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Old 05-08-09, 07:10 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 8th, '09

Since 2002


































"There’s something very unseemly about what Apple is doing. It’s very counter to the ideals of openness, which is a concept Apple pioneered in computing." – Tim Wu


"CNN’s blocking of the [anti-Dobbs] ad seems like the actions of a network desperate to provide cover for its primetime host rather than living up to its standard of being the most trusted name in news." – Eric Burns/NYT


"It was a cesspool of criminal activity." – Paul Ferguson


"It made a hissing noise and went pop." – Ellie Stanborough



































August 8th, 2009




British Man Arrested for Role in Running FileSoup File Sharing Website
Bobbie Johnson

A British man has been arrested for his role in running one of the internet's oldest file sharing websites.

The man - who started the FileSoup website in 2003 - was taken into custody last week after a raid on his home in Taunton, Somerset, and subsequently released on bail without charge.

FileSoup, which was started in 2003, is well-known in the file sharing community but does not host illegal material itself. Instead, it operates forums where users share links to files which then allow them to download TV shows and movies from around the internet.

When contacted by the Guardian, the man verified that he had been arrested last Monday, but refused to comment further without consulting a lawyer.

However, in a posting on FileSoup itself, he detailed the situation - including how police seized a number from his home, including mobile phones, computers, hard drives and a video camera.

"I was arrested and taken to the local police station," he wrote. "On the way I asked and was told that it would take about a couple of hours. When I arrived, the booking-in charge was entered as suspicion of downloading copyrighted movies."

After what he claims were several hours in which he was refused contact with friends, family or a legal representative, he was eventually given a solicitor, interviewed by officers and released without charge. His bail conditions state that he must surrender to police in October.

Avon and Somerset police would not comment on the case when contacted by the Guardian on Tuesday evening.

Known online as "Geeker", the man has run FileSoup since it started in 2003. For several years it operated as a so-called "tracker" website - much like notorious Swedish file sharing site the Pirate Bay, whose backers were each sentenced to a year in prison and fined £600,000 by a court in Stockholm for copyright offences.

Since 2005, however, FileSoup has not operated as a tracker - instead hosting forum pages where community members regularly post links to files that let them download copyrighted programmes and films.

However, with British law still unclear whether such sites are illegal - since they effectively act as search engines for online material, rather than hosting it - the site's fans were left up in arms.

"This is insane," said one commenter on the Torrentfreak website, which broke the news. "I'm saddened by this news," commented another.

Among the concerns was the news that the goods seized during the operation were no longer being held by police, but had instead been handed over to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), an accredited private group that often assists law enforcement with inquiries in such cases.

A spokesman for Fact, which is funded by organisations such as BSkyB, Paramount and Sony Pictures, said it could not comment on an open investigation.

The federation largely concentrates its activities on shutting down the authors and sellers of pirate DVDs, but recently it has been intimately involved in a number of high-profile file sharing cases - not all of them successful.

Two years ago a 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested for running a website called TV Links, which pointed users towards television shows online, some of which had been illegally copied. Although no charges were ever brought against the individual behind the site, it was closed down as a result.

Shortly after that incident, police raided the HQ of another file sharing website, a private music community called Oink. The site had become well-known for allowing users to access out of print material and pre-release versions of new music - and was even used by musicians including Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who told New York magazine that he "frequented it quite often".

The site's administrator, 25-year-old Alan Ellis, was taken into custody by Middlesbrough police and after further raids in May 2008, four men eventually plead guilty to various copyright infringement offences. Three defendants were sentenced to community service, and all four fined between £360 and £500.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ring-tv-movies





Cal State Student Faces 10 Year Prison Term for Playing with Video Games

College student is accused of modifying consoles for personal financial gain

Playing with video games can lead to hard time, just ask Matthew Lloyd Crippen. The Cal State Fullerton student was arrested Monday on federal charges that he illegally modified Xbox, Playstation, Wii and other video game consoles to enable the machines to play pirated video games.

Crippen, 27, of Anaheim, was taken into custody Monday morning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The arrest follows his indictment by a federal grand jury on two counts of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Specifically, the college student is accused of modifying for personal financial gain technology affecting control or access to a copyrighted work, according to an ICE statement.

Each criminal count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

The charges against Crippen stem from an ICE investigation initiated late last year after the agency received a tip from the Entertainment Software Association.

Last May, ICE agents executed a federal search warrant at Crippen's home, where they seized more than a dozen Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony video game consoles.

“Playing with games in this way is not a game -- it is criminal,” said Robert Schoch, special agent in charge of the ICE investigations office in Los Angeles.

“Piracy, counterfeiting and other intellectual property rights violations not only cost U.S. businesses jobs and billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, they can also pose significant health and safety risks to consumers,” he said.

Counterfeiting and piracy have grown in recent years in both magnitude and complexity, according to ICE. Industry and trade associations estimate that counterfeiting and piracy now cost the U.S. economy as much as $250 billion a year and a total of 750,000 American jobs.

Some estimates indicate that 5 percent to 8 percent of all the goods and merchandise sold worldwide are counterfeit.

Crippen was expected to make his initial federal court appearance late Monday in Los Angeles.
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Cal-...-52386872.html





Student Beaten to Death at Boot Camp
Wen Ya

A teenager sent by his parents to a boot camp to cure his Internet addiction died after he was beaten by camp supervisors, police in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region claimed yesterday.

The three teachers who allegedly beat Deng Senshan, 16, were detained by local police Sunday, Deng Fei, the boy’s father, a businessman from Ziyuan county, told the Global Times yesterday.

“We are investigating a case where a high school student was beaten to death by his camp supervisors. The case is still under investigation,” a police officer at the Jiangnan branch of Nanning Public Security Bureau said.

He refused to give further details.

Deng graduated from Ziyuan No. 2 High School in Guilin in July and was sent to Guangxi Qihang Survival Training Camp, a branch set up by Guangzhou Self-help Teenager Development Training Center on Saturday by his parents.

They had read an ad about the camp online and hoped the experience would help rid their son of his Internet addiction.

Deng Fei paid the camp 7,000 yuan ($1,024) for one month of training.

He signed the camp agreement that said it aimed to help children to become independent and rectify their bad habitats by “close management with training teachers.”

“Our methods are tough but do not include torture or other methods that might damage a child’s health,” reads the mission statement.

But his son was put in solitary confinement within hours of his arrival and was then beaten to death by his trainers after they “scolded” him for running too slowly, Deng said.

“My son was very healthy and was not a criminal. He just had an Internet addiction when I left him at the camp.

“The police informed us that our child had died on Monday morning. We can’t believe our only son was beaten to death,” the father said.

The teachers who beat Deng realized he was badly injured and sent him to hospital in Wuxu town three hours later. He was declared dead about 3 am Sunday – 10 minutes after he arrived at the hospital, Deng Fei said.

The boy’s medical record, which was faxed to the Global Times, read: “The boy showed no response to emergency treatment.

“He arrived with a very weak heartbeat and could not breathe. He was exhausted after being beaten. We were unable to save him.”

The victim’s father was notified by the police of his son’s death and rushed to the town. He called the camp but officials there denied the incident had taken place.

The camp’s principal, a man surnamed Xia, denied Deng had been beaten by his teachers and told the father his son was sent to hospital because of a serious fever.

“But I was told the truth by my relative who is in the local police force,” the father said.

After arriving at the local funeral parlor to identify his son’s body, he saw “blood all over the his face” and “wounds on his wrists were bruises from where had been restrained by handcuffs.”

Photos of Deng’s body shown to the Global Times show visible injuries.

The forensic doctor, surnamed Gan, who carried out a postmortem examination on Deng refused to answer any question when contacted by the Global Times.

“The teachers promised me that they would not use any physical punishment on my son when I dropped him off,” Deng Fei said.

Some 40 people, including parents and Deng relatives, are calling for an investigation and demanding the camp be closed down immediately.

“We’re planning to sit before the local government for a protest tomorrow. If they don’t give us justice, we will go to the camp to confront them,” Deng said.
http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2009-08/453958.html





Students Settle with TurnItIn

With the deadline for a Supreme Court appeal rapidly approaching, the students who sued TurnItIn for issues surrounding Copyright Infringement decided to reach a settlement on Friday 7/31/09.

Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper that's being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves. If your teacher uploaded a paper and ran a TurnItIn report without your permission, I bet the students' attorney would like to hear from you. Robert Vanderhye's contact information is on the settlement papers below.

It seems to me that the students brought the case to challenge the concept of a third party holding their private school writings on internet-based servers (which allegedly could be hacked), using those papers in a for-profit enterprise on a daily basis, and disseminating those papers without the students' permission. I don't believe that this is a case of the students wanting to be able to cheat easier. I believe it's a case of the students wanting to challenge the whole notion of "We want to stop you from doing something wrong, and so we're going to (do something wrong ourselves, and ...) steal your work and the work of others to build a hugely profitable business acting as the plagiarism police."

Does the end justify the means? In the interest of stopping plagiarism, is it OK for someone to steal your work, to build a giant database of "previously written works"?

It also appears to me that the recent ruling by the District Court of Appeals put the students in a bind. The ruling was doubly against them:

* the court upheld the lower court ruling on fair use, and that the students agreed to allow TurnItIn to hold their private works by clicking "I agree", and

* the students' actions while gathering evidence for the case could be re-considered in the lower court to be determined whether they committed a tortuous act, mis-representing themselves and "hacking" the site (using passwords easily found on the internet with Google).

So the students were behind the eight-ball. Either take it to the US Supreme Court, and take their chances (even getting the case HEARD by the Supreme Court would be a long shot), or cut a deal with the defendant and agree to drop the claim, if the defendant agrees to drop their claim. They opted for the latter.

These students, or other equally pissed-off students, can take another, higher-probability, angle at bringing down the "Big Brother will commit millions of heinous acts per day, so that you don't have to commit one" -type service.

I'm certain that the lead attorney on the case (who did all the work pro bono) would love to hear from you, if you've had papers submitted to this service by your teacher, against your wishes. Below is a zoomed shot of his contact information. Looks like ravar@nixonvan.com
http://a-non-a.blogspot.com/2009/08/...-turnitin.html





Swedish Anti-Piracy Law Keeps Downloaders on the Defensive
AFP

Four months after Sweden implemented a new law to crack down on internet piracy, the AFP’s Marc Preel discovers that the debate continues about the measure’s long-term implications for file sharers and copyright holders alike.

Sweden's tough new anti-piracy law has led to a sharp drop in illegal downloading but critics say the effects will be short-lived and argue it is an excessive breach of personal privacy.

Sweden's legislation, based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), is credited with a 30 percent fall in the country's total web traffic the day after it came into effect.

Experts say that the drop in Swedish web usage is explained by the fact that illegal downloading represents between 50 and 75 percent of Internet traffic worldwide.

The new law, effective as of April 1, gives copyright holders the right to force internet service providers to reveal details of users sharing files, opening the way for legal action that could see downloaders pay damages and fines.

Data from Internet service provider Netnod show usage is still free-falling, four months after the law was passed.

In France, lawmakers have kept a close eye on Sweden's approach to illegal downloads as they look set to pass their own anti-piracy bill later this year.

"It's obvious that those who are using file-sharing have been scared and moved somewhere else, like streaming music sites," said Daniel Johansson, a researcher at KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

"Some popular Swedish artists have seen their downloading on websites like The Pirate Bay go down by up to 80 percent," he added.

The Pirate Bay claims to have some 22 million users worldwide.

While unauthorized downloads are on the slide at a time when global record sales are booming, the amount of music bought from legal download sites have shot up by 57 percent compared to last year.

Music retailers say their overall sales have risen by 14 percent, according to data from IFPI, an association that represents the recording industry worldwide.

But it is not just music that is downloaded illegally -- films and video games are also popular with Internet pirates.

Per Strömback, a spokesman for the Swedish Games Industry association describes Sweden's tough stance on piracy as "a historic example of effective legislation".

"No one could predict such a dramatic decrease in illegal traffic and not only that there's also been a huge increase in the legal services," he told AFP.

As yet, no one person has been charged under the new law but Lisa Cronstedt, a Sweden-based spokeswoman for IFPI, told AFP that the group plans to sue individual illegal file-sharers within the next month.

Five audio book publishers have already secured a landmark victory against Swedish Internet service provider ePhone when it refused to release data of customers believed to have downloaded copyrighted material illegally.

ePhone's chief executive has said he plans to appeal the judgment, which said the company could be fined if it does not hand over the information.

Companies like ePhone fear they will lose customers if forced to release data such as Internet protocol (IP) addresses, which identifies which computers are used to surf the web.

Christian Engström, a member of the European Parliament and the deputy leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, argues Internet users will be unfairly punished under the new legislation.

"This is a completely unequal law, where ordinary people will become scapegoats and will be asked for hundreds of thousands or millions of kronor by the industry," Engström told AFP.

"I don't think it will be efficient in the long run. I believe the traffic is going to climb up again after some months," he said, adding that eventually people will find new ways to avoid being traced.

Engström's party, which calls for greater web privacy and legalized file-sharing, soared in opinion polls shortly after a Stockholm court in April found the four Swedish men behind popular download site The Pirate Bay guilty of promoting copyright infringement.

In June's European elections, the Pirate Party won just over seven percent of the popular vote.
http://www.thelocal.se/21092/2009080...utm_content=96





Pirate Bay Spokesman Calls it Quits

Three months after being sentenced to prison and fined £600,000, one of the men in the Pirate Bay trial says he is stepping down from his job as the site's spokesman.

Thirty year old Peter Sunde - known online as "brokep" - announced in a blog post that he was leaving the role, after a tumultuous period for the Swedish file sharing site.

It's not clear whether he is cutting his involvement with the site entirely, or just stepping down from being point man, but in a post on his blog, Sunde explained that his work with the Pirate Bay was too time-consuming. "I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read".

Although he was not one of the Pirate Bay's founders, Sunde - who holds Norwegian and Finnish citizenship - became involved early on and soon became the public face of the site. He often handed out dismissive or absurd rejoinders to those who attacked the operation, and in 2007 he told me in an interview in Malmo that "I don't like the word untouchable, but we feel pretty safe".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ay-peter-sunde





Pirate Bay Buyer Lines Up Record Deal
AFP

The Swedish firm set to buy The Pirate Bay, Global Gaming Factory (GGF), has said it is about to ink a deal with a major record company, a move that will enable it to sell the label's content through the file sharing site.

GGF, which is set to acquire the illegal download site, revealed on Wednesday that a deal was imminent.

"We almost have a contract ready with one of them," chief executive Hans Pendaya told AFP.

He declined to name which record label GGF was planning to strike an agreement with but said it was one of the "Big Four" from EMI, Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music.

Pendaya explained the idea behind the deal was to sell the record label's content and back catalogue through the Pirate Bay, which it agreed to buy at the end of June.

He added GGF's purchase of the popular download website is set to be rubber- stamped by shareholders by August 27th at the latest.

The Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest download sites, claiming to have 20 million registered users.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files for free using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site -- yet none of the material can be found on the site's server.

Its three founders and the site's main financial backer were sentenced to a year in jail in April by a Stockholm court.

Their sentencing came at a time when many countries across the world were looking at ways to tighten up the law on internet piracy.
http://www.thelocal.se/21126/2009080...utm_content=96





Labels Pressure Global Gaming for Pirate Bay Money
Greg Sandoval

Music industry executives in Europe have begun pressuring Global Gaming Factor, the company that intends to buy The Pirate Bay, to turn over to them any money it pays to acquire the site.

Jo Oliver, the general counsel for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), wrote Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming's CEO, on July 24. Oliver told Pandeya that the group will ask authorities in Sweden to "issue an order prohibiting Global Gaming from paying the purchase sum" to the founders of The Pirate Bay. Oliver added that copyright owners will also ask the government require Global Gaming to turn over information about the acquisition should it go through.

In the spring, a Swedish court found the Web site's co-founders--Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg--along with Carl Lundstr?m guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site. The court sentenced them to a year in jail and ordered them to pay $3.6 million in damages. But Sunde Kolmisoppi maintains that the co-founders haven't owned The Pirate Bay since 2006.

Last month, CNET News reported that the IFPI planned to intercept any money Global Gaming pays to acquire The Pirate Bay. Copyright owners from the film and music industry allege that Reservella, the holding company that is the listed owner of The Pirate Bay, is controlled by Neij.

The IFPI also didn't mince words about what would happen if the new Pirate Bay continued to help users download pirated music.

"We need to warn you that if GGF takes responsibility for The Pirate Bay service in its current form, or if GGF operates The Pirate Bay in any way in violation of applicable copyright law, we will be forced to take legal action."

Oliver told Pandeya that he could count IFPI as a friend if he is successful in licensing music from the top record companies.

"We hope that your discussions with the rights holders reach a mutually acceptable resolution," Oliver wrote. "IFPI would welcome and give strong support to the launch of a new online service."

Pandeya has said that under his control The Pirate Bay will morph into a legal service that offers content in exchange for users' computer bandwidth and hard drive space.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10305092-93.html





Q&A: Tenenbaum Says he Faces Bankruptcy after $675K Piracy Verdict

'Reality' and 'reasonableness' are needed with RIAA lawsuits, says student
Jaikumar Vijayan

In a major victory for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a federal jury one week ago fined Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum $675,000 for illegally downloading and distributing 30 copyrighted songs.

Tenenbaum's case is only the second RIAA music piracy lawsuit to go to trial. The first ended in June with the jury in that case assessing damages of $1.92 million against Minnesota native Jammie Thomas-Rasset for copyright infringement. In an interview, Tenenbaum -- now something of a cause celebre among those opposed to the RIAA campaign -- talked about his case, the size of the fine against him and his attempts to get the "RIAA juggernaut" off his back.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

What was your reaction to the verdict? I was disappointed, but not surprised. I saw how the trial had gone. The judge was very successful in convincing the jury that this law passed in 1999 should be applied to me. My legal team and I didn't think this law was ever meant for non-commercial downloaders. But the judge succeeded in convincing the jury ... that for each song they were required to (fine an amount) between $750 and $150,000. So, given the jury instructions, it seemed pretty inevitable that I would get hit with some completely unrealistic fine.

So are you going to pay? Yes I am going to pay up. I'll flip the couch and find, what would it be, 60 million pennies?

What then is the next step? If (the fine) stays in the range of something completely crazy, which I can't pay, I have no choice but to declare bankruptcy. We have the option of appealing to the judge to adjust the damages, which apparently she [has] within her power to do. On top of that, we can appeal to the next court up. And I think we have the basis for that. We were denied our 'fair use' defense. The judge basically said, 'No this isn't the defense the jury should be allowed to hear.' We think it was a mistake in justice and fairness and a mistake in law.

Didn't the judge rule that accepting your definition of fair use would basically give copyright owners no protection at all? Well, I disagree with that. The judge is better versed than I am in this, better versed in the law and has been on the bench for some years. So I don't want to go out and say something like, 'Oh, she is so wrong.' But I do think that it was a mistake, both in fairness and in law. I think it was partially an issue of plaintiffs citing a whole bunch of case law showing that fair use had never been decided by a jury. I think fair use is a defense the jury should at least have heard and have had a chance to decide upon for themselves.

Why didn't you settle when you had a chance? I did try to settle when they sent the first letter to me saying, 'We have reasonable belief you have infringed our copyright. Call this 1.800 number to settle.' I called the number up and we went back and forth. I think they wanted $3,000. I sent them a money order for $500 which came back with a letter essentially saying, 'Call back when you really want to talk.' I said I couldn't afford more. Then after not hearing from them for a couple of years, this formal complaint arrives at my door in the form of a stack of pages -- maybe 50 pages -- thick, written in legal-ease. So I came to court and talked to the plaintiffs and I offered them $5,250 at one point and they came back to me and doubled that. I mean I didn't have that. And even if I did, it just seemed wrong to just submit to that without any formal proof, without going to court.

I mean we have in America this idealistic view of our judicial system that it will see both sides of a story. So I got to trial and now I have this huge verdict against me.

Are you surprised that such a large verdict was awarded by a jury of your peers? I guess what you are asking is how can a jury of 10 ordinary folks sit down and nonchalantly say, 'Yeah, this kid owes $675,000.' There is a famous experiment (the Milgram experiment) in which they have volunteers come in and apparently someone who looks like some kind of an authority figure tells the volunteers to turn a knob. They are told this knob will inflict pain on a subject. The majority of people had no problem turning that knob even if they saw the results. The take home message on that was people aren't terribly conflicted about carrying out what they believe is their proper job when they have been instructed by someone in a position of authority what it is. So, here came this judge, she sat them down and said this law applies here and for each song you must apply $750 to $150,000 [in fines]. If you are a juror, you think doing anything other than that is beyond your purview.

You have had a lot of support. But there are many who think you deserve to pay for stealing music. This is an issue that is being debated and I am glad that an open honest debate can be sparked out of this. I am not saying file sharing is always good or always beneficial. I am not saying that file sharing is wrong or always detrimental. I am just saying file sharing is, and always will be. And I think that it's necessary, given this RIAA campaign, for us a society to step back, look at the issue and see it with a certain sense of reality and reasonableness. A $700,000 fine is neither.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...racy_ver dict





iiNet Seeks TIO, ACMA Help to Boost Case
Andrew Colley

AUSTRALIA'S third-largest ISP may recruit the telecommunications industry's peak regulators in its bid to beat a copyright lawsuit brought against it by a group of entertainment giants.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) said it was yet to formally discuss the case with the ISP but iiNet’s regulatory chief Steve Dalby said he had held informal discussions with the group about issues relevant to the case.

Mr Dalby said that the ISP was seriously considering approaching a major industry regulator to participate in the case. He said the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the TIO were among the regulators he had in mind.

“I think it could be useful for a point of view from ACMA, DBCDE, ACCC or TIO as industry regulators and policy makers to be tabled as part of the case discussion on whether or not disconnection is a reasonable or desirable step,” Mr Dalby said.

“We have not made an approach to any of those bodies as of today (to take part in the AFACT lawsuit).”

As expert witnesses, the agencies would be called to help iiNet defend allegations that it breached intellectual property rights of 34 major music and movie companies in the NSW Federal Court.

The landmark case is being run by Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) on behalf of the copyright holder group which includes Warner Bros. Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Roadshow Films, Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Seven Network.

They have alleged that iiNet engaged in acts of primary copyright infringement by using undefined technical means to store illegal files being transferred over peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. They also claim that the ISP engaged in secondary copyright infringement by failing to “take reasonable and appropriate steps” to stop customers illegally sharing files.

The regulators would be called on to help provide evidence that there were no “reasonable and appropriate” steps that iiNet could take to stop the acts of infringement.

The case has been compared with the landmark 2005 Kazaa file-sharing case against Sharman Networks. While the facts of the case are markedly different, it borrows legal principles in Kazaa trial where copyright owners successfully proved that Sharman Networks encouraged acts of infringement by providing software that facilitated peer-to-peer file-sharing.

AFACT hired two investigators to become iiNet subscribers and trade files on the ISP’s network. It then sent notices to the ISPs with lists of internet addresses requesting that the ISP disconnect the users -- requests which were not met.

Broadly, AFACT argues that by failing to disconnect customers after it notified iiNet of the breaches, the ISP had engaged in secondary infringement.

Mr Dalby said iiNet would argue it did not have the legal means to investigate allegations of copyright infringement presented by third-parties without a court order under current telecommunications laws.

The federal government is watching the case closely. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is considering introducing new three-strike legislation that would allow ISPs to legally disconnect repeat copyright infringers.

The case is due to go to its next hearing on August 19.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15317,00.html





Network Neutrality in Congress, Round 3: Fight!

Ed Markey (D-MA) is a big fan of "third time's the charm." He has introduced his plan to legislate network neutrality into a third consecutive Congress, and he has a message for ISPs: upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic.
Nate Anderson

The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009" means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to "block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade" access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device.

ISPs would also be forbidden to "impose a charge" on content providers that goes "beyond the end-user charges associated with providing the service to such a provider." In other words, AT&T doesn't have to let Google "use its pipes for free," but it can only collect the money is owed through customary peering and transit arrangements.

The bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA)—who introduced similar legislation during the last Congressional session. During the Congressional session before that, Markey pushed network neutrality as an amendment rather than a standalone bill. Neither method has yet been successful.

"The Internet has thrived and revolutionized business and the economy precisely because it started as an open technology," said co-sponsor Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) in a statement. "This bill will ensure that the non-discriminatory framework that allows the Internet to thrive and competition on the Web to flourish is preserved at a time when our economy needs it the most."

The bill goes out of its way to beat the "lack of competition" drum, noting that "the overwhelming majority of residential consumers subscribe to Internet access service from 1 of only 2 wireline providers: the cable operator or the telephone company." Given this limited choice, the bill warns that ISPs "have an economic interest to discriminate in favor of their own services, content, and applications and against other providers."

And thus... this bill, which defines US policy as anti-discrimination and pro-capacity upgrades, even for "applications and services that require substantial downstream and upstream bandwidth."

Rulemaking and enforcement of network neutrality would be given to the Federal Communications Commission, which would also be given the unenviable job of hashing out what constitutes "reasonable network management"—something explicitly allowed by the bill. Such management must be "narrowly tailored" and the techniques used must be "the least restrictive, least discriminatory, and least constricting of consumer choice available." Detailed rules are left to the FCC.

Neutrality would also not apply to the access and transfer of unlawful information, including "theft of content," so a mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed.

If enacted, the bill would allow any US Internet user to file a neutrality complaint with the FCC and receive a ruling within 90 days. If an ISP is found to be in violation, damages may have to be paid to "the complaining party," which sounds like an excellent way to deputize Internet users into probing their ISPs for discriminatory practices.

Markey's last two attempts at pushing network neutrality have faltered, but with a new president and new FCC chair in place—and both open to the concept—the idea's political fortunes may have shifted as well.

That's certainly the hope of Free Press, the media reform group that spearheaded the fight against Comcast's P2P throttling technique last year. "An army of lobbyists has been unleashed by the phone and cable companies to kill Net Neutrality so they can become the Internet’s gatekeepers," said Policy Director Ben Scott. "But the momentum is shifting in the public’s favor. President Obama has repeatedly called for Net Neutrality; we have a new pro-Net Neutrality chairman now heading the Federal Communications Commission; and popular support is growing every day."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...neutrality.ars





FCC Chair Touts Broadband as Top Priority
Troy Wolverton

The Federal Communications Commission's top "strategic" priority will be to encourage greater availability and adoption of broadband Internet access, the agency's new chairman, Julius Genachowski, said in a meeting Monday with editors and reporters at the Mercury News.

The agency is still studying the issue and examining the best ways to implement the new "national broadband plan," he said. But the effort is an attempt to address the situation he inherited, where, thanks to the policies "adopted over the last decade," the United States is falling behind other countries.

"There should have been a national broadband plan years ago," he said. "There wasn't."

Genachowski only took office in late June, but already the agency has appeared more activist that it did under his predecessor, Kevin Martin. In June, the FCC started examining the exclusive deals by which phones are tied to particular carriers. Last week, the agency opened an inquiry into why Apple rejected Google Voice, a telephone service application, for its iPhone applications store.

Although issues surrounding mobile telephony and competition in general are among Genachowski's priorities, they may eventually take a second seat to those surrounding broadband adoption.

Although broadband is a "core" infrastructure for the country, Genachowski suggested that it didn't get enough attention from the previous administration. He noted that some 40 percent of U.S. households don't currently have broadband access. That rate rises to 60 percent among some sectors of the population, such as minorities and low-income or rural residents.

But it's not just that adoption rates aren't as high as they should be. Transmission speeds are too slow, and there may not be enough competition, he said. Meanwhile, he suggested that broadband is too expensive for some consumers and the government hasn't done enough to tout its benefits.

"Where we are today is a consequence of the policies that were adopted for the last decade," he said.

The one area where broadband adoption has been an outright success has been the government's e-rate program, whose goal is to connect all schools and libraries to the Internet, he said. Under that program, schools and libraries are able to get low-cost broadband connections that are subsidized by the federally managed universal service fund.

But while Genachowski touted the e-rate program as a success, he said it was only one potential piece in solving the nation's broadband issues. Genachowski didn't have clear answers about what other steps the agency would take. But the first step, he said repeatedly, was that the agency needed to gather data on them and make the data more accessible both inside and outside the agency.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Microsoft Delays Music Streaming Service

Microsoft has pushed back the launch date of its free music streaming service, which was set to launch by the end of July 2009.
Emma Barnett

The MSN part of Microsoft's business is ramping up its consumer offering, having announced the launch of MSN Video, an online TV player.

The Telegraph broke the story that the technology giant was planning to have a new streaming service similar to Spotify ready by the end of this month.

However, The Telegraph has now learnt that this original target deadline has not been met. A Microsoft spokesperson said: “In the coming months, MSN [Microsoft’s news and entertainment portal] is planning a new music service in beta via its [MSN] Music channel in the UK. At this stage we won’t be confirming the details behind this but more information will be available soon and will be communicated in due course.”

Not many details are known about the free advertiser funded service at this stage. Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN, revealed the bare facts in an exclusive conversation with The Telegraph: “Music is an important area for Microsoft. We are looking at launching a music streaming service imminently.

It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work.”

Spotify users can stream music for free in exchange for listening to around a minute of advertising every half hour but for £9.99 a month, the ads will be turned off. It is thought Microsoft’s offering will be ad-supported too as well as having a paid-for premium service.

Mr Bale added: “We are looking at how other similar businesses have structured their business models and trying to figure out what will work best for both consumer and Microsoft.”

The service would be operated and owned by Microsoft, while being promoted through MSN and other parts of the Microsoft network.

The MSN part of the business is ramping up its consumer offering, having announced the launch of MSN Video, an online TV player, earlier this week.

The video service will initially offer 300 hours of content from BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the corporation, and from major independent producer, All3Media, responsible for programmes such as Shameless and Peep Show.

The BBC Worldwide partnership is particularly interesting because it will allow viewers for the first time to watch full episodes of archive programming for free, such as What not to Wear and the Young Ones. It will be free to use because each show will carry advertising.

The video player is the brainchild of Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s managing director and vice-president of consumer and online, and the former director of future media and technology at the BBC, who launched BBC iPlayer. Mr Highfield is in talks with other major broadcasters and content providers, such as ITV and Channel 4, about carrying their content via the service.

It is set to go live within the next week.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...g-service.html





Apple, Labels Stir Up Deluxe Digital Cocktail
Antony Bruno

Downloadable music didn't kill the album cover. The CD did.

By shrinking the size and visual impact of the recording industry's mainstay product -- and then encasing it in plastic security packaging -- the shiny aluminum disc marginalized the LP to a nostalgic memory. By the time the MP3 format came along, consumers shrugged off the absence of album art and liner notes.

"We were living for so long with the CD cover art space after vinyl went away that we lost that feel of a great tactile, creative experience," says Livia Tortella, Atlantic Records general manager/executive VP of marketing and creative media. "Something got lost when you had to crack open the plastic CD with all the marketing stickers on it."

Enter Cocktail: a new digital music format that Apple is developing with record labels. The format will go beyond a simple PDF file of liner notes, and instead bundle photos, videos, lyrics and other assets with an album's music. Details remain slim, but label sources confirming the effort's existence point to it as the digital version of the record sleeves of yore.

The Cocktail format would enable fans to play an album without having to open their iTunes music management software. Supported devices haven't yet been confirmed, but industry sources expect them to be limited to the more advanced iPods, such as the iPhone and the iPod Touch. There have also been rumors of a yet-to-be-announced multimedia tablet computer from Apple that would fall somewhere between an iPhone and a laptop in terms of size and functionality.

More Revenue, Not More Sales

Will the Cocktail format drive greater digital album sales? Probably not, but that's not what the music industry is expecting from it. Instead, label sources position it as a way to further monetize existing digital album purchases. While pricing information isn't available, Cocktail-formatted albums will almost certainly cost more than the standard album available on iTunes.

One major-label source notes that when a digital album is released as both a standard music-only download and a deluxe download with extra content, the deluxe version typically outsells the standard one by 85 percent to 90 percent in the first few weeks after its release, even though it usually costs $2 to $5 more.

"It's not about selling more albums," a label source says about Cocktail. "It's about selling more unique kinds of content. We as an industry have found that when you offer more content, there's an appetite for it. So why not continue to offer more?"

Cocktail wouldn't be the first effort by the majors to push more interactive versions of digital albums. For instance, Atlantic's Fanbase application, which it has bundled with the CDs of such artists as Rob Thomas and T.I., aggregates photos, videos and news specific to an individual artist from various online sources. Tortella says Fanbase has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is viewed up to 4 million times per month.

Cocktail-formatted albums would include only content selected and bundled by the label, but the broader goal would be the same -- to offer fans a more immersive digital music experience than they have had with MP3s and CDs.

Apple has already offered a variety of incentives at iTunes to enhance the appeal of digital album purchases. Its "Complete My Album" option allows fans who have purchased one or two songs from a record to buy the remaining tracks at a discount. Through a partnership with Ticketmaster, iTunes has bundled digital albums with the purchase of a concert ticket. And earlier this year, its new iTunes Pass format provided artists and labels with a way to sell a "subscription" that allows fans to purchase an album along with other exclusive content that is released in stages.

"Kids will either choose to buy something or not," Tortella says. "It's up to us to make it as exciting as possible to get people to want to buy. When you're dealing with different product configurations, it makes it more exciting."

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5701KE20090801





House Democrats Seek To Block Performance Royalty Vote
FMQB

Late Friday, a group of 22 House Democrats sent a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders, urging them not to move a vote on the Performance Royalty to the House floor.

In a letter sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn and Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson, the 22 Democratic lawmakers wrote, "At this time, Congress lacks adequate information on the overall impact that this legislation could have on local radio broadcasters and the potential disadvantages to our local communities that depend on radio to create jobs and bring residents their local news, emergency information, weather, and information on the activities of their elected governments."

"We are further concerned by the assertions that this bill will unfairly divert money from our local communities and direct those funds primarily to large record labels. Such an act can have a serious economic and social impact on loca radio broadcasters across the country."

The letter concludes, "Accordingly, we urge you to refrain from moving H.R. 848 to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives until such time as the impact of this legislation can be fully examined."

In related news, Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) have both added their support to the Local Radio Freedom Act, the bipartisan resolution opposing the controversial Peformance Royalty Rate. The Local Radio Freedom Act is now supported by 246 House members and 23 U.S. Senators.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1440233





Free Radios to Perk Up "Untouchables"

Authorities in eastern India are distributing free radio sets to lower-caste villagers so that they can listen to music and news after a hard day's work and improve their awareness, officials said Wednesday.

Officials of Bihar state are distributing transistors costing 400 rupees ($8) each among hundreds of "Dalits" or the formerly "Untouchables" who remain oppressed at the bottom of India's ancient Hindu caste system.

"It (radio) will entertain the tired villagers with music and will make them aware about what is happening around with news," Bihar's Tribal Welfare Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, said Wednesday.

Manjhi said the move will empower the dalit villagers further and raise general awareness levels.

"You can listen to music, news and improve your areas of information if you have a radio at home," Chief Minister Nitish Kumar added.

More than 16 percent of India's 1.1-billion population are Dalits and they continue to face discrimination and injustice although untouchability now is a crime.

(Writing by Bappa Majumdar; Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Sanjeev Miglani)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...5744EN20090805





Venezuela Begins Shutdown of 34 Radio Stations

* Chavez says stations no longer belong to 'bourgeoisie'

* Calls closures part of effort to democratize airwaves

* Critics say the move attacks freedom of speech (Adds Chavez comment)

Raymond Colitt and Ana Isabel Martinez

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez's drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

The association of radio broadcasters said 13 stations had stopped transmitting, following an announcement Friday night by government broadcasting watchdog Conatel that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations.

Critics said the crackdown infringed on freedom of speech and that owners were not given the right to a proper defense.

"They're closing the space for dissidents in Venezuela," William Echeverria, head of the National Council of Journalists, told RCTV, a private cable TV station, which did not have its broadcasting license renewed in 2007.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government's effort to democratize the airwaves.

"We haven't closed any radio stations, we've applied the law," Chavez said on state television. "We've recovered a bunch of stations that were outside the law, that now belong to the people and not the bourgeoisie."

Chavez supporters say they are waging a "media war" against private news companies and have denounced in recent days what they say is a renewed offensive by privately owned domestic and international media to discredit Venezuela.

Diosdado Cabello, the public works minister who also oversees Conatel, said some of the radio stations were shut because they did not have their broadcasting licenses renewed and others transferred them illegally to new owners.

Conatel delivered an order to CNB radio in Caracas before dawn for its five stations to stop transmitting by 8 a.m., the station said on its website.

At CNB's headquarters in downtown Caracas, hundreds of CNB employees and government critics gathered to protest the shutdown. Some later marched to Conatel.

CNB said it would continue to broadcast on its Internet site, www.cnb.com.ve.

'Mutilator of Rights'

"This government has turned into a mutilator of rights," Juan Carlos Caldera, of the opposition political party Primero Justicia, said on Globovision TV.

Antonio Ledezma, the opposition mayor of Caracas, called on Venezuelans to protest the move in the streets.

One of the stations to cease operations was Radio Bonita 1520 AM in the city of Guatire, 25 miles (40 km) from Caracas.

"Fifteen years after my father died, they tell me (broadcasting) licenses can't be inherited, we're shocked," Felix Ali Obelmejia, director of Radio Bonita, told Globovision.

Another 120 radio stations were being investigated for administrative irregularities and the radio frequency of stations being shut down would be transferred to new community broadcasters, Cabello had said.

Venezuela's attorney general presented this week draft legislation that would establish prison sentences for anyone who provides false information that harms the interests of the state. Rights groups harshly criticized the proposal.

As part of his drive to remake Venezuela as a socialist country, Chavez has vastly expanded the number of publicly owned television and radio stations since he took office in 1999. Some are directly owned or financed by the government, while others are operated by cooperatives and community groups.

(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea; Editing by Will Dunham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/bonds...46551720090801





Swan Songs?
Charles M. Blow

The music industry’s deathwatch kicked off about a decade ago, but it seems the vigil could soon be over.

According to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna’s 60th birthday.

The speed at which this industry is coming undone is utterly breathtaking.

First, piracy punched a big hole in it. Now music streaming — music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal — is poised to seal the deal.

The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won’t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds “acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007.” CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.

And a survey of British music fans, conducted by the Leading Question/Music Ally and released last month, found that the percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music “regularly” and nearly a third listen to it every day.

This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.

In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

So it was no surprise that The Financial Times reported on Monday that Apple is working with the four largest labels to seduce people into buying more digital albums. It’s too little too late.

(Note: I wrote this column while listening to “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” the last truly great CD I ever bought. Every track is a gem. When did I buy it? 1999.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/opinion/01blow.html





Aerosmith's Tyler Tumbles off Stage
AP

Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was reportedly taken to a hospital after falling from stage during a concert at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in western South Dakota.

Tyler, 61, fell while entertaining the crowd by dancing around after the sound system failed during the song "Love In an Elevator," concertgoer Lance Yellow Robe told the Rapid City Journal.

Tyler was on the stage's catwalk when he tottered backward and fell, Yellow Robe said. Security rushed to help him and the crowd cheered when Tyler got back up.

Tyler was taken backstage and around 12:15 a.m., Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry came out to tell the audience Tyler was being taken to the hospital and that the show would not go on.

Rapid City Regional Hospital coordinator Rod Brandhagen initially told The Associated Press that Tyler was on his way there early Thursday. He later declined to give any additional details.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_13003749





New Michael Jackson Songs on Missing Hard Drives

Another thriller is developing in the complex afterlife of Michael Jackson.

His sister LaToya has taken possession of computer hard drives that contain a trove of unreleased songs he recorded with A-list singers such as Ne-Yo, Akon, and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

The drives were in the "Thriller" singer's rented Holmby Hills, Calif., mansion when he died suddenly in June. Hours afterward, the family descended on the house to claim all its contents, and LaToya grabbed the drives, Rolling Stone said, quoting the late singer's manager, Frank DiLeo.

"They backed up trucks, removing everything," DiLeo was quoted as telling the magazine in its issue that hits newsstands on Friday. "They thought Michael owned it all, so they took even the rented furniture. That's who's going to run his estate?"

Jackson's will gave 40 percent of his estate to his 79-year-old mother, Katherine, who wants more control and has raised doubts about the pair of high-powered executors currently overseeing his business affairs.

In a follow-up interview with Reuters, DiLeo said he was "pretty sure" the hard drives were at the family's Hayvenhurst compound in Encino, Calif.

"The estate lawyers will send out letters" to recover the drives so that the contents can be logged, DiLeo added.

An email sent to a representative for LaToya Jackson was not answered, and a family spokesman was not immediately available.

A spokeswoman for will.i.am said the singer did not have duplicates of his work with Jackson. Representatives for Akon and Ne-Yo either could not be reached or had no information.

DiLeo told Rolling Stone that there were at least 100 songs -- including many recorded at Jackson's 1980s peak -- that were never released, including a few "sensational" tracks that were left off "Bad," the 1987 follow-up to his blockbuster "Thriller."

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...56D6M220090806





LimeWire Chairman: P2P Concerns Overblown

Music industry behind FUD, says Mark Gorton
Jaikumar Vijayan

Lime Group Chairman Mark Gorton found himself in the hot seat last week during a hearing on the problem of inadvertent data leaks on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks including his company's, LimeWire. The hearing was held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Furious lawmakers blasted Gorton over what they claimed was his company's continued failure to ensure that users of LimeWire software did not share files inadvertently. The scathing criticism came in the wake of testimony by two witnesses at the hearing. Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc., a P2P networking monitoring service, disclosed how he had discovered highly sensitive government data, ncluding presidential motorcade routes, on LimeWire networks.

The other witness was Progress and Freedom Foundation's Thomas Sydnor, who said his experiments with LimeWire's P2P software had revealed it to be extremely susceptible to inadvertent file sharing. The disclosures led to committee chairman Edolphus Towns (D-NY) saying he would soon introduce a bill seeking to ban the use of P2P software on government networks.

In a conversation with Computerworld, Gorton flatly rejected some of the testimony. He claimed that concerns about data leaks on P2P networks are being fueled and orchestrated by music labels concerned more about copyright infringement on P2P networks than anything else.

Were you surprised at the criticism directed at you and LimeWire during the hearing? I'm not sure I had that much in the way of expectations going into it so I am not sure if I was surprised. I mean this hearing was more or less orchestrated by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). I am personally of the opinion that you cannot view these hearings outside of the context of the litigation which the recording industry has going on with LimeWire.

Why do you say that? If you look at the testimony by Tom Sydnor, his firm is supported by the major record labels. If you look at his report it is completely biased. It seems superficially kind of shocking. But when you start parsing it, it really is very tricky and deceptive.

Is there an example of this that you can show? Sure. Sydnor says he went and installed LimeWire on a computer and that it immediately started sharing (all of the files) on the computer and that it was a security disaster. What he failed to mention is that in order to achieve that result he had to have taken that computer and installed a previous version of LimeWire on it. He then, really, deliberately had to go and remove all of the security settings on it, ignore countless warnings and consciously share file by file all of the files he was talking about. He then had to uninstall LimeWire from that computer and then reinstall the newer version which just picked up the settings he previously had put on it. He gives the impression that any time you install Limewire it goes and shares all these files and that is just absolutely untrue. He manages to parse the facts cleverly enough to give a highly misleading picture of reality.

What about the testimony from Tiversa? Tiversa is a company that sells a service to businesses and to the government. It attempts to monitor peer-to-peer networks and to notify [clients] if they find a document (belonging to their clients). Tiversa has a strong monetary incentive to make the problem of inadvertent file-sharing seem as bad as it can possibly be. It is not to say that they were completely inaccurate. But they seem to want make the situation a lot more serious than it necessarily is.

What do you think about the response from committee members to the testimony? Certainly many of them did not approach the hearing with an open mind at all. You can go and look at the campaign contributions for some of those members. They receive contributions from the recording industry. Based on that, many of them did not seem to have an open mind at all. To some extent I think many of them are also not familiar with the technical details of file sharing and don't understand the difference between a search using LimeWire and finding a file that is served by a completely different program. It is a distinction that is very important in terms of understanding the security issues. But I think most of them did not come there to learn. Most of them came there to be angry at me without taking the time to understand the facts. That's not to say there isn't a problem. That's why LimeWire has been working in the last couple of years to do what it can to eliminate inadvertent file-sharing.But grandstanding and deliberately ignoring the facts does not help address the problems that are out there.

So, is the latest version of LimeWire safe? It does not share documents by default. If you install LimeWire, it will not share documents automatically. In order to share documents you have to go through a process in which you click nine times and pass three warning signs in order to share a document. That is not the sort of thing people are going to do by accident. We have really changed the interface, the way file sharing is done or the way you can send files to be shared. We have gotten rid of the entire concept of shared folders. It doesn't exist anymore. We completely reengineered that entire process top to bottom. We very clearly, very visibly show people which files they are sharing and give them controls to be able to control that. No files are shared automatically. It is only by taking affirmative steps that users can share files.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...ource=rss_news





By the Time We Got to Woodstock: 40 Years Later
Steve James

Woodstock lives -- on stage, on film, in books and TV news clips, and forever in the memory of anyone who came of age in the '60s.

Forty years after the three-day music festival that celebrated peace and love during a time of protest and anger at the Vietnam War, Woodstock nostalgia is in full commercial flow.

A little ironic, considering that the festival famously became a "free concert" after it drew hundreds of thousands more people than the 200,000 that organizers had planned at $18 per ticket.

Survivors from some of the acts that played Aug 15-17, 1969 will again take the stage on what was Yasgur's Farm, but is now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in upstate New York.

The "Heroes of Woodstock" show on Aug 15 features the Levon Helm Band, Jefferson Starship, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Country Joe McDonald.

Meanwhile the movie "Woodstock" has been re-released in a 40th anniversary director's cut, along with the 2-CD soundtrack, while Rhino Records has put out a 6-disc box set featuring every performance at Woodstock.

And later this month, director Ang Lee will debut "Taking Woodstock," a movie about a man working at his parents' motel who inadvertently sets in motion the concert.

But for many, the definitive story of that Summer of Love is "The Road to Woodstock," a book by Michael Lang, one of the organizers of the festival.

Realization of a Dream

"There was this impression that there was a beautiful field and a bunch of people turned up and some bands were in the area and they put up a stage and played," Lang told Reuters. "It actually took 10 months of planning!"

He and his partners had planned on 200,000 people attending the event, and they actually sought the help of the Army Corps of Engineers for some of the logistics.

"But they must have got wind of what was happening. They canceled a meeting at the Pentagon the day before, so we were left on our own," Lang said.

Coming at the height of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement that divided America mostly along generational lines, it is perhaps hardly surprising the military did not want to get involved with what was viewed as a hippie festival.

So Lang and his partners were left to stage a show that featured 32 of the top musical acts of the time and an audience Joni Mitchell referred to as "half a million strong."

"Woodstock was the realization of the dream," Lang said of an event known as much for its mud, bad acid and miles-long traffic jams on the New York Thruway, as for its music.

"But it was not frustrating, I enjoy solving problems. It was exciting at the time, there was no blueprint and we made it up as we went along," said Lang.

"There were a lot of similarities with what is going on now in the world," he said. "It was a time of the first Earth movement, the ecology movement, which was very important for our generation."

That summer 40 years ago was notable also because man walked on the moon for the first time and America was horrified by Chappaquiddick, when a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy ran off a bridge resulting in the death of his young woman passenger, and the Charles Manson murders.

There was also the issue of war - Vietnam then, Iraq now. "After eight years of the Bush administration, I could see we were in a very dark moment again," said Lang.

"And then the inauguration of Obama was portrayed in the New York Times and other papers as 'a Woodstock moment.'"

Lang, a music producer and promoter, also organized concerts on the 25th and 30th anniversaries of Woodstock, featuring more contemporary artists. But from Richie Havens, who opened the original Woodstock, to Jimi Hendrix, who closed it, it is the musicians he remembers most.

"There were three surprises -- Joe Cocker, who was unknown at the time; Carlos Santana stood out - you knew a superstar was being born. And Sly Stone. His energy was beyond anything I had ever experienced. I was camped out on the corner of the stage and I saw them all," said Lang.

(Reporting by Steve James; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5754D420090806





Internet Ad Spending Shrinks Again
Brad Stone

Here’s a quick update on the once-invincible business known as online advertising. Worldwide spending on Internet advertising shrank by 5 percent in the second quarter of the year, to $13.9 billion from $14.7 billion, according to research firm IDC. That is the second consecutive quarter that revenues have dropped over the previous year’s quarter, which is creating all sorts of pressure on firms like Yahoo, AOL and the wide world of ad-dependent Web start-ups.

IDC said that money spent on online display advertising in particular dropped 12 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago. Classified ads lost 17 percent, hitting sites like Monster.com particularly hard.

Search advertising was the least affected, dropping only 3 percent, the company said. (The firm estimates that Google alone defied gravity, increasing its American search revenues by 3 percent in the period.)

IDC expects a similar drop in the current quarter. But analysts see some good news in all of this. Since ad spending has steadily dropped since the beginning of 2008, growth is now relatively flat. “We don’t see the steep decline in the growth curve anymore,” said an analyst, Karsten Weide. “I think it’s a safe bet to say we have probably hit bottom. Things aren’t great but at least they aren’t getting any worse anymore.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...nks-again/?hpw





News Corp May Charge for Web News; Blasts Amazon
Robert MacMillan

News Corp, which is trying to stem newspaper revenue declines, could charge for access to its news websites by the middle of next year, and might break off its relationship with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle e-reader if it cannot get better terms.

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the global media empire, said on Thursday that he is unhappy with the Kindle's control of relationships with newspaper subscribers, and might seek a better deal with rival e-reader maker Sony Corp.

Amazon officials did not return calls seeking comment.

Murdoch's comments come after News Corp, whose properties include The Wall Street Journal, cable programmers, local TV stations and movie studios, reported a 10.7 percent drop in quarterly revenue to $7.67 billion, which was in line with expectations, according to Reuters Estimates.

It forecast operating revenue for fiscal 2010, which ends next June, would rise in the high single digits on 4 percent revenue growth.

"I think it looks reasonable," said RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank. "They gave a pretty realistic view of where the growth is coming from and where it is not going to come from, particularly the advertising-supported businesses."

Shares of News Corp were flat in extended trading.

Murdoch said the worst might be over. But another fight looms: persuading millions of people to pay for news on the Internet when most get it for free.

He did not provide details on a conference call with reporters and analysts, but said that he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites by the middle of the 2010 fiscal year, which ends next June.

"An industry that gives away its content is cannibalizing its ability to do good reporting," Murdoch said. The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp's Dow Jones unit, now offers some paid and some free stories.

The move would affect news websites visited by millions of people around the world, including popular tabloids like the New York Post and The Sun in London, as well as other papers such as The Times of London and The Australian.

Publishers including The New York Times are searching for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Many new media experts say it would gut the ad revenue they get now and drive people away.

Slow Exit from Tough Times

News Corp's results reflected the tough conditions that media companies have operated in since the financial crisis took over headlines last year.

Its net loss was $203 million, or 8 cents a share, for the fiscal fourth quarter, ended June 30, primarily because of charges at the unit that includes the MySpace social network. Net income last year was $1.13 billion, or 43 cents a share.

TV revenue, including at its Fox Television Stations unit, fell as local TV station ad revenue fell 27 percent. The HarperCollins book publisher lost $1 million on a 20 percent revenue decline.

News Corp's "other" segment, which houses MySpace and Fox Interactive Media, reported an operating loss of $136 million because of lower ad revenue at MySpace, which is facing rising competition from Facebook.

Revenue rose, however, at the filmed entertainment division, helped by DVD sales of films such as "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Marley & Me." Cable revenue also rose.

News Corp shares have more than doubled since hitting a low of $4.95 in March, as big media companies from Time Warner Inc to Viacom and CBS Corp have said in recent weeks that ad declines are beginning to ease.

News Corp's results reflect "the general notion that the other media conglomerates have reiterated over the past week that the worst is behind us," said Miller Tabak analyst David Joyce.

Excluding impairment charges at MySpace and other business units, adjusted operating income was 19 cents a share, compared with 30 cents last year, about in line with Street estimates.

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan; Editing Bernard Orr, Tiffany Wu and Steve Orlofsky)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...57467120090806





The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)
Ian Shapira

A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.

I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.

But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?

* * *

The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.

The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.

Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)

After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.

The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."

* * *

After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.

Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.

Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?

More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.

The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.

David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.

News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.

When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.

Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.

Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."

That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.

The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."

Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."

So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?

"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.

* * *

The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.

Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."

Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.

After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.

So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...073102476.html





10 Years Ago, an Omen No One Saw
David Carr

Ten years ago Sunday, on an island off an island off the coast of America, something impossibly glamorous took place. Partygoers took boats from Manhattan to the home of the Statue of Liberty to plop pashalike on pillows and blankets and munch on lamb chops while Macy Gray sang, their faces illuminated with multicolored Chinese lanterns and fireworks curated and narrated by George Plimpton.

“That was a silver-flanged fleur-de-lis,” said the voice, highly recognizable but disembodied by darkness.

This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney, decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown, fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, that would lead the national conversation.

It was all kicked off with the kind of lavish party that would seem unthinkable in the current context.

Sponsored liquor flowed, women teetered about on heels in deep grass, and the A-list guest list — Mr. Kissinger, please meet Miss um Ms. uh meet Madonna — was a testament to the power of the synergized word. Content was king and Ms. Brown was its queen.

“Now you’re not exactly the tired masses, the huddled masses, but then again, I’m an immigrant who toiled here on the Concorde,” she said to the crowd after being introduced by Queen Latifah. “But I just want to say, here’s to Lady Liberty tonight.”

Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff.

“It seems like that happened in the 18th century,” said Ms. Brown by phone last Friday.

Magazines are on pace to book little more than half of the advertising pages that the industry did 10 years ago, and dozens of longtime titles have disappeared. The last big magazine introduction — Portfolio at Condé Nast Publications — flamed out this spring after two years at a cost of more than $80 million. Now even Condé Nast Publications, the world headquarters of printed luxury, has brought in the bean counters from McKinsey with an eye toward further cuts. There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk.

I’m still ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party — old prerogatives die hard — so I was trapped on shore, covering it secondhand with a nose pressed up against the glass. But it is worth thinking about how this future, or lack of one, arrived so unforeseen.

Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end.

Peter Kaplan, the former editor of The New York Observer, attended the party and oversaw coverage of the event.

“Tina, for all the excellence of her antenna, was scratching the air, and like many of us, was unable to pull in the new signal,” he said. “She failed to see that it was probably already over and that there was something slightly hollow about that event.”
Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete.

“Most of the talk at the Talk party was about the party itself,” said Kurt Andersen, a novelist, radio host and founder of Spy magazine. “It was weird and interesting because you were sort of wandering around in the dark out there and bumping into people. There was a meta quality to the thing, a self-consciousness, that in retrospect was probably telling.”

At least Ms. Brown did not compose a rap ode to the new magazine. That fell to Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast publisher who managed to get a flock of advertisers to buy the hype and commit to the first four issues of a magazine they had never seen. After Talk closed, Mr. Big quit Manhattan media and moved to a farm in Vermont. Maybe he knew something we didn’t. (He did not return a call.)

“It was the end of something extraordinary, but none of us knew it at the time,” Ms. Brown says now. “What followed was a very turbulent odyssey, not just for me, but for all of us. There has been a volcanic realignment that none of us foresaw.”

After Talk closed early in 2002, Ms. Brown hosted a television show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana. Demonstrating a nimbleness that has characterized her entire career, she is now running The Daily Beast, a scrappy but promising digital media site owned by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

She pays her writers, increasingly an exception these days, but there are no huge contracts or boat rides to sylvan lawns full of impossibly famous people. The Daily Beast has 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, and has kicked up some notice, but its opening party of a hundred or so took place at the very much land-locked Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. There was no Sarah Jessica Parker, no Robert De Niro and no Hugh Grant in attendance. There were a lot of bloggers instead.

Modern media success is enabled by brutal cost control and using hard, fast numbers to convince advertisers they will get a return for their spending. Once stalwart magazines like BusinessWeek are up for grabs and entire formerly lucrative categories have been wiped out. The magazine canard of associative glamour, of selling aspiration by the bucket-load with page after page of pricy merchandise, is all but dead but for a few exceptions.

Ms. Brown once wrote the book “Life as a Party” and on that night, it was.

“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/bu...ia/03carr.html





Subscription Cards, R.I.P.
Dwight Garner

As print culture morphs into Web culture, one of the things I thought I wouldn’t miss about magazines are subscription or “blow-in” cards, those obnoxious rectangles that come flaking out of new issues like so much intellectual dandruff, scaring pets and scattering to the far corners of the living room.

I’m not alone here. Subscription cards have been mocked in Onion headlines (”It Was the Eighth Subscription Card That Convinced Me”); their fraudulent claims have been dissected by Wired editor Chris Anderson; they’ve been the subject of frequent online rants. So many of these tree-slaying cards fill some houses that residents are forced to do horrible things like fold them into origami-like bracelets.

But now subscription cards really do seem to be on the verge of vanishing.

Outside magazine stopped inserting them into new issues in March of 2008 (it alone printed an estimated 20 million cards a year) in an effort to save trees and money. And now here comes the July/August issue of the literary magazine The Believer, with this announcement:

Quote:
This is the final issue of The Believer to contain subscriber cards. Everybody seems to be subscribing online, so it doesn’t make sense to pay for them to be cut up and inserted into each issue, to say nothing of the postage. Some people will miss these cards, but most will understand that their time had come and gone.
I can’t say I lament, exactly, the looming end of these crazy-making cards. But as what feels like yet another milepost in the long decline of print magazines and journals, The Believer’s announcement nonetheless puts me in an auld-lang-synish mood.

The nostalgia market is already picking up on thoughts like mine. On eBay, an old magazine was recently auctioned with this come-on: “Playboy August 1960 - With Subscription Cards.” It was gone before I could get there.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-cards-rip/?hp





TV Dealmaking Season Wraps Up; Prices, Volume Down

Advertisers bought about 15 percent less commercial time from networks ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox for the upcoming TV season and -- for the first time in years -- paid less for the airtime they did purchase.

Advertising and broadcast television executives said nearly all of the dealmaking for the 2009-2010 TV season had wrapped up by late Thursday, following months of what they described as protracted and frustrating negotiations.

Even after the completion of the upfront season, when TV networks often sell about 75 percent of their commercial time, the two sides disagreed about who was to blame for the delay. The upfront market is often finished in June.

"The media agencies were in a tough spot between client expectations and market realities," said one TV executive, referring to the buyers who negotiate time on behalf of advertisers like Procter & Gamble or Ford.

"It took us a month to find equilibrium there."

An executive at a media agency took another view.

"The buyers were hearing it loud and clear from clients, they needed to get better value in the market. Our clients were insistent. Eventually, the TV networks understood that. They understood they needed to get into negative pricing."

Executives on both sides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen negotiating in public, agreed that the upfront market would be about 15 percent smaller than a year ago, when about $9 billion worth of deals were struck.

What is more, prices fell for the first time in eight years. News Corp's Fox, Walt Disney Co's ABC, and CBS Corp's CBS agreed to deals at rates about 4 percent below those of a year ago, according to various media executives.

NBC, majority owned by General Electric and in last place in the prime-time ratings, struck deals at slightly deeper discounts. An NBC spokeswoman confirmed that it had completed its dealmaking, but declined to comment on details about pricing or volume.

Economy Rising

Tom Staggs, chief financial officer of Disney, said during a call last week he was "comfortable with the rates ABC has been achieving," although that network, too, declined to discuss specifics.

Jon Nesvig, president of sales at Fox, said in a prepared statement that the network had "achieved its primetime revenue goal" and that with "a broader economic recovery seeming to take hold, we are very comfortable in our marketplace positioning for next year."

Indeed, all of the broadcast networks appear to be banking on selling the remaining prime-time commercial inventory at higher prices in the so-called scatter market, the term used for last-minute sales.

CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves on Thursday said that "we have retained more inventory to sell in the scatter, and we like our position as the economy continues to improve."

He "anticipates the scatter market will be stronger than the upfronts."

An executive at another network said: "We sold this upfront with the view that we were moving into a rising economy rather than a softening economy."

What's more, some key advertising categories, like auto, retail and financial services, are expected to have bigger advertising budgets in 2010, after buying about 20 percent less commercial time this around in the upfront market.

"We are looking at still a very uncertain period and I think that most advertisers are being more cautious," said Robin Diedrich, a media analyst with Edward Jones.

She nonetheless said TV networks may be able to rebound from the depressed upfront market.

"When the advertising market was soft in 2002, the scatter market did actually stay up there and help make up for what had been a soft upfront."

She added, however, "There are big risks on both sides."

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Edwin Chan, Gary Hill)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/...vertising.html





Now on YouTube, Local News
Brian Stelter

With its ability to collect articles and sell advertisements against them, Google has already become a huge force in the news business — and the scourge of many newspapers. Now its subsidiary YouTube wants to do the same thing to local television.

YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more.

YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.

But news media companies may have reasons to be wary. Few TV stations have figured out how replicate profits on the Internet. YouTube can easily act as another competitor.

So for now, most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, colleges and, in the case of a fledgling San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides.

“It really levels the playing field,” said Kieran Farr, a founder of VidSF who covers the city’s culture and uploads his segments to YouTube.

News Near You, started in the spring, is only part of YouTube’s push into news video. This summer, the company invited the more than 25,000 news sources listed on Google News to become video suppliers. The site is also promoting videos from ABC News, The Associated Press, Reuters and other outlets.

This year, it began featuring breaking news videos — including ones submitted by citizens in Iran, where protests are being captured by cellphone users — on its home page.

So far, the localized videos are no replacement for a print or TV diet of news. On Sunday, visitors near Baltimore saw a news report about a teen assistance program; in Chicago they saw a WGN-TV feature about street performers; and in Los Angeles, they saw a review of an electric motorcycle produced by The Los Angeles Times. Producers often count the views in hundreds, not thousands.

To date, nearly 200 news outlets have signed up with YouTube to post news packages and split the revenue from the advertisements that appear with them. In addition, Google searches now show YouTube videos alongside news articles, helping the videos reach a wider audience.

YouTube’s sheer breadth — it is visited by 100 million Americans each month — makes it a powerful force for promotion, as well as a potential threat to entrenched media companies. And those companies already have more than enough to worry about: much of the local media marketplace has collapsed in recent years as classified ads have moved online, automakers have curtailed ad spending and news and entertainment options have proliferated.

YouTube, meanwhile, is still trying to turn a profit nearly three years after it was acquired by Google. Because copyright concerns prevent it from placing ads on amateur videos, it has striven to sign up professional partners to seed the site with ad-friendly content. News is one obvious option.

“Google can only gain by splitting revenue with people who have feet on the street in local markets,” said Terry Heaton, a senior vice president at AR&D, a company that advises locally focused media organizations.

Google said in June that it was pleased with YouTube’s trajectory and indicated that it expected the site to be profitable in the not-too-distant future, but did not specify when.

While YouTube can gain by adding local video, it remains to be seen whether established news outlets will benefit. Google’s scraping of print headlines and links has led some to assign blame to the company for the financial struggles of newspapers. The chief executive of Dow Jones recently called Google a “digital vampire” that was “sucking the blood” from newspapers by harvesting their free articles.

What YouTube is doing is somewhat different. It is not sending digital spiders around the Web to collect videos automatically; instead, it is asking news outlets to sign up as partners and promising a wider audience for their material.

YouTube’s push to organize local news video began in earnest in the spring when the News Near You module was introduced. The module uses the Internet address of a visitor’s computer to determine the user’s location and whether any partners are located within a 100-mile radius. If so, seven days of local videos are displayed.

But in many places, namely urban markets, 100 miles can hardly be counted as a local area; Steve Grove, the head of news and politics for YouTube, said, “we’ll get a smaller radius as we bring on more partners.”

Mr. Grove said about 5 percent of users who see the News Near You module watch at least one local news video, a rate that YouTube sees as encouraging.

“The relevancy factor kicks into gear,” he said. “Suddenly these videos actually matter to you because they’re about your neighborhood or where you live.”

YouTube’s arms-wide-open approach forces stations to judge whether YouTube is a friend or a foe, echoing a question that newspapers have grappled with for years. (Some have deemed Google a “frenemy.”)

“For stations, there won’t be significant revenue from YouTube in the short term,” said Andy Plesser, the editor of the online video site Beet.tv. That is partly because few of the videos reach an audience of millions, he said.

He also suggested that the local news feature faces resistance from station owners. “Many simply don’t see the value of being on YouTube,” he said.

In New York, the cable news channel NY1, for instance, said it was concentrating on drawing visitors to its own site, rather than sharing videos elsewhere.

“It’s an old conundrum,” Marc Nathanson, an executive producer of NY1.com, said. “When you have valuable content, do you make people come to you for it? Or do you put it out there to enhance the brand and hope that users find their way back to you for more?”

He guessed that NY1 would offer some videos on sites like YouTube in the future.

Meanwhile, a new breed of local news broadcasters — including ones without broadcasting licenses, the traditional barrier to entry in local markets — is emerging online.

“Radio stations, newspapers, universities, advocacy organizations, churches and other local groups, and individuals are becoming news producers,” Mr. Plesser said.

Mr. Heaton said stations should treat YouTube as a marketing machine for their old-fashioned television newscasts.

“As long as Google wants to pay for the bandwidth” to host videos, he said, “let them.”

Mr. Grove said YouTube had not met “a ton of resistance” from news outlets and the main reason there are so few participants is that the initiative is new.

Mr. Grove has stumbled across some local members, including The Dallas Morning News and The Cincinnati Enquirer, that he had not even known were on the site. (Any Internet user can create a YouTube account and start uploading videos free.) The New York Times created a YouTube channel in 2006 and has posted more than 1,300 videos on it, essentially highlighting some of the content on its own Web site.

National news, too, is being curated by the site. The “top headlines” section of the site collects videos from prominent TV sources and crossreferences them with the trends from Google News, then produces the equivalent of a 30-minute newscast for users to watch, either in full or from one segment to another.

In the future, more of the News Near You could come from people who do not report the news for a living. As the protests in Iran continue to demonstrate, citizens are able to provide much of the spot video from breaking news, even though they may lack the objectivity of professionals.

The new iPhone includes a video recording capability with a “send to YouTube” button, suddenly making it simple and fast to upload clips.

Rachel Sterne, the founder and chief executive of the citizen journalism site GroundReport, said the feature “trains laymen to be reporters.” And YouTube says it is developing tools to automatically spotlight those citizen videos as they come in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/bu...03youtube.html





GE's Silencing of Olbermann

The New York Times this morning has a remarkable story, and incredibly, the article's author, Brian Stelter, doesn't even acknowledge, let alone examine, what makes the story so significant. In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp:

Quote:
The reconciliation -- not acknowledged by the parties until now -- showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders' meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly's producers) last April. . . .

In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.'s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.

Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that "If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt." The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly's viewers was scathing. . .

Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting "wasn’t good for either parent," said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.
Though Olbermann denies he was part of any deal, the NYT says that there has been virtually no criticism of Fox by Olbermman, or MSNBC by O'Reilly, since June 1 when the deal took effect. That's mostly but not entirely true. On June 17, after President Obama accused Fox News of fomenting hostility towards his agenda, and Fox responded by saying that the "other networks" were pure pro-Obama outlets, Olbermann did voice fairly stinging criticisms of Fox as "more of a political entity than is the Republican National Committee right now, only it's fraudulently disguised as some sort of news organization."

But a review of all of Olbermann's post-June 1 shows does reveal that he has not ever criticized (or even mentioned) Bill O'Reilly since then and barely ever mentions Fox News any longer. And on June 1 -- the last time Olbermann mentioned O'Reilly -- Olbermann claimed at the end of his broadcast that he would cease referring to O'Reilly in the future because ignoring him (and "quarantining" Fox) would supposedly help get O'Reilly off the air ("So as of this show‘s end, I will retire the name, the photograph, and the caricature").

So here we have yet another example -- perhaps the most glaring yet -- of the corporations that own our largest media outlets controlling and censoring the content of their news organizations based on the unrelated interests of the parent corporation. In light of that, just marvel at what the supreme establishment-power-worshiper Charlie Rose said dismissively in March, 2003, when he had Amy Goodman on his show as a condescending example of someone who opposed the Iraq War, after Goodman touted the vital importance of "independent media" in America:

Quote:
ROSE: I don't know what "independent" means -- "independent" in contrast to what?

GOODMAN: It means not being sponsored by the corporations, the networks -- like NBC, CBS, ABC: NBC owned by General Electric, CBS owned by Viacom, or ABC owned by Disney --

ROSE: My point in response to that would be that we do need you . . . . Having said that, I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not influenced by the corporations that may own those companies. Since I know one of them very well and worked for one of them.
That's the very same Charlie Rose who sat there with the CEO of GE and the CEO of News Corp. as an agreement was reached to order their news employees to stop criticizing the activities of Fox and GE in order to protect the corporate interests of those parents.

It makes no difference what one thinks of O'Reilly's attacks on the corporate activities of GE or Olbermann's criticisms of O'Reilly and Fox News. Whatever one's views on that are -- and I watch neither show very often -- those are perfectly legitimate subjects for news reporting and commentary, and the corporate decree to stop commenting on those topics is nothing less than corporate censorship. A reader last night put it this way by email:

Quote:
It's interesting and somewhat shocking to me that a NYT article wouldn't even mention the effect on the hosts' journalistic freedom. . . . I assume that both Olbermann and O'Reilly would not have agreed to the truce, as the battle is ratings gold for both of them, and I'm sure they frankly hate each other and enjoy it.

The sad truth is that what Olbermann and O'Reilly were doing in this particular instance was one of the rare examples of good journalism on these types of shows. Olbermann was holding O'Reilly's feet to the fire about his repeated falsehoods and embarrassing positions. In turn, O'Reilly was giving the public accurate and disturbing information about General Electric, including extensive technology dealings with Iran. In my personal opinion, this was one of the rare useful pieces of information O'Reilly ever presented to his audience, and Olbermann was there to show how lousy the rest of O'Reilly's information was. Though it was in the context of a bitter feud, the two men were actually engaging in real journalism, at least in this case.
So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC. You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced. Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive." Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration. MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government. And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government. Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional. GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa.../ge/index.html





Malaysia Denies Internet Filter Will Curb Dissent
Royce Cheah

Malaysia denied on Friday that a proposed Internet filter would be used to police blogs and websites, saying it would be used only to block pornography.

The denial comes after news that the Southeast Asian country was considering setting up an Internet filter similar to China's "Green Dam" software, a move the opposition said was aimed at suppressing political dissent.

While Malaysia has used sedition laws and imprisonment without trial to prosecute one leading political blogger, censoring political websites is not the aim of the filter said Information Minister Rais Yatim. "The safety of our children is not an Internet game. We will find any way to ensure we are free from the culture of pornography among children," Rais told a news conference in the Malaysian capital.

"Those who call themselves liberals should look at what has happened to other countries who have become victims, where child sex occurs and pornography is widespread," he said.

Malaysia's argument echoes China's rationale for a planned filter to stamp out Internet pornography that drew criticism from the United States and the computer industry.

China has delayed its "Green Dam" plan indefinitely but Malaysia, with a population of 27 million, is in the process of evaluating the feasibility of implementing such a filter, Rais said.

Green Dam critics say the software was technically flawed and could have been used to spy on Internet users and to block sites that Beijing considers politically undesirable.

Rais said Malaysia's filter would not affect bloggers but they would have to answer in court if they flout the laws.

The Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ) said the proposal went against a government initiative called the "Multimedia Super Corridor" (MSC), which provides tax breaks for foreign technology firms and promises no Internet censorship.

The MSC has attracted investors such as Microsoft Corp and Cisco Systems.

"Any moves to institutionalize filtering will be seen as strengthening the executive's powers in controlling content online," said the CIJ's executive director, Gaythry Venkiteswaran, in a statement.

The MSC attract investments worth 1.6 billion ringgit ($458 million) yearly.

(Editing by Bill Tarrant)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5763JF20090807





A Deeper Look at Iranian Filtering

A researcher finds telltale signs that the Iranian government has become more efficient at filtering.
Robert Lemos

Looking into Iran's portion of the Internet is not an easy task.

But the network security firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger quantities of data than before.

Arbor Networks uses data gathered from distributed network sensors to monitor the data going to Iran from the global Internet.

In a post on Sunday, the firm showed that the overall trend for the first three weeks of July was an increasing amount of traffic headed into Iran. The country has a single national provider that handles Internet traffic, but a handful of internal providers. The picture painted by the data is of an ISP that is becoming increasingly skilled in filtering, says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks.

"It was speculated early on that they lacked capacity," Labovitz says. "It wasn't that traffic was being filtered, it was that it was being dropped because they lacked capacity. Now, it looks like they are navigating 5 gig of traffic again, and I don't think they have turned off filtering."

In a second post on Tuesday, Labovitz showed some interesting patterns in the traffic heading to six of the country's internal network providers. All of the providers showed an enormous drop in traffic following the contested June 12 election, then nearly normal traffic patterns until June 26, then five of the six ISPs showed an 80 percent drop in traffic for approximately three weeks. The one internal ISP that continues to see significant traffic during those three weeks counts many government ministries among its clientele.

Because Iran does not have many connections with global businesses, and very little consumer penetration of the Internet, the populace will likely not complain about the filtering as much as, say, China, where expectations of the Internet are much higher, Labovitz says.

"China's filtering is a much more substantial effort involving business partners and business development relationships involving partners," he says. "It is a much broader business ecosystem that China has evolved over time."
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/unsafebits/23946/





Web Site Tracks World Online Censorship Reports
Jeannie Nuss

When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message.

Mao thought the error - just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China - was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship.

Meanwhile, more than 100 other people in China did the same thing. The spike in reports on Herdict.org in March pointed to government interference rather than a run-of-the-mill technical glitch, even before Google Inc. confirmed China was blocking its YouTube video-sharing site.

"We saw reports coming in as soon as the blocks were happening and certainly before any of the media were reporting it," Herdict founder Jonathan Zittrain said of the months-long YouTube blackout that coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June and recent ethnic riots in the Xinjiang province.

Herdict users report their Web site problems anonymously - numeric Internet addresses are recorded but only general location is displayed - so people can post more freely, encouraging reports about sensitive topics like HIV and AIDS-related sites, and from people in countries with possible government repercussions.

The site doesn't investigate reports, though, so there's no way to know for sure that an outage is related to government meddling rather than a cut cable or other problem unrelated to censorship. Although surges in reports do suggest a government role, a widespread technical glitch can also produce a similar spike.

Web site inaccessibility can also result from network or server errors, firewalls at schools or offices or a new phenomenon called reverse filtering, in which companies block access to copyright-protected material outside a specific country.

Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said Herdict does not aim to present a flawless picture of online filtering, but to let patterns of accessibility speak for themselves.

"The goal ... is to gather the kind of raw data from which people can then start to gain insight and come to conclusions," he said. "With enough people asking, you start to get a sense of where there are blockages in the network."

Herdict - short for "verdict of the herd" - has spread beyond techie circles to garner users in more than 140 countries, including censorship hotbeds China and Iran.

"Herdict has been buzzed (about) for months in China and now it's becoming more popular since ... Google.com was blocked for hours and Twitter.com was blocked twice recently," Mao said in an e-mail.

In Iran, Herdict users have logged unsuccessful attempts to access Twitter and other social-networking sites that have been blocked since the country's controversial June 12 presidential election.

Herdict users like that the site fosters a sense of community among those who can't fully navigate the Web and provides them with hope for a freer Internet.

"It gives people a sense how many people share the same blackout regionally or globally," Mao said. "You are not alone."

Before, someone might complain about a block via a single Facebook or Twitter update, but that information often doesn't go beyond a small group of friends.

Zittrain started Herdict in February - a month before China's block began - to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked online censorship since the early 2000s, he wanted to put Web accessibility at the fingertips of those who use it most, rather than a handful of experts.

"The less 'online' class of people generally don't worry about it, until they run into something blocked like the BBC," said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Boston-based circumvention tool, The Tor Project Inc. "Then they say, 'Hey, what is this? All I want to do is read this one article.'"

The site has versions in Arabic and Chinese, and an interactive map with a roaming orange sheep to mark inaccessible Web sites.

Don't expect censorship to go away, though. At most, Herdict can help give people a better sense of the prevalence of censorship.

"I don't think that a specific monitoring tool will specifically have censorship go away, but we'll just know about it better," said Robert Guerra, project director for the Internet Freedom Program at the Washington-based Freedom House. "It's far more pervasive than people think."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LA TE=DEFAULT





After the Boom, is Wikipedia Heading for Bust?
Jim Giles

Wikipedia has rapidly become one of the most used reference sources in the world, but a new study shows that the website's explosive growth is tailing off and also suggests the community-created encyclopaedia has become less welcoming to new contributors.
Ed Chi and colleagues at the Palo Alto Research Center in California warn that the changes could compromise the encyclopaedia's quality in the long term.

"It's easy to say that Wikipedia will always be here," says Chi, a computer scientist. "This research shows that is not a given."

Launched in 2001, the English language Wikipedia grew rapidly to its current size of almost 3 million articles. However, when the Palo Alto team analysed a downloaded version of the encyclopaedia they found its growth has peaked.

The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.
Editor wars

The balance of power within the people who contribute to Wikipedia also appears to have shifted – away from casual contributors who make infrequent changes, toward more active and established contributors. Chi says the trend could shut out new users.

"Occasional" editors, those who make just a single edit a month, have 25 per cent of their changes erased, or reverted, by other editors, a proportion that in 2003 was 10 per cent. The revert rate for editors who make between two and nine changes a month grew from 5 to 15 per cent over the same period.

"This is evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content," say the Palo Alto team. Chi told New Scientist that the changes could harm Wikipedia in the longer term by deterring new editors from taking part and so reducing the number of people available to spot and correct the vandalism that constantly threatens the encyclopaedia. "Over time the quality may degrade," he warns.

Chi thinks that Wikipedia now includes so much information that some editors have turned from creating new articles to improving existing ones, resulting in more disputes about edits. Such disputes are not a level playing field because established editors sometimes draw on extensive knowledge of Wikipedia's guidelines to overwhelm opposition in a practice dubbed "wikilawyering".
Spam to blame?

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit company that operates Wikipedia, has noted these changes and last month launched a strategic review of Wikipedia in an effort to understand them.

But one of the experts leading that review, Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen Associates in San Francisco says that Chi's arguments are only one of several possible explanations for the changes seen in Wikipedia. The high number of reverts, for example, may be due to the increasing use of spam software that inserts promotional text, such as links to company websites, into articles.

Kim says the review will report this time next year and that any Wikipedia editor can contribute to the process.

The Palo Alto team will present their analysis at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration in Orlando, Florida this October. A blog post by Chi summarises the study.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ef=online-news





Head of English Catholics Warns About Emails/Texting

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.

Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form "transient relationships" which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.

"Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right," he told the Sunday Times newspaper.

"I think there's a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community."

The Archbishop, 63, said too much use of electronic information was "dehumanising," leading to a loss in social skills and the ability to read a person's mood through their body language.

Furthermore social networking sites encouraged children to place an excessive importance on the number of friends they had instead of the quality of their relationships, he said.

"Among young people often a key factor in their committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate," Nichols said.

(Reporting by Michael Holden)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...5710CR20090802





Sin Bins for Worst Families
Alison Little

THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far.

But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million.

Ministers hope the move will reduce the number of youngsters who get drawn into crime because of their chaotic family lives, as portrayed in Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless.

Sin bin projects operate in half of council areas already but Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund them.

He said: “This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem. There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support.”

But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “This is all much too little, much too late.

“This Government has been in power for more than a decade during which time anti-social behaviour, family breakdown and problems like alcohol abuse and truancy have just got worse and worse.”

Mr Balls also said responsible parents who make sure their children behave in school will get new rights to complain about those who allow their children to disrupt lessons.

Pupils and their families will have to sign behaviour contracts known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year, which will set out parents’ duties to ensure children behave and do their homework.

The updated Youth Crime Action Plan also called for a crackdown on violent girl gangs as well as drug and alcohol abuse among young women.

But a decision to give ministers new powers to intervene with failing local authority Youth Offending Teams was criticised by council leaders.

Les Lawrence, of the Local Government Association, said they did “crucial” work and such intervention was “completely unnecessary”.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/...worst-families





Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk
John Markoff and Thom Shanker

It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government’s financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

“We knew we could pull it off — we had the tools,” said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

But the attack never got the green light. Bush administration officials worried that the effects would not be limited to Iraq but would instead create worldwide financial havoc, spreading across the Middle East to Europe and perhaps to the United States.

Fears of such collateral damage are at the heart of the debate as the Obama administration and its Pentagon leadership struggle to develop rules and tactics for carrying out attacks in cyberspace.

While the Bush administration seriously studied computer-network attacks, the Obama administration is the first to elevate cybersecurity — both defending American computer networks and attacking those of adversaries — to the level of a White House director, whose appointment is expected in coming weeks.

But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon’s new “cybercommand” acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns.

“We are deeply concerned about the second- and third-order effects of certain types of computer network operations, as well as about laws of war that require attacks be proportional to the threat,” said one senior officer.

This officer, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work, also acknowledged that these concerns had restrained the military from carrying out a number of proposed missions. “In some ways, we are self-deterred today because we really haven’t answered that yet in the world of cyber,” the officer said.

In interviews over recent weeks, a number of current and retired White House officials, Pentagon civilians and military officers disclosed details of classified missions — some only considered and some put into action — that illustrate why this issue is so difficult.

Although the digital attack on Iraq’s financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to cripple Iraq’s military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage.

Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq’s telephone networks. American officials also contacted international communications companies that provided satellite phone and cellphone coverage to Iraq to alert them to possible jamming and to ask their assistance in turning off certain channels.

Officials now acknowledge that the communications offensive temporarily disrupted telephone service in countries around Iraq that shared its cellphone and satellite telephone systems. That limited damage was deemed acceptable by the Bush administration.

Another such event took place in the late 1990s, according to a former military researcher. The American military attacked a Serbian telecommunications network and accidentally affected the Intelsat satellite communications system, whose service was hampered for several days.

These missions, which remain highly classified, are being scrutinized today as the Obama administration and the Pentagon move into new arenas of cyberoperations. Few details have been reported previously; mention of the proposal for a digital offensive against Iraq’s financial and banking systems appeared with little notice on Newsmax.com, a news Web site, in 2003.

The government concerns evoke those at the dawn of the nuclear era, when questions of military effectiveness, legality and morality were raised about radiation spreading to civilians far beyond any zone of combat.

“If you don’t know the consequences of a counterstrike against innocent third parties, it makes it very difficult to authorize one,” said James Lewis, a cyberwarfare specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.

“Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic” — conventional — “weapons,” said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement.”

Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that “cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive.”

That view is challenged by some legal and technical experts.

“It’s virtually certain that there will be unintended consequences,” said Herbert Lin, a senior scientist at the National Research Council and author of a recent report on offensive cyberwarfare. “If you don’t know what a computer you attack is doing, you could do something bad.”

Mark Seiden, a Silicon Valley computer security specialist who was a co-author of the National Research Council report, said, “The chances are very high that you will inevitably hit civilian targets — the worst-case scenario is taking out a hospital which is sharing a network with some other agency.”

And while such attacks are unlikely to leave smoking craters, electronic attacks on communications networks and data centers could have broader, life-threatening consequences where power grids and critical infrastructure like water treatment plants are increasingly controlled by computer networks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged.

Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman’s terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

“Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The U.N. Charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us...s/02cyber.html





After Links to Cybercrime, Latvian ISP is Cut Off
Robert McMillan

A Latvian ISP linked to online criminal activity has been cut off from the Internet, following complaints from Internet security researchers.

Real Host, based in Riga, Latvia was thought to control command-and-control servers for infected botnet PCs, and had been linked to phishing sites, Web sites that launched attack code at visitors and were also home to malicious "rogue" antivirus products, according to a researcher using the pseudonym Jart Armin, who works on the Hostexploit.com Web site. "This is maybe one of the top European centers of crap," he said in an e-mail interview.

"It was a cesspool of criminal activity," said Paul Ferguson a researcher with Trend Micro.

The ISP was disconnected from the Internet by its upstream provider, Junik, on Monday, after its provider, TeliaSonera told it to stop servicing Real Host or face sanctions Armin said.

Real Host was considered a "bullet proof" hosting provider, that would allow customers to remain online even after they had been linked to malicious activity. It had been linked to the Zeus botnet-making software.

This isn't the first time this type of hosting provider has been knocked offline. In the past year, at least three U.S. ISPs: Atrivo, McColo and 3FN have been unplugged after security researchers built cases against them. Atrivo and McColo were also taken offline by their upstream providers. 3FN was shut down by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

But according to Armin, this may be the "first time an international group has achieved this across borders and in Eastern Europe."

In the past, these takedowns have had a serious affect on spam. And while some observers reported a noticeable drop in spam over the weekend, security experts say that this was probably not attributable to the Real Host takedown.

Observers expect to see the criminal activity linked to Real Host resume soon, but they say that the takedown puts some pressure on the bad guys and the networks that provide service to them. "The precedent that's being set right now is that you need to take some responsibility for your network," said Lawrence Baldwin, owner of security research firm Mynetwatchman. "There actually are some consequences now for allowing an obviously heavy concentration of criminal activity on your networks. It's just not going to be accepted anymore."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...e-latvian.html





Hack Attack Silences Twitter, Facebook Sees Delays
Alexei Oreskovic

Twitter and Facebook, two of the Web's hottest hangouts, suffered service problems on Thursday, raising speculation that they had come under a pre-planned coordinated attack by hackers.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.

Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. The social networking site is working with Twitter and Google Inc to determine whether there was foul play, a person familiar with the company said.

The Twitter outage follows a wave of similar cyber attacks in July that disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter's blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Stone wrote.

A separate Twitter status Web page said: "As we recover, users will experience some long load times ... We're working to get back to 100 percent as quickly as we can."

The time stamp was listed as "3 hours ago," as of 2:05 p.m. EDT (1805 GMT).

Social Media, Antisocial Attacks

Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.

Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers," is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies.

The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.

Denial-of-service attacks are "not different than any other attack, but it's going to very visible to a huge population of people who have now, to some degree, become dependent on this next-generation, real-time service," he said.

A single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter and Facebook as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once, Gibson said.

"It seems a little too coincidental. They're like related services. They're similar. They're very popular," he said, but he pointed out it was just speculation so far.

Not everyone was concerned. For lawyer Zabi Nowald, it was just another day -- Twitter or no Twitter -- as he headed to work in downtown Los Angeles with a laptop in one hand and a Blackberry in the other.

"None of my friends do Twitter; none of my employers do," said Nowald, 27. "It affects my life zero. I lost something I never had."

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, additional reporting by Laura Isensee in Los Angeles, editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...57548520090806





Twitter, Facebook Attack Targeted One User
Elinor Mills

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks, and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them, if we can."

Kelly declined to speculate on who was behind the attack, but he said: "You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet."

Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and it suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

Cyxymu's LiveJournal page wasn't accessible, but a cached version showed that it was updated on Thursday with a message about the denial-of-service, or DoS, attacks on his accounts on the United States-based sites. "Now it's obvious it's a special attack against me and Georgians," said the message, in Russian.

The site also apologized for a spam e-mail attack in which the sender was spoofed and made to look like the e-mails were sent by him. Screenshots are shown. It's unclear whether or how the spam attack is related to the DoS attacks.

In the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the sites, computers that have been compromised by viruses or other malware are instructed by the attacker's computer to visit the specific Web sites all at the same time and repeatedly. The barrage of connection requests overwhelms the target sites, making it so that legitimate Web traffic can't get through.

Such coordinated attacks require the efforts of tens of thousands or more of hijacked computers, which together form a botnet. Spammers send e-mails with malicious attachments or URLs to millions of people to create botnets. Criminals also can lease existing botnets for specific campaigns for as little as 5 cents to 10 cents per bot.

A Facebook representative dismissed a theory that the attack was triggered by a spam campaign in which e-mails had links to the sites. It's unlikely that there would be enough recipients--all clicking on the URLs at the same time--to bring a site down, he said. There was a spam campaign that directed people to Cyxymu's accounts, but it wasn't the cause of the DoS, he said.

"The people who are coordinating this attack, the criminals, are definitely determined and using a lot of resources," Kelly said. "If they're asking our infrastructure to generate hundreds of pages a second, that's a lot of pages our users can't see."

Facebook and Google were able to minimize any impact to their sites, including Blogger, YouTube, and Google Sites, a free Web site service. Facebook even managed to keep the Cyxymu account accessible to Web surfers from that region, Kelly said, though it was inaccessible to people in other geographic areas, including San Francisco.

This was the first coordinated attack on the sites, and all the companies involved were working closely on the investigation, he said. "My team and the teams that are working together at all these companies are doing a really good job very quickly, and I'm proud and happy," he said.

Twitter and LiveJournal did not immediately return e-mails and calls seeking comment.

A Google representative offered this statement: "We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DoS attack this morning and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services."

Political conflicts between Russia and its former republic spilled online last year with DoS attacks and Web site defacements going in both directions.

For more information, listen to Larry Magid's podcast interview with Elinor Mills.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10305200-245.html





Silicon Valley's Secret Recipe
Sue Nelson

Spruce Pine, a modest, charmingly low-key town in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, is at the heart of a global billion-dollar industry.

Although this Mitchell County community calls itself the Mineral City, with just 2,000 residents one could dispute the city status. But when it comes to minerals, Spruce Pine has definitely undersold itself.

The jewellery shops, highlighting local emeralds, sapphires and amethysts, hint at the riches. The mountains, however, contain something far more precious than gemstones: they are a source of high-purity quartz.

This ultra-pure mineral is essential for building most of the world's silicon chips - without which you wouldn't be reading this article.

Geologist Alex Glover, of Active Minerals International, drove me to a disused mine to see this quartz for myself. Our jeep bumped across dried creek beds for miles until we reached two cathedral-like caverns of rock at Hoot Owl mine.

The rocks contain feldspar, silvery flakes of mica, flashes of garnet and smoky veins of quartz. "Fifty years ago men were throwing away the quartz," explained Mr Glover.

"But now it's prized and quartz is the high value item. These are the only places that this quartz is found on the planet."

Spruce Pine quartz is considered the best in the world and can sell for up to $50,000 (£30,000) a tonne.

It is made, like all quartz, of silicon and oxygen but the process of making a computer chip does not rely on its silicon; that can be obtained from common sand.

The clue to why quartz is needed is in the process of making a silicon wafer. These wafers are CD-sized slices of silicon upon which the chips are then etched with electronic circuitry.

Salami slicing

To make wafers, a seed crystal of silicon is heated to high temperatures in a giant mixing bowl until the molten, silvery metal can be stretched slowly upwards.

"It looks like a long cylinder, a bit like a salami," said Bob Carland, director of the Minerals Research Laboratory at North Carolina State University.

"As it comes out of this bowl, it all has one crystal and so everything is aligned the same way. The metal cylinder is then laid down and cut with a diamond saw into slices of salami - in this case it's slices of silicon wafers."

For these wafers to be made into silicon chips, the mixing bowls or crucibles must be as "clean" as possible.

"Any slight defect on the inside of that crucible will be transmitted and get sliced up into the chips," Mr Carland said.

"The amount of impurities in that chip is incredibly important. People producing these wafers will then have a lot of rejects so it's important that the chemistry of that bowl is near perfect."

Spruce Pine's high-purity quartz fits this requirement. It not only gets used for crucibles, but for benches and other instruments that produce the chips.

These chips are essential for today's modern world, but outside the industry, few people are aware of its dependence on quartz.

Unimin, one of the main mining corporations in the area, prefers to remain modest. It politely declines any interview, unwilling to reveal how it extracts quartz from the mountains.

Seen from the air, the scale of the operation reveals itself. The quartz mines are enormous, stretching down mountain faces in tiers of rock ending in pools of white sand.

'Serious commodity'

It's a far cry from how the mountain folk made their living.

Sixty-eight-year-old Ira Thomas is a ninth-generation miner who used to dig up aquamarines and prospect for mica as a child.

He now runs the Spruce Pine Gem Mine, a jewellery shop near the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, and is saddened by the loss of community among those who mine for quartz in industrial quantities.

"We have these huge corporations that have come in and bought out the little mom-and-pop operations," he said.

"These guys were just people like me that were lucky enough to lease a property that had minable quantities of whatever was on it."

Native Americans first mined these mountains but it was the arrival of a railroad in 1912 that gave later settlers the chance to exploit mica, feldspar and quartz on a much larger scale.

Today, in Mitchell County, one in 15 people works within the mining industry.

"That quartz plant just two miles down the road," he added, "is guarded like Fort Knox. That's a top-secret process. So we've got a serious commodity here."

He's right. The quartz plants are protected by security guards, gates and cameras and no one from the mining companies is allowed to talk to outsiders.

Lowell Presnell, historian and author of Mines, Miners and Minerals of Western North Carolina, isn't surprised.

"With the competition in the world today, they have to be really strict," Mr Presnell said, "because if they let their secrets out, somebody else is going to be doing this and they'll undercut their price."

There are also valuable jobs at stake. Since 2000, Mitchell County has lost a third of its manufacturing base and unemployment is at 14%.

North Carolina may be famous for its mountain folk and bluegrass music, but the mines are the only industry it has left.

So far, it is safe. Synthetic quartz is economically too expensive to take the place of Spruce Pine's high-purity mineral.

"It's the most valuable strategic square acreage on the planet," Mr Thomas said.

"Because the world runs on computers, we all know that now. And if we locked the gates to Mitchell County they could not make any more computers."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8178580.stm





Phone Lost 4 Days at Sea Found, Recharged, Returned

A mobile phone lost at sea for four days washed up in perfect condition in Taiwan after drifting 37 km (23 miles) and was discovered by a park lifeguard who tracked down the shocked owner to return it, the finder said on Friday.

Yu Hsin-leh of Taipei lost the phone on July 24 while snorkeling near the Taiwan port city of Keelung, Taiwan's United Daily News reported.

On Monday, it turned up in Longdong Bay Park on the island's northeasternmost cape after floating past numerous towns and rocky outcroppings.

A small water-resistant case had protected the phone at sea, said park lifeguard Lin Huan-chuan, who found it.

Lin said he recharged the battery and called Yu's wife by finding her in the phone's list of saved numbers.

"All the phone's functions were normal," Lin said. "The owner was extremely surprised as he figured he had lost it for good."

(Reporting by Ralph Jennings; Editing by Sugita Katyal)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE56U4A920090731





The Prospects of Microsoft Word in the Wiki-Based World

What will the future look like for office productivity behemoth Microsoft Word in a post-pring, wiki-based world? Ars writer Jeremy Reimer editorializes on whether Microsoft Word will—or will not—adapt to a drastically changed landscape.
Jeremy Reimer

I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs.

"You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt.

But it was true.

The first word processor I ever used was a combination of the PIE text editor and the TEXT formatter, both for CP/M, almost thirty years ago, back when computers were powered by tiny pterodactyls in cages. From there I jumped to DOS machines and the famous WordStar, once the most popular word processor of all time. Around 1987 I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS, version 3.0.

I used to laugh at the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS people, with their silly keyboard templates and inscrutable function-key combinations—I had proper menus and italic text that really looked italic! Of course I also had slow scrolling speeds in graphics mode to view those italics, and bizarre text transitions that would happen when I deleted invisible formatting commands.

Word for Windows 1.1 was a delight, with the transition to a GUI interface, then Word for Windows 2.0 both pleased me with a bevy of new features and frustrated me because it took twice the RAM just to get up in the morning. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I'm sure, have no sympathies). Word 95 was really just Word 6 with red squiggle spell checking and long filenames, and after that things pretty much stayed the same until Word 2007, when Microsoft changed the entire user interface because it was getting too hard to find all the new features they kept cramming in. Jensen Harris has a great series of posts examining the history of Word's user interface and the reasoning for the UI rewrite. It's actually somewhat astonishing to learn how many features Microsoft added in each version.

All in all, I've had a relationship with Microsoft Word for over two decades, with only a couple of brief dalliances with Ami Pro and DeScribe for OS/2 in between (they meant nothing to me—honest!) Thinking about how long I've used Word simply makes it all the more strange to realize that I don't need Word any more.

At all. Ever.

It's complicated

One of the great things about writing for the Web is that you get to contradict yourself, and both your initial statement and contradiction remain available forever for people to see and laugh at. My standard defense is that things change, and in our current world, change is happening faster than ever. Failing that, I fall back on the Whitman defense: "I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

For the longest time I was firmly in the camp that believed people would always want to use tools like Word because they offered so many features. In general, people prefer software with more features. This is an almost universal law of software: if it weren't true, software companies could never sell new versions of their products, because most people would already be satisfied with what they had. True, people claim to pine for the "good old days" when software was less complicated, and they insist that Word 5 was the greatest version of Word ever written, but their actions at the cash register negate their words.

Word not only has tons of features, but it lets you make documents that look pretty and important. We all want to feel pretty and important, so we'll all just keep using Word forever, and people will just have to deal with the ugly complexities of translating Word's complicated document format into manageable XML or other interchange formats. I've written about this before, but the short version is that Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML and completely open, simply because it has to support all the thousands of features that Word itself provides.

So why don't I need Word any more?

Print, out!

To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents. The thinking went something like this: I need to write my documents in Word because I want to share them with other people, and since everyone else has Word (sorry, WordPerfect fans) I'll need to use Word to make sure they can read my documents. Of course, thinking along these lines tended to end up with more people buying Word, something that Microsoft wasn't too upset about.

This led to a few people becoming very concerned about Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processing market, and in particular on the file format that Word used. Suddenly, it was a big deal that the Word format was a big binary blob, a sort of memory dump of whatever Word happened to be thinking about at the time. Despite the fact that all the makers of competing word processors had managed to do a passable job of converting .doc files for years, this was suddenly seen as a horribly unfair move by Microsoft that had to change. Even Microsoft thought the .doc format was a bad idea in an increasingly interconnected world, and started moving over to an XML-based format for Word 2003. The battle to establish Office XML as an ECMA and later an ISO standard, and the cries of proponents of the competing Open Office ODF XML format, became increasingly heated. This was suddenly an Epic War of File Formats, a fight to the death between the forces of good and evil, with good and evil being defined depending on whose side you were on.

What everyone had lost track of in the heat of battle was why we were still using Word (or OpenOffice Writer, which is—let's face it—just a clone of Word) to create documents that were likely never going to be printed.

Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called "Draft" that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to "Print Layout"—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to "know" what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.

Like many conventions of society (such as mutual gift-giving) we keep doing things in a certain way simply out of habit, long after the original need (a barter-based economy) has vanished. Think of how many people attach Word documents whenever they email a resume. Now, consider that Outlook uses Word as the default editor for email and think about just how silly this all is.

Go into any office today and you'll find people using Word to write documents. Some people still print them out and file them in big metal cabinets to be lost forever, but again this is simply an old habit, like a phantom itch on a severed limb. Instead of printing them, most people will email them to their boss or another coworker, who is then expected to download the email attachment and edit the document, then return it to them in the same manner. At some point the document is considered "finished", at which point it gets dropped off on a network share somewhere and is then summarily forgotten.

People keep doing this, but it is an astoundingly awful way to work. Here are just a few of the problems:

* People sometimes forget to attach the document to their email.
* The document can be too large—especially long documents with lots of images—and can clog up the email server.
* Nobody knows what edits were made and by whom. Sure, you can turn "Track Changes" on, but as it transforms your document into a horrible illegible mess, most people very quickly turn it off again.
* Nobody has any idea which is the most recent version of the document. This leads to amusing email flame wars where people insist that you adopt version control for your file names, which nobody ever does because they are too busy arguing about what the syntax should be. Even if you do manage to get version control, you are still never sure if you have the most recent version.
* People save the document in some directory on their hard drive and then forget where it is. The usual solution to this is to email the author again and ask them to resend it.
* People miss the email (usually because there are far too many emails in a day) and claim to have never received the document in the first place.

Even if you somehow manage to survive all these pitfalls and your document reaches the Holy Land of $some_random_network_share, your troubles are just beginning. Now nobody knows where your document is, so they have to pester you to tell them. Once you tell them, they'll usually find that they don't have access to that network share. If they do manage to get access, they'll typically open the document and leave it open for an extended period of time, and now you can't edit your own document because it is locked for "Read Only" access. So inevitably you'll save your own modified copy on your local hard drive, and the whole agonizing dance begins again.

Why do we do this? Because everyone uses Word, so we have to. And why does everyone use Word? Because everyone uses Word. It starts to make sense if you just hit your head on the wall enough times.

It's not even Word's fault, really, that these problems happen. Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don't work that way anymore. Microsoft has added a metric ton of collaboration features to Word over the years to try and adapt to this reality, from Track Changes to Sharepoint integration. I've used almost all of them, and not only are they somewhat clunky, but getting other people to use them is like pushing a rock uphill. There has to be a better way.
Alternatives

While working at my job as a technical writer for a small Vancouver-based software company, I thought a lot about what sort of document management system would relieve us from the quagmire of having hundreds of Word documents strewn about various servers and network shares. There were many different options to choose from. Some, like Sharepoint, had the advantage of being bundled with professional versions of Office and—as already mentioned—integrated with Word. Others, like Documentum, boasted of industrial-strength features and came with an industrial-strength price. On the other side of the equation were free, open-source wiki programs supposedly designed to solve this exact business problem.

My criteria were as follows: whatever system I chose had to be easy enough to use that people other than myself would actually use it. (It wasn't that my coworkers weren't smart—quite the opposite—but demands on their time were huge and learning a complicated document system was somewhere below learning Esperanto on their priority list). It had to be fast so that people wouldn't get frustrated by it. It should be scalable, so that people would trust all their documents to it and not worry about it falling over. And finally, while price wasn't a huge concern, it would be nice if it didn't cost as much as a room full of developers.

I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. Since everyone has read Wikipedia, the interface was familiar and so our users needed no training. Because Wikipedia managed to efficiently store—at the time of this writing—all human knowledge, speed and scalability weren't a problem. Finally, the price (free) was acceptable.

The real win, however, was that everyone started using it. The developers use it. Our architect uses it. The testers use it. Even my boss uses it! Within a few months, the whole company was on board, and it had transformed our office's documentation landscape. The advantages were obvious:

* Everyone was always reading the most recent version of any document.
* The entire history of changes was tracked, and anyone could revert any change, so nothing was ever lost.
* Many people could work on the same document at the same time, thanks to built-in source control and the ability to edit small chunks of a document without affecting the rest of the page.
* You could see who made which change with a single click.
* Documents could be linked together in sensible ways.
* The entire database was searchable and always fully indexed, so anyone could find any document instantly.

Of course, not everything was perfect. There were still those acres of Word documents to convert, but this was surprisingly easy. A simple CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V dance and the text has made its way onto the wiki. All that had to be done then was to add the ==header== and ===subheader=== markup text around the headers and subheaders. (I've played with some wikis that attempt to preserve Word's formatting and allow GUI editing in a Web form, but the results are typically horrible. Plain text is almost always a better way to go). Wikipedia's CSS files automatically make everything look pretty, and more importantly, consistently pretty. Images have to be added manually, but you can store high-resolution images and display smaller versions on the page, so it's actually a net win. There is still the problem of being unable to edit documents while on trains or planes, but universal wireless Internet access is arriving so fast that this issue is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

So that's basically the end of Word at work. Well, at my workplace at least. I have a friend who spends hours and hours taking Word XML documents and untangling them programmatically to extract their data into other formats, and I'm glad I don't have his job. Other friends use Word at work as a matter of course, simply because nobody wants to change. Change is a funny thing, though. One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappeared—because a better alternative arrived. Word—and I know I'll be attacked for saying this—is the new typewriter.

Maybe I'm wrong. Software is, after all, infinitely adjustable, something that typewriters aren't. Microsoft has put some effort into making Word part of the new Web-based world, such as adding support to post an article directly to a blog, including uploading pictures. It's worth noting, however, that this feature was added as a last-minute afterthought. Word, at its advanced age, is unlikely to change what it fundamentally is at the core. For me, the program no longer serves any purpose in my life. Maybe Word 2010 could win me back, but I doubt it. The love is gone, and all the new features in the world won't bring it back.

I've even abandoned Word for my own personal writing. These days, all my writing is destined for the Web, but I still need a place to compose my initial drafts. I can basically use anything for this—I've used NotePad, TextEdit, even FinalWriter on my Amiga. In the end, however, I settled on a very slick software program called Scrivener, available for OS X. It simplifies and enhances the writing process by using a model based around user-defined document sections, not pages of virtual paper. Scrivener has a decent "Save as HTML" feature, which, unlike Word's, produces sane and readable HTML, but even that needs to be cleaned up somewhat before it can be sent to the Web. A much simpler solution is to just copy and paste the text. Where do I paste into? The now-ubiquitous Web text entry box, available on every blog, content management system, and wiki on the planet. It's fast and simple, the perfect combination for our accelerated world.

So farewell, Microsoft Word. Don't feel too bad—you had a long and prosperous run. We had more than twenty years of fun together. You added feature after feature after feature, and I learned how to avoid your crazy style changes whenever I deleted an invisible formatting command. Maybe if you just had "Reveal Codes"… nah, it wouldn't have mattered. The world simply changed.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...t-in-peace.ars





Windows 7 Bug Likely Not a 'Showstopper'
Ina Fried

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is looking into reports of a potential bug in the final version of Windows 7. However, Microsoft's top Windows executive said in a blog posting that the issue appears to be neither widespread, nor the "showstopper" that some are claiming it to be.

The issue, noted on several enthusiast sites this week, involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk. Under certain scenarios, the site suggested Windows 7 would siphon off all the available memory to perform the scan, potentially crashing the system.

One report went so far as to characterize the issue as a potential "showstopper" that might derail the product's launch, while others such as ZDNet's Ed Bott have downplayed the threat.

However, in the discussion on one of the blogs, top Windows executive Steven Sinofsky said that the company is looking into the issue. But, he said that the company hasn't reproduced the crashing issue, nor has it gotten widespread reports of crashes.

"While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level," Sinofsky wrote on the site. "Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC...So far this is not one of those issues."

Microsoft finalized the code for Windows 7 two weeks ago and is preparing to release it to developers in Microsoft's MSDN and Technet programs on Thursday, as well as make it available to some large businesses on Friday. Those plans are continuing, a Microsoft representative said on Wednesday.

The Microsoft representative also confirmed that Sinofsky's comments were authentic and that Microsoft was looking into the issue, but declined to comment further.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10304225-56.html





Ubuntu's New Firefox Is Watching You
sukotto

Ubuntu recently released an unannounced and experimental "multisearch" extension to Firefox alpha 3, apparently in an effort to improve the default behavior of new tabs and of search. In a response to one of the initial bug reports the maintainers mentioned that the extension's other purposes were "collecting the usage data" and "generating revenue." Since this extension installs by itself and offers no warning about potential privacy violations, quite a few people (myself included) feel pretty unhappy. The only way to opt out is to disable the extension manually via Tools > Add-ons.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/...s-Watching-You





Hackers Whack Music Industry For Punishing Pirate
enigmax

Hackers have taken revenge on the music industry after Romania’s first convicted file-sharer was given a heavy fine. The industry said they had selected the individual at random, but hackers responded rather less randomly by causing the music industry website to blocked as malicious by both Google and Firefox.

The Romanian music industry has claimed its first legal victory against one of the country’s file-sharers. After getting access to a Direct Connect hub in 2007 they allegedly used basic techniques to select an individual at random - who just happened to be sharing 66GB of music files.

The copyright to those files was held by members of Uniunea Productorilor de Fonograme din România (UPFR) - a music industry outfit much like the RIAA.

UPFR denies they took the large amount the user was sharing into consideration when pursuing the case, but when the individual was ordered to pay the equivalent of a $4,100 fine this week, it had clearly been taken into account. At the end of 2008, the average monthly income in Romania was just $450.

These symbolic prosecutions have become the hallmark of the music industry and it’s hoped this case will have a deterrent effect on the country’s hundreds of thousands of file-sharers, but that seems unlikely. The same approach hasn’t worked elsewhere and although this lone case has dragged on for 2 years already, it will be quickly forgotten.

Those annoyed at the handing down of a heavy fine took rather less time to issue their punishment. In common with similar traditions all over the world, the UPFR music industry website was targeted by hackers in a revenge attack. It’s not clear exactly what they did to it, but their actions caused the domain to become blocked as a malicious site by both Google and Firefox, which seems kinda fitting.
http://torrentfreak.com/hackers-whac...pirate-090802/





Free the Kindle!





First Ever Criminal Prosecution for Domain Name Theft Underway
Adam Strong

barsOver the years hundreds of stories of domain name theft have been reported, most famous among them of course is the theft of Sex.com. Even as recent as last week, reports of stolen domains sent a chilling reminder through the domain industry as valuable domains Before.com, Adios.com and others were stolen from Warren Weitzman. Until recently, there hasn’t been a case of a domain theft where the thief was caught and arrested. However, on July 30th, Daniel Goncalves was arrested at his home in Union, New Jersey and charged in a landmark case, the first criminal arrest for domain name theft in the United States.

In a similar fashion to the Sex.com theft, the events that led to Goncalves arrest involve a long back story, one that spans well over 2 years, and many players. Although insiders familiar with this case contend that Goncalves has stolen other valuable domains, this case centers on the theft and subsequent sale of the domain name P2P.com.

The Victims

In 2005, internet entrepreneur and domain name investor Marc Ostrofsky and attorney Albert Angel along with his wife Lesli Angel partnered to purchase the domain name P2P.com for $160,000 from a Wisconsin company, Port to Print Inc. The domain industry was heating up in 2005, as was the emerging peer to peer music business and the co-owners of the domain name saw a great deal of potential with this investment and future development of the domain.

Ostrofsky is a well known investor in the domain space. His name was etched in domain name history with his 1999 sale of Business.com for $7.5 million and the multi-million dollar domain holding company,IREIT, that he helped form with investment backing from Howard Schulz and Ross Perot. Albert Angel is an attorney and former Justice Department prosecutor with a background in internet payment processing. Angel and Ostrofsky have known each other for over 25 years and have done business together in other ventures.

The Angel’s had already invested in a small portfolio of domain names including profreedom.com and drugoverdose.com (2 more domains reportedly stolen by Goncalves). As a nurse who dealt with teen drug abuse issues, Lesli Angel became interested in buying and building sites on domains in the late 90’s. Domains such as drugoverdose.com gave her a means to reach out to some of the same audience that she was already helping as a nurse. As the domain space heated up, Angel continued buying domains and built up a portfolio of around 800 domain names.

The Accused

Daniel Goncalves, the 25 year old law firm computer technician arrested on Thursday, reportedly hacked in to the Angel’s AOL email account, used that information to retrieve the login details for the P2P.com from the Godaddy.com domain account. Goncalves performed an internal “domain push” transfer,which in effect transfered the domain name to another Godaddy account that he owned. Goncalves reportedly also falsified Paypal.com transaction records in an attempt to cover his trail and provide evidence that made it appear that he purchased the domain name for $900 from the Angels. The domain was listed in the name of Daniel Louvado during this time period (a bogus name consisting of Goncalves first name and his fiances last name).

In late 2006, Goncalves put the domain name P2P.com up for sale on eBay.com and on September 24, 2006 the eBay.com auction for the domain P2P.com closed in the amount of $111,000. The Angels pointed out to DNN that from their investigations Goncalves already owned his own home with a new inground pool being installed (in New Jersey?), drove a Lotus and Mercedes and was frequently bragging about his travels.

The Baller

Caught in the middle of this and claiming to be a “good faith” purchaser is Mark Madsen, NBA basketball player with the LA Clippers. Madsen is reportedly also a domain name investor and was the buyer of the P2P.com domain name on eBay.com. Domaintools.com Whois history shows that Madsen took ownership of the domain name on February 28, 2007. Current whois records for the domain show that the domain name is protected with whois privacy protection, but according to insiders familiar with the case the current owner is still Madsen. Madsen has been investing in domain names for years and has been linked to the user name thecollins2 in some domain name forums and the company Woodside Technology Group.

The Gatekeepers?

Godaddy.com is the world’s largest domain name registrar. With over 30 million domains being managed, it’s safe to assume the registrar has been faced with a few cases of domain name theft. The domain name P2P.com was registered with Godaddy.com and all evidence from whois history records points to the domain name being moved internally to a new account within Godaddy. The domain name now uses Godaddy’s whois privacy services to hide the ownership. According to the Angels, Godaddy stone-walled many efforts to investigate the theft and in a final passing of the buck, the Angels say that Godaddy told them that they should have been better defended against hackers and must bear the risk. It’s clear that the domain name was pushed between 2 accounts. The Angels contend that subpoenaed Godaddy.com records reveal that the registrar knew that Goncalves was implicated in two other domain thefts at least one month prior to the discovery of the P2P.com theft.

In many cases, intricate registrar contracts, safe-harbor laws and statutory exemptions protect domain name registrars from being held liable in domain theft cases. Cases like Kremen v. Cohen (Sex.com stolen) and Solid Host v. Namecheap however have carved new paths in applying the law to cases involving registrars and domain name theft. The P2P.com civil and criminal cases will use these decisions and likely even lay new ground for future decisions.

The Professionals

Joshua Pelissero, a self-described legend in tracking domain thieves, was enlisted by the Angels to help unwind the events that happened after the domain theft and to find additional evidence of Goncalves online activities. Domain investor Richard Lau and Ellen Rony, expert witness from the Sex.com case were also tapped to help uncover more information about the case. The Angel’s and more specifically Lesli Angel have been tracking Daniel Goncalves and building up evidence for over 2 years. With the help of Pelissero, Lau, and Rony the pieces of the puzzle began to fall together and the evidence began to become more clear. Angel told us “this business is not for the faint of heart. You have to know what your doing and be educated.” With these pros backing up their efforts, the Angels made a great deal of progress.

The Case

In the Spring of 2007, the Angel’s took their case to prosecutors in both New Jersey and Florida. The investigation proceeded in Florida since the Angels are Florida residence, meanwhile the New Jersey police, where the accused resides, put their case on hold. Three months after taking the case, Florida prosecutors dropped it for “lack of evidence”. The only recourse left for the Angel’s was to pursue Goncalves through a civil action. They used the Freedom of Information Act to gather up the evidence from the Florida prosecutors investigations and continued in their vigilance, building up an even stronger civil case.

The civil suit against Daniel Goncalves and Mark Madsen was filed in November 2007 to retrieve the P2P.com domain name. After further discovery, the filing was amended in June of 2009 to include new defendents, Goncalves brother (on RICO conspiracy grounds) and Godaddy.com (for negligence and contributory trademark infringement under Anti-Cyber Piracy statute). The civil suit is still ongoing but but as of Thursday Goncalves is also now facing criminal charges.

Months after the Florida prosecutors dropped the original investigation, Detective Sergeant John Gorman of the New Jersey State Police Cyber-Crimes Unit reviewed and reignited the P2P.com case, asking the couple if they would like to pursue it further. The Angels traveled to New Jersey and presented the mountains of evidence and findings that they had been accumulating over the last 2 years. In May of 2009 the NJ District Attorney approved the indictment and on July 30th Goncalves was arrested at his home and his computers seized.

According to the P2P.com theft victims, this marks the first time in the US that a domain name theft has resulted in an arrest. Detective Sergeant, John Gorman of the New Jersey Cyber-Crimes Unit is responsible for reviving this case. Without his push to move this case forward it’s likely another domain theft would have just been left to be handled through a civil case. Albert Angel told DNN “these hackers basically thumb their nose at the legal system.” With the criminal prosecution moving forward, these cyber-criminals, who often taunt their victims with a brazen “what are you going to do about it” attitude, now may actually face the long-arm of the law.

So why are these thieves escaping justice and why aren’t we hearing more about these cases?

Simply put, Complications

Cases of domain name theft have not typically involved a criminal prosecution because of the complexities, financial restraints and sheer time and energy involved. If a domain name is stolen, the victim of the crime in most cases would need experience with the technical and legal intricies associated with the domain name system. To move the case forward, they would also need a law enforcement professional who understands the case or is willing to take the time to learn. For example, the Angel’s told us that in their case they called their local law enforcement in Florida who sent a uniformed officer in a squad car to their home. The first thing you can imagine the officer asked was, “What’s a domain?”.

Additionally financial restraints play a major role. Often times the rightful owners of these domains simply can’t justify the thousands of dollars in legal fees necessary to handle a case like this. Domains that don’t have the sort of value that a domain like P2P.com has in the aftermarket may still contain a value that only the original owner can appreciate. Good luck convincing a law enforcement professional that your domain name is valuable under those circumstances. It’s likely that many small business owners faced with this situation would simply give up. Lesli Angel told DNN “we’re fortunate enough to be in a position where we can go after the criminals . . .what if you weren’t in our position though?” Pelissero stated that most of the domains he has helped recover were owned by people who didn’t have the means, desire or knowledge to track down the thieves and get their domain name back. “I had a domain stolen from me before, so I know what it’s like to have that happen. It’s horrible and I was only out $10,000″ said Pelissero. “This could happen to anyone and there really is no recourse especially for someone without financial means,” stated Angel.

Complicating the matter further is that domain names are globally traded assets and jurisdiction muddies the waters further. In this particular case, the domain name was stolen from a registrar headquartered in Arizona, the domain was owned by a Florida resident and the accused is a resident of New Jersey. Add to it that the domain registry is located in Virginia. Frankly, the owners were lucky that this all took place on US soil. Imagine how much more complicated a case like this could become if involved international parties.

Attorney Paul Keating told DNN that most cases of domain theft recovery that he has dealt with have been complicated at best. The real problem stems from the fact that domain names aren’t considered property. “The laws do not specifically identify domains as property. That has been the subject of various court decisions. Not all courts have issued consistent decisions. For example, bankruptcy courts have no difficulty treating domains as property. The IRS treats domains as a form of intellectual property and allows amortization along the lines of a trademark though over a shorter period,” Keating said. Further complications come in to play when we look at the rulings in different states. “California is believed to treat them as property after the Sex.com case but that was a federal decision interpreting California law. The Eastern District of Virginia (where the Verisign registry is headquartered) clearly holds domains to be the subject of a license and thus not property. I have been involved in various state-level cases seeking recovery of stolen names or trying to specifically enforce a domain purchase agreement in California and the courts have always honored the claim.”

Albert Angel summed it up well “If your car is stolen and you demand its return from a subsequent purchaser for value, you recover your car in 50 states, on well-settled common law principles. Try to recover a stolen domain name, and you have a decent chance perhaps in one state (CA) but you have bought yourself an expensive, and legally uncertain lawsuit in most other states.” In California the Express.com domain name case actually ruled that the stolen domain be returned to the rightful owner after it was purchased by a third party. In the Express Media v. Express Corp. case domain investor Greg Ricks purchased the stolen domain name from a thief contending the purchase was in good faith, but was ordered to return the domain to the original owners. This however was just one case in one State. Angel contends that “Short of such laws being created on a Federal basis or by each State, any business owner could lose their domain name and website and never legally be able to retrieve it. Federal laws are needed to protect every company and individual domain name owner.”

These complications and hurdles however seemed to be no match for the vigilant Albert and Lesli Angel. In fact when talking to the victims, one realizes that the hacker who stole the P2P.com domain from this group couldn’t have picked a worse target. I’m sure if Goncalves knew he was going to be facing the challenge of a team consisting of Ostrofsky, a well-known and connected player in the domain space, Albert Angel, an experienced attorney and Lesli Angel, a vigilant former nurse who told us she “just can’t stand to see anyone suffering”, he may have reconsidered some of his actions.

When asked what drove their continued vigilance in pursuing this case for over 2 years Lesli Angel told DNN “Besides wanting our domain back, we want to carve a path for others. Let’s face it the legal system has not caught up with the growth of the internet. We hope the outcome of this case paves the way and makes it easier for victims of this type of crime. These guys are thieves! Why are they not being arrested? Why are they continuing to get away with this?”

Goncalves is now out of jail after posting $60,000 bond. He will be facing at least 2 court cases in the future, a civil case and now a criminal case. The NJ prosecutors intend to push forward with the criminal case and press for a felony conviction. DNN will be following the case closely and provide updates as we receive them.
http://www.domainnamenews.com/featur...-underway/5675





UK National ID Card Cloned in 12 Minutes
Ian Grant

The prospective national ID card was broken and cloned in 12 minutes, the Daily Mail revealed this morning.

The newspaper hired computer expert Adam Laurie to test the security that protects the information embedded in the chip on the card.

Using a Nokia mobile phone and a laptop computer, Laurie was able to copy the data on a card that is being issued to foreign nationals in minutes.

He then created a cloned card, and with help from another technology expert, changed all the data on the new card. This included the physical details of the bearer, name, fingerprints and other information.

He then rewrote data on the card, reversing the bearer's status from "not entitled to benefits" to "entitled to benefits".

He then added fresh content that would be visible to any police officer or security official who scanned the card, saying, "I am a terrorist - shoot on sight."

According to the paper, Home Office officials said the foreign nationals card uses the same technology as the UK citizens card that will be issued from 2012.

Guy Herbert, general secretary of privacy lobby group NO2ID, said it was a mistake to assume that the Home Office cared about the card, or identity theft or citizens' benefit.

He said the Home Office wanted the central database to record citizens' personal details in one place for official convenience.

"It is that database which will deliver unprecedented power over our lives to Whitehall and make the Home Office king in Whitehall. The card is an excuse to build the database. If the card is cancelled it already intends to use passports as a secondary excuse," he said.

Home Office officials said they were working on a response to the story, and would issue a statement later today.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...12-minutes.htm





Rivalry Between Apple and Palm Intensifies
Jenna Wortham

The Palm Pre has a large touch screen, slide-out keyboard and fast Web browsing. Palm also likes to point out that another selling point is the smartphone’s ability to link to iTunes, Apple’s music and media store.

Trouble is, Apple wants to make sure the iPhone is the only cellphone that can do that. So it changed its software to block the Pre’s access to iTunes.

Now Palm is calling foul and is trying to rally the consumer electronics industry to its defense. Palm says that Apple, which allows only its own devices to connect directly with iTunes software, is misusing the standards put in place to foster interoperability between computers and devices using a U.S.B. connection.

Palm has filed a complaint with the U.S.B. Implementers Forum, an industry group established by technology companies that developed the technology that links computers to other electronic devices, claiming Apple is restraining trade. Predicting the outcome of this particular filing is tricky, said Mike Abramsky, an analyst with the investment firm RBC Capital Markets.

“There isn’t much precedent for this case,” he said. “It’s breaking new ground. In my mind, ultimately the users are the arbiters in the outcome of these situations.”

The forum declined to comment on when it would respond to Palm’s filing.

Currently, Palm, which once again has the Pre synching with iTunes, accomplishes the feat by duping the iTunes software into recognizing the phone as an Apple music player, allowing it to synchronize and transfer files between the phone and a personal computer. The tactic has raised some eyebrows among those who think that Palm’s approach itself is a breach of the standards set by the U.S.B. governing board.

But Palm says its strategy of masquerading as an iPod is acceptable because it is in response to Apple’s restriction. “We think we are consistent with our compliance,” said Douglas B. Luftman, an associate general counsel for Palm. “We’re not trying to appear to be anything we’re not — except for interoperability purposes with iTunes.”

Other devices not made by Apple work with iTunes, but generally require an additional download or intermediary step to work. Palm’s strategy, which allows an effortless connection between the smartphone and iTunes, is a first for the industry.

If anything, Palm’s sparring with Apple underscores “how critical the iTunes ecosystem has become for consumers,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president for strategy and analysis at Interpret, a market research firm based in Los Angeles and New York. “ITunes is the center of gravity where consumers keep their content.”

Palm is not the only company clashing with Apple over its hardware and software policies. Google and Apple are tussling over Apple’s refusal to allow certain Google applications on the phone. On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission said it was looking into those actions.

For Palm and Apple, the iTunes battle is part of a bigger rivalry. The Palm Pre, introduced in June to glowing reviews, has been lauded as a worthy competitor to the iPhone. The competition is also set against Palm’s luring some of Apple’s senior executives. Jonathan J. Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive, once oversaw iPod development at Apple, and Mike Bell, senior vice president for product development, is another Apple alumnus.

“It’s possible Apple is worried that customers might start buying Palm phones instead of iPhones or iPods,” said J. Gerry Purdy, the chief analyst of mobile and wireless at the research firm Frost & Sullivan.

Mr. Gartenberg, the analyst at Interpret, agreed. “Apple understands that seamless relationship between the iPod, the iPhone and iTunes,” he said. “It’s a big driver behind why consumers are buying their devices, and they’re going to try and protect that.”

Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, said, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of iTunes software may no longer provide synching functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

The stakes are especially high for Palm, which once dominated the smartphone market with its Treo handsets. The company, which has been steadily losing market share since 2007, is counting on the Pre to reverse its fortunes. Paul Coster, an analyst with J. P. Morgan who follows the company, estimated that Palm shipped close to 180,000 devices in its first two weeks and could reach as many as 2.5 million in the fiscal year ending in May 2010.

For Pre owners, accessing iTunes is important, said Katie Mitic, senior vice president for product marketing at Palm. “We appreciate that many, many of our consumers use iTunes as their music or photo management system,” she said. “We just want to make it as easy as possible for them to use it on the Pre.”

Of course, the Pre also has software restrictions on synching with the Zune, the portable media player that is Microsoft’s answer to the iPod, but since it has few users, Palm is not fighting for access there. “The Zune has a much smaller market share,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “There are fewer people using it to control their media, so there are very few other vendor devices who are saying they want to hook into the Zune software.”

Palm’s tiff with Apple also has some people wondering why Apple even bothers. Mr. Purdy, the analyst, described Apple’s decision to thwart Palm’s working with iTunes as “shooting themselves in the foot.”

“All this means is that Palm’s customers would be able to purchase music through iTunes,” Mr. Purdy said. “This would offer an opportunity for increased revenue for Apple.”

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia who specializes in telecommunications law, copyright and international trade, said, “There’s something very unseemly about what Apple is doing.” He added, “It’s very counter to the ideals of openness, which is a concept Apple pioneered in computing.” In 2007, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, issued a call to the music industry for openness, titled “Thoughts on Music.”

As for Palm, Mr. Wu said, “It sounds like an uphill battle, in terms of trying to stop Apple from doing this.”

But Palm may have a shot. “The history suggests that openness wins,” said Mr. Wu, citing examples like AT&T’s attempts to restrict the devices attached to its phone lines and Apple’s early attempts to sell printers that worked only with Macs.

It was not immediately clear how long Palm planned to battle future software patches from Apple that disable the smartphone’s compatibility with iTunes. The company did not say whether it would pursue lawsuits or enlist government aid on restraint of trade grounds.

“This is a classic technology cat-and-mouse game,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “It often comes down to which side tires first.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/te...es/04palm.html





Apple Tried to Silence Owner of Exploding iPod with Gagging Order
Murad Ahmed


(Steve Morgan/The Times)
Ellie Stanborough, 11, with the device. "It made a hissing
noise and went pop"

Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child’s iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company.

The Times has learnt that the company would offer the family a full refund only if they were willing to sign a settlement form. The proposed agreement left them open to legal action if they ever disclosed the terms of the settlement.

The case echoes previous circumstances in which Apple attempted to hush up incidents when its devices overheated.

Ken Stanborough, 47, from Liverpool, dropped his 11-year-old daughter Ellie’s iPod Touch last month. “It made a hissing noise,” he said. “I could feel it getting hotter in my hand, and I thought I could see vapour”. Mr Stanborough said he threw the device out of his back door, where “within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10ft in the air”.

Mr Stanborough contacted Apple and Argos, where he had bought the device for £162. After being passed around several departments, he spoke to an Apple executive on the telephone. As a result of the conversation, Apple sent a letter to Mr Stanborough denying liability but offering a refund.

The letter also stated that, in accepting the money, Mr Stanborough was to “agree that you will keep the terms and existence of this settlement agreement completely confidential”, and that any breach of confidentiality “may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties”.

“I thought it was a very disturbing letter,” said Mr Stanborough, who is self-employed and works in electronic security. He refused to sign it.

“They’re putting a life sentence on myself, my daughter and Ellie’s mum, not to say anything to anyone. If we inadvertently did say anything, no matter what, they would take litigation against us. I thought that was absolutely appalling.

“We didn’t ask for compensation, we just asked for our money back,” he added.

Last week it emerged that Apple had tried to keep a number of cases where its iPod digital music players had started to smoke, burst into flames and even burned their owners, out of the public eye.

An American reporter obtained 800 pages of documentation on the cases from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) following a Freedom of Information Act request in that country. However, she was unable to get hold of the documents for months after “Apple’s lawyers filed exemption after exemption”.

In those cases, CPSC investigators suggested that the iPods’ lithium ion batteries could be the source of the problem.

In 2006 Apple and Dell recalled millions of lithium ion batteries because of overheating problems in laptop computers causing fires — some of the biggest consumer electronics recalls in history. As of September last year, 173,000,000 iPods have been sold worldwide.

A number of bloggers have reported cases where iPods have exploded — usually involving older versions of the digital music players. Last year the Japanese Government warned that iPod Nanos presented a potential fire risk, saying there had been 14 cases in the country where the players had caught alight, with two people suffering minor burns.

In March, a mother in Ohio began court proceedings against Apple, after her son’s iPod Touch allegedly exploded in his pocket, burning his leg.

An Apple spokesman said that, as the company had not looked at the Stanboroughs’ damaged iPod, it could not comment. Argos also refused to comment.

The Trading Standards Institute said that it could not comment on whether such letters were standard across the industry, but that it could understand that Apple would want to protect its reputation by trying to reach a confidential settlement.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle6736587.ece





Move to End Flow of Fake iPhones
Andrew Colley

APPLE is working with the Australian Customs Service in a bid to stem the flow of thousands of counterfeit iPhones entering the local market from China.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company had supplied Australian Customs authorities with details of its trademarks in a bid to help the agency block the entry of iPhone counterfeits into the country.

Apple was acting on a tip from The Australian, which conducted a street-level investigation of an illegal operation to sell the fake phones in Sydney's pubs and to travellers at backpacker hostels.

Counterfeit sellers were asking for up to $400 for the fake units on the street, to take a margin of nearly $345 on the $55 wholesale price quoted by illegal importers.

One seller said he sourced his supply from an employee within Customs. The seller, who refused to supply a name, claimed that the employee used his position to circumvent Customs' usual vetting procedures to import the contraband in shipments of 5000 and 10,000 each.

He said his supplier acquired the phones in China at a cost of $18.50 per unit.

If the claims are true the scale of the operation dwarfs any that the Customs has recently discovered.

Customs said that last year it confiscated 3200 suspected counterfeit mobile phones and MP3 players in 83 seizures.

The tout The Australian spoke to said he recently narrowly missed out on securing a deal to purchase a shipment of 5000 units.

The Australian had an opportunity to compare the unit with an authentic iPhone. Superficially, it was hard to distinguish from a real iPhone and it seemed the counterfeiters could be using the shells intended for the assembly of authentic units.

On closer inspection of the fake phone, an obvious flaw was revealed. It carried markings identical to those of Apple-authorised iPhones. But a portion of the shell that contains a small access recess for a switch on the authentic unit is left empty, exposing the electronics inside.

Its touch-screen and application icons were nowhere near as polished as those in authentic units, but it did offer equivalent features. It could play music transferred to the phone from a computer by USB cable and its seller claimed the software could be updated and improved.

"(The customers) generally want to have something that looks like the real thing, so they can say that they have an iPhone," the seller said.

The tout said the fake units were popular among travellers and that some sellers were able to use the units as a form of portable wealth to fund their world trips.

The sellers courier a small amount from their supply of units ahead to their next destination to avoid passing through customs with large amounts of cash, and then sell them on arrival to finance their stay.

Recent media reports indicate that the fake units are gaining as much acceptance as the authentic units. Web users have started showcasing an iPhone "Mini" -- Apple doesn't manufacture a miniature version of the iPhone -- and other fake units on YouTube.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Rejected By Apple, iPhone Developers Go Underground
Brian X. Chen

Apple is the exclusive gatekeeper to its iPhone App Store, able to reject apps at will — as it did July 28 with Google Voice. But some developers aren’t taking the rejection lying down: They’re turning instead to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, where forbidden wares continue to exist — and even earn developers some money.

That store is operated by Jay Freeman, more fondly known in the iPhone “Jailbreak” community as Saurik. Only five months old, his app store Cydia specializes in selling apps that Apple would reject or ban (or already has). To use Cydia or the apps available through it, customers need to jailbreak their phones — hack them to work around Apple-imposed restrictions — a process that Apple claims is illegal.

Indeed, you can even get a Google Voice app, GV Mobile, through Cydia. After Apple pulled the app from its App Store, developer Sean Kovacs (who is not affiliated with Google) made it available for free through Cydia.

It’s difficult to get accurate data on how many customers have jailbroken their iPhones. But based on the number of unique device identifiers tracked on his server, Freeman claims that about 4 million, or 10 percent of the 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners to date, have installed Cydia. On a recent day, he said 470,000 people were connecting to the Cydia store, up from 350,000 per day just a few months ago. Among many free apps, there are also 15 paid apps in Cydia, and the store has earned $220,000 in overall sales in just five months.

“People are so annoyed by Apple and their shit, and if you give them opportunity to go around it, then they’ll even pay for it,” said Kim Streich, a developer whose app 3G Unrestrictor earned $19,000 in sales in just two weeks through Cydia.

Though Cydia is relatively young, the underground “Jailbreak” community has existed since the first iPhone launched in 2007. That year, Apple didn’t yet have an app store for its iPhone, stifling the true potential of the device. This limitation inspired digital rebels to hack away at the iPhone’s closed platform in an effort to free its mind. The result? An app called Installer, opening a door for early iPhone owners to add games, utilities and other third-party software coded by developers.

It wasn’t until 2008 that Apple offered a software development kit for third-party coders to make programs for its iPhone. That led to the opening of the official App Store in July 2008. Apple’s store grew rapidly, accumulating 65,000 apps and serving over 1.5 billion downloads to date. Many developers abandoned Installer for the more popular App Store, leaving behind an underground space where unauthorized wares could continue to exist. Installer died and became reborn as Cydia, which evolved from an app library into a store in March 2009.

To gain access to Cydia, iPhone owners must jailbreak their smartphones using some freely available tools courtesy of the hacker group iPhone Dev-Team. Given the nature of this procedure, it’s clear Cydia’s primary audience consists of nerdy rebels wishing to utilize the full power of their iPhones, restriction-free.

Cydia’s numbers appear small compared to the rare stories we hear about developers turning into millionaires with hot sales of their iPhone apps in the App Store. But the idea behind a store like Cydia is that you don’t have to be huge to make money. With a smaller market, fewer competitors and a reasonably large customer base, each developer has a higher chance for making a quick buck, Freeman said. Plus, you get more personal attention: Developers submitting their app through Cydia need only contact Freeman, and their app can be made available almost immediately. That’s an enticing alternative to Apple’s approval process, which can take months and is notoriously opaque: Some App Store developers have faced difficulty getting answers to simple questions from Apple about their apps.

It’s obvious what’s driving iPhone customers toward Cydia: Apple’s rejections and restrictions of major iPhone apps. Most notably, Apple recently banned apps supporting Google Voice, the search giant’s internet-based phone enhancement service that can provide cellphone users with free text messaging and transcribed voicemail.

Angry consumers and developers theorize that Apple banned the Google Voice apps so as not to detract business from its partner AT&T’s phone services. The incident has brewed so much controversy that even the Federal Communications Commission has gotten involved, sending letters to AT&T, Apple and Google inquiring about the reasons for the rejections.

“Looks like Apple and AT&T pissed off a lot of people,” Kovacs wrote in a July 28 blog post. “I’ll be releasing GV Mobile v1.2 on Cydia for free today or tomorrow.”

Another high-profile App Store regulation involves SlingPlayer, an app that enables iPhone users to stream video from a Slingbox device hooked up to a TV. When Sling originally submitted the app, it was capable of streaming over both Wi-Fi and the cellular 3G connection. However, Apple requested Sling to modify the app to work on Wi-Fi only. AT&T said this was a necessary move to prevent congestion on its 3G network.

That restriction spawned the most successful Cydia app to date, 3G Unrestrictor, developed by Streich. 3G Unrestrictor, a $2 app that has sold 9,500 copies, allows the iPhone to circumvent any network limitations imposed by Apple. For example, the app enables SlingPlayer users to stream TV over 3G as well as Wi-Fi; and when using the VOIP app Skype to place phone calls, customers can also use the cellular connection, whereas normally the app only enables users to dial over Wi-Fi.

“It’s just amazing what you can do on such a little cellphone, and Apple just forbids customers from doing these things, and it’s just a shame,” Streich said. “That’s why I’m so happy there’s a Cydia store.”

Another developer who reports positive experiences with Cydia is Jonathan Zdziarski, who said he has made more money through the unauthorized store than Apple’s App Store. In February, his app iWipe sold 694 copies in Cydia, compared to 91 copies of iErase in the App Store.

“I guess you could say the App Store is kind of like Wal-Mart, with more crap than you’d ever want to buy,” Zdziarski said. “And Cydia is like the general store that has everything you want and need, from fresh cuts of meat to those homemade cookies you can’t get anywhere else.”

Though some developers say they’re having better experiences selling apps through Cydia, it’s unlikely they will succeed on a longer term, said Rana Sobhany, vice president of Medialets, an iPhone app analytics company. She said the average consumer would prefer to purchase apps through a well trusted source such as Apple.

“There have been all these apps downloaded in the App Store because it’s easy for consumers to find, download and pay for apps,” Sobhany said. “This model is new because Apple has been training people how to download music to their iPods for years.”

However, even in the case of the App Store, developers who strike it rich still face challenges recreating their success, said Phillip Ryu, co-creator of the e-book reader Classics, which has sold over 400,000 copies to date.

“If you’re hoping to reach the mainstream, the best you can hope for is your app catches on fire and charts high enough for you to make a windfall,” Ryu said. “Essentially you aim for the jackpot, and if you don’t hit that, it’s not going to make you a living.”

Freeman said it was too soon to tell whether Cydia would provide developers stable incomes, but he recommends they give it a try, considering the successes some are experiencing. He admits, however, he isn’t making much money as the creator of Cydia: Like Apple, he takes 30 percent of each app sale to cover taxes.

“I don’t make much money off this project, but I value the community, and I look forward to how this changes the device landscape,” Freeman said.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/cydia-app-store/





Apple Breaks App Store Silence
Tom Krazit

In an extremely rare move, an Apple executive has publicly commented on the App Store approval process as it relates to a controversial dictionary application.

Apple's Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and last seen playing the role of Steve Jobs at Apple events this year, e-mailed John Gruber of Daring Fireball to comment on the approval process of Ninjawords, a dictionary application that was initially rejected from the App Store because it supplied the definition of several dirty words. Schiller blamed the snafu on poor timing, saying that Apple never directly censored the application but felt it deserved a 17+ rating, which wasn't formally available as an option until parental controls were released along with the iPhone 3.0 software in June.

Ninjawords draws on Wiktionary.com for its definitions, Schiller said, which means it offers up a few more choice words than the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary have gotten around to including. "Apple rejected the initial submission of Ninjawords for this reason, provided the Ninjawords developer with information about some of the vulgar terms, and suggested to the developer that they resubmit the application for approval once parental controls were implemented on the iPhone," Schiller told Gruber via e-mail.

The developer of Ninjawords isn't exactly mollified by Apple's reasoning. "Apple may slap a 17+ rating on our app and wash their hands, saying 'you're not required to censor your app', but at the same time, they're putting a great deal of pressure on us to do so. Who wants to be the only illicit dictionary on the App Store?" said Phil Crosby of Matchstick, which created the application. Crosby and Gruber noted that several other dictionaries in the App Store contain language that some may find objectionable yet are not required to carry the equivalent of an R movie rating.

But while the debate over Ninjawords will rage on, what's perhaps most significant is that Apple has directly commented on its decision-making process regarding the approval or rejection of a specific iPhone application. As far as I can tell, Apple has never done this in the year-plus history of the App Store, with the notable exception of Baby Shaker. But even then, Apple didn't explain the reasoning behind its decision to approve an application it eventually called "deeply offensive."

Perhaps now that the FCC is taking a closer look at the Google Voice debacle, Apple will now start to finally give developers and iPhone users some specific input on the criteria it uses to approve or deny iPhone applications. To this point, the process has been a black box, frustrating developers time and time again.

Gruber credited Apple with perhaps waking up to the reality that at some point, the App Store approval process went off the rails. "That Schiller was willing to respond in such detail and length, on the record, is the first proof I've seen that Apple's leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform. The improvement I consider most important is a significant focus on fairness, consistency, and common sense in the App Store review process," he wrote.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10304983-37.html





Google Chief Gives Up Board Seat at Apple
Brad Stone

The alliance between Apple and Google, two Silicon Valley giants with a powerful common enemy in Microsoft, is now clearly fraying.

Apple announced on Monday that Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was stepping down from its board. The move comes as the Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the two companies violated antitrust laws by sharing common board members.

The resignation won’t make that investigation disappear. In a statement Monday afternoon, Richard Feinstein, director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, commended the companies for acknowledging “that sharing directors raises competitive issues.” But he said the agency would continue to investigate the remaining overlap between the companies’ boards.

Google and Apple still share one board member, Arthur Levinson, the chairman of Genentech.

Mr. Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board constitutes a stark admission — Apple and Google had previously played down the issue — that the companies are now directly competing in the crucial race to develop the next generation of software for mobile phones and personal computers.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement that as Google moved into more of Apple’s businesses, “Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest.”

The news of the F.T.C. investigation in May drew attention to the growing overlap between Apple and Google in areas like mobile phone software, browsers and online video.

Last month, Google announced that it was developing an operating system for computers based on its Chrome browser, which would compete with Microsoft Windows and Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X.

And in recent weeks Apple rejected two of Google’s applications for the iPhone, including one for Google Voice, a service that allows people to make cheap international calls and send free text messages. The software could have hurt the business of Apple’s partner in the United States, AT&T, which subsidizes the cost of the iPhone and recoups that money through monthly charges.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission began an inquiry into why Apple had rejected Google Voice, asking in letters to all three companies whether Apple consulted with AT&T in making its decision.

When the F.T.C. investigation became known in May, Mr. Schmidt first dismissed suggestions that his role on Apple’s board posed a conflict. Then, at a conference in July, he said he would have to talk to Apple and reassess his role on the board.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he had enjoyed his time on the Apple board, but that the companies “agreed it makes sense for me to step down now.”

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, said of the two boards, “These are brilliant people who were smart enough to rationally see what the rest of the world saw a while ago, in terms of the obvious and growing conflicts of interest.”

The F.T.C. is specifically looking into whether Google and Apple violated Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which says that companies with common board members must limit the sharing of information through those directors.

According to a person briefed on the investigation, Google is arguing that revenue from products like Chrome, which compete with Apple products, did not constitute more than 2 percent of its sales — one of the standards in the law. That argument is difficult to evaluate because Google gives away software like Chrome to drive more traffic to its money-making search engine.

One possible remedy is for Mr. Levinson to leave one of the two boards. The F.T.C. also might ask the companies to sign a consent decree saying that they will refrain from cooperating or sharing strategies in areas where they overlap.

Gary L. Reback, a lawyer at Carr & Ferrell, who in the 1990s helped persuade the Justice Department to pursue its case against Microsoft, said Mr. Schmidt’s departure from Apple’s board suggested Google was taking antitrust questions seriously.

“This is a company with enormous market power, and antitrust enforcers are going to look carefully at everything Google does,” Mr. Reback said. “Google’s first response, which was basically ‘Go fly a kite,’ is not going to work. They are going to have to comply.”

Mr. Schmidt joined Apple’s board in 2006, but his relationship with Apple goes back much further. During Apple’s darkest days in the 1990s, Mr. Schmidt, then chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, was among the Valley’s most prominent Apple supporters. Sun almost acquired Apple at one point.

More recently, Google has actively developed software for the Macintosh as Apple has come back from near extinction to capture nearly 10 percent of the market for personal computers.

Google programs for the Mac include its search toolbar, Google Earth and the Picasa photo-sharing software, while applications for Google Maps and YouTube are shipped with the iPhone.

When it comes to their common enemy, Microsoft, the companies may have less of a reason to coordinate their strategies nowadays. This year, Microsoft posted its first quarterly year-over-year drop in sales, and it has repeatedly fallen short in trying to extend its dominance of desktop computers to the Web and mobile phones.

Last week, in an effort to catch up to Google in search, Microsoft said it would acquire Yahoo’s search business.

Google and Apple “still have a common enemy, but what’s really more interesting is how the common enemy is doing everything it can to make itself irrelevant,” said Stewart Alsop, a longtime industry watcher.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/te...s/04apple.html





Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu with Kim Cascone
Kim Cascone

Here’s a switcher story of a different color: from the Mac, to Linux. It’s one thing to talk about operating systems and free software in theory, or to hear from died-in-the-wool advocates of their platform of choice. In this case, we turn to Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer with an impressive resume of releases and a rich sens of sound. This isn’t someone advocating any platform over another: it’s an on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, real-world example of how Kim made this set of tools work in his music, in the studio and on tour. A particular thanks, as he’s given me some new ideas for how to work with Audacity and Baudline. Kim puts his current setup in the context of decades of computer work. Even if you’re not ready to leave Mac (or Windows) just yet, Kim’s workflow here could help if you’re looking to make a Linux netbook or laptop more productive in your existing rig.

Stay tuned, as I’ll have some other stories on how to make your Linux music workflow effective creatively, particularly in regards to leaping over some of the setup hurdles Kim describes. –PK


Historical Evolution

I’ve been working with computers since the 1970s. Inspired by the work of composer David Behrman, I taught myself assembly language and programmed a simple digital sequencer on a KIM-1, single-board microcomputer, controlling an Aries modular synthesizer I had built. I discovered a then-new magazine called Computer Music Journal at the local computer shop and bought every copy I could get my hands on. (I still have them, too.) Later, I helped a friend’s father, an executive at IBM, unpack and set up the first personal computer IBM made. The manuals alone took up two or three feet of bookshelf space.

Fast-forward through a couple of decades of owning Commodore 64s, Apple computers, and PCs. In 1997, I purchased my first laptop: a woefully-underpowered Compaq Presario. It wasn’t fast enough for real-time audio, so I had to render sound files to hard disk using the audio programming language Csound. I created many of the sounds this way for my CD ‘blueCube( )’. But the capacity to work anywhere was enough for me to give up ever owning another desktop computer.

Frustrated with the ‘code-compile-listen’ process of working with Csound and wanting to work in real-time, I switched to the graphical multi-media programming language Max/MSP, which necessitated a move back to Apple hardware, so I bought a PowerBook. Having Max/MSP running on a laptop was the perfect environment for me. I could build the tools I needed whenever an idea presented itself. The computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part.

Apple Seeds of Discontent

When I’m on the road, I use my laptop as a music studio, performance instrument, and administration office. I don’t like surprises on the road. Having a computer fail means a loss of income, and makes for an embarrassing moment if the failure happens during a performance. If watching laptop music bores some people, watching a musician reboot is even worse. So to be safe, I stress-test all new hardware or software in my studio for at least a month before I take it on the road. Max/MSP patches run for hours, software is used for weeks, and hardware is left on for days at a time to help induce failure before I leave home. But as fate would have it, an iBook I was touring with died a few years ago. I brought the laptop into an Apple repair shop in Berlin, where a technician diagnosed the problem as a faulty logic board. The failure rate on logic boards was high for that model of iBook, and in response to public pressure, Apple instituted a logic board replacement program. Luckily, my laptop qualified and the logic board was replaced for free. But the failure and ongoing buggy behavior impacted my work schedule and added to the stress of touring.

I’ve now replaced logic boards on three computers; the other two I paid for out of pocket. The out-of-warranty cost of replacing a logic board on an Apple laptop is around six hundred dollars — cheaper than buying a brand new laptop, but still significant.

If you make your living with applications that run on OS X, there are no options if a laptop fails. You either repair expensive Apple hardware or buy new expensive Apple hardware. This is called ‘vendor lock-in.’

Then, during my 2009 spring tour, my PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, with missing keystrokes, intermittent backlighting, the failure of a RAM slot, and reduced performance. As an alternative to repairing the PowerBook, I investigated what a new MacBook Pro and upgrades for all my software would cost. A quick back-of-a-napkin estimate came to approximately $3,000, not including the time it would take tweaking and testing to make it work for the tour. If the netbook revolution hadn’t come along and spawn a price-wars on laptops, I might have proceeded to increase my credit card debt. But as a wise uncle once advised, “you invest either your time or your money; never both.”

Meeting Ubuntu

I had tried Linux in 2005 on PowerPC-based Mac laptops, though at the time I couldn’t get audio working, even after extensive tweaking. But I had kept an eye on Ubuntu ever since. After considering MacBook Pro prices, I checked out the new netbooks coming to market and picked up a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I loaded up my Dell with all a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects – not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000.00 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable.
Getting Past Ubuntu Audio Complexities

There are a few differences between how audio works on Mac OS X and how it works on Ubuntu Linux. OS X uses the Core Audio and Core MIDI frameworks for audio and MIDI services, respectively. All applications requiring audio services on OS X talk to Core Audio, which mixes and routes multiple audio streams to the desired locations. Core Audio is simple, monolithic, and easy to set up, and all the end-user controls are accessible from one panel. You can even create a single aggregate device from multiple sound cards if you need more inputs or outputs than one sound card can supply. To Apple’s credit, Core Audio and the applications that make use of it are the reason why you see so many laptop musicians seated behind glowing Apple logos on stage.

On Ubuntu, audio is a rather different story. Apple’s slogan ‘Think Different’ would be good advice for musicians encountering Ubuntu’s audio setup for the first time. Audio in Ubuntu can appear at first to be a confusing jumble of servers, layers, services, and terminology. Go to System->Preferences->Sound, click on the Devices tab, and check out the pulldown menu next to ‘Sound Events’ at the top of the panel. You will see various acronyms, possibly including cryptic-looking technologies like OSS, ESD, ALSA, JACK, and Pulse Audio. These acronyms represent a byzantine tangle of conflicting technologies that over time, and due to political reasons or backwards compatibility, have ended up cohabiting with one another. ‘Frankenstein’ might be an accurate metaphor here.

Thankfully, there is a simpler way, which is the combination of ALSA [a high-performance, kernel-level audio and MIDI system] and JACK [a system for creating low-latency audio, MIDI, and sync connections between applications and computers]. The battle-scarred among us have learned to ignore all the other audio cruft bolted on to Ubuntu and just use ALSA and JACK. One can think of the ALSA/JACK stack, the heart of most pro Linux studios, as the Core Audio of Linux and in my opinion Jack should be the first thing installed on any musicians laptop. I’d go so far as to suggest placing it in the Startup Applications so it’s always running.

The ALSA/JACK combination is a little more complex to set up and tweak than Apple’s Core Audio, but there’s a lot of good information online. [Ed.: ALSA, JACK, and the real-time Linux kernel also have some advantages over Mac OS X that can be worth the effort. While JACK has been ported to Mac, Linux has more JACK-aware tools, which is necessary for transport sync. Just as importantly, once configured, you can build rigs with Linux that have greater low-latency performance than may be practical on Mac or Windows. In other words, while it may require an investment of time, it can be both free and better! -PK]

Workflow

Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a workflow that has worked well in the studio and on the road. Since I created most of my tools in Max/MSP, they could shape-shift to fit any musical task I encountered. A sound mangling tool I’d written for studio use, for instance, I could then adapt for a performance with Tony Conrad. I modified parts of my performance patch for sound installations. This environment served me well over the years – until recently, when my aesthetic focus changed from using randomness in my work to taking a more deterministic approach. This happened to coincide with my change of operating systems.

I do a lot of location recording while on tour. My rig consists of an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder and an Audio Technica AT-822 single-point stereo microphone. I record at 96kHz/24-bit to a 16GB SDHC card in the LS-10. When I want to audition sound files in the field, I use my netbook’s SDHC reader, renaming sound files directly on the card. I can look at some of the files in Baudline if I need to check for low-frequency rumble or technical anomalies. I have come to use Baudline on a daily basis.
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Back in the studio, using the sound editing program Audacity, I remove voice slates, trim heads and tails, adjust gain and EQ as needed, then save them to a project folder. And because I don’t like surprises in the studio, either, this folder gets backed up onto a remote network drive as well as a local USB drive.

Building my sound library takes weeks or months. During this time, I start filling a notebook with ideas, drawings, plans and marginalia, from which a score emerges. I import all my project sound files into the open-source Digital Audio Workstation Ardour, arranging them to loosely resemble the score in my notebook. Once my Ardour session is set up, I move sounds around, try different effects, create new textures by layering, then render and re-import sub-mixes until the piece starts to take shape. I use a KORG nanoKONTROL as a mixing surface. I assign faders, pans and switches assigned to the DAW allowing me to quickly play around with different mix ideas.

Once the piece sounds finished, I mix down to a stereo .WAV file at 24-bit/44.1kHz, without using compression or EQ on the mix bus. Tip: mastering engineers really appreciate getting a raw 24-bit master that hasn’t been fiddled around with by the musician. For performances, I also use Ardour and the nanoKONTROL to do an acousmatic presentation. This version of the Ardour session will have compression and/or EQ on the mix bus, since I want the material to sound more polished. As a side note: I am looking into using the mastering tool JAMin [JACK Audio Mastering Interface] for this purpose in the future.

Sayonara, Apple

After ten years of working on Apple laptops, I’ve left the fold. Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me. Details like not having a tree-view in the right hand panel of the Finder window slowed me down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, feels more like an operating system made for grown-ups. And what’s especially nice is that Ubuntu scales nicely to the expertise of the user. Your cousin the computer geek or your Grandma can install and use Ubuntu and get as deep as they like. Combine this with the recent rash of cheap, powerful laptops, and Ubuntu’s market share is bound to grow.

A Request

It’s important that kernel and audio application developers (1) ensure all audio creation software has support for JACK, (2) improve and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use, (3) ship distros with the realtime kernel already tested and configured for use, (4) to integrate the real-time kernel patches into the mainline kernel. [Ed.: On each of these points, distributions and kernel builds are steadily improving, partly thanks to feedback from communities like the music production community. The realtime kernel likely won't be the default, mainline kernel, but it's important to have well-maintained optional packages at the very least. That doesn't mean you have to wait for improvements to happen, though, and in future articles I'll talk a bit about how you can configure your system now to take advantage of this functionality. -PK]

Most importantly, consider paying a subscription to support developers of JACK and your favorite Linux audio software, or, if you can write code, proofread text, write a manual, do a translation, contribute graphic design, or create content; please help by contributing something to the development of the software you use.

I would like to thank Ken Restivo, Mike Rooke, Paul Davis, Philip DeTullio, Jörn Nettingsmeier and Matt Griffen at Canonical Ltd. for advice and inspiration in the writing of this article.

Kim Cascone is a composer, sound artist, touring musician, lecturer and writer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kathleen and son Cage.

Links:
http://www.osnews.com/story/6720/Int...to_Linux_Audio
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
http://ardour.org/node
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/
http://www.baudline.com/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://drobilla.net/software/patchage/
http://www.ladspa.org/
http://lv2plug.in/
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html
http://linuxaudio.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/
http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.pulseaudio.org/
http://developer.apple.com/audio/overview.html

Corrections / clarifications:

Ed.: I originally claimed that JACK Transport sync is not possible on the Mac OS X port of JACK. As kindly pointed out by a reader, this is not correct. JACK Transport-aware applications on the Mac will work.

Subtler issues:

Kim noted two annoyances with the Finder. One is wanting to type paths directly. On the Mac Finder, you need to invoke a keyboard shortcut prior to doing so. On Ubuntu’s default file manager (GNOME’s Nautilus), you can simply begin typing. There was some disagreement about to whether that really constitutes a notable difference, but suffice to say, you do have a greater range of choice and customization on an open source operating system.

Secondly, Kim argued that you could pull out a drive without having to go to a lot of trouble unmounting it first. At least one commenter argues that risks data loss, and given that users may be using something like FUSE to access foreign file systems like NTFS or the Mac’s own HFS+, I don’t yet know what the exact details will be. As I said in comments, however, Nautilus and the command line eject function for me are quicker and more effective than similar unmounting on Windows and Mac, so I still notch this one for Linux. –PK

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/0...h-kim-cascone/





Small Movie Software Firm Gets Hollywood Traction
Sue Zeidler

Media software company DivX Inc said on Tuesday it signed deals to digitally distribute films for Lions Gate Entertainment Corp and Paramount Pictures, bringing the total number of Hollywood studios to embrace its technology to four.

The small San Diego-based company, which aims to compete in the movie download business currently dominated by Apple Inc's iTunes, has also signed deals with Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros and Sony Corp's Sony Pictures. Paramount is a unit of Viacom Inc.

Through deals with consumer electronics companies, DivX licenses digital video technologies to an estimated 200 million consumer electronics devices.

Its agreements with Hollywood pave the way for consumers to have the freedom to watch these movies on millions of these devices that have shipped worldwide, a spokeswoman said.

DivX is expected to soon reach a deal with a U.S. retailer and said recently it will launch a U.S. site shortly.

So far it has signed agreements with three European online storefronts that let viewers download movies and playback on any DivX certified device.

Hollywood studios are anxiously expanding their digital footprint through various outlets as physical DVD sales slow and as they seek greater leverage in negotiating licensing deals with Apple.

"In partnering with DivX, we are ensuring that our films are made available to video-on-demand sites in a secure, high- quality format," said Curt Marvis, President of Lionsgate Digital Media.

"It's important to us that Lions Gate fans enjoy the same cinematic viewing experience watching our movies at home or on the go as they do in the theater. The DivX format enables us to do that.

"As our fourth format approval agreement with a major motion picture studio, this agreement demonstrates the traction we are gaining in making premium Hollywood content available to DivX consumers worldwide."

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5741C620090805





Fox Pulls Cheap DVD Rentals from Redbox
Carl DiOrio

Hollywood's counteroffensive against dollar DVD rentals has escalated.

Fox effectively has enlisted in Universal's campaign against Redbox and other discount-rental chains by ordering wholesalers to stop supplying discs to Redbox kiosks during the first 30 days after Fox film and television titles hit the market. The move, which News Corp. president Chase Carey hinted at Wednesday during an earnings conference call, follows the collapse of negotiations between Fox and Redbox over terms of a direct product agreement.

Sony recently struck such a deal with the kiosks king, becoming the first studio to agree to supply Redbox with product directly. In exchange, Sony secured a Redbox pledge to keep the studio's used DVDs off the resale market.

Redbox disc resales have been a second major aggravation for Hollywood studios along with the chain's dollar rentals, which studios say are diminishing rental revenue and undermining DVD sales.

Redbox sued Universal in October after that studio ordered wholesalers Ingram and VPD to stop supplying its titles to Redbox within 45 days of release. Universal countersued, and a decision is expected any day from a federal judge in Wilmington, Del.

If the ruling goes against Redbox, other studios are likely to follow Universal in denying Redbox DVDs. But Fox's decision to strike such a posture before the court rules demonstrates how deep anti-Redbox sentiment runs on some studio lots.

Like Universal, Fox will extend its ban on new-release dollar rentals to No. 2 kiosk chain MovieCube, operated by TNR Entertainment. Redbox -- whose 15,000-plus kiosks are located in Wal-Mart, McDonald's and supermarkets run by Kroger, Albertson's and others -- is owned by publicly traded cash-machine company Coinstar.

A Fox insider noted that execs are braced for a Redbox lawsuit in response to the decision to withhold that studio's titles from dollar-rental chains.

A Fox spokesman declined to elaborate on a carefully worded statement issued late Wednesday regarding the policy.

"We invest enormous money, creativity and effort to make entertaining, high-quality Fox movies available throughout the world," the studio said. "In the home entertainment business, Fox offers our movies through bricks-and-mortar retail outlets and online retailers, including both national and regional chains and small mom-and-pop stores, offering consumers a wide selection of new releases and catalog for both rental and purchase. ... Our desire is to maintain for Fox movies a thriving network of distribution serving all types of consumer preferences, on reasonable business terms for Fox as well as our distribution partners."

(Editing by DGoodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5750TR20090806





How Netflix Gets Your Movies to Your Mailbox So Fast

Out of sight in Carol Stream, 42 people move 60,000 discs daily with quiet efficiency. But don't drop off your flicks there.
Christopher Borrelli

The Netflix warehouse in Carol Stream does not appear on any map. Your odds of finding it are slightly better than your odds of stumbling upon a rare insect in a field of weeds.

One could drive to Carol Stream, stop in a random office park, climb from one's car and scream, "Reveal thyself, Netflix!" This is not advisable. But the temptation remains.

If you subscribe to the DVD-rental service, the Netflix warehouse, which you know must exist somewhere; which a P.O. Box on every Netflix envelope suggests does exist; which processes your Netflix queue with alarming efficiency; which you bet will be as magical as you imagined if you ever stumble on it, overrun with dancing Oompa Loompas in matching jumpsuits of Netflix red, is one of those mythical New Economy temples.

Like an Amazon warehouse. Or an Apple warehouse. One imagines miles of pop ephemera between its brick-and-mortar walls -- one imagines that limitless building from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but with 15,000 copies of " Confessions of a Shopaholic."

The truth is stranger.

After a period of pretty-pleasing Netflix to let me poke around its clandestine Chicago-area hub, and see what wonders await and how its ubiquitous red-enveloped packages are processed, I was given an address and a time to arrive and asked not to blab about it. There are 58 Netflix warehouses nationwide, serving 10.6 million subscribers, and only one for greater Chicago; it opened in 2003, Netflix's 19th warehouse. To get there, I was told to go to Carol Stream, to be there around sunrise. I imagined it was like coming upon Narnia -- one stares at it awhile until the entrance becomes evident, which turned out to be sort of true.

The warehouse is indeed in a random office park, resplendent in shades of gray and cream. (In exchange for a visit, I agreed not to divulge the precise spot or let slip a few trade secrets, none of which struck me as remarkable.) If you work at this warehouse, you have signed a confidentiality agreement that you will not divulge its location. You can tell people where you work, just not exactly where. Netflix, based in Los Gatos, Calif., is big on stealth -- and has been since launching 11 years ago. But as Vice President of Communications Steve Swasey explained, the company is so far ahead of its competition in the DVD-by-mail market, including Blockbuster (which Netflix sued for patent infringement), that guarding secrets has been less of a concern these days. (According to the company's quarterly financial report, it saw a 21 percent jump in revenue, one of the few major companies that appear recession-proof.)

Its biggest secret remains the warehouses themselves -- for two reasons. No. 1, each holds several million DVDs, not to mention expensive mail-sorting gizmos and dry-board posted statistics on how many discs were recently returned damaged, placed in the wrong sleeve or scratched. And No. 2, Netflix has grown leery of what happens when customers learn the location of a warehouse -- they drop off DVDs at the door. This will not help get your next disc out faster -- and neither will dropping a disc in the mail early in the morning. (Even Netflix employees are asked to use the post office for Netflix returns.) Before I explain why, a bit more on the warehouse itself: Despite having an address, I drove past it a few times. The building is intentionally disguised, dumpy and drab, the warehouse tucked behind another office building closer to the street. There is also not a single identifiable piece of Netflix signage on anything out front -- not a nameplate or a flash of Netflix red, and certainly not any corporate logos. Unmarked trucks roll up, then roll out. Employees (called "associates," in Netflix-ese) enter through a less-than-obvious door.

Indeed, one of the few things about the building that suggested it was not a meth lab was that, at sunrise, the parking lot was full -- shifts begin at 3 a.m. The busiest time is around 7 a.m., but as I entered, the first thing I noticed was how silent it was. No one was chatting. The second thing I noticed was how, for a Web-based business, there were few computers -- maybe seven in the building, which has towering white walls and a concrete floor. Every Netflix warehouse looks like every other Netflix warehouse, down to the same flat, bright wattage of its light bulbs. It's not attractive, which might explain the hasty mismatch of promotional posters taped to its walls like college dorm decor -- a poster for "Atonement" alongside a poster for the direct-to-video "Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief" alongside a horror flick poster.

There's no there there, by design.

Forty-two people work here, nearly every one in a red Netflix T-shirt, nearly every one in constant motion. Indeed, I was asked not to disturb their groove and hit them up with questions. The busiest sat in wide rows, flanked with post office cartons stuffed with Netflix envelopes.

Six nights a week, a truck leaves for the post office and picks up cartons full of these return-address envelopes; pickup is at 3 a.m. (It's also the reason that the time of day you mail your DVD back has no effect on when you receive your next one.) Back at the 28,500-square-foot warehouse, from which more than 60,000 discs are shipped daily in the Chicago area alone, cartons are placed at the feet of employees, who glance in two directions -- down (to pick up an envelope) and up (to look at the disc), and that's about it. This is the first, and least automated, stage of the process, performed mainly by women, including a seemingly disproportionate number of local grandparents; they have full medical benefits and a 40-hour workweek.

They inspect each returned disc. They rip open each envelope, toss it, pull the disc from its sleeve, check that the title matches the sleeve, inspect the disc for cracks or scratches, inspect the sleeve for stains or marks, clean the disc with a quick circular motion on a towel pulled tight across a square block of wood, insert the disc into its sleeve, and file the disc in one of two bins. The bin to the right is for acceptable discs, the bin to the left is for damaged discs or discs not in the proper sleeve.

To a casual observer, this all seems to happen in a single motion, a flurry of fingers. Employees are expected to perform this a minimum of 650 times an hour. Also, customers stuff things into the envelopes. Scribbled movie reviews, complaints, pictures of dogs and kids. That needs sorting too. After 65 minutes of inspection, a bell rings. Everyone stands up.

Calisthenics!

The team leader leans back, and everyone leans back. The team leader leans sideways. Everyone leans sideways. And so on. This pattern of inspection and exercise repeats every 65 minutes, until rental-return inspection is complete. Swasey, who drove in from Columbus, Ohio, where there is an even larger hub, pointed to a photocopy taped to the wall -- a picture of Disc 4 of "Rescue Me" Season 4 alongside a sleeve that promised Disc 4 of "Rescue Me" Season 3. It's a kind of Netflix perp walk. Some diligent associate caught the mistake before it shipped. "To me, I see it as a goose-bump moment," Swasey said.

From there, action shifts to long machines that go ffft. This, right here, is how you get discs as fast as you do. Inspected discs are scanned into the inventory by a machine that reads 30,000 bar codes an hour -- ffft, ffft, ffft. The moment this machine reads the bar code, you receive an e-mail letting you know that your disc arrived. Then discs are scanned a second time -- if a title is requested, and around 95 percent of titles get rented at least once every 90 days, the machine separates it and sorts it out by ZIP code. (The entire inventory of the building is run through this daily, a process that alerts other warehouses of the location of every one of the 89 million discs owned by Netflix.) After that, separated discs are taken to a machine called a Stuffer -- which goes ssssht-click, ssssht-click -- and stuffed in an envelope, which is sealed and labeled by a laser that goes zzzt.

That's it.

After 5 p.m., trucks are loaded with cartons of mailers and return to the post office -- indeed, Netflix has become the fastest-growing source of first-class mail for the Postal Service, a department official says. How accurate is Carol Stream? Swasey won't say, but I saw a statistic posted on the wall, and, if it's accurate, the percentage of mistakenly shipped discs is negligible -- far less than a quarter of 1 percent. Not that it matters. Netflix is already streaming movies online and through TiVo and Xbox 360s, and the service is looking toward the day when discs are outmoded and warehouses like this one redundant.

That's 10 years off, maybe more, Swasey said. Then he shook my hand and suggested our time was up. Behind him an associate swept what appeared to be a spotless floor, and a woman sprinted back and forth along a mail sorter. And with that, I drove away, the office park seeming to close up behind me, all paths back to the Netflix warehouse growing faint in my rearview mirror. Where patches of grass and road once sat, there was only a wall of beige facades, each indistinguishable from the next, appearing to melt into a monochrome corporate smoke screen. Without the exact address, I couldn't take you there if I tried.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...,6424990.story





From March

Connecticut Cities Win VRAD Box Battle

The state Department of Public Utilities Control has sided with Bridgeport, Stamford and Danbury in their fight to gain control over so-called VRAD boxes that AT&T has been mounting on telephone poles around the state.

Ruling in a case that began in 2007, the DPUC issued a draft decision ordering AT&T to do a better job of notifying nearby property owners – including municipalities – about the placement of the boxes and gaining their consent.

The decision requires AT&T to form a working group to resolve disputes over the boxes with municipalities and also creates the possibility AT&T might be required to relocate some boxes.

At least 1,850 VRADs, short for video relay access device, had been installed in 67 communities as of early last year. They transmit signals for AT&T’s new U-Verse system that integrates telephone, internet and video services.

The trouble is the metal boxes, or cabinets, can be the size of a small refrigerator and weigh 1,000 pounds. Mounted low in telephone poles, they can pose a hazard, the cities believe.

In March 2007, about a year after AT&T began putting up the boxes, Bridgeport, Stamford and Danbury sent a joint letter to DPUC requesting an emergency hearing regarding the siting of the boxes and safety concerns.

Subsequently, Atty. Gen. Richard Blumenthal’s office has joined the cities’ side, as has the Office of Consumer Counsel.

In a brief filed in late June, the attorney general’s office cited testimony about the boxes’ potential hazard from public works administrators in all three of the original complaining cities.

They said the boxes can obstruct the vision of motorists and their protrusion onto sidewalks poses a risk to unwary pedestrians and bicyclists. By making passage difficult they may also violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In addition, the brief presented evidence from other states that some VRAD boxes had caught fire and that a certain type of battery used in some boxes had exploded.

DPUC in its draft decision dated Sept. 29 also ordered AT&T to report safety issues associated with VRAD boxes in Connecticut or any other state.
http://ccm-ct.org/news/2009-innovations/032309vrad.html





Ex-Broadway Mogul Drabinsky Gets 7 Years for Fraud

One-time Broadway impresario Garth Drabinsky was sentenced to seven years in jail on Wednesday and business partner Myron Gottlieb got six for their roles in a half-billion-dollar fraud in the 1990s at their theater production company, Livent, Canadian media reported.

The two were convicted in March of defrauding investors and of forgery at Livent, which was behind Broadway hits such as "Ragtime" and the revival of "Showboat", before the company collapsed in an accounting scandal in 1998.

Drabinsky, 59, was sentenced to seven years and four years for two counts of fraud, while Gottlieb, 66, was given six years and four years for fraud, according to reports.

The sentences, handed out in a packed Toronto court, are to be served concurrently. Forgery convictions for each man were stayed.

Prosecutors had asked for sentences of eight to 10 years, while lawyers for Drabinsky and Gottlieb had requested two-year conditional sentences, and proposed the pair lecture university students as part of a community service obligation.

In the company's 1990s heyday, Livent productions such as "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and others were the toast of Broadway, winning more than a dozen Tony awards. Livent also backed the long-running Toronto production of "Phantom of the Opera".

Canadian prosecutors alleged that the two executives directed company accountants to falsify Livent's records to boost its earnings. This helped to attract about C$500 million ($470 million) in investments and loans to the company.

The judge said in her March verdict that she was "satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb initiated the improper accounting system and knew of its continuation throughout the years 1994 to 1998".

The scheme was discovered in 1998, shortly after U.S. investors, including famed Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz, took control of the firm. A short time later Livent was bankrupt.

($1=$1.07 Canadian)

(Reporting by Cameron French; editing by Peter Galloway)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5744BS20090805





Tourists Miss Isle After GPS Blunder

Two Swedes expecting the golden beaches of the Italian island of Capri got a shock when tourist officials told them they were 650 km (400 miles) off course in the northern town of Carpi, after mistyping the name in their GPS.

"It's hard to understand how they managed it. I mean, Capri is an island," said Giovanni Medici, a spokesman for Carpi regional government, told Reuters Tuesday. "It's the first time something like this has happened."

The middle-aged couple, who were not identified, only discovered their error when they asked staff in the local tourist office Saturday how to drive to the island's famous "Blue Grotto."

"They were surprised, but not angry," Medici said. "They got back in the car and started driving south."

The picturesque island of Capri, famed as a romantic holiday destination, lies in the Gulf of Naples in southern Italy and has been a resort since Roman times.

Carpi is a busy industrial town in the province of Emilia Romagna, at the other end of Italy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE56R2LJ20090728





Preschools Warned of Paedophile Blogger

Dictionary tool Double click on a word to get a translation

The discovery of a blog about naked children and life as an employee at a Stockholm preschool has led city officials to take action.

All preschools in Stockholm have been notified and the blog has been reported to the police.

Stockholm city educational director Thomas Persson received an email from a concerned citized who informed him about the existence of the blog, Dagens Nyheter reports.

Persson in turn notified his colleagues and all of the preschools in Stockholm about the blog.

The author of the blog identified himself a paedophile and wrote that he works at a preschool.

“When you read the blog it's clear that it is about a preschool in Stockholm,” Carina Lundberg Uudelepp, deputy director of the City of Stockholm, told Aftonbladet.

Although it is difficult to know how much of the blog is true, officials are taking it seriously. Aftonbladet reported that content of the blog was deemed believable by school officials, who say it is likely the author works or has previously worked at an actual preschool.

It is also assumed that the man is blogging under a false name, and authorities hope to discover his true identity.
http://www.thelocal.se/21150/20090806/





Sony Plans $199 U.S. E-Reader, Takes on Amazon
Laura Isensee

Sony Corp will begin selling this month the cheapest digital book reader for the United States, heating up the competition with Amazon.com Inc in the small but fast-growing market for electronic readers.

Sony plans to start selling its 5-inch-screen Reader Pocket Edition at $199 -- which it called a breakthrough price -- and a larger touchscreen reader for $299, through nationwide retail outlets such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

To drive demand, the company plans to reduce the price it now charges for downloads of best-sellers and new releases to $9.99 from $11.99, bringing prices in largely in line with Amazon's.

Analysts say people that may have been holding off in the middle of a recession may be tempted by Sony to jump onto the digital-reader bandwagon.

"Achieving the $199 price point, we believe, expands the market dramatically," Steve Haber, president of Sony's Digital Reading division, told Reuters in an interview.

"You can throw it in your bag and always have it with you, and that also allowed us to achieve a more affordable price point."

The news is the latest salvo in a battle between digital readers where Sony -- which was first to market -- Amazon and other companies are vying to establish themselves in a market that they expect to become a profit driver.

In July, online retailer Amazon cut the price of its standard Kindle electronic reader by 17 percent to $299. A larger version of the Kindle sells at $489.

Haber expects the market for e-readers to exceed 2 million units this year in the United States. Forrester Research estimates Kindle and the Sony Reader to hit the one million mark in U.S. sales by the end of 2008 and forecast that the market would reach two million units in 2009.

"We're on track to exceed that forecast in 2009," said Sarah Rotman Epps, a media analyst for Forrester Research. "One of the drivers for that (future growth) is the fact that Sony is getting a product out at $199."

"We predicted that wouldn't happen until next year. They've managed to design an inexpensive device that doesn't feel cheap and that's going to have significant impact in the market."

While digital readers are convenient for avid book readers on the go and those who travel frequently, their high prices have been a barrier to many.

In recent research, Forrester found that 13 percent of U.S. online consumers thought $199 was an "affordable splurge": a price that was expensive but that they would consider. Of consumers planning to buy a digital reader in the next six months, 26 percent said $199 was within reach.

Electronic readers allow consumers to read books, magazines or newspapers on a tablet-like device that downloads content digitally.

Comparisons with Amazon's Kindle will be inevitable.

Sony's more expensive new device, called the Reader Touch Edition, offers users a touch screen like its older PRS-700, but at $299 it is $50 cheaper. It also comes with a built-in dictionary that, with a tap on a word, pops up the word's definition. It also allows users to take notes with a virtual keyboard or attached stylus.

But unlike the Kindle, none of Sony's devices old or new will have wireless connectivity, meaning users will have to download books first to their personal computers or Apple Mac computers -- which Sony now supports.

Haber said Sony was looking into building wireless capability into future readers, but would not give details or a timeframe.

Another major area of divergence is the closed system of sharing in the industry.

In Amazon's case, titles bought through its Kindle Store can be read on the Kindle but also Apple Inc's iPhone or iPod Touch -- but not the Sony Reader.

Barnes & Noble's titles, meanwhile, are accessible on Apple devices and Research in Motion Ltd's Blackberry, but not on the Kindle or Sony Reader.

And titles from Sony's store can only be played on the company's own reader.

Haber said he hopes the industry will move to a common format and common digital rights management, but stopped short of saying Sony will try to make its titles compatible with other devices.

"It's like physical books. You can buy physical books from any store that you want and use it in any room in your home you want," Haber said.

(Editing by Edwin Chan; editing by Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...57370D20090805





Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace
Patricia Cohen

Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?

Anecdotes favoring one side or another were as plentiful as pop-ups, but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.

The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered, said Mr. Zuckerman, whose official title is senior researcher, though he acknowledges that a more accurate label would be computer geek and international development specialist. (At the moment only a small sample of Media Cloud’s tools are on the public Web site.)

The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.” Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out.

For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”

There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)

Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.

Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.

Since every method has virtues and drawbacks, she added, “I think there is tremendous value in having both approaches.”

What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.

Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat. Sites that he characterizes as “one link out” from the most visible (like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit) are entering into the conversation, he argues.

Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.

Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive. After the subject disappeared for a couple of months, the bloggers then resurrected it early this year as Washington began discussing the details of a bank rescue plan. To Mr. Benkler, this preliminary evidence suggests that the network of public media has given a voice to some people who in the past may have had useful ideas but were, as a practical matter, unable to inject them into the national conversation.

“If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.

Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”

Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas. The system provides a platform, Mr. Zuckerman said, on which others can build using their own kinds of tracking software. The point is to start with facts rather than impressions.

As Mr. Zuckerman noted, a lot of anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to the truth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/arts/05cloud.html





The AP Will Sell You a "License" to Words It Doesn't Own
James Grimmelmann

The Associated Press has become so deranged, so disconnected from reality, that it will sell you a “license” to quote words it didn’t write and doesn’t own. Here, check it out.

I paid $12 for this “license.” Those words don’t even come from the article they charged me 46 cents a word to quote from (and that’s with the educational discount). No, they’re from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Isaac McPherson, in which Jefferson argues that copyright has no basis in natural law.

Does that stop the AP? No. They tell me I have to use the sentence “exactly as written” and heaven help me if I don’t include the complete footer with their copyright boilerplate. Along the way, their terms of use insisted that I’m not allowed to use Jefferson’s words in connection with “political Content.” Also, I can’t use use his words in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory” to the AP. As if. Jefferson’s thoughts on copyright are inherently political, and inherently derogatory towards the the AP’s insane position on copyright.

I require no license to quote Jefferson. The AP has no right to stop me, no right to demand money from me. All their application does is count words to calculate a fee. It doesn’t even check that the words come from the story being “quoted.”

Copy and Paste Excerpt Twelve Dollars, Please

Is it any wonder the AP also tries to deceive bloggers into thinking it’s not fair use to quote five words? Their abuse of the public domain is just the reductio ad absurdum of their abuse of fair use. The whole thing is a vile species of copyfraud.
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2009...ords_it_doesnt





CNN Calls on Cable Operators to Block Ad Critical of Lou Dobbs
Brian Stelter

A commercial critiquing CNN’s Lou Dobbs is being shown on Fox News and MSNBC this week — but not CNN.

CNN has worked with the cable operators that carry its channel to block the commercial, which was produced by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters. According to a CNN employee who requested anonymity, CNN managers said in a morning staff meeting that the channel had invoked unspecified agreements with operators to stop the ad from running.

The ad accuses Mr. Dobbs of “promoting the false, right-wing conspiracy that President Obama hasn’t produced a valid U.S. birth certificate.”

It calls on viewers to “let CNN know there’s nothing ‘legitimate’ about racially charged paranoia.”

Media Matters sought to buy air time on the cable news channels in Washington, D.C., New York and Atlanta this week.

In a statement, CNN said that it “retains the right to object to any ad run by the cable operator on our network whose purpose is to attack CNN or our employees.” A CNN spokeswoman said she didn’t know if the word “agreement” was used in the staff meeting.

WhoRunsGov first reported that CNN had “privately pressed cable operators not to run” the ad.

Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, said that CNN’s blocking of the ad “seems like the actions of a network desperate to provide cover for its primetime host rather than living up to its standard of being the most trusted name in news.”

Michael Powell contributed reporting.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ertisement/?hp





A Moment of Muddy Grace
Jon Pareles

BABY boomers won’t let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we? It’s one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending.

On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), N.Y. We listened to some of the best rock musicians of the era, enjoyed other legal and illegal pleasures, endured rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant community and dispersed, all without catastrophe.

A year after the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, expectations about large gatherings of young people were so low that this was considered a surprise. Although the festival didn’t go exactly as planned, it was, as advertised, three days of peace and music. That made Woodstock an idyll, particularly in retrospect, even though it was declared a state disaster area at the time.

“Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work,” Lou Yank, the chief of police in nearby Monticello, told The New York Times.

Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other, more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and relief, the festival’s full legacy had as much to do with excess as with idealism. As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace. It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center crowd — nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged L.S.D.-popping hippies — was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong. There’s a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s farm (though the original Woodstock hillside has been left undeveloped).

A new, much expanded anthology of music recorded at the 1969 festival has been issued: the six-CD “Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm” (Rhino). Complete Woodstock performances by Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Janis Joplin and others have been released by Sony Legacy. Cable and public television channels have their Woodstock specials scheduled, and there’s yet another batch of commemorative books, including “The Road to Woodstock” (Ecco) by the festival’s instigator, Michael Lang, which includes tidbits like how much the bands were paid. “Taking Woodstock,” a comedy directed by Ang Lee, is due for release this month.

A summer package tour, Heroes of Woodstock, features musicians who appeared at Woodstock — including Jefferson Starship (playing Jefferson Airplane songs), Levon Helm from the Band, Tom Constanten from the Grateful Dead, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Country Joe McDonald. It arrives at Bethel Woods precisely on Aug. 15.

Unlike previous anniversaries in 1994 and 1999, however, there’s no big festival this year bearing the Woodstock name — reflecting, perhaps, the dismal memories of Woodstock ’99 in Rome, N.Y., where a hot, pent-up audience, angry at high vendor prices, set fires and looted and vandalized the site.

While the original Woodstock showed how much discomfort an audience would put up with for the sake of sharing an event — something promoters were happy to learn — Woodstock ’99 breached the limit of fan exploitation.

Yet the original Woodstock still has a rosy glow. It was finite and all smiles — far different from the Vietnam War, the racial tensions and the much-discussed generation gap of the same era. Woodstock became free in both senses of the word: free as in liberated (from drug laws and dress codes) and free as in gratis, not collecting tickets and handing out, as Wavy Gravy said, “breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

A cynic might see the festival as a prime example of how coddled the baby boomers were in an economy of abundance. The Woodstock crowd, which arrived with more drugs than camping supplies, got itself a free concert, and when the people responsible could no longer handle the logistics, the government bailed them out. Some people took it upon themselves to help others; many just freeloaded.

Still, Woodstock gave virtually everyone involved — ticketholders, gate crashers, musicians, doctors, the police — a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one another, which was only sensible. Musicians performed for the biggest audience of their lives. Townspeople and the National Guard pitched in to keep people fed and healthy. No one, The New York Times reported, called the cops “pigs.”

One lunatic with a gun could have changed everything. The Altamont Festival, marred all day by violence, took place only four months later. Miraculously, at Woodstock, there was none.

Seemingly within minutes after it ended Woodstock was the stuff of legend: a spirit, a nation, an ideal, amorphous but vivid, with an Oscar-winning documentary film, the 1970 “Woodstock,” to prove it wasn’t all a hallucination. (The film was also an early lesson in how profitable ancillary rights could be; the festival itself lost money, but the film recouped it many times over.)

Sheer size made Woodstock consequential. It was huge. The Beatles had played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium; the 1965 Newport Folk Festival spread about 71,000 people over four days. Had Woodstock drawn the 100,000 to 150,000 people that its promoters planned for, it would simply have been one in a string of big rock festivals dating back to Monterey Pop in 1967, which had an estimated total of 200,000 people over three days.

After Woodstock gave up on collecting tickets — abandoning flimsy fences and declaring itself a free festival — it grew to what was variously estimated as 300,000 or 400,000 people, more than double the attendance of previous rock festivals. That number would have been considerably higher if traffic problems hadn’t turned some away; many people walked for miles to the site.

When the hippie subculture surfaced en masse at Woodstock, two years after the Summer of Love, it was still largely self-invented and isolated. There were pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls of them in smaller towns, nearly all feeling like outsiders. For many people at the festival, just seeing and joining that gigantic crowd was more of a revelation than anything that happened onstage. It proved that they were not some negligible minority but members of a larger culture — or, to use that sweetly dated term, a counterculture.

At Woodstock hippiedom simultaneously reached its public peak and opened itself to imitation and trivialization — one more glimmer of rebellion to be deflated into a style statement.

For true believers Woodstock was about cooperation and mutual aid, and about making love, not war. (At a time when Vietnam had divided America into hawks and doves, that was a peace dove sitting on the guitar in the festival logo.) But Woodstock was also a whole lot of people getting stoned at a rock concert, which was much easier than working to change the world.

Politicos like Abbie Hoffman, who is widely credited with coining the phrase Woodstock Nation, wanted to claim Woodstock as a symbol of resistance to repression. But Pete Townshend batted Hoffman off the stage with a guitar when Hoffman interrupted the Who’s set to protest the imprisonment, for drug possession, of a fellow activist, John Sinclair.

There was antiwar fervor in some songs, like Richie Havens’s “Handsome Johnny” and McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Joan Baez spoke about her husband, in jail for draft dodging, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” There was also, in much of the music, that particular late-1960s aura of imminent doom or enlightenment, in songs like “Wooden Ships” (performed by both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) and the Who’s “Amazing Journey.” And there was Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with its screams of feedback and its divebombing glissandos, brash and dire, angry and insistently American. But Woodstock was no earnest rally; it had love songs, blues and extended guitar jams.

After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock Market: a demographic target group about to have its dreams stripped of radical purpose and turned into commodities. A wider audience realized it was possible to enjoy the music, drugs and fun without the ideological trappings. Soon enough everyone was a quasi-hippie; long hair on men no longer signaled anything about what they stood for. FM radio, which was the pipeline for underground rock, traded quirky, exploratory disc jockeys for consistent formats that advertisers could depend on. Now that it was clear how large an audience was at stake — that it wasn’t just a few freaks — professionals were back in charge.

Woodstock and other late-1960s festivals changed the scale of rock concerts. Bands eagerly moved up to arenas from theaters; a week before Woodstock, for example, two of its acts, the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker, shared a bill at the Fillmore East, which had all of 2,700 seats. Music soon expanded, or bloated, to fill its newfound arenas. The early 1970s were the era of noodling jams and 10-minute drum solos that would have to be torpedoed, a few years later, by punk-rock.

Larger gatherings followed Woodstock. An estimated 600,000 people showed up at both the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 and at the one-day Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973. But those were merely concerts, not cultural symbols. Appropriately or not, Woodstock is still invoked when describing latter-day festivals, although they are considerably smaller, better organized and more comfortable than Woodstock was. None of them tolerate gate crashers.

Since Woodstock I’ve been to more rock festivals than I can easily remember. Most, sooner or later, involve mud. Some have simply been like extremely long standing-room concerts; some have the comforting familiarity of ritual, like the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which dates back almost as far as Woodstock; it had its 40th edition this year).

A few, like Coachella and Bonnaroo, run in stretches like a smart disc-jockey set, segueing neatly through various bands. And a handful have felt like generational statements: the first Lollapalooza (in 1991) and Lilith Fair (in 1997) and, surprisingly, Woodstock ’94 (in Saugerties, N.Y.), which juxtaposed performers from the original Woodstock Festival with more contemporary bands, creating what was probably the only mosh pit ever to greet Crosby, Stills and Nash. But all of them have been consumer experiences: a planned entertainment package of scheduled music and convenient vendors.

Woodstock was different. It was, particularly for a sheltered teenager, an adventure: sloppy, chaotic, bewildering, drenched, uncertain, sometimes excruciating, sometimes ecstatic. Although I was drug free, I had the feeling that the crowd was more than just an audience at a show, that something major was at stake, that Woodstock would prove something to the world. What it proved — that for at least one weekend, hippies meant what they said about peace and love — was fleeting and all too innocent; it couldn’t stand up to everyday human nature or to the pragmatic workings of the market. But 40 years later the sensation lingers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/ar...ic/09pare.html


















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Old 05-08-09, 03:39 PM   #2
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Apple, Labels Stir Up Deluxe Digital Cocktail
Antony Bruno

Downloadable music didn't kill the album cover. The CD did.

By shrinking the size and visual impact of the recording industry's mainstay product -- and then encasing it in plastic security packaging -- the shiny aluminum disc marginalized the LP to a nostalgic memory. By the time the MP3 format came along, consumers shrugged off the absence of album art and liner notes.

"We were living for so long with the CD cover art space after vinyl went away that we lost that feel of a great tactile, creative experience," says Livia Tortella, Atlantic Records general manager/executive VP of marketing and creative media. "Something got lost when you had to crack open the plastic CD with all the marketing stickers on it."

Enter Cocktail: a new digital music format that Apple is developing with record labels. The format will go beyond a simple PDF file of liner notes, and instead bundle photos, videos, lyrics and other assets with an album's music. Details remain slim, but label sources confirming the effort's existence point to it as the digital version of the record sleeves of yore.
heh, good luck with that
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