Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 30th, '06

[JackSpratts]

Have a great New Year!


















"We are no longer having a debate about whether net neutrality should be the law of the land. We are having a debate about how and when." – Ben Scott


"No one could ever do all the things Mr. Brown did. But here is what’s more impressive: musicians are still finding new ways to do some of them." – Kelefa Sanneh


"The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily." – Greg Gutfeld


"Television is just like making a hole in the wall. All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door." – Albert Borgmann


"Historically, we always go after the new technology. We always say that it will physically hurt you — it will hurt your eyes. There was research on whether computers cause miscarriage. Then the next wave of research is, 'Will it hurt children?' Then, 'Will it hurt society?' That’s the pattern of looking into a new technology." – Annie Lang


"I don’t see the Free Software Foundation handing out any Ferrari’s." – Long Zheng


"No one who is in a disputed election like this should get too comfortable in the House of Representatives." – U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.


"The level of surveillance in this country should shock people. It is infiltrating everything we do." – David Murakami Wood


"Nowhere else in the free world is this happening. The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable." – Helena Kennedy


"Humans must dictate our future, not machines." – Richard Thomas


"The best approach? Hammer time." – Jenna Wortham





































December 30th, '06






Why Piracy is Still More Common Than Legal Video Downloads
Ryan Paul

A recent study conducted by consumer and retail analysis group NPD claims that peer-to-peer (P2P) video downloads (which in the study are synonymous with illegal downloads) are outpacing purchases from legitimate video download services five to one (see last weeks WiR, - Jack). The study, which was performed with NPD's VideoWatch tracking software on "the home computers of more than 12,500 U.S. households," states that 8 percent of Internet-using households downloaded video content from P2P services, whereas 2 percent paid to download video content from legitimate providers. The study also indicates that nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult- film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content.

Avast, matey! Opt-in!

The opt-in methodology used by NPD could lead to significant under-reporting of P2P downloading since those who are voluntarily tracked by NPD's software are probably going to be less inclined to violate copyright law. Chances are that the ratio of "legal" to "illegal" downloading is further tipped in piracy's favor than NPD's study indicates. Nevertheless, assuming that NPD's study approximates reality, one could attribute the strength of piracy and the limited adoption of commercial and P2P-based video downloading to several factors.

First, legal movie download services are still relatively new, and the movie industry's trepidation has prevented a diverse body of content from becoming commercially available. I still don't know of any legal video download service that offers my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, for instance. If the new digital economy is all about the so-called "Long Tail," then online video stores are missing a major opportunity by not playing their cards and rapidly expanding their selection. This is doubly true since the "selection" of content available on the P2P networks is truly impressive. P2P wins the the selection category hands down. This is doubly true when you consider that NPD found that 60 percent of P2P downloads were pornographic in nature.

Another obvious factor is Content Restriction Annulment and Protection (CRAP) technologies, more commonly known as DRM. Consumers who pay for digital video downloads want to be able to play those videos with the software of their choice, without a lot of trouble or the imposition of additional limitations. Consumers also want to be able to convert legitimately downloaded content to other formats so that it can be played on mobile devices. Pervasive DRM and high prices make legal video downloading much less appealing to the average consumer.

Consider this one seemingly small molehill that is truly a mountain: burning to DVD. I have my TV connected to my main desktop computer, so getting content onto DVD isn't a big deal for me. Yet that's the exception, not the rule. If you want to be able to burn content to a disc, the P2P networks will serve you better because you can do anything you want with that content since it has no DRM. This means that if you want to burn a DVD or transform a video for use on a mobile device, legit options will leave you disappointed. P2P wins the freedom of use category.

Let's not forget about quality. Maybe Joe Public doesn't lust after HD content or high-bitrate audio, but the P2P world does. Experienced P2P users can find movies and audio whose quality blows away that which is offered online. P2P isn't a panacea in this regard, but when you're trying to convert people away from piracy, charging $11.99 for a low- quality DRM-laden movie when an HD version is a P2P network away, and free... well, are the statistics really that surprising? P2P wins in the quality category, because experienced users can almost always find what they want. There are some real duds out there on P2P, of course, but not enough that it seems to be driving people away from P2P.

Last but not least, there's the pricing. It's hard to compete with "free," but the rise of legitimate services show that people are willing to pay. P2P clearly gives you more bang for your buck, but of course, your usage might also be illegal. More important for this story is the fact that pricing is a moving target. Matters related to increased selection, quality, and the removal of DRM should all affect pricing. What's clear is that current offerings aren't exactly putting the P2P networks on the endangered species list. The download services need to take note, adjust features, and start experimenting with pricing.

STBs to the rescue?

Right now, the current leader in the video download market is Apple, which boasts nine out of every ten digital movies sold in the NPD study. I'm inclined to believe that the market for commercial video downloads will be pushed into the mainstream by set-top devices that provide integrated downloading services that go beyond current "on demand" services by carrying more selection and offering "download-to-own" videos. Such products insulate users from some of the frustrations of DRM while solving the problem of getting the content to a television screen. Apple's upcoming iTV product is a good example of set-top box (STB) hardware with an integrated video download service. Microsoft's increasingly popular Xbox Live Video service is also a great example. I'd like to see NPD perform a similar study in a year or two comparing adoption of set-top-based video downloads with computer-based video downloads so we can see how products like the Xbox 360 and the iTV impact the market.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061227-8500.html





Clients



Keep and Share

Free File Sharing for Groups
WebBlurb

Keep and Share file share and free file sharing is the ideal way to securely share files with your group. It's like a "private MySpace" - a free file sharing website that brings people together, but with all the security and privacy you want - where you always control exactly who can see what information.

With Keep and Share You'll Have:

1. A free file sharing site on the web
2. Selective sharing, secure for those you want to share with
3. Additional free features: share calendars, documents, photos, lists and more with complete security for your group, family, and friends

From the moment you create your account you will have an instant web presence for your group.

You'll be in your file sharing account in 30 seconds, guaranteed.

Your Own Free File Sharing Web Site

Your group's instantly available "share page" acts as a hub for others to access all shared information, shared files and lists. All they do is type in 'your-name.keepandshare.com' and they are at your site. You can even grant editing rights so others can create or update information. By keeping information in one place, everyone you share it with will always view the most recent and up-to-date version of your shared files. Your group members will always be automatically notified of new uploaded files of interest via their personal "dashboard" and email digests.
http://www.keepandshare.com/htm/file...hare_files.htm





Gnutella Turbo 6.6.4

Author Pro-Sharing.com
Licence Freeware
OS Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT 4.x, Windows2000, WinXP, Windows2003
Date Released December 21, 2006

WebBlurb

Gnutella Turbo utilizes a totally decentralized peer to peer network, and is the most advanced file sharing application around. Trade any type of file: MP3, video, images, software, etc. with anyone throughout the internet. Gnutella Turbo combines ease of use with reliability, and moreover, has the ability to resume interrupted downloads; limit bandwidth of both downloads and uploads, and use the filters. Most likely the fastest Gnutella client due to easy to use, lots of files, user friendly oriented, multi-source downloading, resume downloads, and you can multiple searches
http://www.bestsoftware4download.com...-lbwjhiym.html





Adesso Tubes

File Sharing Via Tubes

Adesso Tubes acts as a virtual pipe between you and your friends to share files; notes, music, apps, documents, emails, etc…

Firstly you have to download the software to send/receive files, then all you do is put files in a special desktop folder/icon, and these files will instantly distribute to who ever is on that list, to what ever device they use (as long as tubes is installed), good way to send stuff from work to home.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/200...ing-via-tubes/





Daisy

P2P plugin for Opera, FF, IE7 etc

WebBlurb

Meet your fellow website visitors

Share with them any folder on your PC

Leave a blog for those that come after you


Learn Dai.sy In 3 Easy Steps:

1. You and some friend (s) add the Dai.sy extension to your Firefox Browser
2. Choose a webpage or website for everyone to meet at
3. Click on the Dai.sy icon located on your main browser bar.

* To Change sites or pages, simply click on the "Change Site" icon located to the right of the Dai.sy logo

Now that you are together, here is how to:

> MEET

1. Enter any Nickname you wish to use for this session
2. Choose one of our pre-made avatars or use any image off your pc
3. Create a topic you wish to discuss (this is optional) Click on the "Enter Chat" button and that is all

> SHARE

1. Click the "Choose" button to browse your PC for any folder you wish to share with your fellow site visitors
2. Click on the "Open Shared Space" button to view to all the files the other site visitors are sharing. For easier browsing, you may Search and Sort the files
3. Double Click on the file you wish to download
4. Choose a Destination folder by clicking the blue folder Icon on the right.
5. Click the "Start" button. The progress of your downloads and uploads can are seen in the status windows.

> BLOG

1. Click on the "add new" button
2. Enter a Title, Author Name, Author e-mail and A Password so that only you may edit it in the future.
3. Blog Message: Choose a font type, color and size. Add any MEDIA (Image or Video) you wish by simply pasting the web address of your chosen media file.
http://dai.sy/





Rangboom
WebBlurb

Rangboom is a free service for securely sharing or accessing your files over the Internet. Please use the Sign Up form to request an account. Once you have signed up, download and install the Windows or the Linux client on your computers. See the FAQ for more information.

Friends and Family: Networking, Beyond Email Attachments

Rangboom lets you share your pictures, videos and other files with your family and friends. No need to trust your data to a central storage server or risk sending them as e-mail attachments. Rangboom gives you a private network. Your files stay on your disk and your trusted group can access them just like a local file, if they want to, when they want to.

Example: Bob and Carol Sanders need to share pictures, important documents and spreadsheets on their computers. Bob created a Rangboom group (sanders) and invited Carol to join the group. Through Rangboom, each can view the other's shared folders and files the same way as a local file on his or her computer.

Ad-hoc Networking: Simple, Secure, Virtual

With Rangboom you can create secure networks for collaboration and data sharing with anyone. With thousands of public WiFi networks at hotels, coffee shops and other public spaces, you can quickly establish an ad-hoc virtual network over which you can securely share files, collaborate or play.
http://www.rangboom.com/





FilePanda Beta
WebBlurb

Want to share files? We've got the answer.

Frustrated at not being able to email large files, I decided to spend a few evenings coding this little web app. Right now it's in beta, and it's pretty simple, but there's plenty of features planned for it!

Start Here

Select File (up to 100MB!):

Estimated Upload Times:
1MB - 40 seconds
10MB - 7 Minutes
20MB - 15 Minutes
40MB - 30 Minutes
80MB - 1 Hour

http://www.filepanda.com/





From October

Pando Moves Beyond Email File Sharing
Michael Arrington

New York based Pando has been breaking away from the P2P file sharing pack, which we reviewed in late August. They claim over 1.5 million downloads of their client software, and move up to 20 TB of data per day between users.

Pando is very easy to use. Once the PC or Mac software is installed, you simply drag a file or a folder (up to 1 GB) into the open window. Pando begins uploading that file to its servers immediately, and opens an email form. Simply type in the email address(es) that you would like to receive the file and hit send. When the recipient opens the email and clicks on the small .pando attachment, Pando begins delivering the file, using Bittorent, from the sender’s computer as well as Pando’s servers and any other people receiving the file. Transfer speeds are unreal - my testing shows minimum speeds of 500 kp/s and top speeds at double that. If the recipient has not installed Pando on their computer, they’ll be prompted to do so before the download begins.

Pando is completely free, and also has useful Outlook and Yahoo IM plugins

Today at 9 AM California time Pando is breaking out of the email paradigm and releasing a free new product that allows people to share files directly from a website. This can be done via an embed or link, and I’ve embedded a message from Pando CEO Robert Levitan below as an example. The same file can be accessed via a simple link as well.

For podcasters and videocasters who don’t have the bandwidth availability to serve files, this is going to be extremely useful. Publishers won’t even need to upload the file to their own server. They can simply drag the file into the Pando desktop software and get a link to add to a website. For others, simply adding a Pando link as an additional option to direct download will be attractive as well. We may add Pando links to our TalkCrunch podcasts as well as offering the file as an enclosure to the post. Listeners can simply choose which option they like, although if they choose Pando the download will be significantly faster and we won’t have to pay the bandwidth charges for their download.

Pando’s new product is so efficient that it will also invite abuse, particularly from users sharing copyrighted materials. Pando says it will passively monitor downloads and comply with any DMCA takedown notices they receive from rightsholders.

Pando has some existing competition in this space, notably silicon valley based RedSwoosh, which we wrote about in July. Both RedSwoosh and Pando have attractive offerings. Pando’s large installed base may give it an advantage in staking out its territory.

Pando has raised a total of $11 million over two rounds of financing. The most recent $7 million round was led by Intel Capital.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/26...-file-sharing/





BitTorrent May Go Mobile

With the announcement that BitTorrent Inc. bought the BitTorrent client µTorrent, creator Bram Cohen is looking towards more innovative ways of file-sharing. BitTorrent is a wildly popular peer-to-peer protocol that breaks files, such as movies, songs, into many small portions or blocks and it distributes them to other users as they are requested thus making your downloading experience faster and more reliable. If you are downloading material online, the client will search and intelligently shuffle that data and reassemble the portions together to get a finished product (i.e. song, file).

The creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, has suggested that BitTorrent may go mobile with many other platforms to follow. A simple Java program for all phones would be the perfect solution for cellphones if this is the plan. Downloading content on your phone, via mobile BitTorrent client and a 3G network sounds like a good idea to me. BitTorrent has a loyal following so it won't be long until mobile BitTorrent hits the masses.
http://www.slashphone.com/33/6155.html





Download 2000+ Music Albums for Free
Ernesto

Jamendo is a website with a revolutionary model that allows artists to promote and publish their music. Artist have the opportunity to show their creativity to a broader audience, and the public has a place to listen to, download, and share new music.

Jamendo recently passed the 2000 albums mark and currently indexes 2005 Creative Commons licensed albums. The site offers some great features that make it easy to share and discover new music. You can browse their album collection by genre, country, popularity or tags, for example.

If you find an album that you like, you can share it on your blog, write a review, or donate directly to the artist. Some artists will even include the list of people who donated in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. A great site for both artists and fans. Everybody wins, except for the big record labels of course.

The albums on Jamendo are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps), and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule.
http://torrentfreak.com/download-200...bums-for-free/





Fan Asks Hard Questions About Rap Music
Erik Eckholm

Byron Hurt takes pains to say that he is a fan of hip-hop, but over time, says Mr. Hurt, a 36-year-old filmmaker, dreadlocks hanging below his shoulders, “I began to become very conflicted about the music I love.”

A new documentary by Mr. Hurt, “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” questions the violence, degradation of women and homophobia in much of rap music.

Scheduled to go on the air in February as part of the PBS series Independent Lens, the documentary is being shown now at high schools, colleges and Boy’s Clubs, and in other forums, as part of an unusual public campaign sponsored by the Independent Television Service, which is based in San Francisco and helped finance the film.

The intended audiences include young fans, hip-hop artists and music industry executives — black and white — who profit from music and videos that glorify swagger and luxury, portray women as sex objects, and imply, critics say, that education and hard work are for suckers and sissies.

What concerns Mr. Hurt and many black scholars is the domination of the hip-hop market by more violent and sexually demeaning songs and videos — an ascendancy, the critics say, that has coincided with the growth of the white audience for rap and the growing role of large corporations in marketing the music.

Ronald F. Ferguson, a black economist and education expert at Harvard, said that the global success of hip-hop had had positive influences on the self-esteem of black youths but that children who became obsessed with it “may unconsciously adopt the themes in this music as their lens for viewing the world.”

With the commercial success of gangsta rap and music videos, which portray men as extravagant thugs and women as sex toys, debate has simmered among black parents, community leaders and scholars about the impact of rap and the surrounding hip-hop culture.

“There’s a conversation going on now; a lot more people are trying to figure out a way to intervene that’s productive,” said Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana studies at Brown University.

At one extreme are critics, both black and white, who put primary blame for the failures and isolation of urban black youth on a self-destructive subculture, exemplified by the worst of hip-hop. But many of those critics, Dr. Rose said, fail to acknowledge the deeper roots of the problems. At the other extreme are people who reflexively defend any artistic expression by young blacks, saying the focus must remain on the economic and political structures that hem in minorities.

“That’s the real catch,” Dr. Rose said. “The public conversation about hip-hop is pinned by two responses, neither of them productive.”

Among blacks, to criticize rap, especially in front of the wider society, is to risk being called disloyal, said William Jelani Cobb, a historian at Spelman College in Atlanta, at a recent screening of the film in Newark. But the exaggerated image of male aggression, said Dr. Cobb, who also speaks in the documentary, actually reflects male insecurity and longstanding powerlessness, while the image of women resembles that held by 19th century slave owners.

Chris Bennett, 36, took his daughters, ages 15 and 11, to see Mr. Hurt’s film in Chicago because he said he wanted them to think about the music. Mr. Bennett, a school security guard, said he saw the effects of gangsta rap in his job. “Everyone wants to be tough now,” he said. “Everyone wants to be hard, and education has taken the background.”

The event in Chicago drew some 250 people, including several high school groups. Many of the boys were skeptical about the supposed dire influences of rap. Jock Lucas, 16, hotly argued with female students about the prevalence of lyrics that denigrate women, asserting, as many of the boys did, that a girl who dressed provocatively deserved such labels and might even like them.

“I don’t think rap is a bad influence,” Jock said. “They’re just speaking about how it goes where they come from. If the people who listen go out and do these things, it’s their own fault.”

Another high school student at the Chicago event, Vasawa Robinson, 19, said rap showed “real life” and that “if you try to show a different picture, the kids won’t want to listen.” The more political, socially conscious rap, Vasawa said, was for an older generation.

Mr. Hurt’s film includes clips from a music video by the rapper 50 Cent, from his album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’, ” in which the singer re-enacts a drive-by shooting he survived and boasts in crude terms of his power and readiness to kill his enemies.

It also includes portions of the video “Tip Drill,” an extended fantasy of male sexual domination by the rap star Nelly, who has won praise by promoting literacy and bone marrow donations, but, as the film notes, also markets a drink called Pimp Juice.

Mr. Hurt, who grew up in a black neighborhood of Central Islip, N.Y., in modest circumstances, was quarterback of the Northeastern University football team and said he had been a fanatical “hip-hop head.”

“It was music created by people your age who looked like you , talked like you, dressed like you and weren’t apologetic about it,” he said.

His views changed, he said, when, after college, he worked in a program teaching male athletes about violence against women.

“Here’s the conflict,” Mr. Hurt said. “You still love hip-hop and you love to see the artists doing well, but then you ask, ‘What are they saying? What is the image of manhood?’ ”

White males may be major customers, Mr. Hurt said, “but it influences black kids the most.”

“They’re the ones who order their days around it,” he said, “who try to conform to the script.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/us...b&ei=5087%0 A





Disney Shows The Labels How to Make Hits
Jerry Del Colliano

The Disney Channel kids program "Hannah Montana" is a smash hit. And so is the music 14- year old Miley Cyrus sings as the fictional pop star Hannah Montana. She has sold over 1.6 million songs in about two months beating out the likes of Jay-Z, Sarah McLachlan, The Beatles Love album and a slew of others. It highlights the potential of the 8-14 year old market sometimes known as the "Tweens". These days the usual mojo from teens is not there in the record business. Teens and older Gen Y youths have found their way to music downloading. They're not such a hot record market anymore. But "Tweens", that's another story. Let's break it down.

Disney is looking to record clean, family music for its target age group. That leaves a lot of rappers out. Rap and Hip Hop may have been embraced by "older" young people, but the new record market could be kids -- really, kids -- looking for something the record labels could not know to offer them. That's because the major record labels have gotten into the habit of missing trends. They used to rely heavily on their gut. Now, gut has nothing to do with it. No doubt this "tween" market is not very hip -- and record labels try to be the epitome of hipness. But 1.6 million records -- an average of 100,000 a week since mid-autumn -- should serve as a wakeup call. Miley Cyrus who plays Miley Stewart on the "Hanna Montana" TV series is now getting ready to release an album under her own name. There's little doubt the kids know who she is. If they like her music, they will buy her songs.

I vividly remember putting on an Inside Radio Management Conference event on the campus of The University of Southern California before I sold the publication to Clear Channel and joined the USC faculty. My friend, Professor Ken Lopez, put together one of the hit panels with ordinary college students talking about what they liked and didn't like about terrestrial radio. Keep in mind that was five years ago and radio was actually sounding better to young people then than it does today. I will never forget the students talking about the things they liked in radio. No, these things didn't come from Clear Channel. Nor from CBS. Or any of the other big players. You see, the students waxed eloquent about Radio Disney. At first I actually thought they were putting us on. But their sincerity eventually won the day. These students liked the variety, the creativity, the production on Radio Disney even though they were clearly older than the Radio Disney target demographic. Most of the real world radio people attending heard this and promptly dismissed it. That would turn out to be a mistake. Just as it is a mistake for record labels to try to find the next teen idol when they are not willing to use their gut and gamble on something new. Britney Spears is so, well, 90's. Paris Hilton is so not going to be the one.

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has taken a lot of brickbats for his management style and his boardroom battles. But the very successful Eisner gave us all a hint even back then that he knew radio best. Eisner did not buy big radio stations when consolidation was approved by Congress. God knows Disney had the money to be a big player. I often wondered why and how they resisted buying even one major station once the floodgates opened. ABC Radio owned a lot of major market properties but not a lot of stations overall. When the consolidation buying spree ended ABC owned virtually the same number of stations. All of a sudden Clear Channel's 1,100 stations made ABC seem like a little fish and the little fish from San Antonio looked like the king fish. But Eisner methodically continued buying what some brokers called "shitty little properties" for a few million here and a few million there. He did it to have a place to air Radio Disney. You'll note ABC did a complicated deal (waiting completion) with Citadel to merge their stations. What you should also note is that current Disney CEO Bob Iger kept the "shitty" Radio Disney stations and did not sell them to Citadel or anyone else. Disney knew all along that as hip as we all are in radio and records that traditional radio's day was over, but kid's radio was a potential boom business. Along with theme parks and a cable channel, Disney is proving they were right.

This is all well and good but how does it bode for the future. I wouldn't be surprised to see more trouble ahead for the major labels as they chase their long tail in denial that the music changed. Or, has it? Maybe the labels changed. When radio stations full of hubris stopped programming to their local markets and went big time (as in big time media) perhaps the record labels did the same thing. They cut expenses, consolidated, overreacted to the online peer-to-peer downloading trend, started suing their customers and then declared themselves hip all over again in the digital age. Meanwhile they continue to under achieve.

The record buying public -- even the lost generation Y -- is tired of only rap and Hip Hop. Clean still sells especially with pre-teens. Pre-teens are putting on a record buying clinic for the labels as witnessed by Hannah Montana's success.

Is Disney the only company that listened to its gut? Was Eisner smarter than his unfavorable press led us to believe? Did he know something everyone else missed? I say yes -- and here it is -- when music media starts imitating itself it fails to innovate. Does that sound like an accurate description of both the radio industry and the record business right now?
http://insidemusicmedia.blogspot.com...make-hits.html





The Envelopes, Please, for an Unopened Year
Richard Siklos

SO what do you think? Two weeks ago we invited predictions on what 2007 would be “the year of” in media, and the user-generated responses were abundant and wiki-licious.

Roughly speaking, the predictions filling the in-box weighed heavily toward technological trends. The tone ranged from optimistic to apocalyptic. Not many people tackled such questions as whether “The Hobbit” will be greenlighted, whether the Tribune Company will be broken up or whether Judith Regan’s firing will be settled long before all the juicy details come tumbling out in court. (Um: no, yes, yes?)

For those who toil in the big media businesses, the word “media” itself refers to the big information industries — publishing, broadcasting, music, etc. — but some readers chose a refreshingly McLuhan-esque definition, in which a new media technology could be a pencil or a paper clip or just about anything else.

To wit, Pat Noble of Erie, Pa., predicted that “wristwatches are on their way out” because more people are using cellphones as timepieces. Nick Koscis, a writer from St. Catharines, Ontario, said he looked forward to “the year of the fast-food franchises converting to nutritionally correct dining,” adding: “Being major advertisers on media, I include them in the mix.”

And there were a couple of brief, curious outliers that, for all we know, are prescient:

“Night-vision technology will be adapted to cellphones so photos can be taken directly through people’s clothing,” wrote William Topp of Otisville, N.Y.

One that arrived without a name said that 2007 would “be the year of the child film auteur.” And one more said that it would be “the year of the mobile personal headset display.”

There were also plenty of other thoughtful but more mainstream bets. Echoing the prayer of all his brethren, one media executive — who chimed in on condition that he not be named — suggested that this would be the year of equalization: that media companies would figure out ways to make money from new digital distribution formats and the Internet without cannibalizing their existing businesses. In other words, hallelujah, they will finally make up on volume what they are losing on price.

Many media businesses — particularly AOL — reoriented themselves this year to grab a share of the growing online advertising honey pot. This led James Bedell of Queens to wonder whether we’ll see everyone run back to the other side of the room next year in pursuit of subscription dollars. “Banner ads are nice, membership fees are nicer,” Mr. Bedell wrote. “Look for the information superhighway to pick up a lot more tolls.”

Tony Trippe, an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, predicted a year of consolidation.

“We’re going to see organizations learn that their business model is not the end-all and be-all,” he wrote. “These organizations will try to salvage what they can from their pipe dreams, and that will lead to the buyouts, mergers and consolidations.”

A similar less-cheery view — if you’re a media executive — came from Fred Bothwell of Georgetown, Tex., who predicted the “continuing diminished significance of profit-based mainstream media as information sources.” They will wither, he predicted, as more people turn to Web-based purpose-driven services like Craigslist that are not looking to maximize profits, but to make the world a smiley place.

There were a few votes for Google to continue its rise and to extend its tentacles successfully into other forms of media, particularly video. That said, a couple of readers predicted that the Google juggernaut would run out of steam, possibly at the hands of a resurgent Yahoo.

Interesting days lie ahead for the studios. Doomsday forecasts of declining movie attendance went away when the figures reversed slightly this year, but it will be interesting to see what happens if a studio ( Walt Disney, anyone?) becomes the first to simultaneously release a major film on pay-per-view and at the multiplex.

Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital, issued a report last week arguing that 2007 would be the first year since the introduction of the DVD roughly a decade ago that consumer spending on the discs will decline, putting pressure on studios that rely heavily on them.

One reader predicted that with the bonanza in DVD growth ending, and big media companies desperate for a new growth engine, 2007 would be the year when “traditional media make a big bet on online gaming: they will buy up, invest in or launch massively multiplayer online gaming companies.”

Luke Luckett, a recent graduate of New York University, predicted that the digital divide between those who have ready access to broadband Internet and those who don’t would become more pronounced next year.

For the haves, the Web could become a much more useful and vibrant place as Web and media companies start stitching together their various services to provide versatile and detailed local information. Those services include maps, listings, reviews, advertising, news, traffic reports and all kinds of content from users, like the growing practice of “tagging,” the online equivalent of Post-it notes.

IN the column two weeks ago about “the year that wasn’t,” the inclusion of high-definition television attracted a chorus of viewers who, having their own personal Howard Beale moments, aren’t going to take it any more when it comes to their television viewing.

Betty Morgan of Sumter, S.C., echoed a dozen others when she wrote: “Why would I want to pay more for the same crummy TV programs? I use it to watch my old DVDs while I wait for them to kill one of the new formats. There are too many things to fix before the year of digital happens.”

As Rein Taul of Toronto put it: “I for one am sick and tired of hearing about the red herrings of piracy, lost ad revenue, new technology impacts, etc. The American auto industry is paying the piper for their lack of respect for their customers as manifest through poor product. How far behind can the entertainment industry be?”

Although such views are subjective by their very nature, it is worth noting that people still care passionately about professionally produced media in this do-it-yourself world of exploding choice and control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/bu.../24frenzy.html





The Digital Media Winners and Losers of 2006
Richard Menta

We thought that 2005 was the key year for digital media, because of the MGM v Grokster ruling. We thought, but are still not sure as the content industry's victory in that case did not achieve its primary goal, to stop file sharing. Not only does online trading continue to increase, but other technologies have since made their impact clear. Below are this year's success stories and not so successful stories in a continually turbulent online environment.

The judges are still out on several candidates, who we may see in next year's winners (or loser's) list. They include the DRM protestors, Patti Santangelo, Zune, HD Radio and others.
The 8GB Sansa e200 series is available on Amazon

2006 Winners

1. YouTube

Google purchased them for $1.65 billion. For a company less than two years old, not much more needs to be said. CBS has already credited YouTube for improved ratings on the Letterman show and the site brings US visibility to excellent overseas television programs. That's nice, but they still haven't figured out the best way to make money on all of this success. The site has to develop a stronger business model and do it under continued legal threats from some content holders. That's why the Google acquisition is important as it has the dollars to insulate the company from litigation until it can evolve into a high revenue generator.

2. Apple

Still controlling a hefty percentage of the player and paid download market. SanDisk is making inroads in the portable player arena, but Apple is selling more iPods than ever. iTunes market share is dominant too, though analysts have concerns about the short-term growth of paid music and movie downloads. The big question is where does Apple go from here? As there is early evidence to suggest SanDisk is selling strong among digital savvy consumers, the company will need something more than a minor refresh of the iPod line for 2007. We'll see in the spring what iTV, the present name of Apple's wireless set top box, will offer. Apple's recent deal with the airlines, which will cement the iPod dock (literally and figuratively) into the seats of commercial aircraft, will mean Apple's proprietary standards will dominate in jets for years. Disney arguable deserves to be on this list too. As the only studio that sells movies on iTunes it now dominates the tiny, but burgeoning, movie download market. Disney and Apple expect to generate $40 million in movie sales by year end.

3. MySpace

It is a top five site on the Net and probably the most influential destination for new music. Might it be the most influential for all music?

4. BitTorrent and Azureus

Several million dollars in seed investment followed by preliminary adoption by the movie industry has made Bram Cohen's vision a legitimate member of the content industry clique. For the most utilized protocol on the Net, this means large revenues and no lawsuits for its creator (at least in the immediate future). By cutting a deal with Hollywood Bram Cohen reduced the risk of litigation. This one fact is drawing significant VC activity into the technology. Not only did BitTorrent grab $20 million in latter round funding for itself, torrent client Azureus landed $12 million of its own. Even uTorrent made out as Cohen used some of his new found investment cash to acquire its technology. eDonkey and Morpheus had a commercial dream once. BitTorrent is achieving that dream.

5. Pirate Bay

Started by Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån, Pirate Bay grew into the world's largest BitTorrent tracker. This drew the content industry's ire and on May 31 they orchestrated a raid on the site with the help Swedish law enforcement. The raid confiscated all of Pirate Bay's servers and the press releases flew, heralding the Pirate Bay's elimination. It turned out the celebration was premature. Three days later Pirate Bay was back and, thanks to the press generated by the closure, became more popular than ever. The Pirate Party did not do so well in Swedish elections later in the year, but it has been influential. That influence carried over here to the states where Brent Allison and Alex English are launching a US Chapter with eyes on the 2008 election.

6. Brittany Chan

Brittany and he mother beat the RIAA in their file sharing lawsuits. That's the good news and enough to place her on this list. The bad news is the family had to endure the misery and expense of this trial in the first place. Didn't hear about the Chan victory? That's because while the original suit made front page news, the decision was mostly ignored by the mainstream press.

7. Creative

Took Apple for $100 million in its patent dispute and will now make iPod peripherals, where the company will probably make more money. Their own players are selling better this holiday season, so over all thing have improved for a company that has showed losses on the balance sheet recently. Will future Creative players adopt the iPod dock connector? Silly rabbit.....

8. DJ Danger Mouse

DJ Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) became the scourge of the industry back in 2004 when he released the Grey Album, a limited edition remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album. EMI attempted to stop its release resulting in Grey Day, one of the most successful Internet protests. That got DJ Danger Mouse on our 2004 winners list. This year Mouse is here as one half of the duo Gnarls Barkley, whose first single 'Crazy' is the first song to top the UK charts on download sales alone. It reached number 2 on the US chart. To date, Danger Mouse the most successful artist to ever to leverage the Internet to promote their career. It helped that Crazy was a great song.

9. SanDisk

Released a 6GB player in the spring that sold well. Then at the end of the summer, before Apple could answer with a like capacity iPod, Sandisk released an 8GB version. NPD Group is reporting that SanDisk is drawing 18.4% of Christmas DAP sales. Meanwhile, early MP3 Newswire player data suggests that percentage is even higher among the digital savvy shoppers

10. EMusic

Emusic is the official number two paid download service (the real number two may be the very unofficial AllofMP3.com) and the service has sold 100 million downloads since new management took the company over in 2003. Furthermore, it sold those tracks on the musical virtues of independent artists, not major label artists like Napster and Rhapsody pay for. But there real reason EMusic is here is...well...it's here. Launched as Goodnoise in early 1998, the service is a survivor of the dot com era.

11.Tivo

Tivo won a big patent settlement against EchoStar. There were concerns the company wouldn't make it. Now it has some stability in the market.

Honorable Mention: Sling Media

Deals with mobile providers has this company and its technology on the upswing. Hollywood is rattling its sabres as usual, but its more because it wants to steal the "place shifting" TV market for itself. If Sling Media continues to grow it may become an acquisition target, possibly from one of the telcos like AT&T or Verizon who are investing heavily in IPTV.


2006 Losers

1. StreamCast

The last holdout from the MGM v Grokster case, that case created the new test of "Active Infringement". The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to define and apply the new test, which the folks at Streamcast were confident they never violated. The lower court ruled they clearly did.

2. EchoStar Communications

Parent company of the Dish Network lost a huge $90 million patent lawsuit to Tivo.

3. Sharman Networks

Crushed in Australian court. Has settled with the record industry for $100 million, but to date no commercial P2P app that has come to an agreement with the music industry is showing any ability to gain traction in the pay-per-song market. The fact that KaZaa has not been updated since its acquisition by Sharman proves the glory days are long gone.

4. AllofMP3.com

In September the major credit card companies blacklisted the Russian paid download service. Then AllofMP3.com became a pawn in US/Russian trade negotiations where it was used as a barganing chip in discussions over Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization. The Russians aggreed to shut down illegal sites, but AllofMP3.com is still online - with site traffic up according to Alexa. The RIAA has now announced it will sue AllofMP3.com for damages and its domain. Odd why such a suit is necessary if that site is supposed to disappear soon? Maybe, just maybe, there is more here. We originally wrote off AllofMP3.com, but now wonder if it could become... the comeback kid of 2007?

5. Captain Copyright

And his sidekick Lieutenant Lame...

6. OLGA - Online Guitar Tablature Archive

Shut down again. As far as the music publisers are concerned, if you can figure out the chord progressions of your favorite song - of which 95% of rock songs consist of nothing more than three common chords - you must pay them. If you put them online to save others the trouble you are a thief.

7. BLU-Ray and HD-DVD

Mass consumer adoption will not occur until the dust clears - which may take years. Beta and VHS all over again.

8. Amazon Unbox

Troubled functionality and dubious terms created a backlash in the press. Overall, many questioned the value it offered to consumers.

9. Sony BMG

Shelled out $1.4 million in settlement to the states of Texas and California for last winter's rootkit scandal. A few days before Christmas it spent several more million dollars to settle with 39 additional states. Worse for the company is that these lawsuits kept the scandal in the press for over a year, a scandal that taught users to fear the CD format.

10. Digital Rights Management

DRM is not going away soon, but to date it has not succeeded at doing what it was designed to do - stop file sharing. It has succeeded in annoying the consumer, though. Whether that might lead to mass consumer rejection is unclear at this point.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6...osers2006.html





The Lads Are Getting Picky
David Carr

One million used to be something of a magic number in magazine publishing. If you captured a million readers, advertisers took you seriously.

Now? Not so much. Earlier this month, the British publisher Emap unceremoniously pulled the plug on FHM, a so-called lad magazine with a circulation 1.25 million, and left the country. In the last year, its advertising became as skimpy as the wardrobe of some of its cover models, dropping 19.7 percent in the first 11 months of the year.

One million-plus readers or not, the trends were clear. What had been a white-hot niche in publishing has gone cold. Even Maxim, the circulation leader in the men’s category with a rate base of 2.5 million, is down 5 percent in advertising pages this year from the year before, and the lucrative newsstand sales are down more than 200,000 in the last three years.

Could it be that the lad magazine genre is keeling over on its way to middle age?

Once derided — then occasionally imitated — by mainstream men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ, the lad magazines landed with enough impact that they altered the culture to the point where they no longer stick out.

The heady mix of not-quite-naked women, bawdy humor and stunt journalism once represented a British insurgency against political correctness, but that war that has been all but won.

“Borat,” after all, is a lad with a bad accent, relentlessly pursuing Pamela Anderson, the reigning deity of the B-list universe that the lad magazines inhabit. Adam Sandler’s universal remote in “Click”? Right out of the pages of Maxim, including a mute button for your girlfriend. And you can’t watch a beer commercial without seeing memes from the men’s titles: Miller Lite Beer’s “Man Laws” are right out of the lad handbook.

But making lad magazines was tougher than it looked. Every editorial meeting would start with a blank slate with a few hardy perennials: What about Nazis? Midgets? Shark attacks? Could we have a Nazi saving a midget being attacked by a shark?

It fell to the brave cover models — most of them minor television stars — to sell magazines by wearing very little clothing that seemed about to fall off if one stared long enough. A few years ago, I asked Bob Guccione Jr., who was then publishing Gear, a lad magazine, why the models in his magazine were always tugging at their clothing.

“We’ve got a problem with sand on our photo shoots,” he deadpanned.

Those sands shifted, as they have for a lot of magazines. Computer magazines came and went, mostly, and dot-com business magazines that weighed several pounds soon became brochures. Even the teen niche, which seemed robust a few years ago, dealt with a contraction that included Teen People, YM and Elle Girl.

Magazine publishers tend to see a landing strip with exciting demographics, and then land en masse, a losing proposition in the long run. Publications that create new ways of thinking about old issues — O, the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Everyday with Rachael Ray, and even Dennis Publishing’s The Week — tend to prosper because they magically meet a consumer need that they did not know they had.

Dennis Publishing continues on and off to shop Maxim, along with the company’s other magazines, Stuff, Blender and The Week.

According to a person who was involved in trying to buy the magazine — he did not want to go on the record because he said that it would hurt his relationship with the sellers — the company may have found a strategic buyer in a deal that could close in January.

Stephen Colvin, the chief executive of Dennis Publishing U.S., would not respond to reports of a sale, saying he “doesn’t comment on rumors,” and he added that it is silly to suggest that FHM’s departure suggests that the category, or Maxim, is losing heat.

“Our first quarter is up double digits, and we finished the year very strong,” he said last week. “We are the leader in the men’s category and continue to add subscribers. Maxim entered and changed what had been deemed to be a mature category, and we continue to grow stronger all the time.”

He also said that the company’s early digital and mobile initiatives are paying dividends.

In part, the lad magazines got lapped by technology. YouTube looks like a lad contents page with full-motion video. TMZ has gone Defcon 4 in real-time over Britney’s pantygate. And, Heavy.com has America’s Suck Countdown, with a joke-a-second cadence that would be difficult for anybody to catch up with, let alone a magazine.

“It is tough to come up with something fresh in the category,” said Greg Gutfeld, a former editor of Stuff in the United States and Maxim in Britain. “The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily.”

In Britain, Dennis Publishing has taken to heart the message that humor wants to be free and fast, coming up with a digital product for e-mail called Monkey. The product is a magazine on the desktop, complete with a gee-whiz, page-turning technology, but it is really a portal, with lots of clickable videos and interactive features. You cannot only read about the latest Clap Your Hands CD, you can click through and download some of it.

Many of the ads are just as dynamic, and readers can vote on the next week’s cover model with a click of the mouse, the same device they can use to make some of that clothing fall off, if they wish. It is a very serious stab at funny, lewd content, a hybrid model that takes short-attention spans as a virtue.

Where does that leave the world of paper magazines? Finding a really good idea that captures consumer interest is a neat trick. Sustaining that interest issue after issue with long lead times is brutal. As Keith Blanchard, another former editor of Maxim, said, “It is hard to find the edge when the edge keeps moving.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...ia/25carr.html





Sizzling a Year Ago, but Now Pfffft ...
Bill Carter

The telenovela, the steamy low-budget soap opera genre that has become the staple of television programming in Spanish-speaking countries, lives on its sudden bursts of uncontrollable — and loudly acted — passion.

Maybe that was what was burning in the hearts of network executives in New York about this time last year when, seemingly out of the blue, many of them announced a rush to begin developing a new form of programming for the summer: the American telenovela.
“It’s right to characterize what we were all caught up in last year as telenovela fever,” said Katherine Pope, the executive vice president of NBC Entertainment.

The ardor has apparently cooled. In the 12 months since news reports revealed that CBS was working on as many as seven scripts for telenovelas, that ABC had invested in as many as 45 existing telenovela storylines, and NBC was jumping in to adapt telenovelas already produced by Telemundo, the Spanish-language network that NBC owns, not much more has been said — or done. Not a single telenovela project has been put into production by any of those networks.

The networks’ intense interest in the telenovela genre was sparked by the need to find alternative, inexpensive programming in the summer to replace the round of repeats. Telenovelas are made cheaply in Spanish-speaking countries, for only a fraction of the $2 million to $3 million an episode that network dramas cost.

Once into development, however, financial realities began to set in. The networks discovered they would only alienate their viewers if they tried to make the shows of distinctly lesser quality than their regular shows. They also discovered that the production schedules required to grind out so many episodes in such a short time would be daunting. Most telenovelas shoot as many as 40 pages of script in a day; the conventional network drama seldom does more than about 15 (each page equals about one minute of screen time).

“The economics still have to be figured out,” Ms. Pope conceded.

ABC, has of course, added a new hit prime-time series called “Ugly Betty,” which is based on one of the most popular telenovelas ever produced. But nobody, certainly not its executive producer, Ben Silverman, considers the American “Betty” a true telenovela as the genre is commonly understood — that is, a stylized short-run series with a definitive ending, about 13 weeks long, broadcast in several episodes a week.

“We originally conceived the show as a true telenovela,” Mr. Silverman said, “but it got shifted by ABC to a regular hourlong drama series.” He added that the expensive look of the “Betty” series, which is set in the glamorous world of New York couture magazines, could never have been fashioned on the budget of a real telenovela.

“We could never have shot in New York,” Mr. Silverman said. “We could never have gotten a star like America Ferrara,” he added, referring to the actress in the title role.

Though versions of “Ugly Betty” have played as straight telenovelas around the world, in countries as far flung as Germany, India and Israel, the ABC adaptation is a regular highly produced, episodic network series.

If you want to see what an American version of a telenovela looks like, you would have to have tuned in this fall to one of the stations on the mini-network called MyNetworkTV (MNT), a collection of television stations (including Channel 9 in New York), mainly owned by the News Corporation. The stations were orphaned last winter when their old network, UPN, combined with its competitor, the WB, to form the CW network.

Not that many people have tuned in. MNT has so far tried four telenovelas, including one, “Fashion House,” starring the former sirens Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild (complete with catfight between them), and another, the current “Wicked Wicked Games,” starring Tatum O’Neal.

Running two episodes at a time five nights a week, the network has thus far made little noise with any of its telenovelas. Ratings for MNT’s telenovelas in the 18- to 49-year-old audience, the primary market for most broadcasters, have been negligible. They have been scoring about half a national rating point — or less — which translates to about 650,000 viewers in that group (compared with 8 million to 10 million viewers for a hit show in the same period).

“Obviously we’re not pleased with the ratings,” said Paul Buccieri, senior vice president of Twentieth Television, the production studio that supplies programming to MNT. (The studio is mainly the syndication arm for the Fox Broadcasting Company.) But Mr. Buccieri emphasized that the ratings have not diminished that network’s conviction that telenovelas would work with American audiences.

“We’re still definitely enthusiastic about the genre,” he said.

MNT’s experience has contributed to the slackening of interest among the big networks. Program executives at one network confirmed that the low ratings for MNT’s telenovelas put a chill on their own plans. Mr. Buccieri said that MyNetworkTV has learned many lessons in trying to make the form work, including adding cost-saving techniques like hand-held cameras. MNT has two more telenovelas in production to fill the gap when the current ones leave off.

Longer term, there are questions about whether the network can stay committed to giving up all its prime-time hours to the genre if the ratings do not improve. Reality shows and game shows would be considerably cheaper.

Still, if MNT connects on even one telenovela, it may reinvigorate the passion for them among the major networks.

Executives at ABC, CBS and NBC all said they still have some telenovela projects in development. Mr. Silverman, who continues to option rights to telenovelas made in Latin America, remains a firm believer. “I think someone should give it a shot,” he said.
Ms. Pope said NBC would almost surely stay in the telenovela game, for several reasons, beginning with its association with Telemundo. NBC owns the rights to all the telenovelas that play on that network (and that is almost the only kind of programming Telemundo does). If NBC did commit to a telenovela, it would shoot it in Miami, where Telemundo is based, finding economies by using that network’s studio and sets.

And then there is the interest of Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal Television. Ms. Pope said, “I personally believe we will definitely make a telenovela. Jeff grew up in Miami, he’s seen the form and he’s very dedicated to it.”

She added that many advertisers have also expressed interest in the genre and had indicated a willingness to sponsor a telenovela if a network decided to produce one.

“Ultimately, we are the best-positioned network to get one done quickly,” Ms. Pope said.

But not very quickly. “I’m not sure when you’ll see one,” she said. “It’s really unlikely anyone will make one as soon as next summer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...elenovela.html





Forget L.C.D.; Go for Plasma, Says Maker of Both
Eric A. Taub

What kind of company takes out ads in daily newspapers attacking one of its own type of products? In the case of Panasonic, the answer is a company that has significant investments in a rival technology.

Panasonic, the consumer electronics company owned by Matsushita Electric Industrial, is the world’s biggest seller of plasma TVs. And it has long extolled the benefits of that technology compared with L.C.D., another flat-panel TV product. At the same time, the company sells a full line of L.C.D. sets.

But the company believes that plasma technology is under unfair attack from competitors making “desperate attempts” to denigrate what it sees as plasma’s superiority, according to Bob Greenberg, Panasonic’s vice president for brand marketing.

There is another issue as well, which is that the profit margins on L.C.D. TVs have fallen sharply because of competition.

To demonstrate plasma is better, the company has offered picture comparisons for journalists at electronics shows. And it has developed marketing materials that dispel some of the myths of plasma’s limitations, like how often to refill the plasma gas (never) and the problems with picture burn-in (none anymore).

This holiday, Panasonic went a step further, running an ad in newspapers around the country under the heading “Six facts you need to know before you buy a large flat-panel TV.” The ad points out plasma’s superior contrast, color rendition, crisp motion, viewing angle and durability when compared to L.C.D. TVs.

Not so fast, says Sony. The company, which exited the plasma TV market to concentrate on L.C.D. sets, is running its own series of sportslike newspaper and magazine ads that promote what it calls an HD challenge. Once consumers see reflections of fluorescent lighting in the plasma set, they will opt for L.C.D., the ad contends.

While most people do not have fluorescent lights in their living rooms, Sony believes its challenge shows how bright light bulbs and other reflections can spoil a picture.

“The showroom is the only place where a consumer can compare two TVs,” said Phil Abram, the company’s vice president of product marketing.

To help Panasonic maintain sales of both technologies, it sells plasma sets from 37 to 65 inches on the diagonal, while its L.C.D. TVs can only be purchased in sizes from 23 to 32 inches. Sony, Sharp and other manufacturers sell L.C.D. sets from 19 to 65 inches on the diagonal.

Panasonic also looks to segregate the market. The company argues that L.C.D. TVs, which look brighter in daylight, are the right choice for kitchens and other rooms that need smaller sizes. But in larger sizes and for fast-moving sports scenes, plasma is the right choice, said Mr. Greenberg. Since the ad campaign began, “field research shows that the dialogue is changing. Once you point out that the blacks in plasma are blacker than in L.C.D., it is like pointing out the rabbit in the painting.”

Both technologies are gaining market share at the expense of traditional tube sets, with L.C.D. sales this year overtaking picture tube sets for the first time.

According to data compiled by the NPD Group, L.C.D. TVs held 49 percent of the market in 2006, compared with 26 percent last year. Plasma’s market share increased to 10 percent from 5 percent. At the same time, sales of picture tube TVs dropped by more than half, to 21 percent this year from 46 percent in 2005.

Does Panasonic’s strong support of plasma technology mean that it will never sell a very large L.C.D. TV? Well, not exactly.

“Panasonic in Japan is studying L.C.D. in its larger formats,” Mr. Greenberg said. “If we introduce larger-sized L.C.D. TVs, we will have overcome the problems in that technology.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...gy/25flat.html





Rip Van Winkle Awakens to a Flat-Screen Life
William L. Hamilton

I’M what you’d call a late adopter. Very late.

Last month, after most of my adult life without one, I bought a television. Not just a television, but a 40-inch Sony Bravia XBR L.C.D. flat-panel high-definition, or HD, television. My only other set, which followed me to New York from college in 1974 and got lost, was 13 inches — smaller than my current laptop and more like a radio than the electronic billboard I live with now.

Caught by the great cresting wave of retail that is the holidays, I helped make 2006 the year of the big-screen, flat-panel television, when larger sizes and lower prices converged to make last year’s luxury item a new market commodity. Analysts project that 6.3 million flat-panel units, in sizes 40 inches and above, will be sold in the last quarter of 2006, more than a 100 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Everything else is television history.

My Bravia XBR arrived at my apartment with handlers, like a celebrity walk-in, or valet parking. Two employees from Best Buy in matching polo shirts installed it, hoisting it onto a table where I kept books, and showed me how to use the remote control, which has 47 buttons. A cable man activated a package of 150 channels, with a credit-card-like device he slipped in the back.

“Nice television,” he said as he left.

Then it was just us, newly engaged and alone. Evening fell awkwardly. Why not watch television, I thought. I picked up the remote, pressed the right corner, and we were on.

What is television like? I can tell you, because it’s likely that, after years of viewing, you can no longer see the forest for the trees.

A few quick observations.

Every other show is “CSI.”

Television sounds loud at any volume.

Karaoke is a cherished plot device.

PBS is even more serious in HD.

Last Thursday night, on “Smallville,” Clark Kent told an alien just landed on Earth, “Wherever you’re from, go back.” She replied, “I can’t.”

I know exactly how she felt.

“We should do a study on you,” said Robert Kubey, a psychologist and director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University, when I called, curious about the effect of introducing television into my life. Was it like a rash trip to the gym — could you sprain yourself psychologically, socially, culturally? Or after two decades of nonparticipation in the national discussion are you damaged goods? I missed all of “Seinfeld” and “Sex and the City,” faking it at the water cooler and at parties with a nod and a smile, like someone who can’t speak the language.

Dr. Kubey, and others, took the interest in me that they might have taken in an isolated tribe. I had no concept of a rerun.

“Television is just like making a hole in the wall,” said Albert Borgmann, a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana who studies technology’s impact. “All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door.”

And quickly. Though I surf the Web with high-speed Internet access, television, with 150 channels at 40 inches and powerful stereophonic sound, was like white-water rafting. Light flew out of the set like spray, as I gripped the remote and rode the river from CBS (2) to PBS (13), “Entertainment Tonight” to “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer.” Then I shot the rapids through the rest — Marvin Hamlisch (food tips), QVC (wrap tops, sold out in two colors), Queens Public Television (children praying), Spike (mixed martial-arts fights).

And prime time was still around the bend, sluiced by ratings and sheer with rock. At 8 o’clock, the season finale of “The Biggest Loser ” (the diet Oscars), “America’s Next Top Model” (a kind of reverse of a talent show) and “CSI: Miami.” At 9, Anna Deavere Smith and bikers against child abuse. By 10 o’clock, “CSI: NY.” Have I told you that every other show is “CSI”?

The most important, quantifiable effect on a person exposed to television, experts told me, is time shifting.

“You shift time to the television,” said Annie Lang, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. “If you start watching television, there’s something else you’re not doing. Who knows what you were doing before?” Reading, seeing friends, bonding with partners, theater, film, restaurants — toast.

(In an e-mail, Dr. Kubey from Rutgers told me I would begin eating meals in front of the television. I have. Over a bowl of spaghetti and a glass of red wine, I watched “Battlestar Galactica” until my neighbor complained about the noise — something that I marked proudly as a rite of passage, as he went back upstairs to begin anticipating the worst. It did bring us closer together.) Given the popularity of the personal computer, and worry about its use, I asked Ms. Lang if television was still Public Enemy No. 1 as far as studies of how a pervasive presence might become corrosive over time. “Historically, we always go after the new technology,” she said, explaining that the computer is only being demonized in its turn. “We always say that it will physically hurt you — it will hurt your eyes. There was research on whether computers cause miscarriage. Then the next wave of research is, ‘Will it hurt children?’ Then, ‘Will it hurt society?’ That’s the pattern of looking into a new technology.”

Computers and televisions are rapidly merging, though, into what could be a super-adversary (or friend), and screen size is the first frontier of that future, media experts agreed.

Because television is “new” again, reincarnated as large flat-panel television, content has to be new, too, to support the excitement, said Mr. Borgmann of the University of Montana.

“You have a mining of taboos and experiences that haven’t been tapped into before,” he said. “The two go together.”

A larger screen also demands more attention, or primary viewing — you sit and you watch it — and less “secondary” viewing, when you walk in and out of the room doing other things. You develop what experts call “attention inertia,” and it becomes difficult to disengage.

Last week, I watched an evening of television. I liked “30 Rock.” I now have an opinion about “Survivor.” And “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The O.C.” wish they were “CSI.” As I got ready to turn the crowd of voices off, stand up and go to bed, I skipped through a few quick channels (the remote has an incredibly light trigger), and decided to watch an episode of “Sex and the City” instead. It felt like reaching for the last beer in the fridge. In rerun, Carrie Bradshaw sounds like she’s imitating Sarah Jessica Parker, someone who became famous to me as Carrie Bradshaw, in a show I’d never seen.

Ms. Lang told me that my age may save my life as I knew it. My brain is too old to rewire.

“It’s lost its plasticity,” she said. That’s why they study children.

I could start getting out more. But my last great outing was shopping for a television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/we...4hamilton.html





Film Reviews | 'Children of Men'

Apocalypse Now, but in the Wasteland a Child Is Given
Manohla Dargis

The end is nigh in “Children of Men,” the superbly directed political thriller by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. It’s 2027, and the human race is approaching the terminus of its long goodbye. Cities across the globe are in flames, and the “siege of Seattle” has entered Day 1,000. In a permanent war zone called Britain, smoke pours into the air as illegal immigrants are swept into detainment camps. It’s apocalypse right here, right now — the end of the world as we knew and loved it, if not nearly enough.

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Merry Christmas! Seriously. “Children of Men” may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking. Like Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” another new film that holds up a mirror to these times, Mr. Cuarón’s speculative fiction is a gratifying sign that big studios are still occasionally in the business of making ambitious, intelligent work that speaks to adults. And much like Mr. Eastwood’s most recent war movie, much like the best genre films of Hollywood history, “Children of Men” doesn’t announce its themes from a bully pulpit, with a megaphone in hand and Oscar in mind, but through the beauty of its form.

It may seem strange, even misplaced to talk of beauty given the horror of the film’s explosive opening. For Theo, the emotionally, physically enervated employee of the Ministry of Energy played without a shred of actorly egotism by Clive Owen, the day begins with a cup of coffee, an ear-shattering explosion and a screaming woman holding her severed arm. The Mexican-born Mr. Cuarón, whose previous credits include the children’s films “A Little Princess” (1995) and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), as well as the supremely sexy road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001), has always had a dark streak. But nothing in his résumé prepares you for the shocking realism of this explosion, which proves all the more terrible because here it is also so very commonplace.

Britain, it emerges, is in permanent lockdown. As the specter of humanity’s end looms, the world has been torn apart by sectarian violence. Britain has closed its borders (the Chunnel too), turning illegal aliens into Public Enemy No. 1. Theo and the other gray men and women adrift in London don’t seem to notice much.

Everywhere there are signs and warnings, surveillance cameras and security patrols. “The world has collapsed,” a public service announcement trumpets, “only Britain soldiers on.” The verb choice is horribly apt, since heavily armed soldiers are ubiquitous. They flank the streets and train platforms, guarding the pervasive metal cages crammed with a veritable Babel of humanity, illegal immigrants who have fled to Britain from hot spots, becoming refugees or “fugees” for short.

Among the fugees is Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the linchpin of the story and its defiantly hopeful heart because she’s pregnant, the first woman on earth to carry a child after 18 barren years. Theo meets Kee through his former lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), the leader of an underground cadre, the Fishes (Chiwetel Ejiofior and Charlie Hunnam, among others), who, having renounced violence if not their heavy guns or lugubrious rhetoric, are fighting for immigrant rights.

Avowedly apolitical, Theo agrees to help the Fishes deliver Kee into the ministering care of a shadowy, perhaps apocryphal utopian group, the Human Project. En route, though, the plan goes violently awry, forcing Theo, Kee and a Fish member and former midwife, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to go on the run, first by car and then by foot.

Where they eventually land is in a hell that looks chillingly similar to the Iraqi combat areas of newspaper reportage, television news and mostly uncensored documentaries. There are several heart-gripping set pieces before then, including a hugely unsettling ambush scene shot almost entirely from inside a car crammed with passengers.

The action is swift, ferocious, spectacularly choreographed, with bodies careening wildly amid a fusillade of bullets and flying glass. Yet what lingers isn’t the technical virtuosity; it’s that after the car screeches off, Mr. Cuarón’s camera quietly lingers behind to show us two dead policemen, murdered in the name of an ideal and left like road kill. He forces us to look at the unspeakable and in doing so opens up a window onto the film’s moral landscape.

“Children of Men” has none of the hectoring qualities that tend to accompany good intentions in Hollywood. Most of the people doing the preaching turn out to be dreadfully, catastrophically misguided; everyone else seems to be holding on, like Theo’s friend Jasper (Michael Caine, wonderful), a former political cartoonist who bides his time with laughter and a lot of homegrown weed while listening to Beatles covers and rap. Still others, like Theo’s wealthy cousin, Nigel (Danny Huston, equally fine), who’s stashing away masterpieces like Michelangelo’s “David” for safekeeping in his private museum while Rome, New York and probably Guernica burn, can only smile as they swill another glass of wine. Hope isn’t the only thing that floats, as a song on the soundtrack reminds us.

The writer Kurt Andersen observed not long ago that we Americans are in an apocalyptic frame of mind. Mr. Andersen thinks that the latest in apocalypticism partly owes something to the aging baby boomers confronting their own impending doom, Sept. 11 and global warming notwithstanding. That’s one way to look at it, though the recent elections suggest that more than a few of those boomers are looking past their own reflection out at the world. Working with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Mr. Cuarón manufactures war zones of extraordinary plausibility in this film, but equally amazing is how, through a carbon-blue palette, handheld camerawork and the sag of a man’s shoulders, he conjures the hopelessness and the despair that I imagine many of us feel when we wake up to news of another fatal car bombing in Iraq.

There are, Mr. Cuarón suggests in “Children of Men,” different ways of waking up. You can either wake up and close your ears and eyes, or like Theo you can wake up until all your senses are roaring. Early in the film Theo and the restlessly moving camera seem very much apart, as Mr. Cuarón keeps a distance from the characters.

Every so often the camera pointedly drifts away from Theo, as it does with the dead policemen, to show us a weeping old woman locked in a cage or animals burning on pyres. In time, though, the camera comes closer to Theo as he opens his eyes — to a kitten crawling up his leg, to trees rustling in the wind — until, in one of the most astonishing scenes of battle I’ve ever seen on film, it is running alongside him, trying to keep pace with a man who has finally found a reason to keep going.

“Children of Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains extremely intense scenes of warfare.

CHILDREN OF MEN

Opens today in New York and other cities.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón; written by Mr. Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, based on the book by P. D. James; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Alex Rodríguez and Mr. Cuarón; music by John Tavener; production designers, Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland; produced by Hilary Shor, Marc Abraham, Tony Smith, Eric Newman and Iain Smith; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 100 minutes.

WITH: Clive Owen (Theo), Julianne Moore (Julian), Michael Caine (Jasper), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Luke), Charlie Hunnam (Patric), Danny Huston (Nigel), Clare-Hope Ashitey (Kee), Peter Mullan (Syd) and Pam Ferris (Miriam).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...es/25chil.html





Pan’s Labyrinth

In Gloom of War, a Child's Paradise
A.O. Scott

Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time — 1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was painfully starting to awaken — “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children’s story — with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication — illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?

The brilliance of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician. The director, Guillermo Del Toro, unapologetically and unpretentiously swears allegiance to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical technique and film history.

This Mexican-born filmmaker’s English-language, Hollywood genre movies — “Blade 2” (2002), “Hellboy” (2004) and the ill-starred but interesting “Mimic” (1997) — have a strangeness and intensity of feeling that sets them apart from others of their kind. In his recent Spanish-language films, “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001) and this new one, he uses the feverish inventiveness of a vulnerable child’s imagination as the basis for his own utterly original, seamlessly effective exploration of power, corruption and resistance.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is his finest achievement so far and a film that already, seven months after it was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival, has the feel of something permanent. Like his friend and colleague Alfonso Cuarón, whose astonishing “Children of Men” opened earlier this week, Mr. Del Toro is helping to make the boundary separating pop from art, always suspect, seem utterly obsolete.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects. A child could grasp its moral insights (though it is not a film I’d recommend for most children), while all but the most cynical of adults are likely to find themselves troubled to the point of heartbreak by its dark, rich and emphatic emotions.

The heroine is a girl named Ofelia, played by the uncannily talented Ivana Baquero, who was 11 when the film was made. Ofelia is the kind of child who eagerly reads stories about fairies, princesses and magic lands, longing to believe that what she reads is real. Mr. Del Toro obliges her wish by conjuring, just beyond the field of vision of the adults in Ofelia’s life, a grotesque, enchanted netherworld governed by the sometimes harsh rules of folk magic.

That realm, in which Ofelia is thought to be a long-lost princess, may exist only in her imagination. Or maybe not: its ambiguous status is crucial to the film’s coherence. Like the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, Mr. Del Toro is less interested in debunking or explaining away the existence of magic than in surveying the natural history of enchantment.

The forest around the old mill where Ofelia and her mother come to live is full of signs and portents: old carved stones and half-buried, crumbling structures that attest to a pre-modern, pre-Christian body of lore and belief. In much of the West that ancient magic survives in the form of bedtime stories and superstitions, and these in turn, as Mr. Del Toro evokes them, lead back through the maze of human psychology into the profound mysteries of nature.

Ofelia’s second reality — inhabited by a wide-browed faun, a man whose eyes are in the palms of his hands (both played by Doug Jones), a giant toad, some mantislike insects and many other curious creatures — can be a pretty scary place, and on her visits to it the girl is, like many a fairy-tale heroine, subjected to various challenges and ordeals. Still, this vivid world of fairies offers her an escape from the oppression of a day-to-day existence dominated by her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer in Franco’s army who seems to live by the maxim that fascism begins at home.

A patriarch both by temperament and ideology, the captain treats Ofelia’s mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), with chilly, humiliating decorum, making it clear that she is of value to him only because she is pregnant with his son. He takes pleasure in the exercise of authority and in the trappings of military discipline, addressing himself to the torture of captured resistance fighters with sadistic relish. He seems happiest when he is inflicting pain.

The partisans up in the hills — and their sympathizers in the captain’s own household, including the housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) and the doctor (Alex Angulo) who attends to Carmen — represent one of the film’s alternatives to the militarized, hierarchical society taking shape in post-civil war Spain. Their easy solidarity and ragged mufti stand in emphatic contrast to the crisp uniforms and exaggerated obeisances of Vidal and his men. At his dinner table the captain gloats that Franco and his followers have defeated the “mistaken” egalitarianism of their republican opponents.

Like “The Devil’s Backbone,” which also took place in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, “Pan’s Labyrinth” is not overly concerned with moral subtlety. In Mr. López’s perversely charismatic performance, Vidal is a villain of the purest, ugliest kind. For Mr. Del Toro the opposite of evil is not holiness, but decency.

Ofelia serves as her stepfather’s foil not because of her absolute goodness or innocence but rather because she is skeptical, stubborn and independent-minded. Her rebellion is as much against Carmen’s passivity as it is against Vidal’s brutality, and she gravitates toward the brave Mercedes as a kind of surrogate mother.

Mercedes’s surreptitious visits to the rebels often coincide with Ofelia’s journeys into fairyland, and it may be that the film’s romantic view of the noble, vanquished Spanish Republic is itself something of a fairy tale. To note this is merely to identify a humanist, utopian strain in Mr. Del Toro’s vision, a generous, sorrowful view of the world that is not entirely alien to the history of horror movies. (Think of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” for example, a film linked to “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Victor Erice’s “Spirit of the Beehive,” one of the few masterpieces of Spanish cinema made before Franco’s death.)

Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console as well as terrify. What distinguishes “Pan’s Labyrinth,” what makes it art, is that it balances its own magical thinking with the knowledge that not everyone lives happily ever after.

The story has two endings, two final images that linger in haunting, unresolved tension. Here is a princess, smilingly restored to her throne, bathed in golden subterranean light. And here is a grown woman weeping inconsolably in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic violence and occasional obscene language.

PAN’S LABYRINTH

Opens today in New York.

Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Guillermo Del Toro; director of photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Bernat Vilaplana; music by Javier Navarrete; production designer, Eugenio Caballero; produced by Bertha Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and Álvaro Augustin; released by Picturehouse. Running time: 119 minutes.

WITH: Sergi López (Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Alex Angulo (Doctor) and Doug Jones (Pale Man).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/2...es/29laby.html





Not for the Faint of Heart or Lazy of Thought
Manohla Dargis

EACH year my favorite films shift depending on the day, the hour, the minute. Recently, fond memories of a few bite-size favorites were supplanted by fonder recollections of Guy Maddin’s nuttily wonderful “Brand Upon the Brain!,” which I watched in a 1913 movie palace while attending the Toronto International Film Festival. (It later played as part of the New York Film Festival.) Generational anomie of a very American independent sort had been pushed aside by Mr. Maddin’s homage to silent cinema with its live narration, full orchestra, three Foley artists and a castrato in a fur hat.

As delightful as “Brand Upon the Brain!” is, this was a disappointing year, partly because there was nothing as sublime as Terrence Malick’s “New World,” as thrilling as David Cronenberg’s “History of Violence.” The big studio offerings included the usual mixed bag of pricey schlock (“The Da Vinci Code”), deflated pop (“Superman Returns”) and garbage (“Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties”). The studio dependents seemed more timid than ever, with few, outside Sony Pictures Classics, even bothering to release foreign-language films. Though some smaller distributors stepped up with the goods (“Half Nelson”), not enough filmgoers bothered to go to the theater. It would be nice to think that the missing art-house audience will catch up with “Duck Season” on DVD, but I wonder.

If not for Clint Eastwood and Alfonso Cuarón, this drab holiday season would be a washout. Increasingly, film companies are cramming their best Oscar bets into December, a scenario that benefits no one, including the filmmakers and their audiences. It’s particularly instructive to watch the studios attempt to win favor with critics, whom they tend to treat with contempt the rest of the year. In Los Angeles, where I live, that contempt is in full evidence at press screenings where attendees are routinely wanded and their belongings searched. It’s not supposed to be personal, even when strangers order you to stand with your arms and legs outstretched so you can be wanded. Happily, I saw the best film of the year in New York:Originally released in France in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece, “Army of Shadows,” received its American theatrical release this year thanks to the invaluable programmer and distributor Bruce Goldstein, who makes Film Forum one of New York’s most important destinations. Mr. Melville based the film on Joseph Kessel’s 1943 French Resistance novel and on his own experience fighting in the Maquis, which probably explains why he painted the story a darker shade than did the original author. Writing during the war, Mr. Kessel needed hope. Many years later, Mr. Melville could afford to express his pessimism through an austere mise-en-scène in which Resistance fighters carry the shame of a nation on their squared shoulders, and a man’s fallen hat rocks on a cobblestone street, an allusion to the head that will soon roll.

Clint Eastwood’s "Letters From Iwo Jima” confirms his reputation as one of the greatest directors working today, and one of the few for whom filmmaking is a moral imperative. As dark in palette and heart as “Army of Shadows,” and as thoroughly and bracingly stripped of sentimentality, Mr. Eastwood’s film takes us inside the shadowy caves of Iwo Jima, where Japanese soldiers battle against the same American soldiers represented in the director’s “Flags of Our Fathers.” In “Iwo Jima,” Mr. Eastwood humanizes the Japanese without evading their barbarism; rather shockingly, neither does he flinch when it comes to the Americans. Here, historical enemies turn into human beings, and then they die and die and die and die, becoming yet another army of shadows.

David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” isn’t for the faint of heart or lazy of thought, notably those for whom moviegoing is simply a more socially acceptable version of sucking on a pacifier. Like the Austrian documentary “Our Daily Bread,” the film makes for harrowing, demanding, sometimes unpleasant and insistently engaged viewing, but it’s also mysterious and exciting to think about. It recalls what the filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas said in the early 1960s about avant-garde films he called Baudelairean: “It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.” That more or less says it all, superbly.

Admirers of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” will find much to appreciate in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s“Our Daily Bread.” Yet what makes this remarkable film about industrial food production among this year’s best isn’t its sometimes shocking subject matter, but its formal rigor. This year’s crop of nonfiction titles included PowerPoint presentations, cut-and-paste news reports and the usual exercises in dithering solipsism, precious few of which were well considered, shot and edited. The relative cheapness of digital video has been a boon to documentary film (really, video) makers, who can now shoot miles of badly composed imagery and, if the subject matter is zingy or exploitative enough, earn credit where none is due. “Our Daily Bread” is a vivid reminder that aesthetics are part of the documentary ethos, not added value.

Directed and written by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, “L’Enfant” keeps close watch as an amoral young thief becomes a man of conscience. The urgency of the filmmaking and the shocking setup — the thief sells his newborn son for money — give “L’Enfant” the feel of a thriller and the heft of a Bible story. Despite that heaviness and the seemingly unforgivable nature of the crime, the film moves fast and feels fleet, partly because the thief spends much of the story running from the cops, from his marks, from himself. There is much to cherish in the film, including the obvious fact that the Dardennes are not interested in right versus wrong; they are, rather, concerned with humanity, including their own.

The people over at Universal Pictures, who have decided to open “Children of Men” on Christmas Day, either have a seriously wicked sense of humor or (my guess) don’t think this story about the end of the world stands a chance among the other holiday offerings. That’s too bad. The film certainly sounds like a downer — with no more children being born, human beings are staring into the abyss of their own future — but so does “Blade Runner.” Brilliantly directed by Alfonso Cuarón, “Children of Men” won’t connect with those audiences who like their dystopian fictions to end with a family hug, but there’s lots to love and respect here, starting with the genius of Mr. Cuarón’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki.

In “Three Times,” which traces love across three different time frames, the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien recombines themes, textures and moods from several of his earlier features. The film’s first section, “A Time for Love,” which takes place in the mid-1960s and features the hypnotic repetition of the song “Rain and Tears,” is a masterwork in miniature. One of the pleasures of Mr. Hou’s visual style, the deliberation with which he moves the camera and cuts his scenes together, is that it allows you to really enter the story with the characters, so you can fall in love alongside them. The characters barely seem to be looking at each other, but Mr. Hou’s camera misses nothing.

Michael Mann doesn’t always receive the critical respect he deserves, partly because he likes to make genre films; maybe if he had hired Jack Nicholson to run around with Crockett and Tubbs he might have at least seduced the audience. Glorious entertainment, “Miami Vice” is a gorgeous, shimmering object, and it made me think more about how new technologies are irrevocably changing our sense of what movies look like than any film I’ve seen this year. Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.

Mr. Maddin’s “Brand Upon the Brain!” and Sacha Baron Cohen’s merciless “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” round out my list. Mr. Baron Cohen’s comedy has provoked some amusing huffing and puffing from detractors, along with a handful of lawsuits. One common complaint about the film is that it is mean. So it is; so are the Three Stooges. But unlike Larry, Curly and Moe. Mr. Baron Cohen mixes some savage political critique in with his high jinks and mischief. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter, who apparently needed to be dispatched from Kazakhstan to Austria to actually watch “Borat,” declared it “the film of the year” as well as “cruelly anti-American.” Cruel, but fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/movies/24darg.html





Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation)
Louis Uchitelle

AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here.

Import penetration, as it is called, worried economists and policymakers when it first became noticeable 20 years ago. Many considered factory production a crucial component of the nation’s wealth and power. As imports gained ground, however, that view changed; the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.

Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, put it: “We want people who can design iPods, not make them.”

But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.

“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,” said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.”

Mr. Cohen is a partisan. He was a co-author of the 1987 book “Manufacturing Matters,” one of the first to sound an alarm as imports began to displace domestic output. But even the National Association of Manufacturers, which is supportive of members like Whirlpool and General Electric who shift production abroad, agrees that sooner or later innovation and production must go hand in hand.

Franklin J. Vargo, the association’s vice president for international economic affairs, sounds even more concerned than Mr. Cohen. “If manufacturing production declines in the United States,” he said, “at some point we will go below critical mass and then the center of innovation will shift outside the country and that will really begin a decline in our living standards.”

As it is with global warming, the crisis is in the future. Manufacturing output is not likely to fall below critical mass, as Mr. Vargo puts it, in this generation — or perhaps for several generations. The United States is still a powerhouse in manufacturing, and the output of the nation’s factories continues to rise. The problem is that the craving for manufactured goods in this country is rising faster than output, and imports are filling the gap, particularly in crucial industries.

Measuring this growing shortfall is imprecise. The government does not do the calculation, and outsiders must put together numbers from more than one federal database to make estimates. Mr. Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com calculates that 20.5 percent of the manufactured goods bought in America last year were imported. That was up from 11.7 percent in 1992 and 20 percent in 2004. Only once since 1992 did the penetration rate slip — by four-tenths of a percentage point in 2001, a recession year.

The other big industrial nations — France, Germany, Japan, England, Canada — also find themselves importing more and more of what they consume. In this comparison, the United States is not even high on the list, reflecting its preglobalization starting point in the 1970s as a much more closed economy than the others.

But the country-to-country comparisons hide a disturbing trend. Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, argues that in this country, import penetration is rising faster in core industries like machine-tool building than it is in other countries. And these are the industries that are, or should be, centers of innovation and invention.

“If you keep some production here, that is O.K.,” Mr. Cohen said. “But a lot of companies are not doing that, or slowly ceasing to do so. It is a complicated mosaic.”

Mr. Tonelson’s efforts to document the exodus are part of his job. His organization represents small manufacturers who keep production at home much more than a General Electric or a Whirlpool. They suffer from import penetration more than the multinationals. The Business and Industry Council even favors tariffs as a protective measure — a red flag for many mainstream Democrats and Republicans, who shun any suggestion that they might be protectionist.

Still, Mr. Tonelson, using the same data and the same methodology as Mr. Zandi, but delving into individual industries, finds that the United States is importing more than 50 percent — and in some cases close to 90 percent — of the machine tools used in this country, the aircraft engines and engine parts, the parts that go into cars and trucks, the industrial valves, the printed circuits, the optical instruments and lenses, the telephone switching apparatus, the machines that mold plastics, the broadcasting equipment used for radio, television and wireless transmissions. The list goes on.

“It is hard to imagine,” Mr. Tonelson said, “how an international economy can remain successful if it jettisons its most technologically advanced components.”

HIS alarm is not widely shared. Most economists and policy analysts say America’s growing service sector and powerful financial sector will eventually offset deterioration in manufacturing. In the short run, these optimists count on a falling dollar, particularly vis-à-vis the Chinese yuan, to put a brake on imports by making them more expensive, and to encourage exports by making them less costly in foreign currency. Thus will America gradually reverse its still-ballooning trade deficit.

But implicit in this solution is the belief that industries gone, or nearly gone, will come quickly back to life, and that skills given up can be quickly reacquired.

“Economists assume that the factors of production respond very quickly,” Mr. Cohen said. “They don’t. If you were a chief executive, would you build an expensive factory here on the strength of a shift in the exchange rate?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/bu...ey/24view.html





Hewlett-Packard, Recasting Itself, Is Looking Beyond PCs and Printers
Damon Darlin

Hewlett-Packard is looking for a second act. Several of them, actually.

Its turnaround was confirmed this year when profits from PCs and corporate servers and storage devices nearly doubled from a year earlier. It sold more PCs than any other maker and claimed the title of the world’s largest technology company.

Now it has to sustain those gains. The $92 billion company has set a goal of growing 6 percent next year and the year after. That means it must add about $5.5 billion a year in new revenue, or about what Yahoo produces each year in total revenue. “Scale has enormous advantages,” Mark V. Hurd, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview. “One disadvantage is that billions of dollars of annual revenue growth may appear underwhelming expressed as a simple percentage figure.”

The Law of Big Numbers is the bane of any giant company. It decrees that a behemoth has a harder time growing as quickly as a small and nimble company. Hewlett-Packard is no exception.

It has cut 15,000 employees and plans to trim more of its $84 billion in expenses to become more efficient and deploy the savings for growth, but cost-cutting improves the bottom line faster than it does the top line. A debt-free company with an $11 billion cash hoard, H.P. could acquire other companies, but it has said it prefers not to make any major acquisitions. It still needs to add revenue by growing from within, and that will not be easy.

“H.P. could do both,” said Benjamin Reitzes, an analyst with UBS Investment Research. “A company with almost $100 billion in revenue should be doing both.”

It has some ideas. It is moving quickly to build printers for almost any application in which ink hits paper. Analysts say that is a slam dunk. Two other areas that the company has identified for growth, selling cost-efficient corporate data centers and consumer electronics, pose considerably more risk.

Mr. Reitzes is confident that Mr. Hurd can succeed. “He’s worked some magic before,” he said.

Printers are H.P.’s sure thing. It makes nearly half of all printers sold across the globe. The printer unit contributes half the company’s profits with enviable profit margins of 15 percent because of the ink and toner it sells for those printers.

So far, the company has avoided becoming complacent. It dominates the market for home printing, where 55 percent of all digital photographs are printed. As consumers have begun shifting to printing digital photographs at stores, it is following them to wherever they choose to print. It builds in-store printing kiosks, sells digital prints online through its Snapfish.com service and runs the online or backshop photo-printing operations for major retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Costco.

It is part of a shift in emphasis from printers to printing. “Anything that is printed is an opportunity for H.P.,” said Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president for the imaging and printing group.

So the company is now selling large digital presses to commercial printers who make billboards or in-store marketing materials. It recently sold color digital presses to Amazon.com, the online retailer, which uses them to print books on demand. The payoff is obvious. “When you talk about liters of ink rather than milliliters of ink, that is exciting for us,” said Mr. Joshi.

H.P.’s move to sell the data center of the future stems from its own perpetual drive to cut its overhead. As it consolidates its 85 United States data centers into 6, it is creating a showcase that its sales team can point to: a computer room that would cost significantly less to run because it would be energy efficient and run with few technicians.

“What we are recommending to our customers is huge,” Mr. Hurd said. “Every company wants to do what we are doing. We think everyone has to do it sooner or later.”

Air-conditioning units at its data center in its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters used to blow out air at 58 degrees to cool the racks of servers and storage devices. Now, because of sensors that monitor the temperature of the air circulating next to the devices, sufficient cooling can be achieved with a 66-degree setting. The result is a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption, the company says, representing enough electricity in that 100-server room to cool 116 homes.

An added benefit: The room is quieter. Not that it matters because the company’s plan is to automate every process so a technician need visit only when there is a error that software managing the center cannot solve. “We are about halfway to a 24/7 lights-out data center,” said Chandrakant Patel, an H.P. fellow and the research scientist with H.P. Labs who helped design the Dynamic Cooling software.

The technology is there. Whether it will succeed depends on how convincing the hundreds of sales representatives the company is now hiring can be.

The third goal is to move beyond the traditional PC. Hewlett-Packard is clearly benefiting from the shift in consumer preferences toward notebook PCs. As the entertainment-obsessed consumer shifts toward ever more mobile devices like hand-held video players and phones that can function as mini-PCs, the company wants to be ready with always-connected devices that may blur the differences between a PC and consumer electronic devices.

“It is an important part of the vision we have,” said Shane Robinson, H.P.’s chief technology officer.

These “managed home” products may be the toughest part of the company’s growth strategy to execute.

H.P. has been selling TVs for several years, even selling them in Best Buy, the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer. But it has not broken into the upper ranks of TV makers, where Sony, Samsung and Sharp hold court. The company’s products are in 28,000 stores, but it has been unable to use the considerable clout it has with retailers who sell its notebooks and printers to push its TVs and other consumer products, said A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein.

Hewlett-Packard’s hand-held devices are aimed at corporate users, a market that is collapsing, and most of the products are considered flops. The entire iPaq line of H.P. hand-helds is being overhauled this year to focus on wireless connectivity, said Todd Bradley, the executive vice president of the PC unit.

Stephen Baker, a technology analyst with the market consulting firm NPD, which sells data to H.P., said it was still too early to judge the company’s progress. “They haven’t had high expectations and went about it slowly and deliberately,” he said. “They don’t have the high numbers because they haven’t been ready.”

For his part, Mr. Hurd said: “The managed home will happen, but it may evolve at a slower pace than in enterprise. You can spend a lot on the managed home and not get a return.”

That time may be near. The company has three new but unheralded products that point in the direction it is headed. The Media Smart TV is a flat-panel 37-inch liquid-crystal-display TV that automatically pulls in content stored on a PC or other networked devices with a hard drive. It costs $2,000, a 50 percent premium over its regular 37-inch L.C.D. set.

The $570 iPaq Travel Companion is a hand-held device with a screen that lets users watch videos through a wireless connection to the Internet. And the Media Vault, a storage device, is attached to the home network to store music, movies and photos. It is priced at $350 to $500 depending on how much data it stores. “We are about a year ahead of anyone else,” Mr. Bradley said.

But the products are hard to find in the stores — in part, company executives concede, because they are pioneering a new category. “The retailers are adjusting to how to sell the products,” said Satjiv Chahil, the senior vice president for the PC division’s marketing. “When you are doing breakthrough products, the normal distribution doesn’t pick it up all the way,” he said.

That may change as Apple Computer pushes forward with its own connected TV, the iTV, and as other companies announce similar strategies at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “The Apple iTV? It’s a Media Smart wannabe,” Mr. Chahil said. “Steve Jobs is validating a behavioral change and an industry direction. The good news is that we were there a year in advance.”

“Consumers keep telling us they want something that is insanely simple,” Mr. Hurd said. He added that the company believes the new Media Smart TV to be “insanely simple.”

The problem for Hewlett-Packard is that to keep pace with market changes, the company that Mr. Hurd describes as “the world’s leading I.T. infrastructure company” may have to recast the PC part of itself as a consumer electronics company like Sony, Samsung or that other computer maker that has made the shift, Apple. And that will not be easy.

“If we want to be a great company, we can’t do one thing,” Mr. Hurd said. “We need to do multiple things at all times.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...25hewlett.html





Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights

A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations
Joseph E Stiglitz

At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of "intellectual property rights."

Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to "zero marginal costs" and "non-rivalrous consumption") when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.

We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year's treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; 170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version. Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.

Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way ... You can't expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale."

Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.

A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.

The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.

The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7582/1279





What Questions Would You Ask An RIAA 'Expert'?
NewYorkCountryLawyer asks:

"In UMG v. Lindor, the RIAA has submitted an 'expert' report and 26-page curriculum vitae, prepared by Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University who is the RIAA's expert witness in all of its cases against consumers, relating to alleged copyright infringement by means of a shared files folder on Kazaa, and supposed analysis of the hard drive of a computer in Ms. Lindor's apartment.

The RIAA's 'experts' have been shut down in the Netherlands and Canada, having been shown by Prof. Sips and Dr. Pouwelse of Delft University's Parallel and Distributed Systems research group to have failed to do their homework, but are still operating in the USA. The materials were submitted in connection with a motion to compel Ms. Lindor's son, who lives 4 miles away from her, to turn over his computer and music listening devices to the RIAA.

Both Ms. Lindor's attorney and Ms. Lindor's son's attorney have objected to the introduction of these materials, but Dr. Jacobson's document production and deposition are scheduled for January and February, and we would love to get the tech community's ideas for questions to ask, and in general your reactions, thoughts, opinions, information, and any other input you can share with us. (In case you haven't guessed, we are the attorneys for Ms. Lindor.)"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/28/0141221





No code for you!

Judge Rules Against Jennings, Democrats to Seat Buchanan
AP

A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race.

Circuit Judge William Gary ruled that Jennings' arguments about the possibility of lost votes were "conjecture," and didn't warrant overriding the trade secrets of the voting machine company.

Democrats in Congress meanwhile, said they'd allow Republican Vern Buchanan to take the seat next Thursday, but with a warning that the inquiry wasn't over and that his hold on it could be temporary.

The state has certified Buchanan the winner of the District 13 race by a scant 369 votes.

The ruling Friday from Judge Gary prevents for now the Jennings camp from being able to use the programming code to try to show voting machines used in Sarasota County malfunctioned. Jennings claims that an unusually large number of undervotes _ ballots that didn't show a vote _ recorded in the race implies the machines lost the votes.

"The judge has reaffirmed that there is no merit to Christine Jennings' baseless allegations that the voting machines malfunctioned," Buchanan spokeswoman Sally Tibbetts said in a statement released by his campaign. "As noted by the judge in today's ruling, two parallel tests conducted by the state revealed '100 percent accuracy of the equipment in reporting the vote selections.'"

Reggie Mitchell, a lawyer for People for the American Way, a group working with the Jennings campaign in challenging the election results, said the judge's decision would likely be appealed.

"We'd like to get (the code) and prove our case as opposed to listening to the state and (the voting machine company's) theories," Mitchell said.

Jennings still has a complaint filed before Congress, which is the ultimate arbiter of who will fill the seat. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Katherine Harris, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate.

"The House has the power to collect evidence and make a decision about who, if anyone, was duly elected to represent the people of the 13th district," U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., said Friday before the judge's ruling. Holt plans to make an official statement next week making it clear that by seating Buchanan, the House isn't forfeiting the right to reverse that decision later.

"No one who is in a disputed election like this should get too comfortable in the House of Representatives," Holt said in a news conference at the Capitol.

But that was before Gary put a dent in Jennings' plans with his ruling Friday, in which he said that testimony by experts for Jennings about how unlikely it was that voters would have chosen to simply skip the race was merely "conjecture."

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the judge's ruling Friday didn't change plans by the House to investigate the election, and also noted that the ruling isn't final because Jennings can appeal.

But Democrats have no plans to block Buchanan from taking the seat, deciding the people of the southwest Florida district should have representation while the contest is being decided, Hammill said.

"This is the best way to maintain representation for Florida District 13 while allowing the two appropriate challenges to run their course," said Hammill.

Jennings said she agreed.

"I think it's the right thing to do, to seat Vern Buchanan temporarily while we gather evidence," Jennings said before Gary's ruling. "But I am pursuing this and I do believe I will end up being the representative for the people of the 13th District."

Neither Jennings nor her lawyers could be immediately reached following Gary's ruling.

Holt said Democrats were sending a message that the winner of the seat should be decided deliberately.

"This is not going to be a Congress where procedural matters are determined by brute force," he said. But, he said he believed the evidence would show that the vote was marred and there was a good possibility Jennings would ultimately be seated.

The electronic touch-screen machines used in Sarasota County are at the center of the challenge.

Some 18,000 Sarasota County electronic ballots did not register a vote in the race, a much higher undervote rate _ nearly 15 percent _ than in others such as those for governor or U.S. Senate. Jennings contends the machines lost the votes. Buchanan backers and the company say that if there was an unusually large undervote it was likely because of bad ballot design.

The state found no evidence of malfunctions in the machines, which were made by Election Systems & Software.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...AKING/61229007





Linux is Equal to a Genuine Windows
Rick

While webdeveloping I heard I had a weird javascript quirck in on of my backends of burningCat in Internet Explorer. Although I am working on Ubuntu I installed IE6 (via ies4linux). After a short while debugging and restarting IE6, Internet Explorer gave me the option to upgrade to IE7. I know that you have to have a genuine copy of windows, however I gave it a try, because linux might just be better than a genuine copy of windows . The results was rather surprising......

First of all I had to select my Windows version. Well I had to lie a little since I don't have a Windows version, however not being a spoilsport I selected the XP variant. MS accepted my little lie and proceeded to the next page prompting "Validation required". I gave it a try and received a message that "due to security settings activeX controls were prohibited to be executed". Not a bad thing, since activeX is one of the major disadvantages in IE.

However MS offers also a different validation type via an executable. MS trusted my linux completely and gave me a code to enter for validation. I entered the code and proceeded to the next page. MS did think I own a Genuine copy of windows and offers me the option to download the new Internet Explorer.

However IE7 isn't that big to start developing for, therefore I decided not to 'upgrade' IE6, however there is a possibility to do so under linux.
http://www.internetschoon.nl/viewSin...ne-Windows.htm





Microsoft Ad Push is All About You
Aaron O. Patrick

Microsoft is making a global push to sell advertisements targeted at the interests and demographic of individual users on its popular Hotmail email service, msn.com news page and other Microsoft-owned sites.

Putting ads in front of people based on their Internet use, known as "behavioral targeting," is becoming more common as techniques to monitor Web use get more sophisticated. Microsoft is aiming to grab a bigger slice of the online advertising market, where it currently lags behind Google and Yahoo.

The Redmond, Wash., giant says it can take behavioral targeting to a higher level. It has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its free Hotmail email service -- the biggest in the world -- with information gained from monitoring their searches.

When people sign up to use Hotmail, they are asked for 13 pieces of personal information, including age, occupation and address -- though providing all the data isn't obligatory. If they use Live Search, Microsoft's rival to Google's search, the company can keep a record of which words people searched for and the results they clicked on.

For advertisers, combining these two sets of information could allow them to better target the ads they send to people's computers, and avoid wasting people's time with irrelevant ads, according to Chris Dobson, Microsoft's global head of advertising sales. Microsoft is using the information to sell ad space on Microsoft Web pages, including msn.com and Hotmail.

Microsoft executives say the system works anonymously and they won't pass on people's names or addresses to advertisers. Executives say they want to foster confidence in users to build a long-term business, and one that gives an incentive to not misuse personal details.

The system allows advertisers to send different ads to each person surfing the Web. For instance, if a 25-year-old financial analyst living in a big city were comparing prices of cars online, BMW could send an ad for a Mini Cooper. But it could send a 45-year-old suburban businessman with children an ad for the X5 SUV, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

Here's how it works: If someone types in "compare car prices" on Live Search, Microsoft's computers note that the person is probably considering buying a vehicle. The computers then check with the list of Hotmail accounts to see if they have any information on the person. If they do, and an auto maker has paid Microsoft to target this type of person, the computer will automatically send a car ad when she next looks at a Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should see more ads that are of interest to them. "We know what Web sites they have visited and what key words they used," says Mr. Dobson. "We can deduce what their interests are." Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76 percent.

Microsoft launched the system in the U.S. in September and plans to roll it out around the world, says Mr. Dobson. So far, Microsoft says it has signed up about 100 advertisers, although a spokeswoman declined to name any of them.

"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come," says Simon Andrews, chief digital strategy officer for WPP Group's MindShare, a large buyer of ad time. "There is a lot of potential to know if people have been looking at specific sites."

The company has sold ads on Hotmail and its other sites for many years. Previously, though, the system wasn't as specialized: Advertisers could tailor ads for individuals depending on what country they lived in, for instance, ensuring French ads didn't appear on U.S. Web sites. Microsoft has never before matched Hotmail users' personal information with what they're doing online.

The move is part of a push by Microsoft to grab a larger share of the rapidly growing Internet advertising market. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, Microsoft's online ad revenue rose 5 percent, though the company didn't disclose the amount. During the same period, ad revenue at Google jumped 70 percent to $2.69 billion; at Yahoo, it rose 18 percent to $1.16 billion.

In addition to Hotmail, Microsoft has recently launched other sites that rely on advertising, including Windows Live Spaces, a social-networking site that competes with News Corp.'s MySpace. It also has introduced advertising to existing sites, including Office Online, a Web site with updates for its Office software.

Mr. Dobson, a former executive with ad-buying agency ZenithOptimedia, a unit of Publicis Groupe, is in charge of all online ad sales for Microsoft. Last month, he succeeded Joanne Bradford, Microsoft's global ad-sales chief, who was promoted to run the MSN Web sites. Mr. Dobson, who is based in London, had been Ms. Bradford's deputy.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06361/749452-96.stm





Verizon to Allow Ads on Its Mobile Phones
Matt Richtel

VERIZON WIRELESS, among the nation’s most widely advertised brands, is poised to become the advertising medium itself.

Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said.

The development is a substantive and symbolic advance toward the widespread appearance of marketing messages on the smallest of screens. Advertisers have been increasing the amount they spent on mobile marketing, despite lingering questions about the effectiveness of ads on portable phones.

Verizon officials said their initial foray would be a cautious one — they will limit where ads can appear, and exclude certain kinds of video clips — and thus may invite greater demand to place ads then they can accommodate.

“We know we can make significant dollars in mobile Web advertising in 2007,” said John Harrobin, vice president of marketing and digital media for Verizon Wireless. “That said, we likely will not — we want to take it carefully and methodically, and enable the right experience.” More generally, he added, “Mobile advertising is going to take off in 2007.”

•

In absolute terms, the amount of money spent on advertising on mobile phones has been small but it has been growing rapidly. In 2005, advertisers spent $45 million on such messages, and should spend around $150 million this year, according to Ovum Research, which projects that such spending will reach $1.3 billion by 2010.

The interest of advertisers in the medium stems from a theory that ads placed on mobile phones could create a particularly intimate bond with consumers. The gadgets are ubiquitous, personal, and messages could theoretically be tailored to individuals based on demographics like age, gender and location.

Numerous factors have limited the growth of cellphone advertising. Chief among those factors has been the reticence of carriers to allow ads to appear alongside news, sports and other information that is provided by their official content partners. These partners, from ESPN to USA Today and dozens of others, appear on the content menus that subscribers see when they use their phones to search for information over the Internet.

Carriers have also been concerned about annoying cellphone users with obtrusive marketing messages.

In October, Sprint became the first major carrier to allow advertisements to appear with content that is listed on its menus, or as they are known in the industry, their official content “decks.” Cingular, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, declined to comment on whether it would allow advertising on its decks.

The participation of the carriers would greatly broaden the potential audience. Seventy to 80 percent of what people view on their cellphones derives from links on these decks. The rest of the content is viewed “off deck” — on innumerable content sites that wireless consumers are free to access over the Internet.

Lack of access to these cellphone screens “is one of the biggest considerations right now,” and has limited growth, said Angela Steele, a mobile marketing expert at Starcom USA, a media buying and planning firm whose clients include Kellogg, Nintendo, Oracle and Allstate.

Even without cooperation from carriers, advertisers have been able to reach consumers visiting off-deck sites, and such marketing has grown in size and in scope.

The first advertisers drawn to mobile phones tended to be quick-serve restaurants and hotels — businesses that people might want access to on the go. But increasingly, there is traditional brand marketing, said Jeff Janer, chief marketing officer for Third Screen Media, a mobile ad management company that pairs advertisers and agencies with providers of mobile content, like USA Today and the Weather Channel.

Mr. Janer said an example of the evolution took place over the last few months as Unilever ran an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter campaign on mobile phones. The campaign, which Mr. Janer said cost $75,000 to $100,000, placed small banner ads on sites like the Weather Channel that urged consumers to click on a link to visit the “Kitchen of Love.” The link took them to a site featuring Fabio, the romance heartthrob, who is spokesman for the ad campaign.

“It’s the first consumer products group we’ve run on mobile,” Mr. Janer said.

Mr. Janer, echoing the sentiment of executives from traditional ad agencies, said that mobile phone ad budgets were growing. He said that a year ago, advertisers typically committed $25,000 for a campaign of four to six weeks. That figure is now $150,000 to $200,000, he said.

The ads have tended to involve simple banners or text messages, like those connected to the “American Idol” show, in which consumers are urged to send in a vote. Or they have offered digital coupons, like those that allow Dunkin’ Donut customers to show a coupon on their phone at the counter to get a 99 cent latte. Or they have involved sweepstakes offers.

Increasingly, driven by the growing capability and speed of wireless networks, they involve more intensive graphics, and, to a much lesser degree, video clips.

Despite these developments, advertisers continue to have serious questions about the effectiveness of mobile ads. While acknowledging there is potential for a particularly intimate relationship with phone users, advertisers say there is a dearth of data about whether the ads are motivating consumer behavior.

“There’s still a question of cost and value,” said David Cohen, executive vice president and United States director of digital communications for Universal McCann, an ad agency, whose clients include Microsoft, Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Wendy’s. The agency last week said it had signed a deal to use ad management software provided by Third Screen Media to deliver mobile ads and try to track their effectiveness.

Mr. Cohen said mobile advertising still appeared to be costly and inefficient. Because of a constrained supply of quality ad space, he said, the cost per thousand impressions is around $40, compared to $10 to $15 on the Internet.

•

David Goodrich, director of digital for the West Coast region for OMD, an ad agency, said he did not believe mobile advertising could be particularly effective until marketers could regularly and easily buy space for video clips.

Advertisers “are crazed to get information” onto the phones, Mr. Goodrich said. But the effectiveness “will be really limited until you’ve enabled site, sound and motion.”

That will not be happening anytime soon on Verizon, according to Mr. Harrobin. He said that during extensive tests the company did in determining whether to run ads, and how to run them, it determined that consumers find short, stand-alone video advertisements to be intrusive.

But Mr. Harrobin said that in the tests, consumers did seem to accept a single banner at the top of a page.

“What we don’t want to do is repeat the mistakes of the Internet — spam, interstitials, pop-ups,” Mr. Harrobin said. Bored, offended or inconvenienced consumers could quickly blame Verizon and leave for another service, hurting the wireless carrier’s core business and reducing its monthly subscription fees.

“We offer voice services,” he said of Verizon’s core business. Advertising “is tertiary on top of that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/bu...ia/26adco.html





Away From the Tour Group, an MP3 Player as Your Guide
Joe Sharkey

I AVOID guided tours in interesting cities because the tours are usually dumbed down to accommodate, say, the inquisitive dimwit who thinks Robespierre was a fashion designer in Paris.

So I usually go it alone when I have a few hours free to walk around an unfamiliar city. And that isn’t always efficient, even with a good guidebook.

I remember one drizzly afternoon several years ago in Berlin, trying to find the site of Hitler’s bunker and the long-gone Reich Chancellery. I finally found the spot with precise directions from a concierge at the Adlon Hotel. The site was a muddy, forlorn, unmarked lot opposite a block of ugly East German-era apartment buildings, though there was a man with a cart on the corner selling bratwurst.

“I heard the site is marked with a little plaque now,” said Elyse Weiner, a former network news producer and foreign correspondent who has figured out that there are a lot of people who like to take short walking tours in a strange city, and who do not relish the idea of doing so in a group, trotting along behind a tour guide with a flag.

Ms. Weiner is the founder of iJourneys (iJourneys.com), which produces narrated walking tours for use with personal MP3 players, including iPods.

She has not done Berlin yet, but her tours now consist of the Left Bank of Paris, Ancient Rome, Old Rome, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Vienna, Salzburg and Barcelona. Each costs $14.95 to download and includes a map. She has lately been wandering around Jerusalem with a recorder, making notes for her next digital narrative.

“Rome was one of my first inspirations,” she said. A friend going to Rome on a business trip had a few hours free and asked for advice. Knowing Rome well from her days in the news business, she wrote out a detailed three-page tour itinerary, an idiosyncratic 90-minute walk filled with historical and cultural information.

She added, “The same week I was in Miami, on one of those South Beach walking tours with a docent who was very boring, plus some old ladies on the tour kept complaining about not being able to go shopping. I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’ ”

Guidebooks are not especially practical for someone with very great interest and very limited time. Many audiotape tour guides tend to be broad, bland and overproduced, Ms. Weiner said, adding: “I thought, ‘I’m a newsgirl who’s traveled a lot. Why can’t I travel with someone like me?’ ”

The result is a series of focused recorded walking tours that play out in real time — in one long tracking shot, as it were. I listened to Ms. Weiner’s 75-minute Ancient Rome tour, which goes from Capitoline Hill to the Coliseum.

I’m familiar with that walk, but I was engrossed by her narrative. I could re-envision the landscape while picking up new information, like the workings of the elevators, pulleys and winches for Coliseum spectacles, and seeing the spot where Marc Antony delivered the eulogy for the assassinated Julius Caesar. (I’d always thought Caesar was assassinated in the Forum, but Ms. Weiner set me straight. On that particular Ides of March, the Senate was meeting elsewhere, at the Theater of Pompey.)

Producing a tour, Ms. Weiner does copious research and spends many weeks walking the same short route while talking into a digital recorder. Then, back home in New York, she records a final version. There is no musical soundtrack.

“I could have put that in but I deliberately did not because I figure you’re walking in a real city in real time, and you need to hear that Vespa coming up behind you,” said Ms. Weiner, who was in the network television and radio news business for 20 years.

Other producers in the podcast-guide business include Soundwalk.com and AudisseyGuides.com, which have walking tours, and Audible.com, which includes city tour guides in its large inventory of recorded books and other material. In addition, many museums and other places offer docks for downloading tours to digital players. The field is obviously set to grow.

Ms. Weiner insists on keeping it low-key, personal and irreverent, like a friend taking you for a stroll in a city she loves.

“Our Paris walk is only on the Left Bank, and it’s continuous, so if it takes a minute to walk from one end of a little block to the other, I still have to talk,” she said. “So I can point out, like, the site of the once-fleabag hotel where Oscar Wilde died, and tell you his final words, which were supposedly: ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/business/26road.html





Social Network Users Have Ruined Their Privacy, Forever
Steve Kerrison

Students at the University of Bristol have recently been warned of the dangers of posting to social networking websites. They aren't the first to hear these warnings, and they won't be the last.

Prof. Nigel Smart of the Computer Science Department at the University of Bristol has expressed his concern at the worrying trend of people giving up their privacy on the internet via social networking websites. He told HEXUS: "I am concerned that from some of the posts I have seen, by colleagues, students and others, that there is a deep societal problem emerging of people giving up their privacy without realising it".

There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.

Just about anyone can read what's posted onto social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook. 'Anyone' includes the intended audience of friends, but potentially relatives, teachers and employers too. And much of what is posted can never be deleted. I don't need to point out that Prof. Smart's fears are well-founded and that this is bad news, do I?
Anonymity down the drain

People have been posting stuff onto the web for years, though, so why is privacy suddenly a bigger problem for a larger number of people? Three or four years ago, it was all about chat rooms and forums. Both have a level of anonymity by default; you can choose your handle and only talk about what you want to, truth or lies... nobody will know.

Chat rooms are all but dead and buried now, amidst fear of sexual predators and other unsavoury types. However, forums continue, by virtue of their more topic-focused and moderated nature.
There's more to worry about on the web than predators and viruses. We're giving everyone access to our personal lives.

Then came what some people like to call 'Web 2.0'. On that wave of "let's pretend we've upgraded the Internet, LOL" came the social-networking websites... along with those terrible pages of drivel people like to call 'blogs'. It became cool to talk about mundane things and show other people what had been happening in your life. In essence, all the chat room goers had something to do once again.

So where's the problem in that? People treat users on their social-networking 'friends lists' just like their normal friends. They'll chat to them, share details from their lives, show them photos... do stuff friends do. People are comfortable with that. Problem is, they're too comfortable.

Bitching down the phone to someone about somebody else is a fairly common occurrence amongst friends, so socially, it's quite acceptable to do the very same with online friends, right? Yes, except unlike a phone call, it isn't private. Interestingly, you could probably get away with it in a chat room; they were essentially anonymous, but social networking is much more personal; the anonymity is all but gone. Fancy being sued for libel? How about initiating a police inquiry, or an investigation by the board of your educational establishment? It could happen, if you say or post the wrong things.
Irreversible damage

Once something appears on the Internet, it's almost impossible to remove. Within minutes, chances are a search engine will crawl it, then that search engine will cache it, so that even if the page changes, the original content will still be there, for a while, at least. Then there are archiving systems like the Way Back Machine. Once the page is on there, it doesn't matter what changes are made... it's archived. Of course, this assumes that pages are accessible by anyone, which isn't always the case, but that doesn't really matter.

It's easy to get an account with almost any social-networking site, and we've learned from chat rooms, it's easy to pose as somebody else. It's easy, then, to get added to a friend list (especially with the 'more friends the better' attitude of current social-networking sites). Suddenly, that 'friends only' stuff is pretty much public.

As these sites continue to grow in popularity, so too does the value of the information on them to parties other than those directly involved. Parents can see what their children really get up to at Uni'. Teachers can see what their pupils really think. Potential employers can profile applicants based on their online braggings and other shenanigans. While much of the content might be taken humorously amongst friends, other parties might not see it that way.

Profiling a person by their online activities need not be a long and arduous task entailing reading their boring blogs and examining all their FaceBook pictures, either. If somebody can write 1000 lines of code to scan MySpace for sexual predators, someone else can apply the same principals to profiling a single person.

Social networking users need to take a step back and think about just what they're posting onto the Internet. It'll probably be too late for a number of people, and it'll take a lot more 'victims' of the lack of privacy before most users actually start heeding these warnings. Just beware that anything posted online to your friends now, could very easily come back to haunt you in days, months, or even years to come.
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7499





George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move
Nick Allen

It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

``You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'' The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

``People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

Who's In Charge?

At a single road junction in the London borough of Hammersmith, there are 29 cameras run by police, government, private companies and transport agencies. Police officers are even trying out video cameras mounted on their heads.

``We've got to stand back and see where technology is taking us,'' said Thomas, whose job is to protect people's privacy. ``Humans must dictate our future, not machines.''

Blair said citizens have to sacrifice some freedoms to fight terrorism, illegal immigration and identity fraud.

``We have a modern world that we are living in, with new and different types of crime,'' Blair said Nov. 6 at a press conference in London. ``If we don't use technology in order to combat it, then we won't be fighting crime effectively.''

Constant Monitoring

In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.

Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.

By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.

``The level of surveillance in this country should shock people,'' said David Murakami Wood, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle who headed the study. ``It is infiltrating everything we do.''

Wood is also concerned about the U.K.'s growing DNA database. The files contain the genetic codes of more than 3.8 million people, or 5.2 percent of the population. By comparison, the U.S. has the DNA records of 0.5 percent of its residents.

DNA matches helped solve 45,000 crimes in the U.K. last year, including 422 murders, 645 rapes and 9,000 burglaries, according to the Home Office. But the database isn't foolproof.

Burglar Who Wasn't

Police who knocked on Raymond Easton's door in Swindon, England, in 1999 were certain he had committed burglary at a house 200 miles (300 kilometers) away. DNA found at the scene was a 37 million-to-1 match with Easton's sample, which had been taken three years earlier.

Easton, a former construction worker, had Parkinson's disease and could barely dress himself. He was still charged. Further tests proved he had never been to Bolton, where the burglary occurred, according to the Greater Manchester police.

``Britain's DNA database is spiraling out of control,'' said Helen Wallace, deputy director of GeneWatch U.K., which campaigns for responsible use of genetic science. ``It could allow an unprecedented level of government surveillance.''

Other government plans include loading the confidential medical records of 50 million patients in the state-run health system onto a central database without their consent.

Most controversial of all are Blair's biometric ID cards linked to a national register holding every citizen's fingerprints, iris or face scan. Starting in 2010, anyone renewing or applying for a passport will have to get one.

``Desperate for some sort of legacy, the prime minister has nothing to offer but Blair's Big Brother Britain,'' said Phil Booth, national coordinator of the anti-ID card group NO2ID.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=avL4PSqZrcj4





How To: Disable Your Passport's RFID Chip
Jenna Wortham

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful – tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison. Not to mention the “special” customs search, with rubber gloves. Bon voyage!

1) RFID-tagged passports have a distinctive logo on the front cover; the chip is embedded in the back.

2) Sorry, “accidentally” leaving your passport in the jeans you just put in the washer won’t work. You’re more likely to ruin the passport itself than the chip.

3) Forget about nuking it in the microwave – the chip could burst into flames, leaving telltale scorch marks. Besides, have you ever smelled burnt passport?

4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=9





Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears

Size and scope of the interagency investigative tool worry civil libertarians
Dan Eggen

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as "OneDOJ," already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation from the federal government.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.

The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access, officials said.

But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, U.S. attorneys and other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced that the program will be expanded immediately to 15 additional regions and that federal authorities will "accelerate . . . efforts to share information from both open and closed cases."

Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and often manually, with Justice's five main law enforcement agencies: the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Within three years, officials said, about 750 law enforcement agencies nationwide will have access.

In an interview last week, McNulty said the goal is to broaden the pool of data available to local and state investigators beyond systems such as the National Crime Information Center, the FBI-run repository of basic criminal records used by police and sheriff's deputies around the country.

By tapping into the details available in incident reports, interrogation summaries and other documents, investigators will dramatically improve their chances of closing cases, he said.

"The goal is that all of U.S. law enforcement will be able to look at each other's records to solve cases and protect U.S. citizens," McNulty said. "With OneDOJ, we will essentially hook them up to a pipe that will take them into its records."

McNulty and other Justice officials emphasize that the information available in the database already is held individually by the FBI and other federal agencies. Much information will be kept out of the system, including data about public corruption cases, classified or sensitive topics, confidential informants, administrative cases and civil rights probes involving allegations of wrongdoing by police, officials said.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates -- many of whom are already alarmed by the proliferation of federal databases -- warn that granting broad access to such a system is almost certain to invite abuse and lead to police mistakes.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the main problem is one of "garbage in, garbage out," because case files frequently include erroneous or unproved allegations.

"Raw police files or FBI reports can never be verified and can never be corrected," Steinhardt said. "That is a problem with even more formal and controlled systems. The idea that they're creating another whole system that is going to be full of inaccurate information is just chilling."

Steinhardt noted that in 2003, the FBI announced that it would no longer meet the Privacy Act's accuracy requirements for the National Crime Information Center, its main criminal-background-check database, which is used by 80,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

"I look at this system and imagine it will raise many of the same questions that the whole information-sharing approach is raising across the government," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based group that has criticized many of the government's data-gathering policies.

"Information that's collected in the law enforcement realm can find [its way] into other arenas and be abused very easily," Rotenberg said.

McNulty and other officials said the data compiled under OneDOJ would be subject to the same civil-liberties and privacy oversight as any other Justice Department database. A coordinating committee within Justice will oversee the database and other information-sharing initiatives, according to McNulty's memo.

Gene Voegtlin, legislative counsel for the Arlington-based International Association of Chiefs of Police, said his group welcomes any initiatives to share more data with local law enforcement agencies.

"The working partnership between the states and the feds has gotten much better than the pre-9/11 era," Voegtlin said. "But we're still overcoming a lot of issues, both functional and organizational . . . so we're happy to see DOJ taking positive steps in that area."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122500483.html





Feds: Homeland Security Project Didn't Protect Privacy
Declan McCullagh

A Department of Homeland Security program that linked details on millions of air travelers with profiles drawn from commercial databases was plagued by "privacy missteps" that misled the public, a new government report concludes.

The Transportation Security Agency, operating under the auspices of Homeland Security, had publicly pledged two years ago--in official notices describing the Secure Flight program--that it "will not receive" or have access to dossiers on American travelers compiled by a Beltway contractor.

That promise turned out to be untrue, according to a report published Friday by DHS' privacy office. The commercial data "made its way directly to TSA, contrary to the express statements in the fall privacy notices about the Secure Flight program," the report says. (Click on "Secure Flight Report" to view a PDF version.)

The report, and a second one critiquing a government database called Matrix, was released on the last business day before Christmas, a tactic that federal agencies and publicly traded companies sometimes use to avoid drawing attention to critical findings. Neither report appears on the DHS.gov or TSA.gov home pages, or even on the home page of the DHS privacy office, but rather was linked to from a subpage on the DHS privacy site.

Jim Harper, a policy analyst with the free-market Cato Institute who serves on a Homeland Security advisory panel, said the reports show that the department needs to pay far more attention to privacy. "They didn't think ahead. They didn't study. They didn't pay attention to the privacy issues," Harper said. "It may need to be hammered home many more times."

Secure Flight was born in September 2004 when DHS ordered airlines to hand over the complete records of all passengers who traveled on a domestic flight in the month of June--which were in turn linked with information on those passengers drawn from commercial databases. (Secure Flight, which was put on hold in February in large part because of privacy concerns, was the successor to DHS' Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System.)

The agency's Secure Flight contractor, a McLean, Va.-based company called EagleForce, bought databases with personal information on Americans from three data-mining firms: Acxiom, Insight America and Qsent. The data included U.S. citizens' names, gender, spouse's names, address, date of birth, and in some cases Social Security numbers.

The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were "not intentional," and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a "data flow map" to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act.

This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act.

In an interview with CNET News.com earlier this year, Peter Pietra, TSA's director of privacy policy, downplayed those concerns. Pietra said the agency disagrees with GAO's interpretation of the law.

A Matrix post-mortem
The second report released Friday represents a postmortem of a defunct project called the Matrix, or the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. Matrix ended in April 2005. (Click on "Matrix Report" for a PDF version.)

DHS provided most of the funding for Matrix, $8 million in 2003, with the Department of Justice tossing in $4 million. Operated by Seisint, which is now part of LexisNexis, the pilot project involved information sharing between state government, federal government, and commercial databases. At least 13 states participated, including California, Texas and New York.

Matrix quickly became controversial for a long list of reasons: It launched in July 2003 with no privacy policy in place. Few participating states ever conducted a self-audit to make sure abuse didn't happen. Neither the Justice Department nor DHS ever did. Privacy specialists weren't consulted until nearly three years after planning began. Even though Matrix was supposedly created as an antiterrorism network, only 2.6 percent of the cases investigated turned out to be terrorism-related.

Also raising questions was the unwillingness of LexisNexis and the participating governments to give a complete list of information accessible through Matrix. But a page captured by Archive.org from the former Matrix-at.org Web site lists records from criminal histories, driver's licenses and motor vehicle registrations, court documents, property ownership, professional licenses, and commercial databases including telephone directories. Other reports have said Social Security numbers, speeding tickets, and family members also are included.

The ACLU had been one of Matrix's most vocal critics. It charged that Matrix was "dangerous and Orwellian" and represented an intrusive data-mining program on innocent Americans.

DHS' privacy office said Friday that Matrix "was undermined, and ultimately halted, in large part because it did not have a comprehensive privacy policy from the outset to provide transparency about the project's purpose and practices and protect against mission creep or abuse."
http://news.com.com/Feds+Homeland+Se...3-6145796.html





Computer Warming a Privacy Risk
Quinn Norton

A security researcher has a devised a novel attack on online anonymity systems in which he literally takes a computer's temperature over the internet.

The attack uses a phenomenon called "clock skew" -- the tendency for the precise clocks in modern computers to drift off of the correct time at slightly different rates, which can be affected by heat.

"When a crystal is manufactured, it has a clock skew, and it's different for each crystal (throughout its) lifetime," explains Steven J. Murdoch, a Cambridge University researcher who discussed his work at the Chaos Communications Congress on Thursday.

Last year UCLA Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno showed that clock skew can be used to identify computers on the internet, by charting the timestamps in a machine's traffic. But the skew is a fairly weak identifier, providing at best 64 unique fingerprints. A network of a thousand computers would have 16 with an identical clock skew.

The research spawned a variety of theories on how clock skew could be used to attack anonymity online -- from detecting daytime hours at a server located in an unknown country, to counting the number of hosts behind a NAT firewall. Murdoch was the first to make an attack work.

His victim is the Onion Router, or "Tor" -- a sophisticated privacy system that lets users surf the web anonymously. Tor encrypts a user's traffic, and bounces it through multiple servers, so the final destination doesn't know where it came from.

Murdoch set up a Tor network at Cambridge to test his technique, which works like this: If an attacker wants to learn the IP address of a hidden server on the Tor network, he'll suddenly request something difficult or intensive from that server. The added load will cause it to warm up.

Because temperature affects how fast most electronics operate, warming up the machine causes microscopic changes in clock skew over time. Now the attacker queries computers on the public internet that he suspects of being the Tor server, looking for the shift in skew over the course of hours.

When he finds a computer that has guilty change in its timestamps, he has a match.

"It's actually quite hard to defend against," says Murdoch. "(You can) lock the timestamp, but even without explicate timestamps, it's conceivable."

That doesn't mean it's time to give up on online anonymity: Murdoch points out that other attacks on Tor are currently easier and quicker.

"Right now it's probably not the best attack, it's a guide to what could be done in the future."

Ironically it might be the most extremely hardened computers that would be most vulnerable to this style of attack. Murdoch theorizes that military computers with precise time reporting should be easier than more casual networks like Tor, in the long run.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...rss.technology





DOD Bars Use of HTML e-mail, Outlook Web Access
Bob Brewin

Due to an increased network threat condition, the Defense Department is blocking all HTML-based e-mail messages and has banned the use of Outlook Web Access e-mail applications, according to a spokesman for the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations.

An internal message available on the Internet from the Defense Security Service (DSS) states that JTF-GNO raised the network threat condition from Information Condition 5, which indicates normal operating conditions, to Infocon 4 “in the face of continuing and sophisticated threats” against Defense Department networks.

Infocon 4 usually indicates heightened vigilance in preparation for operations or exercises or increased monitoring of networks due to increased risk of attack.

The JTF-GNO mandated use of plain text e-mail because HTML messages pose a threat to DOD because HTML text can be infected with spyware and, in some
cases, executable code that could enable intruders to gain access to DOD networks, the JTF-GNO spokesman said.

In an e-mail to Federal Computer Week, a Navy user said that any HTML messages sent to his account are automatically converted to plain text.

The JTF-GNO spokesman declined to say why the command raised the threat level except to say that Infocon levels are adjusted to reflect worldwide social and political events and activities. He said the current threat level does not bar the use of attachments, including Power Point slides used for briefings.

He also declined to tell FCW what other restrictions on e-mail that JTF-GNO has imposed. But a December 2006 newsletter of the Colorado National Guard said that under Infocon 4, Guard members receiving e-mails from any unknown source, including “mail received from unrecognized Department of Defense accounts,” should be viewed as potentially harmful.

The Colorado Guard newsletter also alerted personnel to be vigilant against e-mail “phishing” attempts to gain personal information.

The ban on use of Outlook Web mail will hit thousands of users at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., according to an internal message available on the Internet. The ban on the use of Outlook Web Access “will significantly impact the way we presently conduct business,” due to the fact that that Web mail is the primary means of e-mail access for 4,500 employees at the base, according to the message.

Robins has developed a work-around for these users to access Outlook directly by logging on to government computers with their common access cards, the internal message said.

JTF-GNO raised the DOD network threat level to Infocon 4 in mid-November after an attack on the networks at the Naval War College (NWC) required NWC to take its systems offline. The JTF-GNO spokesman said at the time that the increase in threat conditions had no relation to the attack against NWC.
http://www.fcw.com/article97178-12-2...eb&printLayout





U.S. Gov't to Use Full Disk Encryption on All Computers
timothy

To address the issue of data leaks of the kind we've seen so often in the last year because of stolen or missing laptops, writes Saqib Ali, the Feds are planning to use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on all Government-owned computers.

"On June 23, 2006 a Presidential Mandate was put in place requiring all agency laptops to fully encrypt data on the HDD. The U.S. Government is currently conducting the largest single side-by-side comparison and competition for the selection of a Full Disk Encryption product. The selected product will be deployed on Millions of computers in the U.S. federal government space. This implementation will end up being the largest single implementation ever, and all of the information regarding the competition is in the public domain. The evaluation will come to an end in 90 days. You can view all the vendors competing and list of requirements."
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/28/154247





French Court Favors Personal Privacy Over Piracy Searches
Thomas Crampton

A French court has ruled that music companies and other copyright holders cannot conduct unrestrained Internet monitoring to find pirates.

The decision, which could leave record companies open to lawsuits in France for invasion of privacy, pits European Union-sanctioned data protection rules against aggressive tracing tactics used by the music and film industry.

"The judge's decision defends the privacy of individuals over the intrusion from record labels," said Aziz Ridouan, president of the Association of Audio Surfers, a group that defends people charged with illegal downloading. "This should send a strong message and hopefully affect every one of the hundreds of people defending themselves."

The case involved an Internet user in the Paris suburb of Bobigny whose internet provider address — a unique computer identifier — was traced while the user was on the peer-to-peer software Shareaza.

"The right-holders found the IP address of my client and reported it to the police," said Olivier Hugot, the defending lawyer, who declined to name his client. "The annulment of the case is important because it has direct impact on the tactics used by record companies in dozens of cases in France."

The organization responsible for tracing down Internet users, the Society of Music Authors, Composers and Publishers, played down the impact of the court decision and said that it would appeal.

"This is just an isolated decision amid the many cases that we have successfully pursued," said Sophie Duhamel, communications director for the organization. "That said, it is not so good to have the decision in the jurisprudence."

The ruling sends a strong message about privacy, said Mathias Moulin, a legal adviser at the French government watchdog that defends privacy on the Internet, the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberty.

"The rights-holders should now understand that they cannot set up a system to identify downloaders on the Internet without proper authorization from us," said Moulin, whose organization has the ability to grant such permission. "It is important to have these protections established by a court."

Invasion of privacy carries fines of up to €300,000, or $395,000, and five years in prison, Moulin added.

While it is up to the individuals to pursue such legal action, one government-supported organization is considering moves against monitors.

"We do not know how many families or individuals were monitored before they chose who to prosecute," said Jean- Pierre Quignaux, a representative of the government-supported National Union of Family Associations. "Given the judge's decision, we are considering action against those invading privacy to catch music downloaders."

French privacy law is based on a directive from the European Commission, but the ruling is not likely have an impact beyond France because of national laws.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ss/privacy.php