Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 5th, '06

[JackSpratts]

"Copyright is my area of expertise, we weren't going to fold. They tested the waters with us to see if my client was prepared to go the distance. We weren't going to be fooled by the allegations and the threats." – Seyamack Kouretchian


"Every pile of money that is enough to buy a newspaper is disturbing if you look closely enough at it." – Tom Scocca


"There are some upstarts in Los Angeles, but none have achieved the demonstrated scale and performance that Steve has shown. This is the kind of technology that is celebrated, and it is on the scale of the invention of the Steadicam. He’s going to give that kind of freedom to actors and directors." – Richard Doherty


"[On the Internet] information is now shared in a different way, and artists who are getting a bad deal can connect with each other." – Jenny Toomey


"Is that all we get, you bastard?" – White House reporter


"Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime." – A. O. Scott


"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all." – Lukas Grunwald
































Tube à Grande Vitesse

When I lived in France a few decades ago things were so backwards most homes didn't have telephones, let alone computers, and the entire country I think had only three TV channels. It was pathetic actually. They were way behind the rest of the West in adopting information technology. Realizing they had to do something fast the government tried to create the world's most sophisticated telephone network and for a very brief time it almost looked like they were going to succeed. Homes were outfitted with spiffy terminals that hooked into a new centralized phone system and did everything from making calls to making dinner reservations. This was pre-web and foreigners (read Americans) who saw it were impressed, for about a minute. Very soon yanks started connecting to each other on the net and before one could shout "Vite!" France’s centralized, proprietary network started looking very passé…again.

Well you know, things change so fast it's almost impossible to write history. Before the wiki's posted half of it's outdated. In a big technological turnaround Parisians have just been offered what may be the world's fastest consumer internet connection. 100 happy families will test a new package combining TV, unlimited telephone and blazing asymmetrical internet access speeds of 2.5Gbps down and 1.2Gbps up. After a free introductory two month period the service is expected to sell for about $89.00 a month - which happens to be a lot less than I’m paying now for cable TV, phone and much, much slower DSL in the US. The price is great, but it's the speeds that astound.

A big French telco has laid a 60 mile optical fiber across Paris to get into an unregulated business, something their copper monopoly is not. This may all be a sort of PR stunt to impress regulators however so I'm not yet convinced it's going to amount to much in terms of anything substantial anytime soon. While nearly anyone with enough cash can string a few miles of fiber, the really hard part is connecting all those endless individual addresses, and from my perspective that's the essential part of the system. I'm not particularly interested in what a handful of big media company servers are pushing out to consumers, even if the pipes are speedy; what I want are millions of individual users building a blazingly fast community. I don’t see much happening with that scenario in the next five years beyond incremental bandwidth increases (my ISP's speeds have been flat for two years for instance) but the writing's on the wall: speeds will increase at some point, and to something unimaginably fast by today's standards, even if it takes a lot longer to happen than a press release from France Telecom would indicate.

In the society of file-sharers, musing about the changes such speeds will bring is a perennial and enjoyable diversion. Files are ever swelling and unless speeds improve to compensate the net result is a slower transfer. At the sites I frequent lossy mp3s are being replaced by much larger lossless flacs that typically require about 225 MB of storage per album, as opposed to about 60 MB for the mp3 or ogg equivalent. The migration to lossless is occurring because the files are theoretically bit-for-bit duplicates of the original and sound as fine as you'd expect a clone to sound, but their increased bulk does take a while to grab and can dent one's ratio. At the new speeds these lucky French users are getting they could upload one lossless CD every two seconds, thus improving their balances and greatly expanding the general state of online inventories; and if movies naturally take a little bit longer to send we're still looking at unheard of intervals of less than 20 seconds to upload an entire DVD. Downloading of course is twice as fast. Heading to the beach for a petite vacance en Août? Before you go turn on your PC and in fifteen minutes you’ll have 100 new films and 100 new CDs for your month à la plage (et c’est pas mal).

Now to handle such avalanches of data the entire computer from routers to hard drives will have to be enhanced but we can certainly expect continuing work in that area and as long as the ISPs have actual competition - something that's not guaranteed unfortunately - we might even see these network improvements right here in our own neighborhoods. Wouldn’t that be formidable?


















Enjoy,

Jack




















August 5th, '06








Woman Forces US Record Industry to Drop File-Sharing Case

Dangerous precedent set
OUT-LAW.COM

A group of US record labels agreed to drop a music piracy case in the US after the alleged file-sharer argued that it could not be proved that she downloaded any illegal music. The case may set a precedent that undermines scores of other music piracy cases.

Tammie Marson of Palm Desert, California refused to pay the initial $3,500 demanded by a group of record labels and opted to fight the case in court. Marson and her lawyer Seyamack Kouretchian of Coast Law Group argued that the fact that Marson's computer contained illegal music files downloaded over her internet connection was not proof that she had committed a crime.

The record companies – Virgin, Sony BMG, Arista, Universal and Warner Brothers – agreed to dismiss the case and pay their own legal costs.

"They don't take these cases to trial, they either settle or dismiss," Kouretchian told OUT-LAW. "It was our position that they could not ever prove that Tammie Marson downloaded this music or that Tammie Marson made it available. It was just an absolute impossibility. The best they could ever prove was somebody had used Tammie Marson's internet account to download the music or make it available. That's the best they could ever do."

Marson argued that as a cheerleader teacher she had had hundreds of girls through her house, any one of whom could have used her computer. She also used a wireless internet network, meaning that people outside of her house could have used her internet connection. "She doesn't even know what a shared folder is," said Kouretchian.

If this becomes a popular defence it could seriously hamper a huge number of file-sharing lawsuits taken in the US against individuals. It also looks to be a trend in defence against movie file-sharing law suits.

Software executive Shawn Hogan is using a similar argument in his response to a film industry case against him. He has decided to fight the case rather than pay the $2,500 demanded of him, even though it will cost him far more than that. His case is that he did not commit an offence and that the film industry cannot prove that he did.

"They're completely abusing the system. I would spend well into the millions on this [lawsuit]," he told Wired magazine.

Kouretchian said that Marson chose to take a similarly principled stand. "Copyright is my area of expertise, we weren't going to fold. They tested the waters with us to see if my client was prepared to go the distance," he said. "We weren't going to be fooled by the allegations and the threats."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08...esharing_case/





Senate Ratifies Cybercrime Treaty
AP

The Senate has ratified a treaty under which the United States will join more than 40 other countries, mainly from Europe, in fighting crimes committed via the Internet.

The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, ratified late Thursday, is the first international treaty seeking to address Internet crimes by harmonizing national laws, improving investigative techniques and increasing cooperation among nations.

The convention had been signed by 38 European nations plus the United States, Canada, Japan and South Africa, as of the end of 2005. It was opened for signature in 2001.

''While balancing civil liberty and privacy concerns, this treaty encourages the sharing of critical electronic evidence among foreign countries so that law enforcement can more effectively investigate and combat these crimes,'' said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

The convention targets hackers, those spreading destructive computer viruses, those using the Internet for the sexual exploitation of children or the distribution of racist material and terrorists attempting to attack infrastructure facilities or financial institutions.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...ybercrime.html





Music Industry Sues P2P Firm LimeWire
Greg Sandoval

ZDNet Tags: Music Digital rights management (DRM) Peer to peer Lawsuits Digital media Copyright Piracy

After months of issuing warnings, the music industry finally made good on its threat to file suit against peer-to-peer software company LimeWire.

A group of music companies, including Sony BMG, Virgin Records and Warner Bros. Records, have accused LimeWire and the company's officers of copyright infringement, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in New York. LimeWire produces software that's often used to create copies of music recordings and then distribute them over the Web.

The recording industry is asking for compensatory and punitive damages, such as $150,000 for every song distributed without permission.

LimeWire is "devoted essentially to the Internet piracy of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the record companies charge in their suit. "The scope of infringement caused by defendants is staggering."

The recording industry continues to pressure file-sharing companies that refuse to do one of two things: either adopt a business model that compensates record companies, or shut down.

Last week, the makers of the Kazaa file-sharing system agreed to pay the record industry $115 million and use a filtering technology to prevent users from distributing files that infringe on copyrights. Other companies that have either gone out of business or altered their business models are Grokster, WinMx and BearShare.

"Despite numerous efforts to engage LimeWire, the site's corporate owners have shown insufficient interest in developing a legal business model," the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement. "While other services have come productively to the table, LimeWire has sat back and continued to reap profits on the backs of the music community. That is unfortunate and has left us no choice but to file a lawsuit to protect the rights and livelihoods of artists, songwriters and record label employees."

LimeWire representatives could not be reached for comment.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6102509.html





Billy Bragg’s MySpace Protest Movement
Robert Levine

When he is not writing or performing protest songs, the British folk-rocker Billy Bragg is apparently reading the fine print.

In May, Mr. Bragg removed his songs from the MySpace.com Web site, complaining that the terms and conditions that MySpace set forth gave the social networking site far too much control over music that people uploaded to it. In media interviews and on his MySpace blog, he said that the MySpace terms of service made it seem as though any content posted on the site, including music, automatically became the site’s property.

Although MySpace had not claimed ownership of his music or any other content, Mr. Bragg said the site’s legal agreement — which included the phrase “a nonexclusive, fully paid and royalty-free worldwide license” — gave him cause for concern, as did the fact that the formerly independent site was now owned by a big company (the News Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch).

Mr. Bragg said that he himself had kept most of the copyrights to his recordings, licensing them out to the various record companies that have released his albums over the years. “My concern,” he said in a telephone interview, “is the generation of people who are coming to the industry, literally, from their bedrooms.”

About a month later, without referencing Mr. Bragg’s concerns, MySpace.com clarified its terms of service, which now explain who retains what rights. A sample line: “The license you grant to MySpace.com is nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license your content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com).”

Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group for musicians that focuses on intellectual property rights, said the Internet could help musicians warn one another about potential contractual problems. “Information is now shared in a different way,” she said, “and artists who are getting a bad deal can connect with each other.”

Mr. Bragg, who said he never had any direct communication with executives from MySpace, has put some of his music back on the site. And he offered some praise for the site’s effectiveness in spreading his message. “That’s the amazing thing about MySpace,” he said. “If you say something, word gets out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/bu...a/31bragg.html





Delayed Digital Releases Annoy iTunes Users
Brian Garrity

Growing numbers of fans are protesting online when labels delay the digital release of hit radio singles. But these consumer complaints are doing little to stop record companies from deferring the availability of downloads.

Just ask fans of "Hustlin'," the chart-climbing track from rapper Rick Ross.

User forums inside the iTunes Music Store are burning up with posts clamoring for the song, which has been at radio for more than 22 weeks. Ross' label, Island Def Jam, is yet to offer it for sale as a digital download.

Specifically, iTunes shoppers are using the iMix, a community playlist feature intended for music discovery, as a tool to lobby for the track's release.

In recent weeks, iTunes users have created more than 100 iMix playlists that feature titles demanding availability of the single. For example, "!!!!!!!!$$$$$$$$We Want Rick Ross$$$$$$!!!!!" is a typical playlist name.

What is for sale is the video for "Hustlin'," which iTunes offers for $1.99. That too has drawn the ire of some fans.

"The song should have came first -- not the video," one anonymous reviewer writes of the clip, echoing a common refrain voiced in the user comments.

Other users are advising frustrated fans to turn to file-sharing services to get the song.

Similar "protest" playlist campaigns are mounting inside iTunes, calling for the release of surging radio tracks like "SexyBack" by Justin Timberlake. Likewise, emo fans have created hundreds of playlists with titles imploring the release of the catalog of Hawthorne Heights.

Most labels offer tracks for digital sale when a single is released to radio. When they do not, fans quickly react. Playlists demanding the release of "Call on Me" by Janet Jackson and Nelly sprang up when the single was slow to show up on iTunes. It ultimately arrived digitally after more than four weeks at radio.

Whether the songs in the playlist relate to the iMix title (many do not) is beside the point.

In the comments section of the playlist, the iMix creators urge other shoppers to give their protest mix the highest possible rating. That makes their pleas more prominent when others search for the song in question. "Vote 5 stars to get 'Hustlin" and other great songs by Rick Ross," a typical iMix creator's note to other users reads.

Fans are unsure about where to place the blame. The vast majority of consumer wrath is directed at iTunes, not at the labels holding back the music.

Most labels are unmoved by such online outcries. Generally, they are sitting on songs in hopes of driving sales of related products, like ringtones and videos, or -- most important -- to create a bigger first-week pop for the album and the digital single. Thus, "Hustlin"' likely will not surface as a legal download until Ross' album, "Port of Miami," drops August 8.

Island Def Jam is at the forefront of this trend, using the strategy this year with the likes of "SOS" by Rihanna and "So Sick" by Ne-Yo.

In both cases, iTunes users mounted furious playlist protests to no avail. But in the eyes of some music executives the label's strategy worked. Witness Ne-Yo's "In My Own Words," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 after its February 28 release. Similarly, Rihanna's "SOS," released at the end of April, rocketed to No. 1 on The Billboard Hot 100 and set a then-record for one-week sales of a digital track, moving more than 157,000 downloads.

In some cases, exclusives with other retailers can hold up the release of tracks. The arrival of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" was delayed on iTunes, in part, because Epic Records gave Verizon an exclusive. Atlantic pursued a similar strategy with Sprint for T.I.'s "What You Know."

Subscription services like RealNetworks' Rhapsody are attempting to get around the hold-backs by offering to post music on a streaming-only basis ahead of street date. But label response has been limited.

Label executives and iTunes declined comment. But privately, label executives and retailers remain torn over whether hold-backs affect album sales.

The strategy "is just an old-fashioned record business belief that the first-week numbers have to look great," an executive at one leading digital retailer says. "It's about bragging rights in the marketing meeting."

Tim Quirk, GM of music content and programming for RealNetworks, says the practice is self-defeating.

"Conversations I have with labels are, 'Please, let's not be pointless.' When a label says, 'We're not releasing something online,' that just means it's not in the licensed services yet. It is online," he says. "If something isn't there that people want, they will go other places to get it. So you might as well make it available."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-ITUNES-DC.XML





Apple Gets French Support in Music Compatibility Case
Thomas Crampton

The French constitutional council, the country’s highest judicial body, has declared major aspects of the so-called iPod law unconstitutional, undermining some controversial aspects of the legislation.

“ Apple’s lawyers might want to drink a glass of French Champagne today, but not a whole bottle,” said Dominique Menard, partner at the Lovells law firm and a specialist in intellectual property. “The constitutional council has highlighted fundamental protections for intellectual property in such a way as to put iTunes a little further from risk of the French law.”

Released late Thursday, the council’s 12-page legal finding made frequent reference to the 1789 Declaration on Human Rights and concluded that the law violated the constitutional protections of property.

The decision affects Apple’s market-dominant iTunes Music Store by undermining the government’s original intention, which was to force Apple and others to sell music online that would be playable on any device. Apple’s iPod is the only portable music device that can play music purchased on iTunes, which lead rivals to complain about anti-competitive practices.

Although the ruling could still require companies like Apple to make music sold online to be compatible with other hand-held devices, it said that the companies could not be forced to do so without receiving compensation. The council also eliminated reduced fines for file sharing.

“The constitutional council effectively highlighted the importance of intellectual property rights,” Mr. Menard said, emphasizing that Apple and other companies must be paid for sharing their copy-protection technology.

The law, which had been approved by the French Senate and National Assembly last month, was brought for review at the demand of more than 100 members of the National Assembly. The council’s review of whether the law fits within the French Constitution’s framework is one of the final steps before a law is promulgated. It now could take effect as altered by the council or the government could bring it once more before the Parliament.

The French minister of culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, advocated enforced interoperability as a way to ensure diverse cultural offerings on the Internet by limiting technical constraints on digital works.

While the constitutional council highlighted the need for compensation, it was not such good news for Apple and other companies that the principle of forced interoperability remained in place, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal director of the Association of Audionautes, a group opposed to copy restrictions.

“It is good news for Apple because they receive monetary compensation, but much bigger bad news if it forces them to license iTunes,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te...y/29music.html





French iTunes Law Goes Into Effect
AP

A closely watched French law that allows regulators to force Apple Computer Inc. to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings went into effect Thursday.

The Internet copyright law included passed France's parliament June 30. The Constitutional Council threw out several measures last week, concluding that they violated constitutional property protections.

French President Jacques Chirac signed it this week with the body's changes. The law was published in the government's Journal Official on Thursday, formally putting it into force.

Apple, which had described an earlier draft of the copyright bill as "state-sponsored piracy," did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment Thursday. Currently, songs bought on iTunes can be played only on iPods, and an iPod can't play downloads from other stores that rival iTunes' premium music catalog.

In a sign that other governments may follow France's example, recent proposals or regulatory moves to open up iTunes have emerged in Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Poland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-03-08-52-34





Apple Defends iTunes-iPod Compatibility
Jaime Espantaleon

Apple Computer Inc. has struck a defiant stance with Scandinavian regulators, staunchly defending its right to make its iPod the only portable music player compatible with songs purchased from the company's iTunes music store.

Norway's consumer agency on Wednesday released non-confidential portions of Apple's 50-page response to their claims that the company is violating contract and copyright laws in their countries.

The Norwegian regulators expressed disappointment with the limited concessions offered in the response, received Tuesday. In Sweden, Bjorn Smith of the Swedish consumer society said that Apple had "given in to some demands but not to others."

In June, the consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden claimed that the iPod maker's product usage restrictions go against Scandinavian laws. At the time, the Scandinavians said they were considering taking the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to court, possibly seeking an injunction banning iTunes from their markets.

Apple's letter indicated it is not willing to change its business model by opening its iTunes downloads to rival portable players that cannot play music recorded in the iTunes digital format.

It also asserted that the demands of the Scandinavian agencies are outside of their authority, specifically as they relate to copyright and digital rights management rules.

The company argued that it is reasonable to "prevent users from downloading music acquired from Apple Music Store to other digital players" because users can still burn any purchased iTune onto a CD and then freely play it as they deem suitable, provided that they respect copyright laws.

The letter also stressed that a Norwegian law that allows users to "acquire legally obtained works on what the general opinion regards as relevant playing equipment" applies specifically to "copying music from protected CDs to MP3 players," but does not concern "electronic files via Internet."

Consumers "have the freedom of choice and the mechanism does not violate competition laws," Apple's letter also said.

Apple also proposed a meeting to "probe possibilities for a mutual agreement" with the regulators.

"This is not good enough," Bente Oeverli of the Norwegian consumer agency told The Associated Press, but added that "it seems we may reach an understanding on some points."

Oeverli said the two sides still disagree on the crucial point - the ability to download music files to other players than iPod.

Apple's iTunes also face trouble in France, where Parliament passed a hotly debated law on Internet copyright in June that could force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings.

However, a French court last week threw out some measures of the law, leaving it now to French President Jacques Chirac to decide whether to sign the bill with the court's changes or send it back to parliament.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-19-01-20





Carmakers Race To Accommodate iPods
Caroline McCarthy

Apple Computer has partnered with Ford Motor, General Motors, and Mazda Motor to help drivers integrate their iPods into their cars' audio systems.

Owners of Ford, Mazda and GM cars who want to take their iPods on the road may no longer have to worry about purchasing quirky add-ons like the iTrip or chargers that plug into cigarette lighters. Apple announced on Thursday that it has teamed up with the three car companies to incorporate "seamless integration" into new 2007 models that will let iPods be controlled within cars' audio systems and charged whenever the ignition is on.

An internal study by Ford determined that the demand for incorporating digital audio players into consumer vehicles is rising fast: The auto manufacturer predicts that 2009 sales of digital-music players will more than double those in 2005. The market for such devices, despite competition, remains thoroughly dominated by Apple's iPod.

The plans and infrastructure for iPod integration differ among the three manufacturers. Ford, for example, will be incorporating audio input jacks compatible with the iPod and other MP3 players into a majority of 2007 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. For an additional price, beginning early next year, Ford dealers plan to begin selling a system called TripTunes Advanced that will enable an iPod to be stored and recharged in a vehicle's glove compartment while the driver or passenger directs its functions using controls on the radio or steering wheel.

GM, on the other hand, has developed an iPod-specific device called the Personal Audio Link. This gadget, the size of a deck of cards, synchronizes the music player with the car's XM Satellite Radio band so that the XM interface can be used as controls--including displaying the song and artist information on the XM screen.

Like Ford's TripTunes Advanced, GM's iPod integration system will be located in the glove compartment and will also be able to charge the iPod while the ignition is running. The Personal Audio Link will make its debut this October in the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet HHR sport utility vehicles; the carmaker will then gradually introduce the hardware into all 56 of its new car and truck models sold in the United States--mostly by the end of 2007.

GM's device will be an opt-in feature, retailing for about $160 plus installation charges. According to a statement from GM, a subscription to XM Satellite Radio will not be required for the Personal Audio Link to work.

Mazda, which will be introducing iPod integration into all of its vehicles worldwide, was not available for a comment on the specifics of the technology used.

A number of other car manufacturers, both domestic and foreign, have already accommodated some or all of their new models to allow for iPod integration--among them are DaimlerChrysler's Jeep, Volkswagen, BMW and its Mini, and Honda Motor. With the addition of Ford, Mazda and GM, Apple estimates that more than 70 percent of new cars sold in the United States by the end of 2007 will have some kind of iPod integration technology.
http://news.com.com/Carmakers+race+t...3-6101744.html





Verizon Wireless to End Music Download Fee
Bruce Meyerson

Verizon Wireless is eliminating the monthly $15 fee for its music download service in conjunction with the launch of a cell phone featuring an iPod-like click wheel and a memory card that can hold up to 1,000 songs.

The new "Chocolate" handset, made by LG Electronics Inc. of Korea, features software that will let users play their own MP3-format music on the device in addition to songs purchased from Verizon's music store - avoiding the mini-controversy that accompanied the launch of that service early this year.

The company is charging $150 for the phone with a new two-year contract, and an additional $100 to buy an insertable mini-storage card that can hold 2-gigabits of music or other files such as photos.

Songs purchased from the V Cast Music store, priced at $1.99 each, can be downloaded twice: once over the cellular network to the phone, and once over the Internet to a computer.

Wireless music downloads are seen as a robust new source of revenue for cellular operators now that they are investing billions of dollars to upgrade their networks for speedier data connections. So far, carriers have been more inclined to create their own stores to capture more of the profits. Sprint Nextel Corp. also sell music through its own store, charging $2.50 per song for downloads to one phone and one computer.

Songs purchased from V Cast will be formatted to run with Windows Media Player from Microsoft Corp.

But the Chocolate phone also can play songs that users copy from their own music collections in the generic MP3 format.

Verizon drew some howls of protest in January when the software upgrade required to use the new V Cast music store disabled the MP3 player capability on the two compatible phones. Users could still convert their songs to the Windows format and play them on the phones.

At the time, Verizon asserted that the handicap was purely temporary - merely the reflection of software integration challenges, rather than any ploy to force users to buy its songs or to weigh in on larger battles over digital copyright restrictions.

The company is still working on a software upgrade to restore the MP3 capability to the two phones, one an LG and one from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a spokesman said.

Verizon Wireless is jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-01-39-12





Fledgling Music Mogul Goes Online To Sign Acts
Todd Martens

The bass player with Grammy-nominated rock band Fall Out Boy looked no further than his computer screen when signing the biggest act to his fledgling indie label.

Pete Wentz signed Panic! at the Disco to Decaydance Records after listening to the group online. He also secured his first soundtrack deal after reading the blogger-fueled hype the camp Samuel L. Jackson thriller, "Snakes on a Plane," which opens August 18.

"I just called my manager and said I somehow wanted to be involved in this movie," Wentz says. "It didn't really sink in that it was something that we could be a part of. I don't show up on any lists of the most powerful people in Hollywood or anything."

Not yet anyway, but Wentz is creating a budding little pop-punk empire. His label, a joint venture with New York-based Fueled by Ramen -- where Fall Out Boy is signed -- has spawned more than one success story since its launch last year.

Panic! at the Disco's "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out" has sold 831,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Newcomer the Hush Sound is making inroads with its new album, "Like Vines." Also on the roster is Gym Class Heroes, whose album came out July 25.

Panic! was Decaydance's first signing. Wentz found the act when it posted "Time to Dance," one of its first songs, on his LiveJournal blog in late 2004.

Wentz also has taken a page from the Tom Delonge and Mark Hoppus manual for creating a successful punk business. Like the former members of Blink-182, Wentz runs his own clothing firm, Clandestine Industries. The Clandestine line will be available this fall at high-end retailer Fred Segal. The brand is already available online and at Fall Out Boy shows.

With so much on his plate, only his duties with Fall Out Boy, which is in preproduction on a new album, prevent Wentz from becoming a full-time entrepreneur.

"I'm the guy you can reach between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.," he says. "I'm just now learning about marketing and that whole aspect of the label. It's something I'm interested in being involved in, but I'm no expert."

But those who have worked with him hint that he could be a closet businessman.

"He's a rock star first and foremost, but he's more than just a guy in a band," says Jason Linn, executive VP of music at New Line Cinema, which partnered with Decaydance for the "Snakes on a Plane" soundtrack. "He has great ideas, and he understands how to do things without relying on a big machine. He would be an excellent marketing guy for any label."

Wentz says, "I won't lie. I'm a control freak. I want to fly the plane. I want to prescribe myself medicine. I'm real neurotic about that kind of stuff."

Wentz has been heavily involved in the soundtrack to "Snakes on a Plane," choosing the tracks and picking the remixers for the album. Acts on the album include Panic! at the Disco, the Hush Sound, Cee-Lo, the All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy, among others.

The title track features members of the Academy Is . . ., Gym Class Heroes, the Sounds and Cobra Starship, a side project from Midtown singer Gabe Saporta. The song went to radio July 11 and has yet to chart.

Wentz is organizing an album release show for August 16 at the Key Club in Los Angeles. To promote the show and give away tickets, Decaydance is teaming with http://www.friendsorenemies.com, which will post photos of those walking the "red carpet" at the event.

More ambitious is Wentz's long-term vision for the label, which he sees as a sort of social democracy. New bands are signed only after winning a majority vote from those already on the label, and Wentz is formulating a risky plan in which each act would share in the financial success of the other.

"All the bands are given incentives or bonuses of some sort when bands go gold or platinum," Wentz says. "A lot of labels have tried to have a family vibe, but we think it's important to actually have one, and not just have one when we talk in magazine articles."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Music You Can See: Warner Plans to Sell Albums on DVDs
Ethan Smith

The music industry has for years struggled to develop a new physical format that could spark increased sales by replacing the CD. Now Warner Music Group Corp. is planning an aggressive attempt to address the issue by pushing consumers to buy their music on specially outfitted DVDs.

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is in the final stages of securing technical licenses that will enable it to sell a bundle of music and extra features on a single DVD, according to people familiar with the matter. The DVD would include a music album that plays in both stereo and surround-sound on a standard DVD player -- plus video footage that plays on a DVD player or a computer. There will also be song remixes, ring tones, photos and other digital extras that can be accessed on a computer.

The company plans to make the new format available to its subsidiary record labels for product-planning purposes as early as next week and to introduce the discs to consumers with a handful of titles in October. A full-blown launch is planned for early next year. The hope is to fuel increased sales of both new product and catalog titles, in the process lifting the industry just as the 1982 introduction of the CD boosted sales as consumers replaced cassettes and vinyl albums.

Retailers -- who have faced hard times as CD sales have declined in recent years -- have been enthusiastic about the new format. "The CD is getting old and tired," said Jim Litwak, president and chief operating officer of Trans World Entertainment Corp., which owns more than 800 music and media stores, including the Coconuts, Wherehouse and FYE chains. Indeed, MTS Inc.'s Tower Records was recently barred by at least two of the four major music companies from receiving new product, after a dispute over credit arrangements. Interim Tower chief executive Joseph D'Amico didn't respond to requests for comment.

"As a retailer I'm going to be holding on desperately for any compelling physical product," said Eric Levin, who owns two independent stores called Criminal Records in the Atlanta area. "So the introduction of a new format...is cause for excitement." Mr. Levin is also president of the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, a trade association with 30 members, who he said are also pleased by the prospect of the new format. A Warner spokesman declined to comment on specific plans but said the company, broadly speaking, plans to "offer content through a breadth of products to meet consumer needs. And we will remain nimble and innovative in every aspect of our business -- including our digital and physical offerings."

The DVD album is the latest in a parade of would-be successors to the CD, including the surround-sound products Super-Audio CD and DVD-Audio, and most recently DualDisc, which plays like a CD on one side and like a DVD on the other. Warner was one of two companies, along with Sony BMG, to embrace DualDisc last year. But the capacity of both the CD and DVD sides of DualDiscs is limited compared to normal CDs and DVDs. In contrast, the storage capacity of the planned Warner DVDs is up to four times what can be held on the DVD side of a DualDisc. Warner and Sony BMG have sharply scaled back their DualDisc output.

Warner is not proposing any generic name for the new format, beyond simply "DVD album." The company plans to encourage retailers to stock them alongside normal CD albums on shelves, and they would likely carry a higher price tag, though just how much higher will probably be determined by the amount of extras included on any given disc. The company plans to continue releasing albums on CD, too, for the foreseeable future.

But there are some stumbling blocks that may discourage consumers from embracing DVD albums. The new discs would not play on normal CD players, meaning consumers could not simply pop their new discs into their car stereos or other players. And users would not be able to copy the main audio mix onto their computers. On the proposed DVD album, the main audio mix is to be protected by the same software that already protects the content on normal DVDs.

The DVD album would include "preripped" digital tracks of the entire album, ready to be copied onto a user's computer -- a totally separate set of data from the higher-quality, DVD-audio sound that users hear when they slip the DVD in a player. The lower-quality, "preripped" tracks could be copied to a CD.

Richard Greenfield, media analyst at Pali Research, said the DVD album format was unlikely to be of much help to the music industry: "Is it going to be a big deal? I tend to think not, given the failures of previous high end formats. But I don't think it's a bad thing."

People familiar with the situation say Warner is close to a deal with Apple Computer Inc. that would make the digital tracks essentially identical to those the computer company sells through its iTunes Music Store service -- something that has proved elusive for others in the music industry, since Apple has been unwilling to license its proprietary copy-protection software to outsiders. People briefed on the talks said a likely solution would involve Apple creating the digital tracks and Warner putting them on DVDs.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Microsoft: iPod Clone Requires Investment
Allison Linn

Microsoft's plans to offer an iPod competitor could take up to five years of investment, but the spending is worth it in part because it will help the software maker's broader entertainment agenda, a company executive said Thursday.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft Corp.'s entertainment and devices group, told financial analysts that the company's planned Zune product line will require millions of dollars in investment and will not pay off immediately.

"This is something that's going to be a three-, four-, five-year investment horizon," Bach said at a daylong meeting on the company's Redmond campus.

But Bach said Zune is key to Microsoft's overall entertainment ambitions and will capitalize on - and tie into - the company's other entertainment offerings. These include the Xbox video game console, Microsoft's television technology and the media-focused version of the Windows operating system that lets people do things like record and watch live television.

"We're not just introducing Zune to do the same thing that other people do," Bach said in an apparent reference to Apple Computer Inc.'s market-leading iPod music and video player and iTunes store.

Microsoft has been working for years to break into consumer electronics with such products as software to record live television and play games. It has had some success, particularly with the Xbox and its highly popular online game service, Xbox Live.

Bach said Microsoft hopes to create a similar sense of community with Zune that it has with Xbox Live, allowing users to share music playlists and video, and learn about things like upcoming concerts.

Microsoft has offered few details about Zune, which is expected to be in stores this fall. It's expected to be tied to a content service.

The software maker faces tough competition from Apple's iPod and iTunes. Other hardware manufacturers, including Creative Technology Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co., offer portable media players using Microsoft's software, although they've had little success against Apple.

Microsoft has poured resources into its money-losing video game business, particularly with the launch of its Xbox 360 late last year. Bach said Thursday he hopes the games business will be profitable in Microsoft's fiscal year ending in June 2008.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-16-53-36





In Microsoft Plan for Future, All Roads Lead to Internet
Steve Lohr

In a daylong meeting with analysts on Thursday, Microsoft executives detailed how the company was spending heavily to build Internet services into all its products, from operating systems to video games. But they cautioned that any big payoff from those investments would not come for a few years.

Microsoft’s size and broad portfolio of products, the executives said, would prove an advantage in competing against Google, the current leader in Internet services.

Internet search, according to Microsoft, will increasingly become seamlessly integrated into the Windows desktop operating system, Office productivity software, cellphones powered by Windows and Xbox video games.

“Search will not be a destination, but it will become a utility” that is more and more “woven into the fabric of all kinds of computing experiences,” said Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

The company lags well behind Google in tapping online advertising so far, but Microsoft is optimistic about its prospects. The $27 billion online advertising market, analysts predict, will double in size over the next three years. “That’s a great opportunity,” Mr. Johnson said, “and Microsoft is uniquely positioned.”

Analysts attending the meeting said the Microsoft strategy, presented in greater detail than in the past, was a pragmatic one.

“It’s not really about beating Google,” said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs & Company. “But Microsoft has to do well enough to keep people in the Microsoft environment — on the desktop, the Web or gaming online — so they don’t leave the Microsoft environment to go to Google for search.”

As a business, Internet search is crucial because ads linked to search words have been such a fast-growing advertising market — and Google has been the runaway leader.

Microsoft has spent the last two years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, building its own search advertising technology, called AdCenter. The new advertising system was introduced only two months ago. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how the AdCenter system lets advertisers measure clicks on the keywords they purchase by time of day, day of the week and often by the age, gender and geographic location of the person seeing the ad. Microsoft’s MSN services like Web e-mail require users to register and submit some personal information, which Google does not.

“You get better information on what’s working in your ad campaign and better return on investment,” said Yusuf Mehdi, chief of advertising strategy for Microsoft’s Internet services. “That’s something you can’t do on other systems.”

In a demonstration, Mr. Mehdi showed some of the work being done by a group exploring the future of advertising in Microsoft’s research labs. In a digital television prototype, a viewer who liked a dress worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in an episode of “Sex and the City” could click on it, automatically pausing the video, and on the screen an Internet search result would appear, identifying the dress, its maker and a link to buy it.

Still, Microsoft expects its progress in advertising to be gradual. The company projected that in fiscal 2007, which began this month, the revenue from its online services business would grow 7 percent to 11 percent, to $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion. That would be an improvement from last year, when online services revenue fell 2 percent, to $2.3 billion, and the unit lost $77 million.

By contrast, Google, in its recent quarter alone, reported that profit doubled to $721 million while revenue grew 77 percent to $2.4 billion.

Microsoft executives acknowledge that as computing increasingly gravitates to the Web and often toward ad-supported services, it creates both a technical and business challenge for a company whose great strength is in personal computer desktop software.

But the Microsoft vision is that Internet services can complement rather than cannibalize the company’s traditional business if they are built into products like Windows.

“Microsoft’s current offerings represent a huge advantage that we can migrate into this services world,” said Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect.

Despite its struggle to adapt to Internet services, Microsoft as a whole is performing quite well. In the year ended last month, the company’s revenue grew 11 percent, to $44.3 billion, and its operating profit rose 13 percent. to $16.5 billion.

Even though Microsoft has grown fairly strongly for years, its stock price has been stagnant. Investors worry that the future of computing belongs to new Internet-based rivals, like Google.

In private conversations, Microsoft executives said that the skeptics were taking a short-term perspective and that Microsoft had repeatedly proved skeptics wrong.

Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer, noted that in the 1990’s, when Microsoft began to move into corporate data centers with server software, many industry experts scoffed. Microsoft, they predicted, would surely fail.

Last year, Microsoft’s server and tools business reported revenue of $11.5 billion and operating profit of $4.3 billion.

“It took real research and development and a long time to get there,” Mr. Mundie said. “We’re doing that all the time. We make big long-term bets. That’s what’s going on here now, and it’s very different than this general perception that the company isn’t really doing anything interesting.”

At the meeting, Microsoft declined to pledge that Windows Vista, its new operating system, would be shipped to consumers in January, the most recent prediction given. Vista has been repeatedly delayed, and Microsoft said there was no reason yet to push the schedule back further.

But Mr. Johnson, co-president of the platforms and services group, said, “We will ship Windows Vista when the product is ready,” leaving open the possibility of added delays.

Microsoft’s shares fell 2 percent, to $23.87, on Thursday amid concern about the timing of Vista’s debut.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, said the company’s pace of Windows releases would accelerate. “We will never repeat the experience of Windows Vista again,” Mr. Ballmer said. “We will never have a five-year gap in major releases again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/bu...ss/28soft.html





AOL to Cut 5,000 Jobs

Some 5,000 AOL employees, or about 26 percent of the company's 19,000-person work force, will lose their jobs within six months as a result of restructuring, Time Warner's AOL online division on Thursday.

"At a company meeting this morning, Jon Miller (AOL CEO) told AOL's worldwide work force of 19,000 people that within six months, it was likely that around 5,000 employees would no longer be with the company," AOL said in a statement.

Time Warner on Wednesday announced that the long-struggling AOL plans to make e-mail, instant messaging and other services available at no cost to users with broadband Internet access. The offering marks yet another transition for the venerable Internet service as it tries to move on from an era of dial-up access and subscription-based revenue.

AOL, which is in the process of selling its European Internet access business, employs about 3,000 employees in its access business in Europe, one source said.
http://news.com.com/AOL+to+cut+5%2C0...3-6101824.html





Apple May Restate Results Amid Probe
AP

Apple Computer Inc. says it expects to restate some of its financial results as a probe into its granting of stock options widens, threatening years of profits.

The notice of further evidence of ''irregularities'' comes as Apple has been riding its wildly popular iPod digital music player to the most profitable period in its 30-year history. Fueled largely by steadily rising iPod sales, Apple has reported $3.1 billion in profit during the past four years.

Without providing specifics, the computer and software maker said late Thursday it had uncovered enough evidence of mishandled stock options to raise doubts about the accuracy of its financial statements dating back to Sept. 29, 2002.

The developments threaten to rattle investors, based on how Wall Street has punished other companies that have recently disclosed potential accounting problems caused by stock option improprieties.

Apple shares fell $1.70, or 2.4 percent, to $67.89 in early trading Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, where they have traded in a 52-week range of $42.02 to $86.40. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company's market value has increased by about $55 billion since September 2002.

Apple first raised a red flag about the way it accounted for stock options in late June when it announced an internal investigation into a series of ''irregularities.''

Some of the nettlesome stock options were given to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but he voluntarily canceled those in 2003 before cashing them in.

After digging deeper, Apple uncovered enough new problems to prompt the company to hire an outside lawyer to take over the investigation and notify the Securities and Exchange Commission about its findings.

Apple hopes to complete its accounting review as quickly as possible, said company spokesman Steve Dowling. In the meantime, Apple may miss a deadline for filing its latest quarterly report with the SEC.

The company said it has hired an outside lawyer to lead the investigation.

More than 60 other companies across the country are grappling with similar stock option headaches, but Apple is by far the most prominent of the lot to acknowledge trouble so far.

While Apple hasn't explained exactly how it mishandled stock options, most of the problems at other companies so far have revolved around ''backdating.''

Under this practice, insiders try to make the rewards more lucrative by retroactively pinning the option's exercise price to a low point in the stock's value. Usually, a stock option's exercise price coincides with the market value at the time of a grant to give the recipient an incentive to drive the price higher.

If companies backdate options without accounting for the move, it can cause profits to be overstated and taxes to be underpaid.

The financial manipulation also exposes companies to possible fraud charges.

The U.S. Justice Department has already brought criminal charges against Brocade Communications Systems Inc.'s former CEO, Gregory Reyes, and is actively investigating other cases. Reyes is free on a $2 million bond.

More than 20 of the companies entangled in the stock option imbroglio are in Silicon Valley, where the incentives first became a staple of compensation packages for rank-and-file employees as well as top executives.

As high-tech stocks soared during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, workers began to clamor for even better stock option packages in pursuit of a big jackpot. That hunger for ever-more lucrative stock options is believed to have driven many Silicon Valley companies to resort to backdating as they tried to recruit and retain workers.

To properly account for backdated stock options, companies generally have to recognize more expenses than they originally recorded on their books. Making that adjustment can erase a substantial amount of profit.

In the past month, Mountain View, Calif.-based Mercury Interactive Corp. has erased more than $530 million of past earnings because of stock option backdating.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...k-Options.html





McAfee Security Programs May Expose Data
Dan Goodin

Consumer versions of McAfee Inc.'s leading software for securing PCs is susceptible to a flaw that can expose passwords and other sensitive information stored on personal computers, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerability affects many of McAfee's most popular consumer products, including its Internet Security Suite, SpamKiller, Privacy Service and Virus Scan Plus titles, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer at eEye Digital Security Inc., a competing maker of security products.

McAfee spokeswoman Siobhan MacDermott confirmed the vulnerability and said software engineers were testing a fix. She said officials expected to release the patch Wednesday using a feature that automatically updates McAfee products over the Internet. The flaw does not affect 2007 versions of McAfee products, which were released Saturday, she said.

Maiffret said he has found a way to connect to PCs running the flawed McAfee products over the Internet and make them run code of his choosing. The flaw, if exploited, would make it possible for a criminal to track bank account numbers, and access, modify and delete sensitive files and do other damage on machines running the McAfee products, he said.

The reported flaw came on the same day that McAfee posted an item on its Web site taking a swipe at Microsoft Corp., whose products increasingly compete with the offerings of McAfee, Symantec Corp. and other security companies. It warned that code had been released that exploited flaws in a feature used to automate certain administrative tasks in Microsoft's Windows operating system.

"Microsoft products have always been an attractive target for hackers and malware authors," according a posting on the McAfee Web log.

Maiffret's company, which in the past has discovered embarrassing flaws in products sold by Apple Computer Inc., Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee, said he was withholding technical details of Monday's vulnerability to prevent criminals from learning how to exploit it.

The flaw comes two weeks after Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based eEye disclosed a hole in McAfee program for protecting business computers. In that case, Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee said it had fixed the defect three months earlier but did not warn customers about it until eEye made it publc.

In May, eEye uncovered a similarly dangerous flaw in security software by Symantec.

Neither Maiffret nor McAfee said they were aware of any attacks that target the flaw disclosed on Monday.

"The vulnerability isn't public, so you shouldn't see exploits for it," Maiffret said, adding that users of McAfee products should make sure they are configured to automatically check for updates each day.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-21-55-07





New Program Allows Online Book Browsing
Hillel Italie

HarperCollins, which announced last year that it was digitizing its vast catalog, has set up a "Browse Inside" program that will allow readers worldwide to view online excerpts from books by Michael Crichton, Isabel Allende and several other writers.

"We see it as the next step," HarperCollins president and CEO Jane Friedman told The Associated Press during a recent interview.

Readers wanting to view - but not download - a sample of Crichton's "Prey" or other selected works can visit the HarperCollins Web site and, eventually, the sites of authors and retailers. Friedman is also hoping to establish links with MySpace and other online social networkers.

HarperCollins already participates in Amazon.com's "Search Inside!", a similar program to "Browse Inside," but sees the new initiative as another way of ensuring control of its content at a time when Google Inc. and others are establishing vast online databases of books.

"Browse Inside" formally launched Thursday and the publisher expects to greatly expand its program over the following year. Friedman said the amount of text available from a given book will depend in part on the author's wishes. "Right now, we plan on letting readers view about 5 percent of a book online, but I could imagine some writers wanting to make more available, or even an entire book," she said.

While Friedman says she's determined to make HarperCollins, a unit of News Corp., the "No. 1" online marketer among publishers, she has no plans to become an online retailer. Pearson PLC's Penguin Group USA, Bertelsmann AG's Random House Inc., and other publishers have been selling their books directly to readers, a policy that has angered booksellers.

"We see no reason to duplicate a service that our friends in the retail business already do quite well," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-03-08-18-40





XM Radio Reports Wider Loss
Seth Sutel

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. posted a wider second-quarter loss Thursday and again cut its full-year subscriber forecasts, but its stock rose after the loss came in below what Wall Street had been expecting.

XM's shares have been beaten down this year following a string of bad news announcements, and the rebound in the shares marked a slight reprieve for a company that had once been an investor favorite.

XM, which is based in based in Washington, D.C., lost $231.7 million, or 87 cents per share, in the three months ending June 30, versus a loss of $148.8 million, or 70 cents per share, a year ago. The loss included $105 million in charges for restructuring debt and other non-operating items.

Revenue nearly doubled to $227.9 million from $125.4 million a year ago.

However, XM also cut its full-year subscriber estimate for the second time in two months, saying it now expects to have between 7.7 million and 8.2 million customers by the end of 2006, up from the 7 million it currently has.

XM cited "current marketplace dynamics" and regulatory uncertainty regarding certain of its radio models for the latest estimate cut, and said it would refine that range at the end of the third quarter.

Even with the lower subscriber estimate, XM's CEO Hugh Panero told investors on a conference call that the company was sticking by its target of becoming profitable from operations in the fourth quarter of this year and for the full year 2007, though he added that the goal "becomes very challenging" at the lower end of the range of subscriber estimates.

XM had already lowered its full-year estimates in May, saying at the time that it expected to have 8.5 million subscribers at the end of 2006, down from its previous estimate of 9 million, blaming problems with product availability and soft retail sales.

The latest figures include $82.3 million in losses from restructuring its debt as well as other non-operating losses. Excluding those items, the loss was equivalent to 48 cents per share, smaller than the 67 cents per share that analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting.

XM's shares tumbled in early trading to a three-year low of $9.63 but quickly bounced back, rising 53 cents, or 5.1 percent, to close at $10.89 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

On Monday, the company named one of its board members, Nate Davis, to the newly created position of president and chief operating officer. Davis, a former senior executive at XO Communications, Nextel and MCI, will remain on XM's board, where he has served as a director since 1999.

XM's gross cost for adding each new subscriber increased to $112 in the quarter, up from $98 in the same period a year ago, which CFO Joe Euteneuer attributed to lower-than-expected subscriber additions and added expenses for trying to get certain units to comply with Federal Communications Commission regulations.

The company added 398,012 net subscribers in the period, ending the second quarter with 6.9 million subscribers, an increase of 56 percent over the year-ago period. XM said separately that it now has 7 million subscribers.

Once a stock market darling, XM has fallen out of favor with investors in recent months following the abrupt departure of a director earlier this year over strategic differences with the company, the lowered subscriber forecasts and regulatory inquiries into its marketing practices.

XM also ran into regulatory problems with some of its units that contain FM transmitters, which allow users to hear XM through standard car radios. Its competitor Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. has had similar issues.

Sirius's stock is also down this year, but not as much as XM's - about 41 percent from the beginning of the year, versus 62 percent for XM, before Thursday's announcement.

Bank of America analyst Jonathan Jacoby maintained his "buy" rating on XM's stock in a note to clients Thursday, saying the relatively higher valuation of Sirius wasn't justified. However, he characterized XM's overall report as "not pretty," noting the weak subscriber additions and other factors.

Sirius, which has been gaining subscribers with the addition of shock jock Howard Stern at the beginning of the year, reports its quarterly earnings Aug. 1. Its shares rose 1 cent to finish at $3.97 on the Nasdaq.

Both companies provide more than a hundred channels of radio for fees of about $13 a month, including dozens of channels of commercial-free music as well as talk, sports and news. The services require special receivers and are available nationwide.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-16-37-24





The Wi-Fi in Your Handset
Matt Richtel

What if, instead of burning up minutes on your cellphone plan, you could make free or cheap calls over the wireless networks that allow Internet access in many coffee shops, airports and homes?

New phones coming on the market will allow just that.

Instead of relying on standard cellphone networks, the phones will make use of the anarchic global patchwork of so-called Wi-Fi hotspots. Other models will be able to switch easily between the two modes.

The phones, while a potential money-saver for consumers, could cause big problems for cellphone companies. They have invested billions in their nationwide networks of cell towers, and they could find that customers are bypassing them in favor of Wi-Fi connections. The struggling Bell operating companies could also suffer if the new phones accelerate the trend toward cheap Internet-based calling, reducing the need for a standard phone line in homes with wireless networks.

The spottiness of wireless Internet coverage means that for now, the phones will be more of a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, standard cellphone service. But dozens of American cities and towns are either building or considering wide-area wireless networks that would allow Wi-Fi phones to connect and make free or cheap calls.

“It’s a phone that looks, feels and acts like a cell phone, but it actually operates over the Wi-Fi network,” said Steve Howe, vice president of voice for EarthLink, which is building networks in Philadelphia and Anaheim, Calif.

Later this year it plans to introduce Wi-Fi phone service that Mr. Howe said could cost a fifth as much as traditional cell service.

The technology is in its early stages, and it faces some hurdles to widespread use. But it is being promoted by big technology companies like Cisco Systems and giving rise to new competition in the mobile phone business.

A handful of companies are already using Wi-Fi phones to cut costs within offices or on corporate campuses, and the phones will soon be reaching the consumer market.

Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said last week that four manufacturers plan to begin shipping Wi-Fi phones that are compatible with the service by the end of September. Among them is Netgear, a maker of networking equipment, which plans to charge $300 for its phone; the other makers include Belkin, Edge-Core and SMC.

Skype allows free calls to other Skype users and usually charges pennies a minute for calls to regular phones, although it has made all domestic calls free through the end of the year.

EarthLink plans to sell phones for $50 to $100, then charge roughly $25 a month for unlimited calling. Initially, the service will work only with hotspots where Internet access is provided by EarthLink, either in homes or on its citywide networks.

The major cellphone companies have taken notice of Wi-Fi phones, and some have chosen to deal with the potential threat by embracing it, building it into their business plans.

Cingular Wireless plans to introduce phones next year that will allow people to connect at home through their own wireless networks but switch to cell towers when out and about.

Later this year, T-Mobile plans to test a service that will allow its subscribers to switch seamlessly between connections to cellular towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, including those in homes and the more than 7,000 it controls in Starbucks outlets, airports and other locations, according to analysts with knowledge of the plans. The company hopes that moving mobile phone traffic off its network will allow it to offer cheaper service and steal customers from cell competitors and landline phone companies like AT&T.

“T-Mobile is interested in the replacement or displacement of landline minutes,” said Mark Bolger, director of marketing for T-Mobile. Wi-Fi calling “is one of the technologies that will help us deliver on that promise.”

Major phone manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are offering or plan to introduce phones designed for use on both traditional cell and Wi-Fi networks. Samsung said last week that it had begun to sell its dual-mode phone in Italy.

Wi-Fi not only has the potential to offer better voice quality than traditional cellular service, but it also opens the door to videoconferencing and other data services on mobile devices. Cellphone users are now often limited to the services offered by their carriers, but Wi-Fi phones could have access to a wider range of offerings on the Internet, in some cases at faster transmission speeds than on the carriers’ networks.

But there are enough limits to the technology that it may be some time before people start tossing out their old cellphones to take advantage of Wi-Fi.

The radio signals sent from standard mobile phones connect to tens of thousands of cell sites on towers or attached to buildings, billboards and other structures. These cells have an average range of two miles, allowing them to blanket much of the country.

Wi-Fi hotspots have a much more limited range, usually no more than 800 feet. Unlike the cellphone towers, which are operated by the carriers, the hotspots tend to be controlled by individuals or smaller companies, and are not coordinated or organized into a larger network.

“It’s going to be a long time before you’ll have a reliable Wi-Fi connection anywhere you go,” said Michael Jackson, director of operations for Skype.

A company called Fon, which is based in Spain and is backed by Skype and Google, is trying to accelerate the spread of Wi-Fi by selling cheap wireless routers to anyone who will agree to let other people in the vicinity use them by paying an access fee. The buyers can choose to split the fee with the company.

In October, Fon plans to begin charging about $150 for a wireless router that also serves as a docking station for a Skype-compatible Wi-Fi phone. The phone will connect easily to hotspots operated by Fon members.

“Wireless Internet infrastructure can be incredibly inexpensive,” said Martin Varsavsky, the founder and chief executive of Fon.

Without special software, like that from Fon, however, hotspots may not automatically set up a connection with the new phones. Instead, until the technology is smoothed out, users might have to configure their phones to connect whenever they are in range of a new hotspot.

“If it takes you five minutes to set up at the airport and you save 50 cents, why would you bother?” said Benoit Schillings, chief technology officer of Trolltech, an Oslo company developing software to make these connections easier.

Another wrinkle is that Wi-Fi networks operate over unlicensed radio spectrum. This spectrum is essentially public space, which means that anyone can make use of it, but it also means that the frequencies can be congested, potentially causing interference and dropped calls.

By contrast, the major cellphone carriers paid billions of dollars to the federal government for the right to use their slices of the radio spectrum. They can control who is on their networks, maintain quality standards and limit overcrowding. But the spectrum fees introduce a layer of costs that Wi-Fi calls are not burdened with.

Companies including Clearwire, founded by the cellphone pioneer Craig O. McCaw, are building subscribers-only wireless data networks using a technology called WiMax that has a much greater reach than Wi-Fi, and mobile phone service is part of their plans.
The hotspot technology has inspired a vigorous and complex discussion in the telecommunications world about how the traditional companies should react.

On its face, the technology would seem to present the carriers with a major problem. The more time subscribers spend connected to Wi-Fi hotspots, the less time and money they spend on the cell network.

Yet carriers also recognize that per-minute charges are falling across the industry, and that the loss of revenue they suffer if they allow people to switch onto a Wi-Fi network could be offset by attracting loyal subscribers who sometimes want to connect that way.

Further, some carriers argue that if people connect to Wi-Fi in their homes and offices, where there are close and reliable hotspots, they will enjoy connections that are better than those via cell towers and will not need standard phone lines. In a home, for example, the mobile phone could connect as effectively through Wi-Fi as traditional cordless phones do now to their base stations.

Larry Lang, general manager of the mobile wireless group at Cisco, said Wi-Fi would allow good service in people’s homes “without having to put up big cellphone towers in the neighborhood.” Cisco makes equipment that phone companies use to handle digitized calls.

Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum Research, said some carriers were still wary of Wi-Fi service. He said they were concerned that when hotspot reception was not good — whether at home or elsewhere — they would be blamed.

“The guys who don’t want it are predominately Verizon Wireless,” Mr. Entner said. They do not want a customer who is getting poor service at a hotspot “complaining that Verizon service is responsible,” he said.

A spokesman for Verizon Wireless, Jeff Nelson, said the company was looking at Wi-Fi service but had no plans to offer a product in this area. “At this point, we don’t see a great application for customers,” he said.

Further complicating the business discussion for the carriers are the incestuous ownership arrangements in the telecommunications world. For instance, Cingular Wireless is owned jointly by AT&T and BellSouth, while Verizon Wireless is part owned by Verizon Communications, the regional phone giant.

BellSouth, AT&T and Verizon Communications each have an interest in selling high-speed Internet access for homes and offices. If consumers have an incentive to set up wireless networks in their homes — networks that could be used for superior phone service — it could give them another reason to buy high-speed Internet access.

Of course, as many laptop users have discovered, Wi-Fi Internet access is not always something you pay for. Sometimes it is something you just find, as can be the case when people deliberately or unintentionally leave access points open and unsecured. The phones that work with Skype, and most likely others, will turn the free access point in a neighborhood café — or a neighbor’s house — into a miniature provider of phone service.

“It can be very open, decentralized,” said Mr. Entner of Ovum Research. But, he said, such a grass-roots infrastructure presents many challenges. For example, callers could get frustrated when the hotspot they are relying on for a connection stops working and there is no one to complain to.

Mr. Entner said, “You could knock on your neighbor’s door and say, ‘By the way, buddy, I’ve been bumming your Wi-Fi signal to make calls; please turn it back on.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te.../29phones.html





Pay Phones Suffer As Cell Phone Use Rises
Samantha Gross

A stroll along Ninth Avenue in Manhattan reveals an ugly picture of the state of the pay phone these days. The phones are sticky, beat up and scarred, and some don't work at all. A child's change purse is stuffed on one phone ledge, along with a large wad of wrapping plastic. On a nearby ledge, an empty bottle of tequila sits in front of a hole that once held a phone. Empty cans of malt liquor sheathed in brown paper bags are a frequent sight.

With rising cell phone use and vandalism and neglect taking their toll, pay phones are disappearing around the nation. Consumer activists and advocates for the poor have protested the drop in numbers - saying that public phones are necessary in emergencies and represent a lifeline for those who can't afford a cell phone or even a landline.

"If you have a cell phone, you hardly look for the pay phones," said 25-year-old Sayed Mizan, listening to his iPod on a subway platform. "Besides, most of the time if you see the pay phones, they're either out of order or they're too filthy to touch."

Public phone operators insist that the bad reputation of pay phones is undeserved - though they do concede that they have removed many stands in recent years due to falling use.

Nationwide, the number of pay phones has dropped by half to approximately 1 million over the last nine years, according to an estimate by the American Public Communications Council, a trade association for independent pay phone operators.

"If a pay phone isn't covering its costs, we take it out," said Jim Smith, a spokesman for Verizon, which operates more pay phones in New York than any other company. "Toward the late '90s, the wireless phenomenon really got some momentum. That really put the squeeze on the pay phones."

The drop in pay-phone numbers angers advocates, who are quick to point out that cell phones - and sometimes any phones at all - are prohibitively expensive for many people.

A full 7.1 percent of the nation's households had no phone of any kind in November 2005, up from 4.7 percent three years earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

For those people, and for the estimated 43 percent of U.S. residents with no cell phones (as of June 2004), pay phones are especially crucial, advocates say.

"Pay phones are a big deal for them," Sage Foster said of the homeless men and women he works with as a housing counselor. "For most of them, it's their only means of communication."

Pay phones also served an important purpose during two recent catastrophes in New York City - the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the 2003 blackout that darkened much of the Northeast. Cell phones failed during the crises, but many pay phones kept working because of their direct wiring and the phone company's backup power stores.

Ragan Belton remembers queuing up at a pay phone with 30 others to call her daughter on Sept. 11. "God forbid there's an emergency and you have to go several corners to find one that's working," she said.

But public telephones were not always regarded as such a blessing.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, the phones became increasingly unpopular with community boards and local officials afraid of drug dealers. Eventually, Verizon changed all its phones to refuse incoming calls and removed phone booths, which had become grim repositories for trash and human waste.

"There was a time when all kinds of criminal elements would set up a sidewalk office using a pay phone," recalled Smith, the Verizon spokesman.

But the phone stands that replaced them are still magnets for trash and vandalism, and some still smell distinctly of urine.

"Some operators have just abandoned locations," said Willard R. Nichols, president of the independent operators' trade group. "If you've got vandalism and damage, it's very hard to keep the phone in service, because the repair costs are too high."

Despite the rising costs, it is unlikely that pay phones will be phased out entirely, according to industry representatives who say demand remains high in working-class neighborhoods and in locations like truck stops and airports.

Marilyn Ginsberg, a retired city employee who at 63 relies almost exclusively on her cell phone, says she hopes they are right.

"They're important to have around, if for no other reason than if there's an emergency, someone can dial 911," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-15-56-58





Big Brother Wants A Window Into VoIP At Any Cost
Nate Anderson

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, has powered its way back onto the front page this summer, and if you 1) live in the US and 2) pay taxes, you might soon be paying to implement it. And if you're a drug-dealing mobster, you might soon be experiencing it.

The FBI wants the ability to tap VoIP calls. To do this, the agency also wants access to all of your network traffic—and it looks like it's on the way to getting it. Following a long set of legal battles, the US Court of Appeals in June upheld 2-1 a newer and broader definition of CALEA's scope that could affect every university and library in the country.

While the case may not be fully settled until the Supreme Court hears it, the Justice Department has announced plans to cut the legs out from beneath it. The DoJ proposed a series of amendments to the original legislation which explicitly give the FBI the authority it seeks. Unfortunately for network operators, these amendments could be costly—and the government has no plans to help them foot the bill. If either 1) the amendments pass or 2) the courts uphold the FCC decision, CALEA will open the floodgates for easy government surveillance of Internet activity, and it could cost taxpayers a bundle.

What's included in the amendments, and how might they affect you? Let's take a look.
From cell phones to VoIP

The FBI wanted greater access to cellular phones in the early 1990s, when the a technology was still in its infancy. Congress gave it to them in CALEA, a law intended to update surveillance authority for new forms of communication. The FBI has taken full advantage of that new authority; in 2005, 91 percent of all government intercepts involved portable devices—mainly mobile phones.

But soon after the new law was written, technology leaped ahead. When the rise of broadband connections and VoIP services became too great to ignore any longer, the FBI pushed to expand CALEA's scope, claiming that it needed the new authority to keep up with high-tech criminals. In a 5-0 vote back in 2004, the FCC voted in favor of the FBI's proposals and opened the door to "wiretaps" of broadband networks, which had previously been excluded from wiretapping requirements.

The new proposals caused controversy because CALEA had included a series of exemptions for Internet systems. The FBI argued that Congress had never meant to preclude the agency from tapping VoIP calls, and the FCC eventually agreed. The EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and other groups opposed the move to extend the law to the Internet. A lawsuit was filed against the FCC which claimed that the regulator had overstepped its authority and had gone beyond the plain spirit of the law.

The courts have now ruled in favor of the FCC, which means that most network operators will need to make their systems wiretap-friendly in 2007. Because of the way the rules were drawn up, the CALEA requirements extend to universities, public libraries, and other institutions that operate networks connected to the public Internet. The rules also make clear that the government will not reimburse operators for the necessary network upgrades.

In the past, the FCC specifically elected to classify broadband Internet as a data service rather than a communications service in order to rationalize deregulation. Expanding the scope of CALEA to include Internet surveillance seems somewhat contradictory, since the language of CALEA clearly indicates that the law was intended only for communications services.

Universities have been vocal critics of the new rules, claiming they will be fabulously expensive to implement. The government responded by allowing institutions to route all traffic through a Trusted Third Party (TTP) that would handle the necessary filtering and compliance. Costs for such a service could be far lower than the alternative, but this would involve passing all the traffic over a campus network to a private company, and not every university will be excited by the prospect.
New CALEA amendments

The government hopes to shore up the legal basis for the program by passing amended legislation. The EFF took a look at the amendments and didn't like what it found.

According to the Administration, the proposal would "confirm [CALEA's] coverage of push-to-talk, short message service, voice mail service and other communications services offered on a commercial basis to the public," along with "confirm[ing] CALEA's application to providers of broadband Internet access, and certain types of 'Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol' (VOIP)." Many of CALEA's express exceptions and limitations are also removed. Most importantly, while CALEA's applicability currently depends on whether broadband and VOIP can be considered "substantial replacements" for existing telephone services, the new proposal would remove this limit.

Also interesting is section 103e, which deals with "network access service assistance requirements." The entire section was added to clarify what, exactly, network operators need to do in order to make their networks wiretap-friendly. The government realizes that it would pose an undue burden on carriers to make them responsible for "looking inside" each packet and filtering it based on content. Instead, the law directs operators to grab the full "stream of wire or electronic communications"—in other words, all network data transmitted by an individual.

This stream would then be passed to the government, which would have the job of sifting through it and extracting only the information covered by the court order (VoIP, e-mail, etc.). A government analysis of this section concludes that such a data stream might be too much for the government to handle in real-time. The analysis notes that "some temporary storage or buffering may be necessary" and network operators must "be capable of storing communications and other information or time period specified by the law enforcement agency as necessary to effectuate the interception or access."

This provision worries the EFF. One of their lawyers tells Ars that "the bill will put the technology in place to buffer packet streams, and places the job of filtering those streams under government control. We know from the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that the government is not limiting itself to access to under court orders, and the CALEA bill must be considered in light of the capacity it generates."

Although the new CALEA amendments make clear that this buffering and filtering will only be used under court supervision, the EFF is justifiably concerned that putting this technology in place on such a broad scale opens the door for abuse. If Congress enacts these CALEA provisions, surveillance can be ordered and analyzed from the comfort of FBI headquarters. Given how easy this could make wiretaps, and given the potential cost of implementation, the question remains: is the new program needed?
"Surveillance state?"

Each year, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts issues a report on wiretapping. The 2005 version makes for fascinating reading, and throws cold water on the idea that the government conducts massive wiretapping operations of 'Net activity. It also throws cold water on the idea that wiretap applications are hard to get.

1,773 intercepts were recorded last year, while a single one was rejected by the courts. Though many people imagine that "the Feds" do the bulk of such surveillance, reports shows that state police and prosecutors requested far more wiretaps than did their federal counterparts (1,148 to 625). Wiretap operations take, on average, 43 days, though the largest investigation of the year (involving mobsters in New York) took 287 days and netted 51,712 cell phone calls. Encryption was encountered only 13 times, all of them by state officials. None of the encryption systems prevented authorities from getting at the "plain text" of the messages.

The vast majority of all wiretaps targeted cellular phones. Electronic taps accounted for only 23 cases, and only eight of those involved computers. This fact alone calls the CALEA expansion into question. If the government does so little electronic surveillance, and has no trouble getting the required court orders, why is it necessary to force every major computer network in the country to spend money to become wiretap-friendly?

The FBI can do taps without the new CALEA authority, after all; that was the whole point behind the development of its Carnivore system (the agency now uses off-the-shelf tools). While this requires more work to set up each time a tap is needed, it was done fewer than 10 times last year—hardly a burden for the agency.
Court-sanctioned searches aren't the only kind

One of the most interesting bits in the 2005 wiretapping report concerned the nature of the alleged offenses. Most of the wiretaps—81 percent—dealt with drug crimes. Second on the list was racketeering. Homicide came third. Gambling was fourth. What's missing here? Terrorism.

Given the government's current preoccupation with ferreting out terrorists and stopping potential attacks in their planning stages, it's interesting that terrorism doesn't show up more frequently (it's not even a category on the official chart). Obviously, this raises questions. Is the government truly doing few terrorism-related wiretaps? Or is such information being gained without judicial oversight?

The EFF and other civil liberty groups believe that the latter is true. The public's odds of getting definitive answers wouldn't look good to a Vegas gambler, especially after the recent dismissal of the ACLU's case against AT&T, but there's still the possibility that some information will come to light. The EFF's case against the telecom giant is still alive, and it may only be through such cases that the public ever learns just how much of its government's surveillance goes on without oversight—and whether it wants to trust that same government with even broader powers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7372.html





Hackers Clone E-Passports
Kim Zetter

A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.

The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery. But Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy.

"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Grunwald says. "From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."

Grunwald plans to demonstrate the cloning technique Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

The United States has led the charge for global e-passports because authorities say the chip, which is digitally signed by the issuing country, will help them distinguish between official documents and forged ones. The United States plans to begin issuing e-passports to U.S. citizens beginning in October. Germany has already started issuing the documents.

Although countries have talked about encrypting data that's stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.

"And of course if you can read the data, you can clone the data and put it in a new tag," Grunwald says.

The cloning news is confirmation for many e-passport critics that RFID chips won't make the documents more secure.

"Either this guy is incredible or this technology is unbelievably stupid," says Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow at Privacy International, a U.K.-based group that opposes the use of RFID chips in passports.

"I think it's a combination of the two," Hosein says. "Is this what the best and the brightest of the world could come up with? Or is this what happens when you do policy laundering and you get a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions about technologies they don't understand?"

Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country's e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.

In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker -- Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies -- but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.

He then launched a program that border patrol stations use to read the passports -- called Golden Reader Tool and made by secunet Security Networks -- and within four seconds, the data from the passport chip appeared on screen in the Golden Reader template.

Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader -- which can also act as a writer -- and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.

As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.

The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.

Although he can clone the tag, Grunwald says it's not possible, as far as he can tell, to change data on the chip, such as the name or birth date, without being detected. That's because the passport uses cryptographic hashes to authenticate the data.

When he was done, he went on to clone the same passport data onto an ordinary smartcard -- such as the kind used by corporations for access keys -- after formatting the card's chip to the ICAO standard. He then showed how he could trick a reader into reading the cloned chip instead of a passport chip by placing the smartcard inside the passport between the reader and the passport chip. Because the reader is designed to read only one chip at a time, it read the chip nearest to it -- in the smartcard -- rather than the one embedded in the passport.

The demonstration means a terrorist whose name is on a watch list could carry a passport with his real name and photo printed on the pages, but with an RFID chip that contains different information cloned from someone else's passport. Any border-screening computers that rely on the electronic information -- instead of what's printed on the passport -- would wind up checking the wrong name.

Grunwald acknowledges, however, that such a plot could be easily thwarted by a screener who physically examines the passport to make sure the name and picture printed on it match the data read from the chip. Machine-readable OCR text printed at the bottom of the passport would also fail to match the RFID data.

Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services at the State Department, says that designers of the e-passport have long known that the chips can be cloned and that other security safeguards in the passport design -- such as a digital photograph of the passport holder embedded in the data page -- would still prevent someone from using a forged or modified passport to gain entry into the United States and other countries.

"What this person has done is neither unexpected nor really all that remarkable," Moss says. "(T)he chip is not in and of itself a silver bullet.... It's an additional means of verifying that the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom that passport was issued by the relevant government."

Moss also said that the United States has no plans to use fully automated inspection systems; therefore, a physical inspection of the passport against the data stored on the RFID chip would catch any discrepancies between the two.

There are other countries, however, that are considering taking human inspectors out of the loop. Australia, for one, has talked about using automated passport inspection for selected groups of travelers, Moss says.

In addition to the danger of counterfeiting, Grunwald says that the ability to tamper with e-passports opens up the possibility that someone could write corrupt data to the passport RFID tag that would crash an unprepared inspection system, or even introduce malicious code into the backend border-screening computers. This would work, however, only if the backend system suffers from the kind of built-in software vulnerabilities that have made other systems so receptive to viruses and Trojan-horse attacks.

"I want to say to people that if you're using RFID passports, then please make it secure," Grunwald says. "This is in your own interest and it's also in my interest. If you think about cyberterrorists and nasty, black-hat type of guys, it's a high risk.... From my point of view, it should not be possible to clone the passport at all."

Hosein agrees. "Is this going to be the massive flaw that makes the whole house of cards fall apart? Probably not. But I'm not entirely sure how confident we should feel about these new passports."

Grunwald's technique requires a counterfeiter to have physical possession of the original passport for a time. A forger could not surreptitiously clone a passport in a traveler's pocket or purse because of a built-in privacy feature called Basic Access Control that requires officials to unlock a passport's RFID chip before reading it. The chip can only be unlocked with a unique key derived from the machine-readable data printed on the passport's page.

To produce a clone, Grunwald has to program his copycat chip to answer to the key printed on the new passport. Alternatively, he can program the clone to dispense with Basic Access Control, which is an optional feature in the specification.

Grunwald's isn't the only research on e-passport problems circulating at Black Hat. Kevin Mahaffey and John Hering of Flexilis released a video Wednesday demonstrating that a privacy feature slated for the new passports may not work as designed.

As planned, U.S. e-passports will contain a web of metal fiber embedded in the front cover of the documents to shield them from unauthorized readers. Though Basic Access Control would keep the chip from yielding useful information to attackers, it would still announce its presence to anyone with the right equipment. The government added the shielding after privacy activists expressed worries that a terrorist could simply point a reader at a crowd and identify foreign travelers.

In theory, with metal fibers in the front cover, nobody can sniff out the presence of an e-passport that's closed. But Mahaffey and Hering demonstrated in their video how even if a passport opens only half an inch -- such as it might if placed in a purse or backpack -- it can reveal itself to a reader at least two feet away.

Using a mockup e-passport modeled on the U.S. design, they showed how an attacker could connect a hidden, improvised bomb to a reader such that it triggers an explosion when a passport-holder comes within range.

In addition to cloning passport chips, Grunwald has been able to clone RFID ticket cards used by students at universities to buy cafeteria meals and add money to the balance on the cards.

He and his partners were also able to crash RFID-enabled alarm systems designed to sound when an intruder breaks a window or door to gain entry. Such systems require workers to pass an RFID card over a reader to turn the system on and off. Grunwald found that by manipulating data on the RFID chip he could crash the system, opening the way for a thief to break into the building through a window or door.

And they were able to clone and manipulate RFID tags used in hotel room key cards and corporate access cards and create a master key card to open every room in a hotel, office or other facility. He was able, for example, to clone Mifare, the most commonly used key-access system, designed by Philips Electronics. To create a master key he simply needed two or three key cards for different rooms to determine the structure of the cards. Of the 10 different types of RFID systems he examined that were being used in hotels, none used encryption.

Many of the card systems that did use encryption failed to change the default key that manufacturers program into the access card system before shipping, or they used sample keys that the manufacturer includes in instructions sent with the cards. Grunwald and his partners created a dictionary database of all the sample keys they found in such literature (much of which they found accidentally published on purchasers' websites) to conduct what's known as a dictionary attack. When attacking a new access card system, their RFDump program would search the list until it found the key that unlocked a card's encryption.

"I was really surprised we were able to open about 75 percent of all the cards we collected," he says.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71521-0.html





Lenovo Aims to Calm Fears Over Security
Mickey Meece

Less than six months into his new job as president and chief executive of Lenovo, William J. Amelio, faced his first big public relations test. The company, founded in China, had acquired the personal computer business of I.B.M. last year after passing a national security review. But this spring it ran headlong into security fears in Washington.

In the end, the State Department agreed to keep 16,000 desktop PC’s it bought from Lenovo off its classified networks. During a recent interview, Mr. Amelio, 48, discussed the episode, Lenovo’s branding and strategy. Following are excerpts:

Q. How did the State Department decision play out?

A. It’s dying down dramatically. I personally spent time in Washington, along with other key executives, to help educate a lot of the lawmakers. The issue isn’t associated with hardware at all. It’s associated with a common problem in the industry: the potential or ability for someone to put viruses in PC’s. We’re confident all our Lenovo computers don’t possess any backdoor surveillance equipment, spy chips or the like.

Q. It wasn’t that they inspected your computers and found something wrong?

A. There was never anything found. We do not want this to become a flashpoint for United States and China trade. When you view our company, we’re global in every sense of the word. We have a C.E.O. who is American. Our board has five United States citizens on it. Three from Hong Kong and four of the original founders of the Lenovo company. There has been no change in the machines since we made the acquisition of the I.B.M. division.

Q. How did you try to turn the dust-up into an opportunity?

A. This is not an issue unique to any manufacturer. This is an industry issue. Let’s get the rest of the industry together — which we’re working on right now — to say, “How do we combat this issue of hacking?”

Q. How’s the acquisition so far?

A. In the first year out of the chute, our China business accelerated. The business outside of China, which was the previous I.B.M. PC Division, in fact, shrunk a lot less than anticipated by industry experts. There were estimates of a 20 to 30 percent hit, but revenues shrunk 7 percent and we actually grew unit shipments 2 percent. Over 95 percent of our customers stayed with us, so we’re pretty excited about those results.

Q. What percentage of sales comes from China?

A. We’re upwards of a $14 billion company today; less than $4 billion in China, the rest outside.

Q. What is Lenovo’s strategy?

A. Our strategy is fourfold: 1) to get our supply chain outside of China to be as effective as it is inside China. 2) to get our transaction business ramped up as quickly as we can in markets outside of China, especially in the high-growth segments for PC’s, which are notebooks, very-small-business and small-business customers. 3) to get our desktops as highly competitive outside China as they are inside. 4) brand: you can imagine we have one of the most difficult branding jobs in the world right now as we’re transitioning some brand equity from the I.B.M. brand to the Lenovo brand.

Q. How are you building the brand?

A. First, we were top sponsors in the Olympics in Torino, and we will be in Beijing. We went 16 days with flawless execution and we had the whole I.T. responsibility for the Torino Olympics. On the heels of that, we announced the Lenovo 3000, which are Lenovo-branded desktops and notebooks sold outside of China. Q. You bought the right to use the I.B.M. name, are you moving rapidly to take that name off the ThinkPad?

A. We have a contract with I.B.M. to sunset the use of the I.B.M. logo. We reached an agreement to keep it exactly the way it is now for another two years. We will do that. However, there are large accounts that are very interested for us to pull the logo off now, which we will do.

Q. How important is ThinkPad ?

A. We’ve announced 18 new versions of ThinkPads over the last year. We’ve demonstrated to all our large accounts that we’ve had a very good stewardship of the ThinkPad brand.

I travel a lot and I carry a bag of red dots, the ThinkPad TrackPoints. When I’m in an airport and I see somebody with a ThinkPad, I’ll walk up to them and quiz them and get some instant customer feedback. Then I give them a few red dots. If I give them my card, too, they never believe who I am.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te...interview.html





German Efficiency

The German movie industry’s campaign to scare people from illegally copying movies and other copyrighted material (”Hart aber gerecht“, translates to something like “tough but just”) has experienced a real blow to its public image, again.

The image put forward by the campaign strongly contrasts with the supposed level of technical knowledge within the organization as well as their webhosters: for a period of about 21 hours the server’s DocumentRoot was open to the public. Everyone interested could peek at (drastic, if not hilarious) anti-piracy campaign videos, server logfiles and such. German blogs already have been eager to analyse and comment.

Most delicate is the matter of eCards, though: the website offers a service to send “scary postcards” with campaign motives to people you chose - without any kind of sender oder receiver verification (no opt-in, which is de facto illegal in Germany). And of course, all the addresses used and texts sent via the card service since April 2006 were logged in cleartext, and have already attracted some considerable attention. ;-)

Needless to say there is no privacy disclaimer at all on the website…

There are several backups of the logfiles availabe: HTTP (uncompressed / 47MB), HTTP (2,2MB compressed) and eDonkey.
http://netzpolitik.org/2006/die-logf...nd-verbrecher/





How The Piratebay Raid Changed Sweden

A lot of things happened after the Swedish police attempted to take down The Piratebay. It’s time to recap and look ahead.

Torrentfreak asked Mathias from Piracy Unlimited (and Sweden) to give an overview of the things that happened, and the things that will happen.

First of all, the attack against the Pirate Bay was highly unsuccessful - they only stayed down for a couple of days before they were back in full force. Stronger than ever thanks to the widespread media attention. Subsequently several sources reported that the MPAA initiated the attack, by directly influencing Swedish authorities on governmental level, in this case the Ministry of Justice, to intervene in this specific case, which is considered illegal in Sweden (the term is “minister rule”). It also turned out that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down, something that should’ve made the Swedish government move even quicker. What they did was that they hinted to the prosecutor in this case that the government ‘expected quick results’ in this matter. The prosecutor had written a PM a while back that it was impossible to convict the Pirate Bay, but after some letters from the MPAA and this not so subtle hint from, what I think was the Secretary of State, he changed his mind.

When Swedish television published documents that proved this, there was some intense outburst for a while in the media, and this only worked to give the piracy movement more sympathies. Their anthology, Copy me, sold out and a new edition will be released in a few days.

Piratbyrån, which is a Swedish pro-piracy think tank, had their server seized at the same time and it was in police custody until just the other day. Between the legal efforts to get their equipment back and other other lobbying, Piratbyrån managed to gather similar and supporting groups around Scandinavia to launch an international lobby organization, which was given the name Pro Piracy Lobby. Right now, PPL is in contact with groups in a dozen countries that is interested in joining.

Secondly, the Pirate Party had already existed for about half a year, but all this attention also gave wings in their sails, and they had thousands of new members in a matter of weeks. Suddenly, they had transformed into the largest party without parliament seats. In Sweden, you get seats in the parliament if you get four percent of the votes. As we speak, the Pirate Party has almost as many members as the Green Party, which is a party that supports the current government, and without them, the current government can’t maintain their majority This leads the Pirate Party to believe that if they get into the parliament they can fill such a vital role, and thereby make a big difference. Worth noting is that some unofficial gallups from various sources indicate that the Pirate Party is the most likely party for a Swedish first-time voter to choose on election day.

This success has also led to pirate parties forming in a number of other countries: France, Italy, USA, Belgium, Austria, and very recently also Germany, Spain and Russian. There is also one forming in the UK. Together, they have founded PP-International, which is an international collaboration forum/group to exchange experiences, ideas and such, and Sweden has a very important role here.

The general elections are being held in the end of September, and the election campaigns are becoming hotter and hotter. The Pirate Party has decided that what they have now, ideas and ideology, strategy and policies, is what they’re going to run, no need to do any additions or changes now - all energy is put on the election campaign, and the work will be focused very strongly on this until after the election.

What happens after that will depend completely on how the election turns out, and here are many alternatives:

On one scenario, the Pirate Party gets their 4%, which few within the party doubt they will. In that case they will move to become influential in the forming of the government. In Sweden, the prime minister is elected by the parliament, which means that he or she must have a majority of the MPs behind him/her. No party ever gets that many seats, and so, a party that will form a government must seek support from another party, who then gets a situation where they can influence the government. This is a position that the Pirate Party seeks. Their parliamentary work will depend heavily on whether they succeed or not.

Outside the parliament, there is much to be done. If a party gets more than 2.5% of the votes, they will have state subsidiaries that allow them to employ a few people full-time to work for them. The amount of money rises with, I think, every extra .5% of the total votes. These will of course be used to have people working full time on strenghthening the party, and help with the local groups - up to now, all members of the Pirate Party works without pay for this idea that they support. A few full-timers would be nice to do alot of the foot-work.

Also, more and more local groups will be formed, and these will do the work locally, mostly making the Pirate Party seen in their surroundings, as the Pirate Party won’t run in local elections. There will be a lot of local organizing being done.

Also, they will probably put down alot of work in helping the pirate parties around the world via PP-International.

In the long run, the Pirate Party will aim for the election to the European Parliament in 2009, where it’s easier to get in. A party that receives 1% of the votes in an election has the right to have their ballots placed at voting locations by the election authorities at that place. Thus, there is a good possibility the Pirate Party gains even more in the EP elections than in the Swedish general ones.

In any way, there is an exciting few years we have ahead of us.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pira...hanged-sweden/





The Politics of Piracy Emerge in Sweden
John C. Dvorak

Overlooked by the major media is the weird situation in Sweden, where a political party and lobbying organization has cropped up with the sole purpose of overturning the current crop of copyright and patent laws and creating something more modern and realistic: the Pirate Party and the Pro Piracy Lobby. This movement, while unlikely to have any effect in the U.S., could change things so dramatically in parliamentary democracies that we'd feel the aftershock anyway.

This all began with the recent shutdown of The Pirate Bay, a famous quasi-legal Web site run out of Sweden. The Pirate Bay has been playing various games with the government over the past year, moving its server around. The site can best be described as the Napster of BitTorrent sites, one of a few mega-sites where kids manage their P2P file sharing. It's used mostly for music and movie trading in violation of copyright, and everyone knows it. But under Swedish law, it may not be doing this illegally. It's a middleman.

Apparently various record industry interests (and movie folks, too) put a bunch of leverage on the Swedes to shut these folks down. But the Swedish system of such law enforcement is arcane and apparently not effective against an operation like this, since it is in a legal gray area. Enter Uncle Sam.

The U.S. government, after getting a bunch of complaints from Hollywood and the record industry, allegedly threatened Sweden (though some diplomatic channel), telling the country that it would be blacklisted in the World Trade Organization if it didn't shut down the Pirate Bay once and for all. Of course, there would have been a huge fuss in Europe if Sweden was indeed blacklisted, and a trade war would have ensued, so I doubt the threat was serious. After all, the WTO's main purpose is preventing trade wars. And we must have our Volvos. Nonetheless, that's the way the story has been played in the news, and the idle youth of Sweden—and now, perhaps, all of Europe—are politicizing around the issue.—Continue reading...

Let me tell you something. You do not want youth politicizing. Not that the kids shouldn't take part in politics. You just don't want to get them all jacked up over an issue like this. There are lots of them. They often have a lot of spare time. En masse they can ruin things for the "establishment." Luckily, they tend to be lazy and cynical and seldom take to the streets or the ballot.

Well, it looks like the boneheads in Hollywood and the RIAA, along with onerous new copyright laws such as the DMCA and other restrictions, are triggering change. I'd be cautious. Today's youth internationally are not like anything we've seen before. Their view of the world is skewed by the media and new realities. When they see all these restrictions, they see them done on behalf of fat guys who are flying around in private jets with a cabin full of high-class hookers while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. They see rappers in limos wearing diamonds and having their teeth removed and replaced with gold for no apparent reason other than to spend the suckers' money. They see mega-yachts and homes that are the size of a small college all bought and sold on the backs of the kids buying music. Indeed, they are seeing a different world than most of us did when we were growing up. It's nuts. It looks unfair or, worse, exploitative.

Then they see old ladies arrested for copyright violations because a grandkid downloaded a song. Dead people are indicted in hysterical sweeps. Kids are threatened with ruination for song-swapping.

They're not going to put up with it for long, I can assure you. While I think any outrage will fall short of storming the compounds of the rich and burning their homes, once the next-generation youth finally figure out that they can take over at the ballot box, all hell will break loose.

In a parliamentary system, a group like the Pirate Party, which will quickly surpass Sweden's Green Party, doesn't have to win a majority of seats to have an effect. In multiparty systems (unlike in the U.S.), you have to form coalitions to rule, and all sorts of deals are made for anything to get done. And I suspect that a lot of older politicos are tired of being pushed around by U.S. intellectual-property monopolists and would love to side with the Pirate Party on the excuse that they "had to."

Links to the current situation are on my blog here. To American ears, this all seems and sounds silly. But the moniker for the Pirate Party in Swedish, Piratpartiet, actually has a nice ring to it.

I'm not sure how far any of this will go, and perhaps this new up-and-coming youth culture will get caught up in chat rooms or online games or green-tea cultivation instead of fighting this fight. But this much I can tell you: If they decide to make a fight of it, they'll win, and things will indeed change. Stay tuned.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1996840,00.asp





News From The North



The TankGirl Diaries


30.7.2006

The Brussels Journal published at June 22 this good sum-up story of the Swedish situation. Since June 22 the membership of Pirate Party has grown to 7607 from the mentioned 7136. The membership of the closest rival The Green Party (Miljöpartiet) has stayed at the mentioned 7862.

Pirates Enter Politics:
Filesharing Swedes Attack Copyright Laws

Sweden appears to have a full-fledged pirate movement. In addition to The Pirate Bay it also has a Pirate Office and a Pirate Party. The latter are considering entering Swedish politics by taking part in this year’s elections for the Swedish Riksdag and may very well obtain a seat.

The pirate movement started in the summer of 2003 with the establishment of the Pirate Office (Piratbyrån). Its name refers to the Svenska Antipiratbyrån, the lobbying group which was set up by media companies to investigate breaches of copyright and take these to court. The Pirate Office believes that there should be no obstructions to the copying of information and culture, and wants to start a public debate on the issue. In November 2003 the group Bittorent-tracker established The Pirate Bay, which has continued independently since October 2004.

On 1 January 2006 Rickard Falkvinge opened a website announcing the intention to start a Pirate Party (Piratpartiet, pp) and a prototype of the party programme. On 15 February the party already had the 1,500 signatures needed for official registration as a political party. Today it has 7,136 members. Not bad compared with the 7,862 members of the green party Milieupartit (mp), one of the two leftwing parties, with 17 seats in the Riksdag supporting the social-democratic minority government of Göran Persson. The razzia on 31 May by the Swedish police against The Pirate Bay led to a 50% increase in its membership.

The Pirate Party’s programme can be summed up in three main points: personal integrity should be protected, culture should be free, patents and private monopolies are harmful to society. The party’s position is that in modern society individuals are monitored in all kinds of ways, especially in the digital world. It claims that current legislation is totally outdated and hampers creativity, hence all restrictions on copying information for private purposes should be lifted. This means that copying an MPG- or MP3-file for personal use or for a friend should be made legal, but does not comprise the total abolition of today’s copyright and patent laws. The party acknowledges that such legislation is reasonable and necessary for companies and commercial interests.

The party has no opinions on any other issue and has announced that its vote in the Riksdag will be available in exchange for the realisation of its programme. The party adopts a neutral position between the two large blocs in Swedish politics: the Alliance for Sweden which groups four parties of the right, and the bloc on the left comprising the governing social-democrats with the Greens (mp) and the Left (v). These blocs are on a par in the opinion polls, and the Pirate Party hopes that in the elections it may be in a position where it can shift the balance. Some polls indicate that there is a chance of it gaining a seat. The minimum number of votes required to gain a seat (4%) is 225.000, and the party is hoping to glean these from the 800,000 to 1.1 million Swedes who use file sharing.

Already, however, the Pirate Party’s influence is being felt in Swedish politics. The Greens, the Left and the Moderaten (m) have made adjustments to their programmes to prevent voters from switching to the Pirate Party. Thomas Bodström, the Swedish Justice Minister, clearly concerned by the advent of the Pirate Party, suggested altering the law to make filesharing legal in exchange for an extra tax on the use of broadband. The Pirate Party’s response to this was negative. They said this was not an acceptable solution but one which indicates that the traditional politicians have still not grasped the problem.

30.7.2006

The Myths of Filesharing

Norbottens-Kuriren runs a story on the myths of filesharing.

"The law against filesharing is a fact, the debate is in foll bloom, and everybody wants to have a solution. But what will eventually happen? How shall we consume music five years from now? On the other side is the industry, [justice minister] Bodström and the law enforcement. On the other side are the Pirates: both the Bureau and the Party. The pirates want to ditch the copyright law and legalize all filesharing. The industry is fighting with at any cost against free filesharing and refers to the legal download sites available. The situtation appears to be locked. But solutions have to be found - that is the only thing the two parties agree on."

With this introduction the newspaper the newspaper poses the question to Rogel Wallis, a professor from the Royal Technical University, who also happens to be the chairman in Skap, the organization of Swedish pop music composers, and a composer himself. How shall we average music consumers buy our music five years from now?

The question makes Wallis to take first a deep breath. "Five years is a long time. I don't think there is any possibility to stop filesharing." He compares the present situation to the moment in the beginning of the last century when public radio broadcasts started in the USA. At the time the music publishers wanted to prevent the playing of music in the radio. They argued that if music could flow freely and if people could hear what they wanted, their market of printed scores would collapse. The issue was solved with a license of a sort, and with it the American version of Stim (the Swedish royalty collection organization for musicians) got started.

"Now many are looking for a similar solution. A license fee targeting all broadband users, to compensate the copyright owners the losses from their presumably reduced sales. But it is not at all certain that copyright owners, record and movie companies are suffering any major economical damage due to filesharing", says Roger Wallis. "The myth that every downloaded song or film equals a lost CD sale or an unsold movie ticket has no truth whatsoever. This much we know from research." Instead Wallis thinks that Internet works today much like radio worked earlier: through Internet people hear music that they end up liking, and then they go to buy either the song or the album.

As for the future options, the two alternative extremes are either to liberate it all or to keep pursuing filesharers. Neither of these is particularly attractive to Roger Wallis. He characterizes the present situation as 'moral panic'. "Moral panic tends always to overshoot, and is later replaced by more pragmatic business solutions. But this panic has been exceptionally powerful. On this particular case there has been an unforeseen amount of lobbying, and there is a huge amount of money in the background. This battle will continue for a long time."

31.7.2006

Austrian Pirate Party Goes Official

The fast spreading of the political pirate movement from Sweden to whole Europe appeared initially to surprise even the Swedes themselves. They had been focusing so much on their own election campaign and domestic debates that it took a moment for them to realize what was actually happening. European sister parties started to pop up here and there, basically copying their agenda and signing to the same powerful pirate symbolism. As to be expected, these were merely small grassroot organizations of a few activists, with little more than a website and a discussion forum to begin with.

After the initial surprise the Swedish mother party quickly assumed a leading and consulting role, helping the newcomers in various organizational and political issues. And it seems that in this time, and for this movement, the grassroot can quickly grow into official. The Austrian Pirate Party - Piraten Partei Österreichs - will be the first party to follow Swedish Piratpartiet in becoming an official national party. The Austrian Pirates will be handing over their basic principles to the Austrian Ministery of Inner Affairs today and they have promised to provide further information about their plans in coming press releases.

1.8.2006

Pirate Party Now Larger Than Greens in Sweden

With its 7633 members Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) is now clearly larger than the Green Party (Miljöpartiet) with its 7249 members. Actually Pirate Party had reached the Greens already a few weeks ago but the earlier publicly announced member count of the Greens included people who had stopped paying their membership fees, and now these people have been cleaned away from the register.

This is by no means an insignificant political achievement. The Greens have 17 seats in the Swedish parliament and together with Social Democrats and Left Party they form the ruling coalition in Sweden. Without Greens the government would lose its majority in the parliament where seats are split to seven different parties. And this is precisely the sort of situation the Pirates are trying to achieve in the September 17 election: to get a balance of power position from where they can trade their support to any potential coalition that is willing to realize their agenda.

1.8.2006

What Goes Around Comes Around

Metro is Sweden's most popular morning paper with over a million daily readers. The newspaper is running an interesting story about what can happen in music business in the promised land of pirates. The story is about Wille Crafoord, a popular Swedish musician who in early 90s was founding one of the first hip-hop bands in Sweden, JustD. Later on he has released a number of solo albums with jazz, soul och pop influences, and since 2003 he has been a member in a two-man group Griniga Gamla Gubbar ('Whiny Old Men') which sings rap in Swedish.

Due to his popularity there have been some bootleg recordings made from his gigs, and unsurprisingly some of these bootlegs have found their way to Pirate Bay's generous music offerings. One of the bootlegged songs being distributed on Pirate Bay was 'Bögdisco' - a humorous little song that Wille liked to play on his gigs but never seriously intended to record. However, some Swedish individuals with producing and remixing skills found the song from Pirate Bay and liked it enough to make a good disco version of it. And as it happened, the artist himself liked the pirate version so much that he 'stole it back' from Pirate Bay and is releasing it officially. He also managed to contact the initially unknown contributors, and all parties are happy about the idea of an official release. Wille tells Metro that he found the guys so cool that he might even do more musical co-operation with them in the future.

When asked what Wille thinks about filesharing, he told Metro's reporter that he takes the idea of filesharing very positively, and to prove it, he even started to sing in the telephone a fresh song 'Share files, share files' that he was working on.

3.8.2006

Austrian Pirate Party Gets Wind Into Its Sails

The Austrian Pirate Party (Piraten Partei Österreichs) that went official a few days ago has started to get plenty of local media coverage. The news about the new party started to break out in the media yesterday afternoon, and the party's website got almost 20.000 hits yesterday alone. TV channel Pro7Austria has been interviewing party members and will run the interview in its evening news today. The party has also been offered a chance to make a 2 hour radio show on its own conditions - an offer they are unlikely to refuse.

4.8.2006

Pirates at Stockholm Pride

Piratpartiet, together with most Swedish political parties, has been present at the big annual Stockholm Pride festival. The festival is organized by the Swedish GLBT (gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual) communities in co-operation with hundred or so companies and other organizations. Its programme extends well beyond the sexual minority themes, and the numerous festival events attract a large number of domestic and international visitors. The main site, Pride Park, is packed with activities, music, restaurants, and its is also a place where organizations like parties and trade unions can present themselves to the audience. In other words, a great event to make political work, and that's precisely what the pirates have been doing there.

The reports from the pirates working at the festival have been very positive. Lots of campaign material has been handed over to interested people, and there have been numerous discussions on political themes with festival guests.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=247766

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/





Apple Meets Scandinavia's Reply Deadline
Katarina Kratovac

Apple Computer Inc. met a Tuesday deadline to respond to Scandinavian regulatory claims that Apple is violating their laws by making its market-leading iPod the only compatible portable player for iTunes downloads.

Apple's response, however, was not immediately made public as regulators considered the company's request to keep parts of it confidential. Authorities would not comment on the content of the 50-page response letter.

Consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden have threatened to take the Cupertino, Calif., company to court on charges of violating contract and copyright laws.

The action could lead to a ban on iTunes from Scandinavian markets if Apple does not allow songs purchased through its iTunes Music Store to be heard on other portable music players and not just the iPod.

The Scandinavian troubles for iTunes come as the French Parliament in June passed a hotly debated law on Internet copyright that could force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings.

A French court last week threw out some measures of the law, though appearing to leave the thrust of it intact.

It is now up to French President Jacques Chirac whether to sign it with the court's changes or send it back to parliament.

In Sweden, Bjorn Smith of the consumer agency said Apple's response arrived by mail on Tuesday.

He said Apple had "requested that specific parts of the letter be treated as confidential."

The agency would review whether the request was in line with Swedish law, which says confidentiality clauses can be placed on parts of commercial correspondence dealing with business secrets or court matters.

If the agency decided that Apple's demands were unjustified, the letter may be made public as early as Friday, Smith said.

"It is good Apple responded in time. It was their obligation to answer," Smith said, adding that the reply is not necessarily an indication that Apple would meet Scandinavian demands.

Smith said the Scandinavian agencies would need several days to decide their next move.

In Oslo, Arne Odden, Apple's manager for Norway, declined to comment on why the company asked for confidentiality.

In California, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris confirmed it filed a response to the Scandinavian agencies, saying only that Apple was "looking forward to resolving this matter."

Intellectual property experts have said that Apple may be able to claim that its licensing contracts with music publishers dictate the restrictions on how and where it can sell songs on iTunes.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-12-59-29





When Good Demos Go (Very, Very) Bad
Eric Auchard

Eleven years after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in his 1995 book “The Road Ahead“ predicted humans would one day talk to their computers rather than have to type, the future appeared to be at hand.

At Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Vista product manager Shanen Boettcher set out to show just how easy to use the speech recognition technology built into upcoming Windows Vista software will be. Like, for example, dictating aloud a simple, heartfelt letter to mom, and having one’s voice automatically transcribed into a computer.

The result was a disaster.

Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.

It was not just a perfect refutation of the problems of making machines understand human speech. What other features of Microsoft Windows Vista pose trouble, the audience was left to wonder? “The crashing demo didn’t do a lot to instill confidence in the new Windows product,” one Wall Street analyst, who was present at the demo, said.

Windows Vista, already five years in the making, has been postponed by Microsoft several times. Delays have put off the consumer version of Windows until early 2007 — after the crucial holiday shopping season. Vista is scheduled to ship to corporate customers this November, that is, unless more problems are uncovered.

Later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer blamed the failed speech recognition product demonstration on “a little bit of echo” in the room, which confused the speech-to-text system. To be sure, a second demonstration during the meeting showed how effectively speech recognition can be for navigating around applications, like Microsoft Outlook.

Structured menus appear to work fine. But recognizing random, natural speech still has quite a ways to go, by all appearances: “Let’s set so double the killer delete select all.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/07/28/...very-very-bad/





Text Mining The New York Times
Roland Piquepaille

Text mining is a computer technique to extract useful information from unstructured text. And it's a difficult task. But now, using a relatively new method named topic modeling, computer scientists from University of California, Irvine (UCI), have analyzed 330,000 stories published by the New York Times between 2000 and 2002 in just a few hours. They were able to automatically isolate topics such as the Tour de France, prices of apartments in Brooklyn or dinosaur bones. This technique could soon be used not only by homeland security experts or librarians, but also by physicians, lawyers, real estate people, and even by yourself. Read more…

Let's start with the introduction of this UCI news release — and forget the marketing hype.

Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.

Here is a quote from one of the researchers.

"We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier," said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. "To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians."

Now, let's look at a real example and as how the team discovered links between topics and people. Below is a graph showing "topic-model-based relationships between entities and topics. A link is present when the likelihood of an entity in a particular topic is above a threshold." (Credit: UCI)

Here is another example picked from the UCI news release.

For example, the model generated a list of words that included "rider," "bike," "race," "Lance Armstrong" and "Jan Ullrich." From this, researchers were easily able to identify that topic as the Tour de France. By examining the probability of words appearing in stories about the Tour de France, researchers learned that Armstrong was written about seven times as much as Ullrich.

But what exactly is 'topic modeling'?

Topic modeling looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics. Older text-mining techniques require the user to come up with an appropriate set of topic categories and manually find hundreds to thousands of example documents for each category. This human-intensive process is called supervised learning. In contrast, topic modeling, a type of unsupervised learning, doesn't need suggestions for an appropriate set of topic categories or human-found example documents. This makes retrieving information easier and quicker.

This research work has been presented by Newman and his colleagues during the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (ISI 2006), which was held in May in San Diego. Here is a link to their technical paper, "Analyzing Entities and Topics in News Articles Using Statistical Topic Models" (PDF format, 12 pages, 248 KB). The above graph has been extracted from this paper.

For more information about the topic modeling technique used by these scientists, you can look at the works done by Mark Steyvers and his Memory and Decisions Laboratory (MADLAB).

In particular, you can try the software available from this Topic Modeling Toolbox. And as you might not have the archives of the New York Times at your disposal to do some experiments, start with something smaller and see what kind of topics you discover — using the contents of this blog for example.

Sources: University of California - Irvine, July 26, 2006; and various web sites
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=304





UCI researchers 'text mine' the New York Times, demonstrating evolution of potent new technology
Press Release

Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.

The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.

"We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier," said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. "To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians."

Text mining allows a computer to extract useful information from unstructured text. Until recently, text mining required a great deal of preparation before documents could be analyzed in a meaningful way. A new text-mining technique called "topic modeling" - which UCI scientists used in their New York Times experiment - looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics - all with minimal human effort.

UCI researchers didn't invent topic modeling, but they developed a technique that allows the technology to be used on huge document collections. They also are among the first to demonstrate its ease and effectiveness by applying it to a newspaper archive. The results reveal few surprises, but the application demonstrates the ability of topic modeling to spot trends and make connections in a way that could be applied to more complicated and cumbersome documents such as those used by medical researchers and lawyers.

Newman and UCI researchers Padhraic Smyth, Mark Steyvers and Chaitanya Chemudugunta presented their research at the recent Intelligence and Security Informatics conference in San Diego.

The topic model, applied to the collection of news articles published from 2000 to 2002, identified patterns of words that occurred together in the stories. From those words, researchers were able to identify topics. Information associated with those topics was charted over time, allowing the scientists to pinpoint what months of the year certain topics were most in the news and how much ink they received from year to year.

For example, the model generated a list of words that included "rider," "bike," "race," "Lance Armstrong" and "Jan Ullrich." From this, researchers were easily able to identify that topic as the Tour de France. By examining the probability of words appearing in stories about the Tour de France, researchers learned that Armstrong was written about seven times as much as Ullrich. Charting information over time, researchers discovered that discussion of Tour de France peaked in the summer months but decreased slightly year to year.

"If I were interested in advertising a product related to the Tour de France, I might want to know whether interest in the Tour de France is increasing or decreasing," Newman said. "This might be very important knowledge."

Including the Tour de France, the model automatically identified a total of 400 topics ranging from renting apartments in Brooklyn and diving in Hawaii to voting irregularities and dinosaur bones. As for newsmakers, topics included Tiger Woods, Elian Gonzalez, Denzel Washington and Barbie.

"Text mining is an incredible tool," Newman said. "It already allows a doctor to identify the common thread in old and new medical research. With topic modeling, connections can be drawn faster and more efficiently in large volumes of text."

About topic modeling: UCI researchers performed their experiment using a statistical topic model based on a text model developed at UC Berkeley in 2003. Thanks to an improved solution technique proposed by Mark Steyvers and a research partner, this model has advanced from academic use to something that is now widely used in the research community. Topic modeling looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics. Older text-mining techniques require the user to come up with an appropriate set of topic categories and manually find hundreds to thousands of example documents for each category. This human-intensive process is called supervised learning. In contrast, topic modeling, a type of unsupervised learning, doesn't need suggestions for an appropriate set of topic categories or human-found example documents. This makes retrieving information easier and quicker.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/new...ew_press?id=51





From Maher to Movie To . . . Groceries?

Profit Problems Send Amazon in Strange Directions
Frank Ahrens

No longer content to remain in the online retail market, Amazon.com is heading into the movie business, even as the company's profit projections disappoint and its stock tumbles.

The Seattle-based giant -- which launched in 1995 as a bookstore and is now the world's largest online retailer, selling everything from breakfast bars to ball bearings -- has purchased the rights to turn the best-selling novel "The Stolen Child" into a feature-length film.

The move into multimedia comes only days after Amazon reported second-quarter earnings were down nearly 60 percent compared with the same period last year, despite a rise in revenue and traffic. It was the sixth consecutive quarter the company showed a decline in profit, sending the company's stock price down 22 percent Wednesday in Nasdaq trading.

Amazon did not disclose how much it paid author Keith Donohue for the movie rights. The deal, which has caused many analysts to scratch their heads, follows other investments in content and technology that have been criticized. Amazon recently said, for instance, that it was moving into the grocery business, typically a low-margin arena.

Even as Amazon struggles financially, it continues to morph. In order to bring more traffic to its Web site and hold visitors longer, Amazon has begun offering original content, following the lead of other Web sites. Last summer, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, Amazon streamed a live show on its site featuring comedian Bill Maher and a performance by Bob Dylan.

The company recently tapped Maher to host "Amazon Fishbowl," an interview program streamed on the Web site with such bands as Soul Asylum and authors such as Donohue.

The debut novel by Donohue, who lives in the Washington area, concerns a young boy who is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced with a changeling. Two narrators tell the parallel stories of the young human living with the mythical creatures while the impostor learns the ways of humans. The novel was inspired by an 1886 poem by William Butler Yeats.

The book, which was published in May by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of German media giant Bertelsmann AG, was slow to be reviewed by mainstream outlets. But Amazon sent galleys to 100 of the site's top customer reviewers, who lauded it. That helped propel the book to the top of Amazon's fiction list, much the way bloggers and other non-mainstream media outlets such as YouTube create groundswells of their own. Positive reviews followed, in The Washington Post, USA Today and elsewhere.

Amazon also placed more than 2 million sticker ads for the book on the sides of boxes shipping other books to Amazon customers, said Nan Talese. Amazon did not require the publisher to pay for the advertising, she said, though many bookstore chains do charge publishers for prime placement in their stores. Also, the publisher flogged the book on fantasy blog sites. "We do as much guerrilla marketing as we can on the Internet," Talese said.

The book has sold more than 30,000 copies, an impressive figure for a debut novel by an unknown author. Amazon hopes to translate that success to the movie screen. The company is seeking studio partners that would produce and distribute the movie, but would not name studios it is talking to.

If the film is made -- far from a sure thing -- Amazon would use its platform to market the movie and sell DVD copies. The book's fantastical story line could play well on the screen, thanks to special effects, and might be able to tap into the audience that turned the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" novels into blockbuster films.

"People like the book, and we wanted to listen to our customers who were passionate about it," said Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener. "We wanted to make sure an equally great movie was made from the book."

Donohue, who works for the federal government, said he was skeptical when his literary agent asked to send galley copies to United Talent Agency in Hollywood, which had worked with Amazon on the Maher project.

"I would hear from time to time, it's at this production company or that production company," said Donohue, who calls his book a psychological fairy tale. "I kind of dismissed all of that. It's all kind of mysterious to me."

Amazon ended up buying the film rights because the company "bit so hard" on the book, Donohue surmised. He also noted: "I've been a customer since 1995 when they first started, and I've been kind of interested in how they expand and contract and go in different directions."

Donohue would not disclose how much he was paid for the rights to his book, but offered, "I'm still here," meaning his day job.

As for Amazon, the company's woes also include a recent lawsuit loss to Toys R Us Inc., which ended Amazon's exclusive rights to sell the company's toys on the Web. Analysts say Amazon is over-investing in technology and content and that the company's recently announced price-slashing may not make up lost profits.

For instance, Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co., lowered his rating on Amazon shares from "market perform" to "underperform." Shares of Amazon closed up 30 cents, at $26.56, yesterday.

"Amazon.com remains heads-down focused on creating the best possible experience for our customers and to helping them find, discover and buy anything online," Herdener said. "This is our goal with 'The Stolen Child.' "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072701808.html





Making the testers pay

Microsoft to Charge For Office Beta
Dawn Kawamoto

Microsoft plans next week to charge a nominal fee for Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads, in a move that runs counter to the practice held by most software companies.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

"Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

Although Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the "technical refresh," or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the spokeswoman said.

Those who want to test drive Beta 2 to review how it works can access the software for free. But if they need to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required.

"This is the first time Microsoft has charged for an Office beta, and it's not something that is planned for on a repeat basis," the spokeswoman said.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+cha...3-6099987.html





Is a 'Perfect Storm' of Mac Sales on the Horizon?
David Morgenstern

PC users don't really get the Mac and have never gotten the Mac. Since most of the world talks Windows, it's no surprise that few in the industry really appreciate the windfall that's in store for Apple Computer over the next 18 months.

The big deal for Mac users will be upgrades, primarily meaning the transition of the installed base of Mac users to the Intel-based machines. The first sign of the pent-up demand for newer, faster Macs can be seen in Apple's latest quarterly results. The sales of some 800,000 notebooks—almost all the high-priced spread—represents a 61 percent increase from the year-ago quarter.

"We know all about that," you say, of course. It was almost a year ago that Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked onstage at the company's WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) and announced the switch.

With our internal clocks it feels as if it all must have happened by now. But it's only just beginning. For example, Apple's super-loyal base of professional content creators haven't yet received their Intel machines.

What chip will power Apple's next-generation workstations? Could it be Intel's new Xeon processor or the Core 2 Duo? Click here to read more.

However, this cycle isn't your usual processor upgrade cycle that comes every time Intel or Advanced Micro Devices tweaks a process. This is a major shift that affects all parts of the Mac customer-developer-vendor ecology.

Longtime Apple watchers can count two earlier events of similar magnitude.

The first such transition occurred in March 1994 with the arrival of the PowerPC architecture. The Motorola 680x0 architecture that had served the Mac platform for a decade was quickly supplanted by a set of new, more powerful machines.

Along with the CPU came the PCI expansion bus, which replaced a wonderful, but proprietary, bus called NuBus that Apple had used for ages. Customers that had a significant investment in NuBus cards were forced to upgrade their boards to PCI versions.

At the same time, the software that ran on the new machines needed changing as well. At such times customers are open to pitches, and a "sidegrade" war broke out, with software vendors offering all kinds of deals to folks running the competition's titles.

We can expect much of the same this time around.

The second mega-upgrade cycle hit with the PowerPC G3 (the PowerPC 601 through PPC 604 waves were considered the first two generations). The initial version of the G3 was more than 30 percent faster than the fastest G2 chip and many operations were boosted way beyond that range. Forget that the G3 didn't support multiprocessing—it was a lot faster.

To protect its access to these upgrade customers, Steve Jobs killed its Mac OS licensing program—canceled all agreements and paid off the claims. That shows how big a deal these major platform shifts are to Apple.

This coming Intel transition may prove to be a triple high biorhythm for the Mac. Along with the new Intel models, the Mac market will be bolstered early in 2007 by the arrival of Mac OS X "Leopard" (v10.5) and later in the spring with Intel-compatible versions of major Mac software platforms, such as the Adobe Creative Suite 3 products.

The base of professional content creators will likely wait for the software to arrive and then follow with a hardware purchase.

Wild cards in the Intel transition mix are "switchers," the customers persuaded by the demonstrations of content creation in the Apple stores. Will this trend with Windows users switching to Mac continue after the arrival of Windows Vista and its prettier face? Maybe.

With Vista missing the holiday and back-to-school seasons, many customers are buying Macs. A family in my neighborhood has been all PC since the PC XT. But the eldest son is going off to college and says he wants a Mac. It's the vanguard of a new generation gap. He's never owned a Mac but he's gotta have one—a good sign for Apple.

In addition, there are the many longtime Mac veterans who often skip the first couple of models in a major hardware transition and let early adopters shake out the hardware bugs or design flaws. It remains to be seen whether these buyers will enter the transition earlier or later.

My estimate is that it will be earlier.

But it's the demand for performance across the segments that creates the most misunderstanding between Mac and PC owners. All owners of Macs want more performance and need more performance. This is because the content creation and display applications that are core to the Mac experience can take all the bandwidth, processor power, memory and storage that you can throw at them and ask for more.

On the other hand, the PC market is focused on price and commoditization. This holds true for the enterprise and for consumers. For example, this week's Dell advertisement in the New York Times is all about systems costing around $500. By comparison, all Macs, even the entry-level models, are thicker and more performance-minded machines.

That is because Mac users want more performance and are willing to pay a premium for that performance.

The predilection for thinner clients in the Windows market may be worrying Microsoft a bit, especially when it comes to Windows Vista upgrades. Microsoft wants to figure out how to get the PC market excited about thicker machines running performance-driven applications.

At its partner conference, Microsoft backed away from giving release dates for its Expression family of Web design products. Click here to read more.

I received a slide from a presentation given by Michael Sievert, the Windows client marketing boss, at the WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) in Boston earlier in July. It covers this very topic.

The slide describes Windows Vista "scenarios" for consumer, small business and enterprise/midmarket segments. By scenario, he means a value or application that would drive thick Vista sales in that segment.

For the enterprise, Microsoft points to the need to optimize desktop infrastructure; to find, use and share information; to support a mobile work force; and to improve security and compliance.

For small businesses, the slide suggests that the drivers for thicker computing are backup, security, sales and marketing, financial management, collaboration, and mobility.

For the consumer segment, Microsoft points to "memories," or content creation and management; viewing TV and movies; gaming; music; "communications," or the connection of messaging content between handhelds and PCs; and productivity.

However, these targets are just that: There's no strategic vision from Microsoft or specific plans built around these bullet points, right now.

On the other hand, Apple over the past five years has executed successfully on a technology and business strategy that puts a thick computing platform in the middle of digital workflows. This plan was articulated before the release of Mac OS X.

The company now offers its users an elegant hardware platform, a robust graphics foundation in its operating system, support for rich content standards, and most importantly, a solid list of solution-based programs for content creation and management from Apple and its software developers.

Guess what? Real customers, not just gamers, want performance, will buy performance and can use it. Apple is counting on it.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1995493,00.asp





Best Dell Bug Ever Or Is It A Feature :-)
Wellington, New Zealand

Chris here at work just found this cool bug on all our Dell Optiplex GX520. It was so cool in fact that we decided to capture a video and post it online.

The bug appears when you put your mobile phone close to the cd-rom unit of the dell and then recieve a sms/txt.

What happends is it goes into some sort of suspension mode from which you can't bring it back without breaking power or holding down the power button for four seconds.

It worked with all the new dells here in the office and with any mobile phone. Just make sure to save all of your work before you try it at home.

The only remaining question is: Is it a bug or feature?

Update: I can see from my google analytics that this is still popular and finding it's way around the world one city at a time. If anyone else has tried this i'd enjoying knowing the results... just flick me an email from the contact page form (you can be anonymous)
http://www.rickardliljeberg.com/blog.php?itemID=153





Another reason to use WASTE

Pentagon Keeps Eye On War Videos
Richard Allen Greene

The Pentagon is keeping a close eye on what its troops post online, with special attention being paid to videos that show the aftermath of combat.

There is no specific policy that bans troops from posting graphic material.

But troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are hearing the message that they should consider carefully what videos they upload to the web.

Sites such as YouTube and Ogrish.com have hundreds or thousands of clips from soldiers, some set to rock music.

At their most graphic, they show the aftermath of suicide bombings and gunfights between coalition forces and insurgents.

Many include troops using foul language.

One soldier who served in Iraq in 2005 told the BBC there was "a tight watch" being kept on video and pictures posted to MySpace, with civilian contractors monitoring the internet on behalf of the Pentagon.

Images 'misused'

The BBC has not been able to confirm that contractors are scouring the internet for inappropriate material from the military.

But US Central Command - which is responsible for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - does have a team reading blogs and responding to what they consider inaccuracies about the so-called war on terror.

And a longstanding military public affairs officer in Iraq said the Pentagon is also worried about some of the images that are appearing online.

"There's continuing concern about the use of these videos and stills being used by our enemies to propagate the false notion that our military members are barbaric, warmongers - which is unequivocally not the case.

"And... many of these videos and photos can harm force protection and operational security measures."

Ward Carroll is the editor of Military.com, which has a section called Shock and Awe where combat videos are posted.

One of the most popular is called Hostile Demise.

In it, US forces watch what seem to be insurgents depositing weapons in a field, discuss what to do and then get permission from their commander to shoot three people dead and destroy their two vehicles.

"It's very graphic. At some level, it's a view of what happens when you pull the trigger," Mr Carroll, a former Navy officer, told the BBC.

"It's sobering, it's energising, it can be off-putting."

'War is grotesque'

He said the US Department of Defense would prefer that his website not have such videos.

"The military has an interest in its reputation and its image. When the popularity of these prurient, violent videos starts to eclipse their ability to control the image, then a concern arises."

Military.com exists to celebrate the military, he said, and would never post a video showing dead Americans or innocent bystanders.

"We have had stuff submitted where you could see the aftermath of the explosion. We ruled that has no value in our mission," Mr Carroll said.

But such images are precisely the mission of Ogrish.com, according to co-owner Hayden Hewitt.

"There is a distinct misapprehension in the West about what war is like. They think it's a gentlemanly thing. People have forgotten how grotesque war is."

Mr Hewitt estimated that his website has about 1,000 separate items from Iraq - many more from insurgent websites than from coalition forces.

He said he did not know how many coalition troops had posted video to his site.

But he said it was clear to him why they did so: "Some people don't want infamy or fame. They just want people to know what they have been through."

And he said no policy would stop service members from posting material online if they were determined to do so.

"Clamping down is probably a very bad move," he said.

One soldier who posted a video summarising his tour of duty in Afghanistan agreed.

"I don't remember them telling me not to post anything but I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to," said the veteran, who asked to be identified only as Mike.

"But I posted it when I got out of the military. I'm not sure if I would have posted it or not if they told me not to."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/5226254.stm





A Counselor Pulled From the Shadows
Gary Rivlin

LARRY W. SONSINI, Silicon Valley’s most feared and sought-after lawyer, dresses in fine Italian suits even as the rest of the Valley — other high-priced attorneys included — ply their trades in chinos and blue Oxford shirts. He is soft-spoken and restrained, sometimes eerily quiet, in contrast to the brash and kinetic entrepreneurs and financiers who otherwise dominate the landscape.

While the Valley can be a chummy, clubby place where even adversaries freely trade tales of children and outside activities, Mr. Sonsini would no sooner share personal information about himself, a longtime legal rival said, than a soldier at war would fraternize with an enemy combatant. In a land in which even the top executives and most successful venture capitalists generally use verbal mallets to drive home a point, he is a surgeon, adroit at using an intellectual and legal scalpel to win an argument or get his way.

Silence, in Mr. Sonsini’s case, has been golden. During his 40 years as a lawyer, Mr. Sonsini, 65, has served as legal counsel to the most prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. He helped to bring public many of the leaders of the technology boom, including Netscape Communications, Pixar, Google, Apple and Sun Microsystems. The investment banking firm of Robertson Stevens, based in San Francisco until it closed its doors in 2002, handled more than 500 initial public offerings over a 30-year period, and Mr. Sonsini was there for most of them.

“In one way or another, Larry was involved in almost every deal we underwrote,” said Sanford R. Robertson, founder of the bank that bore his name. Mr. Sonsini, who briefly served on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, is not just the area’s most influential lawyer, Mr. Robertson said, “He’s probably the most powerful person in Silicon Valley.”

Powerful, but discreet. Powerful, but rarely center stage. While Mr. Sonsini is hardly a shrinking violet, he cultivates the image of Silicon Valley’s most ubiquitous supporting player, often preferring to say his lines behind the scenes. “It’s not my job to be in the newspapers,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I think my clients like me to be a trusted adviser with a high degree of integrity and stay out of the limelight.”

BUT many of Mr. Sonsini’s clients are currently in the limelight because of a growing scandal involving possible improprieties or illegalities relating to the backdating of lucrative stock options. Mr. Sonsini and his firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, based in Palo Alto, Calif., represents or represented “just under 50 percent” of Silicon Valley companies implicated in the scandal, according to a spokeswoman for the firm. That representation included offering advice on corporate governance issues like the proper handling of stock options.

Mr. Sonsini has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal, nor is it even clear that he will be swept up in the investigation of questionable options policies that his clients adopted. But at least one former client that federal prosecutors have charged with criminal wrongdoing, the chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems, noted earlier this year that Mr. Sonsini advised the company on its stock options policies. The executive, Gregory L. Reyes, has declined to comment more recently; Brocade’s attorney described Mr. Sonsini as a “giant” and “brilliant lawyer.”

Mr. Sonsini declined to comment about Brocade and said that he was also “a little reluctant” to discuss the options investigation more broadly. “Not because I’m defensive, but because we represent a number of companies involved and it’s not appropriate for me to get out ahead and comment on things,” he said.

Even so, this man who has stuck mainly to the shadows now finds that the regulatory and prosecutorial spotlight aimed at his clients is casting a glare on his own actions. And Silicon Valley’s technorati are suddenly chattering about Mr. Sonsini, the éminence grise of high tech, with a frequency usually reserved for Google, the precinct’s venture capitalists or its hottest start-ups.

Those who have worked with Mr. Sonsini, including several rival attorneys who have sat across the table from him in negotiations, generally describe him as a wise man with a strong moral compass.

“You can hear rumors, and people talk, but his reputation has been durable in the more than 20 years since I’ve been here,” said Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit, the business software company and one of Mr. Sonsini’s longtime clients.

Robert V. Gunderson Jr., a founding partner at Gunderson Dettmer, another prominent Valley firm, stated: “Larry is a fierce but honorable competitor.”

Despite the hubris that permeated Silicon Valley during the tech boom of the mid- to late 1990’s, most companies there managed to avoid the public fates that later turned Enron, WorldCom and Tyco International into shorthand for corporate greed. But now Silicon Valley is emerging as the center of gravity for this latest inquiry into corporate abuse. Federal investigators are examining the extent to which top executives fudged dates — and then hid the fact that they did so — so that stock options they granted themselves and their employees would provide a bigger financial windfall when they chose to cash them in.

And one man at the center of it all is Larry Sonsini.

Mr. Sonsini’s firm provided legal counsel on corporate governance issues like the proper handling of stock options to roughly a dozen of the 25 Silicon Valley area companies implicated so far in the widening probe. Those 25 companies are either under federal investigation or have announced their own internal reviews.

FEDERAL prosecutors filed criminal charges against two former executives of Brocade Communications, a data storage equipment maker based in Silicon Valley, 10 days ago, claiming that the two officers backdated options. Wilson Sonsini served as outside counsel to Brocade and Larry Sonsini himself was a member of Brocade’s board and sat on the compensation committee until stepping down from the board last year.

Prosecutors have accused Brocade’s former chief executive, Mr. Reyes, of defrauding not only investors but also its board by doctoring documents, including board minutes. Mr. Reyes, through his attorney, Richard Marmaro, denied any wrongdoing, dismissing as clerical errors any alleged forgeries. But prosecutors, questioned at a news conference, said that they had not ruled out the possibility that Mr. Sonsini could be charged at a later date. In February, Mr. Reyes told BusinessWeek that Mr. Sonsini encouraged him in 1999 to assume sole authority to award Brocade options through the creation of a so-called committee-of-one.

Mr. Sonsini did not deny Mr. Reyes’s contention so much as muddy the waters. “I’m not so sure the committee-of-one didn’t exist before becoming counsel to Brocade,” he said.

Committees-of-one are typically established in intensely competitive job markets like the one the Valley presented in the late 1990’s, where speed and oversize compensation packages were essential to recruit top people. They are legal, but they can also place public companies on dangerous ethical ground because of the potential for abuse.

One member of the Valley’s legal profession, who requested anonymity because he sees Mr. Sonsini regularly and said he wanted to maintain good relations with him, said that he also had helped Valley companies create committees-of-one. But once you confer that much power on a single individual, he said, “you better watch what the guy does.”

When read that quote, Mr. Sonsini said that “you should not assume that those issues were not addressed,” suggesting that he was monitoring Mr. Reyes but could not possibly have known that the executive might have been forging dates and documents.

It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Sonsini and other lawyers at his firm played in the legal woes of some of their clients, but over the last several years, the S.E.C. has aggressively pursued penalties against lawyers who give clients bad advice.

“It’s a frontier area right now,” said Alan R. Bromberg, professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The S.E.C. is pushing toward holding lawyers responsible even if they give bad advice, rather than fraudulent advice.”

But Mr. Bromberg also said that serving as outside counsel to a company while sitting on the company’s board was not usually a problem. “It’s essentially a disclosure issue,” he said. “You need to make sure that everybody that is involved in the decision-making process is aware of the two hats an individual is wearing.”

Just as it would be difficult to exaggerate the breadth of Mr. Sonsini’s reach across Silicon Valley, it would be hard to overstate his influence inside his own firm. Mr. Sonsini dominates Wilson Sonsini as few lawyers ever dominate a firm.

Allen Morgan, a former Wilson Sonsini partner who worked there between 1982 and 1997 (he is now a prominent Valley venture capitalist), estimated that Mr. Sonsini’s own practice was at least three to four times as large as that of the firm’s next closest partner — an estimate that Mr. Sonsini did not dispute. For nearly three decades, Mr. Sonsini served as the firm’s chief executive, until ceding the post to a younger partner last year. He is still the firm’s chairman.

“He’s like the Hollywood lawyers,” said Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor who has known Mr. Sonsini 25 years. “He acts like a counselor and a consigliere. He’s the deal maker and the deal arranger.”

When Carleton S. Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, came under attack by her board in 2001 after she announced plans to purchase Compaq Computer for $25 billion, she relied heavily on Mr. Sonsini to help her counter opposition to the deal. He has also advised Steven P. Jobs of Apple and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, among others.

Clients say that they can phone Mr. Sonsini at 11:30 at night, and say they are equally certain he would make himself available at 5 in the morning. Like a legal Zelig, he has been present at many critical moments in the Valley’s history, though his central role in those events usually surfaces only after corporate or legal documents are filed or when tongues begin wagging over a few glasses of fine California cabernet.

“Larry has the ability to make C.E.O.’s feel like they are his only clients,” said Craig W. Johnson, Mr. Sonsini’s partner for 19 years until leaving the firm in 1993. Mr. Johnson, quoting another former Wilson Sonsini partner, said Mr. Sonsini could juggle so many demanding clients because he performs like “a machine gun with every bullet hitting the center of a moving target.”

Mr. Sonsini is not one to offer encouraging pats on the back or ask after colleagues’ children, acquaintances say. “He’s not someone prone to expressions of emotion,” said Kenneth P. Wilcox, who, as chief executive of the Silicon Valley Bank, has worked closely with Mr. Sonsini for several years.

Mr. Morgan, the former Wilson Sonsini partner, said that he did not recall Mr. Sonsini ever raising his voice in the 15 years that they worked together. But Mr. Sonsini’s clients, some so young they seemed barely out of short pants, have not always proved as calm. It is then, when a client is in the midst of an outburst, that the Valley’s superlawyer might be at his best, acquaintances say.

“He’ll be representing a guy who’s pounding the table and beyond mad,” Mr. Robertson said. “But Larry, who has a very quiet style anyway, will calmly take this person through the situation, and patiently explain what the law is and what is possible. I’ve witnessed this on many, many occasions.”

WHEN Mr. Sonsini graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, he chose to join a four-lawyer firm in a backwater whose very name, Silicon Valley, had yet to be coined. Over the following decades he orchestrated the firm’s transformation into a 600-lawyer juggernaut.

“Larry Sonsini is a guy who grew with, and then helped to define, Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Campbell of Intuit.

Mr. Sonsini studied securities law at Boalt and from the start of his career he made that his specialty, catering to the Valley’s venture capitalists, some of whom would send a start-up his way that they thought might be ready to go public. In turn, Mr. Sonsini parlayed his ties to the area’s most promising start-ups into a lucrative relationship with the country’s top investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.

“The investment banks wanted to build relationships with certain law firms who were in the industry,” Mr. Sonsini said. “As I got to know these banks, it enabled me to introduce clients to them.”

Mr. Sonsini’s ability to ingratiate himself with those in a position to throw business his way partly explains his rise to the top of the Valley’s legal food chain. So, too, does his business acumen. He is an entrepreneur in a land of entrepreneurs who, by all accounts, has about as a good a feel for corporate strategy as his most gifted clients.

“He’s as good a businessman as he is a lawyer, and he’s built the dominant law firm in Silicon Valley,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a former Securities and Exchange commissioner who now teaches at Stanford Law School. “That gives him lots of credibility with executives also looking to build successful businesses.

“He gets them, and they get him,” Mr. Grundfest added.

Mr. Conway, the prominent Valley angel investor best known for his early investment in Google, first met Mr. Sonsini around 1980 and said that the lawyer had an immense, unrivaled network of contacts. Mr. Sonsini can open those doors for those he represents — and slam doors shut and cause fits of anger or panic among those who oppose him.

“He has access to every C.E.O. in the Valley,” Mr. Conway said. “They’ll pick up the phone for him immediately.”

As an example, Mr. Conway offers Google, which was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and which is run by Eric Schmidt. “If you’re going to go crossways with him, you’ve got a problem, because if it’s an issue at Google, he’s going to call Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey,” Mr. Conway said. “Or he’ll call David Drummond, who used to work with him and is now a honcho at Google. He has influence everywhere.”

SOME say Mr. Sonsini is a much better deal maker than he is a lawyer. But one prominent rival, Bruce Alan Mann, a senior partner at Morrison & Foerster of San Francisco, dismissed that criticism as unfounded. He said that Mr. Sonsini, who taught securities law at Boalt Hall from the mid-80’s until last year, could quote the intricacies of Delaware case law from memory.

“Anyone who says Larry isn’t much of a lawyer is being jealous,” Mr. Mann said. “He’s as on top of the law as any lawyer I know.”

Others in the Valley describe Mr. Sonsini as a walking conflict of interest, a problem they say is born out of the sheer breadth of companies he and his firm represent. For example, he represents not only Hewlett-Packard but also Sun Microsystems, which he incorporated in 1982 and helped take public in 1986 — and there are no two fiercer rivals in Silicon Valley than those two.

Still, some clients say Mr. Sonsini’s omnipresence does not bother them. “If you really believe this guy isn’t trustworthy, if you believe he can’t silo his approach to giving you advice, then don’t use him,” Intuit’s Mr. Campbell said. Mr. Sonsini, he said, has often told him that he cannot help him because of a conflict. “I trust him,” Mr. Campbell said.

Perhaps Mr. Sonsini’s most pointed potential vulnerability amid the current options scandal is a trait that clients and others generally offer as a compliment: so deep is his understanding of the issues that management is facing that it is often difficult to tell where his legal advice ends and his business counsel begins.

“Larry is a master in my mind of knowing what’s important for the client, and focusing on it, and not letting the legal niceties get in the way of accomplishing the client’s goal,” Mr. Mann said. “He doesn’t let legal issues that can be resolved kill a deal.”

But sometimes such niceties are critical to keeping a client out of hot water. Mr. Sonsini may have offered astute business advice when he helped companies like Brocade contend with the hiring crunch that now lies at the root of the Valley’s options problems — but such advice has also drawn the attention of investigators and regulators who are examining whether it was legally sound.

Although it remains unclear exactly who or how many may have crossed the legal line during the Valley’s boom years, veterans of the dot-com craze said that those swept up in it found themselves in the midst of a financial whirlwind.

“It was a very peculiar time when some of this stuff happened,” Mr. Gunderson, the Valley attorney, said. “I think people to a certain extent lost their bearings.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/bu...30sonsini.html





All the Internet’s a Stage. Why Don’t C.E.O.’s Use It?
Randall Stross

CHIEF executives are inclined to avoid activities generally deemed to be high-risk: Sky diving. Cliff jumping. Motorcycle racing. And blogging.

Two years ago, when Jonathan I. Schwartz, then the president and chief operating officer at Sun Microsystems, inaugurated a blog that made him the most senior executive at his company to venture onto such a publicly visible platform, he embraced the risks. “Hey, life is short,” he wrote on the first day, as if he were about to leap from a plane. The title of that first post was “Head First.” Mr. Schwartz not only survived the plunge, he turned out to be a natural. In a voice that is refreshing in its unprocessed directness, he discusses big-picture trends in the computer industry, promotes Sun’s wares and tweaks competitors, and reports on the odd epiphany experienced while on the road or engaged in intellectual combat with industry friends and adversaries. The regularity of his posts, which blend serious content and an informal writing style, and their wide-ranging scope make this blog the apotheosis of expository writing: thought made visible.

When Mr. Schwartz was promoted to the top job at Sun this spring, he automatically became a member of an elite group: Fortune 500 C.E.O. bloggers. He is the only active member.

Where is everyone else?

Capital markets function as they should when the flow of information is strong and unimpeded. Mr. Schwartz has shown ably that for the chief executive sincerely interested in increasing information flow to the fullest range of stakeholders, a blog is a hydraulic wonder.

Many companies, eager to claim that their dearest wish is to draw ever closer to outside constituencies, boast that they encourage blogging among employees. Microsoft, for example, says that it has more than 3,000 employees who maintain blogs on the company’s Web site, an impressive number. But a large company is an outsize elephant, and each employee works within a tiny wrinkle on the hide. Only the chief executive is in a position to sit astride the beast and share the widest perspective. The fact that Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and its chairman and former chief executive, Bill Gates, have chosen not to blog leaves an embarrassing silence at the top that the combined clacking of those underlings cannot fill.

It is not just Mr. Ballmer who is conspicuously absent. Other chief executives in the computer industry, the place most at ease with the technology, are also missing. Those who would like to read a blog maintained by Steven P. Jobs at Apple Computer must settle for a parody, “The Secret Life of Steve Jobs,” started in June by an anonymous wag. (In almost every post, the fictional Mr. Jobs recounts an unpleasant encounter with someone else, from state troopers to Steven Spielberg, which includes his exasperated refrain: “I invented the friggin’ iPod, O.K.? Have you heard of it?”)

Outside the technology field, only one other Fortune 500 company has had a C.E.O. who has called himself a blogger, John P. Mackey of Whole Foods Market. Mr. Mackey has made a total of six posts over the course of 10 months, and these consist of reprints of speeches and interviews and similar materials created originally for a different purpose. Using blogging software to park a reprint once every two months does not a blog make.

In contrast, Mr. Schwartz has posted his thoughts, very much on the fly, five times a month for two years. Over time he has earned credibility by his willingness to put in public view his unfiltered ruminations on a regular basis.

That credibility was needed last week, when he sought to put a positive spin on Sun’s quarterly earnings, his first as chief executive. One-time charges combined to produce another loss for the quarter — the company has reported losses for the past five fiscal years — but revenue was up significantly.

After the earnings release, Mr. Schwartz itemized on his blog the many positive developments that he sees in the company’s business. Viewed alone, it would be easy for unhappy investors to dismiss. But read as the latest installment of candid self-evaluations of the company’s strategic initiatives and performance, Mr. Schwartz’s optimism exerts a tonic effect.

C.E.O. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz’s example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive’s work week. In an exhortatory piece, “If You Want to Lead, Blog,” published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that “having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today.”

“My No. 1 job is to be a communicator,” Mr. Schwartz told me last week. “I don’t understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.”

Assuming that other chief executives are willing to make their thoughts just as visible as Mr. Schwartz’s, the blog provides a highly efficient medium of publication. Mr. Schwartz, for instance, simultaneously reaches shareholders, software developers and current and prospective customers. With posted responses, these groups easily reach him as well as one another.

Debbie Weil, author of “The Corporate Blogging Book,” which Portfolio Hardcover is to publish this week, tries to persuade reluctant executives with the argument that blogging would save the time they now spend on hundreds of daily e-mail exchanges. “Why not do it more efficiently?” she asks in her book. “Instead of a one-to-one message, why not a communication from one to many thousands?”

American executives are accustomed to relying on professionals to write speeches and books in their name. The temptation to do the same with a blog may seem irresistible, but it would only end badly. Mr. Schwartz warned fellow executives who were considering hiring a ghost writer for their blogs not to bother. “It’s like hiring someone to write your e-mail,” he said.Mr. Schwartz does not brag about his own style, but it is difficult to imagine a surrogate who would know how to cover a mix of topics that encompass, to pick a few at random, Java’s strategic similarity to electrical light bulbs, a “Harry Potter” movie and network loads, chip multithreading, cold calls and the California Department of Transportation’s Windows-centric Web site.

Swipes at competitors like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell and Red Hat provide an entertaining display of pugilistic skill, with all blows above the belt. And when industry alignments shift, as they always do, and yesterday’s foe becomes today’s partner, Mr. Schwartz has said nothing that could create an embarrassment.

When he is composing his postings, Mr. Schwartz said that he had to keep in mind nontechnical as well as technical readers, from “my mom and dad to a kernel geek working at a competitor.” He also has to affix legal boilerplate if he happens to make forward-looking statements about the company, but he does not have Michael A. Dillon, Sun Microsystems’ general counsel, review every post before it goes out.

Mr. Dillon said his office gave a one-time briefing about the relevant securities laws to all Sun employees — about 3,000 of them are blogging — and then trusted them to stay out of trouble. It’s not the blogs that worry Mr. Dillon but the employee e-mail messages sent without the thought or consideration that goes into a blog post.

WHEN an employee of a publicly traded company publishes regularly on a business blog, something valuable for outside observers is created: a firsthand chronicle. This deserves to be called something special, a primary blog — that is, a primary source, created by a participant or eyewitness — that distinguishes it from all the other blogs (and, yes, from all other newspaper columns, too) that are written at a remove by commentators. Primary blogs maintained by Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s would provide the most vital information to investors.

Ms. Weil, the author, spoke with me last week about the reluctance of Fortune 500 executives to share their thoughts on a public blog, and could find no acceptable excuse for their silence.

“They should come down from the mountain and communicate in their own words — without handlers,” Ms. Weil said. “For what they’re paid, is that too much to ask?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/bu...ey/30digi.html





Interns, the Founts of Youth
Maureen Tkacik

IT was a typical Sweet 16 70’s-theme party. Drama geeks in vintage bell-bottoms circled the rink at the Cherry Hill Skating Center in southern New Jersey, a disco ball spun overhead and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting that read “Happy Birthday Claire” sat beneath balloons in the corner. Then someone made the inevitable call for a game of spin the bottle.

“Spin the bottle?” cried out Rose Luardo, a rail-thin guest in a platinum Afro wig, as she looked up from the Diet Coke she was sipping through a Twizzler. Will Christianson, 16, a tall boy in a patchwork sweater and a mop of blond highlights who was sitting beside her, laughed mockingly.

Ms. Luardo, after all, is 34 years old. And she had come to be among this sea of dewy-faced high schoolers not as a chaperone or older sister, but because Will is her personal unpaid intern and, in her words, B.F.F., best friend forever. She met him when he came to see her band play in Philadelphia last winter. They subsequently got to know each other through MySpace and instant messaging, and when Ms. Luardo needed to channel the voice of a teenager for a marketing project, she enlisted Will’s help.

Since then he has been her point man for keeping up with all things young. In turn she has been spending many a weekend shuttling him from his home in Moorestown, N.J., to parties, concerts and the occasional summer blockbuster.

At one time there was no way to better broadcast one’s failure to thrive as an adult than to hang around high school kids. It meant that the world beyond senior prom had shut its doors, forcing a return to a place in which your value was determined solely by your ability to drive a car and procure beer. But now, according to young professionals working in fields in which fluency in the dialects and habits of teenagers is paramount, hanging out with high schoolers is cool, and sometimes even professionally advantageous.

Often these teenagers are known as “the intern.” They are working for little or nothing at clothing labels, guerrilla marketing firms and one-person event-planning operations, making coffee, opening mail and tagging along with their employers in environments they deem interesting. While they get college-résumé-boosting work experience, not to mention entree into clubs and parties, their employers get around-the-clock muses and ambassadors to youth culture.

“I don’t need to look at the Internet anymore, I just look these kids straight in the eyes and they tell me everything I need to know,” said Ms. Luardo, a former buyer for Urban Outfitters who is now a musician, part-time sales representative and freelance marketer. A few weeks ago, Ms. Luardo, Will and one of his friends, Dot Goldberger, were eating enchiladas at a restaurant in Center City Philadelphia.

“Rose doesn’t know anything about music,” Dot said, as Will sneaked a sip of Ms. Luardo’s blood orange margarita. Besides the fact that he likes hanging out with Rose, Will said he was glad to help her because it kept him busy and might look good on a college application. Will’s father, Allan Christianson, said he was just thankful that Ms. Luardo was willing to share the task of driving his son around. “At first I thought, ‘Gee, she’s a little older,’ ” Mr. Christianson said, “but a lot of people get old only because they think they are.”

There is no way to quantify how many young professionals are employing high school students, but Mark Oldman, a founder and a co-president of Vault.com, a career-information Web site, said his firm estimates that the number of high school students doing internships has increased 30 percent in the past five years. “It’s one very potent way of diversifying your high school portfolio” on a college application, he said.

And Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies internships in communication industries, said that because small media, entertainment and arts companies often don’t offer formal internship programs, high school students are filling informal roles in such businesses, especially because “they are locked out of traditional internship programs that offer credit for college.” While some high schools offer course credit for internships or even require them, most don’t.

To employers desperate for a hot line into the Clearasil demographic, the young interns offer both cheap labor and the frisson of authenticity. “It’s amazing how working around teenagers just injects a buzz into the office,” said Doug Kennedy, 36, the founder of Reverb Communications, a marketing firm. He employs seven high school interns for $7 an hour — and unlimited junk food — to test video games and write positive reviews of them on message boards. (He also takes them on office field trips, like the one they took earlier this month to see the Warped Tour in San Francisco.)

Tina Wells, 26, the founder and chief executive of Buzz Marketing, a youth-centered market research and promotions firm in New York that employs four unpaid interns, including two 12-year-olds, said all the cross-generational bonding is a natural part of any youth-oriented industry. “These kids are so savvy,” she said. “They know that they’re creating the culture that we’re all consuming, that everyone wants to be younger and younger and we’re all obsessed with the same characters on ‘The Hills.’ ”

But beyond the office, young interns have also become popular companions, conferring a certain status on the 20- and 30-somethings who let them tag along after hours. “There is something exotic about teenagers,” said Julie Gerstein, a 27-year-old D.J. and college writing instructor in Philadelphia. A friend of Ms. Luardo’s, she is using Will’s intern services to help craft a syllabus for a freshman writing seminar.

Ms. Gerstein said she can’t “personally, like, throw down with a 16-year-old.”

“I’m too much of a mom figure,” she said. “But I know lots of people who hang out with teenagers just as friends.”

Christopher Noxon, the author of the book “Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up,” thinks there can also be something craven about adults’ desire to find out what teenagers know. “There is sort of this desperate, pathetic need to keep up with fads that reminds me of the women in ‘Absolutely Fabulous,’ ” he said.

At the same time, Kristen Cabido, a 24-year-old who has managed employees from 17 to the late 20’s at the Lower East Side outpost of American Apparel, thinks the age gap between people her age and teenagers is becoming more and more negligible. “More than ever,” she said, “people in their 20’s are living at home or getting their bills paid by their parents and going out and getting wasted like it’s 1995, so hanging out with 15-year-olds is not outside the realm of normal.”

But hanging out with high schoolers has its own complications: Do you buy beer for them? Make them drive? Is it O.K. to be attracted to the intern? Ms. Luardo sets boundaries up front: she won’t buy them beer or hand over her keys, but they “mostly just want to go to all-ages shows” and other events her older friends are too tired to attend. And though age and gender differences may conjure up unsavory images of sexual dalliances, the people involved in these arrangements say the relationships don’t typically cross over into romantic territory.

One exception is 16-year-old Cory Kennedy, who since last fall has been working as an unpaid intern for the Los Angeles party photographer Mark Hunter, 21. Since her job began, she has become both his girlfriend and something of an Internet phenomenon thanks to Mr. Hunter’s Web site, www.thecobrasnake.com, which is dominated by pictures of her with her signature unbrushed hair and improbable outfits.

While Cory said that her internship with Mr. Hunter involved its share of drudgery, she is also getting credit at her charter high school, where she was able to label her work an independent study in photojournalism. Most enticing, though, it gave her an entree to hip fashion and entertainment industry parties. “I was just leading this crazy exciting new life,” she said. (Her mother, Jinx, said she was keeping a close eye on Cory, but in general thought Mr. Hunter was a good influence.)

Indeed, many students find that these internships, and the people serving as their mentors, play more influential roles than a college education in shaping their futures. Claudia, a 37-year-old graffiti writer and fashion designer who goes by the name Claw Money and works in the East Village, has two interns. She hired Greg Passuntino, now 20, and later Harry McNally, now 21, when they were 16 and 19, respectively. Mr. Passuntino spotted Claudia, whose last name is not used because of legal issues involving her graffiti, dancing at an East Village nightclub, and they struck up a friendship. “And then all my friends started getting internships and jobs, so I was like, I need an internship,” he said.

While Claudia said she “lobbied heavily” for Mr. Passuntino to go to college, he dropped out of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Both he and Mr. McNally, who met her through Mr. Passuntino, found better prospects working for Claudia at wages she described as “much better than retail or T.G.I. Friday’s” and on assorted side projects. (Mr. Passuntino does Web design; Mr. McNally has a fledgling T-shirt label called Pegleg.)

But it’s not all mutual flattery and admiration. “It’s really illusory sometimes, where you’ll have a moment and be like, this person was born after ‘Star Wars,’ ” said Ben Velez, a 35-year-old D.J. and the vice president for marketing for the clothing label Triple Five Soul in New York. Mr. Velez employs a 17-year-old intern from Scarsdale, N.Y., named Gus Vaisman and spends much of his working life in the company of people a decade or two younger than him, but tries to gravitate toward people his own age socially. “I don’t talk to teenagers very often,” he said. “The pop cultural references that they’ll use as ironic, I lived through.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/fa...s/30CANDY.html





Lights Going Out On Aging White House Press Room

The following witness story is about the life and times of the aging press room at the White House, which has been the scene of countless key announcements over the years and is soon to be closed for some months for a make-over. It is by Steve Holland, who has covered the White House for Reuters since 1990.

Steve Holland

After 35 years of grave announcements, political hardball and just plain old spin, the curtain goes down this week on the White House press room.

The broken-down chairs will be removed, the coffee-stained carpet ripped out, the last sandwich wrapper swept up and the vermin chased out -- namely, the reporters, photographers and camera crews who make the place a second home.

This is the place the television cameras do not show, at least in detail, when they beam White House news of note and lesser note from the presidential spokesman, who stands at a podium with a slick-looking backdrop of blue curtains and the official seal.
It is not quite a complete tear-down but pretty close. The briefing room and adjacent press offices, a tight warren of cubbyholes, will be torn out and only the walls and floor left standing. It will be the most extensive makeover since the facility was built in 1970 over Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool.

For anywhere from seven to nine months and perhaps longer, the White House press corps will be disconnected from the mother ship, exiled across Pennsylvania Avenue to temporary quarters, where the spokesman's briefings will take place.

The old briefing room is officially unplugged on Friday. A proper send-off is being prepared for Wednesday with former presidential press secretaries in attendance.

The main reason for the work is to install a new air conditioning system and address a feared asbestos problem.

Some paranoid reporters fear President George W. Bush will fulfill a dream of many presidents and permanently dislodge the press and loosen up some prime office space close to the boss.

Steve Scully of C-SPAN, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said the press corps will be vigilant in making sure "the Bush White House keeps its promise to move us back in a timely basis."

"We have no reason to believe we will not be back in our old space next spring, but we're reporters, so we always approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism," he said.

A Tight Squeeze, With Fungus Too

Officials from Bush on down say the press corps will be back -- and with newfangled, fiber-optic accessories. The last makeover was in 1981 and the place is like a dingy garage compared to the museum-like White House itself.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the cramped nature of the briefing room has its dividends as it brings the press secretary and reporters close up and encourages a spirit of collegiality.

"The good news is that once this thing is renovated you'll still have that proximity but you'll also have a functioning heating and air conditioning system along with wiring that meets code, and carpets that do not contain every known bacterium and fungus," he said.

Back in the old days, reporters lounged in leather chairs in the West Wing lobby, then darted to a bank of phones to file reports in what is now the national security adviser's office.

President Richard Nixon got tired of having his visitors accosted by the press, and workers slapped together a room in a corridor linking the White House residence to the West Wing.

Thus was born a room where famous news events have been announced and political spin found a prominent launching pad.

With the end of an era nigh, White House veterans are recalling some of the more dramatic events and jousting that took place in the venerable old briefing room.

"The iconic moments usually relate to stories, in the sense that the briefing room was often the place you heard it first," said former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

In the high tension on the day President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981 by would-be assassin John Hinckley, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig rushed to the briefing room and announced, "As for now, I'm in control here."

Mike McCurry spent hours at the podium fending off queries about President Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and defending his initial statement that Clinton did not have an "improper relationship" with her.

As spokesman in the latter years of Ronald Reagan's presidency and all of the first George Bush's four-year term, Fitzwater had many announcements at all hours of the day and night, such as, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun" in 1991.

He chuckled the other day at the memory of rounding up reporters at 5 a.m. to announce the United States had attacked an oil rig in the Gulf, but that he had no more details.

"Is that all we get, you bastard?" shouted one reporter.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-scienceNews-2





Nothing Is Rotten In The State Of Denmark...

If you're looking for happiness, go and live in Denmark.

It is the happiest country in the world while Burundi in Africa is the most unhappy, according to a report by a British scientist released Friday.

Adrian White, an analytical social psychologist at the University of Leicester in central England, based his study on data from 178 countries and 100 global studies from the likes of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

"We're looking much more at whether you are satisfied with your life in general," White told Reuters. "Whether you are satisfied with your situation and environment."

The main factors that affected happiness were health provision, wealth and education, according to White who said his research had produced the "first world map of happiness."

Following behind Denmark came Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas.

At the bottom came the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Burundi. The United States came in at 23rd, Britain was in 41st place, Germany 35th and France 62nd.

Countries involved in conflicts, such as Iraq, were not included.

"Smaller countries tend to be a little happier because there is a stronger sense of collectivism and then you also have the aesthetic qualities of a country," White said.

"We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th, and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being."

He admitted collecting data based on well-being was not an exact science, but said the measures used were very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes.

Regular studies by academics across the globe using the same tests would allow researchers to better understand what factors affected happiness and White said he hoped every country in the future would carry out bi-annual checks.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsar...Art-R2-Today-9





CBS Appeals Fine For Janet Jackson Breast Flashing
Jeremy Pelofsky

CBS Corp. asked an appeals court on Friday to overturn a Federal Communications Commission fine for the network's broadcast of pop singer Janet Jackson's breast flash during the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast.

The FCC ruled that the incident was legally indecent and fined 20 stations owned by CBS $550,000.

"We disagree strongly with the FCC's conclusions and will continue to pursue all remedies necessary to affirm our legal rights," CBS said in a statement.

"CBS has apologized to the American people for the inappropriate and unexpected half-time incident, and immediately implemented safeguards that have governed similar broadcasts ever since," the network said.

Last month, President George W. Bush signed a new law that raises fines tenfold for radio and television broadcasters that air extensive profanity or sexual content that the FCC determines violate U.S. decency standards.

Congress approved the increase in fines -- to as much as $325,000 per violation -- in response to the Super Bowl incident. Some television viewers were outraged by the half-time entertainment during the game when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped off part of duet partner Janet Jackson's costume and briefly exposed her breast.

CBS said it was required to pay the $550,000 fine as a procedural step in order to appeal the FCC ruling.

The FCC said it would "vigorously defend" its decision.

"CBS' continued insistence that the halftime show was not indecent demonstrates that it is out of touch with the American people. Millions of parents, as well as Congress, understand what CBS does not: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" was indeed indecent," FCC spokeswoman Tamara Lipper said in a statement.

U.S. television and radio broadcasters are barred from airing obscene material and are limited from broadcasting indecent materials between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., a period of time when children are likely to be watching. The restrictions do not apply to cable or satellite services.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Libraries Say More Maps Missing Than Those That Were Stolen
AP

Elite libraries have told the FBI that more antique maps are missing than those stolen by E. Forbes Smiley III, who admitted in June to stealing nearly 100 maps.

The British Library, Yale and Harvard report more maps missing from their collections than those the map dealer has admitted to taking. The most valuable maps are within Smiley's area of interest - early maps of North America - and several are copies of maps he has admitted stealing.

"We continue to entertain serious doubts about the completeness of the investigation and the extent of Mr. Smiley's cooperation with the authorities," Clive Field, director of scholarship and collections at the British Library, recently wrote to the FBI. "We note that he has admitted to stealing only one map from our collections but are not persuaded that this exhausts the limits of Mr. Smiley's involvement in our thefts."

Smiley, 50, who lives on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in New Haven on June 22 to one count of theft of major artwork in the theft of a map from Yale University. He admitted taking 97 maps over eight years from the New York and Boston public libraries, the Newberry Library in Chicago, Harvard University library and British Library in London.

He later pleaded guilty to three larceny charges in state court in the Yale thefts.

The British Library suspects Smiley of taking three additional maps and has hired a Philadelphia lawyer to take up its case.

Harvard on Friday released the names of five additional maps missing from its collection, following the lead of Yale and the British Library in making its thefts public.

Richard Reeve, Smiley's lawyer, said his client has furnished complete information to the FBI and worries that the libraries have found a scapegoat on whom to pin additional thefts.

"Either the maps have legs themselves or there are other people taking maps," he said.

Prosecutors defended their work and invited the libraries to produce additional evidence.

"If they're uncovering more information, we'll be more than happy to take a look," said Tom Carson, a spokesman for Connecticut's U.S. attorney.

Librarians and the FBI are scheduled to meet in New Haven on Aug. 7 to sort out issues related to the case before Smiley's sentencing in September. He faces up to six years in prison, but the judge could impose more jail time if proof emerges that he stole more than the nearly 100 he has already confessed to taking.

The oldest maps dated to the 1500s and some are the first records of settlements, territories and discoveries in America, experts say.

Poor record-keeping by the libraries limited the FBI's investigation. Investigators also had difficulty tracing maps, which were printed in multiple copies, to a single owner.

Investigators say that without Smiley's cooperation they would have recovered only a fraction of the maps they ultimately obtained.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-30-12-37-02





At 60, Sony Focuses On Rebuilding Brand
Yuri Kageyama

Three years ago, Sony Corp. launched the Qualia line of luxury gadgets that included a tiny $3,300 digital camera and a $13,000 audio console that automatically centered a compact disc regardless of how carelessly it was tossed into the player.

Problem was, Sony engineers seemed more enamored with the extravagantly priced technology than consumers were, and the products meant to highlight Sony's fine-tuned prowess received little interest beyond the initial gee-whiz.

The gadgets were a sign of a growing gap between Sony creations and consumer sensibilities at the company that brought the world the Walkman portable music player. The company, which turned 60 this year, appeared to be losing touch with its customers.

"Sony used to be a company that had superior technology and cool design and created products that other companies didn't have," said Akihiko Jojima, author of "Sony's Sickness." "Sony has become merely a brand for brand's sake."

A turnaround effort led by Chief Executive Howard Stringer, who a year ago became the first foreigner to head the Japanese company, is showing early signs of paying off. Stringer - the former head of Sony's U.S. unit and previously a top executive at CBS - adopted a two-pronged strategy of downsizing and focusing on growth areas.

It's no simple task. Sony has sprawling operations spanning everything from electronics and video games to Hollywood movies, financial services and a music joint venture.

Stringer says Sony can't allow itself to grow obsolete.

"Any time a company is 60 years old, it has to say to itself: Are the advantages of age outweighed by the weaknesses, and the weaknesses are that you get stuck in your ways and you get conservative? The opportunities to reinvent yourself are the ones that have to be taken," Stringer said. "You adapt or you die."

One of his first moves was to pull the plug on the Qualia line.

He also reversed some decisions of his predecessor Nobuyuki Idei, a marketing expert who helped raise Sony's stature but never achieved the lucrative "synergy" he had repeatedly promised would come between electronics and the movie, music and other content businesses.

Stringer has ordered 10,000 job cuts by March 2008, of which 9,600 have already occurred. That amounts to about 6 percent of Sony's global payroll of 158,500.

Sony also has sold off $975 million of assets and lowered its stake in a Japanese retail chain that sells candy, cosmetics and other trinkets unrelated to electronics. It also scrapped its Aibo pet robot division and stopped making plasma TVs.

In February, the company stopped promoting retired executives to advisory positions, a common practice at Japanese companies. It removed 45 advisers who served a symbolic purpose but required a chauffeur-driven car.

Jojima and other analysts say Sony is faring better under Stringer. But more time is needed to assess whether the Tokyo-based company can make a full recovery to its heyday that ran from the 1960s through the 1980s, when it scored hits with the transistor radio, Walkman, videotape recorder, compact disc, color TV and other pioneering products.

There have been some successes.

On Thursday, Sony posted a $276 million profit for its fiscal first quarter, compared with a $65.2 million loss last year. In the most recent period, it credited strong sales of liquid-crystal display TVs, digital cameras, camcorders and laptops.

Even its electronics division, which accounts for more than two-thirds of overall revenue, returned to the black. Still, the unit hasn't posted a profit for a full year since fiscal 2002. And Sony shares are worth only about half of what they were five years ago.

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi, who heads the electronics business, believes that TVs and portable music players are two products in which Sony must show it's a winner.

"If we lose in either category, it's inevitable that people are going to have doubts about Sony," he said.

Sony has fallen behind Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod in portable digital music players: Sony has sold one-fifth as many players as the 58 million iPods that consumers have snapped up.

A book on Sony by Japan's top business daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, said the success of the iPod and the iTunes download service made Sony's brand power "a thing of the past."

"As an outsider to the music industry, Apple acted extremely quickly," according to the book "Sony Versus Sony." "Sony, which had its own music division, worried about possible damage to CD sales and could not act as quickly."

One error Sony made was sticking to a format for music files called ATRAC3, which protected against illicit copying. Sony only belatedly adapted to the more widely used MP3 file format. The iPod played MP3s from its inception.

Although Sony won't say much more about its plans for future music players, Stringer is giving more say to software designers and requiring greater interaction among the various teams developing products.

Late last year, Sony brought Tim Schaaff from Apple and appointed him senior vice president of Sony's software development. Schaaff oversaw interactive media at Apple and the development of Apple's QuickTime media player for computers.

Sony has scored in one category, the TV, with new flat-panel models that have commanded top global market share in the category during some periods.

A venture for liquid crystal displays Sony set up with Samsung Electronics of South Korea in 2004 has helped Sony play catch-up and boost profits, but it also demonstrated Sony had fallen too behind to go at it alone.

Chubachi acknowledged Sony had grown overly confident of its cathode-ray tube TV technology, failing to see how slimmer TVs were "an entirely new category."

In fact, Sony had grown arrogant about designing products that anticipated, rather than followed, consumer tastes, Chubachi said. Some colleagues were appalled when he started a basic customer-satisfaction push within the ranks.

The original Walkman, which sent on sale in 1979, was long heralded as an innovative product that was ahead of its time. Many, even within Sony, had predicted the Walkman would never catch on, warning that consumers wouldn't want to be seen wearing earphones.

They couldn't have been more wrong. But over the years, Sony grew complacent about its ability to come up with cutting-edge products and lost sight of the consumer.

"Producing a hit without listening to customers is inefficient, and we may even strike out," said Chubachi.

Stringer also has made "Sony United" the company motto to encourage Sony to take advantage of the full scope of its businesses. Mistakes were made - like the digital music player - when Sony's section working on computer chips or software development failed to work closely with its other product designers, officials say.

Mitsuhiro Osawa, analyst with Mizuho Investors Securities, believes Sony has been humbled.

"In the past Sony was overly confident that whatever it would make would sell," he said. "Sony acted like it was a samurai king in business."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-29-17-14-42





Sentry Insurance Says Customer Data Stolen

Personal information on 72 worker's compensation claimants was stolen from Sentry Insurance and later sold over the Internet, the company said.

The data sold included names and Social Security numbers but not medical records, Sentry said. Data on an additional 112,198 claimants was also stolen but there is no evidence it was sold, the company said.

Sentry said it notified everyone affected and was providing credit monitoring services to help prevent fraud.

The thief was "a lead programmer/consultant with a nationally recognized computer contractor" hired by Sentry, based in Stevens Point, company officials said Friday.

Sentry said the consultant was arrested outside Wisconsin by the Secret Service and faces federal felony charges.

Secret Service representatives did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment Saturday.

Mary Weller, corporate communications director for Sentry, would not say where or when the arrest occurred, or give details about when the theft occurred or how it was discovered.

It was the first theft of claimants' personal data from Sentry, Weller said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-29-15-57-59





ATube

AOL to Revamp Its Video Portal
Anick Jesdanun

AOL is revamping its video portal this week to give visitors one-stop access to clips from around the Internet, including those at rival sites like YouTube.

AOL envisions becoming a television guide for online video and will initially showcase more than 45 video-on-demand channels featuring free and for-pay video from partners like A&E, Nickelodeon, National Lampoon and the WNBA women's basketball league.

Clips not featured will still appear through AOL's video search tool, which incorporates technology from a video search startup it bought this year, Truveo Inc. Those could include free, user-contributed video at sites from YouTube Inc. and Google Inc.

A "beta" test version of the portal is scheduled to launch Friday, with the main launch expected later in August.

The move represents AOL's latest efforts to build on its strengths in online video as it seeks to boost traffic to its ad-supported sites and make up for declines in its subscription business for mostly dial-up access.

Executives say the new portal has been in the works for more than a year, long before any serious discussions about making free even more of AOL's services, including AOL.com e-mail accounts. AOL LLC and its parent company, Time Warner Inc., plan to announce details on that Wednesday.

AOL historically has emphasized news, chat rooms and other features exclusive to paying customers. The company began the shift to free in late 2004, but only after Google and Yahoo Inc. had a stronghold online.

"It's fair to say we came to market late with a portal," said Kevin Conroy, executive vice president for AOL. "We are focusing here on what's next. We believe we're hitting the market at exactly the right time to take a leadership role in the next-generation portal experience, meaning a video portal."

Earlier this year, AOL won a broadband Emmy for last July's "Live 8" concert special - delivered in seven separate feeds, all without the meltdowns common with early online video events.

AOL later launched with Warner Bros., also a Time Warner unit, the "In2TV" broadband network featuring free viewing of dozens of old television shows like "Welcome Back Kotter," "Sisters" and "Growing Pains."

But AOL faces immense competition.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Google Video offer clips for sale, generally $1.99 for an episode of a television show. YouTube, meanwhile, has become the leader in user-generated video and has at least a year's head start on AOL's own video-sharing site, UnCut Video.

AOL executives say the company won't try to steer AOLVideo.com visitors away from rival offerings, figuring it's better to create a user-friendly experience that would grow the market for everyone, including AOL.

"We want to increase awareness, usage," said Fred McIntyre, vice president for AOL Video. "We want this to be the place people come to start when they think video."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-01-38-19





CNN.com Creates User Submissions Section
Anick Jesdanun

With camera phones and other gadgets a greater part of everyday life, CNN wants to make it easier for viewers to submit images they happen to capture as they witness news in the making.

CNN and other news organizations have long accepted submissions from the public, but until now the tools at CNN's Web site have been made available in response to specific stories or events.

"It was much more ad hoc," CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin said Monday. "We haven't had a formal place for people to submit any type of user-generated content."

CNN is creating a permanent place, at CNN.com/exchange, where so-called citizen journalists can submit any photos, graphics, audio and video. It is also accepting submissions via e-mail.

Contributors will not be paid, however.

Visitors to the site can view other people's submissions, including ones that CNN does not use on television or elsewhere.

The initiative comes amid the growing popularity of video-sharing sites, particularly YouTube.com.

In recent days, Internet users have been posting on YouTube unfiltered images of how the fighting in Israel and Lebanon is affecting people caught in the middle. Examples include graphic images that are not usually seen in TV news reports - the mangled bodies of children, a person on fire in a road during an attack.

Martin said the CNN Exchange initiative was in the works long before the Mideast developments.

"The timing of everything is just so ripe with users being much more comfortable with gathering video and having the means," Martin said, noting that many cell phones and digital cameras these days can capture video.

One key difference, though, is that CNN's staff will vet every submission and post only those it deems authentic and appropriate.

"All the submissions on CNN Exchange will be reviewed and held up to the same editorial (standards) that all reporting is," Martin said.

MSNBC.com said it is also expanding its citizen-journalism efforts, but won't announce details until later this year.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post and other Web publishers are adopting technology that could lead visitors to articles from competing news organizations.

Inform Technologies LLC will aggregate news from various traditional news outlets and Web journals and help direct readers to related articles, no matter where they are located. The idea is to keep readers from defecting to search engines to find such information.

Other participants include The New York Sun and The Oklahoman newspapers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-15-59-22





Sports’ Greatest Hits at One Web Site (but There’s a Catch)
David S. Joachim

It’s a sports fan’s dream: instant, on-demand access to classic sports moments like Muhammad Ali’s knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965 or Dwight Clark’s leaping catch in the back of the end zone to take the 49ers to the Super Bowl in 1982 or Kirk Gibson’s last-gasp home run to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers.

ESPN took a major step toward this goal last month when it consolidated many of its archives in its online video service called ESPN 360. The hitch is that you have to be a subscriber to Verizon, Adelphia or another of a handful of regional broadband providers to have access to all the film in the ESPN 360 service.

ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, is the most visible player in a much larger experiment being played out across the Internet, where programmers are trying to figure out how to bring expensive old-media-style content, and its revenue models, to the Web.

At least three of the biggest broadband providers — Comcast, Verizon and Adelphia — are striking deals for television programs, music and video games that cannot be readily found elsewhere on the Web. In this way, they are applying the cable TV model to the Internet by providing a distribution vehicle for entertainment programming.

The deals signal a larger strategic shift among broadband providers, which for years competed on the basis of the speed and reliability of their Internet connections. Turning to the cable TV model to attract new customers is one way to maneuver away from the price wars that have defined that business.

“On TV 50 years ago, you had four or five channels,” said Ron Feinbaum, a senior vice president at Scripps Networks, which is in discussions to license to Web portals content from the Food Network and the Home and Garden cable channels. “Then came cable, then pay channels. On the Web, over time, we will see different levels of access and potentially different grades of content.”

These strategies are reminiscent of early online services like AOL, which offered dial-up access and gated content for a monthly subscription. (Paradoxically, AOL has since put nearly all of its content on the Web, available to any Internet user.)

Last year, Verizon began offering its 5.7 million broadband subscribers an option of home pages from three content providers: Disney/ESPN, Yahoo and MSN. Each monthly subscription includes a package of services that would otherwise cost about $200 a year. For example, the Disney package includes ABC News Now, ESPN 360 and Movies.com MAX, with full-screen movie trailers and video reviews from Ebert & Roeper.

Comcast — the biggest broadband provider, with nine million customers — offers video streams of live National Hockey League games, behind-the-scenes tours of HBO series like “Rome,” the Rhapsody streaming music service and a service from Nascar offering live broadcasts of races, in-car audio and telemetry tracking. The services, valued by Comcast at roughly $300 a year, are included in the $43 monthly subscription price.

Adelphia, which has about 1.8 million subscribers and will become part of Comcast and Time Warner starting tomorrow, is taking a slightly different approach. Rather than including exclusive content as part of its $43-a-month subscription price, it is offering a content package, called NetPack, for an extra $10 a month. It includes ESPN 360 and subscriptions to the game site Shockwave.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, American Greetings, MLB.com and Weather.com.

Although some analysts are particularly skeptical of Adelphia’s add-on packages, Craig Leddy, a senior analyst at Interactive TV Works, a media market analysis firm, said the network distribution model had worked over many decades in television, particularly for ESPN.

“Of all the models out there,” he said, “the licensing model has worked pretty well for them, and helped them in turn offset the huge sports rights fees they have to pay. So if you went directly to consumers, it would be a long battle before you could get them to really pony up for it.”

For the media companies providing the content, these deals represent a potential new source of revenue from largely existing properties. Verizon, for example, pays ESPN for each broadband customer (although the companies will not divulge the terms of their deal) and the companies share in the ad revenue. Some broadband providers also offer some teaser content in the hope of “upselling,” or directing the user back to the original content provider. For example, when a user is persuaded to buy extra content from Disney, Disney shares that revenue with Comcast.

“Content costs money, and there are a lot of rights issues involved,” Mr. Leddy said. “It’s up to the media companies and distributors to figure out the models that will make sense for consumers and not impede on the benefits of the Internet.”

For years before merging its video offerings in June, ESPN offered three separate video services on its Web site: Motion, a free service with short clips like news, game highlights and the network’s Mike and Mike cartoons; the original 360 service for long-form video like documentaries, full episodes of ESPN programs and movies, extended interviews and some live games like World Cup soccer; and a pay-per-view package for live college football and basketball games and specials like the World Series of Poker.

The 360 portion, as before, is available only to those who get their Internet connections from one of ESPN’s broadband partners. That amounts to about eight million potential viewers today. And ESPN is continuing to digitize large parts of its film library at its headquarters in Bristol, Conn., as it works out arrangements with the leagues, syndicates, film libraries and other content owners to distribute film more broadly at ESPN.com — no small task when you consider that partners like Major League Baseball want to build their own franchises online.

“ESPN has to serve a number of masters,” Mr. Leddy said. “They have to keep the sports leagues and their teams happy, they have to keep cable operators happy, and they have the advertisers. And oh, by the way, they have to please consumers. It gets complicated, more so than other content providers.”

Not all broadband providers are making bets on proprietary content. Some, like EarthLink, BellSouth and Cox, are sticking to their technical roots.

“Exclusivity is one of many competitive strategies to consider, and you have to be very thoughtful about it,” said Bob Wilson, senior vice president for programming at Cox. “Otherwise you and your competitors can end up just trying to ‘out-exclusive’ each other, and all you accomplish is bidding up your costs and making the content providers rich.”

Craig Forman, president of EarthLink’s value-added services unit, said the best content on the Internet was produced by the common user. “There is a huge amount of pain and failure in anyone who has tried from a programming perspective to come up with the ‘I Love Lucy’ of the Internet,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te...y/31cable.html





Camera System Creates Sophisticated 3-D Effects
John Markoff

In a darkened garage here, Steve Perlman is giving digital actors a whole new face.

A former Apple Computer engineer who previously co-founded WebTV Networks and the set-top box firm Moxi, Mr. Perlman is now putting the finishing touches on Contour, a futuristic camera system that will add photorealistic three-dimensional effects to digital entertainment. The new system will be introduced today at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Boston, and effects created with it could start appearing as early as next year.

The system could change the nature of cinematography in several ways, according to leading Hollywood producers and technologists who are planning to use the system. For example, it will make it possible to create compellingly realistic synthetic actors by capturing the facial movements of real actors in much greater detail than is currently possible.

David Fincher, who directed the films “Fight Club” and “Panic Room,” is planning to use Contour next year when he begins filming “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a movie based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which Brad Pitt will play a character who ages in reverse.

“Instead of grabbing points on a face, you will be able to capture the entire skin,” Mr. Fincher said. “You’re going to get all of the enormous detail and the quirks of human expression that you can’t plan for.”

The technology will let filmmakers transform the appearance of actors in the computer, raising the possibility of a new form of digital video in which the viewer can control the point of view — what is being described in Hollywood as “navigable entertainment.”

The Contour system requires actors to cover their faces and clothes with makeup containing phosphorescent powder that is not visible under normal lighting. In a light-sealed room, the actors face two arrays of inexpensive video cameras that are synchronized to simultaneously record their appearance and shape. Scenes are lit by rapidly flashing fluorescent lights, and the cameras capture light from the glowing powder during intervals of darkness that are too short for humans to perceive.

The captured images are transmitted to an array of computers that reassemble the three-dimensional shapes of the glowing areas. These can then be manipulated and edited into larger digital scenes using sophisticated software tools like Autodesk’s Maya or Softimage’s Face Robot.

“Steve is really on to something here,” said Ed Ulbrich, vice president of Digital Domain, a Hollywood special-effects company in Venice, Calif. “The holy grail of digital effects is to be able to create a photorealistic human being.”

Until now, realistic digital actors have required significant amounts of computing power, at great expense.

“It’s been used in stunts and big special-effects scenes,” Mr. Ulbrich said. “Now you can use it for two actors sitting at a table and talking. You have the ability to tell stories and have close-up scenes that make you laugh and cry.”

Mr. Perlman’s system is a leap forward for a technology known as motion capture, now widely used in video games and in movies like “The Polar Express,” which starred Tom Hanks in various digital guises.

Motion capture cuts the costs of computer animation while creating more natural movement. Today’s motion-capture systems work by tracking the locations of hundreds of reflective balls attached to a human actor. This permits the actor’s movements to be sampled by a camera many times per second. But the digital record is limited to movement, and does not include the actual appearance of the actor.

The difference offered by Mr. Perlman’s technology is in the detail. Standard motion-capture systems are generally limited in resolution to several hundred points on a human face, while the Contour system can recreate facial images at a resolution of 200,000 pixels. The digital video images produced by the system are startlingly realistic.

Mr. Perlman, who helped develop Apple’s QuickTime video technology, said the computer-generated animation techniques pioneered by Pixar Studios were reaching a visual plateau and, as a result, losing some of their audience appeal.

But an important hurdle to commercial success for the Contour system is whether it will be the first low-cost technology to cross what film and robot specialists refer to as the “uncanny valley.”

That phrase was coined in the 1970’s by Masahiro Mori, the Japanese robotics specialist, as he sought to describe the emotional response of humans to robots and other nonhuman entities. He theorized that as a robot became more lifelike, the emotional response of humans became increasingly positive and empathetic — until a certain point at which the robot took on a zombie-like quality, and the human response turned to repulsion. Then, as the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human, the response turns positive again. Critics were quick to point out the eerie look of the characters in “Polar Express.”

“We are programmed from birth to recognize human faces,” Mr. Perlman said.

There are some limits to the new technology. For example, the Contour system can capture eyebrows, mustaches and short beards, but it is not able to capture freely moving strands. It is also not able to capture areas where makeup cannot be applied, like the eyes or the inside of the mouth. The Contour developers are now experimenting with plastic teeth molds with embedded phosphor powder.

If the Contour system can be commercialized, it will allow digital film directors to easily and inexpensively control camera angles and generate elaborate visual fly-throughs in movies. It will also lower the cost of creating fantasy characters like Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

In addition to films, the new system will be valuable in creating more realistic video games, Mr. Perlman said. A major video-game development company has committed to use the system in future games, he said, adding that he could not give its name at this time.

The Contour system has been developed by a small team of software and hardware engineers that Mr. Perlman has assembled in the garage of his home in Palo Alto, Calif., over the last three years. He rewired the garage to handle the power requirements of the lighting system and a small graphics supercomputer that was built from scratch. Contour will be distributed by Mova, one of a group of start-up firms that Mr. Perlman has assembled since he left WebTV in 1999, after it was purchased by Microsoft.

Contour is not the only attempt to develop more advanced digital cinematography techniques, said Richard Doherty, a digital media consultant who is president of Envisioneering Inc., in Seaford, N.Y.

“There are some upstarts in Los Angeles, but none have achieved the demonstrated scale and performance that Steve has shown,” Mr. Doherty said. “This is the kind of technology that is celebrated, and it is on the scale of the invention of the Steadicam. He’s going to give that kind of freedom to actors and directors.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te.../31motion.html





Developer’s Son Acquires The New York Observer
Katharine Q. Seelye

Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old son of a wealthy New Jersey developer who was sentenced to prison last year, has bought The New York Observer, paying what one person familiar with details of the sale said was nearly $10 million for a majority stake in the weekly newspaper.

“I own The New York Observer,” he said yesterday.

Mr. Kushner said that he bought the newspaper because it was a marquee property in the media capital of the world, and that the opportunity to buy a newspaper did not come around very often. The paper’s relatively small circulation — 50,000 — belies its influence, particularly in New York’s media, political and real estate circles.

He also said The Observer was a good brand that could one day make a lot of money, though it now loses about $2 million a year.

Because every side of the transaction is private, it is difficult to precisely determine the financing behind the deal. It is not clear how much of a stake Mr. Kushner bought, but Arthur Carter, the current publisher of The Observer, is retaining some interest and will be offering the new owner strategic advice.

The Kushner name is well known to readers of The Observer and other media outlets, which have given thorough coverage to federal charges against his father, Charles B. Kushner, who was a major Democratic fund-raiser and contributor to James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey.

Charles Kushner was sentenced last year to two years in prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. He also admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and having a videotape of the encounter sent to his sister, the man’s wife, in an attempt to get back at her for cooperating with a federal investigation into his business activities.

The elder Mr. Kushner now lives in a halfway house in Newark run by the Department of Corrections and is expected to be released in late August. A spokesman for his real estate company, Kushner Companies, said that the son, Jared, had worked for the company until recently.

Jared Kushner said he was proud of his father, but that he was his own man.

“I love my father,” Mr. Kushner said, “but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on. The only difference is that this is far more public,” he said of his purchase of The Observer.

Mr. Kushner pledged to stay out of the editorial process and focus instead on improving the paper’s bottom line.

“I am here to help build the paper in a way that will lead to the best and most honest reporting, regardless of who is involved,” he said. “It is up to the editors and reporters to decide what should be in the paper. The headline in everything we do should be integrity.”

Peter W. Kaplan, the editor of the paper, said that Mr. Kushner had no agenda, adding, “He told me that he will not interfere with the paper, that editorially, the paper is ours.”

Mr. Kaplan said Mr. Kushner had told him that he had three objectives: to market the brand name of The Observer; to build its Internet traffic; and to provide resources for more news beats so that the paper could have what Mr. Kaplan called “a stronger paper with more constituencies and more advertising.”

He said that Mr. Kushner represented the 21st century in the newspaper industry. “In that sense,” Mr. Kaplan said, “his 25-ness is a huge asset. He is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom.”

Mr. Kaplan said yesterday that he would be confirming the news of the sale to the newspaper employees on Sunday night and Monday.

“It’s a large part of my task to convey to them that Jared is very much a guy building a new business,” he said. “I’m not going to put the weight of any history on his shoulders.”

At least one staff member, Tom Scocca, a senior editor and the Off-the-Record columnist, said he was sanguine about Mr. Kushner owning the paper. “I don’t think that there’s any great sense of dread or fear about this,” he said. “I think Arthur has had the paper these many years because he cares about it, and I’d be very surprised to discover that he had sold it in a way that’s rash or ill-considered.”

Mr. Scocca also said that Mr. Kushner was not particularly tainted because of his father.

“Every pile of money that is enough to buy a newspaper is disturbing if you look closely enough at it,” he said. “But I don’t think he has any reason or need to protect the existing press barons from scrutiny. This is an exciting move.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/bu...1observer.html