represents Linda Perry, a songwriter for Christina Aguilera and Pink among others, said that about 2 percent of the songs in the company’s catalog have licensed guitar tablature associated with them.

For the remaining songs in Famous Music’s catalog — and the vast majority of the music publishing industry’s collective catalog — there is insufficient demand to justify the costs of publishing tablature.

As a result, guitarists who want to know how to play less mainstream songs have gone to sites where amateurs post tablature. Under this agreement, MusicNotes, publishers and artists will essentially earn money from an army of volunteers, who are creating content that the publishers are not creating on their own.

Tim Reiland, chairman and chief financial officer of MusicNotes, which is based in Madison, Wis., said publishers would receive “a very healthy split” of the advertising dollars.

“We’ve got lots of work here to get the publishers signed up, but we think they should,” Mr. Reiland said. “We think it’s a good deal.”

MusicNotes bought MxTabs.net, one of the most popular guitar tablature sites, last year as it came under legal attack by music publishers. Publishers claimed that even incorrect versions of music notation violate copyright laws, since the postings represent “derivative works” related to the original compositions, to use the legal parlance.

The guitar tablature sites were typically small operations, running on little more than revenue gleaned from Google text ads. Many shut down rather than challenge the publishers in court. (Ultimate-Guitar.com, which has a New Jersey phone number but claims that it is based in Russia and that it complies with Russian copyright laws, still operates. Its advertisers include AOL, T-Mobile and Dell, among others.)

Mr. Reiland said MxTabs has more than 100,000 tabs in its files. Those tabs will remain under wraps until the site’s re-emergence this summer — assuming his company can clear at least 50,000 of those tabs with publishers. “We’d have to have at least that many to make it a good experience for the customer,” he said.

Mr. Reiland and Kathleen Marsh, the chief executive of MusicNotes, are now making plans to sell advertising. That is a new realm for the company, since it has subsisted until now on fees charged to users for downloading sheet music and a small number of guitar tablatures generated by publishing houses.

Ms. Marsh said the site “already has a lot of interest” from advertisers. “This demographic — teenage boys to young adults — is very similar to the demographic for gaming. There are a lot of advertisers who are interested in that group.”

Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst with Forrester Research, said tablature sites could also join other online publishers and anonymously track the Internet travels of their users. The budding guitar players might somehow show that they were shopping for a car, for instance, or other expensive goods. Suddenly, she said, “these users are really valuable targets for sellers of all kinds.”

Lauren Keiser, the president of the Music Publishers’ Association, and the chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York, said he would offer the MusicNotes proposal to his board this month to gauge their reaction. “As a publisher, I want to see this baby walk,” he said. “And we’ll see. There might be a whole bunch of other deals coming out of this.”

Representatives from Ultimate-Guitar did not respond to calls seeking comment. Cathal Woods, the director of Olga, wrote via e-mail that he had, in the past, approached Harry Fox, the Music Publishers’ Association and the National Music Publishers’ Association with similar business deals.

Those groups “have always rejected out-of-hand any requests about licensing,” Mr. Woods wrote. “I’m somewhat surprised by this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/te...gy/02ecom.html





Sports Organizations' New Event: Guarding Online Revenue
Doreen Carvajal

When the Pan American Games start in Brazil in July, thousands of top athletes will run, wrestle and leap, but they will not be able to indulge in one popular daily exercise: blogging.

Neither will their physicians, coaches or massage therapists, in a blanket ban affecting some 7,000 people during two weeks of competition ending July 29 in Rio de Janeiro.

That rule may make some participants wince in virtual pain, but it reflects a spreading trend among international sports institutions to impose vigorous controls over the online use of game information and photographs.

In February, a dispute broke out between the International Rugby Board and the World Association of Newspapers over new restrictions that will be imposed during the Rugby World Cup, which starts in Paris in September.

In return for Rugby Cup press credentials, the rugby board is limiting the number of game photos that can be published in online news sites during competition. It is also demanding that headlines not be superimposed over photographs, a rule designed to protect corporate sponsors like Heineken and Toshiba.

"We're not being draconian," said Greg Thomas, head of communications for the International Rugby Board, which is based in Dublin. "It's just in some instances we need to protect ourselves if people step over the mark. This is just in case we feel an organization is doing something untoward, such as blatantly putting something over the background where it obscures obviously our sponsors, who are keen to get as much exposure as they can."

The Rugby Cup's executives argue that they are "unashamedly" guarding potential revenue during an expansion period for the sport. But critics have argued that sports institutions are also seizing more power to manage and burnish their images.

"There's a natural trend among sports organizations to expand their territory," said Jens Sejer Andersen, director of Play the Game, a nonprofit sports ethics research group in Denmark. "This is normal for any business that tries to expand its control of the market. But it goes to the core of the functioning of the independent media in our society. The danger is that no real discussion about events on and off the sports field can take place, reducing us to millions of passive sports-consuming robots."

Since the late 1990s, tensions about online publication of game photos has often surfaced in connection with the media credentials issued by the sports authorities. These authorities wield the power to grant journalists access to photograph games, provided the journalists abide by rules that are constantly evolving with the development of online news sites.

In the United States in 1997, for instance, the National Football League threatened to revoke the press credentials for The Florida Times-Union if the paper failed to sign waiver forms barring it from posting photographs of Jacksonville Jaguar games on its Web site. The Times-Union countered by warning that it would not cover the Jaguars, and the dispute sputtered out.

This form of saber rattling has continued since then, from big game to big game, with news organizations and sports institutions loath to press the issue in court and instead relying on alternative forms of leverage.

In 2004, for example, British newspapers countered efforts by the dominant English Premier soccer league to seek more control over the online use of sports photos by shunning game shots that showed the logos of sponsors like Coca-Cola and Barclays.

Last year, the World Association of Newspapers also successfully challenged FIFA, the international soccer association, by approaching top sponsors to complain about proposed restrictions on the use of game photos - a tactic that is now an option in its current dispute with rugby officials.

"Sports organizations are taking a much harder view on limiting access for commercial gain, and it's not isolated," said Larry Kilman, a spokesman for the newspaper association, an industry group with 18,000 members, based in Paris. "They look at each other to see what each is doing.

"We don't have any objection to their licensing agreements and the exclusive rights that they provide to broadcasters." he continued. "But we think that these restrictions are not needed and they're being overly cautious."

At stake for big-league sports organizers is the potential revenue they could reap through new forms of media. The International Rugby Board, for instance, chose to limit the online publication of still photographs to five for each half of the game - in part because it wanted to protect the exclusivity of its own subscription-based "match tracker," which features game commentary online along with a running assortment of still photographs.

For similar reasons, the authorities of the Pan American Games wanted to protect the exclusivity of their events by barring athletes from blogging or "vlogging" with audio or video content. Eloyza Guardia, a spokeswoman for the organizers, said they were simply following the lead of the International Olympic Committee.

A similar ban was imposed during the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006. Emmanuelle Moreau, a spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland, said the organization was still gathering opinions about a new policy that will be drawn up in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing next year.

Typically, there is a divide on this issue between dominant sports organizations and lesser-known competitions that are trying to build audiences. The America's Cup sailing match, which starts April 16 in Valencia, Spain, attracts less television coverage than some international events and is placing no restrictions on blogging and is allowing liberal use of still photos; a maximum of three pictures per minute can appear online. The Volvo Ocean Race last year actually required its sailors to blog.

Jeff Bukantz, captain of the U.S. fencing team, which is bound for the Pan American Games, was unaware until recently that competition blogging was banned.

In 2004, he published a running personal commentary when he was captain of the U.S. Olympic fencing team, which won a gold medal. He describes athlete blogging in general as a cathartic outlet for pressured competitors to release pent-up thoughts and feelings.

"Our athletes will abide by whatever the local rules are," he said, but he called the blogging ban "shocking."

"It's certainly an egregious form of censorship," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/01/news/sports.php





Canada to Trademark 'Winter' for 2010 Olympics
Ian Austen

The Winter Olympics are coming to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2010, and the Canadian team is boasting that it will "own the podium." If a bill before the Canadian Parliament is passed, the organizers of those games will own something even more rarefied: the trademark on the word "winter."

With little fanfare, the Canadian government recently introduced legislation that breaks with conventional trademark law and would grant the Vancouver organizing committee rights to "winter" and a long list of other common words, among them: "gold," "silver," "medals," "sponsor," "games," "21st," "2010," as well as the name of the host city itself. The legislation would also give the committee special enforcement powers.

The measure is part of a worldwide effort by the brand-conscious International Olympic Committee to thwart what it calls "ambush campaigns," sports-themed advertising during the Olympics by companies that are not Olympic sponsors.

Other countries, including Britain, have passed similar legislation. But in Canada, the plan has met with criticism from those who dislike the notion of common words becoming private property, even temporarily. The law would expire at the end of 2010.

Under the proposed law, marketers would infringe on the new trademarks only if they used the protected words in certain combinations. For instance, "gold medals," or "Vancouver 2010." (Journalists are exempted from the law.)

"It's highly problematic," said Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who first raised criticisms of the proposed law. "It creates the prospect of a David and Goliath fight over free speech."

Doug Clark, the director of patent policy at Industry Canada, a government department, said the measures are part of a Canadian government promise to the Olympic committee "to ensure protection for the Olympic brand and to prevent ambush advertising."

When asked why the government was not offering to outlaw ambush advertising for other large, limited-time events like concerts, Clark replied: "Rock concerts are not publicly subsidized events. Rock concerts do not cost $2.45 billion."

The law would also allow the organizing committee, a private group, to act like a government agency when it comes to enforcement. That means it would be able to obtain a court injunction without proving that an infringement of its trademark for, say, "winter games," has caused it "undue harm."

A lawmaker, Scott Brison, of the opposition Liberal Party, said that he would seek to modify the bill, particularly focusing on its inclusion of common words.

"Generally we support protecting the Olympic brand," Brison said. "But we are concerned that any proposed remedy is absolutely defensible and does not unduly compromise the rights of citizens and individual businesses."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...s/olympics.php





'Children of Men' HD DVD Hits Xbox 360 Playback Snag?

We've received numerous reader reports that Universal's new 'Children of Men' HD DVD is a bit of lemon for some Xbox 360 owners, due to incompatibility problems with the console's HD DVD add-on drive.

'Children of Men' hit stores earlier this week on March 27, as one of the most highly-anticipated HD DVD releases on the format thus far, and as our Kenneth Brown wrote in his recent review of the disc, it apparently boasts stellar video and audio. Unfortunately, more than a few Xbox 360 owners have had issues playing it on the device's popular HD DVD add-on drive, with many of our readers writing in to say that the disc simply won't play, and that even multiple returns of the disc have produced the same issue.

When testing the disc out on our own Xbox 360 add-on HD DVD drive, we had the same results -- the disc spins in the tray, but is seemingly unrecognized by the system. A black screen and a reboot threw us back to the Microsoft Dashboard menu regardless of how many times we continued to try and load the film. We tried this dic on another Xbox 360 and found the same problem. Strangely, that tryout was even more unsuccessful -- we didn't even make it to a black screen, it simply spun the disc longer than usual and remained at the Dashboard menu.

We should note that since word of these issues first emerged, readers have also written in to say that the disc plays back fine on their Xbox 360 devices, while others have reported playback problems with the disc on Toshiba's XA2 player (we had no such issues on our XA2).

We've contacted both Microsoft and Universal, but have not yet received any official word on whether it is a hardware problem, a software problem, or both.

We'll certainly keep you posted as soon as official word comes in. In the meantime, we've set up a dedicated thread in our Forums area to discuss playback problems with 'Children of Men' on the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive.

Stay tuned...
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/552





First AACS Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Key Revoked
Thomas Charron

"An update posted for Intervideo WinDVD 8 confirms that it's AACS key has been possibly revoked. WinDVD 8 is the software which had it's device key compromised, allowing unfettered access to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content, resulting in HD movies being made available via many torrent sites online. This is possibly the first known key revocation which has taken place, and little is known of the actual process used for key revocation. According to the release, 'Please be aware that failure to apply the update will result in AACS-protected HD DVD and BD playback being disabled,' which pretty much confirms that the key revocation has already taken place for all newly released Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs."
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/07/1417253





Usenet Server to Return Shortly
Thomas Mennecke

For some, a day without Usenet (the newsgroups) might as well be a day without oxygen. The newsgroups have become an important aspect of the file-sharing community, challenging heavyweights such as BitTorrent and eDoneky2000 as the most resourceful mediums of information. However, Usenet’s more centralized nature is more susceptible to widespread failure - and as UseNet Server (UNS) customers have discovered, has resulted a sporadic newsgroup blackout for the last day.

The situation arose on March 28, when a 250 amp breaker protecting one of UNS primary distribution units failed. That alone only caused a short outage, however the failure of the breaker snowballed into additional problems. According to UNS, “when the breaker failed only one phase of the breaker went out, leaving two phases on-line. The failure resulted in the supply cables to overheat and compromise their integrity. Our electricians have strongly recommended that we replace all three 150 feet (each) of the supply lines.” What was predicted to be a several hour delay slowly migrated into a massive quandary. Replacement of the main power wires began on April 2nd.

Being these are the main power leads to UNS’ server farm, the replacement of these heavy gauge wires required their service to go off line. Additionally, the difficulty in replacing the wires required downtime of up to two days. Although going two days without newsgroup access may be considered a tragedy to some, the repairs should ensure trouble-free service – at least with respect to UNS’ power supply. Two days later, it appears progress is being made, and UNS’ service will be incrementally restored within two hours.

"The work is almost complete now,” a representative of UNS posted on the Slyck forums. “They have finished pulling the old cable out which is the hardest and most time consuming portion. They just completed the new wire run and are now terminating the new wire on the PDU (power distribution units) and break panels. In about 2 hours we should be able to let customers back in. When we turn back up we will slow allow more connections so users will likely see 'connection refused' errors for up to an hour after we get the system back online.”
http://www.slyck.com/story1452.html





New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone
Louise Story

It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.

In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.

“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.

In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.

Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the United States, but cellphones in the States do not come with the necessary software. For now, consumers have to download the technology themselves.

Still, big advertising and technology companies like Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe, an advertising conglomerate, are pushing to popularize the technology here.

Until now, in most parts of the world, Web surfing has been separate from everyday activities like riding the train, watching television and driving. But the new technology may erode that distinction.

“You’ve picked up this product, and you don’t want to go back to your PC,” said Tim Kindberg, a senior research at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. “Or you’re outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.’ ”

In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people’s sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.

“Everything in the physical world has information related to it somewhere electronically, including yourself and the desk you’re sitting in,” said Chas Fritz, chief executive of NeoMedia Technologies, a company developing these cellphone capacities.

The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens.

American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.

There are other technologies being developed for consumers to scan objects, including radio waves, computer chips or satellite location systems, but the bar code technology is the most developed — and simple and cheap enough even for individuals to publish them on printed materials or on Web sites.

But Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe are meeting for the second time with cellphone companies in May to advocate for the technology. Technology companies like Motorola and Microsoft have also been researching uses for the codes.

In Japan, the codes did not become mainstream until the largest cellphone companies started loading the code readers on all new phones a few years ago. Now, millions of people have the capability built into their phones, and businesses, in turn, are using them all over — on billboards, street signs, published materials and even food packaging.

In the late 1990s, several dozen start-up companies tried to create devices that would scan print content and ads and then reveal extra information to the reader. But consumers balked at using a special device only to interact with publications.

But now the time seems right for cellphones, ubiquitous and increasingly sold with cameras, to be pressed into service as the scanners.

“There are three things you tend to carry — your keys, your wallet and your phone,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief executive of Denuo, a unit of the Publicis Groupe that focuses on emerging and future technologies. “I can see something in advertising in one place, scan it with my phone and recall it later when I am shopping. Or, imagine, I can buy it using my phone.”

About a third of the 84 million households with cellphones in the United States have phones that have cameras on them, according to Forrester Research, and that number is expected to grow as consumers replace their phones. But few people with those phones have downloaded the software to read the codes.

In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it. Supermarkets stick them on meat and egg packaging to give expiration dates and even the names of the farmers who produced them.

One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets.

Yasuko Nishigai, 22, used her cellphone recently to buy a ticket from Tokyo to the Japanese tropical island of Okinawa. To board her flight, she waved the code on her cellphone screen over a scanner.

“I didn’t use a single piece of paper, just my phone,” she said.

The codes are “a natural extension of print,” said Nina Link, the president of the Magazine Publishers Association. “How many times have you engaged with a magazine and you’ve seen something and you’ve said, ‘Boy, I’d really like to remember to get that information.’ And you have to remember to write down the URL.”

The new technology would allow phones to read the codes from computer screens, too. Commuters rushing out the door could scan Web sites on their computer screens with their phones to take the content with them. MySpace users could put a code on their personal pages, so that their friends can quickly transfer the profiles to their phones.

The technology would also allow advertisers to do something they could never effectively do before: monitor the impact of their ads in old media like magazines and billboards by measuring how often their codes are clicked.

In the Philippines, the Daily Philippines newspaper has run ads with the codes. In Britain, News Group Newspapers, the division of the News Corporation that includes newspapers like The Sun, is testing the codes along with some of its sports articles. Readers can scan the code in the newspaper and then see videos relating to the article. Similarly, Economie Matin, a magazine in France, is testing the codes.

In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters. The publisher Prentice Hall is including the codes in a new marketing textbook for undergraduates so that they can get updates on case studies using the codes.

Executives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint declined to say whether they were in discussions with the companies that make the code reading technology. Bar code companies said the carriers stood to benefit from the codes because they might encourage consumers to add Internet service plans to their accounts and spend more time on their phones.

The wireless companies have other options to help cellphones interact with the physical world. They could, for instance, adopt image recognition software, which would allow phones to recognize anything — a Coca-Cola can, for example — and deliver related messages. Or, text messaging, currently the most common way that advertisers interact with consumers on their phones, has many advertiser applications.

Advertisers have also experimented with Bluetooth wireless devices and radio frequency identification to beam messages from billboards to consumers’ cellphones, but those technologies are more expensive than the codes.

Even if the wireless companies adopt the bar codes, they will have several formats to choose from. The most widely used ones have names like Semacode, QR Code and Qode.

Getting consumers to use new technologies like these codes takes a lot of marketing by the carriers, said David Oberholzer, associate director of content programming at Verizon Wireless. He said Verizon is just starting to profit from the work it did to create interest in text messaging.

“The consumer needs a reason to do it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode, a bar code company. “They don’t just wake up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go scan some bar codes.’ ”

Martin Fackler contributed reporting from Tokyo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/business/01code.html





Solar Power Breakthrough at Massey
Mervyn Dykes

New solar cells developed by Massey University don't need direct sunlight to operate and use a patented range of dyes that can be impregnated in roofs, window glass and eventually even clothing to produce power.

This means teenagers could one day be wearing jackets that will recharge their equivalents of cellphones, iPods and other battery- driven devices.

The breakthrough is a development of the university's Nanomaterials Research Centre and has attracted world-wide interest already - particularly from Australia and Japan.

Researchers at the centre have developed a range of synthetic dyes from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature, where light-harvesting pigments are used by plants for photosynthesis.

"This is a proof-of-concept cell," said researcher Wayne Campbell, pointing to a desktop demonstration model.

"Within two to three years we will have developed a prototype for real applications. "The technology could be sold off already, but it would be a shame to get rid of it now."

The key to everything is the ability of the synthetic dyes to pass on the energy that reaches them - something that mere coloured water could not do.

"We now have the most efficient porphyrin dye in the world," said the centre's director, Ashton Partridge.

"It is the most efficient ever made. While others are doing related work, in this aspect we are the world leaders."

The development of the dyes has taken about 10 years and was accomplished with funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand for fundamental work and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology in the later stages.

Now the team is seeking extra funding to go commercial.

"This particular technology does not require the large infrastructure required for silicon chips and the like," said Professor Partridge. It lends itself to being taken up by local and New Zealand industries.

Other dyes being tested in the cells are based on haemoglobin, the compound that gives blood its colour.

Dr Campbell said that unlike silicone-based solar cells, the dye- based cells are still able to operate in low-light conditions, making them ideal for cloudy climates.

They are also more environmentally friendly because they are made from titanium dioxide - an abundant and non-toxic, white mineral available from New Zealand's black sand.

Titanium dioxide is used already in consumer products such as toothpaste, white paints and cosmetics.

"The refining of silicon, although a very abundant mineral, is energy- hungry and very expensive," he said.

Professor Partridge said the next step was to take the dyes and incorporate them in roofing materials, tinted window glass and wall panels where they could generate electricity for home owners.

The aim was to develop a solar cell that could convert as much sunlight as possible to electricity.

"The energy that reaches Earth from sunlight in one hour is more than that used by all human activities in one year."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4017784a13.html





Can the Star Maker Make Himself a Star?
Kelefa Sanneh

TIMBALAND is not an invisible man — not exactly. He has released four major-label albums, none a big hit but all respectfully received. He tried to become a music mogul by starting his own label, Beat Club, which didn’t take off. For years he has popped up in music videos: hiding in the shadows of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody,” haunting Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” He has popped up on albums too, murmuring encouragement to Missy Elliott or seconding Jay-Z’s boasts.

But he has spent much of the last decade hidden in plain sight, his name buried in the liner notes. He long ago established himself as the most exciting producer in pop music, a composer who has changed the way rappers and singers — and their fans — think about rhythm. It’s no exaggeration to compare him to James Brown, another rhythm fanatic who found new possibilities in old grooves. The only difference: James Brown was a bona fide star.

Timbaland has never seemed very comfortable in front of the camera, and collaborators have occasionally complained about his gruff mixing-board-side manner. Nonetheless over the last year or two he has redoubled his efforts to achieve pop stardom, even if he’s not well suited for it. He has been writing himself into the hit songs he produces, turning his clients into duet partners. He spars with Justin Timberlake on “SexyBack” and “My Love” and flirts awkwardly with Nelly Furtado on “Promiscuous” and with the Pussycat Dolls on “Wait a Minute.”

All this has been building up to the release, on Tuesday, of “Timbaland Presents Shock Value” (Mosley Music Group/Interscope), his fifth album and his most ambitious. Timbaland now has more clout than ever. Over his sharp and twitchy beats, teen heartthrobs sound daring, established pop stars sound hip, rough rappers sound radio-friendly. “Shock Value” proves that just about everyone returns his phone calls. The guest list ranges from Fall Out Boy to Elton John, from Dr. Dre to 50 Cent. And for the first single, “Give It to Me,” he delivers a verse alongside Mr. Timberlake and Ms. Furtado.

Nowadays a real star needs a real feud, so Timbaland used “Give It to Me” to vent long-simmering frustration with Scott Storch, the Miami-based producer (and, before a rift, a Timbaland collaborator) who has emerged as a hitmaker in his own right. “I’m a real producer and you just the piano man,” Timbaland sneers, and those two words, “real producer,” suggest a whole constellation of claims and paradoxes. How can some guy who plays the piano compare himself to Timbaland, who ... wait, what exactly does he do again?

Ever since there have been pop stars, there have been people charged with making them sound their best; these people soon realized that working in a recording studio could be a musical job, not just a mechanical one. But often being a producer meant being a bandleader: Phil Spector worked with the musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and Norman Whitfield worked with the Funk Brothers.

As electronic production took over, the process of music-making got more abstract, and it got harder for a nonexpert to figure out exactly what tools a producer was using. (Although we’re all pretty sure computers are involved.) It has become much easier to see the product — the star, the video, the live performance — and much harder to picture the process. Producers who want to be players in the image-driven world of pop music have to find ways to fight off obscurity.

In hip-hop the answer is simple: Start rapping. That’s what Dr. Dre did (effectively), and what Kanye West did (brilliantly). You can create an outrageous character for yourself, as Lil Jon has done; no doubt many listeners don’t realize that the doofus with the pimp cup is also a first-rate knob-twiddler. Or you can demand attention in other ways. The New Orleans-raised hip-hop producer Mannie Fresh appends a ridiculous — and attention-getting — announcement to every song he produces. (“Yo! Rednecks, coloreds, Asians, Africans, Ethiopians, whatever you is: It’s your boy, Freshly Snipes, ya heard?”) Even if the song circulates on MP3, with no liner notes attached, there can be no mistaking who made it.

Timbaland, 35, was born Timothy Mosley in Norfolk, Va., and he spent about a decade as a D.J. and fledgling producer. He broke through in 1996, the year he produced Ginuwine’s space-age mating call, “Pony,” and Aaliyah’s live come-on, “If Your Girl Only Knew” The next year he produced “Supa Dupa Fly,” the dazzling debut album from Ms. Elliott, an old high school friend.

Also in 1997 Timbaland made his full-length rapping debut when he joined with the Virginia rapper Magoo to release the album “Welcome to Our World.” It was a modest success, and though it didn’t turn either man into an A-list rapper, it was a sleek showcase for Timbaland’s signature style: heavy, indolent beats enlivened by skittering syncopation. (Like James Brown before him, he found a way to emphasize the downbeat, not the backbeat.) Then as now Timbaland was a rapper whose main subject was producing: “It’s time to change my style/My rhythm, my ism, my prism, my beat mannerism.”

Since then Timbaland has never stopped making hits, although some years were better than others. (The year of Ms. Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” 2001, was one triumphant year; 2006 was another.) And as part of his long campaign for visibility he never stopped making albums, all of which have included at least a fistful of breathtaking tracks. His 1998 solo debut, “Tim’s Bio: From the Motion Picture: Life From Da Bassment,” was fidgetier and more severe than his earlier work. (It also introduced the world to a young rapper billed as “Ludichris.”)

His next album with Magoo, “Indecent Proposal,” from 2001, scrambled influences and rhythms and samples: fluttering tabla drums here, a smudgy house track there. And in 2003 the two released “Under Construction Part II,” a sequel of sorts to Ms. Elliott’s “Under Construction”; it was full of sparse, drum-driven dance music.

Throughout, the common lyrical theme was frustration: Timbaland complained that he wasn’t being given his due. No doubt most producers feel this way, including Timbaland’s current antagonist, Mr. Storch. In “Built Like That,” his rather lame response to Timbaland’s “Give It to Me,” Mr. Storch takes credit for Mr. Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” (Mr. Storch is listed as one of three songwriters, alongside Timbaland and Mr. Timberlake; he isn’t listed as a co-producer but does receive a credit for playing keyboards.) He also mentions Timbaland’s protégé Nate Hills, known as Danja, who is emerging as a first-rate producer with a knack for melody. (He helped produce five of these songs, including “Give It to Me,” and produced one himself.)

Mr. Storch raps, “Your boy Danja got to hate you with a passion, man/He makes the hits while you taking all the credit, damn.” It’s inevitable, perhaps, that a beef between producers would devolve into a squabble over liner notes.

In any case Timbaland wins this round, not just because of his decadelong track record but also because “Give It to Me” sounds so much better than “Built Like That.” It’s an instantly addictive song built from a muscular rhythm and a few well-placed synthesizer notes. And Timbaland’s half-rapped, half-sung verse fits snugly between Ms. Furtado’s spooky segment (she always sounds as if she’s just seen a ghost) and Mr. Timberlake’s boyish taunts.

Not every collision on “Shock Value” works this well, but all of them are worth hearing, even for those perverse people who don’t consider themselves Timbaland fanatics. “The Way I Are,” featuring Keri Wilson and D.O.E., is a swirling electronic come-on. “Oh Timbaland,” the album’s only true solo track, is built from a playful piano loop, menacing syncopations and strobed synthesizers. (He’s obsessed with this last technique right now; you can hear it in Mr. Timberlake’s “My Love” and in Omarion’s “Icebox.”)

Even more intriguing are his experiments with rock, which dominate the album’s second half. “One & Only,” the Fall Out Boy collaboration, must be the most futuristic emo song ever: Timbaland creates a breakneck rock ’n’ roll backbeat and then, after the second chorus, shifts to half time, changing the rhythm while keeping most of the sounds the same. “Apologize” showcases One Republic, a young band based in Los Angeles; Timbaland’s hissing counterrhythms turn a handsome rock ballad into something even better.

Inevitably, there are times when this CD feels more like a compilation, and times when Timbaland goes overboard trying to prevent that. Elton John’s appearance comes at the end, in a song called “2 Man Show.” He doesn’t sing, he only plays piano, but Timbaland goes out of his way to remind listeners who they’re listening to. “Come on, Elton,” he keeps saying. Doesn’t he trust us to read the liner notes?

Maybe not, and who can blame him? In an age when songs are often mislabeled or unlabeled or sold without production information (as often happens at the iTunes shop), liner notes themselves are starting to seem obsolete. One day Timbaland will get his box set, including all the hits but also the shoulda-been-hits, by Brandy and Ms. Jade and Petey Pablo and — well, it’s a long list. In the meantime you can’t blame him for seeking the spotlight any way he can. Unlike Mr. West, Timbaland will never be mesmerizing on the microphone, and so he’ll probably never be an old-fashioned star. But maybe he’s a new-fashioned star: a spectral one.

Even when he doesn’t have the microphone, Timbaland often overshadows whoever does. He’s not one of those musical therapists who make singers sound more like themselves. On the contrary, he prides himself on challenging his clients. They have to find a way to work around his weird beats. (Many of his productions don’t really make sense until you hear them a few times; he loves songs that sound wrong at first.) His music isn’t predictable, but it’s definitely recognizable. In that sense he’s among the most assertive pop producers of all time.

“Shock Value” includes a track called “Bounce,” featuring Ms. Elliott, Mr. Timberlake and Dr. Dre. There’s a heavy downbeat that almost sabotages the rapped verses; you can feel some syncopation, but you can’t quite hear it. And then, at the end, everything stops. All that’s left is a looped hiccupping sound — the syncopation you thought you had imagined. It had been there the whole time, pushing the track forward, mischievously throwing the rappers off balance. And once you’ve heard it clear, it’s impossible to ignore. Everything else about the song seems like an afterthought; that tricky little rhythm is the star.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/ar...ic/01sann.html





If at First You Don’t Succeed, Write a Check
Randall Stross

SIX months ago, Microsoft stood in front of the world and rather bravely stated the question on everyone else’s mind: Why on earth does the world need another search engine?

Before supplying the answer, the company acknowledged in full-page advertisements that, yes, it was late to the game, and, yes, it was confronting the prospect of “becoming a footnote in search history.” But it had decided to forge ahead and “write a few new chapters.”

It cast the competition — read: Google — as eggheads whose “complicated mathematical equations” retrieve all too many results, which overwhelm the average user. Microsoft’s copywriters boasted that its employees had developed entirely new ways to filter and display search results that would set its service clearly apart. It could not resist adding that those new features had been developed, in part, by those who “didn’t even pass calculus. Imagine that.”

Nowhere outside of a high school lunchroom would this pass as biting criticism. But Microsoft deserves credit for trying to compete on the basis of the intrinsic quality of the search experience. The tag line for this campaign was: “Algorithm. Meet Humanity.”

Microsoft would soon learn, however, that those amusingly incomprehensible mathematical equations used by Google produced a search engine that grew ever stronger. While the quality of results among different search engines is hard to judge objectively, Google enjoys the benefits of a network effect. Its software is tuned to learn from the clicks of its users, and the more users it attracts, the smarter the software evolves, the more users are drawn in, and on the virtuous cycle revolves. Humanity. Meet Algorithm.

In that matchup, algorithm wins. Google had a 50 percent share of searches in the United States in October 2006, while Yahoo had 24 percent, and Microsoft, 9 percent, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The most recent data, for February of this year, show that Microsoft had climbed a bit, to a 9.6 percent share, but that Google had jumped much farther ahead, to 56 percent. (Yahoo’s executives had something to ponder, too: its share slipped by three points.)

Watching your principal competitor widen its lead with organic growth, unaided by advertising, makes you receptive to trying something else — anything else. Microsoft has decided that the search business needs a sort of “frequent flier” rewards program to attract and hold on to users: Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search.

John Battelle broke the story last month on his Searchblog. Adam Sohn, director of global sales and marketing for Windows Live, confirmed that Microsoft would pay large companies $2 to $10 a user annually — the more searches, the larger the bounty earned — in credits that can be used for Microsoft products and training services.

“We’re the underdogs in this business,” Mr. Sohn acknowledged. Breaking users of their inclination to use what he called “the incumbent” — he would not use the “G” word if he could help it — requires a willingness to depart from standard practice, and to weather sniping from outside critics. “There’s always controversy when anyone tries something new,” he said.

Microsoft is seeking 30 companies, each with at least 5,000 PCs, who are willing to sign up and install on employees’ computers a small program — a “browser helper object” — that will count the number of searches performed with Microsoft Live Search.

The notion that a lagging search engine would offer monetary incentives directly to end users is not wholly new. A year ago, Yahoo appeared to be readying a rewards program for its search users that would be offered first to Yahoo Mail customers. A Yahoo survey, asking what would entice e-mail customers to designate Yahoo as their primary search engine, offered ideas like five free music downloads a month, a discount to Netflix, or 250 frequent-flier miles each month that could be transferred to most major airline mileage programs.

After completing the survey, Yahoo decided not to start the service. Whether it had discovered that its own e-mail customers withheld enthusiasm for the idea of making Yahoo their default search engine is not known. A company spokeswoman last week declined to discuss the survey or the subsequent decision to abort the plans for a rewards program.

Microsoft also tested the idea of rewarding search users last year, when its MSN unit put up a promotional Web site, “MSN Search and Win,” which provided instant prizes ranging from a Starbucks gift certificate to a Panasonic high-definition television. The promotion lasted about five months and, according to Mr. Sohn, “drove tens of millions of queries and for a relatively small amount of money.”

Both Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN were thinking about the problem of customer acquisition in the same way. But Microsoft’s new program brings an entirely new approach to acquiring customers: buying them at wholesale, instead of retail. Microsoft need only persuade the I.T. department in order to achieve broad adoption at a large company, rather than slogging, cubicle by cubicle, to win loyalty one employee at a time. If the employees prove recalcitrant and continue to use “the incumbent,” that will be for I.T. to handle.

Microsoft, stuck in distant third place and losing ground to the leader with every lap, should realize that the airlines’ frequent-flier programs may not work well as a model for the software business. Mara Lederman, an assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto who has closely studied the airlines’ programs, said one feature that has been essential to their popularity among business travelers is that customers earn the rewards but do not pay for the product — their employers do.

“If the fare for your preferred airline is $100 more, you don’t care because you don’t pay,” she said. “You just want the points because you want to take the family to Hawaii.”

In the case of search, who pays isn’t an issue because the price is zero. But under Microsoft’s program, Professor Lederman said, “there’s no reward going directly to the individual carrying out the search.” She predicted that employers would have to take an active role, offering monetary incentives or applying administrative pressure, in order to obtain the desired outcome of full participation of the work force.

Airlines have benefited from another feature: frequent-flier awards are more alluring than they deserve to be. The frequent-flier programs give away only empty seats, which is why the actual cost of the rewards is exceedingly cheap. (That’s also why it’s hard to redeem your miles for any flight that doesn’t leave at 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.) “Microsoft does not seem to understand this,” Professor Lederman said.

IF Microsoft has determined that it is futile to compete with Google head-to-head, and if, as seems to be the case, it is willing to cast dignity aside and adopt marketing gimmicks in an attempt to gain market share, why stop at half measures? Why not go all the way, as iWon.com has done ever since its founding in 1999? That portal, which includes a search service powered by its sister company, Ask.com, runs sweepstakes. Performing searches, up to a certain number each day, is the easiest way to increase one’s odds of winning a $10,000 prize awarded daily. On Tax Day, however, a special prize will be bestowed: $1 million.

The market share of IWon is not measured in the standard industry surveys, but we can speculate that as April 17 approaches, “I’m Feeling Lucky” users from Google may temporarily take their positive premonitions there.

To bolster its struggling search service, Microsoft should forget pitching I.T. managers with penny-ante discounts and give the million-dollar sweepstakes a try. If frequent fliers are gullible enough to think that they won’t need zillions of miles for great seats to Hawaii, then frequent searchers may be no less susceptible to the lure of a jackpot, no matter the odds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/bu...ey/01digi.html





Survey: Most People Know About Vista But Few Intend to Upgrade
John Pospisil

A recent Harris Poll has found that while most online computers users are aware of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, few are intending to switch over to the new operating system anytime soon.

The Harris Poll of 2223 US online adults in early March found that 87% were aware of Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, only 12% of Vista-aware respondents were intending to upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months.

The poll revealed that 39% of those intending to move over to Vista planned to upgrade their existing computer so it would meet Vista requirements, 35% planned to buy a new computer with Vista preinstalled, 17% planned to purchase a new “Vista-ready” computer, and 8% said that they would install Vista on their existing computer without any upgrade.

A similar Harris Poll in December 2006, just one month before Vista’s consumer launch, found that 47% of those online were aware of Vista, and that 20% intended to upgrade in the coming year.

It seems that while Microsoft’s “Wow Starts Now” marketing campaign has boosted awareness of Vista, it hasn’t substantially increased the total number of people planning to upgrade.

The survey does indicate, however, that the release of the new operating system has affected the timing of the purchase of a new computer for 40% of the respondents who were aware of Vista: one in five said they had delayed the purchase of a new computer, and one in five said they would bring forward the purchase of a new computer.

According to Milton Ellis, Vice President of Harris Interactive’s Technology Group, said Microsoft has some way to go to convert the awareness of Vista into sales.

“In order to generate that ‘WOW’ factor, Microsoft will have to put forth a value proposition that will move the majority to the upgrade category in the years ahead. Vista promised better performance, reliability, security, and a revolutionary user interface - but it appears consumers looking to upgrade are not ready to buy into the promise whereas new computer buyers will want the latest and greatest,” said Ellis.

“Microsoft has faced this challenge before with operating system upgrades. Consumers tend to wait until a few service packs have been released to fix real or perceived problems. No doubt, Microsoft understands these issues and will proceed accordingly.”
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...nd-to-upgrade/





Hasta la Vista Baby, Say PC Makers

TAIPEI: After all the hype surrounding its January launch, Microsoft’s new Vista operating system has yet to brighten the outlook for PC makers and could even lead to oversupplies for those who had built up inventory.

Top PC makers, such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo may now have to resort to sales of lower-margin computers in emerging markets such as China, Eastern Europe and Latin America for their growth this year.

Featuring high-definition video and audio functions and three-dimensional graphics, Vista is being billed as a major upgrade of its predecessor, Windows XP.

But the software, which runs on more memory and superior graphic cards, has not taken off as fast as some had hoped, leading to concerns of potential inventory woes for makers of those products, analysts and industry players said. “Vista has had no big help,” said Acer’s president Gianfranco Lanci, adding that PC makers are really not counting on Vista to drive high demands for the industry. Samsung Electronics, the world’s top memory chip maker, also said that demand for DRAM computer memory chips from Vista hasn’t materialised as fast as it had predicted.

“We had expected the ‘Vista impact’ on DRAM around April, but now we see it being delayed into the second half,” said Hwang Chang-gyu, semiconductor business president of Samsung Electronics.

But many PC vendors were already sceptical on fresh demand from Vista even before the product’s launch in January, better preparing them for a potential disappointment, said JP Morgan analyst Charles Guo.

Major PC players like Asustek Computer, also the world’s top motherboard maker, said Vista might have warmed up the market but significant results have not been seen.

“We aren’t seeing any effects yet and compatibility issues will take at least six months to resolve,” said an executive at Asustek, who declined to be identified.

He added that many corporate customers — who tend to buy in much larger volumes than individual consumers and therefore can make a bigger impact — were staying on the sidelines for now as individuals accounted for new buying.

“We’ve carried out numerous surveys recently with IT managers and they’ve all said they are not planning to migrate to Vista, and we are not expecting a major influx anytime soon,” said Bryan Ma, an analyst at IDC, expressing a similar view.

Different forms of Microsoft’s various Windows operating systems now run more than 90% of the world’s PCs.

Computer makers are now looking to strong buying from emerging markets such as China, Eastern Europe and Latin America to boost business.

Dell announced earlier this week a super cheap computer costing as little as 2,599 yuan ($336) specifically for China, now the world’s second largest PC market by unit sales.

“Emerging markets are still a key driver for growth in the PC sector. Global PC shipments this year should grow by low double digits, in the 10% range,” said Mr Lanci.

The comment by Acer, which is trying to overtake China’s Lenovo as the world’s No 3 PC maker, was in line with the outlook for the broader industry.

IDC expects worldwide PC shipments to reach about 253 million units this year, up 11% from 228 million in 2006. That 2007 growth rate is up from the 9.6% posted last year.

Vista’s newness aside, analysts also say the right computing platform, which is needed to run the operating system smoothly, is a main factor that will determine whether the software will be accepted in the near term.

“Intel’s main Santa Rosa platform needed to support Vista features won’t be launched until May 10, and in the last five to 10 years, the biggest PC driver is still price,” said JP Morgan analyst Alvin Kwock. Microsoft founder Bill Gates said last month that Vista has been well received and that PC vendors have seen a nice lift in their sales.

A week before his comments, chief executive Steve Ballmer had said that Vista would only create a ‘small surge’ in PC sales for its fiscal year starting in July, and would not spur a big increase in normal growth rates.

“Vista was very popular in the first couple of weeks, but let’s not just focus on that. Dell and Hewlett-Packard don’t even advertise much on PCs with Vista,” said JP Morgan’s Kwock.
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Hasta...ow/1830472.cms





PC Makers to Microsoft: "Vista Is Not a Seller. You Suck"
Jesus Diaz

This may feel like Groundhog Day for you and Steve Ballmer, but according to computer and component manufacturers, Vista is not the hotcake that they were hoping for. The not-so-shiny-shiny-anymore OS is not helping sales at all and some companies may end with a whole bunch of unsold stuff in their warehouses.

Take Acer's president, Gianfranco Lanci, who has just said that "PC makers are really not counting on Vista to drive high demands for the industry." Or Samsung Electronics, who now says that DRAM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections, something that is being echoed by the industry as a whole.

So forget about Señor Gates' words on Vista pushing PC sales. You may want to punch us, Bill, but apparently those 20 million copies sold are indeed business as usual.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/...uck-248336.php





Russian School Principal Faces Trial for Microsoft Piracy
AP

A Russian school principal accused of installing pirated Microsoft software in school computers was ordered Tuesday to stand trial for a second time, in a case widely seen as a misguided attempt to crack down on software bootlegging.

The Perm regional court overturned a lower court's February ruling to end the prosecution of Alexander Ponosov, said court spokesman Anatoly Sobolev. The lower court had said the case was insignificant.

Ponosov a small-town school director in the Ural Mountain region of Perm, about 620 miles east of Moscow, had been charged with violating intellectual property rights by installing bootleg versions of the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office software. He insisted that the computers came with the software already installed.

Microsoft Corp. said it had nothing to do with the charges, and that the company declined to file a civil action against the teacher last year.

Both Russian and Western officials say Russia - the biggest producer of pirated goods after China - needs to be tougher on bootleggers of audio recordings, DVDs and software.

Violations of intellectual property law were cited as a major impediment to an agreement with the U.S. - signed in November after years of wrangling - paving the way for Russia to join the World Trade Organization.

But President Vladimir Putin has called Ponosov's trial "utter nonsense," saying manufacturers of pirated goods should be targeted, not consumers.
http://www.komotv.com/news/microsoft/6747952.html





Vista Protected Processes Bypassed
Anonymous Hero

"Security Researcher Alex Ionescu strikes again, this time with a proof of concept program that will arbitrarily enable and foremost disable the protection of so-called 'protected processes' in Windows Vista. Not only threatening Vista DRM and friends, it's also another step towards hardened and even more annoying malware. Normally, only specially signed processes made by special companies (decided by Microsoft) can be protected, but now the bad guys can protect any evil process they want, including the latest version of their own keylogger, spambot, or worm, as well as unprotect any 'good' one."
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/07/1426200





Addonics CompactFlash Adapters Replace Notebook Hard Drives
Charlie White

Now here's a great idea from Addonics: replace a laptop's 2.5" hard disk with flash memory, using a $30 adapter that lets you boot from CompactFlash cards. Suddenly you've converted that lappy into a solid-state notebook without spending an arm and a leg. That's what Addonics has done with its CompactFlash Hard Drive Adapters for notebooks, available in both SATA and IDE flavors and accommodating either single or dual CompactFlash cards.

So let's say you get yourself a couple of 12GB CompactFlash cards—that would cost you about $260, and they're capable of read and write speeds of about 9MB per second. Not the fastest drives in the world, but still serviceable. For under $300, you have yourself a solid-state laptop. But 24GB isn't going to be enough storage space, is it?

We've heard talk of Samsung cranking out 64GB CompactFlash cards before too long, though they won't cost any $130, that's for sure. Anyway, if you don't need that much storage space, low-priced solid-state notebook conversions just got a whole lot easier.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/periphera...ves-249594.php





For Chatting Face to Face, Webcams With a Clearer View
Anne Eisenberg

SEEING people on screen while talking with them by phone has its advantages, but consumers have been slow to take to the video technology and its often grainy images. Now, better cameras and video services may change all that.

Companies that once offered only instant messaging services have been adding and improving video messaging programs that allow subscribers to see and talk to one another, too, with tolerable sound and image quality.

To tap this potential world of video buddies, manufacturers are offering high-quality portable Web cameras that clip neatly onto laptops, or pack up in small containers to be taken along on business trips.

The cameras are about the size of a lipstick and plug directly into the U.S.B. port on a computer. They have built-in microphones and wide-angle lenses. Because they can be mounted securely to the top of the monitor, they will not wobble or produce unflattering, under-the-chin views of faces, as desktop Webcams are prone to do when perched on the arm of a chair or hitched temporarily to a laptop.

The Webcams may have particular appeal for people who want to try video chatting but don’t want to buy a new laptop with an embedded Webcam solely for the camera.

The better portable Webcams typically cost at least $60 because of the quality of components like lenses. But the overall price of video chatting is modest because the major players in the industry, like Windows Live Messenger and other video message services, are free, supported in part by advertising.

So if you are already paying for a broadband connection like D.S.L. or cable, which are essential for video streaming, a clip-on Webcam may yield the benefits of face-to-face conversations with business contacts, friends or far-away relatives, at no additional cost beyond the camera.

To test how well the portable Webcams worked, I tried two models and asked several neighbors to experiment with them, too. We tested the Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 ($75 to $100 on the Web), and the QuickCam for Notebooks Pro ($66 to $90), from Logitech. Our consensus is that both cameras do the job — and are easy to set up and use.

Be aware, though, that the images in live video chatting will not be as crisp as, say, still photographs taken by the same Webcams. Sending highly defined images and refreshing them many times a second requires more available bits per second than instant messaging services can usually provide.

But the quality of the images transmitted by the two cameras was surprisingly good, and after an initial investment of an hour or so to set up the software and hardware, you can talk for as long as you want with no worry about the phone bill.

A neighbor of mine, Li Wah Lai, a graphic designer at Standard & Poor’s, agreed to try both cameras with her laptop. Ms. Lai is an old hand at using Webcams: at Christmas her two sons, then planning an extended trip to China, bought her a desktop Webcam so that the family could stay in touch. The boys have Webcams that are built into their laptops — one a Mac, the other a PC.

Both sons are now in China, and Ms. Lai often has video chats with them when she is home in New York City. But she also travels a lot, and wants to keep in touch with her family at those times, too. After plugging in the new Webcams and testing them for a week, Ms. Lai decided that buying a portable camera would be a great help. “I’m getting one,” she said.

She said that both Webcams worked well, but that she preferred the Microsoft model for several reasons, including its lens, which is retractable. It sits within the camera when you’re traveling and then, with a push, pops out.

A number of instant messaging programs support video chatting, including those from AOL, Skype, Yahoo and Microsoft. Ms. Lai and her sons, Mickey, 20, who is studying in Shanghai, and Ming, 22, teaching English in Qingdao, all use Skype.

I decided to try the cameras with a different system, Windows Live Messenger, and the e-mail service with which it is paired, Hotmail. First, I signed up for both and installed the camera software, which comes on a CD and offers special features like on-screen controls that let you zoom in, pan and tilt. That took about 10 minutes.

Once the software was installed and the screen gave the go-ahead, I plugged the camera into a U.S.B. port. I read a bit of text into the microphone in a normal voice and adjusted the controls. Then I started getting used to the sight of myself on the screen. All of that took another 10 minutes.

Finally, after clicking on the name and e-mail address of a friend I had persuaded to sign up, I pressed the Live Call button, and we were in business.

We talked and typed, sending still pictures with one click and short videos with another. I had expected the video to have some distortion, but on screen my chat buddy sounded and looked very close to his in-person self.

I tried out the Logitech camera with Skype Video Messaging. The Logitech Webcam has a slightly snugger fit on the screen lid than the Microsoft version, and is a bit more compact. It compensates well for dim lighting. The sensor on its camera has 1.3 megapixels, versus 2 megapixels for the Microsoft version.

But I saw no difference in the instant-messaging video images of the two cameras; both were diminished by the transmission process, which typically reduces the 30 frames a second the cameras can produce to 15.

“We can do 1.3 megapixels at 30 frames a second,” Andrew Heymann, senior global product manager at Logitech, said of its Webcam. But the instant messaging services ask for far fewer megapixels at 15 frames a second, “so we compress the data off the camera,” he said.

Despite the imperfect images that result primarily from data compression on the messaging services, Ms. Lai is highly pleased with the images of her sons when she talks with them.

“It makes me feel good just to see their faces,” she said. “With the camera, it’s like they are next door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/bu...y/01novel.html





Thousands Are Laid Off. What’s New?
David Carr

When executives at Circuit City decided last Wednesday to cut costs by laying off 3,400 of their most experienced salesclerks, they undoubtedly went through a number of calculations: that they could save $250 million over two years; that consumers are inured to bad service; and that the layoffs would be a one-day blip in the news.

They were right about the last part. After hearing a fairly expansive report on public radio’s Marketplace late Wednesday, I woke up the next morning eager to read more.

USA Today ran a short article on the front page, The Wall Street Journal ran a brief on B4, The New York Times published a wire report inside its business pages, while The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times gave the news a bit more room.

Only the piece in The Baltimore Sun really explored the broader implications, while most of the coverage stuck to the usual suspects and themes. There were a few quick mentions on the evening news, but I saw no cable-talk umbrage at what this meant. And the next day, it was yesterday’s news.

Media outlets could not be blamed for having a little fatigue when it comes to layoffs, which have become an organic part of American life. With Detroit laying off more than 70,000 people in the last few years, the approximately 8 percent of Circuit City’s work force who got the heave-ho as a result of a “wage management initiative” — yet another advance in corporate-speak — do not seem like a big deal. (Nor did the news have legs on Wall Street, apparently. On Friday, Circuit City closed at $18.53, down 25 cents from the week before.)

But there are larger issues here. Circuit City, pushed by other big retailers and the consumer’s desire for low prices, could not compete. So they fired the cream of their work force, not even giving those employees a chance to re-apply immediately for their job at lower wages until after a cooling-off period of 10 weeks. In doing so, the company engaged in a kind of domestic outsourcing.

“The fact that this was a nonstory is as emblematic of our times as the firings themselves,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor who teaches labor issues at the University of California, Berkeley. “What makes this troubling is that this is not an auto parts supplier in Michigan under global pressure; this is a retail giant jettisoning its most experienced workers because it is under pressure from the Best Buy across the street. That is a big story.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, the heroic narrative of business reporting began to focus on executives, in which a new pantheon — executives like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and, um, Jeffrey K. Skilling — were touted as beings who had left the gravitational pull of traditional economics.

Even now, the corner office is where reporters usually go when it’s time to cover business. According to Christopher R. Martin, an associate professor of journalism at Miami University, of the top 25 newspapers in the country, only four have reporters assigned to the labor beat.

“Newspapers have shifted from going after mass audiences to targeting upscale audiences. This is a great story,” Mr. Martin said, referring to the Circuit City layoffs, “but it’s about working people. There have been dual wage systems before, but here you have something completely different — the wholesale firing of people who did their jobs well.”

Last summer, I needed some gadgets for a multimedia project, so I walked in to a Best Buy. A young man walked me around the floor, assembling a bag of components before promising me that it would all work. It did and I’ve been back to Best Buy twice since then, not because I checked prices, but because I knew they had well-priced merchandise with knowledgeable sales help.

Circuit City seems to have forgotten that the customer interaction — the user interface, to use contemporary language — is their point of difference in an age when consumers can have perfect pricing information with the click of a mouse. “In a service economy where all the books say you are supposed to put the customer first, Circuit City is doing exactly the opposite,” Mr. Martin said.

True, these aren’t the kind of union jobs with benefits and wages that made America what it is today. But increasingly, America is nation of clerks — not adolescents in their first jobs, but heads of households struggling to get by on the desiccated compensation that working in retail provides. Newsrooms, which should know something about layoffs, have trouble fathoming that many people work in retail because it is the only work they can find.

In a bit of happy coincidence, The New York Times did have an article on Thursday in its business section demonstrating that the top 300,000 Americans had almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. The explanation was just a flip of the page away in the brief about Circuit City.

The Circuit City pratfall does have an executive level narrative as well: if you add up salary, bonus, stock options, and other perks, Philip J. Schoonover, chief executive, and W. Alan McCollough, chairman, received almost $10 million in various kinds of compensation last year for steering the company to its imperiled state.

Circuit City retains a rhetorical commitment to the people it just axed on its Web site: “Our associates are our greatest assets. We expect every associate to demonstrate that they respect and value others for their efforts, their knowledge and the diversity that they bring.”

By Thursday, there was a lot less of that to go around. But it’s clear the only time the clerk at a big-box store is going to get any ink is when he fetches you a replacement cartridge for your printer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/bu...ia/02carr.html





Spinning Into Oblivion
Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato

DESPITE the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.

This is a far cry from the musical landscape that existed when we opened an independent CD shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1993. At the time, we figured that as far as business ventures went, ours was relatively safe. People would always go to stores to buy music. Right? Of course, back then there were also only two ringtones to choose from — “riiiiinnng” and “ring-ring.”

Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (“Do you have the new Sarah McLachlan and ... uh ... is there a Beatles greatest hits CD?”) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (“Can you get the Japanese pressing of ‘Kinda Kinks’? I believe they used the rare mono mixes”). Fourteen years later, it’s clear just how wrong our assumptions were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

In the late ’90s, our business, and the music retail business in general, was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears — whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices.

The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to sue the company out of existence — which was like thinking you’ve killed all the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the association’s lawyers could say “cease and desist.”

By 2002, it was clear that downloading was affecting music retail stores like ours. Our regulars weren’t coming in as often, and when they did, they weren’t buying as much. Our impulse-buy weekend customers were staying away altogether. And it wasn’t just the independent stores; even big chains like Tower and Musicland were struggling.

Something had to be done to save the record store, a place where hard-core music fans worked, shopped and kibitzed — and, not incidentally, kept the music business’s engine chugging in good times and in lean. Who but these loyalists was going to buy the umpteenth Elton John hits compilation that the major labels were foisting upon them?

But instead, those labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. These “big boxes” were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our wholesale cost. They didn’t care if they didn’t make any money on CD sales. Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender that frappéed.

The jig was up. It didn’t matter that even a store as small as ours carried hundreds of titles you’d never see at Best Buy and was staffed by people who actually knew who Van Morrison was, or that Tower Records had the entire history of recorded music under one roof while Costco didn’t carry much more than the current hits. A year after our shop closed, Tower went out of business — something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The customers who had grudgingly come to trust our opinions made the move to online shopping or lost interest in buying music altogether. Some of the most loyal fans had been soured into denying themselves the music they loved.

Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the impression that it’s doing something by occasionally threatening to sue college students who share their record collections online. But apart from scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that’s just an amusing sideshow. They’re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

At this point, it may be too late to win back disgruntled music lovers no matter what they do. As one music industry lawyer, Ken Hertz, said recently, “The consumer’s conscience, which is all we had left, that’s gone, too.”

It’s tempting for us to gloat. By worrying more about quarterly profits than the bigger picture, by protecting their short-term interests without thinking about how to survive and prosper in the long run, record-industry bigwigs have got what was coming to them. It’s a disaster they brought upon themselves.

We would be gloating, but for the fact that the occupation we planned on spending our working lives at is rapidly becoming obsolete. And that loss hits us hard — not just as music retailers, but as music fans.

Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato own an online music retail business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/op...nunziato.html?
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Beaming Up 3-D Objects on a Budget
Peter Wayner

OVER the last few decades, the electronics industry has worked magic with documents by building gadgets that copy, e-mail, print or fax flat images. Now it is building boxes that do something similar with three-dimensional objects.

These tools are not news to the industrial designers of the world, who have been able to buy 3-D printers and scanners with prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. But now hobbyists and small businesses are starting to benefit from low-cost versions of the tools.

Laser scanners with arrays of cameras can create digital models of objects that encode all the significant bumps, cracks, corners and facets of real things. Computers can enhance, morph or tweak the models before shipping them to 3-D “printers” that may be halfway around the world. The result is a new version of the thing itself, but built from some resin or starch.

For instance, $2,495 could buy a desktop laser scanner from NextEngine (www.nextengine.com) of Santa Monica, Calif., that can digitize small objects that fit on its 6-inch-wide turntable. Older scanners that are also more capable and up to the task of scanning something like a car cost much more. The Z Corporation (www.zcorp.com) sells a hand-held scanner that works much like a big camera for $39,900.

But scanning is only half the task. A three-dimensional version of the local copy shop is appearing as those scans are uploaded to companies that offer printing priced by the job. It is an attractive option, since the commercial machines that do the printing can be the size of small refrigerators and cost $40,000 or more.

Great Eastern Technology (www.get.com), for instance, will make small multicolored copies from a starch-based powder for about $70 using a printer from the Z Corporation. Larger objects that could fill up the printing bed, which measures 10 inches by 10 inches by 8 inches, might cost about $700. Minico Industries (www.minicoindustries.com) uses printers from a company called Dimension that use a different process to build things out of pure monochrome ABS plastic. It charges about $50 a cubic inch.

The Dimension printers are usually chosen by people who need stronger and more durable models created with a bit more precision, while the Z Corporation printers are often favored by those who need multiple colors. The prices are estimates, and most shops will compute a full price from the digital model after measuring the exact amount of raw material needed. The digital models can be enlarged or recolored before printing.

The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of this relatively low-cost duplicating method, often called rapid prototyping. Hearing aid companies, for instance, are producing some custom-fitted ear pieces from scanned molds of patients. Custom car companies produce new parts for classic cars or modified parts for hot rods. Consumer product makers create fully functional designs before committing themselves to big production runs.

Tom Clay, chief executive of the Z Corporation, says he is constantly amazed by the uses people find for his products. Doctors use them to build practice models, and museums build replicas so people can feel the object without damaging the real artifact. He thinks one big potential market will be three-dimensional portraiture, so people can create busts for immortality.

The legal landscape, though, may not be ready for the Napsterization of three-dimensional things. Most of the cute, small tchotchkes in my house that fit on the turntable of the NextEngine scanner I tested are copyrighted. Zapping up a new version might run afoul of the same laws being used to fight the piracy of songs.

Jessica Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the author of the book “Digital Copyright,” said, “The rules for running it through your 3-D scanner are pretty much the same as running it through your photocopier.”

I tried to avoid that issue by creating my own objects from a set of Legos. With the scanner connected to my PC, software went to work to construct a three-dimensional model.

The demands taxed my one-year-old system. NextEngine recommends using a PC with plenty of disk space, at least two gigabytes of memory and a high-end video card, although I was able to limp along with only 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. Each model I produced chewed up 50 to 100 megabytes of the disk, something that can be reduced by scanning with less precision.

The process is surprisingly simple and yet fraught with glitches. I pushed one button and the NextEngine scanner took a complete set of pictures from various angles. Every two minutes it completed a scan, rotated the object on its turntable a few degrees, and began again. After I aligned the different scans by identifying the same point in different images, it turned the pictures into a 3-D model ready for printing. Adopters must be ready to develop the same skill as the early photographers who juggled glass plates and egg white emulsions in total darkness. I spent several hours on the phone with a customer-support technician from NextEngine who offered some tips.

When I first put the objects on the turntable and just pressed the button, the results were covered with holes where the scanner could not get a reasonable image. Light-colored matte surfaces are easier for the laser range-finder to measure, and one trick for making models of dark shiny objects is to coat them with a cloud of white powder. Some even paint the object.

NextEngine is working hard to help people over this hurdle. Customer-support connections are built directly into the software so you can easily ask for help. The company is also building another generation of its tools to eliminate some common errors, like segments that escaped the view of the scanner. They touched up my models with this software to make sure there were no gaps that might confound the printer.

I shipped a file (about 45 megabytes) to the two printer manufacturers, the Z Corporation and Minico, to print sample facsimiles. The results were good, although both companies pointed out that they could do a better job with a cleaner scan produced with better resolution — something requiring more care, better lighting and more powder.

I tried scanning my face in a NextEngine scanner, and it wasn’t as easy as scanning a Lego device. It was hard to hold still for several minutes, and it was not simple to align multiple shots. Mr. Clay says that it is vastly simpler to produce what he calls a Mount Rushmore bust from only one angle.

Brad Porter, the president of Great Eastern Technologies, says he has printed a number of busts. “The biggest issue is hair,” he warned. “Hair doesn’t scan well.” Many people will start with direct scans of the faces, he says, but use 3-D modeling software to reconstruct the hair. That is a big advantage for those with cowlicks.

The ability to retouch or modify the scanned objects is surprisingly useful. The printed versions of the Lego spaceship I scanned were enlargements, and retouched before printing. One has a tie-dye look; another has new holes and additions.

The three-dimensional printers that generate the products are also getting cheaper. A Cornell University project called Fab@Home is sharing open-source versions of a design that is being manufactured by an Albuquerque-based company, Koba, at prices of about $3,000.

And the most adventurous are branching out from standard resins. Evan Malone, a Cornell graduate student working with Fab@Home, posted pictures of hors d’oeuvres built by “printing” the school logo on some crackers with Cheez Whiz they loaded into a print head that usually holds plastic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/business/05scan.html





Burning Rubber Cross-Country, in the Studio
Edward Wyatt

A secret, illegal cross-country auto race is under way, and much of it is taking place in a barn-size building on a windswept hilltop here, some 35 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

“Drive,” a new drama scheduled to have its premiere on Fox on April 15, portrays a dozen characters who are forced into a race for reasons they don’t understand, sent on a journey from Key West, Fla., to points as yet unknown.

Yet despite the premise of a cross-country race, most of the actors in the new series will rarely get behind the wheel of a car outside the studio. Much of the audience could be none the wiser, thanks to advances in digital special effects that have recently made the leap from feature films to television.

“This could not have been done last year,” said Loni Peristere, a founder of Zoic Studios and a special-effects guru for “Drive.” “We’re able to do this because of advances in hardware, advances in software, advances in technique.”

A recent visit to the set of “Drive” showed the unusual nature of this project. Most of the recording of actors in cars takes place on a specially designed stage that has no sets, just a giant green curtain draped around three-quarters of the inside of the building.

When the actors are behind the wheel of a car, it is likely to be in one perched atop a three-foot-high pedestal that rides on thin bladders filled with compressed air. The apparatus allows the cars to slide easily across the specially coated floor, much like a puck on an air hockey table. A camera mounted on a crane allows the viewer to swoop over the hood of a car and into the front seat, then travel out a side widow and into another car in the race.

“The reason for all this elaborate technical equipment,” said Greg Yaitanes, an executive producer of the series and the director of the pilot episode, “is to achieve what should be a simple effect: moving from car to car while you’re tearing down the road.”

But it is a process that has not been tried before for television, he said. Movie and television fans are used to seeing scenes shot inside a car. From journeys that wind through the Italian hills in “Roman Holiday” to trips down the streets of Manhattan inside Jerry’s car on “Seinfeld,” most of those scenes have been filmed in one of two ways.

In one, a car is placed on a trailer and pulled along the road, as cameras mounted outside the car film the action. In another, a stationary car is placed inside a studio, and the actors are filmed as various backgrounds are placed outside the car or, more recently, street scenes are digitally placed in the car’s windows.

Both of those techniques are fairly easy to spot, because actors riding on a trailer frequently spend little time looking at the road, and — as the film “Airplane!” spoofed so well — placing backgrounds behind cars can look vividly unrealistic.

Now, however, digital effects have advanced to the point where viewers are more often left wondering, “How did they do that?”

In the case of “Drive,” the effects are “a combination of techniques that are out there in different forms,” Mr. Yaitanes said. “People had used the air casters, and some people had used the raising of the cars, and some people had used the crane stuff. But nobody had really put all of the elements together into one sequence like this.”

The use of green-screen technology, where a fake background is electronically substituted for a real one, is not new. Local television weathermen have been using the technique for years, standing in front of a green curtain while pretending to point at a map.

Movies have made great use of green screens as well, especially in films laden with acrobatic special effects, like “The Matrix” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” where actors are suspended from cables to make them appear to be flying.

But the use of green screens in series television has been limited, mainly because the cheap versions tended to look unconvincing and the good-looking versions were too expensive.

Recently, however, green-screen work has been showing up more often in television series. On “Ugly Betty,” the ABC comedy-drama set at a high-fashion magazine in New York, many of the street scenes near Betty’s home in Queens are shot in Hollywood using green-screen technology. The NBC hit “Heroes” will soon feature on its Web site a behind-the-scenes look at how it produces its special effects.

The inspiration for the race sequences in “Drive,” Mr. Yaitanes said, was a scene from Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” in which Tom Cruise is driving his family on a jammed highway in a minivan. In the scene, the camera darts around and through the car as if it is mounted on the back of a humming bird.

But in the film, the cars that are traveling alongside Mr. Cruise’s minivan are digitally generated. In “Drive,” the surrounding cars needed to be real, because they were carrying actors who were racing against one another, and who would need to interact.
“The rig we would need to accomplish all of this on the actual road would be so elaborate that it wouldn’t even work,” Mr. Yaitanes said. The solution was to record a choreographed race sequence using stunt drivers on the open road.

Then the cars were moved into the studio, where the actors got in. The cars were placed on the pedestals and slid into place on the set, which has a green curtain. A camera on a crane then zoomed along the hood of the car, over its top and around the side, capturing facial expressions, body movements and dialogue.

The two sets of images were then merged, with a seamless jump from real drivers on the road to actors pretending to be drivers in the studio.

For the actors, the process required some mental gymnastics.

Kevin Alejandro, who plays Winston Salazar, who joins the race when he gets out of jail, said he was excited by the prospect of a lead role in a drama about a cross-country auto race. With a love of cars engendered by a father who rebuilt Camaros, he said, he was shocked when the producers told him that he probably would not be doing any road driving.

“It takes a certain kind of concentration and you have to believe in yourself doing it,” he said of the studio driving. “It was intimidating being told I wasn’t going to be able to drive,” particularly because his character has one of the sweeter cars in the race: a low-riding 1964 Chevy Impala.

For all of the high-technology effects going into “Drive,” there can be some rather low-tech moments, as when seven men spent much of two hours pushing two cars around the set, trying to perfect the effect of one car pulling up next to another so the passengers could look at each other across the road.

In one scene, four men pushed a Ford Taurus roughly 50 feet, up next to a Land Rover, which was then pushed back the same distance by a group of three men. They did this for 19 takes before Mr. Yaitanes got the look he wanted.

“Next time you’re in a car going 50 miles an hour, look in the car next to you,” he explained. “Everything’s moving relative to you, so it’s those little movements we’re trying to recreate. So, in the middle of using the cutting-edge technology, just pushing a car across the floor is the best way to do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/ar...on/07driv.html





Back to the (Double) Feature
A. O. Scott



The essence of “Grindhouse,” Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s exuberant, uneven tribute to the spirit of trash cinema, is distilled in a scene from “Death Proof,” Mr. Tarantino’s feature-length contribution to the project. Two vintage American muscle cars, already scuffed and dented from chasing each other along back roads and two-lane blacktops, descend, engines whining and tires squealing, onto a highway full of late-model minivans, S.U.V.’s and family sedans, all of them driving safely within the lines and the speed limit.

It’s a great car chase, but it’s also a metaphor. “Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry. Those Detroit relics, modified with loving care in someone’s garage or backyard, may waste gas and burn oil, but they seem to have an individuality — a soul — that the homogeneous new vehicles, with their G.P.S. and their cruise control, their computer chips and their air bags, can never hope to match.

And “Grindhouse” argues, with more enthusiasm than coherence, for the integrity of a certain kind of old movie. Not the stuff that finds its way into the Classics section of the video store, but the kind that the guys behind the counter are always talking about: cheap, nasty slasher films, sleazy sexploitation pictures, gimcrack sci-fi epics starring people you never heard of. Just about anything, in short, with the right combination of topless women, gory, pointless violence and inspired amateurism. Also car chases.

Really, though, what Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino try to evoke is less a particular style or genre of moviemaking than a lost ambience of moviegoing. “Grindhouse” consists of a double feature (“Death Proof” preceded by Mr. Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror”) accompanied by trailers for nonexistent coming attractions (with titles like “Machete” and “Werewolf Women of the SS”) and beset by technical difficulties. Each of the features is missing a reel — the management apologizes for the inconvenience — and of course it’s the reel with the sex in it, which the projectionist probably stole for his own amusement. The prints are full of scratches, bad splices and busted sprocket holes, and the images are not always in focus.

It’s all a pretty good joke, especially since most of these glitches, artifacts of an earlier technological era, have been produced digitally. (Unfortunately the software application has not yet been developed that can simulate clouds of stale cigarette smoke in the projector beam, broken seats and sticky, smelly floors at your local multiplex.) The filmmakers are at once bad boys and grumpy old men, effortlessly adept at manipulating new-fangled gadgets even as they sigh over the way things were in the good old days.

Their approach is both broadly populist and fussily esoteric. It doesn’t take a cinephile to appreciate, say, the sight of Rose McGowan in skimpy go-go dancer get-up, or to be repulsed by the spectacle of zombies with melting, pustulant faces feasting on human flesh. But the obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives “Grindhouse” its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.

Young people who see this movie — in the spirit of the thing, they should ideally sneak in during school hours — might do well to seek out a 45-year-old underemployed bachelor with a large DVD and comic book collection who can help them parse the basics (“What’s a reel, Uncle Quentin?”) and the more advanced material as well.

That Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino are motivated by a sincere love of the movies they send up can hardly be doubted, but the affection is expressed in different ways. Mr. Rodriguez revels in badness for its own sake. “Planet Terror” is intoxicated by its own absurdity; it tries to raise incompetence to the level of craft, if not art. The random close-ups, the lurching cuts, the off-kilter framing — all of this is obviously intentional. So is the hodgepodge story, which is like a stew made of the contents of every can in the cupboard.

Ms. McGowan plays Cherry Darling, a hard-luck go-go dancer. She reunites with an old boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez), who turns out to be a notorious gunslinger. They team up with a bunch of other townspeople — we’re somewhere in Texas — to fight off rampaging zombies (including Bruce Willis and Mr. Tarantino, who also has a small role in “Death Proof”). The zombies have been infected by a virus, and the only hope for a cure is. ...

But that’s enough of that. Sensation trumps sense in “Planet Terror,” especially once Ms. McGowan, who has lost a leg in a car accident, has been outfitted with a machine-gun prosthesis. It’s certainly eye-catching, but “Planet Terror” is a joke that goes on for too long without much purpose beyond its own frantic inventiveness.

Its sloppiness is a trait it shares not only with obscure horror movies (many of which were much more rigorously executed), but also with some of Mr. Rodriguez’s other films. His energy, in movies like “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and the later “Spy Kids” installments, has often outstripped his taste. Not only does he like bad movies, he has a habit of making them too.

Mr. Tarantino is another story — a connoisseur, a scholar and a bit of a highbrow. Not a snob though. Quite the opposite: He combs through trash in search of art and has done a lot to teach American audiences (and critics) to appreciate the formal seriousness and aesthetic sophistication of, for example, Asian action movies. “Death Proof” is in part a sincere tribute to the work of Monte Hellman, whose films have ascended from the fetor of their low-rent origins into the purer air of art houses and museum retrospectives, which is where they belong. Mr. Hellman was always a serious filmmaker, and Mr. Tarantino is too.

At a certain point in “Death Proof” the scratches and bad splices disappear, and you find yourself watching not an arch, clever pastiche of old movies and movie theaters but an actual movie. You are not laughing at deliberately clumsy camera work but rather admiring the grace and artistry of the shots — in particular a long take in which the camera circles around a group of women talking in a diner. At his best — in parts of “Pulp Fiction,” in “Jackie Brown,” in sections of “Kill Bill, Vol. 2” — Mr. Tarantino strips away the quotation marks and finds a route through his formal virtuosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history back to the basics of character, action and story.

“Death Proof” is a decidedly modest picture, fittingly enough given its second billing in this double feature. But its scaled-down ambition is part of its appeal. It consists of long stretches of talk — the rambling, profane banter that is Mr. Tarantino’s hallmark as a writer — interrupted by kinetic bouts of automotive mayhem.

The verbal and visceral elements have no organic connection, and the plot is booby-trapped with surprises. I’m hesitant to risk giving away too much, but I will say that Kurt Russell is awfully good, and that I could listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Tracie Thoms, two of the movie’s motor-mouthed heroines, talk through the whole three hours of “Grindhouse,” read the phone book or recite “The Faerie Queene” on tape in my Volvo in the middle of a traffic jam.

I’m not sure I’d sit through “Planet Terror” again to get to them in “Death Proof” though. Of course, in the old days, true grindhouse devotees would wander in and out of the theater all day long. I guess DVD’s serve a similar function in our own time. In any case be sure not to miss the trailer for “Thanksgiving” — not for the squeamish or the humor impaired, and not that you’d necessarily want to see the movie, if it existed. Also, when viewing “Grindhouse” at home skip the commentary track and bring in a few drunks off the street to mutter and snore. It’ll be just like the old days.

“Grindhouse” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Tell your mother you were over at your friend’s house doing homework, and be sure to tell your friends at school about the severed limbs, the exploding heads and the naked you-know-whats.

GRINDHOUSE

Opens today nationwide.

“Planet Terror” written and directed by Robert Rodriguez; director of photography, Mr. Rodriguez; edited by Mr. Rodriguez and Sally Menke; production designers, Steve Joyner and Caylah Eddleblute; produced by Mr. Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan. “Death Proof” produced, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Mr. Tarantino; edited by Ms. Menke; production designers, Mr. Joyner and Ms. Eddleblute. Released by Dimension Films. Running time: 180 minutes.

“PLANET TERROR” WITH: Rose McGowan (Cherry), Marley Shelton (Dr. Dakota Block), Freddy Rodriguez (Wray), Josh Brolin (Block), Jeff Fahey (JT), Michael Biehn (Sherriff Hague), Naveen Andrews (Abby) and Stacy Ferguson (Tammy).

“DEATH PROOF” WITH: Kurt Russell (Stuntman Mike), Sydney Tamiia Poitier (Jungle Julia), Vanessa Ferlito (Arlene), Jordan Ladd (Shanna), Tracie Thoms (Kim), Rosario Dawson (Abernathy), Zoë Bell (Zoë), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lee), Rose McGowan (Pam), Eli Roth (Dov) and Omar Doom (Nate).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/mo...grin.html?8dpc





Wrestling With Songs Tougher Than the Rest
Nate Chinen

Bruce Springsteen, finally taking the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, started out by assuring the crowd that he was still alive. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. The evening had felt, he said, “a little bit like that dream everybody has, where you’re invisible and you’re floating above a room, and all these people are talking about you.” The kicker, of course, is that it turns out to be your funeral.

Mr. Springsteen was the surprise twist in “The Music of Bruce Springsteen,” and the only logical conclusion. He had observed roughly a third of the concert’s 20 performances from the vantage of a mezzanine box: floating above the room, if hardly invisible. What he heard was a raft of artists grappling with his songs and, a bit more arduously, his style.

Some of them managed the task brilliantly; nobody made it seem easy. Mr. Springsteen’s songs occupy various stations in the emotional expanse between defiant and defeated, and they don’t take kindly to revision. Robin Holcomb’s piano-and- vocal take on “Brilliant Disguise,” with its cloak of strange new tonalities, was among the concert’s most inventive turns; that it wasn’t too enjoyable was only partly Ms. Holcomb’s fault. Another pianist, Uri Caine, devised a jazz abstraction of “New York City Serenade.”

The Holmes Brothers saw no need to tweak the gospel lilt of “My City of Ruins,” which they performed with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. The choir was a reminder of the concert’s cause, music education. Proceeds — a net of $150,000, by the tally of the producer, Michael Dorf — benefited the nonprofit initiative Music for Youth.

Many of the other artists went for extreme simplicity, reining in the atmosphere of the songs. This could be deadly, as a band called Low Stars proved with an earnest four-part vocal harmony on “One Step Up.” (It wasn’t half as spirited as the sha-la-las warbled by Bobby Valli, and an entourage he called the Jersey Guys, on “Jersey Girl” — actually a Tom Waits song.) Earlier the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter had played “The River” as a coffeehouse standard, and the Bacon Brothers had made “Streets of Philadelphia” into a folk ballad. Both acts sounded sincere, and too polite.

That wasn’t the case in the haunting solo acoustic work of Steve Earle (convincingly morbid on “Nebraska”) and Joseph Arthur (deliberate and brooding on “Born in the U.S.A.”). Juliana Hatfield, alone with an electric guitar, made “Cover Me” sound a bit more like a desperate plea. And Pete Yorn played a “Dancing in the Dark” that stressed the darkness over the dancing; he was after the restless twinge already lurking in the song.

Had Jewel appeared as advertised, she presumably would have played in an acoustic vein as well. Her unbilled replacement was Patti Smith — a serious upgrade — singing “Because the Night,” the song jointly written by Ms. Smith and Mr. Springsteen that remains her biggest hit. Backed at the piano by Tony Shanahan, Ms. Smith delivered the anthem with clarity and cool intensity; she punctuated the end of one chorus by nonchalantly spitting on the stage.

It was a hard act to follow, as Dave Bielanko pointed out when his band, Marah, walked onstage. They met the challenge with a spirited version of “The Rising,” one of several numbers in the concert that faithfully echoed the sound of Mr. Springsteen’s E Street Band. Results in this area were occasionally messy. The singer M. Ward barely got through “I’m Goin’ Down” with Elysian Fields; “Hungry Heart,” as rendered by the punk striver Jesse Malin and the Ronette survivor Ronnie Spector, was a shambles.

But Damon Gough, the British singer-songwriter known as Badly Drawn Boy, pumped “Thunder Road” with a bright and goofy exuberance. Later, the Hold Steady — the last scheduled act, appearing after Odetta’s magisterial and wry “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” — managed to turn Springsteen emulation into an act of operatic dimensions.

“There’s gonna be a rumble out there on that promenade,” snarled the band’s lead singer, Craig Finn, on “Atlantic City,” making the line his own. A moment later, guitars and drums kicked in heavily, and Mr. Finn ratcheted up with them.

There was nowhere to go from there except to the source: Mr. Springsteen, with his harmonica and acoustic guitar. “The Promised Land,” his first song, was stark and grim; on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” he slipped in a self-referential aside. Then he beckoned the full cast onstage for a “Rosalita” reprise, offering the verses to any takers. Mr. Finn took up the gauntlet, barely able to contain himself: he seemed about to burst. Beside him, Mr. Springsteen grinned widely. A guy could get used to funerals like these.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/ar...ic/07bruc.html





Scottish Cop Isn’t Fazed by Protests or Bagpipes
Janet Maslin


The Naming of The Dead

By Ian Rankin.

452 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.

It’s been 20 years since Ian Rankin started writing about Inspector John Rebus, the lone-wolf Scottish police detective who lives by his own set of rules. Rebus has a preferred way of conducting himself: any way he wants, and too bad if his superiors don’t like it. Over time this attitude has brought Rebus exactly nothing, unless you count the satisfaction he takes in settling scores, one criminal miscreant at a time. He is now a year from retirement and not exactly resting on his laurels.

“Rebus knew his place in the food chain: somewhere down among the plankton, the price for years of insubordination and reckless conduct,” Mr. Rankin writes in “The Naming of the Dead.” This seems a fair assessment. So Rebus tends to be treated dismissively, but sooner or later those who underestimate him wind up sorry. The man is relentless once he shakes off his doldrums and gets into high gear.

Since Mr. Rankin has his Rebus-like side (“Often I’m not sure where I end and he begins,” he has said), the warm-up stages of these novels are deliberately, stubbornly wayward. Mr. Rankin incorporates many minor characters and is never in a hurry to dispense with their small talk.

That’s especially true in this new crime story, which has the temerity to treat the July 2005 G-8 conference in Edinburgh as the backdrop for a case involving sex offenders and a serial killer (or serial kilter, as a Scottish newspaper accidentally misprints it). Eventually it will all click, but not until Rebus and Mr. Rankin have taken their sweet time.

These dilatory tactics aren’t a drawback; they are among the most likeable features of this top-flight, enduring series. The books use a deceptively casual tone to worm their way into Rebus’s thoughts. Although it is de rigueur to know what music a crime-novel star likes to listen to, what a shambles his private life has become, what he eats for breakfast and drinks for dinner, Mr. Rankin gets just as much mileage out of showing how Rebus circles around and around a problem. He meanders very slyly until he’s ready to pounce.

During the preliminaries the events in a Rebus book can appear even more deceptively unrelated than those in most crime stories. Consider that Rebus and his younger and fresher partner, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, happen to be investigating a relatively stale case when a brand-new bit of mayhem occurs: One of the dignitaries visiting for the G-8 falls out of a window in Edinburgh Castle during an official dinner.

Is this sheer coincidence? At the very least, it’s an occasional for a Rebus wisecrack. “Could be there was bagpipe music between courses,” he suggests. “Might’ve broken his will to live.”

The officer in charge of G-8 security decides to get rid of Rebus before he becomes annoying. Rebus winds up suspended. “End of game,” says the security chief. “Sayonara. Finito.” With his usual respect for authority, Rebus replies: “Picked up a few words at the dinner, eh, sir?”

So Rebus and Siobhan wind up out on the fringes of G-8-inspired chaos. That turns out to be the most interesting place to be. “The Naming of the Dead” describes a roiling circus atmosphere that seems benign at first, attracting a tent city of protesters who include Siobhan’s parents, but eventually escalates into rioting (and coincides with terrorist bombings in London). “Nice day out for all concerned,” Rebus says after learning that 200,000 protestors have shown up for a demonstration. “Doesn’t change the world I’m living in.”

But it does. “The Naming of the Dead” begins with the funeral of Rebus’s brother and gives him this and other reasons to mourn. Even as Mr. Rankin distributes a trail of breadcrumbs that runs sneakily through the book’s many subplots and encounters, he suffuses this story with a sense of loss, not least because Rebus is made mindful of his own youthful rebelliousness. There’s only so much of his past he can cling to by quoting the Who and educating Siobhan about rock trivia (like how Steely Dan got its name).

“The Naming of the Dead” is filled with family relationships that threaten to come undone. Siobhan defied her parents to become a cop, but now she starts wanting to feel more like a daughter. The victims of those sex crimes have aggrieved, protective relatives, and at least one marriage is headed for the rocks. A couple of menacing paternal types, a councilman and a much less dangerous mobster, manipulate their underlings and expect the kind of fealty they can no longer command. The title suggests a way of honoring the lost when all else has failed.

A book with this many plot elements risks becoming amorphous and overcomplicated. But Mr. Rankin doesn’t get lost that way. In his backhanded, reluctant way Rebus winds up uniting all the book’s loose ends, and seeing how he accomplishes this is a pleasure. Besides, “The Naming of the Dead” isn’t really about its detective plot. It’s about Rebus’s taking stock, not only of his own past but also of the world around him.

The sight of Edinburgh overtaken by an angry public spectacle winds up stirring his memories in a profound, melancholy way. But it’s not Mr. Rankin’s style to say so. Far better and more typical to put it this way: “Funny to think it’ll be back to old clothes and porridge next week.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/books/02masl.html





Maybe She’s Reappeared; Definitely She’s a Mystery
Janet Maslin


What The Dead Know

By Laura Lippman

376 pages. William Morrow. $24.95.

Laura Lippman’s “What the Dead Know” is an uncommonly clever impostor story, so cagily constructed that it easily fulfills the genre’s two basic demands. First, Ms. Lippman is able to keep her reader guessing about the main character’s disputed identity until the very end of this book. Second, when the revelation comes, it makes perfect sense, and it has been hiding in plain sight. This is not one of those mysteries with a denouement that feels tacked on, half baked or pulled out of thin air.

Here’s the premise: A woman involved in a Baltimore highway accident comes forth with a bizarre revelation. Out of the blue she claims to be Heather Bethany, one of two adolescent sisters who were last seen at a mall in 1975. She knows a lot about Heather, and her claim is plausible, but there’s also something about her that prompts incredulity. Ms. Lippman’s well-drawn cast of supporting characters — including a police officer, a social worker, a lawyer and a dapper retired detective who studied the case closely when the girls vanished — are left to study her closely and try to figure out what game she’s playing.

It’s fair to assume that Ms. Lippman would not be leading her readers through nearly 400 serpentine, carefully nuanced pages if Heather Bethany were Heather Bethany, pure and simple. It’s a sure thing that something is amiss. But what? This book is so well larded with small, potentially troubling details that any of its characters might be hiding something. Starting with the so-called Heather: Ms. Lippman quickly lets the reader know that this woman has lived under a series of assumed names. She also lets it slip that the tricky part of being Heather is “not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn’t know.”

Ms. Lippman usually writes installments of a series about Tess Monaghan, reporter turned detective. (Ms. Lippman is a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun.) These books are dependably solid, but the stand-alone “What the Dead Know” is in a different league. Even in comparison with her “Every Secret Thing” (2003), another stand-alone that overlaps slightly with this one in their plots about missing girls, the new book is exceptionally well executed.

This time Ms. Lippman writes like a warmer-blooded American Ruth Rendell, keenly observant and giving a faintly spooky charge to every stray detail. Even as she expertly summons the minutiae of teenage girlhood circa 1975, it’s gratifying to know that the contents of Heather’s favorite purse will have something to do with Heather’s destiny.

“What the Dead Know” takes its title from Ecclesiastes and is divided into several different time periods. The book starts in the present, flashes back to the disappearance and then reveals what happened to the parents of Heather and her sister, Sunny, after the girls went missing. This structure allows Ms. Lippman to dispense information sparingly, with the precision that is one of this book’s most satisfying features.

First we see the Bethany family as a unit. Then we learn that the mother, Miriam, is having an affair, and that the father, Dave, is a rigidly spiritual ex-hippie whose joyless quest for enlightenment hangs heavily over the rest of his family. Only later is it revealed that the girls were adopted (under highly fraught circumstances), so that even if a parent can identify Heather, there will be no corroborating DNA proof. And only later is it clear that one of the parents has died and will never learn the truth about the daughters’ fate.

Similarly, Ms. Lippman teases the reader with Heather’s memories of a troubled sexual history. She seems to have been held prisoner. When she went to high school and played kissing games with classmates, she was the only teenager who secretly had an abusive husband at home. With information that sketchy, it’s possible to jump to all the wrong conclusions, which is precisely what Ms. Lippman wants to encourage. The book’s clues are indistinguishable from its red herrings until the final pages.

For a novel steeped in such elaborate gamesmanship, “What the Dead Know” is unusually three-dimensional. Its characters are credibly and movingly drawn — particularly Miriam, who has relocated and shape-shifted several different times since the disappearances, just as Heather claims to have done. Miriam winds up hiding in Mexico, driven there by the relentless publicity surrounding the Bethany case and not brought back to Baltimore until the book is ready for its aha! moment. Miriam returns as if from another planet, amazed at the doll-like, interchangeable young women on the covers of American celebrity magazines, creatures who contrast so sharply with her real, lost daughters.

The sisters are equally well evoked, right down to the most seemingly mundane touches. In detailing their last known day together, Ms. Lippman presents a mall visit that is a superb feat of covert trickery. Their itinerary seems so banal, and yet it holds the key to their future. They look at clothes and dress patterns. They run into an oddball music teacher they know from school. They sneak into an R-rated movie, which happens to be “Chinatown.” They have the usual kind of petty, sisterly spat. Then they are grabbed by a policeman, and there’s no one but Heather to explain what happened next. Thirty-two years later all the remaining witnesses are either incapacitated or dead.

This presents a mystery writer’s classic challenge to the reader: Here are the facts, now put them together. It’s a cerebral tactic buried within a very human story, and that makes for an unusual combination. And “What the Dead Know,” like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/books/05masl.html





Pushing a New Writer Upstream
Julie Bosman

At a table with a half-dozen enraptured Borders executives in a private room at the French bistro Mon Amí Gabi, between sips of Côtes du Rhône, the fledgling British novelist Steven Hall began telling the Nicole Kidman story.

“I had Nicole Kidman call me at home,” he said, in his Manchester accent. “She wanted to know if I’d change the main character of my book from a man to a woman, so she could play her. But I didn’t give it to Nicole in the end.”

Over the next three days, the story would be retold to Barnes & Noble employees over dinner in Minneapolis, and to dozens of independent booksellers in Portland, Ore. With any luck, the story would ensure that Mr. Hall’s unfamiliar name, and more important, his new book, stuck in their memory. And that they then would sell, sell, sell.

This is the pre-publication book tour, a ritual an increasing number of authors are enduring so that their books can have a fighting chance in an industry that issues, by some estimates, more than 175,000 titles a year.

Unlike the postpublication book tour, which focuses on publicity and public appearances, the pre-publication tour is meant to win the hearts of the front-line soldiers in the bookselling trenches, and more and more publishers are finding it an indispensable part of their marketing plan.

While major decisions are left to the bookstore chains’ influential buyers, the people out in the field — the store managers and the clerks — can wield considerable power over how long books continue to be displayed on prime tables at the front of the store, and therefore over the what their customers choose to buy and read.

In January, about two months before Mr. Hall’s novel, “The Raw Shark Texts,” was scheduled to hit the shelves, Canongate U.S., Mr. Hall’s publisher, footed the bill for four days of wining and dining, with Mr. Hall pitching his book in person to people who can help determine whether it sinks or swims.

Like a novice politician, Mr. Hall shook hands and talked patiently with booksellers both small and powerful, from an assistant store manager in Minneapolis to the head buyer at City Lights, the renowned San Francisco independent.

There were four long dinners on his schedule, plus a handful of media interviews, a book signing, three photo shoots and a meet-and-greet at Powell’s Books in Portland.

It was heady stuff for Mr. Hall, who before this had never left Europe. He was born in Derbyshire, England, outside Manchester, and now lives in Hull, a “tiny, deprived, poor little city,” he said.

He is cheerful, apple-cheeked, often ebullient, even while traveling without a heavy winter coat in Chicago and Minneapolis at the end of January. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s America, there are beaches there,’ ” he said, shrugging.

The trip is the kind of socializing opportunity that most unknown authors would relish. For first-time novelists like Mr. Hall, the odds of scoring a best seller are practically nonexistent.

But Canongate U.S., an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, is betting the ranch on “The Raw Shark Texts,” a postmodern psychological thriller and love story. (Mark Haddon, the author of the best-seller “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” contributed a blurb, calling it “the bastard love-child of ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ ”)

It goes on sale in the United States today, and the publisher has already printed 100,000 copies, a huge run for a relatively small independent publisher. Canongate has vowed to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign to promote the book.

The film rights were sold to Film Four in London for a sum in the mid- to high six figures, in a frenzied auction involving Warner Brothers and New Line. The book is to be translated into 24 languages, including Mandarin, Bulgarian and Slovak.

And the novel has already received admiring reviews in The Los Angeles Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, along with a mention in GQ.

None of that guarantees a best seller, of course. So publishers like Grove/Atlantic have turned to the so-called pre-pub tour, laying the groundwork early and telling prized booksellers in person that this is the big book they are pushing this season.

Mr. Hall was not depending entirely on the pre-pub tour to start word of mouth. He had been doing his own promotional work long before the book went on sale, regularly updating a MySpace page (myspace.com/stevenhallbooks). Powell’s Books in Portland invited him to write a Web log on the bookstore’s site for a week in March.

“I’m like a parent,” Mr. Hall said. “It needs my attention right now. I’m doing everything I can to help it until it can stand on its own two feet.”

Indeed, by the time the book is on the shelves, the promotional work is almost over.

Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, is credited with inventing the pre-publication tour a decade ago when he circled the country with Charles Frazier, the author of “Cold Mountain.” The book was a smash, selling 1.6 million copies in hardcover and spending 61 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and 33 in paperback.

In a business that is becoming increasingly driven by online retailing and corporate buying decisions, booksellers are all too eager to meet authors and publishers in person.

After leaving Chicago, Mr. Hall and his publishers were off to Minneapolis for an interview at Minnesota Public Radio (his second interview ever), a quick photo shoot and, later that night, another dinner with Barnes & Noble executives.

“I can go back to 70 employees in my store and say I talked to the publisher, and that will motivate them to hard sell,” said Russ Wilbur, the store manager of the Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis, at a dinner where he was seated next to Mr. Hall. “I’m telling you, that’s the book business. That’s how it works.”

In Portland, the visit was timed with the annual Winter Institute, a two-day conference of hundreds of independent booksellers sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, a trade group representing independently owned bookstores. Each publisher was allowed to bring only two authors, creating an exclusivity that BookExpo America, the major industry event of the year, lacks.

At dinner there one night, Mr. Entrekin stood up, wineglass in hand, for a speech in which he called Mr. Hall’s book “the most original novel I’ve read in 10 years.”

In attendance were some of the biggest names in the tightly knit world of independent bookstores, who are still not accustomed to being wooed over fancy dinners. “This is a new thing,” said Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. “Only three times a year do we network like this with publishers and authors. We’re reading it before the hype hits.”

Nancy Rutland, the owner of Bookworks in Albuquerque, met Mr. Hall in Portland. “It makes a huge difference,” she said. “Now I’ll want to read the book, and then we’ll try to get him to Albuquerque.”

Booksellers usually view the dinners as a grand gesture by the publisher, said Paul Yamazaki, the chief book buyer at City Lights.

“What they’re trying to do is make a statement about the book,” he said. “They want you to go read it, and it gives them another five minutes. But you can’t manufacture these things. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and the book has to deliver,” he said. “Ultimately it’s about the book.”

But the effects of meeting an author in a social setting are undeniable. “The back story with Steven is that he’s from where he’s from — he’s a working-class guy,” Mr. Yamazaki added.

“I wasn’t going to read it,” another bookseller said, “Until he said that Paul Auster of ‘City of Glass’ was one of his major influences.”

By Thursday night in Portland, a group of authors was busily signing books in a ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel. Mr. Hall was looking bleary-eyed, taking slugs from a bottle of Budweiser between signing books. He was eager for this trip, to be followed by months of the real book tour, to be over.

“It’s a bit of an odd system,” he said. “You take a writer, the kind of person who wants to sit on his own for three years at a time, and then make them go to a bunch of dinner parties.”

Friday morning, on Feb. 2, he was on a plane back to England.

“It’s quite weird to be hyped-up and talking to a couple hundred people about the book,” he said, “to going home and sitting with my Xbox.”

All the pre-pub hoopla had Mr. Hall hoping for a best seller, he said, and if that did not happen, he was bracing himself for a “world of pain.”

“There’s a big part of me that’s saying, careful — not a single book has been sold,” he said. “Everyone loves me now, but if the book doesn’t sell, I’ll never be able to show my face in America again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/bu...a/02shark.html





Missing Child: Another Magazine Gone, Though Still on Web
Louise Story

As goes Life, so goes Child.

Meredith Corp., a book and magazine publisher, said Tuesday that Child magazine would be printed for the last time this spring, although the magazine's Web site would continue to post original content. The company announced the move as part of a broader restructuring that would eliminate 60 jobs, 30 of them at Child.

The strategy is starting to sound familiar in the magazine industry. This month, Hachette Filipacchi said it would stop printing the U.S. version of Premiere, the movie magazine, but keep its Web site. And Time said Monday that it would cease publication of Life, though it would make the magazine's photograph archive available free online.

Meredith said that Child's Web site would become part of a parenting portal that is expected to be operational in July and include Parents, American Baby and Family Circle, three of the company's other titles.

"We continuously review our business activities with the objective of maximizing our performance and growth potential," said Stephen Lacy, chief executive for Meredith, in a statement.

Child lost a substantial number of readers last year and faced competition from new titles like Cookie, an upscale parenting magazine introduced by Condé Nast in late 2005. Child's circulation fell 18.5 percent last year to 740,534 paid subscribers in the second half of the year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a nonprofit association that tracks the industry.

"Cookie's going after the same market that Child was always trying to go after, and they're doing it better," said Kelly Foster, senior partner and print director for MindShare, a media-buying agency in the WPP Group.

Parenting magazines, like wedding magazines, have the perennial challenge of finding new readers once the target audience stops feeling the need to subscribe. These days such magazines must also compete with the Internet; in the case of Child, some readers now go to sites like BabyCenter.com for information.

Child's advertising revenue, mostly derived from companies producing baby food, clothes and diapers, has also weakened over the past year.

Subscribers to Child will be able to choose whether they want to receive a refund or Parents magazine instead, said Patrick Taylor, a spokesman for Meredith. Meredith bought Child and other titles from Gruner + Jahr in 2005.

Meredith, which is based in Des Moines, Iowa, also owns Better Homes and Gardens.

The company said it would incur an exceptional $3 million charge from the closure of Child, mostly to cover severance expenses. Another $7 million charge would apply to write off unrecoverable assets from Child, including deferred costs from subscription acquisitions.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/28/news/child.php





Illusory Characters With Startling Stage Presence
Steven McElroy

To the average moviegoer the sight of Eddie Murphy portraying several characters in the same scene is no longer a shock. Such special-effects trickery has become commonplace: a good makeup artist, a few carefully placed cameras, some digital tweaking and presto.

In live theater an actor standing alongside himself would still be a jarring sight — but perhaps not for long.

When “Losing Something,” written and directed by Kevin Cunningham, opens on the 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan, the production will mark the first use by an American theater company of a high-definition video projection system called Eyeliner. Using Eyeliner together with Isadora — new software that controls digital video — Mr. Cunningham and the creative team at 3LD (or 3-Legged Dog) are hoping to produce some dazzling, perhaps even shocking, effects.

“We don’t have to obey the laws of physics anymore,” Mr. Cunningham, also 3LD’s executive artistic director, said before a recent rehearsal. During a subsequent run-through of the show — an oblique ghost play told from the point of view of a middle-aged man drifting into the oblivion of memory loss — actors routinely floated in space or appeared out of nowhere.

The Eyeliner system makes use of an old stage trick called Pepper’s Ghost that by most accounts was first seen onstage in an 1862 production of Charles Dickens’s “Haunted Man,” at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. John Henry Pepper (1821-1900) is usually credited with discovering the illusion, though an engineer named Henry Dircks was really first to suggest placing an angled piece of plate glass between audience and actors, allowing off-stage objects or people to “appear” reflected on the glass as if they were onstage. When the off-stage lights were turned off, the ghosts seemed to vanish.

With Eyeliner, the unwieldy glass pane is replaced with a lighter, nearly invisible screen invented by Uwe Maass, the managing director of Event Works, a company in Dubai. Another company, Vision4, from Denmark, holds the licensing rights for New York.

“We believe that new ground will be found in the symbiosis between art and technology,” Mikael Fock, the director of Vision4, wrote in an e-mail message. “That is why we are enthusiastic to collaborate with the 3-Legged Dog, who share the very same aspirations.” Vision4 will even bring two productions of their own to the 3LD space next year in what is intended to be a continuing partnership between the two companies.

Mr. Maass’s invention has been gaining a higher profile for a while now: many of the millions who saw Madonna sing with the animated rock band the Gorillaz at last year’s Grammy Awards probably did not know that, for part of that performance, they were watching a virtual Madonna — courtesy of Eyeliner. Only now are the possibilities for live theater beginning to be explored.

Early in “Losing Something” the lead character, X (Aldo Perez), contemplates his existence in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. His older self, also played by Mr. Perez, enters from upstage, crosses to stand beside X, and the two face each other and talk. One is the real Mr. Perez, the other a recorded video image projected onto an offstage mirror and reflected onto the Eyeliner screen.

“Video is often used as a sophisticated set element or backdrop,” Mr. Cunningham said. “But it’s flat, and no other element onstage is flat. Here we’re trying to make all elements fully dimensional — to manipulate time, light and image the same way I would manipulate clay as a sculptor.”

To do this, “Losing Something” employs both recorded video images and traditional Pepper’s Ghost effects — actors hidden offstage are reflected onto the screen, where they appear to be floating. Additional video images, projected from the rear, help to create a sort of three-dimensional movie box.

Then Isadora takes over. The software, invented by Mark Coniglio, a composer and media artist who is a director of the dance company Troika Ranch, gives its user real-time control over the digital video. An operator can make a recorded video character stop, look and listen, as if reacting to a real person onstage.

All of this new technology means that when “Losing Something” is firing on all cylinders, it can be a challenge to distinguish the real actors from the projected images.

Jeff Morey, the video designer, ran Isadora at a recent rehearsal, monitoring two Macintosh computers and making the complex program sound simple. “When you see it onstage with the actors, it’s clear what you need to do,” he said. “But making it work in a way that’s transparent is a different animal.” Mr. Morey said he was trying to create the illusion of depth and distance. “There’s a sense of magic to it,” he said.

Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Morey both said their experimentation with Eyeliner and Isadora was just beginning and would probably continue to reveal surprises.

“We’re babies at this,” Mr. Cunningham said. “We’re really looking forward to the next production because we’re learning so much. Our whole process is turned on its head in a way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/th...02eyel.html?hp





P2P: Introduction and Real World Applications

Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the first in a 2-part series on Read/WriteWeb, exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 (this post) is a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 will discuss future applications.

As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages - instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Introduction

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been receiving increasing demand from users and are now accepted as a standard way of distributing information, because its architecture enables scalability, efficiency and performance as key concepts. A peer-to-peer network is decentralized, self-organized, and dynamic in its pure sense, and offers an alternative to the traditional client-server model of computing. Client-server architecture enables individuals to connect to a server - but although servers are scalable, there is a limit to what they can do. P2P networks are almost unlimited in their scalability.

In "pure" P2P systems, every node acts as a server and client - and they share resources without any centralized control. However most P2P applications have some degree of centralization. These are called "hybrid" P2P networks and they centralize at least the list of users. This is how instant messengers or file sharing programs work - the system keeps a list of users with their IP addresses.

Different applications of P2P networks enable users to share the computation power (distributed systems), data (file-sharing), and bandwidth (using many nodes for transferring data). P2P uses an individual's computer power and resources, instead of powerful centralized servers. The shared resources guarantee high availability among peers. P2P is a really important area to research, because it has a huge potential in distributed computing. It is also important for the industry as well, as new business models are being created around P2P.

P2P Standards

The key thing for the architecture of P2P networks is to achieve reliability, efficiency, scalability and portability.

For the moment there are no standards for P2P application development, but standards are needed to enable interoperability. Sun has tried to implement a framework basis called JXTA, which is a network programming and computing platform for distributed computing. Sun was the first company to try and develop standards for P2P, but surely other companies will also try to implement their own standards. Microsoft, Intel and IBM are investing and working in their research laboratories on P2P supported application frameworks or systems. It is an open area where no standards are accepted yet.

Gnutella

Gnutella has been used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner. It's an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers.

Using the same search protocol, such as Gnutella, forms a compatible network for different applications. Anybody who implements the Gnutella protocol is able to search and locate files on that network. Here's how it works. At start up, Gnutella will try to find at least one node to connect to. After the connection, the client requests a list of working addresses and proceeds to connect to other nodes until it reaches a quota. When the client searches for files, it sends the request to each node it is connected to, which then forwards the request to the other nodes it is connected, until a number of "hops" occurs from the sender.

According to Wikipedia, as of December 2005 Gnutella is the third-most-popular file sharing network on the Internet - following eDonkey 2000 and FastTrack. Gnutella is thought to host on an average of approximately 2.2 million users, although around 750,000-1,000,000 are online at any given moment.

The industry use P2P networks in many different ways, each with different business model and different infrastructure. So now let's look at some real world applications for P2P...

Instant Messaging

The first adopted usage of P2P applications was instant messengers. Back in the early days of the internet, people used gopher and IRC servers for communication. These technologies could only handle a certain number of users online at the same time, so there were delays for communicating whenever the server was approaching its limits. However the use of P2P changed the whole idea of IM. The bandwidth was shared between users, enabling faster and more scalable communication.

File Sharing

The peer-to-peer file sharing era started with Napster and continued with much more powerful applications such as Kazaa, Gnutella. These programs brought P2P into the mainstream. Although some P2P file-sharing applications have stopped because of legal issues, there is still a high demand in the industry. Now Napster has gone 'legit' and there are new media P2P apps like Joost (P2P TV) arriving on the scene. We will discuss this more in the next post.
Collaborative Community

Document sharing and collaboration is really important for a company. This issue has tried to be solved by internal portals and collaboration servers. However the information has to be up to date and with portals this wasn't always possible. Collaboration with P2P broke that barrier, by using peoples computer resources instead of a centralized server.

Groove is a software with P2P capabilities which was acquired by Microsoft in April 2005. Groove is now offering Microsoft Office based solutions, mainly using P2P for document collaboration. It also allows the usage of instant messaging and integration with some video conferencing solutions. It provides user and role based security, which is one of the most important aspects of P2P for an organization. Groove is also a “relay server” to enable offline usage.

IP Telephony

Another major usage of P2P is IP telephony. IP telephony revolutionaries the way we use the internet, enabling us to call anywhere in the world for free using our computers.

Skype is a good example of P2P usage in VoIP. It was acquired by eBay in 2005. Skype was built on top of the infrastructure of P2P file-sharing system, Kazaa. The bandwidth is shared and the sound or video in real-time are shared as resources. The main server exists only for the presence information and billing users of the system whenever they make a call that has charges (e.g. SkypeOut).

High Performance Computing - Grid Computing

High performance computing is important for scientific research or for large companies. P2P plays a role in enabling high performance computing. Sharing of resources like computation power, network bandwidth, and disk space will benefit from P2P.

Hive computing is similar - it is where millions of computers connecting to the internet can form a super computer, if it is successfully managed. One of the popular projects is SETI@HOME (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which enables users to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is a voluntary project with more than 3.3 million users in 226 countries - it has used 796,000 years of CPU time and analyzed 45 terabytes of data in just two and a half years of operation.

Some industrial projects also exist in this area. Datasynapse is charging users for the CPU cycles they use. Open Source projects also exist, like Globus and Globus Grid Forum.
http://www.personalbee.com/227/11969633





Solving the Phone Number Blues
David Pogue

Review

If you only use one telephone with one phone number, this column will not be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric, you.

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle.

You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cellphone when you are at home (or the other way around).

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, nips all of these problems right in the bud. It is a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, "One number for life," pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, asking them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uni-number, all of your phones ring simultaneously.

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you are home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail).

You can also play your messages at GrandCentral.com, and even download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You can even have messages sent to you by e-mail, as sound files that you can play through your e-mail program.

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A $15-per-month premium plan offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of a limited time, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

There are some substantial downsides to getting involved with GrandCentral. First, GrandCentral offers you a choice of about 20 uni-numbers, but it does not yet offer phone numbers in every area code, so your next-door neighbor may wind up having to dial an out-of-town number to reach you. In 14 central American states, GrandCentral offers no numbers at all, and it is not available outside Canada and the United States. You can see what is available at GrandCentral.com.

For an annual fee, you can request a specific, vanity phone number.

Second, while you're publicizing your new number, there will be an awkward period when some people are still dialing your old numbers.

You will have to check all your old voice mail boxes plus your new GrandCentral one. Otherwise, this unification of all your phones and answering machines makes life less complicated.

Be warned, however: GrandCentral offers a huge list of additional features that are not so simple. If you are not careful, GrandCentral can turn into a full-blown hobby.

For example:

Caller naming. Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name — "Call from Ethel Murgatroid" — when you answer the phone

How does it know the name? Sometimes Caller ID supplies it. GrandCentral also knows every name in your online address book, which can import your contacts from any e-mail program.

Callers not in these categories are asked to state their names the first time they call. On subsequent calls, GrandCentral recognizes them.

Listen in. For the first time in cellphone history, you can listen to a message someone is leaving, just the way you can on a home answering machine.

Your phone rings and displays the usual Caller ID information. You answer it. But before you can even say "Hello," GrandCentral's recording lady tells you the caller's name, and then offers you four ways to handle the call: "Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call."

If you press 3, the call goes directly to voice mail, but you get to listen in. If you feel that the caller deserves your immediate attention, you can press * to "pick up" and join the call.

This subtle feature can save you time, cellular minutes and, in certain cases of conflict-avoidance, emotional distress.

Record the call. Hitting 4 during a call begins recording it. GrandCentral then treats the recording as a voice mail message. Here again, you can immortalize the historic calls of your life, or just create a replayable record of driving directions.

Ringback music. This little feature lets you replace the ringing sounds the caller hears while waiting for you to answer (what Lily Tomlin used to describe as "one ringie-dingie, two ringie-dingies") with music, in GrandCentral's case, any MP3 file of your choice.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../PTpogue15.php





France Caters to Market for the Most Simple of Computers
Thomas Crampton

The Minitel, a French government-sponsored minicomputer that was wired into 14 million French homes at its peak in the mid-1990s, had a limited service offering, a black-and-white screen and slow connection speeds that doomed it to near-extinction in the face of the Internet.

Now, a French Internet service provider, Neuf Cegetel, has taken inspiration from the Minitel to develop a computer based on a similar low-cost model, aimed at people who are unable or unwilling to buy a computer. In a gesture to high-technology enthusiasts, however, the system uses the open-source software beloved by many engineers and programmers.

"We wanted to create something as simple and cheap as the Minitel to reach technophobes and people without much money," said Frédéric Charrier, manager of the Easy Neuf project, which started its first national advertising campaign last week. "For a slightly higher subscription, customers get a simplified computer with all services they might need."

For €39.90, or $53.30 - a €10 premium over the price of most broadband subscriptions in France - customers get a white computer roughly the size and shape of a toaster. A one-time payment of €29 buys a keyboard, mouse and camera; for €99 more, the customer can get a 14-inch color monitor.

French Internet service providers have compelling reasons to push people to buy computers, said Ian Fogg, an analyst in London at the research firm Jupiter.

Household ownership of computers in France, which stands at 61 percent according to Jupiter, is lower than the European average of 64 percent and significantly below countries like Denmark and Sweden, where more than 80 percent of homes have computers. At the same time, rapid deregulation has made France one of the most competitive markets in Europe for Internet providers.

"People talk about the Nordic markets, but Europe's most dynamic Internet markets are the Netherlands and France," Fogg said. In France, three major private companies are competing to lay fiber cable to homes. "France is leading Europe toward the mass-market use of fiber-based broadband, he said."

Faced with financing this costly infrastructure investment, those laying fiber to the home - Neuf, Free and Orange - have to maximize the number of customers using those lines.

"If one-third of the people in a building do not own a computer and see no reason to get broadband, it becomes a serious financial issue," Fogg said. "Some Internet companies have offered incentives for people to buy computers, but Neuf has taken it to the ultimate level in offering the computer themselves."

To Neuf, the issue came down to the difficulty that first-time computer users experience in dealing with Windows.

"Nearly 80 percent of all current customer calls relate to problems with Microsoft Windows," Charrier said. "We decided it was easier to build our own platform to limit potential problems."

"Our promise of customer service forced us to conceive everything from the consumer perspective in order to reduce calls," Charrier said. "This starts with the instruction book containing many photos, goes as far as the simplified computer interface and goes down to a redesign of the keyboard."

The keyboard uses color codes to indicate the characters that appear by pressing the Shift or Alt keys and has separate keys for the @ and € symbols. Customers can ask that the computer itself be inspected and operated remotely by Neuf technicians to resolve problems. The computer will also notify Neuf of problems like overheating, which the customer may not detect.

For the operating system, the computer uses a version of Linux with a graphic overlay designed by Neuf.

"The choice of open source was both for price and motivation," Charrier said. "We pay no licensing fee for the software, and engineers feel motivated to work on a new kind of project that helps the open-source community."

The choice has been hailed by April, an advocacy group for free and open-source software. "This is the first time that a company offers open-source software in a mass consumption product that has a help desk to assist customers," said Benjamin Drieu, treasurer of April, who also works for a company involved in the Neuf project.

"Normally, only programmers have the confidence to use open source, so this could change the perception of free software."

The suite of open-source software on the Easy Neuf includes the Firefox browser, Abiword word processor and the Gnumeric spreadsheet program.

The built-in memory is a fairly limited 512-kilobyte flash disk, but the device is compatible with external hard drives and a range of peripherals like printers, Internet phone headsets and digital cameras. As new peripherals become popular, the necessary software will be available for download onto the Neuf computers via regular software updates.

The operating system displays icons along the bottom of the screen, and offers several versions, depending on the needs of the user. At the simplest level, the computer offers menus based on a theme. The screen button "search," for example, has a submenu offering a telephone (which links to a yellow pages Web site), an encyclopedia (which links to Wikipedia) and another option that links to search engines.

"We have found that many people like to have the Internet edited back to what they find essential," Charrier said.

"The customer we are aiming for prefers a limited and stable offering."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...ology/neuf.php





Microsoft Office Sheds Features for Simplicity's Sake
David Pogue

Life has a funny symmetry, don't you think? When you're born, you're short, toothless and bald. You spend the first part of your life gaining height, teeth and hair — and the last part losing them again.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Office is following the same trajectory. (This might sound like the stretched analogy of the year, but bear with me.)

Microsoft spent the first dozen years of Office's life piling on new features. Over time, the humble word processor called Word became a photo editor, a Web-design program and dessert topping. Not one person in a hundred used those extra features. Still, we kept buying the upgrades, thanks to our innate fondness for unnecessary power (see also: SUVs).

Eventually, however, Microsoft Office developed a reputation for bloat and complexity. It was fully grown: tall, hairy and toothy.

So what did Microsoft do? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which makes its debut on Jan. 30, is that it is simpler, more streamlined and creates much smaller documents.

Thanks to a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are practically totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone.

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office's guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It's all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

Better yet, you can see how each formatting choice will affect your document — a font, style or color change, let's say — just by pointing to a control without clicking. No Apply button, no thumbnail preview; your actual document changes temporarily and automatically. (Unfortunately, this doesn't work with chart styles in Excel.)

The bad news, of course, is that this Office bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed. Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play a game you could call Find the Feature.

The game is so challenging because the Ribbon changes. Its controls change depending on which of the seven permanent tabs you click at the top of the screen (Home, Insert, View, and so on). Still other Ribbons appear only when needed; a graphics Ribbon appears, for example, when you click a picture in the document.

You're stuck with the tabs Microsoft gives you. You can't rearrange them or hide the ones you never use. Even if you never create form letters or write academic dissertations, the Mailings and References tabs will be there on the Ribbon forever, wasting space.

Nor is that the only loss of customizability. Microsoft has also removed the ability to design custom toolbars stocked with the features, fonts or style sheets you use most. In Office 2007, the only thing you can customize is something called the Quick Bar: a tiny row of unlabeled icons, awkwardly jammed in above or below the Ribbon.

The second big disruptive change is the new file format. Microsoft, to its credit, has not touched the standard Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats for 10 years. You never had to worry that your colleagues' Macs or PCs would not be able to open your documents.

Now you do. The new file formats (.docx for Word, for example) are much more compact than the old ones, and they're also easier to recover from data corruption. But older versions of Office for Windows can't open them without a free converter (available at microsoftoffice.com). Office 2004 for Macintosh can't open them at all, although shareware and Web conversion utilities are available.

Fortunately, you can easily instruct your copy of Office 2007 to save its documents in the older format. In these turbulent transitional times, that might be a good idea.

The Ribbon reorganization and new document formats are by far the most important changes in Office 2007. There are, of course, some other new features, especially in Word.

Word has always let you define style sheets: memorized sets of formatting characteristics — for headings and captions, for example — that you can apply with one click. Now, however, there are sets of coordinated styles. One click on Elegant or Formal, for example, impressively reformats all styles in an entire document.

What used to be called the File menu is still present in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, although it's now represented by the Office logo. Its submenus offer Quick Print, which prints one copy on your main printer — no dialog boxes required. Excellent; how often, really, does the average person switch printers?

Other improvements: A zoom in/ zoom out slider appears at the bottom of the window. The spelling checker now flags right spelling/wrong usage errors, as in, "I need to loose ten pounds." A Translation tool gives you instant, if imperfect, foreign-language translations.

You can now export a document as a PDF file. You can write blog entries that you then post directly to Blogger, TypePad or WordPress servers. A Document Inspector window lets you purge hidden text, comments or other elements that might give away corporate secrets in a document you're about to transmit. And something called Smart Art lets you drop canned business graphics into your memos.

In Excel, the world's most popular spreadsheet, you can now handle ridiculously large matrices of numbers (one million rows, 16,000 columns). Charts are fancier, and "conditional formatting" automatically applies color to cells whose numbers meet certain criteria. For example, cells in a temperature-tracking spreadsheet could show shades of blue for cold days, or reds and yellows for warmer ones.

As for Outlook, Microsoft's flagship e-mail/calendar program, the most significant change is Instant Search, which lets you pluck one informational needle from the haystack of e-mail, attachments, calendar appointments, addresses and to-do items — fast. (The horribly sluggish Search from the old Outlook has, at long last, been taken out behind the barn and shot.)

Outlook can now subscribe to RSS newsfeeds (free bulletins from blogs and news Web sites). A new To Do bar consolidates everything you have to worry about: tasks, appointments and e-mails you've flagged. And — praise be — attached documents appear right in the body of your e-mail messages.

In PowerPoint, the presentation software, there's not much new apart from the Office-wide improvements. There is, however, a new tool for creating diagrams and flow charts, and slide libraries let you "publish" self-updating slides that you or other people may want to use in other presentations.

Now then: If Office over all is simpler to use, its version matrix is not. There are eight versions. All include Word, Excel and PowerPoint; they differ only in the extras.

The $150 Home and Student edition, for example, also includes OneNote (a note-taking program). The Ultimate package ($680 — ouch) includes Access (database), Accounting Express, InfoPath (electronic forms), Groove (collaboration "workspaces"), Outlook, and Publisher (page layout). You can also buy programs à la carte.

Over all, Office 2007 is much more pleasant to use than previous versions. It seems to be the work of the New Microsoft, a company that is far more concerned with elegance, beauty and simplicity than the Old Microsoft. Little things like typography, choice of wording and on-screen feedback get much more consideration in Office 2007 (and Windows Vista, which goes on sale to consumers the same day).

Still, switching will be a headache for Office veterans for weeks. You may gain productivity once you've made peace with the Ribbon, but in the meantime, you'll spend a lot of time stumbling through the new layout.

Handy hint: Don't upgrade right before diving into an important project on deadline. In fact, for best results, don't buy until you've spent some time at microsoftoffice.com watching the tutorials and downloading the free trial versions.

By then, you'll have realized that the news, over all, is good. Microsoft Office may not be quite as big and hairy as it once was — but it's still got teeth.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/.../ptpogue18.php





The Accidental Publicist: Wippit and the Beatles
Victoria Shannon

Even when pressed, Paul Myers will not lay claim to teasing the public about the Beatles on the Internet.

"It was purely accidental," he said with a laugh when asked about the phantom press release posted this month on his London-based digital music Web site with the headline, "The Beatles available for download on Wippit."

Problem was, the full text of the press release - dated March 14 even though it was posted on March 9 - was not to be found under the headline.

The mystery got a mild bump in attention across the blogosphere and generated a news story on BBC.com. No surprise: The Beatles are among the last Top 10 bands, along with Led Zeppelin and Radiohead, that have not licensed their songs for sale digitally to outfits like Wippit and iTunes.

And when Apple (the computer company) settled its long-running trademark dispute last month with Apple (the Beatles' old record label), both analysts and ordinary fans speculated that a digital deal could at last be struck. So Wippit's press release was at least plausible.

In the end - that is, on March 14, the date of the press release - Wippit disclosed that it was offering collections of video clips of the Beatles for sale by download or as part of its subscription service. And even then, Wippit did not secure the rights for North American sales, so downloads from the United States are prohibited.

Myers, who founded Wippit seven years ago, before the age of the iPod, has no regrets about his incomplete, if not downright misleading, publicity lure. For a company that signs its press e-mails with the Oscar Wilde quotation, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about," the stunt was not completely out of the blue.

Whether you see Myers as a marketing maestro or madman, he is still a pioneer in the digital music market. Wippit - named for the dog, not the Devo song "Whip It" - started as a peer-to-peer music site that, unlike its peers of the day, paid musicians and record labels royalty fees.

Today, Wippit is a subscription and download service that costs £50 per year or 29 pence per download. At various times, it has been the second-ranked digital music store in Britain, behind iTunes and ahead of Napster and eMusic, Myers said. While more than 50 percent of its business is in Britain, North America accounts for a good 17 percent; it also does business in continental Europe.

Myers believes digital music stores will not be able to compete on price or music catalogue for long because the differences among them just won't be that big.

Instead, they will need draws like old Beatles' videos or, as with a separate Wippit offering, unique services like converting tunes into cellphone ring tones, he said.

Another Wippit hallmark is that it offers half of its music selections for purchase in the unrestricted MP3 format, which can be played on virtually any digital music device, including the iPod.

Wippit subscribers choose MP3 over the alternative - the WMA format from Microsoft that is more difficult to copy on other media - by a ratio of four to one, Myers said, proving that something as techie as format can be a sales draw.

At the same time, he predicted, government noises, especially in Europe, about forcing music hardware and software to be compatible across brands will pressure the major record labels to free their digital sales from copying constraints and other digital rights management.

"They've got to look at the numbers and say, 'We want to sell more - forget about protecting the catalogue,' " Myers said. He expects at least one of the labels to make that move before the end of the year.

In the meantime, Wippit's Beatles release got worldwide attention, Myers said with relish.

And the British press is still speculating that EMI is on the verge of releasing The Beatles' back catalogue as digital downloads.

But don't hold your breath: EMI surely knows a thing or two about manipulating publicity to its advantage, too.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../ptend29.3.php





From February

Kodak's Cartridges: A a First Step
Victoria Shannon

It has long been a mystery and irritation to consumers: Why are ink-jet printer cartridges so expensive?

You can buy an entire printer for the price of three or four ink refills. For people who print a lot of photos at home, it feels like punishment for being a fan. For people who might be tempted to custom- print their own, it is a real barrier to even starting.

Mostly, the out-of-kilter pricing is a quirk of how the printer business evolved. It's the razor-and- blade model: The razor comes at an incredible value, but you are stuck buying expensive, proprietary razor blades for as long as you shave.

Kodak, struggling for a way to reclaim its past glory in the digital age, has decided to up-end the approach. This week, it got into the home ink-jet printer business, but it was the printers' replacement cartridges that got all the attention. The more expensive color ink is priced at $15, while the black ink cartridges go for $10.

For those of us paying $30 and up each time the printer runs dry, this is a godsend. Of course, Kodak's printers will not come at the dirt- cheap prices that we are now used to, but at around $200, the all-in- one printer-scanner-copiers are not completely out of reach, either.

Hewlett-Packard, the biggest seller of ink-jet printers, hasn't officially responded to Kodak's tactic. Nor have Canon, Lexmark and the others.

The inevitable result of competition like this can only be good for the consumer, right?

You might think so. But it may be too little, too late. Most of the printing of photos from digital cameras is not done at home, but through either Internet services or retail kiosks. Self-printing accounts for only about 30 percent of the snapshots that end up on paper, relegating us home-printing types to nearly the same niche status as home darkroom developers of the film age.

O.K., so if Kodak can make printer cartridges at a profit for $10, why can't the others? My brilliant suggestion to Jaime Cohen Szulc, the chairman of Eastman Kodak Europe, was for Kodak to make $10 cartridges for the other printer manufacturers.

Ah, but there's a catch: One of the reasons Kodak can cut the price and still claim to maintain high printing quality is that it moved the "print head," the mechanical device that actually does the spraying of the ink, from the ink-jet cartridge to the printer itself.

The conventional approach of the other printer makers is to craft the print head, at some expense, onto the cartridge. So Kodak's cartridges, even if they were slightly rejiggered to fit a Canon printer, would still need to be re-engineered to include the print head. Szulc said that this just was not going to happen.

Besides, the disgruntlement over ink prices isn't just about the $30. It is also about being locked into an HP replacement, for instance, if you have an HP printer, and Kodak has not changed that part of the equation. The existing printer manufacturers have made it difficult, if not impossible, for outside companies to make knock-off (i.e., cheaper) generic replacements.

Szulc said the Kodak's research has repeatedly shown that dissatisfaction with the price of ink cartridges is consumers' No. 1 complaint about home printing. Most also say they would print more if the cost were more reasonable.

"We're late to the market," he admitted. "That's why we couldn't come in with something that's only slightly better than what already exists."

Although Szulc called his company's tactic a "breakthrough" on pricing, he also said, "We're not doing this because we're nice people. We intend to make money on each printer and cartridge." Kodak aims to be among the top three printer makers in the world within three years, he said.

Still, Kodak is to be applauded for the move to cheaper cartridges, which will roll out globally in stages. (Two of its new printer models will be sold in Europe this spring before broader availability later in the year; no specific plans have been announced for Asia.) It may yet change the dynamics of the printer market.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ss/ptend08.php





Google’s Chief Gets $1 in Pay; His Security Costs $532,755
Miguel Helft

It is not common for the salary of an American chief executive to be dwarfed by the cost of keeping that executive safe. But then, Google is an unconventional company.

The Internet search giant paid its top executive, Eric E. Schmidt, a salary of $1 and a holiday bonus of $1,723 in 2006, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday. But Mr. Schmidt’s personal security cost shareholders $532,755, representing the bulk of his compensation. Mr. Schmidt also received $22,456 to offset taxes due on a perk: the use of a Google-chartered aircraft by family members and friends.

Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin, president of technology, and Larry Page, president of products, earned the same salary and bonus as Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Page received an additional $36,795 for transportation, logistics and personal security.

The token salaries represent a sacrifice that Google’s top executives can afford to make. As of March 1, according to the filing, Mr. Schmidt owned more than 10.7 million shares, worth more than $5 billion at Wednesday’s closing price of $471.02. Mr. Brin owned 28.6 million shares worth about $13.5 billion, and Mr. Page owned nearly 29.2 million shares worth about $13.7 billion. Each sold shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the 12 months since the previous proxy filing.

The salary and bonuses paid to Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page reflect little change from 2005, when they each earned a salary of $1 and bonuses of $1,630 to $1,723.

For the latest filings, guidance by the Securities and Exchange Commission included personal security as a perk that should be listed as compensation, said Jon Murchinson, a Google spokesman. He would not give further details about Mr. Schmidt’s security expenses.

Four other Google executives — the chief financial officer, George Reyes; the senior vice president for business operations, Shona Brown; the chief legal officer, David Drummond; and the senior vice president for product management, Jonathan Rosenberg — earned salaries of $250,000 each.

Adding other compensation, including stock option awards and incentives, they earned $1.7 million to $2.8 million. They also held unvested stock options with an estimated worth as of Dec. 31, 2006, that ranged from $21 million for Ms. Brown to $30 million for Mr. Drummond.

The company’s filing also includes a shareholder proposal to be voted on at the company’s May 10 annual meeting that would require Google to resist demands for censorship by all legal means and would prevent it from holding data that could be used to identify individuals in countries that restrict freedom of speech.

In recent years, Google has been criticized for its decision to create a search engine for the Chinese market that censors certain results. And its rival Yahoo has come under fire from human rights groups for handing over personal information to the Chinese authorities about users who were later imprisoned for criticizing the government.

Google’s board recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/te.../05google.html





Master of Search Seeks Mastery of the TV Dial
Miguel Helft

Following its conquest of YouTube last year, Google is now aiming for a piece of the old-fashioned tube.

The Internet search giant is announcing Tuesday that it will begin selling television ads on the 125 national satellite programming channels distributed by EchoStar Communications’ DISH Network.

The agreement is Google’s latest foray into offline media, and it underscores the company’s ambition to bring its wildly successful online advertising technology and auction-based pricing to new markets to continue fueling the company’s rapid growth.

Google’s online advertising technology has appealed to advertisers in large part because it allows them to aim ads effectively at specific audiences and users, and to measure the performance of those ads quickly. The company hopes it can bring those forces to old-line media.

“We think we can add value to this important medium by delivering more relevant ads to viewers, providing better accountability for advertisers and better monetize inventory for TV operators and programmers,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said in a statement announcing the EchoStar partnership.

Last year, Google began tests to sell radio spots and newspaper ads. Those tests have been inconclusive so far, and some analysts say the company needs to show investors that it can succeed in a market other than Internet search and advertising, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue.

“For Google to maintain its current momentum, it needs to become the king of something else beyond search, or play a meaningful role in a market that is much larger than the $16 billion online advertising market,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

For Google, the $70 billion television advertising market offers a potentially lucrative payoff. But Google is likely to encounter some resistance from cable operators with established sales forces, and competition from technology start-ups that also hope to broker TV ads.

Google’s official entry into television advertising has been widely anticipated, and it follows a limited test the company has been conducting since last year with a small Northern California cable system. The agreement with EchoStar, which has about 13 million subscribers, will allow Google to test its system nationwide.

Google will begin to place ads on the DISH Network in the next few months. A few dozen advertisers are expected to take part in the system initially, and Google says it hopes to open the program eventually to its entire base of advertisers.

“The EchoStar partnership allows us to take this to a national TV audience in all of their networks,” said Keval Desai, Google’s director of product management for TV.

Mr. Desai said the television ad system would work much like Google’s existing online and offline advertising systems. EchoStar would make some unspecified amount of air time available to Google’s advertisers. Advertisers or agencies would upload video spots to the system along with their desired target audience or network and would specify the price they are willing to bid for the air time.

Google’s ad system would then select the winning ads and play them on the air. Using information collected by EchoStar’s set-top satellite boxes, it will be able to give advertisers a report showing how many people viewed any ad and whether users tuned it out in the first few seconds.

Google will also use information collected by EchoStar to deliver the ads to their target audiences more precisely, the companies said.

Advertisers will not be able to designate specific households, but will be able to choose individual networks like ESPN or MTV and a time of day. Alternatively, they could choose a demographic group or geographic region, and Google’s system would schedule the ads across a variety of networks.

“Through this groundbreaking partnership with Google, we are confident we will be able to bring increased efficiencies to DISH Network’s advertising sales and more accurate, up-to-date viewer measurement with easily accessible online reporting to advertisers,” Charles W. Ergen, EchoStar’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Advertisers and agencies testing the system with Google said they were hopeful that it would prove compelling.

“The Internet is very effective for our clients,” said David Kenny, chief executive of the online marketing agency Digitas.

Mr. Kenny, who is also responsible for the digital strategy of the Publicis Groupe, the parent company of Digitas, added, “If we can do the same on the television screen with video assets, it has tremendous potential.”

But Mr. Kenny noted that the inventory available through Google’s system would most likely represent only a small slice of the overall television advertising market.

“This test is not a test that is going to change the future of television,” Mr. Kenny said.

One of Google’s biggest challenges in selling radio advertising has been its inability to obtain sufficient amounts of air time during prime-time hours and from top radio networks. Mr. Desai said that the EchoStar partnership included air time during all hours of the day and that Google was actively seeking other partners, including cable operators, satellite providers, television networks and local stations.

Michael Kelly, EchoStar’s executive vice president for advertising, said the advertising air time available through the system would be a “small percentage of EchoStar’s overall inventory.”

But he said Google’s ability to deliver ads that are more relevant to viewers, its auction model for selling ads and its expected ability to bring new advertisers to television would be good for EchoStar.

“I think it will have a positive impact on prices,” Mr. Kelly said.

Delivering more relevant ads may also allay fears among advertisers that viewers will increasingly use digital video recorders to skip ads, Mr. Kelly said.

Neither Google nor EchoStar would discuss how revenue from ads would be split between them. When Google sells ads on other companies’ Web sites, it gives the majority of the advertising revenue to those companies and keeps only a small portion.

Some analysts believe that if successful, Google’s technology could invigorate television advertising.

“It is very timely that TV can catch up and even surpass the Internet in terms of accountability,” said Bill Harvey, a media researcher and president of Bill Harvey Consulting.

But Mr. Harvey said Google might encounter resistance as it tries to sign up more partners.

“From the ad sales standpoint, Google competes with the networks’ own sales forces,” he said. “That could slow the adoption.”

Spot Runner, a start-up company that offers an automated online system to broker television ads, is already placing spots from large companies and small local businesses on most major cable networks, said Nick Grouf, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

Mr. Grouf also said cable technology provides more interactivity and is better suited for precise ad delivery than satellite television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/bu...ia/03adco.html





Google Enters DoubleClick Sweepstakes; Microsoft Must be Annoyed
Larry Dignan

Google is reportedly entering the DoubleClick sweepstakes in an effort to keep Microsoft from buying the ad network. It is almost as if Google is playing the how-annoying-can-we-be-to-Microsoft game.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported that Google is now interested in DoubleClick (see Techmeme discussion.) Sure, Google could build its own DoubleClick-ish network, but why not just buy it for a few billion if only to annoy Microsoft. After all, Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, which had nearly zilch for revenue. Google could surely pay the $2 billion DoubleClick's owners want for something that resembles a real business.

For those keeping score at home the DoubleClick sales process shapes up like this: Microsoft is annoyed; Google is like the wealthy kid that giggles as he keeps poking you; and the private equity firm that owns DoubleClick is downright giddy.

Just imagine if you're the owner of DoubleClick right now. Hellman & Friedman bought DoubleClick, which had a spotty track record as a public company, for $1 billion, did some tinkering in the background and now is sitting on a potential bidding war between Google and Microsoft. With any luck–and a few more leaks to the Journal–Hellman & Friedman could more than double its money. Gotta love the private equity game right now.

Meanwhile, the Journal notes that Microsoft is likely to win as the bidding for DoubleClick surpasses $2 billion. That's a shame because Microsoft can't afford to let Google acquire DoubleClick. As noted before, Microsoft should buy DoubleClick to bolster its online advertising services. Microsoft employee Don Dodge has a nice rebuttal to my idea, but Google's entry may change things a bit.

Let's assume Google is serious about DoubleClick. If you combine Google and DoubleClick Microsoft will really have to play catch-up. And I'd argue we're beyond the point where Microsoft could build its way to parity. Take DoubleClick off the market and Yahoo becomes one of the few options for Microsoft's online advertising aspirations. And that's really going to be pricey.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4769#comments





DoubleClick to Host Ad Exchange
Louise Story

DoubleClick, which delivers marketing messages to Web sites and monitors how many clicks they get, is setting up a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements.

The service, which was to be introduced Wednesday, could make DoubleClick a more attractive acquisition target, according to advertising industry executives.

DoubleClick, which opened in 1996 as a pioneer in the placement of banner ads online, has evolved into a company that serves - separately - both buyers and sellers of digital advertisements.

For advertising agencies and media buyers, it helps place ads online and gauge the effectiveness of campaigns. For Web publishers - companies that publish Web content and accept ads on their sites - DoubleClick delivers the ads to the Web sites and sells software that helps make the most of available space.

The new DoubleClick advertising exchange will bring Web publishers and advertising buyers together on a Web site where they can participate in auctions for ad space.

DoubleClick, based in New York, views the exchange as the centerpiece of a growth plan, David Rosenblatt, the company's chief executive, said in an interview Tuesday. "We already have the largest sellers and the largest buyers," he said. "This will link them for the first time."

He described the exchange as a mix of eBay and Sabre, the airline-reservations system that travel agents use. The service will let advertisers see information about what competitors bid for particular ads, in the same way that eBay shows previous bids. And it will let publishers try to ensure that they sell their ad spots at the highest possible price, the way that airlines try to do with the seats they sell.

"The value of our company depends completely on our ability to maximize our customers' revenue," Rosenblatt said.

Some of the biggest names on the Internet appear to have already seen the value in DoubleClick's service - or its potential. Google and Microsoft are pursuing bids to buy the company, according to The Wall Street Journal, which said that DoubleClick's owner, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, has priced DoubleClick at more than $2 billion.

Hellman & Friedman, which paid $1.1 billion for the company in July 2005, did not return a call for comment on Tuesday night.

The online advertisement exchange will make DoubleClick more attractive to a potential acquirer because there is much demand for such a service and little supply, industry executives said. One of the few companies that runs this kind of auction, Right Media, took in $40 million in October when it sold a 20 percent stake to Yahoo.

"If you want to be a network in this kind of market, the biggest challenge you face is access to publisher-side supply," said Michael Walrath, the chief executive of Right Media. "So ad management - providing the trafficking and delivery services to publishers - is a really nice foot in the door to gaining access to those publishers' supply."

Historically, ads in traditional media like television and magazines have been purchased through human negotiation. But the auctions introduced by Internet companies like Google and Yahoo for search advertising have forced some advertising executives to look for more efficient ways to sell ads. Now some of the biggest names on the Internet, including Google and eBay, are seeking to participate more broadly in advertising auctions.

DoubleClick's revenue in 2006 was about $300 million, but some industry executives said that the auction service the company was introducing made it worth much more.

"Whoever gets them can immediately turn into an ad-exchange business overnight," said Dave Morgan, the chief executive of Tacoda, an online advertising network. "Two billion dollars will not be a stretch for that."

DoubleClick has signed up 35 Web publishers, advertising networks, agencies and advertisers to test the system, which should be up and running in the third quarter. Two of the testers are Advertising.com, a large ad network, and Media Contacts, an interactive media buyer that is part of Havas. DoubleClick will charge a commission for each ad impression traded on its exchange.

DoubleClick serves - or delivers - the display ads on many large Web sites, including AOL and MySpace. It is those relationships with Web publishers that industry executives see as vital to the success of the exchange and to the courtship by companies like Google and Microsoft, which are trying for a broader foothold in online advertising.

Google has reportedly offered Web publishers free ad-management services - like those that DoubleClick charges for - in exchange for the ability to sell premium ads on their sites.

Most of the ads for sale on existing exchanges are leftover space that big advertisers are not interested in, said Shelby Saville, a senior vice president at StarLink, a media buying firm within the Publicis Groupe.

But exchanges help add transparency, Saville said. Advertisers often do not know exactly which sites their ads run on with ad networks, and an exchange could remove some of that unknown factor, she said.

DoubleClick will allow Web publishers to sell ad space on their sites without identifying themselves. Some Web publishers may want their spaces sold along with the name of their sites, but others may not want advertisers to see that they sell ads at a lower price on the exchange than they do in traditional negotiations. And DoubleClick will let Web publishers hold private auctions in which they invite only select ad agencies or advertisers to bid on their ads.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...iness/adco.php





Firefox OS: Why My Hard Drive & Software are Obsolete
Leo Babauta

While the debate of Windows v. Mac v. Linux rages on, at times rising to a roar in certain circles, I meekly raise my hand and offer a newly emerging fourth choice: none of these operating systems really matter anymore.

Why not? Because for writers like me, and for many others, all the software and storage space you really need is now online. All that matters is that you have your browser — and at the risk of sparking another flame war, I recommend Firefox.

Need a word processor, spreadsheet, photo program, or really most anything useful? Old-fashioned desktop applications aren’t necessary anymore, for the most part. You can fire up your browser on any computer, and given a decent internet connection, you’ve got your entire OS and hard drive right there, from anywhere you log in.

Now, before people start chiming in with “But I need X Application in order to do my work!” I have a disclaimer: my needs are relatively simple, so you may not be able to do what I’ve done. But I’ve intentionally simplified my needs, and for many people, this simplification can not only work, but be better than what’s offered on the desktop.

Here’s my Firefox OS, with an intentionally heavy reliance on the Google suite of software:

Word processor. I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I used its predecessor, Writely, in the past, and it works well. I’ve never been a fan of the bloated MS Word … until recently, I used the much smaller and faster open-source word processor, AbiWord. But when I would forget to email myself a text file from work to home, I cursed myself and made the switch to Google Docs. I haven’t regretted it yet.

Spreadsheet. Again, Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It isn’t as feature-rich as Excel or OpenOffice yet, but it does the job for most of my needs. In fact, it’s rare that I ever need anything more, and I suspect that’s the case for most people. And I expect the software to improve over time.

Email. This is a no-brainer. Gmail, all the time. It’s so much better than desktop email apps, and better than its competing webmail apps too. Fast, easy to use, powerful searches and features … enough can’t be said about Gmail. It’s my No. 1 app for work and personal use.

Feed reader. I’ve tried a lot of blog readers, including some good desktop and online readers. But Google Reader is by far the most efficient. I read it 2-3 times a day, and crank through my feeds. I can get through 100+ posts a day very quickly.

Blogging software. For my main blog at Zen Habits, I’ve tried various software, but so far the best for my needs is WordPress. It has everything I need, and is very extensible with lots of great plugins.

Photo software. One of the biggest reasons I need a hard drive is for all my photos, at work and home. I’ve solved that with Picasa Web Albums — another Google solution. I tried Flickr, but their free account is too flimsy, and Picasa just works better. Plus, if you like their great desktop software, it’s so perfectly integrated. I just uploaded all my thousands of photos from home, and it’s nicely organized online.

Hard drive. What do you need a hard drive for? Besides the space needed to run your system, and software such as your browser, we use hard drives for file storage — for our word processing and spreadsheet documents, photos, music files, PDFs, etc. Well, for the most part, all my files are now saved online. Between Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, and Picasa, everything I save is stored on the internet. The one thing I haven’t found a perfect solution for is mp3s, but I haven’t been using those much, and I’m sure a solution will turn up soon (let me know in the comments!). Another great solution is online storage such as Box.net, MediaMax (25 GB for free!), Gmail Drive and the like.

File management. The main reason for an OS is to manage your files. Well, since all my files are online, that’s now a moot point. How do I manage my files now? Well, as I use mostly Google software, I use Google’s philosophy: tag and archive everything, and use the tags or Google’s fast and powerful searches to find anything you need. This takes a bit of an adjustment on the user’s part, trusting this new paradigm to work, but trust me, it’s much better than filing stuff in folders. You save a heck of a lot of time filing and finding stuff. It’s not hierarchical, so that’s difficult for many people — but it works.

Backup system. One of the big problems with a hard drive is the very real possibility that it will crash sometime during its lifetime. And unless you’ve been good at backing up your files, you will lose that data. With all my files saved online, there’s no need to back up these files, which can be time-consuming and troublesome. Good news: most of these services do a good job of backing up your data for you.

Calendar. For its ease-of-use and simplicity, Google Calendar (of course). It doesn’t have all the functionality of certain desktop calendar programs, but it works great for me.

Bringing it all together. I use a lot of Google apps, but Google’s main problem (for me) so far is that it doesn’t integrate these services well. Well, enter another Google solution: the Google Personalize Homepage. It’s now my home page. But I don’t use it like many others do, with all kinds of fun and distracting widgets, or to read all my blogs. No, I just have all my Google services on this page for easy access, along with quick bookmarks for all the other stuff I use for work and for my blogging, and some stickies for taking quick notes. One page to rule them all.

Miscellaneous. I’m a fan of GTD, so I use Tracks for my to-do lists. I use other online software, such as Backpack for keeping other lists, but the ones above are the main apps. I also use AutoHotkey to quickly bring up the pages I use a lot, like Gmail, my to-do lists, my story ideas file, and the like, as well as to type my different signatures and other shortcuts.

Firefox, of course. All of this is possible with Internet Explorer or the very good Safari or Opera browsers, but Firefox just makes it that much better. It’s so easy and fast to use, plus there are certain extensions I can’t live without — Foxmarks, Gmail Manager, FireFTP, Download Statusbar and Web Developer among them. Give me Firefox, and I don’t care what brand of OS I’m using.

Is online software as feature-rich as desktop software? Not yet. But it’s good enough for my simple needs, and it’s getting better all the time.

Have I really gotten rid of my hard drive and software? Not yet. I still have all my old files on the hard drive, but they’re collecting dust. I no longer store my new files on my hard drive, and I rarely use my old desktop software. I keep them on my computer just in case I need to open up a specially formatted file, but for my nitty-gritty daily work, I don’t need that old software anymore.


Someday, none of us will, and the decades-old OS debate will be a thing of the past.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/tec...-obsolete.html





Hackers Dissect Apple TV to Create the Cheapest Mac Ever
Rob Beschizza

Apple TV is dead, long live the Mac Nano. Sort of.

Just two weeks after Apple released its streaming media box to the public, hackers successfully installed OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, on the $300 device, making it the cheapest PC Cupertino has ever sold.

"The breakthrough is done, OS X runs on Apple TV!" wrote "Semthex," the anonymous hacker responsible for the mod, at his website. "Now we got (the) low-budget Mac we ever wanted."

The add-on may be of limited appeal to everyday users. It involves a laborious 13-step procedure, and the resulting installation is unable to take advantage of all the Apple TV's hardware. Without video acceleration, games can't floor the graphic chip's throttle. There's no audio or ethernet support either, making the box useless for its original purpose as a media hub.

Over the past week, however, enthusiasts worked to solve these problems, exchanging ideas over IRC and testing new versions of specially tailored system software Semthex created, which is necessary to bypass built-in restrictions on installing the full version of OS X.

"This hack seriously opens up the doors with what the Apple TV could be used for," said Tom Anthony, administrator of Apple TV Hacks, in an e-mail.

Released March 21, Apple TV won praise for its compact design and usable interface, and criticism for its limited utility and poor-quality video content. Early hacks included adding the popular Xvid video codec and installing a larger hard drive. Some hackers enabled SSH to permit secure command-line access to the box, and USB keyboards and mice soon followed. Other unauthorized add-ons include the Apache web server, early attempts at a Linux port and the VNC remote desktop system.

The hacks are not for the faint-hearted. Gaining the system access required to accomplish these modifications usually requires owners to get their hands dirty, opening the box and following complex instructions that might deter the casual user.

With OS X on board, however, almost anything might soon be running on Apple TV, even the Media Center edition of Microsoft Windows.

The reasons behind this assault are found in the box itself: Despite being fitted with a Pentium M processor, as much RAM as Sony's PlayStation 3 and a faster graphics chip than a Nintendo Wii, Apple TV doesn't replace other devices under the TV set. While some people are happy to stream media from iTunes libraries to their televisions, many want to put that hardware to other uses. More, perhaps, than anyone suspected.

Anthony's site was briefly unavailable earlier this week, battered by hordes of visitors.

"I wasn't quite prepared for how big it would be; in the first week I had half a million visitors, and I had to purchase additional bandwidth to the site," Anthony said. "The biggest problem with the site has been (that) I have been receiving so many e-mails ... I haven't been able to keep up with my day job."

If Apple objects to this kind of interference, it has yet to say so openly, though unlikely sounding (and unconfirmed) rumors circulated late last week that Apple was remotely disabling add-ons through a remote internet connection.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/new...letvhacks_0406





Flashy Wrestling Shows Grab the World by the Neck and Flex
Seth Schiesel



Quick, name the biggest events in global pop culture during the last week.

College basketball’s Final Four? Hoops makes for nice water-cooler talk in the United States, but do you think Florida vs. Ohio State was news in Japan? Hardly. And the start of the baseball season gets Americans excited, but did thousands of Europeans fly over to watch the Rockies play the Diamondbacks? Uh, no.

Meanwhile, the eyes and wallets of millions around the world were fixed on this unglamorous city for what is becoming a star-studded entertainment happening: WrestleMania. On Sunday 80,103 people from 24 countries and 50 states packed the cavernous Ford Field stadium here while the program was delivered via satellite to 110 countries.

Two decades after stars like Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter propelled professional wrestling from the dank beer halls of its infancy onto screens around the globe, this smorgasbord of hairspray, cleavage and monster body slams remains as popular as ever, even if it usually escapes the notice of coastal tastemakers.

In recent years World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., the company based in Stamford, Conn., that dominates the pastime, has turned pro wrestling into a sort of modern-day Chautauqua, a perpetual traveling roadshow that crisscrosses the nation while broadcasting from packed arenas 52 weeks a year. Every year more than two million fans pass through W.W.E. turnstiles worldwide. Every week, wrestling shows attract more than 15 million television viewers, making them a fixture among the top-rated cable programs.

Yet WrestleMania remains the pinnacle. An annual event that began at Madison Square Garden in 1985, WrestleMania is now an almost weeklong celebration of everything wrestling, from a black-tie induction into the W.W.E. Hall of Fame to Aretha Franklin singing “America the Beautiful” before the final night’s matches. No wrestler is a true star until performing at WrestleMania (yes, the fights are scripted), and any true fan must make the pilgrimage at least once. Here are some voices and scenes from a profoundly American event that now speaks to a global audience.

Wednesday, March 28

The final round of hype begins not in Detroit but at the Trump World Tower in Midtown Manhattan, where thousands of fans mob the atrium, hanging off at least four levels of escalators to watch a noon “press conference” at which no questions are taken. The big twist at WrestleMania 23 is that Donald Trump will face off against Vince McMahon, the W.W.E. chairman, via proxies in Detroit in a “Hair vs. Hair” match, which means the winner shaves the head of the loser.

Mr. Trump’s champion is Bobby Lashley, an affable former all-American in (real) wrestling. Mr. McMahon is represented by Umaga, a wild-haired Samoan with tattoos covering his face. Mr. Lashley’s slogan is “I’m living my dream.” Umaga alternately growls and bellows incoherently over a pounding soundtrack of tribal drums. There is no confusion about who the good guy is.

That night, in a bar in the Greektown neighborhood of Detroit, Ray Paige, 51, a local lawyer, explains why even in the town that produced Joe Louis and Thomas Hearns, wrestling has become more popular than boxing.

“They have marketed the product better in terms of providing a morality-based story line,” Mr. Paige says. “Kids like good guys, and wrestling provides them. Boxing doesn’t.”

Thursday, March 29

Around 6 p.m. hundreds of fans throng the sidewalk for blocks down the street from the Gem Theater in Detroit. THQ, a big video game publisher, is holding the Superstar Challenge to promote its SmackDown vs. Raw game franchise, which has sold more than 30 million copies since 2000. The doors won’t open for another hour, but fans hoping to watch wrestlers play the video game started lining up around 2 p.m.

Fourth in line is Jon Palmar, a tall, thin 18-year-old with a spiky haircut who is soon to graduate from high school in Miami. As an early graduation present, his family paid $750 for a seventh-row ticket to WrestleMania, and he has personally paid a scalper $100 for a ticket with a face value of $18 to this THQ event. “It’s the combination of the athleticism, the showmanship and the stories that just hooks you,” he says. “And I want to become a wrestler myself. You know, some steroids and I’ll be able to do it.”

Is he serious about the steroids?

“To accomplish my dreams I’m willing to do whatever it takes,” he says. Inside, an up-and-coming wrestling star called C. M. Punk has “Drug Free” tattooed across his fingers.

“Wrestlers, even more so than athletes in the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or baseball, we’re closer to being superheroes to a lot of people, especially kids,” he says. “Look at me: I’m covered in tattoos, and you might not think just by appearance I’m a good role model. But I don’t do drugs, I’m straight, I abstain from all that stuff, and it’s the perfect ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ and I think a lot of people can relate to that.”

Friday, March 30

The W.W.E. has rented the Fox Theater, a 1920s movie palace, for the world premiere of “The Condemned,” an action-adventure film starring the hulking wrestler known as Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Before it starts, Nigel Doughty, 26, an accountant from Manchester, England, explains why he and a friend each paid $1,400 for a platinum WrestleMania travel package.

“For a wrestling fan this is the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the World Series all in one,” he says. “We had to save up for 18 months to be able to get here, but from the first day I started watching years ago I was like, ‘One day I’ll make it to WrestleMania,’ so this is a lifelong dream come true.”

What makes wrestling so compelling? “As a kid watching wrestling it’s about the costumes and colors,” he says, “but as you get older it becomes about the story lines and the characters. It really is a soap opera for men.”

Saturday, March 31

It is shortly after noon at Midday Madness 3, a chance for fans to get autographs and have their pictures taken with W.W.E. stars.

In the line that winds through a hotel lobby, Jackie Fairbairn and Rebecca Richards, both 22, stand out in their “Aussie WWE Divas” T-shirts. These women from Sydney, Australia, are accompanied by other members of their international fan crew, Tim Wood, 23, of Nottingham, England, and Kim Mattson, 24, who works at an investment firm in Norwalk, Conn.

“I met Tim at WrestleMania 21 in Los Angeles, and we met the Australian girls at WrestleMania 22 last year in Chicago,” Ms. Mattson says. Now they stay in touch through e-mail messages and get together at least once a year.

“Meeting these guys is more important than the actual show now,” Mr. Wood says. “It’s like a social occasion with friends from all over the world.”

And like the Deadheads who followed the Grateful Dead, the crew is hitting the road after WrestleMania. “We’re going to ‘Raw’ in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday, and then we’ll be in Fort Wayne on Tuesday for ‘SmackDown,’ and then we’ll be back in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 9 for ‘Raw,’ ” Ms. Mattson explains, referring to various W.W.E. series. “Really the show never stops.”

Sunday, April 1

The big night is finally here. An hour before doors open, thousands crowd the stadium loading dock, hoping for a glimpse of the stars. Inside, the physical production puts even the biggest rock concerts to shame. A stage and proscenium the height of a small office tower loom over the west end of the stadium, feeding a runway to the ring in the center of the floor.

Randall Godfrey, 33, middle linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, is sitting just a few rows from the ring. “Wrestling is definitely more punishing than playing football,” he says. “I mean, we wear pads. They don’t. Football is hard, but it can’t compare to the physical punishment these guys take in the ring.”

Before the hair showdown, the biggest match is a heavyweight title fight between Batista and the Undertaker, an immense, legendary figure who has a 14-0 record at WrestleMania.

From the very last row of the very highest tier of the stadium, each wrestler is the size of a fingernail held at arm’s length. But John Berkeypile Jr., 13, from Jackson, Mich., barely glances at the huge video screens by the stage. Standing on his chair, his eyes glued to the Lilliputian figures in the ring, he delivers a running commentary as he cheers on “ ’Taker.”

“ ’Taker’s doing a little old-school, coming off the ropes,” cries John Jr., who is at WrestleMania with his father. “Here comes the leg drop, now trying a choke-slam, but Batista gets out of it. Uh-oh, here comes another leg drop!”

The Undertaker ends up defending his WrestleMania record as he pile-drives Batista on his head. And then, to the surprise of few, Mr. Lashley defeats the ogrelike Umaga in the hair match. Mr. McMahon hams up his defeat, cringing and wailing suitably as Mr. Trump shaves his head. Stone Cold Steve Austin is the guest referee. In keeping with his slogan — “Arrive. Raise hell. Leave.” — he decks Mr. Trump on his way out, just because.

After all, it’s WrestleMania.

On Monday World Wrestling Entertainment presents “Raw” at the Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Conn.; on Tuesday it presents “SmackDown” and “ECW” at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/ar...n/04mania.html





Russia Challenges the U.S. Monopoly on Satellite Navigation
Andrew E. Kramer

The days of their cold war may have passed, but Russia and the United States are in the midst of another battle — this one a technological fight over the United States monopoly on satellite navigation.

By the end of the year, the authorities here say, the Russian space agency plans to launch eight navigation satellites that would nearly complete the country’s own system, called Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System.

The system is expected to begin operating over Russian territory and parts of adjacent Europe and Asia, and then go global in 2009 to compete with the Global Positioning System of the United States.

Nor is Russia the only country trying to break the American monopoly on navigation technology. China has already sent up satellites to create its own system, called Baidu after the Chinese word for the Big Dipper. And the European Union has also begun developing a rival system, Galileo, although work has been halted because of doubts among the private contractors over its potential for profits. Russia’s system is furthest along, paid for with government oil revenue.

What is driving the technological battle is, in part, the potential for many more uses for satellite navigation than the one most people know it for — giving driving instructions to travelers. Businesses as disparate as agriculture and banking are integrating it into their operations. Satellite navigation may provide the platform for services like site-specific advertising, with directions that appear on cellphone screens when a user is walking, for example, near a Starbucks coffee shop or a McDonald’s restaurant.

Sales of G.P.S. devices are already booming. The global market for the devices hit $15 billion in 2006, according to the GPS Industry Council, a Washington trade group, and is expanding at a rate of 25 to 30 percent annually.

But what is also behind the battle for control of navigation technology is a fear that the United States could use its monopoly — the system was developed and is controlled by the military, after all — to switch off signals in a time of crisis.

“In a few years, business without a navigation signal will become inconceivable,” said Andrei G. Ionin, an aerospace analyst with the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, which is linked to the Russian defense ministry. “Everything that moves will use a navigation signal — airplanes, trains, yachts, people, rockets, valuable animals and favorite pets.”

When that happens, countries that choose to rely only on G.P.S., he said, will be falling into “a geopolitical trap” of American dominance of an important Internet-age infrastructure. The United States could theoretically deny navigation signals to countries like Iran and North Korea, not just in time of war, but as a high-tech form of economic sanction that could disrupt power grids, banking systems and other industries, he said. The United States government’s stated policy is to provide uninterrupted signals globally.

G.P.S. devices, in fact, are at the center of the dispute over the Iranian seizure of 15 British sailors and marines. The British maintain that the devices on their boats showed they were in Iraqi waters; the Iranians have countered with map coordinates that it said showed they had been in Iranian waters.

Russia’s project, of course, carries wide implications for armies around the world by providing a navigation system not controlled by the Pentagon, complementing Moscow’s increasingly assertive foreign policy stance.

The United States formally opened G.P.S. to civilian users in 1993 by promising to provide it continually, at no cost, around the world.

The Russian system is also calculated to send ripples through the fast-expanding industry for consumer navigation devices by promising a slight technical advantage over G.P.S. alone, analysts and industry executives say. Devices receiving signals from both systems would presumably be more reliable.

President Vladimir V. Putin, who speaks often about Glonass and its possibilities, has prodded his scientists to make the product consumer friendly.

“The network must be impeccable, better than G.P.S., and cheaper if we want clients to choose Glonass,” Mr. Putin said last month at a Russian government meeting on the system, according to the Interfax news agency.

“You know how much I care about Glonass,” Mr. Putin told his ministers.

G.P.S. has its roots in the American military in the 1960s. In 1983, before the system was fully functional, President Ronald Reagan suggested making it available to civilian users around the world after a Korean Air flight strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down.

G.P.S. got its first military test in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and was seen as a big reason for the success of the precision bombing campaign, which helped spur its adoption in commercial applications in the 1990s.

The Russian system, like America’s G.P.S., has roots in the cold war technology to guide strategic bombers and missiles. It was briefly operational in the mid-1990s, but fell into disrepair. The Russian satellites send signals that are usable now but work only intermittently.

To operate globally, a system needs a minimum of 24 satellites, the number in the G.P.S. constellation, not counting spares in orbit.

A receiver must be in line of sight of no fewer than three satellites at any time to triangulate an accurate position. A fourth satellite is needed to calculate altitude. As other countries introduce competing systems, devices capable of receiving foreign signals along with G.P.S. will more often be in line of sight of three or more satellites.

Within the United States, Western Europe and Japan, ground-based transmissions hone the accuracy of signals to within a few feet of a location — better than what could be achieved with satellite signals alone. The Russian and eventual European or Chinese systems, therefore, would make receivers more reliable in preventing signal loss when there are obstructions, like steep canyons, tall buildings or even trees.

Still, a Glonass-capable G.P.S. receiver in the United States, Western Europe or Japan would not be more accurate than a G.P.S. system alone, because of the ground-based correction signals. In other parts of the world, a Glonass-capable G.P.S. receiver would be more reliable and slightly more accurate.

American manufacturers that are dominant in the industry could be confronted with pressure to offer these advantages to customers by making devices compatible with the Russian system, inevitably undermining the American monopoly on navigation signals used in commerce.

In this sense, the Russians are setting off the first salvo in a battle for an infrastructure in the skies. Russia sees a great deal at stake in influencing the standards that will be used in civilian consumer devices.

The market for satellite navigators is growing rapidly. Garmin, the largest American manufacturer, more than doubled sales of automobile navigators in 2006, for example, and in February it showed a Super Bowl ad that was seen as a coming of age for G.P.S. navigators as a mass market product.

Jeremy D. Ludwig was one consumer who said he would be willing to pay a slight premium for a device equipped with a chip capable of processing Russian navigation signals.

He recounted a recent trip on Interstate 25 in Colorado, when, he said, he was dismayed to discover the G.P.S. device on his BlackBerry had inexplicably lost its signal, just as he was trying to decide which exit to take into Denver.

“If you don’t know which exit to take, you’re already lost,” Mr. Ludwig, an art student, said in a recent telephone interview from Colorado Springs.

That kind of attitude is what Russia is banking on even as it also takes a stab at making consumer receivers — so far without much success. But the Russian goal of diversifying navigation signals used in commerce will be achieved, Mr. Ionin said, even if foreign manufacturers simply adopt the Russian standard, and even if Russia’s own attempt to make consumer devices fails.

To encourage wide acceptance, Mr. Putin has been pitching the system during foreign visits, asking for collaboration and financial support.

Now, only makers of high-end surveying and professional navigation receivers have adopted dual-system capability.

Topcon Positioning Systems of Livermore, Calif., for example, offers a Glonass and G.P.S. receiver for surveyors and heavy-equipment operators. Javad Navigation Systems is built around making dual-system receivers, with offices in San Jose and Moscow.

Javad Ashjaee, the president of Javad, said in an interview that wide adoption was inevitable because more satellites provided an inherently better service. “If you have G.P.S., you have 90 percent of what you need,” he said. Russia’s system will succeed, he said, “for that extra 10 percent.”

Adding Glonass to low-end consumer devices would require a new chip, with associated design costs, but probably not much in the way of additional manufacturing expenses, he said.

Already this year, in a sign of growing acceptance of Glonass, another high-end manufacturer, Trimble, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., introduced a Russian-compatible device for agricultural navigators, used for applying pesticides, for example.

Whether consumer goods manufacturers will follow is an open question, John R. Bucher, a wireless equipment analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said in a telephone interview.

Garmin, which has more than 50 percent of the American market, has not yet taken a position on Glonass. “We are waiting,” Jessica Myers, a spokeswoman for Garmin, said in a telephone interview.

For most consumers, she said, devices are reliable enough already. Growth in the industry is driven instead by better digital mapping and software, making what already exists more useful. Garmin’s latest car navigator, for example, alerts drivers to traffic jams on the road ahead and the price of gas at nearby stations.

At home at least, the Kremlin is guaranteeing a market by requiring ships, airplanes and trucks carrying hazardous materials to operate with Glonass receivers, while providing grants to half a dozen Russian manufacturers of navigators.

Technically precise they may be, but even by Russian standards, some of the Russian-made products coming to market now are noticeably lacking in convenience features.

At the Russian Institute of Radionavigation and Time in St. Petersburg, for example, scientists have developed the M-103 dual system receiver. The precision device theoretically operates more reliably than a G.P.S. unit under tough conditions, like the urban canyons of Manhattan.

With its boxy appearance, the M-103 resembles a Korean War-era military walkie-talkie. It weighs about one pound and sells for $1,000, display screen not included. To operate, a user must unfurl a cable linking the set to an external antenna mounted on a spiked stick, intended to be jabbed into a field.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t developed a hand-held version yet,” said Vadim S. Zholnerov, a deputy director of the institute.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/business/gps.php





'Planet Earth' Viewers Get Close to Nature

The 11-part hi-def epic was filmed with a camera system that provides startling high-quality perspectives.
David Sarno

A thousand feet above Van Nuys, J.T. Alpaugh sat in the rear seat of a news copter, joystick in hand, ready to show off the high-definition video camera that hung orb-like from the front of the aircraft.

"OK, see that car up there?" Alpaugh asked. "Next to the white truck?"

Two miles down Ventura Boulevard, a white speck crept across an intersection. Next to it was another, smaller white speck.

"Sort of," said a reporter along for the ride.

"Right. Now watch the monitor," said Alpaugh.

The helicopter's high-definition video screen showed the same unremarkable view of Tarzana that could be seen outside the windshield. The long ribbon of Ventura Boulevard stretched into the distance, and the two white specks inched along. But as Alpaugh pressed a switch on his controller, the specks began to grow. And grow. And grow, until the smaller one had bloomed into an obviously alabaster white Mercedes E-class, featuring a blue California license plate whose letters and numbers were so vivid that both passengers read it aloud.

This camera system — called the Cineflex V14 — was designed by engineers at Cineflex, LLC, a division of the Van Nuys-based Helinet Group. The Cineflex takes a $90,000 high-definition camera and fits it with a telephoto lens capable of magnifying images to 84 times their actual size. But more than resolution or zoom length, what defines the Cineflex is its preternatural stability. The lens and sensor float inside a kind of gyro-stabilized bubble that does not move, no matter what the helicopter does. So even if the pilot drops into a steep turn through bumpy, stormy air, the image of that license plate won't so much as flitter.

One of the first filmmakers to see the Cineflex's potential was BBC nature producer Alistair Fothergill, the man behind "Planet Earth," the 11-part, hi-def nature epic that premiered Sunday on the Discovery Channel. Fothergill saw that Cineflex's tremendous range, resolution and stability could allow aerial teams to capture gorgeous, high-quality close-ups of animals without disturbing them. Moreover, using high-definition video meant air crews could finally ditch burdensome film cameras. No longer would helicopters have to land and reload every time a 10-minute film magazine ran out; now crews could stay aloft for hours, filming continuously.

"We suddenly saw, hang on, there are a series of animal behaviors out there which have not been filmable because [the old] cameras cannot keep up," said Fothergill. But Cineflex could. "And that was clearly going to be revolutionary."

The first episode of "Planet Earth" featured an extended hunting sequence in northern Canada. Helinet cinematographer Michael Kelem and his crew used a Cineflex to track wolves as they stalked migrating caribou. "As soon as they start running, you're on them," said Kelem, "You're like a police helicopter in a car chase."

Kelem was able to capture four wolf hunts in his first two hours, including one that ended in a prized "pull-down" — or kill. "The [camera] guys on the ground were going, 'That's better than we can do in two weeks!' "

Although filming wolf kills is a blast, it turns out not to pay much. So Helinet does a lot of work in Hollywood. Founder Alan Purwin — who for a while in the '80s was the guy who flew "Airwolf" — is a respected aerial coordinator who enjoys fruitful relationships with directors like Steven Spielberg, Tony Scott and Michael Bay. Cineflex-equipped copters are a filmmaker favorite because at some level, they can do just about anything. Helinet pilots can "park" in midair for static shots — Cineflex's stability makes it look like the shot is taken from a steel crane — and perform dangerous and intricate stunt sequences, like the one Purwin did for the upcoming movie "Transformers" that involved flying four helicopters in tandem under the bridge on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Back up above Tarzana, Alpaugh trained the camera on a poor sap speeding down the Ventura Freeway in an F-150 pickup.

"He has no idea we're looking at him," said Alpaugh, offering a comment on Cineflex's other, more ominous application: surveillance. In the monitor, the driver's face was so well defined you could tell he didn't shave that morning.

It's clear that aerial photography has come a long way since the days of the white Ford Bronco, when a momentary glimpse of shoulder was enough to keep viewers watching.

Law enforcement is a growing market. Helinet has partnerships with federal, state and local authorities as well as the work it's done with "three-letter agencies."

When it comes to Cineflex's potential as a law-enforcement tool, though, Alpaugh and Purwin prefer to accentuate the positive. "Let's say there's an event with a lot of crowds," explained Alpaugh. "An event that may be attractive as a terrorist target."

Law-enforcement officials can then "look at people, look at expressions, look at clothing, look at backpacks — things you would normally look at if you were on the ground walking among these people."

Kelem, the Helinet cinematographer who shot the wolf hunt, has an idea for a documentary: "I'd like to cut a tape where it's animals chasing animals and police chasing criminals," he said. "It's like the same."

Which is either amusing or insensitive — depending on your angle.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=3&cset=true





Surveillance

8-Month Jail Term Ends as Maker of Video Turns Over a Copy
Jesse McKinley

Eight months after he went to jail for refusing to turn over a videotape of a violent protest to federal authorities, a freelance videographer and blogger was released on Tuesday, ending what has been called the longest incarceration ever of an American journalist.

The videographer, Josh Wolf, was released after appearing before a federal judge here on Monday and turning over a copy of the video he had shot of a July 2005 anticapitalist protest in which a police officer was injured and someone tried to set a police car on fire.

Mr. Wolf answered two questions about the protest here, which coincided with a meeting of the Group of Eight economic leaders in Scotland, said his lawyer, Martin Garbus. Mr. Wolf denied seeing anything regarding the attack on the officer or the police car, Mr. Garbus said, and also posted all the video on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net.

Mr. Wolf, 24, was jailed in August for refusing to hand over the video or testify despite a grand jury subpoena. While Mr. Wolf never testified in front of a grand jury, the judge, William Alsup of Federal District Court, said in the release order on Tuesday that the United States attorney now had “all the materials sought in the subpoena.”

While some critics, including Judge Alsup, had questioned whether Mr. Wolf, who was unaffiliated with any news organization, actually qualified as a journalist, advocates for press freedom hailed his release.

“Josh gave up his freedom for 224 days because he believes that a free and independent press cannot exist without a trusting relationship between a journalist and his information sources,” said Lucie Morillon of Reporters Without Borders, an international freedom-of-the-press group.

Mr. Garbus also characterized Mr. Wolf’s release as a victory because he did not testify or identify people on the video, sentiments echoed in a brief statement released by Mr. Wolf.

“The government met Mr. Wolf’s demands: release him without appearing before the grand jury and without having to testify,” the statement read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/us/04wolf.html





Misfired Memo Reveals Tabs Kept on Journalist
Angela Macropoulos

Journalists have an uneasy awareness that public relations professionals keep tabs on them, the better to hone the way that the lobbyists pitch and spin ideas for articles. While the extent of this practice normally is not aired in public, Wired magazine posted on its Web site a long e-mail memo about one of its reporters that was accidentally sent to the reporter by Microsoft.

In February, during the course of reporting on a video blogging initiative at Microsoft called Channel 9, the Wired journalist, Fred Vogelstein, received a 13-page, 5,500-word internal memo from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, a firm that represents Microsoft.

The document, which was meant to prepare Microsoft executives for interviews, contained frank details, including some less-than-flattering observations like "Fred's stories tend to be a bit sensational, though he would consider them to be balanced and fair," scripted responses to questions and a strong-arm list of the points the agency expected to see in the piece.

Vogelstein, a contributing editor at Wired, was described as "tricky" during interviews. "He looks deeply for any dirt around whatever topic he is focused on and generally is tight-lipped about the direction he will take for his stories, sometimes even misleading you to throw you off," the memo said. "It takes him a bit to get thoughts across, so try to be patient."

The memo also said that the Microsoft publicity team would get a chance to review the article: "We should have a look at it in early March and it should run late March for the April issue." But that is a practice shunned by journalists. Both Wired and Waggener Edstrom say that the review did not happen.

Frank Shaw, the president of Waggener Edstrom in charge of the Microsoft account, said that the person who made the blunder felt "awful, and there was no action. It was the kind of mistake anyone could make." Microsoft, he said, "was not upset with Waggener Edstrom for the contents of the mail."

The article Vogelstein wrote was about a Microsoft project that permitted employees to blog about the company's corporate doings - a concept called "radical transparency." Shaw said, "In a lot of ways, it was irresistible to Wired to bring attention to it. To show it as the polar opposite of the transparency piece they were working on."

Vogelstein said that the memo, which made its way into an e-mail message about appointment scheduling, gave him a weird sense of voyeurism.

"We all want to know what everybody thinks about us, but I think most of us, if we found out, would be sorry," he said. "Some of the stuff I was totally fine with, but I objected to being called 'tricky' and I thought, 'Wow - they really think that?' "

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, wrote in his personal blog that the memo's command-and-control message showed that Microsoft's "old company culture" lingered.

Evan Cornog, associate dean for academic affairs at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and publisher of The Columbia Journalism Review, said that the memo gave the public a useful glimpse of how journalism works. "Readers need to know the kind of terrain reporters have to negotiate to get a story," he said. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. One comment on Anderson's blog said the most striking thing was that Waggener Edstrom spent hundreds of hours on controlling the message, but that one wrong keystroke seemed to have trumped the agency's efforts. "On one hand, you have 3,500 rank-and-file bloggers creating good will for an embattled company. On the other, you have a few highly paid PR guys burning that good will as fast as their retainer." The New York Times
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...iness/memo.php





'Talking' CCTV Scolds Offenders
BBC

"Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.

About £500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be "very careful" over the cameras.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, "in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions".

"But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can't go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people," he added.

The talking cameras did not constitute "secret surveillance", he said.

"It's very public, it's interactive."

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Downing Street's "respect tsar", Louise Casey, said the cameras "nipped problems in the bud" and reduced bureaucracy.

"It gets across the message, 'please don't litter our streets because someone else will have to pay to pick up that litter again'," she told BBC News.

"Half a billion pounds a year is spent picking up litter."

'Scarecrow policing'

Mr Brokenshire told the BBC he had a number of concerns about the use of the talking cameras.

"Whether this is moving down a track of almost 'scarecrow' policing rather than real policing - actually insuring that we have more bobbies on the beat - I think that's what we really want to see, albeit that an initiative like this may be an effective tool in certain circumstances.

"We need to be very careful about applying this more generally."

The talking cameras will be installed in Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, in London, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.

In Middlesbrough, staff in a control centre monitor pictures from 12 talking cameras and can communicate directly with people on the street.

Local councillor Barry Coppinger says the scheme has prevented fights and criminal damage and cut litter levels.

"Generally, I think it has raised awareness that the town centre is a safe place to visit and also that we are keeping an eye open to make sure it is safe," he said.

But opponent and campaigner Steve Hills said: "Apart from being absurd, I think it's rather sad that we should have faceless cameras barking at us on orders from who? Who sets these cameras up?"

There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain.

A recent study by the government's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was becoming a "surveillance society".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nd/6524495.stm





ACID Scans Web for Pirated Multimedia

The Virage division of Autonomy has developed search technology that can scan the Web for pirated video and multimedia clips.

Broadcasters, movie producers and media publishers of all types have access to a new search technology that can scan the Internet to discover Web sites that are illegally distributing copyrighted video and images.

ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection), developed by the Virage division of Autonomy, can detect illegally posted rich media in any format wherever it is posted, according to Autonomy founder and CEO Michael Lynch. Autonomy officially introduced the ACID technology in a press conference here on April 4.

"Acid watches very large amounts of video and it can spot video that is owned by someone else," in a highly automated process, Lynch said.

It could be used to detect movies, television clips or any copyrighted media posted, for example, on YouTube, on personal Web sites or on any other Web site, according to company officials.

The technology is equally useful to these file-sharing sites, because it gives them the means to scan their sites for infringing media before it's posted, or at least before it results in a lawsuit. The technology allows these scans to be performed quickly to avoid lengthy delays in posting new content online.

The automated search technology will free copyright owners from having to spend hours manually searching through files on video-sharing sites, company officials said.

With the current explosion of interest in video distribution and video sharing over the Internet, the technology will give media producers the means to try to stay ahead of the increasing volume of illegally distributed multimedia content, Lynch said.

Furthermore, it doesn't rely on tagging technology or video watermarking to locate copyright-infringing media. These techniques can be thwarted by changing formats or by video codec changes, according to Lynch.

Instead, ACID uses Autonomy's "meaning-based computing" technology, which allows computers to find relationships within many different types of unstructured data, including text, word processing documents, e-mails, audio and multimedia. Acid uses patented image and audio analysis technology to look for known examples of copyrighted material no matter what format it's stored in.

ACID is also based on Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), a basic search platform that can analyze information in more than 1,000 formats including text, voice and video.

Since ACID works with all media formats, it can detect whether a portion of a copyrighted video or audio tract has been overlaid or stored as part of a new and original media file.

Meaning-based computing is Autonomy's overall strategy for helping organizations mine useful information from unstructured data. It is based on search technology that goes beyond keyword-based search engines to enable organizations to locate data within the organization that would otherwise go undiscovered, according to Lynch.

Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.

The computer industry, Lynch maintains, has to turn to technology like meaning-based computing because, "We are going to see less and less structure in data because there is going to be more and more data and it is going to be unstructured."

The computer industry's current "obsession with structure and - keyword - tagging is fundamentally wrong" as a way to bring order to unstructured data, Lynch said.

Global defense and aerospace company BAE Systems is implementing IDOL to make it easier for the company to find documents and information scattered across a multitude of offices and information systems, according to Scott Petrie, a knowledge engineer with BAE's San Diego-based National Security Solutions group.

Petrie said he was recruited by the company to help find ways for the company to mine more value from its unstructured data resources. BAE chose IDOL because it provided the best technology for finding relationships within the vast store of unstructured data in repositories of all types within the company, Petrie said.
http://www.physorg.com/news94982094.html





A Lyrical Approach to a Subject That Shocks
Dennis Lim

ZOO,” the new film by the Seattle director Robinson Devor, arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival better known as “the horse sex documentary.” But as festival audiences discovered, this description, while not incorrect, was also misleading. The film revisits the true story of a man who died in July 2005 after a sexual encounter with a horse in rural Washington State but does so with a lyricism startlingly at odds with the sensational content.

“This topic is not something people want to think about,” Mr. Devor said in an interview at Sundance, summing up both the challenge of marketing the film and the reason he and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, were compelled to make it.

Speaking at the premiere Mr. Mudede called “Zoo” a “thought experiment.” He added, “If someone can go there physically, I can go there mentally.”

Contemplating an unorthodox merging of man and beast, “Zoo” (which is set to open in New York on April 25) is itself an exotic hybrid: a fact-based film combining audio testimony with speculative re-enactments that feature a mix of actors and actual subjects. (The title is the subcultural term for a zoophile, a person whose affinity for animals sometimes extends to the carnal.)

“Zoo” obliquely recreates the events of the fateful night that caused a media frenzy in the Seattle area two summers ago. Shortly after being dropped off at an emergency room in Enumclaw, Wash., a 45-year-old Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan — known in the film only by his Internet handle, Mr. Hands — died of internal injuries resulting from a perforated colon. The police investigation led to a farm and turned up videotapes and DVDs that showed several men engaging in sexual acts with the resident Arabian stallions. Bestiality was not illegal in Washington at the time, but in response to the Pinyan incident the State Senate voted last year to criminalize it.

Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede, a columnist for the Seattle weekly The Stranger, noticed a disturbing uniformity in news coverage and public opinion surrounding the case.

“There seemed to be two responses: repulsion or laughter,” Mr. Mudede said. “People didn’t want to have any connection or identification with these men. Early on Rob and I said to each other, ‘We’re going to revive their humanity.’ ”

“Zoo” strives to liberate Mr. Hands from his posthumous fate as tabloid punch line. It allows the friends of the dead man a means for disclosure and dares to find, in their candid accounts of their desires and the hidden worlds where they were fulfilled, something strangely beautiful and even recognizable.

“It was fascinating that there was a community of close friends, that there were basic human interactions happening alongside things that seemed completely alien,” Mr. Mudede said. “Zoo” minimizes its freak show aspect by emphasizing the coexistence of the mundane and the bizarre, a strategy it shares with the pair’s 2005 Sundance entry, “Police Beat,” an enigmatic reverie inspired by Mr. Mudede’s crime-blotter column. What emerges here is a sad, even tender portrait of a group of men who met from time to time at a farm, where they would drink slushy cocktails, watch some television and repair to the barn to have sex with horses.

The film’s nonzoophile perspective is provided by Jenny Edwards, the founder of a local rescue organization called Hope for Horses, who helped investigate potential animal abuse in the Enumclaw case. “I don’t yet quite know how I feel about that,” she says in the film, referring to the intense feelings that zoophiles claim to have for animals, “but I’m right at the edge of being able to understand it.”

“Zoo” invites the viewer out onto that ledge of near comprehension. That it does so with neither squeamishness nor prurience owes much to Mr. Devor’s sidelong approach, one that was born of necessity. The story’s central figure was dead, and his family wanted nothing to do with the film. Only one of the three zoophiles interviewed agreed to appear in the re-enactments. All are identified simply by their online names: Coyote, H and the Happy Horseman.

“I’m glad we weren’t able to depend on the talking-head approach,” Mr. Devor said. Mr. Mudede concurred. “It was a chance to really make a film instead of a ‘60 Minutes’-style documentary,” he said.

Driving for the first time into Enumclaw, a town at the base of snow-capped Mount Rainier, the filmmakers immediately grasped the cinematic potential. “Talk about a mythic place,” Mr. Devor said. “This happened in the shadow of a volcano, in these verdant fields. You had beautiful animals, private gatherings, secret societies.”

“Zoo” makes the most of its Edenic setting. Sean Kirby’s Super-16 cinematography reinforces the sense of a prelapsarian idyll, with lush images of rhododendrons in bloom, Mount Rainier perfectly framed in a picture window, men walking through the woods at night in dreamy slow motion.

Unabashed aesthetes, Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede are anomalies in the grungy landscape of American indie film. Given the off-putting subject matter “Zoo” might even be accused of using beauty as a salve, as some reviewers grumbled at Sundance.

Responding to this critique Mr. Mudede said: “I don’t think the aesthetic element is deceiving. It’s not that we’re making something difficult more accessible through beauty. That’s exactly the situation in which these men experienced their friendship.”

But he added, laughing, “I admit if this had happened on an ugly pig farm we wouldn’t have made the film.”

Mr. Devor said it was tricky trying to communicate the movie he had in mind to his wary subjects: “They would be like, ‘What do you mean impressionistic images?’ ”

As it happened, it was a zoo, as the participants call themselves, who initiated contact, sending an e-mail message to Mr. Mudede in response to an article he had written about the case. “I think there was a desperate need to talk,” Mr. Mudede said.

Coyote, the only zoo who appears in the film, said in a recent e-mail interview that he came to trust Mr. Devor after meeting him a few times. “I felt in my gut he was not going to make an exploitive type of movie,” he wrote.

Despite an instinctive suspicion of publicity, it was evidently important to the zoos that their stories be heard. H, the farmhand who was the host of the get-togethers, called Mr. Devor in mid-December after “Zoo” had been selected for Sundance and consented to an audio interview (leaving Mr. Devor just a few weeks to frantically re-edit the film).

Coyote, for his part, remains conflicted about his involvement. “I do not think a higher profile is good at all,” he said. “We have no torch to bear or cause to defend. We just want to be.”

According to Mr. Devor the biggest challenge was not getting the zoos to talk but finding a location to shoot the film.

“We went to every single horse farm within two hours of Seattle and came up empty,” he said. “Owners would say things like: ‘We have Microsoft picnics here. They’re going to think it happened in my barn.’ ” He finally found a sympathetic farmer in Canada, who helped pull some strings with a landowner in Washington.

The overwhelming aversion to zoophilia is bound up in established taboos and moral codes. The debate, if it would come to that, tends to concern the welfare of the animal and the murky issue of consent. The men in “Zoo” attest to the fulfilling completeness of zoophile relationships and claim not to resort to coercion. On the latter count they have an unlikely ally in Rush Limbaugh, who can be heard in the film weighing in on Mr. Pinyan’s death: “How in the world could this happen without consent?”

But the apparent arousal of the horses is beside the point for many animal advocates, including Ms. Edwards. “Horses have an incredible sense memory and are unbelievably willing to learn,” she said in an e-mail message. “They want to do what is asked of them. But I’m not convinced they want to have sex with us.”

Mr. Devor interviewed the zoos and is more inclined to term the sex consensual. He spoke to them one-on-one, in hotel rooms, and his subjects sometimes illustrated their points by showing him homemade pornography. “It was in my face, really graphic stuff,” he said. “It’s a strange way to get to know someone.” But some of what he saw did change his outlook.

The sex in “Zoo” is merely glimpsed and barely discernible in a few seconds of a video that the police had confiscated and that was circulated on the Internet after Mr. Pinyan’s death.

“The film is extreme more in its formalism than in terms of graphic content,” said Mark Urman, an executive producer of “Zoo” and the head of theatrical releasing at ThinkFilm, which is distributing it. “One really worries if there’s a significant population looking for the tabloid version.”

But Mr. Devor has detected among audiences a curiosity, if not an appetite, to see more. “So many people have said to me there’s not enough sex,” he said. “I think there’s a need to see the mechanics.”

Those viewers should be careful what they wish for. “Maybe we can find some things to put on the DVD,” Mr. Devor said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/movies/01lim.html





Fashion Ads Touch a Nerve in Gender-Conscious Spain
Victoria Burnett

Two cute little girls in designer clothes - or a pair of nymphets selling sex? A beautiful woman in stiletto heels surrounded by glistening, muscular men - or a glamorization of rape?

Advertisements by the Italian fashion houses Dolce & Gabbana and Giorgio Armani have shocked some Spanish consumers and fallen foul this month of the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose hallmark has become the promotion of women's rights.

Dolce & Gabbana announced March 12 that it was suspending all advertising in Spain after the government's Institute of Women and the Spanish Association of Media Users called for the withdrawal of an ad it deemed sexist. The ad, which appeared in the Spanish press, showed a man pinning a woman to the ground by her wrist while four other men looked on.

The same week, the ombudsman for children's rights for the Madrid region called for the withdrawal of an ad by Giorgio Armani that depicted two young girls wearing makeup, one of them in a bikini top.

"If you take the Armani logo off that picture, it's not dissimilar to the pictures that circulate on the Internet promoting sex tourism," said the ombudsman, Arturo Canalda.

Armani said March 12 that it was "extremely surprised and greatly concerned" by the reaction to its ad, but the company declined requests for further comment. The ad, which appears on the company's Web site, ran in only one Spanish daily newspaper but has not been officially banned or withdrawn.

Dolce & Gabbana said Spain had recently "demonstrated a strong censorship feeling," adding later that the country was behind the times, according to local news media.

The fashion houses are not the first companies to be caught in the cross hairs of Spain's drive for gender equality. In December, Maribel Montaño, the governing Socialist party's secretary general for gender equality called on the fast-food chain Burger King to withdraw a television ad for its Whopper XXL, in which a horde of men march through the streets brandishing hamburgers, rip off their underwear and toss it into a burning oil drum, and push a luxury car off a bridge. Montaño said that the ad portrayed men as "cavemen" and sent a "dangerous message" about the male image that would reinforce macho culture.

Complaints about risqué ads are not unique to Spain. The outcry over the Dolce & Gabbana ad has spread to Italy, where the company also withdrew it.

Simon Silvester, an executive planning director in Europe for the agency Young & Rubicam, noted that the fashion industry has a long tradition of producing ads with a shock factor.

But the recent cases touched a nerve in Spain, where 68 women died last year at the hands of their partners or former partners, despite a 2004 law against gender-related violence, according to government data. Academics, advertising executives and pro-government officials said that the reaction to the ads reflected a heightened public sensitivity to gender issues, an awareness that they said was at least partly the result of Zapatero's campaign to promote sexual equality and defend minority rights.

Public mood and the response to advertising were shaped by legislation, said Marie Laver, a senior strategist at Initiative, a London-based media agency.

"There are certain trigger points that you find around legislation concerning issues, like child obesity or sexuality," she said. "It's the sexuality button in Spain that is the trigger."

Since Zapatero came to power in April 2004, his government has intervened in public and commercial life to try to change Spain's macho culture and do away with outdated female stereotypes. The Spanish Congress approved a bill on March 15 that requires 40 percent of all candidates in national and regional elections to be women, and creates incentives for companies to employ more women than men. According to government statistics, unemployment among women is 14.4 percent, double the level among men.

In January, the Spanish Health Ministry announced a campaign to measure 8,500 women in order to get a more accurate picture of the average female's shape and size, which would be used to design clothes that fit them better. The ministry has also forged an agreement with top Spanish fashion companies, including Inditex, owner of the Zara chain, to standardize women's clothing sizes and phase in the use of mannequins that are a European size 38. The move followed a decision in September by the main Madrid fashion show to ban models with body mass indexes that were under a certain level.

Of course, different issues pushed buttons in different markets, advertising executives and representatives of several European regulatory bodies said. The Dolce & Gabbana ad that caused outrage in Spain and Italy had run in some glossy magazines in France and prompted no complaints, according to the European Advertising Standards Alliance.

Two other ads by D&G, which featured men and women brandishing knives, were banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority in January. The complaints said that the ads glamorized knife violence just as the country was struggling to cope with an epidemic of knife-related crime.

On the other hand, the advertising authority dismissed complaints in July 2005 that billboard ads for "The L Word," a television series on the Living Channel about a group of lesbian friends, were degrading to women. The ads showed the oiled midsections of semi-naked women, one of them tugging down underwear emblazoned with the words "Hello Girls."

Zapatero's critics, and even some of his supporters, say that the government has created an oversensitive climate in which the Spanish are having their values dictated to them. Some point out that while provocative ads may be banned, even the most conservative newspapers have pages of classified ads offering paid sex and mainstream television channels routinely air what critics consider soft pornography.

"It's good to be conscious of these sensitivities in a country that has a domestic violence problem like ours," said Josep Ramoneda, director of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. "But it's another thing to treat women as if they were defenseless children. On a Friday night, anywhere on Spanish TV you'll find soft porn, and yet we get completely overwrought about an advertisement."

Spanish officials dismissed such criticism this week.

Montaño, the Socialist Party's equality chief, said that, far from being behind the times, as Dolce & Gabbana had suggested, Zapatero was much more modern than those who criticized his policies and "much more in line with the rights of homosexuals, maltreated women, people who cannot fend for themselves."

"Modernity is about defending people's rights," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/.../fashion26.php





Censorware Not Good, Just Better Than COPA
Bennett Haselton

On March 22nd, District Court Judge Lowell Reed ruled that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutional, partly because the judge called it "vague and overbroad," and partly because less restrictive means existed, such as Internet blocking software. I'll leave others to comment on the legal issues, but blocking software is something that I've studied, and it's important to make sure this decision is not seen as some kind of vindication for the "censorware" industry.

The thrust of the judge's findings about blocking software was that it blocks a high proportion of pornography, blocks a low proportion of non-pornographic Web sites, and that it is difficult for most kids get around. I think that these conclusions are correct for the purpose of the decision he was making -- in other words, blocking software blocks a high proportion of pornography compared to the law in question, and is difficult to get around compared to the law in question. But let's not get carried away -- blocking software is not that accurate, and not that hard to defeat.

Consider first the accuracy rates cited by the judge. Citing expert witness reports, he wrote, "I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material", and then quoted several different rates for overblocking provided by expert witness reports, ranging from about 4% to 11%. I wrote earlier about the different ways to interpret overblocking error rates -- the gist was that if you care about the constitutional issues with filter use, then you look at the percentage of blocked sites that are non-pornographic (i.e. for every porn site that gets blocked, how many research sites get canned along with it), and that number tends to be high. On the other hand, if you simply care about the effectiveness of blocking software in a home setting where there is no constitutional issue raised, then you look at the percentage of non-pornographic sites that are blocked, and that number tends to be low.

For example, suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Web sites in a given sample are sexually explicit, or 100 Web sites out of 10,000. To use Judge Reed's numbers, suppose that 95% of those porn sites, or exactly 95 in this sample, are blocked, whereas of the other 9,900 sites, 5%, or exactly 495 of them, are not blocked. Then the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked is only 5%, but the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn is actually 83% (495 blocked non-porn sites, out of a total of 495+95=590 blocked sites). One of our past studies of blocking software did indeed sometimes find error rates of about 80%, due to errors caused by IP address blocking and filters being tripped up by keywords (even when "keyword blocking" features were supposedly turned off -- because in that case the program still blocked sites on its master blacklist, and those blacklists are frequently built by scanning the Web for keywords).

Another portion of the judge's ruling dealt with the difficulty of getting around blocking software:

Filtering companies actively take steps to make sure that children are not able to come up with ways to circumvent their filters. Filtering companies monitor the Web to identify any methods for circumventing filters, and when such methods are found, the filtering companies respond by putting in extra protections in an attempt to make sure that those methods do not succeed with their products... It is difficult for children to circumvent filters because of the technical ability and expertise necessary to do so by disabling the product on the actual computer or by accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer and successfully avoiding a filter on the minor's computer... Accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer will not enable a minor to avoid a filtering product that analyzes the content of the Web page requested, in addition to where the page is coming from. Any product that contains a real-time, dynamic filtering component cannot be avoided by use of a proxy, whether the filter is located on the network or on the user's computer.

After the ruling came out, I tried some of the best-known blocking software programs to see how easily they could be defeated: Net Nanny, SurfControl, CyberSitter, and AOL Parental Controls. Net Nanny and SurfControl apparently could not block https:// sites at all, so I was able to get to https://www.StupidCensorship.com/ and access anything I wanted from there, despite the fact that that site had been public for over a year. Apparently I do have the "technical ability and expertise necessary" to "access the Web through a proxy", but then again I'm not a minor, so, kids, don't hurt yourself trying that.

CyberSitter did intercept the https:// request so it did block StupidCensorship.com, but it didn't know about some of the other proxy sites that we had mailed out to our users recently. One of those did however get blocked because the word "hacking" appeared on the page -- as in,

This site is a tool for circumventing Internet censorship to promote free speech. It does not enable any hacking, cracking or any illegal activities (since it doesn't let you to access any sites that you couldn't access from home anyway).

so it's probably safe to say that if the CyberSitter filter is that paranoid, it would result in a good deal of overblocking as well. AOL Parental Controls also did not block the latest proxies, although it wouldn't let me load sites like Playboy through the proxy, presumably because it recognized the contents of the page and blocked it (so on that point, Judge Reed was right).

But none of the products could stop the doomsday weapon, which is to burn an Ubuntu Linux CD and boot from that, bypassing any security software installed under Windows. I can see your eyes glazing over at the thought of kids attempting to do that, but it's merely an unfamiliar process to most people, not actually difficult. (I've been saying for years, that with the greater difficulty of using Linux over Windows, there's nothing cool or clever about running it just for its own sake so you can feel badass, and the only time you need it is if you want to do something that only Linux lets you do. Well, here's something!)

But in spite of everything, I think the judge's conclusions about blocking software were still broadly correct, because he was comparing the merits of blocking software against the merits of a law that would have prohibited commercial pornography from being published on the Web in the United States. In talking about the "effectiveness" of such a law, the judge and lawyers cited the fact that as many as 75% of adult sites were hosted overseas anyway. But even that high number understates the situation, because hypothetically if all the porn on the Web in the U.S. did get outlawed, it would be easy for anyone to spend all their time looking at porn from outside the country. When you're talking about a supply of content that is so large that nobody could finish looking at it all if they spent the rest of their life trying, it doesn't really matter if 25% or 50% or 75% is located within your legal jurisdiction. I never stop hoping that a judge will say, "Look, pictures of naked people don't hurt anyone, no, not even people under 18. Shoot, when I was 13 and president of Future Lawyers of America, my friend gave me a copy of Playboy as a down payment for my unsuccessful attempts to defend him on curfew-breaking charges in Foot v. Ass, and look how I turned out." But even a judge who firmly believed that people under 18 were harmed by pornographic images, would have found little reason to uphold this law.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/04/1330219





P2P: Potential Future Applications

Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a 2-part series exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 was a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 (this post) discusses future applications.

As we mentioned in Part 1, broadband speeds are ever increasing and so the demand for peer-to-peer networks is also increasing. However many things that could be accomplished by P2P networks are still in development or research. There is huge potential that at least some of the resulting applications will go mainstream, just as Napster did in the late 90's or Skype in the early part of this century. In Part 2 of our series, we look at some of these potential future applications for P2P on the Internet.

Search Engines

Starting in the late 90's, a search engine company called Google changed the way we search the internet. Their idea was to index the web and get the top results, using their now famous Page Rank algorithm. However nowadays, indexing the web accurately has become a huge and seemingly impossible job to complete. So P2P search engines could be the next solution - where every node (user) is a crawler itself.

In P2P search (a.k.a. distributed search), each individual connected to the network serves its local index as a source of search. Instead of having a central company and a central server, each participant of the network is a search repository. Since we are talking about web indexing and web searching, a user's internet cache might be their contribution to the search database. When they execute a query, firstly their local system is queried; than if the results are not satisfactory, the next peer is queried, and so on. The difficulty is the selection of good peers to provide satisfactory results. P2P search may well be a long shot, but one possible solution in this area to check out is the Minerva Project. It is described as follows:

"Each peer is considered autonomous and has its own local search engine with a crawler and a corresponding local index. Peers share their local indexes (or specific fragments of local indexes) by posting meta-information into the P2P network. This meta-information contains compact statistics and quality-of-service information, and effectively forms a global directory. However, this directory is implemented in a completely decentralized and largely self-organizing manner."

Video and Audio Casting

The impact of video and audio web sites on the Internet has been very large over the last couple of years - and will only increase. Therefore there has been talk of moving video streaming to P2P networks, to lessen the load on the Internet. A P2P approach for video streaming would be to hold a copy of a file in different parts of the world and serve it from multiple points to users.

The creators and entrepreneurs of Kazaa and Skype, Zennstrom and Friis, are working on such a project - called Joost, a.k.a. the Venice Project. It will be like a TV on demand service, but based on P2P where clients connect to the network and download TV programs. Joost also features social networking aspects - you can rate and discuss TV programs with other people. At the moment Joost does not provide a lot of channels, but the potential is there once more content is added. See also Read/WriteWeb's earlier review of Joost and other IPTV services.

Mobile P2P Applications

Many popular web applications have been ported to mobile platforms already. Likewise there is huge potential for P2P mobile applications, at least when wireless network enabled mobile phones become more popular. I think it will follow the same trend as for PC P2P applications - i.e. it will start from instant messaging, followed by file-sharing and IP telephony, then video and other media. Already Skype uses P2P for its VoIP, as we explained in Part 1. Also back in 2001 Swedish software maker Pocit Labs developed a mobile file sharing client called BlueTalk. It enabled file sharing over Bluetooth for up to 54 people - for example to trade files or play networked games.

A more recent example is PeerBox, reviewed earlier this year by ThinkMobile. PeerBox allows you to search and download music, videos and pictures; among other things.

E-commerce

Consumer to Consumer e-commerce is one of the most popular services on the Internet. A centralized trading platform (such as eBay) enables consumers to trade, buy or sell their goods. However in a centralized system, there is always a possibility of a failure - such as the server goes down or is busy. P2P enabled e-commerce can remove the centralized system and so lessen the possibility of failures. However there are many things that have to be implemented for a P2P system for e-commerce to work - it has to be secure, transactional and workflow-based to track different stages of the sales process. It also has to support detailed search, e-commerce advertisements and location awareness of the peers.

One early example perhaps is Tamago, a P2P marketplace that has been reviewed before on Read/WriteWeb.

Conclusion

In this two-part series, we've examined different types of P2P systems and their applications - past, present and future. We've covered just a few areas (check the comments on our previous post for other exciting applications).
http://www.personalbee.com/227/11969633





A Blogger Infiltrates Academe

Cory Doctorow has no college degree, just a busy Web site and some provocative views on copyright
Brock Read

It was on an airplane not quite a decade ago that Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the wildly popular blog Boing Boing, became a copyright crusader. Mr. Doctorow calls the moment his "conversion experience at 30,000 feet."

Chatting with lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he came to the conclusion that the entire copyright system was badly broken. As the co-founder of a company that sold peer-to-peer software, Mr. Doctorow had tried working within that system. But shortly after his airborne epiphany, he joined the foundation and began to fight for a whole new interpretation of copyright law.

For the next five years, Mr. Doctorow spent a good deal of time on airplanes, flying off to conferences, colloquia, and legal hearings. As the foundation's director of European affairs, he traveled, by his estimation, more than three weeks out of every month.

So when Mr. Doctorow sits on a lonely bench here at the University of Southern California discussing his latest move, a foray into academe, he exudes the nervous energy of someone who is not used to sitting in one place — or, at the least, someone who hardly expected to find himself in this particular place.

Mr. Doctorow has been at the university's Center for Public Diplomacy since last summer, working as a scholar and, for the most part, staying put. This spring he has taken his first stab at life as a lecturer, teaching a graduate-level course in which he guides students through an irreverent history of copyright law.

The visiting professor mentions that he recently invited a representative from Warner Brothers, one of the entertainment companies he often criticizes on his blog, to speak to the class. The industry official's appearance was a dispatch from the other side of what Mr. Doctorow sees as a continuing war over copyright law, digital rights, and the very meaning of intellectual property.

Mr. Doctorow has little taste for what he calls the "maximalist" view of intellectual property — the notion that copyright is something to be enforced strictly rather than something that should strive to be as invisible and as flexible as possible — and the subtitle of his course is meant as a bit of a provocation. "Is everyone on campus a copyright criminal?" the syllabus asks, alluding to the overwhelming majority of college students who have swapped music, movies, and software on peer-to-peer networks. If the answer is yes, he suggests, then something has clearly gone wrong.

With his new course, Mr. Doctorow has joined the growing ranks of scholars preaching that copyright law needs a makeover. Professors like Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford University; Siva Vaidhyanathan, of New York University; and Edward W. Felten, of Princeton University, have taught courses that sought to poke holes in traditional views of copyright. But while those professors made their names in large part through academic books and research projects, Mr. Doctorow has taken a decidedly different route. He doesn't hold a college degree, and he earned his reputation not through scholarly work but through a blog.

Mr. Doctorow has no interest in playing down his role as a blogger who has infiltrated the ranks of academe. Even the name of his course, "Pwned," is a nod to the medium that made his name. A neologism with varying pronunciations coined by online gamers and made popular by bloggers and discussion-board posters, it refers to the act of being thoroughly bested. The theme of domination, Mr. Doctorow argues, is all too appropriate for a branch of law that has favored corporate interests over individual ones.

Mr. Doctorow's supporters at the university say his unorthodox path to academe is an asset, not a cause for concern. "The academy needs to have people come in and redefine the rules, to push the traditional precepts of how things are done," says Joshua S. Fouts, director of the public-diplomacy center, which brought Mr. Doctorow to the campus as its first Canadian Fulbright chair in public diplomacy. "What Cory does here is basically what he does at Boing Boing: He thinks about technology on a global scale."

Tech Start-Up

Mr. Doctorow traces his activist streak to his parents, a pair of Toronto schoolteachers whom he describes as "Trotskyist." But his own career in advocacy got off to a slow start. As a young man he enrolled in four different colleges, including the University of Waterloo and Michigan State University, but he dropped out of each one.

In the late 1990s, he and two friends founded OpenCola, a company that developed a piece of open-source peer-to-peer software. Mr. Doctorow soon found himself hobnobbing with entertainment-industry executives and copyright activists like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that has opposed copyright holders in court and in public debate.

Mr. Doctorow had not considered himself militant on matters of copyright, but his encounters with entertainment-industry officials left him jaundiced. "It was clear this wasn't an industry that was working with technology," he says, recalling an afternoon when he watched representatives of one record company trade high-fives after buying out a lesser peer-to-peer firm that they had saddled with lawsuits. "It was only interested in suing technology."

After joining the EFF, Mr. Doctorow was quick to put his money where his mouth was. In 2003 he finished his first science-fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which became the first novel published under Mr. Lessig's nascent Creative Commons license. The license allowed readers to pass the book around freely online, provided they neither made money from it nor used to it to create "derivative works" of their own. (Mr. Doctorow later relaxed his stance on derivative works and amended the license.)

But Mr. Doctorow's most influential role came as a writer and editor of Boing Boing — a job that started, he says, as something of a happy accident.

Boing Boing began life in the late 1980s as a print publication that billed itself as "the world's greatest neurozine." The print edition faded away, but in 2000 its founder, Mark Frauenfelder, recast the project as a one-man blog. Mr. Doctorow started writing for the site early the next year.

At first Boing Boing was content trying to live up to its subtitle: "a directory of wonderful things." In short, unceremonious posts, Mr. Frauenfelder and Mr. Doctorow charted the Web's blossoming at the turn of the century, dispensing links to sites they found clever and articles they deemed worthy.

But the blog got its big break when a post rounding up theories on the closely guarded identity of a much-hyped invention called "IT" made it onto CNN. The invention — which turned out to be the Segway scooter — was something of an anticlimax. But Boing Boing's popularity snowballed, and it is still increasing steadily. The site regularly tops a list of the Web's most popular blogs kept by Technorati, an online monitoring service. (Technorati reports that more than 20,000 other blogs have linked to posts on Boing Boing in the past three months.)

The site now has four contributing editors, but Mr. Doctorow remains its most passionate commentator on policy issues. He posts frequently about copyright law, intellectual property, and digital-rights management, and his condemnations of "maximalist" copyright holders are acid-tongued. When Sony was caught selling music CD's that surreptitiously installed software on users' computers, he accused company executives of "jaw-dropping contempt for their customers."

A Fertile Field

The site has turned Mr. Doctorow into an influential figure in the copyright wars, but he says Boing Boing is as much a scratchpad as it is a soapbox. "I use it to keep a running track of stuff that seems to be pieces of the puzzle," he says. "Most of the pieces are just blue sky, but every now and again you find a corner."

That philosophy carries over to Mr. Doctorow's course at the University of Southern California. Intellectual property is, at the moment, a fertile field of study. Almost every day, it seems, has its breaking-news story: Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement. The recording industry sues college students for music piracy. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, waxes hopeful about a world without digital-rights-management tools.

Mr. Doctorow requires students to sift through such stories and write about them on a class blog (http://uscpwned.blogspot.com) that, stylistically and philosophically, could be Boing Boing's wonkier little brother. By class-project standards, the blog is robust and readable, and for good reason. Students are not just writing for Mr. Doctorow but also to impress each other: At the beginning of each weekly class session, student bloggers run through their recent posts and lead a free-form discussion of current events in copyright.

Students also edit articles on Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, of which Mr. Doctorow is quite fond. Many professors try desperately to steer their students away from the site, but Mr. Doctorow has required students in "Pwned" to browse Wikipedia in search of articles on copyright and technology that could use improvement.

In the meantime, Mr. Doctorow uses his weekly lectures to cover the history of intellectual property "from Augustus Caesar to Alan Turing," as the course syllabus puts it. Like Mr. Lessig and Mr. Vaidhyanathan, he speaks of a longstanding battle between corporations — who, in his eyes, typically use copyright as a cudgel to support their financial interests — and consumers, who rely on copyright to preserve their own stake in the process of cultural production.

In Mr. Doctorow's view, copyright law should strive to preserve people's freedom to consume works as they see fit, and it should encourage consumers to adapt copyrighted works so long as they are not making money off the result. "What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight," he wrote in an essay published last year.

So Mr. Doctorow advocates licensing schemes, like Creative Commons, that let copyright holders authorize noncommercial uses of their work. And he argues that fair-use doctrine should be interpreted liberally.

A Different View

What Mr. Doctorow tells his 17 students about copyright is strikingly different from the official position that the rest of USC's thousands of students hear.

In August university officials sent an e-mail message to undergraduates, warning them that the university — and, possibly, the recording industry — would punish them for file-sharing infractions. To Mr. Doctorow the letter was a sign that the university was failing to educate students about the underpinnings of intellectual-property law.

So the visiting professor made his own sharply critical annotations to the message and posted them online. Showing a flair for drama, he called one statement made in the letter — a claim that "as an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property" — "the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university."

"The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship," he wrote. "To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping."

Mr. Doctorow says no one from the university ever contacted him to complain about the annotation. (Campus officials say they did not send the letter out again this semester.) But if administrators had registered objections, Mr. Doctorow would not have listened too closely. His fellowship at USC ends in the spring, and he says he is glad to be unconcerned with tenure and other issues full-time professors face. "I'm not a career academic, so none of that stuff matters to me," he says.

That also means Mr. Doctorow can devote his time away from the classroom to writing for Boing Boing, and to his science-fiction novels (he has now published three, along with two collections of short fiction), even though that kind of work would not be much help in a tenure review. He views the university, it seems, with a sort of detached bemusement.

Gray Areas

Of course, bemusement can work both ways. Mr. Doctorow says some students have had difficulty persuading their academic advisers that a course on copyright law — especially one with a title like "Pwned" — is a worthy elective.

Mr. Doctorow's course might be a hard sell to vocation-minded advisers, but it has managed to attract students from a broad swath of disciplines. The course's enrollees include students in pre-law and sports management, students who see themselves as budding activists, students who plan to start record labels, and one who told Mr. Doctorow he joined the course simply because he had downloaded a lot of music illegally.

Mr. Doctorow says his goal is not to train a generation of "copyleft" advocates but rather to give students the sense that intellectual property is, at the very least, a field with plenty of gray areas.

"There's a pre-law kid in the class who wants to be a lawyer for video-game companies," he says, pointing out that the gaming industry has a much stricter take on copyright than groups like the EFF would advocate. "I would prefer for that kid to do progressive things in his job than for him to have a one-sided, maximalist view of copyright."

There are times when he can't help but engage in a bit of Boing Boing-style rabble-rousing — as when he pauses to consider USC's "free-speech zone." The university established the zone to keep student protesters from spreading out across the campus, and it is clear that Mr. Doctorow is unimpressed with the idea. He is especially upset that the student-run Free Culture club, which he advises, was fined for posting flyers elsewhere on the campus, informing readers that they were not standing in a free-speech zone.

Today he decides to wander over to the zone and try to get a sense of what kinds of speech are allowed only within its borders. A security officer tells him the zone is for large gatherings and speakers using megaphones, but another campus official gives him a different interpretation: Any speech accompanied by props that could be dangerous, like picket signs, must be restricted to the zone, the official says. Mr. Doctorow presses forward with a series of increasingly absurdist questions — Do balloons count as dangerous props? What about costumes? — and then he leaves, smiling as he shakes his head.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i31/31a03001.htm





Is iTunes Changing the Way 20-Somethings Watch TV?
Dr. Macenstein

A quick look at the top TV programs sold on iTunes shows quite a disparity between America’s top shows according to Nielsen and what the average iTunes user is watching. For instance, the TV show LOST, once a media darling, has struggled this season, and often does not make it into the top 20 shows of the week. However, LOST does consistently well in the iTunes rankings, and this week occupies slots 1, 4, and 17 as of this writing. Battlestar Galactica (iTunes ranked 3, and 11) and South Park (iTunes ranked 7, 8, and 12) both fail to crack the Top 20 cable shows each week, and consistently lose out to shows such as The Fairly Odd Parents and reruns of House and Spongebob Squarepants. The FOX shows 24 (iTunes ranked 2, and 10) and Prison Break (iTunes ranked 6) do not appear in Nielsen’s Top 10 either.

So why are these shows huge hits on iTunes at $1.99 an episode when many of these shows can’t attract viewers for FREE on broadcast TV? Simple. Younger viewers, college students, largely, are finding iTunes’ “On-Demand” style of television viewing fits their hectic schedule better than appointment television. 20-year-old Jeff, a full time college student at Illinois State University, explains his situation; “Most of my friends and I actually end up waiting for the DVD box sets of a show to come out, and then we watch them in marathon sit-down sessions. We don’t have the kind of schedules where we can dedicate a specific block of time every week and say we’ll be there [to watch a show]”.

Perhaps this is the reason why so many of the highly rated shows sold on iTunes are of the LOST, Heroes, 24, and Prison Break variety, where there is one long-reaching story arc that needs to be followed. People with hectic schedules who are likely to miss an episode of such a show will be “Lost” when they try to watch the next week’s episode. By purchasing an episode on iTunes, they don’t have to be back in their dorm room at 10 PM on a Wednesday, they can watch it on the way to (or even IN) class.

“At home my parents have Tivo,” says Mark, also at Illinois. “We kind of use iTunes as a Tivo substitute here, we all put in money towards a season, and then we watch the shows together when we get a chance.”

What will be interesting to see is how the iTunes model will eventually affect these 20-somethings’ viewing habits as they get older. Software and computer makers like Apple and Microsoft constantly vie to get their products into as many school classrooms as possible, as early as possible in a child’s development. They know that the more comfortable children get using a specific brand of technology, the more likely they are to continue to seek out that familiar brand as they get older. The same thing applies to this new generation of On-Demand TV watchers. Whether through the “low-tech”method of waiting for DVD box sets to be released, or the instant gratification of the iTunes Store, it looks like viewing habits are being molded.

“Almost all of my friends have a video iPod now,” says Sara, a Sophomore at Rutgers University in NJ. “We have a thing now where each of us on our floor chooses a show we want, and then we share it. I’ve gotten used to watching shows on the tiny screen in bed or even walking between classes. It’s pretty cool.”
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/573





Radio

KDND Staff Will Not Face Charges In Water Intoxication Death
FMQB

No criminal charges will be filed against the staff of KDND/Sacramento in the case of the woman who died in January after participating in the station's water drinking contest, Hold Your Wee For a Wii. The district attorney's office determined that the behavior of the KDND morning team, which ran the contest, did not rise to the level of criminal activity. The premise of the contest was that contestants had to drink as much water as possible without vomiting or urinating, and the one who drank the most earned a Nintendo Wii gaming console. One contestant, Jennifer Strange, died hours after the contest from water intoxication.

"There were no observable indications or symptoms that Jennifer Strange was experiencing a serious medical emergency which would have required station employees to seek or administer medical aid to her," the district attorney's office said in a statement. Prosecutors also noted that Strange participated willingly and could have left at any time, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Entercom spokesman Charles Sipkins released a statement after hearing of the prosecutors' decision, saying, "This was an unfortunate accident, and we continue to extend our deepest sympathy to the Strange family." The station fired 10 employees after the contest, including the Morning Rave team and other staffers.

Meanwhile, Strange's family is moving forward with a wrongful death lawsuit against KDND. The family's suit claims that the station failed to consult with appropriate health authorities regarding the potential health risks of the contest, that they "failed to take any steps to identify prospective participants who might be at risk of injury," and that they "failed to secure any medical professional or para-professional services during the contest, even after the contestants begin feeling ill." The family is seeking funeral and other expenses incurred plus undisclosed punitive damages.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=381242





Web Music: On the Threshold of a Stream
Wilson Rothman

For all the talk about satellite radio, the most vibrant frontier in radio may be the Web. Many traditional AM and FM stations have begun streaming on the Internet, along with hundreds of smaller online-only operators. Even subscription download services like Napster, Rhapsody and MTV's Urge have pre-programmed radio for users who are not in the mood to hunt for tracks.

Currently, the most compelling online radio is interactive. Services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker evaluate your musical tastes, then serve up a continuous stream of programming to match. They mix familiar songs with new material you might like. They all do it by harnessing the technological forces of social networking, data mining and music analysis, though each uses a slightly different technique.

Despite so much momentum, there are still plenty of bumps. The Copyright Royalty Board of the U.S. Library of Congress recently announced a Web-radio royalty payment plan that has caused many free Internet broadcasters to fear for their fragile business models.

Some new interactive music services choose not to stream anything. Instead, they rely strictly on music the listener already owns or new tracks donated by publicity-hungry independent artists and labels. Others are becoming as creative with the way they license content as they are with the way they personalize it for you.

On its surface, Pandora is the simplest option. When you visit www.pandora.com, enter the name of a song or artist you enjoy. Immediately you will hear music from a "station" based on that initial choice. You can refine your station by naming other artists and songs, and Pandora picks music from those artists but more importantly, it chooses other songs you might like based on your suggestions.

Pandora makes recommendations based on songs analysis by musicologists in Pandora's Music Genome Project. They listen for up to 400 different characteristics in every song, from musical genre to the presence of a particular instrument. Songs with the most similarities naturally make their way to the same radio stream.

If you do not like one of Pandora's suggestions, you can click on the "thumbs down" sign and it is never heard from again. If, on the other hand, you do like a song, you can give it the "thumbs up," and that particular preference will be used in later suggestions.

Now that the free ad-supported service has been operational for 15 months, it can use the behavioral data of its six million listeners to add a new layer of suggestion. For instance, even if, on paper, the musicologists think it logical to pair a song by the "American Idol" superstar Clay Aiken with one by the Canadian folk balladeer Ron Sexsmith, several hundred listeners may give the juxtaposition a vote of no confidence. Tim Westergren, a Pandora co-founder, says the database now contains half a billion useful points of "contextual feedback."

Last.fm (www.last.fm), an interactive radio service started in 2003, does not use a musicologist. Instead, it bases its suggestions primarily on the wisdom of the crowd. A Last.fm co-founder, Martin Stiksel, refers to it as "collaborative filtering applied on a massive scale."

The service asks users to download software - available for Macs and PCs - that tracks music playing on their computers. The song counting process, called "scrobbling" by Last.fm's chief software developer, lets the company observe shifts in popularity, spot unexpected correlations between songs, and even discover new artists - or new tracks by known artists.

To date, Last.fm has "scrobbled" 65 million tracks by 8 million artists, in over 200 different countries. As with Pandora, you can identify songs you love, which helps to tailor your radio experience. The result is a stream of music that, statistically speaking, you ought to enjoy.

An important byproduct is the identification of musical "neighbors." As the Last.fm community grows to over 15 million active users, it also promotes itself as a social networking site, like MySpace. You can see and contact others whose musical tastes correspond significantly with your own.

"This is community-driven," Stiksel said. "Interest in new music flags when you don't have an infrastructure of informers around you."

The most ambitious free service is Slacker, which started this month. The ad-driven beta program at www.slacker.com resembles Pandora. But when the full-fledged release becomes available in early summer, Slacker will have several components. Slacker was founded by former chief executives of Musicmatch and Rio, so it is only fitting that Slacker will offer a free software player, like the once popular Musicmatch Jukebox, and a portable iPod-like device, like those Rio made.

One twist is that, like Last.fm, the Slacker jukebox will enhance the radio stream by paying attention to the songs you choose. (DJs will aid in programming as well.) Another twist is that, in addition to MP3s, the portable player will carry personalized radio streams that will be automatically freshened from time to time. Paying $7.50 per month will give you access to more features, but even if you do not pay, you will be able to buy the portable player and have access to free - though ad-rich - radio streams.

Slacker says it will introduce a satellite receiver dock this year for the portable player. The Slacker team plans to blast individual song files to listeners from a satellite several times per hour. As each song is sent, the player itself will determine whether the song is a good fit for its particular user. If so, it will be saved. If not, it will be rejected.

Because of the controversy over royalty rates, and because of its unique portable properties, Slacker made its own licensing deals directly with the four major music groups plus several hundred independent labels. Last.fm recently announced content deals with Warner Music Group and EMI for tracks on its new, ad-free $3-per-month premium radio service.

The royalty issue is explicitly why services like Soundflavor, Goombah and Mog do not offer true streaming radio. Soundflavor DJ, a free player available at www.soundflavor.com, uses a collaborative filtering technique, but instead of streaming new songs, it lets you cue up songs on iTunes or Windows Media Player, then takes over DJ responsibility, matching your initial choices with other tracks from your own collection. It is especially effective if you have a library with thousands of tracks. After every few songs, Soundflavor offers you a free track download from an independent artist, or the opportunity to buy a song that its filter suggests you might like.

Goombah (www.goombah.com), another new service, asks you to download software that analyzes your entire music library. You can, however, select artists or albums that you do not want included in this holistic evaluation. After the analysis, Goombah offers free track downloads and connects you to music fans with similar tastes.

Mog (www.mog.com) is a bustling new online community of music fans. Like Goombah, it uses software to examine your whole library, but it gives you the opportunity to prioritize songs that have been played most recently. The result is not streaming radio, but a lively community of music lovers who talk about concerts, post MP3s and share video.

Mog's most inspired development is starting Thursday: Mog TV, a personalized stream of YouTube video posts. Mog says there are 400,000 videos there now, plenty to personalize for everyone's tastes. "Imagine if YouTube knew what songs were in your music collection," said Mog's chief executive, David Hyman. "It's the ultimate mash-up." As for artist royalties, that currently appears to be YouTube's problem.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...29ptbasics.php





WiFi in the Sky: Airlines Prepare Cabin Hotspots

BlackBerrying, web surfing expected aloft within a year; cellphone service may follow
Scott McCartney

The days when airplanes offer a hiatus from being connected to the office are numbered.

After years of discussion and delay, U.S. airlines will start offering in-flight Internet connections, instant messaging and wireless email within 12 months, turning the cabin into a WiFi "hotspot." Carriers are expected to start making announcements around the end of the summer, with service beginning early next year.

Like it or not, airborne cellphone chatter still has a flying chance in U.S. airplane cabins, as well, despite a recent indication that the Federal Communications Commission will keep a ban in place.

The FCC has already auctioned off radio spectrum for cellphone use on airplanes, and telecommunications companies partnering with airlines have successfully tested several systems. But no company made a firm proposal. Facing high costs and opposition from fliers, U.S. airline customers weren't interested. Yet with airlines in Europe and the Middle East to begin offering cellphone service aboard airplanes later this year, that could change.

If the technology proves safe, popular and profitable, U.S. airlines and telecommunications companies may be more interested, under pressure to keep up competitively. In-flight phone calls may not be as popular as lie-flat beds in business class, an innovation that started in Europe and spread, but air travel is a copycat business. Success in Europe could prompt action in the U.S., and bring the FCC back to possibly dropping its ban.

"The likelihood of cellphone service on airplanes coming into play is still very high," said Jack Blumenstein, chief executive of AirCell Inc., a major player in airplane cabin communications.

That may not be what road warriors want to hear as they dread listening to a blathering seatmate.

Still, with current technology, capacity would be limited, so the entire cabin wouldn't be able to chat at the same time. Indeed, only about 14 calls or fewer would be able to take place simultaneously.

For now, the preferred cabin technology in the U.S. is Internet service, which will launch early next year. If broadband connections at 35,000 feet are as popular as they have been at hotels, airports, homes, schools and coffee shops, airplanes will likely be fitted with the relatively inexpensive technology rapidly.

AirCell paid $31.3 million at an FCC auction last year to take over radio frequency once used for expensive air-phone service and reallocate it to Internet and cellphone service. The Internet service already has the approval of both the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration. Mr. Blumenstein says AirCell, a closely held Colorado company that provides communications for private jets, is building out its network of 80 to 100 ground towers and talking to multiple airlines. No customers have been named yet.

"It can't happen soon enough," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel technology analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin and connect to laptop computers and devices like BlackBerrys that have WiFi chips. In all, it will cost about $100,000 to outfit a plane with less than 100 pounds of equipment, and the work can be done overnight by airline maintenance workers, AirCell says.

What makes the service particularly attractive to airlines is that they will share revenue with AirCell. The service will cost about the same as existing WiFi offerings. Mr. Blumenstein says it will charge no more than $10 a day to passengers. It will also offer discounted options for customers and tie into existing service programs like T-Mobile, iPass and Boingo. Speeds will be equivalent to WiFi service on the ground.

AirCell will block voice calls over the Internet with services like Skype -- except for pilots, flight attendants and air marshals, who will be allowed to talk to people on the ground for scheduling, safety and security issues.

While WiFi is preferred in the U.S., cellular service is the top priority in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where social objections to cellphones on airplanes appear to be more muted.

Ryanair Holdings PLC signed a deal to equip all of its 200 planes with a system from OnAir, a joint venture of airplane maker Airbus and SITA, an aviation technology provider. Installation is likely to take place in the third quarter of this year, an OnAir spokesman says. Dubai-based Emirates hopes to begin offering service from AeroMobile Ltd., a joint venture of technology firms Arinc Inc. and Telenor ASA, on flights to Asia starting in late summer. Qantas Airways will start a trial of the AeroMobile system in Australia before June.

Some 30 countries have approved the service from a telecommunications perspective, convinced cellphones on planes with the equipment installed won't tie up large chunks of capacity at towers on the ground. But both companies still need approval from air-safety regulators who have been studying whether cellphones might interfere with aircraft navigation equipment. So far, regulatory approval has been slower than they expected.

OnAir and AeroMobile both install "pico cell" receivers on planes that connect to cellular phones, allowing them to operate at low power to minimize technical problems. The pico cell then routes calls to cellular networks through a satellite link.

Only about 14 calls or fewer can be successfully made at a time per flight, and airline crews can turn the system off during takeoff and landing. If you make the 15th call, you'll get some kind of indication of "no service."

Pico-cell technology has been successfully tested in the U.S., but deployment would be complicated and costly. While Europe has migrated heavily to GSM phone technology, the U.S. still has lots of older phones around more likely to cause ground problems. With the public lining up firmly against cellphones, airlines have been reluctant to sign on and telecom companies were reluctant to invest millions in a potentially unpopular product.

On March 22, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said he would recommend ending consideration of lifting the ban on cellphone use aboard planes because a two-year investigation into possible interference with ground towers had proven inconclusive. It also drew more than 8,000 consumer complaints.

But if systems prove they work in other parts of the world, airborne cellphone service likely will migrate to the U.S. -- perhaps within just a couple of years. AirCell says it can expand its service to include cellular voice calls a year or two after its data launch, if U.S. airlines ever have the stomach for it. Already, LiveTV, the satellite television arm of JetBlue Airways Corp., paid $7 million at an FCC auction for a more-limited frequency that could be used for cellular phones. JetBlue hasn't said what its plans for the frequency will be.

Someday, many more travelers may be donning noise-canceling headphones.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





"’Tweren’t me Your Honor – l33t haX0rz stole my Wi-Fi."

Aircrack-PTW

WEP is a protocol for securing wireless LANs. WEP stands for "Wired Equivalent Privacy" which means it should provide the level of protection a wired LAN has. WEP therefore uses the RC4 stream to encrypt data which is transmitted over the air, using usually a single secret key (called the root key or WEP key) of a length of 40 or 104 bit.

A history of WEP and RC4

WEP was previously known to be insecure. In 2001 Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin, and Adi Shamir published an analysis of the RC4 stream cipher. Some time later, it was shown that this attack can be applied to WEP and the secret key can be recovered from about 4,000,000 to 6,000,000 captured data packets. In 2004 a hacker named KoReK improved the attack: the complexity of recovering a 104 bit secret key was reduced to 500,000 to 2,000,000 captured packets. In 2005, Andreas Klein presented another analysis of the RC4 stream cipher. Klein showed that there are more correlations between the RC4 keystream and the key than the ones found by Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir which can additionally be used to break WEP in WEP like usage modes.

Our attack

We were able to extend Klein's attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz and can additionally be optimized for devices with slower CPUs. The same attack can be used for 40 bit keys too with an even higher success probability.

Countermeasures

We believe that WEP should not be used anymore in sensitive environments. Most wireless equipment vendors provide support for TKIP (as known as WPA1) and CCMP (also known as WPA2) which provides a much higher security level. All users should switch to WPA1 or even better WPA2.

How the attack works

A paper describing the details and methods we used in our attack is available on the IACR ePrint server.

Implementation

We implemented a proof-of-concept of our attack in a tool called aircrack-ptw. It should be used together with the aircrack-ng toolsuite.

Reproduction of our results

Our tool is quite similar to aircrack-ng. You can find a very good tutorial on the aircrack-ng homepage. For usage with our tool, you need to make some little changes.

In Step 3, you MUST NOT use the parameter -ivs. Just skip this parameter, the other command line arguments still apply.
In Step 5, you should use aircrack-ptw instead of aircrack-ng. ls -la output*.cap will give you a list of capture files airodump-ng has created. Usually, if you did not interrupt airodump-ng, there should be only one file named output-01.cap. Just start aircrack-ptw output-01.cap to get the key. If aircrack-ptw was not successfull, wait a few seconds and start it again.

Questions and answers

Does aircrack-ptw work with arbitrary packets?

No, aircrack-ptw currently only works with ARP requests and ARP responses. Using methods like ARP re-injection, it is usually not a problem to generate a sufficient amount of ARP traffic.

In a future version, aircrack-ptw could be extended to work with other packets too.

Does aircrack-ptw work with 256 bit keys?

Currently, aircrack-ptw does not support 256 bit WEP.

Does aircrack-ptw work on WPA1 or WPA2 too?

No. WPA is a complete redesign. Although the TKIP specified for WPA still uses RC4 as encryption algorithm, related-key attacks are not possible in this case since the per-packet keys do not share a common suffix. Furthermore, re-injection attacks on WPA protected networks will not work: WPA requires multiple packets with the same IV to be discarded. Although no cryptographic attacks against WPA1 are known, we recommend WPA2 over WPA1 if you have the choice.

Does aircrack-ptw work against WEPplus?

This has not been tested due to lack of equipment supporting WEPplus. Since WEPplus only avoids the weak IVs of the original FMS attack, we foresee no problems in applying the attack against WEPplus.

Does aircrack-ptw work against Dynamic WEP?

This has not been tested as well. In principle we expect our attack to work on networks protected by Dynamic WEP. Since Dynamic WEP allows for re-keying, the attack will provide a key that may only be valid for a certain time frame. After the key has expired, the attack needs to be performed again.

Any additional information?

We are going to give a talk about aircrack-ptw at the easterhegg 2007 event in Hamburg.

Who we are
We (Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann) are cryptographic researchers at the cryptography and computer algebra group at the technical university Darmstadt in Germany. Head of the group is Prof. Dr. Dr. Johannes Buchmann.

Contact
Please send questions to aircrack-ptw@cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
http://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/aircrack-ptw/





UK Hacker Loses Extradition Fight

A British man has lost his High Court fight against extradition to the US for allegedly carrying out the "biggest military computer hack of all time".

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon, of north London, is accused of gaining access to 97 US military and Nasa computers.

Home Secretary John Reid granted the US request to extradite him for trial.

At the High Court in London, his lawyers argued the 41-year-old had been subjected to "improper threats" and the move would breach his human rights.

His lawyers had argued that, if extradited, he would face an unknown length of time in pre-trial detention, with no likelihood of bail.

He would also face a long prison sentence - "in the region of 45 years" - and may not be allowed to serve part of the sentence at home in the UK, his lawyers had said.

But, on Tuesday, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Mr Justice Goldring dismissed his legal challenge, saying they could not find any grounds for appeal.

Ben Cooper, for Mr McKinnon, said his client would now seek to make an appeal against his extradition at the House of Lords.

"We will certainly be applying for this court to certify a point of law of public importance and to grant leave," he said.

Speaking later, solicitor Jeffrey Anderson said alleged threats by US authorities, including one from New Jersey prosecutors that Mr McKinnon "would fry", would be among issues raised.

That had been a "chilling and intimidating" reference to capital punishment by the electric chair, he added.

It now looked as though the US would try to prosecute Mr McKinnon as a cyber-terrorist, Mr Anderson said.

"This could lead to him spending the rest of his life in prison in the US, with repatriation to serve his sentence in his home country denied as punishment for contesting his extradition."

Mr McKinnon has never denied that he accessed the computer networks of a wide number of US military institutions between February 2001 and March 2002.

Mr McKinnon, arrested in November 2002, has always maintained that he was motivated by curiosity and that he only managed to get into the networks because of lax security.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/6521255.stm





Inspectors: IRS Lost 490 Laptops, Many with Unencrypted Data
Nate Anderson

Every large organization loses laptops, but when those laptops contain the personal tax information of millions of Americans, it's a big deal. Big enough that the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration looked into the problem, and released a report on the Internal Revenue Service's penchant for losing machines filled with unencrypted tax data. "As a result," writes the report's author, Michael Phillips, "it is likely that sensitive data for a significant number of taxpayers have been unnecessarily exposed to potential identity theft and/or other fraudulent schemes."

How bad is the situation? When inspectors looked into the matter, they found that 490 laptops had been reported stolen between January 2, 2003 and June 13, 2006. Unfortunately, because reporting procedures for stolen laptops were often not followed, there isn't a real way to know whether this number is accurate.

490 laptops sounds like a lot, but the IRS currently has more than 47,000 in operation, and has no doubt used many more than that over the last few years. The report does not suggest that the agency try to cut losses to zero, but instead that it take better precautions. When thefts do occur, taxpayer data should be protected. Instead, inspectors found that "a large number of the lost or stolen IRS computers contain similar unencrypted data," and that employees routinely used flash drives, CDs, and DVDs to cart unencrypted data around with them.

The report also points out that physical security is important. 111 laptops were stolen right out of IRS facilities; if these were stored in lockable cabinets while employees were out, theft could be reduced significantly. Many of the remaining laptops were stolen out of vehicles or employee homes, suggesting that "employees may not have secured their laptop computers in the trunks of their vehicles or locked their laptop computers at home."

The problems even extended to off-site data backups, where backup media were often unsealed and open to anyone in the building. In one case, "one employee who retired in March 2006 had full access rights to the non-IRS off-site facility when we visited in July 2006."

IRS management has agreed with the findings of the Inspector General and has pledged to implement the report's recommendations. The report does note, however, that the IRS was warned about unencrypted data back in 2003 but did not take "adequate corrective actions." Here's hoping that more is done this time around. Actually paying my taxes is painful enough; having my identity stolen because of it would be rage-inducing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...pted-data.html





Authorities Say Parents Can't Name Their Baby Metallica
Jack McGoughey

A Swedish couple has run into trouble with the law after trying to name their baby girl Metallica.

Michael and Karolina Tomaro are embroiled in a court battle with Swedish authorities who denied their application to name their six month old child after the legendary rock band.

"It suits her," Karolina Tomaro, 27, said Tuesday. "She's decisive and she knows what she wants."

The six month old has already been baptized as Metallica, but Swedish tax officials have declared the name as inappropriate. Swedish law declares that both first names and surnames must be approved by government authorities before they can be used.

The reason given by the Swedish National Tax Board for the refusal to allow the name to be registered is that the name is associated with the rock group and the word "metal."

According to Tomaro, the official handling the case also said the name was "ugly."

The couple was backed last month by Goteburg's County Administrative Court that ruled that there was no reason to block the name. The court also mentioned that a Swedish woman already has the middle name Metallica.

Once the Tamaro's tried to register the name with the tax autority before applying for a passport, they ran into their trouble. That is when tax officials objected to the name and appealed to a higher court. The ordeal frustrated the family's travel plans.

"We've had to cancel trips and can't get anywhere because we can't get her a passport without an approved name," Tomaro said.

Baby Metallica is not the first Swedish child to have their name denied under Swedish name laws. The names Veranda and Ikea have also been denied in the past.

Another name, Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, was also rejected by Swedish authorities in 1996. The name is not as big of a mouthful as it looks- the name is pronounced Albin. The boy's parents chose the name at the time as a protest against the seemingly ridiculous Swedish naming laws.

One name that did get approved in 2005 was Google. Oliver Google Kai was named so by his parents, the search engine expert Kelias Kai, and his wife Carol.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...ame_their.html





April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet
Tony Long

1969: The publication of the first “request for comments,” or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.

April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

One interesting aspect of the RFC is that each document is issued a unique serial number. An individual paper cannot be overwritten; rather, updates or corrections are submitted on a separate RFC. The result is an ongoing historical record of the evolution of internet standards.

When it comes to the birth of the net, Jan. 1, 1983, also has its supporters. On that date, the National Science Foundation’s university network backbone, a precursor to the World Wide Web, became operational.
http://www.wired.com/science/discove...dayintech_0407


















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