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Old 30-12-09, 09:00 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 2nd, 2010

Since 2002


































"This will reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours. We expect as this further develops it will be reduced to minutes." – Simon Bransfield-Garth


"What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me." – Claire Cranton


"They've never had the powers to force ISPs to build in spying capabilities before now. I imagine law enforcement is very excited about this." – New Zealand IT worker


"I won’t buy brand-new CDs." – Jammie Thomas-Rasset






















Out of iTouch

I just got an iTouch, basically an iPod with an advanced degree from iPhone U., so I thought I'd log in to my home Wi-Fi network and test out this popular pocket-surfer. The network is WEP enabled so I needed a password, long since forgotten. I opened my router set-up page (192.168.1.1) and found it, but when I entered it the iTouch rejected it. I tried several times but it wasn't happening.

On the net there are a million complaints about this with just as many "solutions," most of which seem to entail scorched earth measures like resetting your router (and losing all settings) to making a new security profile (and blocking everything that presently works) to even turning off all security.

I didn't like any of those options and in spite of all the public griping the vaunted geniuses at the local Apple bar were buffaloed so here's what I did:

Under Linksys/Wireless/Wireless Security there are keys numbered 1 - 4, each with over twenty alphanumeric hex digits. On the not unreasonable assumption I could substitute a full key for the password I opened the iTouch Settings page and under Wi-Fi created a profile with my networks name, then plugged the entire 26 characters from "Key 1" into the iTouch password line, being careful not to screw things up with that tiny virtual keyboard.

Well, it didn't work. It was unable to even find the network. On closer inspection it seems the case was wrong on the first letter of the network name so it was apparently blind to it which I found a little fussy but there you are. I reentered the letter, correctly, and tried again. It found the network but then like before it wouldn’t take the password. So on the chance I had miss-entered a digit in that long hex string I redid the key line, and this time it worked, and after a few moments acquired the network. I was in.

Not only that, but it had no problem surfing, which a lot of these apparently do, even when they finally connect, and that’s a whole other dilemma. I logged into p2p-zone and checked out a few posts, then the weather and some news all without issue.

Needless to say surfing is far from practical on such a tiny gizmo and replying to posts in anything more than text speak is arduous. On the other hand with the simple addition of an HD radio/TV chip and the ability to use Skype the useful quotient would skyrocket but hey that’s Apple for you.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation give it a try. I can't say the above procedure will work for you but it may, and you can leave your present security settings in place.

New Wave

Software maker arc90 has created a free browser add on they're calling readability that markedly improves surfing by removing all the distracting stuff you're trying not to look at on a web page. It’s a great concept and well executed. For instance if you're reading an article on a newspaper website, one click re-formats it to look like a page from a novel. Everything else vanishes, ads, banners, all the junk. The only thing remaining is the text presented in your choice of crisp font on a white background with links intact.

Think clean. Think quiet. Think AdBlock taken to the ultimate extreme in engineering and design.

















Enjoy,

Jack

















January 2nd, 2010




Piracy Surcharge Set To Force 40,000 Households Offline
enigmax

Earlier, ISP BT predicted that operating an anti-filesharing scheme in the UK would cost £365m a year. Now the government has admitted that not only will broadband customers have to foot a £500m bill, but that burden will prove too great for 40,000 households – who will have no choice but to give up their Internet connections.

The music industry’s own research indicates that, on a ridiculous ‘one download equals one lost sale’ basis, losses to online piracy will amount to £200m ($319.67m) in the UK during 2009.

Labeling the claims “melodramatic,” in September boss of ISP BT’s consumer division, John Petter, warned that proposed measures to tackle these supposed loses would prove costly for ISPs – a staggering £365m ($583.4m) a year.

Today, according to a new report, government ministers have admitted that the costs will amount to £500m ($799.2m).

ISPs say that issuing warnings will cost every customer £1.40 ($2.24) and otherwise meddling with accounts at the behest of the music industry will add £25 ($40) total to an annual subscription.

Worryingly, ministers say that this extra cost will force 40,000 UK households offline, with BT’s John Petter calling the plans “collective punishment that goes against natural justice.”

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said that it is “grossly unfair” for the government to force all broadband customers to foot the bill, and noted that forcing tens of thousands offline will go against government targets of increasing Internet take-up among the most disadvantaged communities.

“We are confident that those costs will be a mere fraction of the stratospheric sums suggested by some ISPs,” a BPI spokesman told The Times, adding, “..and negligibly small when set against their vast annual revenues.”

British music churned over £3.6bn in 2008, up by 4.7%. In the same year British films accounted for 15% of worldwide box office takings, totaling £2.6bn ($4.2bn) – an increase of $1bn over 2007.

So, if this anti-piracy scheme really is destined to bring them an extra £1.7 billion extra in media sales over the next 10 years, why don’t they offset these “negligibly small” costs against their own “vast revenues” ? Because they can get the customer to pay, of course.

When this £25 charge is added to customer accounts, ISPs up and down the UK should put the amount separately on the bill as an extra item which clearly reads “Music industry surcharge.”

Let’s see how that affects piracy and, indeed, the attitudes of people who now quite rightly feel they should at least be getting some music for their money.
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-surch...ffline-091228/





The Decade in Music: Sales Slides, Pirates, Digital Rise
Edna Gundersen

From the British Invasion in the '60s to grunge in the '90s, modern music's movements always seem to fit conveniently within the boundaries of decades.

Not so the naughts, when the most ubiquitous, significant hit turned out to be the iPod, while pop diffused into a shuffle of fleeting microtrends from dubstep to crunk to screamo.

And the music industry tanked, turning the oh-ohs into the uh-ohs. A benign paranoid hiccup for everyone else, the Y2K threat found a target in the record business as the turning of the millennial odometer signaled the start of a slow-motion crash brought on by the booming computer age. Piracy flourished, revenue fell and the CD steadily lost its status as coin of the realm.

On the upside, the digital rise also swept in unprecedented access to music, generated fan communities and enabled artists to record and distribute songs cheaply without label backing.

Music's fragmented landscape meant fewer mainstream goliaths, yet Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video managed to log nearly 130 million views on YouTube and Shakira's Hips Don't Lie was streamed 85 million times.

Nothing defines pop's past decade as much as the Internet and its evolving powers to alter the way music is created, marketed, shared and consumed. And, some would say, devalued and plundered.

In 1999, the most profitable year in music history, the industry seemed to be riding a wave of limitless expansion. In March 2000, the boy-band boom had yet to go bust, and 'N Sync's No Strings Attached sold a staggering 2.4 million copies its opening week, still the biggest one-week tally on record. The album moved 9.9 million copies by year's end to help boost the industry bottom line to $14 billion.

Wave Bye Bye Bye to those fat numbers. The growing tentacles of piracy also had a grip on 2000 as Napster and Kazaa kicked off a frenzy of illicit file-sharing. Though both eventually were retooled into legitimate services, piracy foes spent years in a losing battle of Whac-A-Mole. The Recording Industry Association of America, the labels' lobbying group, sued 35,000 file-sharers from 2003 to 2009, when it abandoned the strategy.

Digital sales have climbed steadily, but not enough to offset declining CD sales, which have been off nearly 50% since 2000. In February, Taylor Swift's Fearless set a SoundScan record for the lowest sum to occupy the No. 1 spot: 62,000 copies.

The single rises to power

Theft has taken a big bite. Worldwide digital sales reached $3.7 billion in 2008, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. But that's only 5% of what's actually consumed. Users illegally downloaded 40 billion files last year, the IFPL estimates. Peer-to-peer monitoring firm BigChampagne calculates that U.S. fans swipe 1 billion songs a month.

Though not reflected at the cash register, music consumption has grown to an all-time high, not just because of forbidden freebies, but also because it has never been so plentiful, accessible and portable.

Credit the iPod and iTunes, both introduced in 2001 to the joy of music lovers tired of forking over $18 for CDs with two or three desirable tracks. As albums sagged, the single rose to power, granting stellar runs for such earworms as Outkast's Hey Ya, James Blunt's You're Beautiful, Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, Train's Drops of Jupiter and Flo Rida's Low, the decade's top-selling digital song, with 5.2 million downloads.

The Internet's universe of music stretched to infinity at warp speed, empowering fans not only to cherry-pick tunes but also to anoint new stars, whether by texting votes for American Idol contestants or championing Lily Allen, Colbie Caillat and Sean Kingston, all launched on MySpace, activated in 2003.

In 2005, the 10-city Live 8 concerts boasting U2, Paul McCartney, Madonna and Pink Floyd drew 5 million viewers to AOL's live stream, nearly double the audience for ABC's prime-time highlights special.

YouTube's arrival in late 2005 instantly broadened music's reach, starting with OK Go's Here It Goes Again clip of the band on treadmills, viewed 48 million times. (Talent wasn't vital for a viral hit: The same year brought Tay Zonday's creepy Chocolate Rain, viewed 40 million times.)

As labels shrank, artists struck out on their own or sealed record pacts with Wal-Mart (the Eagles) or Starbucks (McCartney). U2 and Madonna signed huge deals with tour promoter Live Nation.

In 2006, the Tower Records chain went belly up. About 2,680 record shops have closed since 2005. Studios have struggled, too, as musicians — inspired by cyber-trailblazers from Prince to Nine Inch Nails— have adopted Pro Tools and a host of do-it-yourself computer programs and Web tools. Musicians communicated directly with fans via websites, Facebook and Twitter. (In February, Erykah Badu tweeted the minute-by-minute birth, from contractions to delivery, of her baby girl.)

A changed landscape

The innumerable online outlets and sheer volume of music has resulted in a culture of a gazillion spokes and no hub. With fans' shortened attention spans and labels' dwindling resources for nurturing acts, the pop machine no longer erects tentpoles like Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen. Eminem, the decade's top-selling artist, was one of few to attain water-cooler status. Will he, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Kings of Leon and a few other '00s standouts still make a stir in 2030? The Beatles have bragging rights to the decade's best-selling album, and they broke up in 1970. U2, formed in 1976, is the only act capable of mounting a global stadium tour.

As the decade fades, nobody has figured out an approach to replace a broken business model. Radiohead tried in October 2007, when it initially released In Rainbows with a digital tip jar for voluntary contributions, then as a physical CD three months later, when it sold 122,000 its first week.

Though the band offered fans an option to get the album free from its website, fans downloaded it from illicit outlets at 10 times the rate of new albums by other top acts.

Perhaps more troubling, In Rainbows may be remembered more for its experimental distribution than for its songs, just as the past decade's digital leaps will leave a deeper imprint than the endless march of prematurely hatched sensations, from Mims to Tweet to Blu Cantrell, who were hyped, devoured and dismissed in the course of one or two disposable ringtones.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/n...ade29_CV_N.htm





An Opportunity Missed to Apply 'Fair Use' to File Sharing
Jon Healey

Joel Tenenbaum set out to become the standard-bearer for people who fight back against Recording Industry Assn. of America lawsuits, but he has come to symbolize fighting back the wrong way. After he admitted on the stand to downloading and sharing 30 songs -- contrary to what he'd claimed in a deposition -- a federal jury found the Boston University graduate liable in August for copyright infringement and ordered him to pay the labels $675,000. Today, the U.S. District Court judge who presided over the case, Nancy Gertner, issued a formal ruling explaining why she had rejected Tenenbaum's "fair use" defense. In a crisp indictment of Tenenbaum's legal team (which was led by notable copyright expert Charles Nesson from Harvard Law School), Gertner said she was prepared to consider a more expansive fair-use defense than other courts had entertained, but the defense blew it.

From her decision (courtesy of attorney Ray Beckerman's blog):

Quote:
The Court, deeply concerned by the rash of file-sharing lawsuits, the imbalance of resources between the parties, and the upheaval of norms of behavior brought on by the Internet, did everything in its power to permit Tenenbaum to make his best case for fair use. ...

As it made clear previously, the Court was prepared to consider a more expansive fair use argument than other courts have credited -- perhaps one supported by facts specific to this individual and this unique period of rapid technological change. For example, file sharing for the purposes of sampling music prior to purchase or space-shifting to store purchased music more efficiently might offer a compelling case for fair use. Likewise, a defendant who used the new file-sharing networks in the technological interregnum before digital media could be purchased legally, but who later shifted to paid outlets, might also be able to rely on the defense.

But the defendant would have none of it. Rather than tailoring his fair use defense to suggest a modest exception to copyright protections, Tenenbaum mounted a broadside attack that would excuse all file sharing for private enjoyment. It is a version of fair use so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress created, defying both statute and precedent. ... In his view, a defendant just needs to show that he did not make money from the files he downloaded or distributed -- i.e., that his use was “non-commercial” -- in order to put his fair use defense before a jury. And every non-commercial use, to him, is presumptively fair. Beyond that threshold, the matter belongs entirely to the jury, which is entitled to consider any and all factors touching on its innate sense of fairness -- nothing more and nothing less.
More important, perhaps, Gertner wrote that Tenenbaum's team didn't provide evidence or precedents to back up its position. In other words, it was all show, no dough. Hence her decision to grant the labels' motion to throw out Tenenbaum's defense before the case reached the jury.

Gertner didn't grant the Recording Industry Assn. of America everything it sought; although she ordered Tenenbaum not to infringe any more copyrights, she refused on free-speech grounds to bar him from promoting file sharing. She also said that a fair-use defense may very well apply to some file-sharers -- "for example, the defendant who 'deleted the MP3 files after sampling them, or created MP3 files exclusively for space-shifting purposes from audio CDs they had previously purchased,'" as Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (which Nesson founded) has argued. But she added, "Tenenbaum is not such a defendant."

Tenenbaum is appealing, so he may yet shake off the mantle of futility.
http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla...e-sharing.html





2009 in Review: File Sharing and Internet Piracy

A look back at the trials and tribulations of illegal file sharing and downloading in 2009
Dan Worth

It seems that 2009 was the year in which the authorities went on the offensive and started to hit back against illegal file-sharing and downloading.

Sweden found itself at the centre of media attention on the issue of illegal file sharing in April as the owners of The Pirate Bay were taken to court and subsequently sentenced to one year in jail and fined £4.2m for facilitating the downloading of copyrighted content.

The extent to which the seriousness of the issue was being taken in the US was highlighted in June when a woman was fined $1.92m (£1.16m) for illegally downloading 24 songs from Kazaa.

Meanwhile, in the UK the government set out its plans to tackle illegal file-sharing with the Digital Economy Bill, which immediately drew a huge amount of criticism from interested parties.

The Bill, spearheaded by Lord Mandelson, was highly controversial owing to its proposal of dealing with persistent illegal file sharers through a three-strikes disconnection policy and asking ISPs to monitor IP addresses.

The government has been keen to take the side of copyrighted content providers, and research it issued in May entitled Copycats? Digital Consumers in the On-Line Age estimated that £12bn worth of copyrighted content could be freely consumed through just one peer-to-peer network over a year on a 50Mbit/s connection.

Studies like this have helped formed the basis of Lord Mandelson's willingness to introduce a policy of disconnection for persistent file-sharers, but this proposal met a potential stumbling block after the EU said that any such action may be illegal.

Additionally, many in the industry have claimed the extent of illegal file-sharing is being overstated by the government and content providers as a justification for introducing some of measures set out in the Digital Economy Bill.

Jim Killock, from the Open Rights Group, said that since the arrival of new service models, such as Spotify, the BBC iPlayer and Sky Songs, which provide online copyrighted content legally, illegal downloading has almost been "cut in half".

However, looking ahead to 2010, more accurate figures on illegal downloading could become available after news in November that Virgin Media is to trial hardware from Detica that provides more accurate measurements on the amount of file sharing taking place on networks.

This could help provide the industry with more accurate metrics and help internet service providers (ISPs) meet some requirements of the Digital Economy Bill, such as monitoring levels of copyright infringement on their networks.

In the main, though, ISPs have shown disappointment with the suggestion in the Bill that they will be required to monitor traffic and report users to the necessary authorities.

TalkTalk helped lead the protests against the Bill with executive director of strategy and regulation Andrew Heaney setting up an online petition on the government's number10.gov.uk web site. To date this has drawn over 20,000 signatures, and Heaney told V3.co.uk that he believes the figure underlines the strength of feeling against the bill.

Several Swedish ISPs also said in April that they will stop logging IP addresses to preserve the privacy and anonymity of users.

Commenting on the Bill, Paddy Gardiner from legal firm Eversheds told V3.co.uk that the Bill had not been properly thought through, and that the Labour government may be trying to rush it in before the general election next year.

But it's not just music and other entertainment that has been the subject of debate around illegal downloading. A report in May from the Business Software Alliance suggested that one in four software installations in the UK is illegal.

In October a business in the north of England was fined a six-figure sum for using unlicensed versions of Microsoft and Adobe software.

Certainly the issues, debates, disagreements and proposed solutions around illegal file sharing are a long way from being resolved, and 2010 could well prove much the same as battle lines become more firmly entrenched.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/analysis/2255...wnloading-file





BitTorrent Sites May Be Censored in Italy
Ernesto

The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.

The Supreme Court ruling follows a nationwide block of The Pirate Bay In August 2008, when a decree from a public prosecutor instructed ISPs to censor the site. As a result, millions of Italians were banned from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted. However, two months ago the Supreme Court nullified this victory, opening up the possibility for anti-piracy groups to censor The Pirate Bay and many other torrent sites in Italy.

This week the Supreme Court detailed its decision. According to the verdict, BitTorrent sites that host torrent files are playing a significant role in the downloading and uploading process of their users. By doing so they are more than an agnostic search engine such as Google.

The fact that a site is not hosted in Italy or operated by Italians is irrelevant according to the court. The site is visited by many Italians who (in part) use it to share copyrighted material, the Supreme Court argued.

With this verdict in hand, copyright holders can now request The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites to be filtered by Internet service providers. The Pirate Bay is first in line, as its case has now been sent back to the Court of Bergamo.

Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi have informed TorrentFreak that the site will remain accessible for now. “There will be another hearing before the Court of Bergamo,” they told us, “which will have to decide again whether to block The Pirate Bay in Italy or not.”

“We will go again before the Court of Bergamo, where we will have ample grounds to defend The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers noted, adding “And we could even appeal the new decision before the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court decision has nevertheless set a dangerous precedent. If The Pirate Bay loses its case it is expected that many other BitTorrent sites will face a shutdown order in the future.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-s...-italy-091227/





Court Orders Three H-1B Sites Disabled

Judge's ruling to shut down three opposition sites is part of Apex libel lawsuit
Patrick Thibodeau

A New Jersey judge has ordered the shutdown of three H-1B opposition Web sites and seeks information about the identity of anonymous posters.

On Dec. 23, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge James Hurley ordered firms that register domains and provide hosting services -- GoDaddy Inc., Network Solutions, Comcast Cable Communications Inc. and DiscountASP.Net, to disable the three sites, ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com. Facebook Inc. was also ordered to disable ITgrunt's Facebook page.

DiscountASP.Net said it has disabled Endh1b.com after it received the order from the New Jersey Superior Court. The order did not request any account information, only that the company "...immediately shut down and disable the website www.endh1b.com until further order of this court..," a spokesman said in an email. Facebook said it received the document Monday.

GoDaddy is complying with the order and has suspended the web hosting for ITgrunt.com, said Laurie Anderson. GoDaddy disputes manager, domain services.

The web site Endh1b.com is registered but not hosted at Go Daddy, Anderson added in an e-mail. "Both domain names have been placed on registrar lock due to the pending litigation. When Go Daddy receives a court order, it is standard procedure to comply," she said.

Hurley's order was made in response to a libel lawsuit filed by IT services and consulting firm Apex Technology Group Inc., based in Edison, N.J. against the three Web sites opposing the H-1B visa program.

The issue is creating a stir among H-1B opponents working in IT-related jobs who fear their posts could result in the loss of their jobs.

Two of the sites, itgrunt.com and endh1b.com, were offline this morning, but guestworkerfraud.com remained operating.

The company is seeking the identity of a person who posted an Apex employment agreement on Docstoc.com, that has since been removed. A link to the document and comments critical of it has been posted on a variety of Web sites, including at least one in India, on Desicrunch.com. The comment broadly alleges that employees will find it difficult to leave Apex because of its contract terms.

Apex, in one legal filing, said the allegations by the anonymous posters are false and defamatory, and were hurting the company. In the filing, Apex said it "has had three consultants refuse to report for employment" as a result postings, according to legal documents.

Apex said it is also seeking "contact details of the individual who posted this legal agreement without permission since we are the copyright owner of the legal document."

Accoring to court documents, a writer responding to admin@endh1b.com wrote that the site has "not posted a legal agreement and don't have the contact details of anyone of our contributors. We will also protect the privacy of any members of our community."
Patrick Papalia, an attorney representing Apex, said that the company has already identified an employee who left the initial comment. But he said the issue goes well beyond the agreement and involves threatening and racist comments against company officials, as well as ongoing allegations that it is engaging in illegal activities. "Apex has an outstanding reputation in the information technology field," he said.

John Miano, who heads the Programmers Guild and is also an attorney, and who one represented one the parties involved in the dispute, said it is "rather chilling" to have a court in New Jersey ordering the shutdown of Web sites operated by people with no connection to New Jersey.

The operator of ITgrunt.com deferred questions to Donna Conroy, who heads Bright Future Jobs, an activist organization on the H-1B issue, who detailed her concerns about it in a post on her site.

In an email, she said, "I'm astonished that an American judge would force American web sites to rat on American workers who wouldn't snitch on an Indian H-1B. If this order stands, it will rob the security every American expects when they post complaints anonymously or express their opinions on-line. It will create a credible threat that Americans could face retaliation from any current or former employer."

The operator of Guestworkerfraud.com linked to ITgrunt.com's blog entry and said he added some comments of his own. He doesn't allow comments on this site. He has since removed the entry concerning Apex. He says he won't let the New Jersey judge "run the Internet and silence free speech by shutting down the whole site. Hence, my site is still up." He asked that his name not be used, in response to an email.

The ISPs and registrars were contacted. ITgrunt operates a page on Facebook. A company spokesman said it has not been formally served. The other companies didn't respond by press time.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...sites_disabled





Cybercrooks Target File-Sharing Networks

Security experts at Kaspersky Labs warn that cybercriminals are shifting their focus from worms and spams to file-sharing services.
Anuradha Shukla

This year is on its way out and seemingly cybercriminals are also planning their year ahead. Secure content management solutions developer Kaspersky Lab has outlined the threats it expects to see in 2010 as a result of cybercriminal activity.

Kaspersky Lab was expecting a rise in the number of global epidemics in 2009 but this year was marked by sophisticated malicious programs with rootkit functionality. Corporates and individuals struggled with the Kido worm (Conficker), Web attacks and botnets. An increase in the cases of SMS fraud and attacks on social networks was also experienced.

Shift in Cyber Strategy

Cybercriminals have changed their strategy and in 2010 they will no longer attack via websites and applications. They are now more focused on attacking computers through file-sharing networks.

This concept is not entirely new according to Kaspersky Lab, which points out that this year saw a series of mass malware epidemics supported by malicious files that were spread via torrent portals. This 'approach' helped cyber criminals spread threats such as TDSS and Virut. There will be a significant increase in these types of incidents on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks next year.

Being a criminal doesn't mean there will be no competition similar to the real business world. Kaspersky Lab says next year, cybercriminals will continue competing for traffic and they are trying to make their businesses legal. Apparently, they want to legalize the way they earn money online using the huge amount of traffic that can be generated by botnets.

Profits from Spam

Partner programs will be popular in the future as botnet owners will try to make profits from activities such as sending spam, performing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or distributing malware without committing an explicit crime.

Google Wave has reasons to be worried next year as it will be a target for cyberattacks. Both iPhone and Android should be careful because the first malicious programs for these mobile platforms already appeared in 2009.

Kaspersky Lab notes that the major cause of epidemics will be the detection of new vulnerabilities in both software developed by third parties and in Windows 7, the newly launched operating system. Next year will be one of the quietest years for some time if no serious vulnerabilities are detected.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/18517..._networks.html





AT&T Tells FCC It's Time to Cut the Cord
Tony Bradley

In response to a Notice of Inquiry released by the FCC to explore how to transition to a purely IP-based communications network, AT&T has declared that it's time to cut the cord. AT&T told the FCC that the death of landlines is a matter of when , not if, and asked that a firm deadline be set for pulling the plug.

AT&T tells the FCC that supporting traditional POTS landlines is impeding investment in broadband, VoIP, and wireless services.AT&T said in its response to the FCC that "with each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network ("PSTN") and plain-old telephone service ("POTS") as relics of a by-gone era."

It also stated "It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete."

Moving to VoIP

Providers like Vonage have been delivering VoIP (Voice over IP) for consumers over broadband Internet connections for years. I should know, I was one of the charter members. I haven't had an actual POTS landline for at least five years.

While my local telephone providers wanted to nickel and dime me for "features" like caller ID and voicemail, Vonage has reliably provided all-inclusive service for $24.95 for as long as I can remember.

While Vonage is still a major player in the consumer VoIP market, just about every communications entity has joined in the game now. VoIP phone services are offered as a bundled service along with broadband Internet service, and digital cable TV by major players like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T itself.

Transition to Mobile

The way wireless phone plans are set up now, it is hard to argue in favor of keeping both a mobile phone and a home phone--even a VoIP line. You can get unlimited minutes of talk time with all of the bells and whistles you can imagine--caller ID, call forwarding, etc. Many plans come with unlimited data, unlimited text messaging, and more. With all of that service in your hip pocket, do you really need a phone attached to your wall?

The number of U.S. households that have ditched the landline entirely in favor of relying solely on mobile phones doubled between 2006 and 2009. A quarter of U.S. households no longer have a landline of any kind, and that number will continue to grow.

No Dial Tone

One of the last remaining reasons for maintaining a standard POTS landline is the fact that in most cases the POTS line maintains a dial tone and the ability to make and receive calls during catastrophes and emergencies.

When Hurricane Ike hit here in the Houston area, there was no power for days, or even weeks in some areas. No power means no broadband Internet, which means VoIP phone services like Vonage don't work. No power to cell towers means no bars on your cell signal and no wireless service.

Some broadband VoIP providers have solutions to address at least short-term power outages. AT&T provides its UVerse customers with a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) battery back-up that maintains power to the broadband router at least for a while.

Emergency services, and the ability to place 911 calls have also been an issue. With a POTS landline it is easy to match a phone number with a physical address, but with broadband VoIP you could be calling from around the corner or around the world and the 911 operators can't tell. There are solutions in place for 911 calls via broadband VoIP, but users who drop landlines entirely in favor of wireless phones may have issues getting timely emergency service.

Those are issues that will have to be worked out, though. The future marches on, and it is fair for AT&T and other traditional POTS providers to want to drop the obsolete, unprofitable technology and focus their resources on the universal broadband and IP communications of tomorrow.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente..._the_cord.html





Clearwire Stayed Ahead in Big Year for WiMax

It rolled out mobile WiMax to nearly 30 markets in '09
Stephen Lawson

2009 was a very big year for Clearwire, as the wireless Internet provider took its ambitious rollout of mobile WiMax from just two cities to nearly 30 markets.

After years of planning and false starts, a national 4G (fourth-generation) mobile data network began to take shape in the U.S., and in terms of launching commercial services, the rollout is on schedule. Clearwire, formed last year through the merger of a pre-WiMax service provider of the same name and Sprint Nextel's Xohm WiMax business, is in 27 markets now and has the capital it needs to reach 120 million people by the end of next year, according to Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert.

Clearwire offers wireless Internet access designed to work in homes and offices and go with users as they travel around within its coverage area. The WiMax service, called Clear, is advertised with speeds of 3M bps (bits per second) to 6M bps, though slower plans are available at lower prices. Regular rates start at $25 per month for 1M bps in a home and $45 per month for unlimited mobile access at 3-6Mbps, both with two-year commitments. Clear is available in major cities including Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Baltimore and Portland, Oregon.

Though majority-owned by Sprint and backed by Intel, Google and three large cable operators, Clearwire is, effectively, the cutting-edge startup of the U.S. 4G industry. Using a technology that came out of the data networking world rather than the telecommunications realm, Clearwire and its partners are taking on AT&T and Verizon for video, voice, data and mobile services. However, this year the company did bring in a new CEO from the mobile operator establishment. William Morrow, who replaced Benjamin Wolff in March, is a former CEO of Vodafone Europe and Vodafone U.K. (Wolff remains vice chairman.)

As it wrapped up the third quarter, Clearwire had about 173,000 subscribers to its WiMax service, with a total of 555,000 customers including users of its older, pre-WiMax offering. The company said it expected to sign up that many again in the fourth quarter alone, as commercial service launched in several more markets.

Those are still tiny numbers in the U.S. broadband industry, and Clearwire has had its share of stumbles this year. Many subscribers took to Web forums such as DSLreports.com to complain that their WiMax service had been slow and inconsistent, with frequent outages. Some complained to state consumer protection agencies that the service didn't perform as advertised and was difficult to cancel.

"The Clear salesman told me the service would work at my address. It did not. But when I attempted to cancel, they said I owed more money -- for a service they could not provide. I have asked for a full refund, but they refuse to provide that," Portland resident Paul Koberstein wrote in September to the Oregon Department of Justice. The department said every time it contacted Clearwire about a consumer complaint, the problem was solved promptly.

Clearwire's Sievert said the company provides a great service and is continuing to make it better. For example, the company is investing in new technology to help it more accurately predict how good service will be at a prospective subscriber's home, Sievert said.

"As we've built new cities, we've learned from our experiences in the prior cities, and that allows us to build a better network," as well as create good buying experiences, Sievert said. All Clearwire tech support is performed by the company's own employees, while sales and customer support are handled by mix of Clearwire and third parties, he said.

Working through the challenges of rolling out 4G has given Clearwire an edge over rivals that haven't done so yet, he said.

"I think it's one of the real advantages that we've got," Sievert said. "We're 27 cities into this, 30 million of the population into this, and we keep getting better and better."

Sievert said the company's biggest challenge has been carrying out the physical construction of its network, which is now live in locations ranging from Maui to Amarillo to Philadelphia and involves extensive use of microwave, a technology that hasn't been widely used in the U.S. before now.

"In addition to being a wireless service company, it turns out that we are a sizable construction company," Sievert said.

But Clearwire's hardest test may come next year. Verizon Wireless announced plans in February to launch commercial 4G service next year using LTE (Long-Term Evolution), a technology that a majority of the world's mobile operators have committed to rolling out over the next few years. AT&T plans to deploy its own LTE network in 2011, and this quarter it began to install a new 3G system called HSPA 7.2 (High-Speed Packet Access) with a theoretical throughput of 7.2M bps.

WiMax backers have long emphasized the technology's head start over LTE. The IEEE 802.16e standard on which WiMax is based was approved in 2005, whereas LTE is just now nearing completion. In fact, Sprint and Clearwire at one time said they would reach 100 million U.S. residents with WiMax by the end of 2008. They missed that date by far, partly because of management changes at Sprint, but the new Clearwire does have a meaningful head start over prospective LTE providers, analysts said.

In addition to having a commercial network online, there are numerous client devices already available for Clearwire's service, analyst Daryl Schoolar of Current Analysis pointed out. The company offers tabletop and USB modems, plus the Clear Spot, a device that lets users share the connection of a single WiMax USB modem via Wi-Fi. There are also more than 20 PCs from Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba and Fujitsu that can be ordered with built-in WiMax modems. Only one of those is a netbook, but Clearwire expects more of these highly portable devices to work on its network next year.

However, Clearwire still needs to beef up its client lineup, Schoolar said. There is only one handheld device to use on the network: the Samsung Mondi, an MID (mobile Internet device) that runs Microsoft Windows 6.1. Clearwire's Sievert wouldn't comment on any other handheld products coming up but said WiMax handsets should be on the market in the second half of 2010.

At a minimum, Clearwire should integrate a WiMax modem in the Clear Spot, Schoolar said. Currently, users have to have a USB WiMax modem and plug it into the Clear Spot, which is a portable, battery-powered Wi-Fi router. Meanwhile, the company will need to keep the mobile hardware industry focused enough on WiMax to keep a stream of products coming after major carriers around the world adopt LTE, he said.

As for Clearwire's coverage issues, it's common for wireless performance to fall short when networks are first built, analysts said. Clearwire has so much radio spectrum -- 100MHz or more in most markets across the U.S., according to the company -- that it should be able to solve its performance issues over time, said Philip Solis of ABI Research.

Those spectrum holdings, along with the marketing and business plans of Clearwire and its service partners, will do more to determine the company's ultimate success than will the technical distinctions between WiMax and LTE, according to IDC analyst Godfrey Chua and others. The two technologies deliver essentially the same thing to consumers, who ultimately will make a choice among service packages from Verizon, AT&T, Clearwire and other operators for the usual reasons of price, reputation and convenience, they said.

"Those Betamax vs. VHS analogies do not apply," Solis said, referring to the way Sony's videotape technology for consumers was made obsolete by the incompatible standard used by other vendors. Consumers get online either way. For them, it's simply a matter of choosing between two different Internet services.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...ource=rss_news





Internet Radio Stations Are the New Wave
Eric A. Taub

Early fans of the iPhone bemoaned that, unlike many of its competitors, their favorite “do anything” device couldn’t do one obvious thing: play local radio stations.

They didn’t get it. FM tuners are passé. Why include tuner technology to play a few dozen stations when you can harness thousands of radio stations over the Internet?

Unlike standard broadcast radio, Internet radio stations can be heard virtually anywhere (copyright restrictions aside), as long as you have a device that can go on the Web; that can be a PC, a smartphone or a stand-alone receiver.

An Internet radio station may have started out life as a traditional local broadcast outlet, and then management decided that it would be great to let people hear it everywhere. Or an Internet radio station may be nothing more than one person in a basement uploading music or talk to the Web, hoping that someone out there will listen.

Literally thousands of genres of Internet radio exist, from oldies, classical and religious to ultraradical talk, from the right and left. The first trick is finding them, and the next is playing them. Fortunately, with a little information, both tasks are rather easy.

TUNE IN To find an Internet station of a particular genre, start with the basics: a Web search. Type in “60s,” “NPR” or “Catholic” and the words “Internet radio” and you’ll come up with a list and links to those channels.

Another useful source is streamingradioguide.com. The Web site lists more than 14,000 stations that can be searched by genre. While extensive, the list is not complete.

Internet radio hardware and smartphone apps that offer radio transmissions don’t typically accumulate station offerings themselves; rather, they use aggregators, companies that create a selection of channels. On the Web, you can access radio channels directly from those aggregators as well; they include Reciva.com, Radiotime.com, Vtuner.com, 1.fm and Freeradio.tv.

In addition, Apple’s iTunes software (Mac and PC) offers hundreds of Internet radio stations. To listen to them, click on “Radio” under “Library” in the left vertical column.

TURN ON A wide variety of stand-alone players are now available that allow consumers to listen to Internet radio without using a PC.

One compelling feature: many offer wireless connectivity — with a wireless router, you can place the player anywhere in the home within range of the signal, and use the player as you would with a normal radio.

Livio Radio’s wireless line includes its AARP, NPR and Pandora models. (Pandora’s music service allows listeners to “create” a radio station based on an artist or genre they like. Then, Pandora automatically plays other music that the service believes fits the same category.)

Each $200 unit features programming from its model name; however all are capable of playing any of the 16,000 Internet stations offered in the unit’s menus, from ’80s music to police scanner intercepts.

The models can be connected to an external stereo system, or the unit’s built-in speakers can be used.

Logitech’s Squeezebox line of Internet radio devices ($200 to $400) include, depending on model, a color screen, speakers and the ability to play both Internet radio and music stored on connected home PCs.

Models range from a tabletop unit to a boombox to the Squeezebox Duet. They are designed to send the Internet feed and your PC’s music collection to a home stereo system, and they come with their own remotes.

For about $120, Myine’s Ira Internet radio receiver connects to a home stereo or powered speakers, and offers 11,000 Internet stations. It incorporates a simple, two-color display and a remote.

Sanyo’s R227 model, $180 at Amazon.com, takes its styling cues from the KLH Model 8 radio of the 1950s, and includes not just the ability to receive Internet stations, but FM ones as well.

The unit features eight presets for both Internet and broadcast stations, and also functions as a music-playing clock radio.

Philips offers a number of wireless Internet radio models under its Streamium brand. The NP2900/37, about $300, includes a color screen, and is housed in a sleek, horizontal sound bar, with a stand reminiscent of an iMac’s.

With four speakers and 30 watts of power, this Streamium can also play music stored on a network-connected Mac or PC, and can display cover art. It also includes a month of Rhapsody, a subscription-based music service.

DROP IN (TO AN APP STORE) Hundreds of radio apps are available at Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch app store, both free and fee-based.

AOL Radio (free) does what its name implies: it simply offers 200 Internet stations across 25 genres, plus 150 CBS radio stations, and includes not just music, but comedy and sports as well.

Crave real-life drama? Police Radio and Scanner 911 (both 99 cents), as well as Emergency Radio ($3) allow you to listen in to dozens of police, fire and emergency service broadcasts around the country.

For public radio fans, at least three apps will give you easy access to “All Things Considered” and other shows. Public Radio App ($3) allows listeners to pause and rewind 300 public radio shows, and bookmark them to return to listen later. The app also displays the Web page associated with the show, and can be set to play as a clock radio.

Other public radio apps are available at no charge, including Public Radio Player and PRI; the latter plays only shows from Public Radio International. In addition, many public radio stations have stand-alone apps for their program stream, including KPCC in Los Angeles, which is free, and New York’s WNYC, which costs 99 cents (for podcasts). Android users can get streaming Internet stations using apps like Streamitall and Last.fm, which are also available to iPhone users (Pandora also has an Android app). BlackBerry users have FlyCast and Slacker Radio (which are also iPhone-friendly) among their options.

So the next time you are browsing through your music library, wishing you had something new, do not lament the absence of AM or FM. Instead of a limited number of stations, a global selection is merely a click away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/te.../31basics.html





Irish Atheists Challenge New Blasphemy Laws

Secular campaigners publish series of anti-religious quotes and say they will challenge law if charged with blasphemy
Henry McDonald

Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.

The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

It defines blasphemy as "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted".

The justice minister, Dermot Ahern, said that the law was necessary because while immigration had brought a growing diversity of religious faiths, the 1936 constitution extended the protection of belief only to Christians.

But Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the new law by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Björk, Frank Zappa and the former Observer editor and Irish ex-minister Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Michael Nugent, the group's chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if it were charged with blasphemy.

Nugent said: "This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

"We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly. Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous."

He said that despite the published quotations being abusive and insulting in relation to matters held sacred by various religions, Atheist Ireland "unreservedly support the right of these people to have published or uttered them, and we unreservedly support the right of any Irish citizen to make comparable statements about matters held sacred by any religion without fear of being criminalised, and without having to prove to a court that a reasonable person would find any particular value in the statement".
Nugent said that the group would be prepared to take on the state if anyone complained about the quotes and that the campaign to repeal the law was part of a wider battle to create a more secular republic.

"You would think that after all the scandals the Catholic church endured in 2009 the introduction of a blasphemy law would be the last thing that the Irish state would be considering in terms of defending religion and its place in society.

"We ask Fianna Fáil and the Green party to repeal their anachronistic blasphemy law, as part of the revision of the defamation act that is included within the act. We ask them to hold a referendum to remove the reference to blasphemy from the Irish constitution.""We also ask all TDs and senators to support a referendum to remove references to God from the Irish constitution, including the clauses that prevent atheists from being appointed as president of Ireland or as a judge without swearing a religious oath asking God to direct them in their work."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...-blasphemy-law





Bad Apple: Censoring the Dalai Lama in China iPhone Apps
Kit Eaton

Oh dear--this isn't going to end well, and it's a shame. Apple, which usually enjoys a rosy-tinted PR glow, has soured its image by censoring iPhone apps that relate to the Dalai Lama in China. Is this the cost of doing business in China?

Apple's entry into the potentially lucrative Chinese mobile phone market was long anticipated both inside and outside the company, and the negotiations themselves seem to have matched the Great Wall itself in sheer complexity and length. Even after the launch, there was concern about how well things were going--but the sales figures of the device have clearly picked up a lot now.

But of course, doing business inside one of the World's closed-minded nations--one that regularly censors the Net and even shuts off access to foreign social networking sites because of its "polluting" effects (read: truthfully newsworthy)--is never going to be easy. To get permission to do business there, you have to kowtow to the Government's point of view. A lot. Even when that point of view is, to us outside the nation, almost criminally insane.

Hence the censorship of apps that mention the Dalai Lama. Never mind how much you might think of the Nobel Peace Prize-winner as a calm, rational, happy and enlightened soul: In China he's a dissident, a figure for fomenting political dissent. Hence Apple has to agree to censor apps that pertain to the little guy.

Nasty? Yes. Evil? Possibly. Representative of Apple completely giving in to Chinese draconian measures? No. Because the company is simply following the rules that everyone--Google, Yahoo, and so on--are all following too. And it's not voluntarily doing so--if it were, it would also have alerted Chinese authorities to any one of a number of apps among the thousands that exist that let users circumvent censorship. Like those that link to YouTube content, which is otherwise banned. Or those that act as indirect gateways to social networking sites that are subject to censorship and lock-downs. China's such a huge business opportunity it can't be ignored, despite the inherent moral and ethical issues.

Of course the Chinese are unlikely to be getting the sort of Government 2.0 apps that are sweeping smartphones here--the ones that let you send in a pic of a pothole in a road, or see where local federal cash spends are occurring. And that's a shame. Though there's always a jailbreak route to a "Seen an example of government oppression? Send in a pic!"
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-...na-iphone-apps





Web Campaign Fails to Prevent Execution in China
Robert Mackey

As my colleague David Barboza reports, a 53-year-old British man named Akmal Shaikh, 53, was executed by lethal injection in China on Tuesday, despite evidence posted on the Web that seemed to illustrate that he was mentally ill.

Mr. Shaikh was arrested in 2008 when Chinese authorities found heroin in a suitcase he was carrying. Members of his family and some people who knew Mr. Shaikh in Poland — where he lived, homeless on the streets, before traveling to China — said that he had been duped into carrying the suitcase by drug smugglers. The smugglers, they said, took advantage of his delusional nature by telling him that they could help him become a pop star in China.

Helen Pidd reported in The Guardian on Monday that a British human rights group, Reprieve, attempted to illustrate that Mr. Shaikh was delusional in a Web campaign that involved posting this music video for a pop song he had recorded called “Come Little Rabbit,” with English, Arabic and Polish lyrics. (Warning: the video contains one graphic image of a dead animal.)

Earlier this month, Reprieve also posted testimony about Mr. Shaikh’s mental state from people who knew him in Poland. He moved there from Britain several years ago, saying he had plans to start an airline, even though he had no money or experience in that field. Reprieve also posted some of the hundreds of rambling e-mail messages Mr. Shaikh sent to the British Embassy in Warsaw in 2005.

As Ms. Pidd explained in The Guardian, Mr. Shaikh shared in the e-mail messages “his delusions with celebrities and government officials he had never met, firing off endless dispatches typed in an enormous 72-point font”:

Quote:
Some messages were copied in to a group of 74 organizations and individuals, including Tony Blair, Sir Paul McCartney, George W. Bush and the BBC program “Top Gear.” But among the nonsense contained in the e-mail was information Shaikh’s lawyers claim proves he had become involved with criminals who took advantage of his vulnerability. One mentioned a character called Carlos, who was going to help Shaikh achieve his dream of making it big in the music industry. Carlos, wrote Shaikh, had excellent contacts, and he knew a producer in Kyrgyzstan who could help him fulfill his dream of becoming a pop star.
Ivan Lewis, an official in Britain’s Foreign Office told The Associated Press that the government had also tried to prove to Chinese officials that Mr. Shaikh was mentally ill. Mr. Lewis later told Britain’s Channel 4 News, “it is reprehensible to put to death a man with mental health problems.”

The video report from Channel 4 News embedded below includes a response from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, who said, “Nobody has the right to speak ill of China’s judicial sovereignty. She added, “We express our strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition over the groundless British accusations.” http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...n-in-china/?hp





Infamous Chinese Pirates Launch Ubuntu that Looks Just Like Windows XP
Sebastian Anthony

From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes ... Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release -- a pirate version of Windows XP itself -- is being cracked down on by Microsoft.

If you clicked the link above, you'll notice that the entire site is in Chinese with no sign of any button that'll magically turn it into English, but if you navigate to the download page, there does seem to be five links to the ISO that you can download. Initial testing, and the screenshots, would suggest that the OS's GUI (graphical user interface) is purely Chinese too, but if you find out a way to convert it into American/English, let us know!

This isn't the first time copycats or pirates have imitated a prevalent operating system. Cloned in China reported on the case of Tomato Garden Windows XP, another pirate distribution, where the creator was jailed for 4 years and fined $147,000. China has very lax piracy laws, but I would expect Microsoft to lean rather heavily on its friends there -- if they have any -- to make sure Ylmf OS is stamped out quickly. It might not be Windows itself, but you can sue for GUI copycatting too!

All in all, despite the questionable legality, it really is a great-looking copycat; almost pixel-perfect. I wonder if Ubuntu developers are happy, or despairing.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/12...ke-windows-xp/





China Says 5,394 Arrested in Internet Porn Crackdown

Chinese police arrested thousands in a drive against Internet pornography throughout 2009, officials said, vowing a deepening crackdown that critics say is being used to tighten overall censorship.

The Chinese government has run a highly publicized campaign against what officials said were banned smutty and lewd pictures overwhelming the country's Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.

Chinese police said late on Thursday the crackdown on Internet pornography had brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009 -- a fourfold increase in the number of such cases compared with 2008.

The announcement on the Ministry of Public Security's website (www.mps.gov.cn) said the drive would deepen in 2010.

Police would "intensify punishments for Internet operations that violate laws and regulations", said the statement from the ministry's Internet security section.

"Strengthen monitoring of information," it urged, "Press Internet service providers to put in place preventive technology."

With an estimated 360 million Internet users, China has a bigger online population than any other country. But the ruling Communist Party worries the Internet could become a dangerous conduit for threatening images and ideas.

The ministry did not say how many of the 5,394 suspects arrested were later charged, released or prosecuted.

The anti-pornography drive has also netted many sites with politically sensitive or even simply user-generated content, in what some see as an effort by the government to reassert control over new media.

China has banned a number of popular websites and Internet services, including Google's Youtube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, as well as Chinese content sharing sites.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60004220100101





Kindle is Most Gifted Amazon Item, Ever
Michelle Meyers

Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales, and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king, perhaps fueled by continued shifts in plans for shipments of Barnes & Noble's competing Nook e-reader.

"We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history," said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

In another milestone for the e-reader, the company noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn't offer specific numbers for either category.

The peak shopping day for the online retailer was December 14, when customers ordered more than 9.5 million items worldwide, "a record-breaking 110 items per second."

Among those items bought between November 15 and December 19, the top electronics, following the Kindle, were Apple's iPod Touch 8GB and the Garmin

In the video game category, top sellers were the Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board; New Super Mario Bros., and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Among software purchases, top items were Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac (Home and Student Edition).

Top wireless purchases included the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (unlocked), Plantronics 510 Bluetooth Headset, and BlackBerry Bold 9700 Phone (AT&T).

Other top selling gadgets included Casio's Waveceptor Atomic Dual-Time Watch, Oster's Electric Wine-Bottle Opener, Omron's HJ-112 Digital Pocket Pedometer, and Bosch's Laser Distance Measuring Device.

We'll have more comprehensive coverage on what looks to be a strong online holiday sales season as the figures come in. In the meantime, here are a few more fun gadget sales factoids from Amazon:

• If all the computers customers purchased this holiday were stacked one on top of the other, they would be more than twice as high as Mount Everest.
• Amazon customers bought more than 50 times more light therapy devices this holiday season than there are sunny days in Seattle the entire year.
• For the holiday time period alone, Amazon customers purchased enough shoot-and-share camcorders to supply 50 years' worth of nonstop YouTube watching.
• Amazon customers purchased so many Blu-ray disc players, that if you lined them up side to side, they would stretch for more than 27 miles.
• During the 2009 holiday season, Amazon customers bought enough 8GB iPod Touches to play 442 years of continuous music.
• In 2009, Amazon customers purchased enough heart rate monitor watches to put one on the wrist of everyone who finished the New York City marathons in 2008 and 2009.
• The last Local Express Delivery order that was delivered in time for Christmas, was placed by a Prime member and went to Seattle. It was a Kindle that was ordered at 1:43 p.m. on Christmas Eve and delivered at 4:57 p.m. that evening.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10422032-1.html





E-books Spark Battle Inside the Publishing Industry
Marion Maneker

The evolution of publishing from print to digital has caused a schism in the reading world. There are now two constituencies: readers (and writers) on the one hand, and the publishing world on the other. And they don't want to hear each other.

Readers want books that are plentiful and cheap, publishers want to preserve their profit, and authors want a larger share of revenue. The conflict has created a strident internecine battle inside the publishing industry. At issue are the price and timing of e-books, and who owns the rights to backlist titles. While publishers, agents and Amazon.com bicker, there is little time for conceiving new content that satisfies customer demand. If the book business doesn't tune in to that demand, it could wind up as a transitional source for the e-readers.

We know that readers want content, because it's clear they're not dazzled by the device. Consumers have made Amazon's limited and rudimentary device a hit, which speaks to their desire for books that are cheaper and easier to obtain. It surely isn't the device's design or functionality. Both are closer to the computer aesthetic of the 1980s than today's digital world. The Kindle may have lots of titles available -- but good luck using the device to decide what to read next.

But publishers have ignored this demand. In response, several conglomerates have aggressively moved to protect their legacy. Macmillan recently announced a plan to delay the publication of e-books and offer enhancements that will justify a higher price. This tactic is aimed at Amazon's policy of trying to set $9.99 as the expected price for an e-book. Most are priced much higher -- but that's beside the point. Amazon and publishers are fighting over this fiction, not the reality. Because Amazon's customers have made it clear that $9.99 is still too high for their taste. Most titles in the company's list of top 100 Kindle bestsellers are priced below $9.99, and the most popular price point is $0.00. But publishers can't hear this, because they're a little distracted right now.

The New York Times recently played up friction between publishers and agents over the electronic rights to backlist books. Random House has sent a letter to literary agents claiming to hold these rights even though it lost a court case on the subject. But agent, e-book publisher and blogger Richard Curtis puts the issue in perspective when he points out that few books are actually at stake here, because electronic rights became a contractual standard in 1990.

The real battle here is not over who controls the backlist rights but what royalties the publisher will pay. Stephen Covey caused a lot of consternation at Simon & Schuster last week when it was announced that he was taking his best backlist titles and publishing them with RosettaBooks, the e-book publisher that tangled with Random House on the issue and won. RosettaBooks is offering Covey half of the publishing proceeds, not the 25 percent or less he'd get from Simon. Publishers want these backlist books to add dollars to their bottom line; authors want to get a higher royalty for the backlist titles because the publisher doesn't need to make any further investment to generate sales. There's not a lot of room here to meet in the middle.

The stalemate ignores an important shift that digital publishing accelerates. The success of the book business over the past two decades was about expanding the supply of books. Growth came through increased volume, more titles and more title availability. That's the story of the six big conglomerates and the growth of the superstores. But digital publishing inverts that formula -- its magic is in the way it meets demand efficiently.

Barnes & Noble discovered that recently when the first of its Nook devices landed in the hands of reviewers. David Pogue and Walt Mossberg have both judged it a dud. The device seems to be a great packaging concept (dual-screen reader) marred by sloppy execution (slow navigation and refresh rates) that may leave them forever playing catch-up. Just building a device is not enough to capture sales. Amazon's advantage is its customer base and brand loyalty. BN's was going to be better functionality. If the books-and-mortar giant cannot make the breakthrough, more devices are coming to market -- and one of them will make a meaningful move forward.

This doesn't need to mean the end of book publishing. Publishers can no longer be vast containers of intellectual property distributed in paper form to bookstores, supermarkets and warehouse clubs. But they don't have to be: They can become highly selective distributors to bookstores, supermarkets and price clubs. That's the lesson of the television, music and movie businesses.

But if the publishers want a role in the e-books business, they'll need to get over it and get on with it, embracing lower-priced e-books with higher author royalties. That seems unlikely. Because it's now clear that publishers just don't want to listen to what their customers are telling them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122403326.html





Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book
Fred von Lohmann

Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion, an elegy to books and what they mean to us, is stirring and highly recommended to anyone who loves books:

Quote:
When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest....

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.
As it happens, the battle over whether you "own" digital goods (like e-books, CDs, and software) or merely "license" them will be a hot issue in court in 2010, with EFF deeply involved in the fight.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12...w-destroy-book





Digital Piracy Hits the e-Book Industry
Matt Frisch

When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

"It's fair to say that piracy of e-books is exploding," said Albert Greco, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more illegal downloads. But digital theft may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.

"Piracy is a serious issue for publishers," said Hachette Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular "Twilight" teen-vampire series says it "considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance."

Authors are concerned as well.

"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it's going to be to pirate them," said novelist and poet Sherman Alexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.

"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."

And it's not just bestsellers that are targeted by thieves.

"Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. "We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Piracy of digital music, thanks to Napster and other file-sharing sites, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat illegal downloading, from shutting down Web sites to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual file-sharers.

Although illegal file-sharing of music persists, Apple's online iTunes store is now the world's biggest seller of music.

To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat e-book piracy, and you'll get a wide range of opinions.

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated.

Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins, told CNN, "we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally."

E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.

"Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"

CNN.com's Brandon Griggs contributed to this story.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/...acy/index.html





Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites
Richard Pérez-Peña and Tim Arango

Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.

Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.

So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?

Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.

But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.

“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.

He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”

Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.

Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.

“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”

For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.

Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.

But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.

Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.

Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.

Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.

These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.

“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.

A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.

The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.

“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”

People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.

By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.

And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.

A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.

But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/bu...28paywall.html





Washington Times Axes Entire Sports Section
AFP

THE financially troubled Washington Times has axed its sports section just days after announcing it will no longer publish a Sunday edition.

The conservative-leaning newspaper began laying off at least 40 per cent of its 370 employees earlier this month and members of the sports department were among those who received pink slips yesterday.

The final edition of the sports section will appear tomorrow.

"Times sports section is kaput," read a message on the Twitter account of a Washington Times sports reporter.

"Make sure to call and cancel subscriptions after Friday."

The newspaper launched in 1982 by the Reverend Sun Myung-moon's Unification Church announced last week it would no longer publish a Sunday edition.

Along with deep staff cuts, the Times this month unveiled plans to be distributed for free to "targeted audiences in the branches of the federal government as well as at other key institutions".

Home or office delivery would be available at a "premium price", it said, while single-copy sales at newspaper boxes and retailers would continue.

US newspapers are grappling with declining print advertising revenue, falling circulation and the migration of readers to free news online, while several major US publishers have declared bankruptcy.

The daily circulation of the Washington Times is around 67,000, compared with 582,844 for The Washington Post.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/bus...-1225814937652





Broadcasters' Woes Could Spell Trouble for Free TV
AP

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks' programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels -- a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.

''Good programing is expensive,'' Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox, told a shareholder meeting this fall. ''It can no longer be supported solely by advertising revenues.''

Fox is pursuing its strategy in public, warning that its broadcasts -- including college football bowl games -- could go dark Friday for subscribers of Time Warner Cable, unless the pay-TV operator gives Fox higher fees. For its part, Time Warner Cable is asking customers whether it should ''roll over'' or ''get tough'' in negotiations.

The future of free TV also could be altered as the biggest pay-TV provider, Comcast Corp., prepares to take control of NBC. Comcast has not signaled plans to end NBC's free broadcasts. But Jeff Zucker, who runs NBC and its sister cable channels such as CNBC and Bravo, told investors this month that ''the cable model is just superior to the broadcast model.''

The traditional broadcast model works like this: CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox distribute shows through a network of local stations. The networks own a few stations in big markets, but most are ''affiliates,'' owned by separate companies.

Traditionally the networks paid affiliates to broadcast their shows, though those fees have dwindled to near nothing as local stations have seen their audience shrink. What hasn't changed is where the money mainly comes from: advertising.

Cable channels make most of their money by charging pay-TV providers a monthly fee per subscriber for their programing. On average, the pay-TV providers pay about 26 cents for each channel they carry, according to research firm SNL Kagan. A channel as highly rated as ESPN can get close to $4, while some, such as MTV2, go for just a few pennies.

With both advertising and fees, ESPN has seen its revenue grow to $6.3 billion this year from $1.8 billion a decade ago, according to SNL Kagan estimates. It has been able to bid for premium events that networks had traditionally aired, such as football games. Cable channels also have been able to fund high-quality shows, such as AMC's ''Mad Men,'' rather than recycling movies and TV series.

That, plus a growing number of channels, has given cable a bigger share of the ad pie. In 1998, cable channels drew roughly $9.1 billion, or 24 percent of total TV ad spending, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising. By 2008, they were getting $21.6 billion, or 39 percent.

Having two revenue streams -- advertising and fees from pay-TV providers -- has insulated cable channels from the recession. In contrast, over-the-air stations have been forced to cut staff, and at least two broadcast groups sought bankruptcy protection this year.

Fox illustrates the trend: Its broadcast operations reported a 54 percent drop in operating income for the quarter that ended in September. Its cable channels, which include Fox News and FX, grew their operating income 41 percent.

Analyst Tom Love of ZenithOptimedia said he expects the big networks will end the year with a 9 percent drop in ad revenue, followed by an 8 percent drop in 2010 and zero growth in 2011.

A small chunk of the ad revenue is being recouped online, where the networks sell episodes for a few dollars each or run ads alongside shows on sites such as Hulu. Media economist Jack Myers projects online video advertising will grow into a $2 billion business by 2012, from just $350 million to $400 million this year.

But that is not significant enough to make up for the lost ad revenue on the airwaves. Advertisers spent $34 billion on broadcast commercials in 2008, down by $2.4 billion from two years earlier, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.

So rather than wait for the Internet to become a bigger source of income, the networks and local stations are mimicking what cable channels do: They're charging pay-TV companies a monthly fee per subscriber to carry their programming.

Since 1994, the Federal Communications Commission has let networks and their affiliates seek payments for including their programming in the pay-TV lineup. Not everyone demanded payments at first. Instead they relied on the broader audience that cable and satellite gave them to increase what they could charge advertisers.

The big networks also were content to let their broadcast stations essentially be subsidized by higher fees for the cable channels that fell under the same corporate umbrella. A pay-TV company negotiating with the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, is likely paying more for the ABC Family channel than it otherwise would, with the extra assumed to help Disney cover its costs for the ABC network broadcasts.

But over time -- such contracts generally run about three years -- more networks began demanding payments for the stations they own. And affiliates already receiving the fees have bargained for more money.

Some talks have been tense. In 2007, Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates 32 network-affiliated stations around the country, pulled its signals for nearly a month from Mediacom Communications Corp., which provides cable TV to about 1.3 million subscribers, mainly in small cities.

The American Cable Association says its members -- mainly small cable TV providers -- have seen their costs for carrying local TV stations more than triple over the past three years. The group's head, Matt Polka, says those fees have gone ''straight to consumers' pocketbooks'' in the form of higher cable bills.

Gannett Co., for instance, which operates 23 stations, has taken in $56 million in fees from pay-TV operators this year after negotiating a new batch of agreements, up from $18 million in 2008. Dave Lougee, president of Gannett's broadcast arm, defends the fees, saying ''broadcasters were late to the game in really starting to go after the fair market value of their signals.''

Analysts estimate CBS managed to get as much as 50 cents per subscriber in its most recent talks with pay-TV providers that carry CBS-owned stations. CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves said such fees should add ''hundreds of millions of dollars to revenues annually.''

That could be just the beginning. CBS and Fox are also asking for a portion of the fees that their affiliates get, arguing that the networks' shows are what give local stations the leverage to ask for fees.

Over time, the networks might be able to get even more money by abandoning the affiliate structure and undoing a key element of free TV.

Here's why: Pay-TV providers are paying the networks only for the stations the networks own. That amounts to a little less than a third of the TV audience, which means local affiliates recoup two-thirds of the fees. If a network operated purely as a cable channel and cut the affiliates out, the network could get the fees for the entire pay-TV audience.

If forced to go independent, affiliates would have to air their own programming, including local news and syndicated shows.

Fitch Ratings analyst Jamie Rizzo predicts that at least one of the four broadcast networks ''could explore'' becoming a cable channel as early as 2011.

Any shift would take years, as the networks untangle complicated affiliate contracts. At an analyst conference last year, CBS's Moonves called the idea an ''a very interesting proposition.'' But he added that it ''would really change the universe that we're in.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...-in-Peril.html





Nintendo Shuts Down Fan Film

Hey, everyone. We just wanted to let you know that Dec. 31 was the last day that The Hero of Time was available for viewing. We came to an agreement with Nintendo earlier this month to stop distributing the film. In the spirit of the holiday season they were good enough to let us keep the movie up for you to watch and enjoy through the end of 2009, but not past 2009. We understand Nintendo’s right to protect its characters and trademarks and understand how in order to keep their property unspoiled by fan’s interpretation of the franchise, Nintendo needs to protect itself — even from fan-works with good intentions.

This has been quite an adventure for us and we have a real sense of peace bringing the project to a close. Between the screenings and the online release many of you were able to see the film and we hope to not have only inspired those of you that live, breathe and dream Zelda but we also hope to have inspired all of you aspiring filmmakers out there! Thank you again for all your patience with the project and we hope you had as much fun watching our movie as we did making it. Thanks for all your wonderful messages of encouragement and support! I’m sure our next project will be right around the corner! No, it’s not Majora’s Mask : )
http://www.theherooftime.com/2009/12...date-01-01-10/





YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, So Users Search Less
Miguel Helft

YouTube, the video site owned by Google, is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. But Hunter Walk still thinks of it as an underdog.

For Mr. Walk, director of product management at YouTube, the competition is not other Web sites: it’s TV.

“Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site,” he said. “They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say, ‘YouTube is so big,’ but I really see that we have a ways to go.”

To that end, Mr. Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to give its users what they want, even even when the users aren’t quite sure what that is. The goal is to get them to spend a few more minutes on the site every day.

This is easier said than done. YouTube will not disclose the size of its video library, but the company has said that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. That is the equivalent of more than 100,000 full-length movies uploaded every week. With hundreds of millions of clips to choose from, the challenge that Mr. Walk’s team faces is to figure out how to select the 5 or 10 or 20 that a user might enjoy most.

The payoff could be large. Google executives have said YouTube is still losing money but is on a path to profitability. Getting users to spend more time on the site would help it get there faster by selling more advertising. It could also go a long way to extend its dominance, shoring up its position against sites like Hulu, which are attracting a growing number of users with full-length movies and television shows.

And it could also help YouTube keep up with other competitors, including video search engines like Truveo and Blinkx, or sites like Clicker.com, which specializes in recommending professionally created videos online.

After Blinkx added better analysis of the visual content of videos to its engine early this year, for example, the average number of clips watched by users jumped to nearly five, from 2.5, said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and chief executive of Blinkx.

For YouTube, part of the challenge is in handling people’s searches. In November, Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. While Google queries tend to be quite specific, users often come to YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.”

But perhaps more important, YouTube must finesse what technicians call discovery. That’s the art of suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on what they have watched before, or on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires mastering data-mining techniques similar to those used by the likes of Netflix and Amazon to make movie or book recommendations.

“I don’t think the YouTube problem is different from the Netflix problem or the Amazon problem,” said Christopher T. Volinsky, executive director of statistics research at AT&T Labs Research. Mr. Volinsky recently helped lead a team that won a $1 million prize established by Netflix to improve that site’s recommendation engine by 10 percent.

That it took his team of top computer scientists three years to make a modest improvement to Netflix, which has some 70,000 titles, illustrates the complexity of the task, Mr. Volinsky said.

YouTube’s work in these areas is largely hidden from users and involves dozens of tweaks, small and large, that Mr. Walk’s team makes every month. Recently, for instance, the group began tackling what it calls topic exhaustion. No matter how much users may like to watch, say, Shaquille O’Neal highlights, they will inevitably reach a point when they will have had enough.

So while YouTube used to suggest more of the same topic to users who watched a particular video, it has gently begun to nudge them toward related topics. The Shaquille O’Neal video may prompt suggestions for Kobe Bryant highlights, N.B.A. clips or even topics further afield, like sports stars who appear in films.

“If we guess wrong, you could leave us sooner,” said Jamie Davidson, a 25-year-old associate product manager on Mr. Walk’s team. “But if we guess correctly, we may get you to watch another 10 videos. This is very hard.”

The techniques involve creating vast graphs, which Mr. Davidson calls conceptual maps, of related concepts like Shaquille O’Neal, the N.B.A. and Kobe Bryant, on which the proximity of two nodes indicates the closeness of two topics. The YouTube recommendation engine uses these maps to find new subject areas that might interest a user.

Over time, YouTube says it plans to rely more heavily on personalization and ties between users to refine recommendations.

Mr. Walk’s team meets weekly to discuss tweaks to YouTube’s software. During a recent meeting, a small group of engineers and user interface designers were brainstorming what might be the next big step in the site’s evolution: pages that would immediately begin playing a stream of clips tailored for a user, instead of offering lists of suggested videos. The idea is to push more videos at users in the hope of allowing them to abandon the keyboard and increasingly experience YouTube from the couch.

“On YouTube, every 45 seconds, you are stuck at a decision point,” Mr. Davidson said. “Any time there is a decision point, people may leave. We don’t want to take out the interactivity, but the default user experience should be a lot easier.”

Palash Nandy, an engineer on the team, suggests a couple of ideas. How about putting an “I’m feeling bored” button next to the search box, echoing Google’s famous “I’m feeling lucky” button? Or why not give users a slider to select the amount of time they want to be entertained, and let YouTube’s software assemble a playlist accordingly?

None of this is likely to appear on the YouTube home page soon. But the team is already working on new ways to let users collectively create lists of videos that share a topic, like cats playing keyboards (youtube.com/bestofkeyboardcat). The ideas may show up first in the TestTube, YouTube’s site for experimental features.

Gauging YouTube’s success so far is difficult. YouTube will not release detailed traffic statistics. But it says improvements in its search and discovery software have helped increase the average time that users spend on the site by 50 percent in the last year.

Data from comScore appears to back that up. The average YouTube user watched 83 clips in October, compared with 53 a year earlier, though it is difficult to know how much of that growth was the result of improvements in YouTube’s algorithms.

Either way, Mr. Walk’s team plans to speed up the pace of innovation to help YouTube users search less and watch more.

“We are the second-largest search engine, and yet search is not even the right paradigm for discovering video,” Mr. Davidson said. “We are trying to move beyond it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/te...et/31tube.html





Hollywood Grosses Shatter Record
Michael Cieply

Hollywood’s last weekend of the year was its best ever, as James Cameron’s 3-D “Avatar” surged past “Sherlock Holmes,” an action romp with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role, for top position in a film lineup that took in a record $278 million at the domestic box office.

The film industry had previously seen its highest dollar figure for a three-day weekend in July 2008, when “The Dark Knight” led an array of summer movies that had $260.8 million in ticket sales.

Fox scored an exceptionally strong second weekend with “Avatar,” which had $75 million in ticket sales, down just 2.5 percent from its $77 million opening the previous weekend, for a total of $212.3 million in domestic ticket sales. It added another hit with “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” an animated comedy that had an estimated $50.2 million in domestic ticket sales in its first weekend, and $77 million since opening on Wednesday.

Bert Livingston, Fox’s senior vice president for distribution, said “Avatar” was being driven by what he called “exceptional” word-of-mouth recommendations.

“Do I have a number? No,” Mr. Livingston said of the ultimate box-office prospects for the movie, which represents 15 years of work by Mr. Cameron and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by Fox. But Mr. Livingston said he expects the film to pass the $300 million mark at the domestic box office quickly, and perhaps to challenge the $533 million in ticket sales for “The Dark Knight,” though probably not the $600 million taken in by Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic” a decade earlier.

“Sherlock Holmes,” which was directed by Guy Ritchie, took in $65.4 million on its opening weekend for Warner Brothers, to place second after having briefly edged slightly ahead of “Avatar” on Christmas Day.

That performance cemented Warner’s lead in the domestic box office rankings among studios. Boosted by hits like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Hangover,” Warner captured roughly 20 percent of domestic ticket sales for the year, comfortably outpacing all of its rivals, according to a count from the Web site Boxofficemojo.com.

“It’s Complicated,” a comedy directed by Nancy Meyers with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in lead roles, placed fourth, with $22.1 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend for Universal Pictures and Relativity Media. Paramount Pictures’ “Up in the Air,” directed by Jason Reitman, with George Clooney in a starring role, was the weekend’s fifth-ranked film, with $11.8 million in sales, for a total of $24.5 million since its opening; it made its debut in a handful of theaters on Dec. 4 and went into wide release on Dec. 23.

Aided by a steady rise in ticket prices, Hollywood has taken in $10.4 billion at the box office this year, moving well past a previous full-year record of $9.68 billion set in 2007, according to Hollywood.com’s box office reporting service. But a few years earlier in the decade it actually made more money when the totals are adjusted for inflation.

Total sales are expected to be about 1.4 billion tickets for the full year, up about 5 percent from 1.3 billion last year, though still well short of the 1.6 billion mark set in 2002, Hollywood.com said.

For a second year, the robust performance by a wide field of films pointed toward a strong first quarter at the box office. Christmas hits tend to play for weeks, as the audience catches up with competing pictures through the holidays and early January.

In 2009 double-digit increases in box office results through the first quarter helped offset declines from DVD revenue, while feeding the film industry’s shift away from dramas that play well on home video toward event films like the science-fiction thriller “Avatar,” whose state-of-the-art effects demand to be seen in a theater.

“Avatar” has been helped by a steady increase in the number of screens using 3-D technology from companies like RealD and Imax. Over the weekend, for instance, 179 Imax theaters contributed $8.8 million to the film’s domestic ticket sales, for a total of $28 million in domestic Imax sales since the film opened.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/movies/28box.html





Audiences Laughed to Forget Troubles
Brooks Barnes

Forget the box-office statistics. We all know 2009 was a big year, more than $10 billion in tickets sold. And dig beyond which marketing campaigns were the slickest and which studio had the most market share. That’s all important at a certain level, but what does the year tell us about the kinds of stories and the styles of filmmaking that resonate with Americans at a time of economic anxiety and partisan animosity?

The picture is always a little cloudy when you try to clump movies together by year. On one level, the adult drama is dead, with a spate of intelligent, solidly reviewed films (“State of Play,” “Duplicity,” “The Soloist,” “The Informant!”) given the cold shoulder by moviegoers. But every now and then one slips through: “The Blind Side,” about a woman who helps a homeless boy succeed at football, came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest hits of the year.

Even so, this year delivered some clear lessons for Hollywood. Among them: audiences don’t flock to see just any superhero (“Watchmen,” despite massive prerelease buzz, underperformed while “Astro Boy” barely registered at all); torture-porn is over, with the “Saw” franchise finally hitting a wall; and people seem more interested in seeing stars — John Travolta, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Julia Roberts, Will Ferrell — on tabloid television shows than on the big screen.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the year, however, was a positive one. Moviegoers decided that relatable, nonthinking comedies — a little raunch but not too much, please (“Brüno” seemed to push it too far) — are the perfect balm for the recession.

“The Hangover,” which cost about $35 million to produce and sold $459.4 million at the global box office, is exhibit No. 1. But audiences also responded to “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” “The Proposal” and “Couples Retreat,” which Universal Pictures smartly opened its wallet to film in Bora Bora.

The comedies that worked, noted Todd Phillips, director of “The Hangover,” were ones that audiences could see happening to them. In his film, about four men who go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party, “the chemistry of these four guys and the brush with which their friendship was painted felt very authentic,” he said. “People could relate to it and picture themselves going through it.”

Oh yeah, and “The Hangover” was actually funny. In the social-networking age, movie fans can spot a stinker (“Did You Hear About the Morgans?”) from a mile away. “You have to deliver on expectations — there can’t be any deception,” Mr. Phillips said. “ ‘The Hangover’ worked because there was nothing to go home and Twitter negatively about.”

Some grit broke through — “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” defied the odds and found an audience — but interest in fantasy, a strong theme from previous years, grew even stronger. Gargantuan special effects were part of the draw (“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” “2012”). But a desire to hide from layoffs and bank failures and the Octomom for a couple of hours was even more powerful.

“There will always be room for the gritty adult drama, but it just really seemed that people wanted to escape into a world of fantasy this year,” said Rob Marshall, director of the musical “Nine.”

Roberto Orci, a co-writer of the recent “Star Trek” and “Transformers” movies, said even big, splashy fantasy pictures can flop if they forget that basic cinematic element: story.

“If you can’t take out the gimmick and still have a story, then you don’t have anything,” Mr. Orci said. “If you look at ‘Star Trek,’ it’s all about relationships and character — here are two opposites who grow up and see in each other the thing that each other lacks. If you remember story, audiences will never have buyer’s remorse.”

Animation was another powerful cinematic current in 2009. “Up,” “Monsters vs. Aliens” and “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” were among the Top 10 best-selling movies of the year, with “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” not far behind. The verdict is still out on “The Princess and the Frog,” a throwback to the hand-drawn musicals of Disney past that is still playing, but the quirky “Coraline” crossed over from the art house to the multiplex, selling $122 million at the global box office. And don’t forget those blue warriors of “Avatar,” a film that opened late in the year and has most of its money-making weeks still ahead of it.

“People are looking for something they haven’t seen before,” said Pete Docter, director and co-writer of “Up,” which is about the adventures of a cranky 78-year-old who ties thousands of balloons to his house. “For us, that was part of the attraction of using an old man as the central character.”

He added: “A lot of people scratched their heads. For, us it seemed like a great opportunity for comedy and to avoid bland-protagonist disease.”

In many ways 2009 was the year that women reasserted their power at the multiplex. With “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” teenage girls officially became as potent an audience as their fanboy brethren. And Hollywood is constantly surprised when audiences of older women can power a movie to blockbuster status (“Mamma Mia!”), and this year was no exception. Also this year studios tried a smidge harder to pay attention to that niche, rolling out pictures like “Julie & Julia” (with Meryl Streep, now 60), “The Proposal” (with Sandra Bullock, 45) and “It’s Complicated” (Ms. Streep again).

Anne Fletcher, who directed “The Proposal,” said she loved the fact that Ms. Bullock and Ms. Streep are such hitmakers. “What stands out to me about this year is the range,” she said. “There was something for everybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/movies/30yearend.html





All That Fosse: All Those Echoes of ‘All That Jazz’
Matt Zoller Seitz

“IT’S showtime, folks.”

That’s the mantra of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), the boozing, chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic filmmaker-choreographer hero of the 1979 drama “All That Jazz,” a hopped-up American variant of Federico Fellini’s navel-gazing fantasia “8 ½” (1963).

Those three words — recited by Gideon into the bathroom mirror each morning after downing a breakfast of Dexedrine and Alka-Seltzer and listening to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto Alla Rustica” — sum up both the character and his real-world counterpart, Bob Fosse, the choreographer, theater director and filmmaker, who died in 1987 at 60. He was a Gideon-level workaholic who ended “All That Jazz,” a self-written advance obituary, with a shot of his alter ego being zipped into a body bag while the soundtrack plays Ethel Merman’s definitive version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

But Gideon’s mantra also summarizes that movie’s significance within narrative film, a mode of storytelling that rarely dares venture beyond the linear for fear of confusing the viewer.

Released 30 years ago this month, “All That Jazz” set a new standard for speed and complexity, its structure boasting as many temporal pirouettes as the headiest art house fare. Yet the film never feels labored. It’s not homework. It’s showtime.

The chain of influence that birthed Fosse’s masterpiece stretches from Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959), Sidney Lumet’s “Pawnbroker” (1964) and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” (1967) through Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and Fosse’s own “Lenny” (1974). The short list of Fosse contemporaries and successors who made commercial films with comparably inventive structures includes Fred Schepisi (“A Cry in the Dark,” “Six Degrees of Separation”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“21 Grams”) and Steven Soderbergh (“The Limey,” “Solaris”).

“I’m kind of a fan of that subgenre,” said the screenwriter and filmmaker Roman Coppola, whose 2001 drama “CQ,” about a young director struggling to make a science fiction film in Europe, derives some of its spirit from “All That Jazz.” “It’s open. It’s not absolutely linear, with one step leading to the next. It kind of weaves through different episodes and layers.”

Fosse’s regular editor, Alan Heim, said the style of “All That Jazz” represents the culmination of lessons he and the director learned on “Lenny,” a biographical drama about Lenny Bruce that employed a docudrama format (including in-character “interviews” with the actors). When an early, linear cut of “Lenny” played a tad sluggishly, Fosse encouraged Mr. Heim to dice the film into a collage, to compress the story and permit surprising juxtapositions.

“By fragmenting it, the picture became much better, much more interesting,” Mr. Heim said.

Fosse was so pleased with the result that he and his screenwriter partner, Robert Alan Aurthur, built time shifts into the early screenplay for “All That Jazz,” essentially treating the script into an uncommonly detailed shot list. Mr. Heim said the film’s high-speed rifling through Gideon’s recent past, childhood and deathbed fantasies (in which he’s interrogated by Jessica Lange’s bombshell angel of death on a set that looks like the Kit Kat Klub from “Cabaret” as redecorated by Fellini) was so flexible, and so distinctively Fosse’s, that the director’s regular composer, Ralph Burns, hung a label on it.

“Ralph said there are flashbacks and flash-forwards, and then there is Fosse time,” Mr. Heim said. “When we were working on Bob’s films, we were working in Fosse time. The phrase has to do with not really being locked into any particular time frame but taking full advantage of what you can do with film, which is mess around with time. That’s one of my favorite things to do, and you don’t get too many chances to do it in straight narrative movies. I got to do it on Bob’s last movie, ‘Star 80,’ also. It was all very exciting for me as an editor.”

The first section of “All That Jazz” takes place in Fosse time, leaping from purely metaphoric images (a trapeze artist falling into a net, illustrating the quotation “To be on the wire is life, the rest is just waiting”) to Gideon’s morning routine, the auditions for his latest show, an editing session on his new movie, a one-night stand with a dancer, and flashbacks to Gideon’s teenage stint as a tap dancer in a strip club, always returning to his afterlife exit interview. The filmmaker’s grace makes complex, sometimes allusive cutting seem as easy as 1-2-3.

Sarah Flack, a film editor who counts Mr. Heim as a primary influence, danced to Fosse time on several assignments, including “The Limey” (1999) and “Marie Antoinette” (2006). The director of those films, Sofia Coppola, is another member of the Fosse fan club, auteur division. “Marie Antoinette” contains a shout-out to Fosse’s 1979 film.

“When I first saw the dailies of Marie Antoinette’s morning dressing ceremony, it reminded me of Joe Gideon’s morning routine,” said Ms. Flack. “I was thinking it would be great to drop in the Vivaldi music from ‘All That Jazz’ while I was assembling the rough cuts of those scenes, but I wasn’t sure it was appropriate at such an early stage of editing to use music from another movie. Literally the next day Sofia e-mailed me from the shoot in Paris and said, ‘Why don’t you use the Vivaldi music cue from ‘All That Jazz’?”

The editing of “All That Jazz” approximates the act of thinking — a characteristic that Ms. Flack said might be responsible for the film’s ability to cover so much narrative terrain so quickly without confusing anyone.

“Whatever happens in the movie, it’s always about Joe Gideon’s imagination — how it feeds his work as well as colors his own version of his life” Ms. Flack said. She compared Gideon to the title character of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl,” who “goes in and out of consciousness and fantasy. The little match girl died happy because in her mind she was somewhere warm and full instead of facing the reality of being alone and starving to death in the cold. Joe Gideon doesn’t want to be dying on the operating table, he wants to be with his friends and family. It’s an extreme form of escapism, and the film’s fragmented structure was essential to showing this aspect of Gideon’s mind.”

It’s also a risky form of storytelling because if it’s done badly, the viewer can become confused.

“The thing about that kind of cutting, from what I have learned along the way, is how much it depends on the context you build for it, and how exactly specific it needs to be,” said Wes Anderson, the director of films including “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and a Fosse admirer. “If it isn’t set up right and if it isn’t precise enough, you find yourself sitting next to someone who’s saying, ‘Is this what you had in mind?’ with a look on their face that means, ‘I think you’re crazy.’ ”

Fosse rarely got that sort of reaction, Mr. Heim said, because he was as skillful as he was audacious. “People in this business are always afraid to leave the audience behind,” Mr. Heim said. “One of the things I liked about working with Fosse was that he believed the more you can tell a story without using words, the better off you are. I always felt when I was working on a Fosse movie that, even though there always were a lot of words, in a sense it was like making a silent movie. The pictures were everything.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/movies/27jazz.html





Innocence Undone, Frame by Frame
Neil Genzlinger

The death of the DVD continued in 2009, and it can’t come soon enough for me. Those wretched round devils have destroyed a small boy’s sense of wonder.

Many years ago, in the blissful days of three and only three networks, that boy — i.e., me — would watch the offered television fare and be amazed by the bravery of the actors and the magical qualities of the land in which lived, a land where things like the rules of gravity seemed to be optional. For decades this innocent awe somehow sustained the boy as he meandered into adulthood and the drabness of real life. “Sure,” he would tell himself, “the car battery is dead and the medical bills are unpaid, but it’s O.K. because somewhere hats can fly off people’s heads straight up, and a girl can shoot bottles out of midair.”

Then these beloved old shows — “F Troop,” “The Munsters” and the rest — started showing up on DVD, making it possible to watch them in super slow motion, even frame by frame. And the boy, now grown, has begun to realize that many of his foundational memories were just tricks of the eye. So hurray that home DVD sales appear to be on their way to another decline in 2009. It’s imperative that these things disappear from the marketplace before any more old television series are digitized. Some shows were never intended for the DVD microscope.

My road to disillusionment started with the opening collage of my favorite show of that era, “F Troop,” an ABC sitcom about a fort full of goof-offs and goofballs on the Indian-plagued frontier just after the Civil War. The show, which ran from 1965 to 1967, had a great theme song like many series in that period. (“Where Indian fights are colorful sights and nobody takes a lickin’; where paleface and redskin both turn chicken.”) Among the images that flashed by as the song played was a sequence in which charging Indians shoot arrows, and then the show’s main characters, Sergeant O’Rourke (Forrest Tucker) and Corporal Agarn (Larry Storch), are seen on the parapet, an arrow whizzing into each man’s hat.

Now, I wasn’t much dumber than any other young kid. (For the record, the year before “F Troop” came on the air I won first prize in my elementary school science fair with an illuminating look inside a huge bees’ nest I’d found.) But I always thought, when I saw that opening “F Troop” montage: “Golly” — I think that word was still in use then — “those guys are letting arrows be shot right at their heads. Gutsy!”

Alas, the loathsome DVD tells a different story. Watching the sequence in super slow motion, it is clear that O’Rourke and Agarn already had arrows in their hats in the first frame. Mr. Tucker and Mr. Storch simply jerked their heads backward to create the illusion that the arrows had just struck. Boy do I feel stupid.

That discovery tripped a switch in my head; when a man realizes he has been lied to, he wants to know how often, and by whom. So lately I’ve been taking a slow DVD journey through my childhood. Turns out I was lied to a lot. By almost everybody.

“F Troop” didn’t stop with the optical illusion of the introduction. There was, for instance, “Our Hero, What’s His Name,” an episode in which Agarn falsely brags to his girlfriend that he has killed Geronimo, and a newspaper trumpets the story. Geronimo hears about it and hunts Agarn down, intent on killing him.

He backs Agarn against a wall and starts throwing knives at him, a half-dozen or so. We see Mr. Storch against the wall, knives thwacking into the wood just inches from his flesh. To a mid-’60s kid it was a stunning example of a brave actor putting his life on the line for a role. To a 2009 grownup with a remote in his hand, it’s more depressing proof that the world runs on deceit: a frame-by-frame examination reveals the knives to be popping out of the wall from behind, not being thrown into it by a fearsome Indian chief. My shame at my own gullibility knows no bounds.

And let’s not even talk about Wrangler Jane, the most enchanting cast member of “F Troop,” played by a lovely teenager named Melody Patterson. Jane, a tender but tough frontier gal, was a sharpshooter who would sometimes blast bottles out of midair. On DVD the strings holding those bottles are clearly visible. Oh Jane, how could you?

Another beguiling woman was camped out over on NBC: the title character of “I Dream of Jeannie” (1965-70), a centuries-old genie played by Barbara Eden. Jeannie, by folding her arms and blinking her eyes, could make things appear and disappear. Humph. More lies. Right from the start.

In the pilot, “The Lady in the Bottle,” broadcast in September 1965, an astronaut named Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) ends up on a deserted island after his space flight is aborted. He finds a bottle, and in the bottle is a luscious genie, whom he asks to conjure up something that might rescue him. And she does: first a Viking-like ship, which pops up on what had been an empty ocean, then a helicopter, which materializes in the middle of the sky where no helicopter had been before. These vessels don’t sail or fly into view; they are there in, literally, an eye blink, as if teleported to the spot. Like magic.

But, in slow-mo, it is evident that the power to summon transportation equipment belonged not to the genie named Jeannie, but to a film editor, one who knew that in those days before high definition and rewind it wouldn’t take much to fool the rubes in the audience.

Before the ship appears, the sea has a notable wave; when the ship pops into view, that wave is gone. The cloud formation in the helicopter-free sky shifts markedly when the helicopter suddenly appears. With that kind of subterfuge in the first few minutes of the pilot, am I really supposed to believe that any of the goings-on in the subsequent 138 episodes were the work of a genuine genie?

I’m also sorry to report that, contrary to my memories, Herman Munster did not have the power to reverse the laws of physics. Herman (Fred Gwynne) was the father in “The Munsters” (1964-66), a sitcom about a ghoulish-looking family trying to assimilate into suburbia. In the episode “Family Portrait” Herman peers into a diner, scaring the bejabbers out of the customers. One man’s hat goes flying off his head straight up.

You would think that if a hat were suddenly not going to be bound by the laws of gravity, the whole hat would be affected simultaneously. But a painstaking examination of the scene in DVD slow motion reveals that two points of the brim, just above the man’s ears, begin heading for the ceiling an instant before the rest of the hat. String again, no doubt. But at least it isn’t visible. CBS, which broadcast the show, must have shelled out for a better grade of invisible string than the folks at ABC did for “F Troop.”

As I sit watching scenes like this over and over in slow motion, some members of my household complain that I have become unnaturally obsessed with the whole subject. Maybe. But I’m pressing on, determined to learn just how much of my life is based on false pretenses. I am dreading what I am going to find in “My Favorite Martian” and “The Addams Family”; highly skeptical that “The Flying Nun” was either really flying or really a nun.

But there’s one show, at least, that I’m sure won’t let me down: “Mister Ed,” about the talking horse. I know that was real. Heck, you could see his lips move.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/ar...n/28tvdvd.html





Bugs & Fixes: Redeeming the Star Trek Digital Code
Ted Landau

The disc versions of several recent movies come with a welcome bonus: a digital copy of the movie. You get one with the Blu-ray version of Inglourious Basterds. For Star Trek, both the DVD and Blu-ray versions include a digital copy.

In what must represent a marketing coup for Apple, these digital copy transfers typically work via iTunes. To access the digital copy, you insert the special disc into your computer's DVD drive and double-click the icon that appears. This transfers you to a "Gift Certificate" page for the movie in the iTunes Store. Enter your unique authorization code (printed on a sheet included with the package) and the movie downloads to your iTunes library. You're now ready to enjoy the movie on your computer, iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Overall, this can be a great deal. At current prices, I got both the Blu-ray and digital versions of Inglourious Basterds for just a few bucks more than the digital version alone.

There is a potential fly in this ointment however. At least for the Blu-ray version of Star Trek, numerous purchasers have reported that, when they attempted to redeem the authorization code, a message appeared saying that the code had already been used and could not be used again. One theory, as yet unconfirmed, is that these codes were somehow "stolen" and posted to a torrent file. Whatever the cause, a representative of Deluxe Digital Studios (posting to an Apple Discussions thread) assures customers that "if they contact support via the website, they will receive a new code for their digital copy of Star Trek for iTunes or Windows Media."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/18572...ital_code.html





A High-Tech Movie Battle: Which 3-D Glasses Are Best?
Eric A. Taub

While the blue-skinned Na’vi are shooting arrows out of the screen toward the audience in the 3-D movie “Avatar,” another battle is being fought in the theater — over the goofy-looking glasses that moviegoers must wear to see the three-dimensional effects.

Four companies are fighting for bridge of the nose with three different technologies. Each of them is more advanced than the paper glasses worn to view “Bwana Devil,” regarded as the first of the commercial 3-D movies in the 1950s, but all work on the same general principle. Each eye sees a slightly different frame of the movie, but the brain puts them together and perceives depth.

About four million glasses made by RealD, the market leader, were worn during Avatar’s opening weekend in the United States. RealD’s glasses use polarized lenses and cost about 65 cents each. MasterImage 3D, another vendor, uses a similar technology.

Dolby Laboratories, the company behind theater sound systems, makes glasses that filter out different frequencies of red, green and blue. They cost about $28 each. The glasses of the third company, XpanD, use battery-powered LCD shutters that open and shut so each eye sees the appropriate frame of the movie. Those cost as much as $50 each.

Each company claims its glasses and projection-system technology is better. Because glasses using one technology are useless in a theater using a different digital projection system, the companies backing the three technologies are scrambling for the upper hand while the 3-D industry is still in its infancy.

James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” is more often than not the main marketing tool. He has endorsed RealD, says the company, which has about 5,000 screens using its system. But he, his wife and his production partner were photographed at the premiere in Japan wearing XpanD glasses, which work on 2,000 screens worldwide. Dolby says its glasses work with 2,200 screens, but it has no Cameron connection. The company helpfully points out instead how a malfunction in the RealD system spoiled a press preview of “Avatar.”

The battle over what glasses patrons wear is a big deal because exhibitors are convinced that 3-D, while seeming like a gimmick now, will lure movie lovers away from their crisp high-definition widescreen TVs at home and back to the theater. But Maria Costeira, the chief executive of XpanD, believes the sky’s the limit: “Eventually, we’ll see 3-D movies on airplanes as well.”

The fight over the glasses may well intensify because TV makers are now pushing 3-D TVs for the home as a way to increase their sales of more expensive sets.

Despite the marketing effort, when it comes down to choosing a 3-D system, many exhibitors are making a decision based on one factor: Do they want to be in the cleaning as well as the movie business?

The expensive Dolby and XpanD glasses are going into a dishwasher after each use, not the trash. Both companies recommend that theater owners clean them in an industrial-grade machine. (To prevent pilfering, Dolby and XpanD glasses can also contain built-in antitheft tags that can be activated by exit-door sensors.)

XpanD offers its theater partners disposable wipes that it can distribute to customers along with their tickets to assure them the glasses are germ-free.

RealD, whose cheap throwaway glasses were being perceived as a liability, has addressed concerns of hygiene. Theater owners are now encouraged to ship back the used glasses to the company, which will clean, repair and repackage them for other theaters.

But in all the hubbub about each product’s advantages and which system Mr. Cameron really, truly loves, the most important question remains unanswered: does one system create a better looking 3-D picture than another?

“I don’t think the consumer can tell the difference,” said Joe Miraglia, the director of design, construction, and facilities for ArcLight Cinemas, a chain of luxury theaters based in Hollywood. The movie chain uses each system in one or more of its theaters, and finds the cost of operation to be roughly the same for all.

While Mr. Miraglia uses RealD in several theaters, he chose XpanD’s LCD glasses for the large curved screen in the company’s flagship Cinerama Dome theater on Sunset Boulevard. This is similar to the technology that will be used by Panasonic, Sony and others as they bring 3-D HDTV to market next year. Recently, electronics makers set standards for creating 3-D Blu-ray discs and players.

But in order to make the wearing of 3-D glasses as routine as ordering popcorn, the makers need some help in the design department. Many of the glasses resemble the “fitover,” or wraparound sunglasses favored by senior citizens in the Sun Belt, a look that is not appealing to young moviegoers.

RealD and XpanD hope that 3-D will soon become a fashion statement. In addition to its standard movie glasses, RealD is introducing child-size versions, as well as high-style 3-D specs that people can wear without embarrassment out in the three-dimensional world as sunglasses or prescription lenses.

Ms. Costeira of XpanD thinks personalized designs that can be used with 3-D HDTVs and video games could turn into something big. “Stylish, thin and light, 3-D glasses will become your new iPod,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/te...28glasses.html





Multi-Touch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
Nick Bilton

Multi-touch screens have been a little slower to enter the electronics marketplace than consumers might have hoped. Since Jeff Han, a research scientist at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, first presented his multi-touch wall at the TED Conference in 2006 we’ve seen other multi-touch technologies trickle into electronic marketplace. The cellphone has used it most, starting with the iPhone, and then moving into other smartphones using Google’s Android platform and Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart counter-top computer. But with the exception of a few outliers and device manufacturer research demos, we haven’t really seen multi-touch used in other consumer electronics yet.

That might all change soon. Ilya Rosenberg, Ken Perlin and a small team of computer scientists from New York University’s Media Research Lab hope to bring a new kind of multi-touch to everything from new e-readers to musical instruments, with their new company, Touchco.

Devices like the iPhone use a technology called capacitive touch and require the pressure of a finger to activate a touch point. These touch technologies also limit the number of simultaneous inputs, restricting you to using two fingers to navigate a device. In contrast, Touchco uses a technology called Interpolating Force-Sensitive Resistance, or I.F.S.R. This technology uses force sensitive resistors, which become more conductive as you apply different levels of pressure, and then constantly scan and detect different inputs.

This allows for very low power, unlimited simultaneous touch inputs and the possibility of fully flexible multi-touch devices. The technology is also extremely inexpensive, Mr. Rosenberg hopes to sell sheets of I.F.S.R. for as little as $10 a square foot.
So where can you expect to see this technology? Mr. Perlin believes you will see a new range of multi-touch e-readers in the coming year, along with new musical instruments and other laptops or notebooks. Touchco has also been working closely with Disney animators to recreate a true digital sketchbook replacement, utilizing extremely sensitive pressure sensors to determine pencil thickness or even use of an eraser. The software behind the sensors can easily differentiate between the palm of a hand, a brush or a pencil.

There is also the possibility that the right implementation on computer could change the way we interact with interfaces. As an example, Mr. Rosenberg showed me a long sheet of I.F.S.R., about the size of a large flat panel computer monitor, which allowed manipulation of a 3-D computer program. When I lightly dragged my hand across the touch panel I could control the cursor. When I applied more pressure, I could select objects and change their orientation, size and shape within the program. It was incredibly intuitive and simple to navigate.

As you can see from the images below, there are lots of potential applications and devices that could use inexpensive multi-touch technology. You can also see some video demonstrations on Touchco’s YouTube page.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...w-devices/?hpw





Tech Changes 'Outstrip' Netbooks
Mark Ward

Rising prices and better alternatives may mean curtains for netbooks.

The small, portable computers were popular in 2009, but some industry watchers are convinced that their popularity is already waning.

"The days of the netbook are over," said Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint.

As prices edge upwards, net-using habits change and other gadgets take on their functions, netbooks will become far less popular, he thinks.

"Technology has advanced so much that it's outmanoeuvred itself," he said. "You wouldn't go for something so basic anymore."

His prediction stems from his belief that the netbooks of 2009 are losing touch with what made them so appealing.

Media heart

Asus kicked off the netbook trend in 2007 when it launched the Eee PC 700 and 701. The 700 sported a 2GB solid state hard drive, 512MB of Ram, a 900 MHz Intel Celeron processor and a seven inch screen.

It was cheap, cheerful and a boon for those wanting to check e-mail and go online while out and about.

But, said Mr Miles, the success of the small, portable notebook has been its undoing because it has spawned so many imitators.

Many contemporary netbook models run Windows XP or Windows 7 which has forced the specifications, and price, upwards. Many, he said, now cost at least £350, a figure close to that for a more capable full-size laptop.

What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users - far more than the basic e-mail and web browsing that made the first models so appealing.

"As soon as you want to do anything else you hit the same problem, it ceases to work," he said. "It does not have the power."

Those changing habits of web users, he maintains, are too complex for those basic machines.

"It's the internet's fault for making us much more multimedia savvy," he said. Uploading and editing still or moving pictures and handling audio all require far more power than the basic netbook offers, he said.

This could explain, he said, why many laptop makers are now turning out very thin and light machines that have power but not the shoulder-wrenching bulk.

All change

Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer Arm, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. Consumers, he said, were chafing against the restrictions that using a netbook imposed on them.

"We have failed the consumer because we have imposed constraints on them," he said.

Changing web habits and greater use of social media will mean consumers will be looking for gadgets that are tuned to specific purposes.

"It will be a lot of different machines for a lot of different people," he said. "This whole market will be exploding in the next couple of years."

Impetus for this change will come, he believes, from the phone world where many, many types of gadgets are already blooming.

"It's no surprise that your mobile has changed a lot in the last three years but your PC hasn't," he said.

Arm hopes that many more netbook makers will be using one of its designs as a core processor and turn to Linux as the operating system.

At the very least a crop of Arm-based netbooks might mean a big boost to battery life. Arm's mobile pedigree means it is designed to be parsimonious with power.

Dell already produces notebooks sporting Latitude ON technology that use both Arm and Intel chips so that they can boot into either Windows or Linux.

Editing tools

Battery life on Linux is in excess of 10 hours, for Windows rarely more than three.

Machines sporting Arm chips are also likely to be thinner as they will not need the heat sinks demanded by processors used in desktops.

Mr Drew said deals Arm has signed with Adobe will help ensure that future devices will be able to use the software maker's familiar video, audio and image editing tools.

What will also be worth watching, he said, is what happens when Google's Chrome OS is launched.

Many of the devices running that will be Arm-based as Chrome is broadly based on one of the Linux distributions. There are also unconfirmed rumours that either Windows 8 or 9 will run on Arm chips.

Mr Drew also expects to see devices tailored to particular types of user.

E-book readers were an example of this, he said, and were evolving into devices capable of doing more than just handle text. Many can play MP3s or let owners browse the web.

Then there is the approaching wave of tablet computers.

Apple is rumoured to be working on one. Dell and Microsoft have shown off their own ideas of what one will look like and there are bound to be many more from established tablet makers such as Archos.

Mr Miles from Pocket Lint believes these are likely to take up the mantle from the netbook.

"I don't think people will expect it to do much more than you get from a netbook," he said, adding that they were perfect for those who needed a device that let them get online quickly to satisfy their curiosity.

They were more likely to succeed now more than ever, said Mr Miles, because of the greater experience people had with using such devices.

"It'll be helped by Apple which has educated people how to use multi-touch through the iPhone and iPod touch," he said.

Netbooks are also likely to come under pressure from smartphones as they get even smarter, said Christoper David, head of developers at SonyEricsson.

Phone makers, he said, have to position themselves to be more open and able to support the web habits of users no matter what they were or what they wanted to do.

"The web is the king," he said. Handset makers must work with those open web standards to ensure that the software on the phones they make is flexible enough to cope.

"Though," he added, "that is only the starting point of the journey."

What will not change, he believes, is the importance of the phone as a vessel for data about its owner.

"We're going to see phones coming along where the form factor will be less and less relevant in terms of what we carry about with us," he said.

Future devices will grab the best resources nearby whether that is a flat screen, projector or thin film display.

The ID credentials stored on what was our phone will handle all the logins and give access to all the sites and services we use.

The netbook, and its limitations, will be well and truly left behind.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8421491.stm





LG Develops Cell Phone for US Mobile DTV Standard
Martyn Williams

LG Electronics has developed handheld terminals compatible with the U.S. mobile digital TV format and will show them at next week's International Consumer Electronics Show, it said Thursday.

The products include the DP570MH, a portable DVD player, and several cell phones. Detailed specifications of the products were not released but LG did issue images showing the products. The cell phone appears to be a modified version of its Lotus smartphone that has a 2.4-inch widescreen display and QWERTY keyboard.

The DVD player has a 7-inch widescreen display with WQVGA (480 pixels by 234 pixels) resolution and two earphone sockets so TV shows and DVDs can be shared with a fellow traveler. Battery life is about 2.5 hours when watching TV and 4.5 hours for DVD playback. It can also be powered from an AC socket.

It will be launched later this year and will cost US$249.

All will be compatible with the ATSC-M/H standard, to which LG Electronics contributed technical knowledge. The service is expected to be mainly used for free-to-air broadcasts of local TV stations with widespread availability across the U.S. beginning during 2010.

To coincide with the launch of services many electronics makers are likely to roll out compatible products and some are expected to be on show at CES.

The International Consumer Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas from Jan. 7 to 10.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/18565..._standard.html





Exclusive: Google Nexus One Hands-On, Video, and First Impressions
Joshua Topolsky

That's right, humans -- Engadget has its very own Nexus One. You've seen leaked pics and videos from all over, but we're the first publication to get our very own unit, and we plan on giving you guys the full story on every nook and cranny of this device. In case you've been living under a rock, here's the breakdown of the phone. The HTC-built and (soon to be) Google-sold device runs Android 2.1 atop a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7-inch, 480 x 800 display, has 512MB of ROM, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB microSD card (expandable to 32GB). The phone is a T-Mobile device (meaning no 3G if you want to take it to AT&T), and includes the standard modern additions of a light sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer. The Nexus One has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and we have to say so far the pictures it snaps look pretty decent (and the camera software is much faster than the same component on the Droid). The phone is incredibly thin and sleek -- a little thinner than the iPhone -- but it has pretty familiar HTC-style industrial design. It's very handsome, but not blow-you-away good looking. It's a very slim, very pocketable phone, and feels pretty good in your hand. Thought you'd have to wait for that Google event for more on the Nexus One? Hell no -- so read on for an in-depth look. C'mon, you know you want to.

Now, of course everyone seems to have one question about the device -- is this the be-all-end-all Android phone / iPhone eviscerator? In two words: not really. The thing that's struck us most (so far) about the Nexus One thus far is the fact that it's really not very different than the Droid in any substantial way. Yes, we'd say the design and feel of the phone is better (much better, in fact), and it's definitely noticeably faster than Motorola's offering, but it's not so much faster that we felt like the doors were being blown off. It is very smooth, though we still noticed a little stuttery behavior (very slight, mind you) when moving between home pages. Still, opening applications and moving between them was super speedy, as was Google maps, and any area of the phone where you've got to get through long lists. Don't get us wrong, the phone cooks -- but it's not some paradigmatic shift for Android. One other note: multitouch has not been included here, so while the functionality is supported in Android 2.0 and up, we're still dealing with a one-finger-at-a-time experience... which leaves something to be desired when you've got a beautiful touchscreen like this to play around on.

Google has also included some visual enhancements you've probably heard about, and minor UI tweaks which make getting around the OS a bit more direct. Firstly, there are a set of really snazzy looking "live" wallpapers, some of which react to touch, but all animate in the background while you're on the homescreen. The company has also changed up its application menu navigation a bit, killing the sliding drawer for a more direct home button and overlay of the icons (which no longer scroll off the page normally, but wrap around a 3D cube on the edges). Google has also expanded the amount of homescreens to five, and gives you quick navigation to them by long pressing on the new "dots" which represent pages not in view. While most UI details look and feel the same, from just a bit of typing the keyboard does seem more responsive and accurate, and we're guessing the Snapdragon helps there as well. Throughout the phone there are also new animations and flourishes which make Android 2.1 feel way more polished than previous iterations (including the Droid's 2.0.1), though it's still got a ways to go to matching something like the iPhone or even Pre in terms of fit and finish. Regardless, it's clear Google has started thinking about not just function but form as well, and that's very good news for Android aficionados.

We're going to have a lot more info and a full review coming in just a few days, but for now, feast your eyes on the video and gallery, and hang tight for more Nexus One goodness. Oh, and if you've got some questions on the device, shout them out in comments and we'll try to answer and / or cover them in the review.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/02/e...rst-impressio/





Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Divulged
Kevin J. O'Brien

A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, in what he called an attempt to expose weaknesses in [the security of global wireless systems.

The action by the encryption expert, Karsten Nohl, aimed to question the effectiveness of the 21-year-old GSM algorithm, a code developed in 1988 and still used to protect the privacy of 80 percent of mobile calls worldwide.

“This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate,” Mr. Nohl, 28, told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day computer hackers’ conference that runs through Wednesday in Berlin. “We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls.”

The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl’s efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls.

“This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,” said Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. “What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.”

Some security experts disagreed. While the disclosure does not by itself threaten the security of voice data, one analyst said companies and governmental organizations should take the same steps to ensure the security of their wireless conversations as they do with antivirus software for computer files.

“Organizations must now take this threat seriously and assume that within six months their organizations will be at risk unless they have adequate measures in place to secure their mobile phone calls,” said Stan Schatt, a vice president for health care and security at the technology market researcher ABI Research in New York.

Mr. Nohl, who has a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia, is a widely consulted encryption expert who waged a similar campaign this year that prodded the DECT Forum, a standards group based in Bern, to upgrade the security algorithm for 800 million cordless home phones.

Mr. Nohl has now set his sights on GSM, whose second-generation digital technology is still the most widely used wireless-communications standard in the world. About 3.5 billion of the world’s 4.3 billion wireless connections use GSM; it is used by about 299 million consumers in North America.

In August, at a hackers’ forum in Amsterdam, Mr. Nohl challenged other computer hackers to help him crack the GSM code. He said about 24 people, some members of the Chaos Computer Club, which is based in Berlin, worked independently to generate the necessary volume of random combinations until they reproduced the GSM algorithm’s code book — a vast log of binary codes that could theoretically be used to decipher GSM phone calls.

The code book, Mr. Nohl said, contains the equivalent of about two terabytes, or 2,000 gigabytes, of digital information, the equivalent of 100 high-definition films.

During an interview, Mr. Nohl said he took precautions to remain within legal boundaries, emphasizing that his efforts to crack the GSM algorithm were purely academic, kept within the public domain, and that the information was not used to decipher a digital call.

“We are not recommending people use this information to break the law,” Mr. Nohl said. “What we are doing is trying to goad the world’s wireless operators to use better security.”

Mr. Nohl said the algorithm’s code book was available on the Internet through services like BitTorrent, which some people use to download vast quantities of data like films and music. He declined to provide a Web link to the code book, for fear of the legal implications, but said its location had spread by word of mouth through the hackers’ community.

The GSM algorithm, technically known as the A5/1 privacy algorithm, is a binary code — which is made exclusively of 0’s and 1’s — that has kept digital phone conversations private since the GSM standard was adopted in 1988.

But the A5/1 algorithm is a 64-bit binary code, the modern standard at the time it was developed, but simpler than the 128-bit codes used today to encrypt calls on third-generation networks. The new codes have twice as many 0’s and 1’s.

In 2007, the GSM developed a 128-bit successor to the A5/1, called the A5/3 encryption algorithm, but most network operators have not yet invested to make the security upgrade.

The disclosure of a GSM encryption key, in and of itself, does not enable surveillance of mobile calls, which must still be overheard and identified from the digital stream of thousands of calls transmitted through a single cellphone station.

The undertaking is highly complex because a digital call typically hops among up to 60 different broadcast frequencies during a single conversation, as the mobile network operator maximizes the use of its available bandwidth.

In a statement, the GSM Association said efforts to crack the algorithm were more complex than critics have asserted, and that operators, by simply modifying the existing algorithm, could thwart any unintended surveillance.

“We strongly suspect that the teams attempting to develop an intercept capability have underestimated its practical complexity,” GSM said in a statement. The association noted that hackers intent on illegal eavesdropping would need a radio receiver system and signal processing software to process raw radio data, much of which is copyrighted.

But Mr. Nohl, during a presentation Sunday to attendees at the Berlin conference, said the hardware and software needed for digital surveillance were available free as an open-source product in which the coding is available for individuals to tailor to their needs.

A security expert whose company sells software to governments, businesses and aid agencies that provides extra layers of security for wireless calls, said Mr. Nohl’s disclosures highlighted the need for better wireless security.

Simon Bransfield-Garth, the chief executive of Cellcrypt, based in London, said Mr. Nohl’s efforts could put sophisticated mobile interception technology — limited to governments and intelligence agencies — within the reach of “any reasonable well-funded criminal organization.”

“This will reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours,” Mr. Bransfield-Garth said during an interview. “We expect as this further develops it will be reduced to minutes.”

Mr. Bransfield-Garth said advances in surveillance technology have made it possible to buy commercial wireless surveillance systems in countries like India for as little as $1,500.

“Customers have told us they have lost multimillion-dollar deals because of information that has leaked out to competitors through phone intercepts,” Mr. Bransfield-Garth said. “Phone intercepts are considerably more common than people realize.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/te...gy/29hack.html





How You Can Build an Eavesdropper for a Quantum Cryptosystem

This presentation will show the first experimental implementation of an eavesdropper for quantum cryptosystem. Although quantum cryptography has been proven unconditionally secure, by exploiting physical imperfections (detector vulnerability) we have successfully built an intercept-resend attack and demonstrated eavesdropping under realistic conditions on an installed quantum key distribution line. The actual eavesdropping hardware we have built will be shown during the conference.

Quantum cryptography, as being based on the laws of physics, was claimed to be much more secure than all classical cryptography schemes.(Un)fortunately physical hardware is not beyond of an evil control: We present a successful attack of an existing quantum key distribution system exploiting a photon detector vulnerability which is probably present in all existing devices. Without Alice and Bob losing their faith in their secure communication, we recorded 100% of the supposedly secret key.

Single photon detectors based on passively quenched avalanche photodiodes are used in a number of quantum key distribution experiments. A vulnerability has been found in which these detectors can be temporarily blinded and then forced to produce a click [1]. An attack exploiting this vulnerability against a free-space polarization based quantum cryptosystem [2,3] is feasible. By controlling the polarization of a bright beam the eavesdropper Eve can force any detector of her choice to fire in the legitimate receiver Bob, such that she gets a full control of it without introducing additional errors. This allows Eve to run an intercept-resend attack without getting caught, and obtain a full copy of the transmitted secret key. We have fully demonstrated this attack under realistic conditions on an installed fiber optic quantum key distribution system. The system uses polarization encoding over 290 m of optical fiber spanning four buildings. A complete eavesdropper has been built, inserted at a mid-way point in the fiber line, and 100% of the secret key information has been recorded. Under attack, no significant changes in the system operating parameters have been observed by the legitimate users, which have happily continued to generate their 'secret' key.

[1] V. Makarov, New J. Phys. 11, 065003 (2009). [2] I. Marcikic, A. Lamas-Linares, C. Kurtsiefer, Appl. Phys. Lett. 89, 101122 (2006). [3] M. P. Peloso et al., New J. Phys. 11, 045007 (2009).

Attached files

* (application/zip - 4.4 MB)

Links

* Quantum hacking group in NTNU
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/F...s/3576.en.html





Virus Scanners for Virus Authors
Brian Krebs

I have often recommended file-scanning services like VirusTotal and Jotti, which allow visitors to upload a suspicious file and scan it against dozens of commercial anti-virus tools. If a scan generates any virus alerts or red flags, the report produced by the scan is shared with all of the participating anti-virus makers so that those vendors can incorporate detection for the newly discovered malware into their products.

That pooling of intelligence on new threats also serves to make the free scanning services less attractive to virus authors, who would almost certainly like nothing more than to freely and simultaneously test the stealth of their new creations across a wide range of security software. Still, there is nothing to stop an enterprising hacker from purchasing a license for each of the anti-virus tools on the market and selling access to a separate scanning service that appeals to the virus-writing community.

Enter upstart file-scanning services like av-check.com and virtest.com, which bank on the guarantee that they won’t share your results with the anti-virus community.

For $1 per file scanned (or a $40 monthly membership) av-check.com will see if your file is detected by any of 22 anti-virus products, including AVAST, AVG, Avira, BitDefender, NOD32, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro. “Each of them is setten [sic] up on max heuristic check level,” av-check promises. “We guarantee that we don’t save your uploaded files and they are deleted immediately after the check. Also , we don’t resend your uploaded files to the 3rd person. Files are being checked only locally (without checking/using on other servers.” In other words: There is no danger that the results of these scans will somehow leak out to the anti-virus vendors.

The service claims that it will soon be rolling out advanced features, such as testing malware against anti-spyware and firewall programs, as well as a test to see whether the malware functions in a virtual machine, such as VMWare or VirtualBox. For safety and efficiency’s sake, security researchers often poke and prod new malware samples in a virtual environment. As a result many new families of malware are designed to shut down or destroy themselves if they detect they are being run inside of a virtual machine.

Virtest checks malware suspicious files against a similar albeit slightly different set of anti-virus programs, also promising not to let submitted files get back to the anti-virus vendors: “Your soft isn’t ever sent anywhere and the files being checked will never appear in the fresh AV signature bases after scanning,” the site pledges. “On purpose in all AV-products are turned off all possible methods and initiatives of exchange of files’ info with the AV-divisions.”

The proprietors of this service don’t even try to hide the fact that they have built it for malware writers. Among the chief distinguishing features of virtest.com is the ability for malware authors to test “exploit packs,” pre-packaged kits that — when stitched into a malicious or hacked Web site — serve the visitor’s browser with a kitchen sink full of code designed to install software via one of several known security holes. Many anti-virus programs now also scan Web pages for malicious content, and this service’s “exploits pack check” will tell malware authors whether their exploit sites are triggering virus alerts across a range of widely-used anti-virus software.

But don’t count on paying for these services via American Express: Both sites only accept payment via virtual currencies such as Webmoney and Fethard, services that appear to be popular with the online shadow economy.
http://www.krebsonsecurity.com/2009/...virus-authors/





TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive
Kim Zetter

Two bloggers received home visits from Transportation Security Administration agents Tuesday after they published a new TSA directive that revises screening procedures and puts new restrictions on passengers in the wake of a recent bombing attempt by the so-called underwear bomber.

Special agents from the TSA’s Office of Inspection interrogated two U.S. bloggers, one of them an established travel columnist, and served them each with a civil subpoena demanding information on the anonymous source that provided the TSA document.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites.

“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said in a statement that security directives “are not for public disclosure.”

“TSA’s Office of Inspections is currently investigating how the recent Security Directives were acquired and published by parties who should not have been privy to this information,” the statement said.

Frischling, a freelance travel writer and photographer in Connecticut who writes a blog for the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, said the two agents who visited him arrived around 7 p.m. Tuesday, were armed and threatened him with a criminal search warrant if he didn’t provide the name of his source. They also threatened to get him fired from his KLM job and indicated they could get him designated a security risk, which would make it difficult for him to travel and do his job.

“They were indicating there would be significant ramifications if I didn’t cooperate,” said Frischling, who was home alone with his three children when the agents arrived. “It’s not hard to intimidate someone when they’re holding a 3-year-old [child] in their hands. My wife works at night. I go to jail, and my kids are here with nobody.”

Frischling, who described some of the details of the visit on his personal blog, told Threat Level that the two agents drove to his house in Connecticut from DHS offices in Massachusetts and New Jersey and didn’t mention a subpoena until an hour into their visit.

“They came to the door and immediately were asking, ‘Who gave you this document?, Why did you publish the document?’ and ‘I don’t think you know how much trouble you’re in.’ It was very much a hardball tactic,” he says.

When they pulled a subpoena from their briefcase and told him he was legally required to provide the information they requested, he said he needed to contact a lawyer. The agents said they’d sit outside his house until he gave them the information they wanted.

Frischling says he received the document anonymously from someone using a Gmail account and determined, after speaking with an attorney, that he might as well cooperate with the agents since he had little information about the source and there was no federal shield law to protect him.

The Gmail address consisted of the name “Mike,” followed by random numbers and letters. Frischling had already deleted the e-mail after publishing the document but said he had learned from previous correspondence with the source that he had been hired as a screener for the TSA in 2009.

The agents searched through Frischling’s BlackBerry and iPhone and questioned him about a number of phone numbers and messages in the devices. One number listed in his phone under “ICEMOM” was a quick dial to his mother, in case of emergency. The agents misunderstood the acronym and became suspicious that it was code for his anonymous source and asked if his source worked for ICE — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The agents then said they wanted to take an image of his hard drive. Frischling said they had to go to WalMart to buy a hard drive, but when they returned were unable to get it to work. Frischling said the keyboard on his laptop was no longer working after they tried to copy his files. The agents left around 11 p.m. but came back Wednesday morning and, with Frischling’s consent, seized his laptop, which they promised to return after copying the hard drive.

Frischling wrote on his blog that he decided to publish the TSA directive to clear up much of the confusion and speculation that was circulating among the public about changes that were being instituted in airport security procedures after a passenger unsuccessfully tried to ignite a bomb Dec. 25 using a syringe and explosive chemicals hidden in his underwear.

“We are a free society, knowledge is power and informing the masses allows for public conversation and collective understanding,” Frischling wrote on his blog. “You can agree or disagree, but you need information to know if you want to agree or disagree. My goal is to inform and help people better understand what is happening, as well as allow them to form their own opinions.”

A former federal prosecutor who asked not to be identified told Threat Level that the TSA is being heavy-handed in how it’s handling the matter.

“It strikes me that someone at TSA is apoplectic that somehow there’s a sense that they’re not doing their job right,” he told Threat level. “To go into this one reporter’s house and copy his computer files and threaten him, it strikes me that they’re more aggressive with this reporter than with the guy who got on this flight.”

Christopher Elliott, who is based in Florida and writes a column for the Washington Post, MSNBC and others, received a visit from a TSA special agent named Robert Flaherty around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Elliott wouldn’t discuss the details of the visit with Threat Level, due to pending legal issues, but he describes in his blog post how he got a knock on his door shortly after finishing dinner and putting his three young children in the bathtub.

Flaherty showed him a badge and said he wanted information about the source of the document he published. When Elliott told him he’d need to see a subpoena, Flaherty pulled one out and handed it to Elliott.

Elliott told Threat Level they talked for 10 to 20 minutes, but he refused to cooperate. Flaherty left but called Wednesday to remind Elliott that he had until the end of the business day to comply with the subpoena.

“I really don’t think they thought this one through,” said Elliott about the TSA tactics.

Elliott could face a fine and up to a year in jail for failure to comply, according to a statement on the subpoena.

The TSA directive was issued Christmas Day, the date of the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253, and indicates that the directive will expire Dec. 30. The directive applies to anyone operating a scheduled or charter flight departing from a foreign location and destined for the United States.

It requires all passengers to undergo a “thorough pat-down,” which should concentrate on their upper legs and torso, at the boarding gate. It also requires physical inspection of all “accessible property” accompanying passengers at the boarding gate, “with focus on syringes being transported along with powders and/or liquids.” It also indicates that restrictions against liquids, aerosols and gels should be strictly adhered to. Heads of state can be exempted from the special screening.

Passengers are also required to remain seated during the last hour of flights, and cannot access carry-on baggage or have blankets, pillows or other personal belongings on their lap during this time.

Aircraft phones, internet service, TV programming and global positioning systems are to be disabled prior to boarding and during all phases of flight. Flight crews are also prohibited from making any announcements to passengers about the flight path or the plane’s position over cities or landmarks.

The TSA was embarrassed earlier this month after a contract worker posted an improperly redacted sensitive screening manual on a government site.

That document revealed which passengers are more likely to be targeted for secondary screening, who is exempt from screening, TSA procedures for screening foreign dignitaries and CIA-escorted passengers, and extensive instructions for calibrating Siemens walk-through metal detectors.

Five TSA workers were put on leave pending an internal investigation into how that document got posted.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...atens-blogger/





Agency Drops Bloggers’ Subpoenas
AP

The Transportation Security Administration on Thursday dropped the subpoenas it had issued to two Internet writers in its effort to learn who leaked an airline security directive.

The agency said the investigation was “nearing a successful conclusion, and the subpoenas are no longer in effect.”

The security directive ordered extra measures after a Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound airliner.

One subpoena went to an Internet travel writer, Chris Elliott of Winter Springs, Fla., who did not immediately comply. Mr. Elliott said agents showed up at his house, demanding that he reveal who leaked the directive.

The administrative subpoena, a demand for information issued without a judge’s approval, is a civil, not criminal, document.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said her organization was supporting Mr. Elliott.

The other blogger, Steven Frischling of Connecticut, said he had been forced to hand over his computer to agents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/us...ics/01tsa.html





Z's Cyber Spies Win New Powers
Nicky Hager

New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced giving police and Security Intelligence Service officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone's online life.

The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand.
In preparation, technicians have been installing specialist spying devices and software inside all telephone exchanges, internet companies and even fibre-optic datanetworks between cities and towns, providing police and spy agencies with the capability to monitor almost all communications.

Police and SIS must still obtain an interception warrant naming a person or place they want to monitor but, compared to the phone taps of the past, a single warrant now covers phone, email and all internet activity.

It can even monitor a person's location by detecting their mobile phone; all of this occurring almost instantaneously.

Police say in the year to June 2009, there were 68 interception warrant applications granted and 157 people prosecuted as a result of those interceptions.

Police association vice-president Stuart Mills said the new capabilities are required because criminals were using new technologies to communicate, and that people who weren't committing criminal offences had little to fear.

However, civil liberties council spokesman Michael Bott said the new surveillance capabilities are part of a step-by-step erosion of civil rights in New Zealand.

Police Minister Judith Collins responded to questions from the Sunday Star-Times about the new surveillance capabilities, saying: "I support the rule of law." In last year's budget she approved extra police funds to subsidise companies wiring surveillance devices into their telecommunications networks.

The measures are the consequence of a law, the 2004 Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act, which gave internet and network companies until last year to install devices allowing automated access to internet and cellphone data.

Telecom, Vodafone and TelstraClear had earlier 2005 deadlines, and new cellphone provider 2degrees installed the interception equipment before launching last year.

Official papers obtained by the Star-Times show that, despite government claims that it was done for domestic reasons, the new New Zealand spying capabilities are part of a push by United States agencies to have standardised surveillance capabilities available for their use from governments worldwide.

While US civil liberties groups unsuccessfully fought these surveillance capabilities being used on US citizens, the FBI was lobbying other governments to adopt them. FBI Director Robert Mueller III told a senate committee in March last year that the FBI needs "global reach" to fight cyber-crime and terrorism and that co-operation with "law enforcement partners" gives it "the means to leverage the collective resources of many countries".

Auckland lawyer Tim McBride, author of the forthcoming New Zealand Civil Rights Handbook, says our politicians had let down New Zealanders when they yielded to the foreign pressure and imported US-style surveillance into New Zealand.

He said "monitoring email, internet chatting and Facebook is like the police and SIS planting bugs in every cafe and park. It would probably help solve a few crimes, but the cost is just too great".

The 2004 New Zealand law, which mirrors laws overseas, requires the content of any communication plus "call associated data", such as times, phone numbers, IP addresses and mobile phone locations, to be able to be copied and sent to the police, SIS or Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) at the time of transmission or "as close as practicable" to that time.

In practice, a specialist said, this means someone's email can be "at the agency within one or two minutes of it actually being on the wires".

When the police and SIS were pushing for the interception capability law they argued repeatedly that it would not "change or extend in any way the existing powers".

But civil libertarians say that the invisibility of electronic surveillance reduces the opportunity to challenge it.

A technician familiar with the developments said the previous surveillance technology dated from the early 1980s when the Telecom phone system went digital. Police bugged individual phones and could request suspects' call logs.

More recently police had taken a warrant to telcos and gone away with printed emails, but did it rarely as there were problems using the evidence in court.

"This is the first big jump from there," said the technician.

"They've never had the powers to force ISPs to build in spying capabilities before now. I imagine law enforcement is very excited about this."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3203...win-new-powers





Microsoft Rolls Out Word Patch

Workaround to comply with court ruling.
Phil Muncaster

Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling copyright infringing versions of the word processing product.

In a statement last week, Microsoft’s director of public affairs, Kevin Kutz, said the firm had been preparing for the injunction decision handed down by the US Court of Appeals.

“With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products,” he explained.

Kutz said he expected to have copies of the software with the offending features removed available for sale by the injunction date, 11 January.

Now it appears that the patch is available on Microsoft's OEM Partner Center Website, under the heading – “2007 Microsoft Office Supplement Release (October 2009)”.

“After this patch is installed, Word will no longer read the Custom XML elements contained within DOCX, DOCM, or XML files,” read the explanatory notes.

“These files will continue to open, but any Custom XML elements will be removed. The ability to handle custom XML markup is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word.”

Microsoft also notes that the patch is required for all US customers.

The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although Kutz has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn.

“While we are moving quickly to address the injunction issue, we are also considering our legal options, which could include a request for a rehearing by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals en banc or a request for a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court,” he said in the statement last week.
http://itnews.com.au/News/163608,mic...ord-patch.aspx





Happy Birthday, Linus
Glyn Moody

Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that's essentially a private event for him, there's an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too.

As is well known, before he started writing Linux, Linus coded on a Sinclair QL, a brilliant if rather bizarre system that was based on a cut-down version of the Motorola 68000 chip used in the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Linus was prepared to put up with the limitations of that chip because it offered multi-tasking – and hence the possibility of some advanced programming.

It was for similarly rigorous reasons that he avoided buying a PC for some time: he disliked the underlying architecture of Intel's chips. But when the 80386 came out, Linus finally succumbed, and at the end of 1990, decided to buy a PC. The only problem was finding the funds to pay for it.

One source was a grant from the Finnish government. This was actually a student loan meant for general living costs during his time at university, rather than specifically for buying computers, but Linus not unreasonably felt that a PC was an indispensable item for a student studying computing science, and hence a permitted expense. He finally paid off that debt in November 1992.

To this student loan, Linus added what he termed “Christmas money”. As anyone who has a birthday very near Christmas will tell you, such “Christmas money” almost invariably includes money for the birthday bundled in too, so it's likely that some funds for the PC arrived in the form of birthday presents. Significantly, Linus wasted no time in buying the new computer after Christmas – and hence his birthday. As he told me in 1996: “ I remember the first non-holiday day of the New Year I went to buy a PC.” The specification is rather sobering:

Quote:
386, DX33, 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, 40 Megs hard disc
Having acquired the hardware, Linus then had to wait for the software he wanted – Tanenbaum's Minix operating system. This was one reason why he had finally opted for the PC: Tanenbaum's Unix-like system had been ported to the 80386, and ran quite quickly on it, as Linus discovered during his university studies, which whetted his appetite for this educational tool.

Minix may have been fast on the PC but it was painfully slow in arriving. In his first published interview, in Linux News, Linus recalled what exactly he got up to in the meantime:

Quote:
As it turned out, Minix wasn't available in Finland (at least I wasn't able to find it easily), so while I got my machine on January 5th 1991 (easy date to remember due to the monthly payments :-), I was forced to run DOS on it for a couple of months while waiting for the Minix disks. So Jan-Feb was spent about 70-30 playing "Prince of Persia" and getting aquainted with the machine.

When Minix finally arrived, I had solved "PoP", and knew a smattering of 386 machine code (enough to be able to get the machine into protected mode and sit there looping). So I installed Minix (leaving some room for "PoP" on a DOS partition), and started hacking.

Getting Minix wasn't altogether a pleasant experience: the keyboard bindings were wrong, and it didn't exactly act like the suns I was used to (ugghh. I *hate* the bourne shell for interactive work). The keyboard was easy to correct (although I didn't like the Minix keyboard driver code), and applying Bruce Evans' 386-patches made the system a bit more "real".

So somewhere around March-91, I had a 386 system running Minix-386, and I was able to install awb's gcc-1.37.1 port. After that, I was able to port bash to the resulting mess, and things looked a bit better. I also spent my time generally fooling around (porting gcc-1.40 and various other programs), and kept on learning about the 386 while doing so (writing small boot-disks that would set up a protected mode environment and print out various inane messages).
In that interview, Linus modestly described the genesis of Linux thus:

Quote:
"Linux" didn't really exist until about August-91 - before that what I had was essentially just a very basic protected mode system that had evolved from a glorified "Hello world" program into a even more glorified terminal emulator. Linux stopped for quite a while at the terminal emulator stage: I played around with Minix, and used my protected mode program to read news from the univerity machine. No down/upload, but it did a fair vt100 emulation, and did it by using two tasks which communicated from keybodard->modem and modem->screen.

By mid-summer -91, "Linux" was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.

By that time I looked around for some standards texts - I decided early on that I didn't want to write the user-level programs, and that in order to easily port things I'd either have to make the new system compatible with Minix (ugghh) or follow some other kind of standard. What I wanted was a POSIX guide, not so much to be 100% posix, but in order not to do anything really stupid I'd regret later.

My quest for the posix standards failed, as the posix standard committee sells the standard to feed itself as I found out, but I did get a good pointer to the (then very alpha and unsupported) GNU libc.a, which had an early manual accompanying it. The manual was of some help, but the biggest help was actually the contact to the person who pointed it out to me: arl@sauna.hut.fi. He was/is the organizer of the pub/OS subdirectory at nic.funet.fi, and was interested in giving Linux a home at nic.

Back then, I was only idly thinking about making my system available (and I had no real time-table), but arl happily created a pub/OS/Linux subdirectory at nic, and thus also gave the system it's name. I wasn't really ready for a release yet, so the directory contained just a README for about a month ("this directory is for the freely distributable Minix clone" or something like that). Arl probably thought the project wouldn't come to anything.
I think we can safely say that “arl” - Ari Lemmke, a member of the Helsinki University staff – was a little mistaken on that point. It's truly extraordinary to contemplate that Linus's “glorified "Hello world" program” is now running nearly 90% of the world's top supercomputers. And at the other end of the scale, it is making huge in-roads into the smartphone market, which means that one day there may be billions of people with the Linux kernel in their pocket.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what the world would be like today had Linus not bought that PC in 1991 with his Christmas and birthday money. There could hardly be a better time than today to thank him for Linux, his amazing gift to us, and to wish him many happy returns.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...birthday-linus





Western Digital Brings Advanced Format to Caviar Green
Geoff Gasior

For quite some time now, mechanical hard drives have stored data in 512-byte chunks called sectors. That sector size worked for lower capacity points, but as areal densities rise, it's become increasingly inappropriate for new drives. As a result, the industry has decided to transition to a 4KB sector size dubbed Advanced Format.

So-called legacy formatting schemes sandwich each 512-byte sector between Sync/DAM and ECC blocks that handle data address marking and error correction, respectively—and also take up space. You still need those blocks with Advanced Format, but only every 4KB rather than every 512 bytes, which translates to a dramatic reduction in overhead. This approach allows Advanced Format to make more efficient use of a platter's available capacity, and Western Digital expects it to boost useful storage by 7-11%, depending on the implementation. Current 500GB/platter products stand to see an increase in useful capacity of about 10%, which is really quite impressive.

Since not all operating systems can handle 4KB sectors natively, Western Digital's Adavanced Format implementation divides each 4KB physical sector into eight 512-byte logical sectors. The drive's firmware performs all the necessary translations, and according to Western Digital, there's no loss in performance as long as partitions are properly aligned. Windows 7 and Vista should align new partitions properly on their own, but you'll have to download a free WD Align application to align partitions correctly with Windows XP. WD Align is also necessary if you're using a disk cloning utility to create partitions under Vista or Win7.

Although Western Digital's Advanced Format implementation uses the drive's firmware to translate requests, users won't be able to add the feature to existing drives with a firmware upgrade. The drive's platters must be prepared for Advanced Format at the factory.

Western Digital is first rolling out Advanced Format in its Caviar Green line. 500GB drives featuring the new formatting scheme are scheduled to start shipping this week and should be followed quickly by higher capacity points. You'll be able to identify an Advanced-Format-compatible drive by its model number, WD10EARS, or by stickers on the drive and its packaging. These new models will also feature larger 64MB caches (previous Greens topped out at 32MB), although Western Digital doesn't expect their street prices to be any higher.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18115





Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row
Eric Wilson

NOT everyone thought it was adorable in September when a 13-year-old wunderkind blogger named Tavi was given a front-row seat at the fashion shows of Marc Jacobs, Rodarte and others.

Oh now, don’t misunderstand. She was totally adorable. You could have gobbled her up, with her goofy spark plug style — a Peggy Guggenheim for the Tweeting tween set. Her feet, in designer stockings, did not quite touch the ground. Within a matter of months, Tavi Gevinson, the author of a blog called Style Rookie, was feted by designers, filming promotions for Target, flown to Tokyo for a party with the label Comme des Garçons and writing a review of the collections for no less than Harper’s Bazaar. Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers of Rodarte, described her in the pages of Teen Vogue as “curious and discerning.”

Rather, it was what the arrival of Ms. Gevinson, as a blogger, represented that ruffled feathers among the fashion elite. Anne Slowey, who has spent decades climbing the editorial ladder to a senior position at Elle, dismissed the teenager’s column as “a bit gimmicky” in an interview with New York magazine. And in an instant, the subtext in her complaint was read by dozens of Ms. Gevinson’s fans as an example of the tension between old media and new, when one leapfrogs ahead of the other.

As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated. After all, what is one to think — besides publicity stunt — when Bryan Boy, a pseudonymous, style-obsessed blogger from the Philippines, is seated at the D & G show in Milan between the august front-row fixtures of Vogue and Vanity Fair, a mere two positions to the right of Anna Wintour?

“There has been a complete change this year,” said Kelly Cutrone, who has been organizing fashion shows since 1987. “Do I think, as a publicist, that I now have to have my eye on some kid who’s writing a blog in Oklahoma as much as I do on an editor from Vogue? Absolutely. Because once they write something on the Internet, it’s never coming down. And it’s the first thing a designer is going to see.”

Perhaps it was to be expected that the communications revolution would affect the makeup of the fashion news media in much the same way it has changed the broader news media landscape. At a time when magazines like Vogue, W, Glamour and Bazaar have pared their staffs and undergone deep cutbacks because of the impact of the recession on their advertising sales, blogs have made remarkable strides in gaining both readership and higher profiles. At the shows this year, there were more seats reserved for editors from Fashionista, Fashionologie, Fashiontoast, Fashionair and others, and fewer for reporters from regional newspapers that can no longer afford the expense of covering the runways independently.

But it is somewhat surprising that designers are adjusting to the new breed of online reporter more readily than magazines, which have been slow to adapt to the demand for instant content about all things fashion. Blogs are posting images and reviews of collections before the last model exits the runway, while magazine editors are still jockeying to feature those clothes in issues that will be published months later.

So it is not without reason that some editors feel threatened, or that seasoned critics worry that they could be replaced by a teenager. The designers and publicists who once quivered before the mighty pens are now courting writers from Web sites that offer a direct pipeline to potential customers. Sure, magazines and newspapers have started their own blogs and tweets, but reading them, you often sense a generational disconnect, something like the queasy feeling of getting a “friend” request from your mother on Facebook. (From Glamour.com: “Dating Tips: Why It’s Important to Get That Number.”)

Sites that include readers in the conversation are thriving, in a sense democratizing the coverage of style, much as designers and retailers — with lower priced fast-fashion collections — have democratized fashion itself. Garance Doré and Scott Schuman, two photographers who have become stars online (and who are a couple off-line), have created popular blogs with the simple idea of posting images of stylish people and opening them to public comment. Now designers are seeking their advice on communications strategies and even design — Ms. Doré and Mr. Schuman have worked on projects with Gap.

Other sites have gained credibility along with traffic. Fashionista.com had 103,512 unique visitors in November, and Fashionologie.com had 27,125, according to the online tracking agency Compete. Jezebel.com (a saucy blog that includes coverage of fashion) shot ahead of Style.com (the Condé Nast fashion site) for the first time this fall with more than a half-million visitors. These are considered large audiences for dispatches on such trivial developments as models refusing to wear Alexander McQueen’s crazy shoes or that such-and-such designer is looking for an intern.

The personalities behind those sites, in turn, are becoming as famous as some magazine editors. Marc Jacobs named one of his bag designs after Bryan Boy, while Sephora asked Lauren Luke, whose makeup videos are an Internet sensation, to preside over beauty contests in its stores. Designers are thinking differently in response to consumers who want instant gratification. Doo-Ri Chung, for example, describing her new basics collection in The Financial Times this fall, said her customer has a “blog mentality, not a magazine mentality.”

“The old idea of reading a magazine and planning ahead, that’s not something that younger customers do,” she said. “It’s a different world, and designers have to adapt.”

Still, the popularity and novelty of such sites have raised concerns that their writers might be unduly influenced by designers or beauty companies. New guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, announced in October, require blogs to disclose in their online product reviews if they receive free merchandise or payment for the items they write about. This bothered some bloggers, and reasonably so, since magazine editors commonly receive stockpiles of the same expensive goodies to review in their pages, and that practice is rarely disclosed even though magazines are beholden to advertisers for their livelihood.

Those guidelines also seem excessive at a time when magazines and newspapers are changing their tone to embrace the online culture. On several fashion sites last week, it was reported that Vogue is planning to feature a group of bloggers in its March issue, including Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil, Ms. Doré and, yes, even Bryan Boy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/fa...7BLOGGERS.html





FileSocial: A Community for Sharing Files on Twitter
Chris Cameron

We have profiled Twitter-based file sharing services in the past, but in some cases the shared files were read-only and the UI design left much to be desired, or the service merely redirected the user to a third-party file sharing service.

Spain-based Ideateca has conquered these drawbacks with FileSocial, a sleek multi-platform file sharing service for Twitter. After authenticating their Twitter account, users can upload any filetype up to 50MB, add a message of 110 characters or less, and FileSocial will post the tweet on Twitter with a link to the file.

The web interface shows users a stream of their files, which any user can download or comment on. Comments automatically get posted to Twitter as @ replies to the user who uploaded the file.

Aside from using the FileSocial web interface, Windows, Mac or Linux users can download a desktop application, built on Adobe AIR with drag-and-drop functionality, to upload files. Android users can also download the official FileSocial Android app, and while there is no official iPhone app, the third-party app tweet media allows uploading through FileSocial's API.

The one major drawback of FileSocial is the inability to post files privately for confidential sharing. All files uploaded to the service show up in a public timeline of files, regardless of whether you choose to post the file to Twitter or not. The option to mark files as private or send the link as a direct message is a key feature that is lacking from FileSocial.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwrit...ty-for-sha.php





Social Networking Joins Addiction List

Celebrities and everyday people are discovering social networking has its pros and cons, says entertainment reporter
Jessica Leo

SOCIAL networking has joined sex, drugs and alcohol as the latest addiction plaguing celebrities. With Australians spending a third of their time online perusing Facebook, however, it seems the everyday Aussie is not far behind in mirroring the trend.

British pop singer Lily Allen has become the latest celebrity casualty of the affliction, announcing she is quitting social networking sites and declaring she will be a "neo-Luddite".

Allen joins US pop sensation Miley Cyrus and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who deleted their Twitter accounts, claiming the site had caused too much disruption to their lives.

TIPS FOR SOCIAL NETWORK ADDICTS

- Limit logging on to only once a day.
- When logged in, limit the time spent to 15 minutes or less.
- Set a timer to monitor time spent on sites.
- Reward yourself (for example, with a coffee) when you stick to the allocated time limit.
- Punish yourself if you stray outside the limits - perhaps donate to a charity you wouldn't normally assist or forgo your morning coffee.
- Make time to schedule face-to-face contact with friends.
- Don't update every minute of your life - think about whose life would be enriched by knowing your every move.

Allen, 24, says she is signing off from Facebook, Twitter and blogging to settle into a normal life with her boyfriend, building contractor Sam Cooper.

"It's not about being famous; it's not about all the parties; it's not about wanting to be the biggest pop star on the planet. It's about being happy," Allen said of her decision.

"For me, that is Sam, spending time at home, sorting out bed linen - being normal."

Allen's final Twitter post said it all, with the singer writing: "I am a neo-luddite. Goodbye."

Despite her music gaining exposure via social networking site MySpace, Allen said she recognised she had a problem. "I just had this revelation that Facebook, blogging, all those things were becoming a total addiction," she said.

"I'd be with my boyfriend or my mum and they'd have got just half of me. So I put my Blackberry, my laptop, my iPod in a box and that's the end.

"We've ended up in this world of unreal communication and I don't want that. I want real life back."

The singer's words are sure to resonate with many, particularly here in Australia. It was revealed last month we lead the world for the time spent on social media sites each month, with our average of 7.12 hours exceeding the national averages of Britain, Italy, North America and Japan.

Furthermore, figures collated for October show Australians spent an average of 27.2 hours browsing online, 7.55 hours of which was taken up by Facebook, while MySpace and Twitter accounted for 39 and 17 minutes respectively.

That is not to say, however, the problem is exclusively ours. A Nielsen audit of Americans' use of online time revealed that in 12 months, Facebook use had grown by 700 per cent and Twitter's numbers had grown exponentially.

The issue this year attracted the attention of former South Australian thinker in residence and neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, who claimed repeated exposure to sites such as Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, with computer games and fast-paced TV shows, could effectively "rewire" the brain.

"Attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are reduced and there's a marked reduction in the ability to think abstractly," Lady Greenfield said.

Adelaide psychologist Dr Darryl Cross, of Crossways Consulting, said social networking was a double-edged sword - while it could serve a purpose of connecting people who were separated by distance, addiction was a serious and very real concern.

"I think people are naturally curious and that's why people entertain gossip, innuendo and rumour," Dr Cross said.

"They love that intrigue. You have a medium like Facebook that feeds into that intrigue.

"Unfortunately, some people do get addicted to it as it feeds their desire about what other people are doing."

Dr Cross said that with technology, such as iPhones and Blackberries, increasing our ease of access to social networking sites, the problem might intensify.

Social networking also can serve a valuable purpose. This year has seen fans and celebrities embrace the power of sites, such as Facebook, to effect social change.

Fans of band Rage Against the Machine launched a Facebook campaign to snare top spot in British charts and deny X-Factor winner the honour, customary each Christmas.

Closer to home, passionate Adelaideans launched Facebook groups to resurrect Hey Hey It's Saturday and the Adelaide Skyshow, generating a groundswell of support.

Dr Cross said it was a matter of adopting the everything-in-moderation adage, suggesting addicts limit time spent and frequency of visits rather than trying to go cold turkey.

"All things in perspective, all things in balance," he said.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/s...006301,00.html





Irish Singer Van Morrison Blames Web Hacker for False Claim of New Baby
Sandy Cohen

Reclusive Irish singer Van Morrison said Thursday that a computer hacker planted a false report on his Web site claiming he had fathered a fourth child at the age of 64 with a new partner.

The false report was disseminated Monday by a Los Angeles-based publicist for Morrison, Phil Lobel. The publicist was quoted by an unidentified associate on Thursday as getting the report from the Morrison site.

The false report was picked up by several news agencies, including The Associated Press, as well as celebrity sites and British newspapers. The false report on the Morrison Web site claimed that a woman identified as Gigi had just borne a son with Morrison.

The singer issued a statement Thursday through an international public-relations agency stressing that the report was completely false and the malicious product of a hacker's attack on his official Web site, www.vanmorrison.com.

It appeared to be the latest in a rapidly growing string of hoaxes in the Internet age. Digital tricksters increasingly place phony footage, facts and press releases on Web sites and video-sharing sites to see how quickly the falsehoods will spread through traditional and new media alike.

John Saunders, president of the European arm of the U.S. public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard Inc., said he contacted Morrison and his wife, Michelle, after seeing the reports and finding them hard to believe. He said the couple wasn't aware of them and initially didn't want to respond.

"The reports were complete and utter fiction. None of it was true," Saunders said in a telephone interview. "But Van generally doesn't feel the need to engage with the media, whether the news is good, bad or indifferent. Michelle and Van studiously stay out of the limelight. They wouldn't have been aware of the traction these false reports were getting globally."

Saunders, a longtime friend of the couple, said he persuaded them to make a statement following several calls, texts and e-mails.

Lobel, a longtime Los Angeles publicist who cites scores of entertainment and corporate clients — including Morrison — on his company Web site, claimed in an e-mail Monday that Morrison had asked him to disseminate the birth announcement. Before sending its story on Monday, the AP called Lobel to make sure the e-mail was genuine, which Lobel confirmed.

Following Morrison's denial of the report on Thursday, repeated phone calls and e-mails from the AP to Lobel went unanswered.

Finally, a reporter visited the West Hollywood offices of his PR company, Lobeline Communications. A man who looks similar to Lobel answered the door and identified himself as a guest visiting from out of town. The man said he would check to see if Lobel was available, then reported that the publicist was on a plane.

Minutes later, a person claiming to be an associate of Lobel's sent an e-mail message from the publicist's account to the reporter, saying that Lobel "called us from his plane" to issue a statement acknowledging that his office had "passed along information from the official Web site of Van Morrison, which we are now told had been hacked."

"All those with Van Morrison regret any confusion this may have caused," the statement said.

The associate who sent the statement refused to identify himself.

Lobel eventually returned a call to the AP confirming the unidentified associate was speaking on his behalf, but the publicist declined to elaborate on the matter.

Morrison's Web site is being redesigned following the Dec. 28 hacking, the second to hit the site since October. Visitors to the site Thursday were invited to register for an e-mail news service but could not browse its contents.

In his prepared statement, Morrison said he remains "very happily married" to Michelle Morrison, his partner since 1992 and mother of their two children aged 3 and 2.

"Once the claims were brought to our attention, they were taken down from the site but not before news organizations repeated these falsehoods," his statement said. "The comments which appeared on my Web site did not come from me. They are completely and utterly without foundation."

Saunders said Morrison wouldn't talk to the media directly and was celebrating the new year with his wife and children. "He has never done interviews about his personal life. Van's been consistent on that," he said.

Morrison's previous marriage, which ended in divorce in 1973, produced one daughter, the Californian singer-songwriter Shana Morrison. She performs occasionally with her father.

___

Associated Press Writer Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this report from Dublin.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...0,539701.story





Whoops! F.C.C. Chairman Spams Facebook Friends
Brad Stone

Facebook scam artists have closed out 2009 by snagging a prominent victim: Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

On Friday morning at around 10:30 a.m., Mr. Genachowski sent his Facebook friends this puzzling message: “Adam got me started making money with this.” It was followed by a link to a Web page that is no longer active. The messages indicated that Mr. Genachowski’s account had been taken over by a malicious program that was using it to send out spam.

As of Friday afternoon Mr. Genachowski’s Facebook profile was no longer visible on the site. A Facebook spokesman, Larry Yu, said the company learned of the problem this morning and suspended the account, as it routinely does in such cases. An F.C.C. spokeswoman declined to comment.

The chairman is by no means alone in getting inadvertently embroiled in social networking scams that can be embarrassing. I wrote about such scams earlier this month, noting that the humiliation sown by these attacks is usually just a byproduct of spammer efforts to get people to click on various links.

It’s not clear how Mr. Genachowski’s Facebook account was compromised; perhaps he or a family member clicked on a malicious link, allowing his account to be taken over.

The most important question: Who the heck is Adam?

Update: Facebook sent this statement, which indicates that if Mr. Genachowski wants to continue to use Facebook, he will have to get some education about the safe use of this particular form of communication.

Quote:
We take security very seriously and have devoted significant resources towards helping our users protect their accounts. We’ve developed complex automated systems that detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised (based on anomalous activity like lots of messages sent in a short period of time, or messages with links that are known to be bad). Because Facebook is a closed system, we have a tremendous advantage over email. That is, once we detect a phony message, we can delete that message in all inboxes across the site.

We also block malicious links from being shared and work with third parties to get phishing and malware sites added to browser blacklists or taken down completely. Users whose accounts have been compromised are put through a remediation process, where they must take steps to re-secure their account and learn security best practices. This is what happened with Chairman Genachowski’s account.

To combat these threats, however, we need users’ help too. You can protect yourself by never clicking on strange links, even if they’ve been sent by friends, and by being wary of sites that ask you to download or upgrade software.

We educate people about online security through our Facebook Security Page, which has well over one million fans.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...ok-friends/?hp





Technology Leapfrogs Schools and Jurisdictions
James Warren

Plainfield East High School doesn’t have a senior class. But it clearly possesses a new staple of American education: “sexting.” I urge a surely chagrined Principal Anthony Manville to buy several large boxes of fig leaves.

A 16-year-old honors student took a nude photo of herself, used her cellphone to send it to a friend and, bingo, for the last two weeks the photo has made the rounds of the three-year-old school with 1,300 students. Plainfield police seized some students’ phones and passed them on to computer forensic experts at the Will County Sheriff’s Department.

The school is contemplating punishment, the police are interviewing students and James Glasgow, the Will County state’s attorney, is mulling whether to prosecute anybody under Illinois child pornography statutes. In the meantime, everybody can spend time off over the holiday cheerfully consuming “Teens and Sexting,” a study just completed by the Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center.

Based partly on a survey of 800 teenagers, parents and guardians, it underscores the role of cellphones “in the sexual lives of teens and young adults.” Four percent of the teenagers indicated that had dispatched “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves” via text messaging, while 15 percent claimed they had received such images of a person they know.

Amanda Lenhart, who wrote the Pew report, said the images were “relationship currency,” shared as either part of or in lieu of actual sex. They are also used to begin or continue a relationship with a special someone. They are often passed along to others as entertainment, or a joke, with many students supposedly not taking the matter especially seriously and thus not understanding the negative legal, emotional or other consequences.

Nationally, the response to this technology-inspired mess is a mishmash. Some jurisdictions have prosecuted teenagers under statutes aimed at creation and distribution of child pornography, in the process stamping them as registered sex offenders. Others have been less aggressive, considering downgrading statutes to make the passing of such images a misdemeanor, not a felony.

Tom Hernandez, a school district spokesman on the Plainfield East situation, said: “Will there be discipline? Yes. But we can’t talk about it.”

Mr. Manville, the principal, deferred to Mr. Hernandez, but the school handbook makes clear that cellphones and BlackBerries are prohibited from use and display during the school day. That does seem both well meaning and totally unrealistic.

Will Mr. Glasgow press a child pornography case? He finds sexting “a troubling development with serious consequences, and kids need to know how serious it is to engage in such activities,” said Charles Pelkie, a Will County spokesman.

But, he said, the office “has tried to address a half-dozen cases through the probation department and tried not to drag kids through the court system.”

So what should you do, especially in an age when it may be quaint to assume that an honors student is consumed only by taking advanced placement microeconomics, playing basketball and starring in chess club?

It’s an issue for educators, not law enforcement, said Colin Greer, an educator and president of the New World Foundation in New York, who writes on morals and ethics. Don’t apply pornography statutes to minors unless somebody is making money off it. Have the Plainfield girl talk to the principal and school psychologist. Make sure the curriculum deals with sex and the Internet, teaching about the ramifications of images going public.

“What I said to our daughters about sex generally applies,” Mr. Greer said. “If you’re in a position where you feel you’re demeaning yourself and being drawn into something reducing your dignity, don’t do it.”

For sure, the culture presents challenges. I may need rotator cuff surgery, given how often harsh language or sexual imagery forces me to leap for the “pause” button on the clicker as I watch prime time television with our 6-year-old.

I’m reminded, too, of Rollo May, the late psychologist whose work had currency during my own sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll high school days. It is fine to strip down, he said. But ultimately society needs a fig leaf, or a certain degree of protection, to preserve a level of intimacy from public exposure. It was a metaphor for maintaining discipline to keep our worst excesses from public view.

The Plainfield honors student did something stupid. Cut her some slack. Give her a quickie primer on the perils of technology. And maybe a land-line phone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27cncwarren.html





Metallica Drummer Struggles with Ringing in Ears
Stephanie Smith

The noise in the concert hall is loud, throbbing. The crowd chants, "Metallica ... Metallica!"

Lars Ulrich holds a drumstick high above his head. For a split second, the frenzy quiets to a dull roar. Ulrich brings his drumstick down with a crash and is swallowed by astonishing noise -- wailing guitars, thumping bass and his own furious banging on the drums.

"I've been playing loud rock music for the better part of 35 years," said Ulrich, 46, drummer for the heavy metal band Metallica. "I never used to play with any kind of protection."

Early in his career, without protection for his ears, the loud noise began to follow Ulrich off-stage.

"It's this constant ringing in the ears," Ulrich said. "It never sort of goes away. It never just stops."

Except the ringing is not spurred by actual sound. It is a condition called tinnitus, a perception of sound where there is none.

"It's a phantom auditory sensation like phantom limb pain when an arm is cut off, and you feel pain in that missing limb," said Richard Salvi, a leading tinnitus expert and director of the Center For Hearing and Wellness at the University at Buffalo in New York. "Much the same seems to happen when you have tinnitus."

Tinnitus can be persistent or intermittent. It often is perceived as a high-pitched ringing in the ears but also can sound like buzzing, whistling, whooshing or clicking.

More than 50 million people in the U.S. experience some degree of tinnitus, according to the American Tinnitus Association. For 12 million of those afflicted, the noise is disabling.

At first, Ulrich said the ringing in his ears was barely perceptible. He said the problem got worse during a 1988 concert tour, oddly while he slept.

"I would fall asleep often with the television on, and I would wake up in the middle of the night to go turn the TV off," Ulrich said. "Except it wasn't actually on. When I realized that I was doing that frequently, actually getting up to turn the TV off that was not on to begin with, I realized that maybe I had some issues."

Watch more on tinnitus

Theories abound, but scientists do not know precisely what causes tinnitus. There is a common thread: loud noise.

"The most reported known cause is noise exposure, excessive noise levels," said Norma Mraz, a doctor of audiology in Atlanta, Georgia. "That can be from machinery, lawn equipment, children's toys, iPods. Things that people are exposing themselves to repeatedly and not taking the proper precautions to protect their hearing."

Mraz said tinnitus may begin with damage to hair cells in the cochlea, a structure in the ear that turns outside sounds into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain.

"It's like walking through the grass," Mraz said. "As you walk initially it lies down, but it bounces back up. If you keep [walking] that same path over and over again, those hair cells, or the grass, will stay down. Then you begin to rip the blades of grass out, and now you've hit dirt. The same thing happens with hair cells. We don't regenerate hair cells."

As hair cells deteriorate the brain may be compensating, generating the perception of "ringing" or "buzzing" in the ear.

Salvi said the easiest way to understand how the brain may do this is to imagine listening to an AM radio station while driving several miles out of town. Eventually, the radio signal begins to fade.

"I reach down to my radio and turn up the volume control. I hear a signal but also noise and static," Salvi said. "With tinnitus, the ear is damaged; it's no longer picking up a signal and sending it to the brain, so the brain basically turns up the volume. You start hearing static electrical activity in the brain that normally is dampened down or suppressed."

Exposure to loud noise is only one of several possible triggers for tinnitus. According to the American Tinnitus Association, head and neck trauma, certain tumors, wax buildup and medications such as aspirin and certain antibiotics may also be to blame. Hearing loss that is typical with advancing age also could lead to tinnitus.

Ulrich said his issues developed over time -- after several long, loud tours with Metallica.

While Ulrich experienced sustained loud noise in big doses, a single, jarring noise can trigger many cases of tinnitus such as those heard on construction sites or during gun blasts and roadside bombings suffered by war veterans. A recent study by the Department of Veterans Affairs' Office of Policy and Planning rated tinnitus as one of most common disabilities among returning war veterans.

"The military is generating a tremendous number of tinnitus patients," Salvi said.

Treatments to manage tinnitus include sound therapy and counseling sessions that help patients to understand, even ignore, the ringing in their ears. Salvi said that merely convincing some patients that they don't have a brain tumor can alleviate anxiety about tinnitus, which may mitigate some of the noise.

As he began suffering with hearing loss and tinnitus early in his career, Ulrich protected himself with earplugs while performing. While his condition still nags him, he said the tinnitus could have been worse, and over the years he's learned to tolerate it.

Ulrich said he is concerned about young people, the so-called iPod generation, who listen to loud music, and may not be as vigilant about protecting their ears.

"If you get a scratch on your nose, in a week that'll be gone," Ulrich said. "When you scratch your hearing or damage your hearing, it doesn't come back. I try to point out to younger kids ... once your hearing is gone, it's gone, and there's no real remedy."
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/1...mer/index.html





Apple Wins Appeal Over Alleged iPod Hearing Loss
Jonathan Stempel

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a class-action lawsuit seeking to hold Apple Inc responsible for possible hearing loss caused by using its popular iPod music player.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed a 2008 district court ruling that the plaintiffs failed to show that use of the iPod poses an unreasonable risk of noise-induced hearing loss.

It also found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to allege a violation of California's unfair competition law.

Jeff Friedman, a Berkeley, California lawyer representing the plaintiffs, did not immediately return a call for comment. David Bernick, who represented Apple, had no immediate comment. An Apple spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Cupertino, California-based Apple has sold more than 220 million iPods since their 2001 launch. It provides a warning with each iPod that urges users to avoid hearing damage by setting the volume at safe levels.

The plaintiffs, Joseph Birdsong and Bruce Waggoner, had argued that the iPod ear buds are designed to be placed deep in the ear canal, which increases the danger of hearing damage.

They also said that iPods pose a danger because of their lack of volume meters or noise-isolating properties, despite being capable of producing sound as loud as 115 decibels.

The appeals court said the plaintiffs showed ways they believe iPods could be made safer, not that they were dangerous.

"The plaintiffs do not allege the iPods failed to do anything they were designed to do nor do they allege that they, or any others, have suffered or are substantially certain to suffer inevitable hearing loss or other injury from iPod use," Senior Judge David Thompson wrote.

"At most, the plaintiffs plead a potential risk of hearing loss not to themselves, but to other unidentified iPod users," he wrote.

The plaintiffs had sought money damages, and to require Apple to improve safety and disclosures, provide better headphones, and test iPod users for hearing loss.

Apple shares rose $1.43 to $210.53 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

The case is Birdsong et al. v. Apple Inc. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 08-18841.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel. Editing by Robert MacMillan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2010?

Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1953 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2010.

What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? How about Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel? Fleming published Casino Royale in 1953. If we were still under the copyright laws that were in effect until 1978, Casino Royale would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2010 (even assuming that Fleming had renewed the copyright). Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2049. This is because the copyright term for works published between 1950 and 1963 was extended to 95 years from the date of publication, so long as the works were published with a copyright notice and the term renewed (which is generally the case with famous works such as this). All of these works from 1953 will enter the public domain in 2049.

What other works would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the books below.

* Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye
* Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
* Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451
* John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest
* C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (the fourth book in The Chronicles of Narnia)
* J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
* Leon Uris’s Battle Cry
* James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
* Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying

Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now study Greek tragedy using Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Oresteia or stage a community performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

The 1950s were also the peak of popular science fiction writing. 1953 saw the publication of Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones, Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation, and Arthur Clarke’s Childhood's End. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2010, we will have to wait until 2049 — a date that, itself, seems the stuff of science fiction.

James Watson and Francis Crick published their groundbreaking paper on the double helix structure of DNA in Nature magazine in 1953. It would be in the public domain on January 2010 if we had the copyright laws in force before 1978. Instead, Nature retains the copyright through 2049. (Not every science journal works under this kind of copyright scheme. “Open Access” scientific publications, like those of the Public Library of Science, are under Creative Commons attribution licenses, meaning that they can be copied freely from the day they are published.)

Cultural icons, too, are kept locked up. The first issue of Playboy magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe on its cover, would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. (Playboy retains the copyright through 2049.)

Think of the movies from 1953 that would have become available this year. You could have showed clips from them. You could have showed all of them. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. Instead, here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years:

* Abbott and Costello Go To Mars
* Escape from Fort Bravo (starring William Holden and Eleanor Parker)
* From Here to Eternity (starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, and Donna Reed)
* Hondo (starring John Wayne)
* Kiss Me Kate (starring Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel)
* Julius Caesar (starring Marlon Brando)
* Walt Disney's Peter Pan
* H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds
* the cult classic Glen or Glenda

If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music or record your own version of some of the great music of the early 1950s, January 1, 2010, would have been a happy day for you under the old copyright laws. Bell Bottom Blues (Teresa Brewer), Angel Eyes (from the movie, Jennifer), Young at Heart (Frank Sinatra), Santa Baby (Eartha Kitt) and C’est Magnifique (Cole Porter) — they would all become available.

All of these works are famous — that is why we included them here. And the authors of famous and commercially successful works would probably renew the copyright for a second term of 28 years. But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher – 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly. That means that

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1981 would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2010.

That means that all these examples from 1953 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1981 enter the public domain on January 1, 2010. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Instead, these works will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century. And for most of them — orphan works — that means they will be both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits, without any benefit going to a copyright holder. Think of the cultural harm that does. How ironic that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with its book burning firemen, was published in 1953 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. To quote James Boyle, "Bradbury’s firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate."
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976





Whatever Happened to ...? Music File-Sharing Case

Update on another memorable story from 2009: Jammie Thomas-Rasset v. the music industry.
Christa Lawler

Jammie Thomas-Rasset has taken her own stand against the music industry that challenged her in federal court.

“I won’t buy brand-new CDs,” said the Brainerd woman who was ordered by a federal jury in June to play $1.9 million for willfully downloading and sharing 24 copyrighted songs, using the peer-to-peer file-sharing network KaZaA.

Thomas-Rasset will purchase used CDs, or music from bands that are on independent labels. Luckily, her favorite band — the Italian goth metal group Lacuna Coil — falls into the indie category.

As for the case that Thomas-Rasset is involved in, all she can do is wait. Both sides are still waiting on U.S. District Judge Michael Davis’s ruling on a motion to set aside the verdict.

The defense contends that the $1.9 million award was unconstitutional. The verdict could be thrown out, or the amount Thomas-Rasset has been ordered to pay could be altered, according to Ray Beckerman — a New York lawyer who is not involved in the case, but who has taken on the recording industry in similar actions. Attorneys for the recording industry asked that Thomas-Rasset be barred from downloading, sharing files and copying recordings, and that she destroy copies of recordings that she has gotten without authorization.

Thomas-Rasset said even if the verdict stands and the fine doesn’t change, it will be a while — maybe years — before she has to make any sort of payment.

She said she doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the case.

“It’s one of those situations where if you do worry about it, do fret about it, you’ll lose your mind,” she said.

The trial that ended in June was Thomas-Rasset’s second go-round with a federal jury. Her case was also heard in 2007, but the judgment was thrown out when the judge decided he had erred in jury instructions.

Thomas-Rasset is married, has four children, and works for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians. She graduated from St. Cloud State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing.
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/155858/

















Until next week,

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