Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 14th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Everything's bigger in Texas, including the imagination of professors who claim that radio airplay of music does NOT boost record sales. There are certain alleged 'studies' that can be rejected out of hand as nonsense, and this one belongs at the top of the charts." – Dennis Wharton


"[Radio] is clearly the number one way that we're getting our music exposed. Nothing else affects retail sales the way terrestrial radio does." – Tom Biery


"Radio has proven itself time and time again to be the biggest vehicle to expose new music." – Ken Lane


"This is as bad as it gets." – Chris Gatford



































July 14th, 2007








Verizon's Copper Cutoff Traps Customers, Hampers Rivals
Deborah Yao

When Henry Powderly II ordered Verizon Communications Inc.'s FiOS fiber-optic service, he knew he was about to be connected to the future of telecommunications.

He also got unplugged from its past. Which meant that while Powderly was gaining features, he was losing some telecommunications options.

Verizon's installer — without warning, Powderly says — removed the copper wires that used to carry his phone calls. For most of the world, copper still links homes and businesses, as it has for a century.

Verizon's new high-bandwidth fiber lines are fully capable of carrying not only calls but also Internet data and television with room to grow. But once the copper is pulled, it's difficult to switch back to the traditional phone system or less expensive Digital Subscriber Line service. And Verizon is not required, in most instances, to lease fiber to rival phone companies, as it is with the copper infrastructure.

What's more, anyone who owns Powderly's house in the future will face higher bills with FiOS than another home with copper. Right now, for instance, Verizon's DSL plans cost as little as $15 (€11) a month. FiOS Internet starts at $30 (€22) a month.

"I was not given an option," said Powderly, a 30-year-old resident Long Island, just east of New York City.

Besides limiting options down the road, the switch to FiOS can have other implications. Unlike copper-connected phone service, FiOS does not work during power outages once a backup battery goes out — not even for emergency calls. Home-alarms and certain other devices work best with copper.

As it hooks up homes and businesses to its fiber network, Verizon has been routinely disconnecting the copper and, many subscribers say, not telling them upfront or giving them a choice. More than 1 million customers have signed up for a FiOS service, which is offered mainly in the suburban areas of 16 states.

Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said customers should have been notified at least three times — once by the sales representative when FiOS is ordered, by the technician before copper is cut and through paperwork given to the customer. Some customers say that has not happened.

The New York phone company has made it clear its entire network is going to fiber-optics. Verizon has decided to spend $23 billion (€17 billion) to make fiber available to 18 million homes by 2010. Network maintenance savings could top $1 billion (€740 million) a year, Verizon said.

"It's a huge expense to maintain those copper networks," said Scott Randolph, federal regulatory director at Verizon. "At some point in time, it would not make sense to operate two networks."

Mark Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America, says there are other reasons for snipping the wires.

"They don't want to maintain it — they don't want the expense and they don't want the competition," he said.

Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, incumbent phone companies like Verizon must lease to rivals their copper network. That is generally not the case for next-generation fiber systems. And so far, Verizon has filed more than 100 notices with the Federal Communications Commission to retire portions of copper throughout its network.

The FCC allows the retirement of copper as long as public notice is given so the phone companies can work together to ensure the smaller companies' access. But rivals say access at reasonable prices is not guaranteed and it is just a matter of time before they are cut off.

"It's a horrendous situation ... We don't let General Motors build a highway and decide what size cars to let on the road," said Joe Plotkin, marketing director for Bway.net, a New York Internet provider. "The small guys have tried to fight this re-monopolization of the network infrastructure."

He and other smaller rivals contend the communications market is fast becoming a two-player game between giant phone and cable companies — diminishing consumer choice.

While AT&T Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. are also retiring their copper networks, they are not touching the so-called "last mile" of copper wiring that runs from each customer's dwelling to the central office where other lines aggregate. Laying fiber, a robust pipeline, through the last mile is much more expensive because each line goes to a particular home or business.

Verizon is taking the pricey route because it believes fiber offers a superior service that will lure customers away from cable operators, who now offer telephone service in addition to television and high-speed Internet.

Rabe, the Verizon spokesman, said the company will restore copper to homes if the customer insists, but Verizon would rather not reconnect the copper and will try to convince the customer to agree. At any rate, the phone giant provides ample warning, he said.

An example of what Rabe describes as adequate notice is the fine print on Verizon's FiOS policy, which is printed on its Web site. It says "current Verizon Online DSL customers who move to FiOS Internet service will have their Verizon Online DSL permanently disabled after their FiOS conversion."

Bill Kelm, a FiOS customer in suburban Dallas, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission last year because of Verizon's "inconspicuous" policy rules.

"It's buried within these long terms of service that people never take the time to read," he said. "It needs to be more conspicuous."

While Kelm has no quarrel with FiOS itself — he pays $145 (€105) a month for TV, Internet and phone — he would like to have been told before he signed up that Verizon would cut the copper. He was counting on Verizon's clearly advertised 30-day money back guarantee in case he did not like the service and wanted to switch back.

"I blew a gasket," Kelm said. "The 30-day money back guarantee was worthless in my opinion."

He's also concerned that Verizon initially priced its current FiOS service lower only to jack rates up once the subscriber is reeled in.

"Then, you're stuck," Kelm said.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3892179.html





‘Leader’ of Fiber-Optic Cable Thieves Arrested

Police arrested two more people Saturday for stealing undersea fiber-optic cables off the southern coast of Vietnam, including the group’s suspected leader. Ten have been apprehended in the case so far.

Police in the southern Ba Ria Vung Tau Province arrested and asked prosecutors to indict Nguyen Thi Bich Phuong, the owner of three vessels found carrying tons of pillaged fiber-optic cable last month.

Phan Minh Tiep, a boatman under Phuong’s payroll, was also arrested. Phuong and Tiep could be charged with “destroying major public national security projects” and possibly face the death sentence.

The three ships’ captains have too been arrested and will face prosecution. Confessions obtained from the three have implicated Phuong as the ringleader of the thefts. The confessions also indicated they began stealing the cables in March this year.

In all, 43 km of cable have gone missing from two lines in Vietnamese waters this year.

Eleven kilometers of the TVH (Thailand-Vietnam-Hong Kong) line and 32 km of the APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network), linking nine Asian countries, have been stolen.

The theft may be partly attributed to the Ba Ria Vung Tau government’s decree last year permitting soldiers and fishermen to haul up unused cables laid before 1975 to sell as scrap.

Amidst the scramble, several fishermen reportedly ‘mistook’ cables in use for unused ones, but Ministry of Post and Telematics officials said the acts were most likely thefts, not mistakes.
http://www.thanhniennews.com/society...3&newsid=29347





ISPs Stand Firm after P2P Ruling

Internet service providers maintain they should not be liable for illegal P2P file-sharing over their networks

The Internet Service Providers' Association has repeated its assertion that ISPs should not be responsible for any illegal file-sharing that takes place over their networks.

Speaking on Wednesday in the wake of a controversial ruling in a Belgian court and comments made by the Conservative leader David Cameron, a spokesperson for ISPA maintained that ISPs should not be "set up to play judge and jury" over alleged copyright infringement.

Last week a Belgian court ruled that the ISP Scarlet — formerly Tiscali — had the technology available to it to block or filter copyright-infringing material being sent over its network via peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, and had six months to start doing so.

The judgement drew praise from John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), who claimed that it proved that "the internet's gatekeepers, the ISPs, have a responsibility to help control copyright-infringing traffic on their networks".

The court's decision — which sets a precedent in European law but seems likely to be challenged — will not be repeated in the UK anytime soon, according to telecoms lawyer Danny Preiskel of Preiskel & Co. "I think we are a way away from reaching a similar decision in the UK in imposing such liability," he told ZDNet.co.uk, adding that such a case here would be "fiercely resisted" by ISPs.

But ISPs in the UK are opening themselves up to some degree of liability by moving away from being providers of "pure conduits", as they might be responsible for anything defamatory contained within the value-added content many ISPs are now trying to sell to their customers, added Preiskel. However, he confirmed that P2P steered clear of this pitfall by virtue of the fact that no content is hosted.

An ISPA spokesperson agreed, telling ZDNet.co.uk that "ISPs are recognised in the eCommerce Directive (2002) as mere conduits of information".

The spokesperson also responded to David Cameron's recent claims that, if ISPs could remove child pornography from their servers, they should also be willing to shut down the transmission of copyright-infringing material. "We are talking about different things here — child pornography is criminal and copyright infringement can be a civil case."

"ISPs shouldn't be set up to play judge and jury," the spokesperson continued. "What we wouldn't want is corporate censorship. Any kind of censorship of the internet has to be at the government level — ISPs are not law enforcement. We understand that ISPs play a part in combating instances of illegal activity on the internet, which is why we engage with rights holders and work with government authorities on that basis, but we wouldn't say we're the gatekeepers of the internet. The people responsible for unlawful content going up on the internet are the people who put it there."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communicatio...9287968,00.htm





AT&T Slams Google Over Open-Access Wireless Proposal
Rhonda Ascierto

AT&T has asked Capitol Hill not to enable an open nationwide wireless spectrum, claiming that Google's lobbying of such a network is a bid by the search giant to obtain broadband airwaves at bargain-basement prices.

The Federal Communications Commission this week is deliberating an auction, slated for January, of newly available airwaves. The regulator is expected, later this summer, to decide how to allocate great chunks of the 700 MHz spectrum, which TV broadcasters are vacating as they convert to digital signals.

Some companies, notably Google, have asked the FCC impose open-access requirements on the spectrum, which means any device could be used over the airwaves. Skype and satellite companies DirecTV and EchoStar are among the various proponents of an open-access network.

FCC chair Kevin Martin has reportedly written a proposal, which has not yet been made public, to make most of the 700MHz spectrum open access. On Tuesday, US carrier Verizon Wireless, which is second only to AT&T in terms of market share, on Tuesday asked Martin to reconsider.

"The one-size-fits-all mentality that characterizes open access regimes for the wireless industry would begin the process of stifling innovation and creativity in our industry," Verizon Wireless general counsel Steven Zipperstein said to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Zipperstein said that while congress and the FCC had been "barraged" with requests to regulate the spectrum with open-access requirements, there is no evidence of how the current closed wireless market has failed consumers.

Yesterday, AT&T weighed in. In a letter to the FCC, AT&T said Google's "eleventh hour request" was self-serving because it would encumber licenses in the forthcoming auction "with a laundry list of intrusive 'open access' requirements that would, perhaps, entice Google to participate in the auction. By its own admission, Google's request is intended to diminish the value of those licenses, thus preventing wireless service providers such as AT&T from bidding on them and clearing the path for Google to obtain them at below-market rates."

AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars, and inhibit the growth of wireless broadband in the country.

Google, which on Monday acknowledged it was considering bidding in the auction in January, said in its letter to the FCC earlier this week that if the big wireless carriers win the spectrum "they would probably use it to protect their existing business models and thwart the entry of new competitors -- both understandable actions from a rational business perspective. Beyond the loss of a valuable public resource, however, that outcome would not bring us any closer to fostering much-needed competition in the broadband market, or providing innovative new web applications and service offerings."

Similar arguments were made to a House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet on Tuesday by the Open Internet Coalition. Its basic argument is that an open-access national network would enable the US to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of wireless innovation. Until now, the four major wireless carriers in the US have limited which networks certain phones can be used and blocked some third-party applications.

Our View

Whether or not Google is readying to build a nationwide wireless network may be a moot argument. Martin's proposal reportedly contains provisions that would divide up the spectrum into six large geographic regions, rather than a single nationwide block. That would mean an incumbent operator could buy just one region to prevent such a network.

There also, reportedly, is no language in the proposal that requires an auction winner to build a network at all. This means an incumbent could buy a regional spectrum merely as a way to block any such nationwide network.

This is all speculative, however, until the report is made public.
http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...1-3A5A3392024A





Bandwidth Hungry Application Drive Fibre-to-Home Demand
Vidura Panditaratne

Bandwidth-hungry applications and services are driving the demand for fibre-to-home infrastructure across Europe, market analyst Frost & Sullivan revealed today.

The report Fibre in the Last Mile in Europe, found that fibre-to-the-home deployments reached over 2.5 million homes in 2006 and estimates this to reach over 14.0 million in 2012.

“Video content, high bandwidth applications and convergence are driving broadband bandwidth requirements in Europe,” Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Fernando Elizalde said. “Several technologies are available to meet the delivery of bandwidth demand, of which fibre in the local loop, and in particular fibre-to-the-home, is future-proof.”

Several service providers across Europe have made commitments to deploy fibre-to-the-node or fibre-to-the-home networks in the next three to five years as the availability of the gigabit passive optical networks technology has made such deployments more economically viable.

One limiting factor has been that digital subscriber technology (DSL), which uses existing copper access networks to deliver broadband, is well entrenched in Europe and lengthens the useful life of existing copper infrastructures.

High capital investment and local network characteristics pose restraints to a full fibre-to-the-home deployment across all countries, the analyst noted.

“DSL is the preferred technology to deliver broadband and other related services in Europe,” Elizalde added. “Local network conditions have been favourable to the deployment of this technology to deliver sufficient bandwidth to cope with user and application demands.”

The advent of high-definition video and other entertainment applications over broadband will easily outgrow the bandwidth capacity of DSL-based networks, and service providers will need to start looking at deploying fibre deeper into the network, even to the home or building, in order to be ready to meet future bandwidth requirements, the the analyst forecast.
http://pressesc.com/01184074187_fibre_to_home





Sigbritt, 75, Has World's Fastest Broadband
CET

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection.

Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.

But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.

"This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.

"As a network owner we're trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections. And Peter Löthberg wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances," he told The Local.

Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.

"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.

Cisco contributed to the project but the point, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, is that fibre technology makes such high speed connections technically and commercially viable.

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.
http://www.thelocal.se/7869/20070712/





The Pirate Bay Interview (Video)
Ernesto

The BitLord show released a special episode in which they interview with Brokep from The Pirate Bay. Brokep talks about TPB’s contribution to the BitTorrent scene, their secret upcoming project, the new anonymous P2P protocol they are working on and much more.

We’ve seen quite a lot of interviews with the guys behind The Pirate Bay, even in in prestigious outlets such as the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair, but this is one of the rare video interviews.

Several topics are discussed including the new “anonymous P2P protocol”, which is not their secret project, that they are currently working on.

Making all transfers anonymous will be the future of filesharing according to Brokep. No more lawsuits and privacy for everyone.

Among other things, Brokep talks about censorship, copyright, lawsuits, Sealand and why we need more BitTorrent trackers to keep the community alive.

I could of course embed the video here, but I think The BitLord show deserves some credit. Check out the interview with Brokep over here.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-interview-video/





Leaseweb Reveals Owner of Demonoid.com
Thomas Mennecke

In a bitter battle of wills between Leaseweb and the Dutch copyright authority BREIN, it appears that BREIN has won. BREIN announced today that Leaseweb has agreed to divulge the identity of the registered owner of Demonoild.com, as well as sign the cease and desist demand which would take the site offline.

Demonoid.com is a highly popular BitTorrent tracker, which operates by invitation only. It's one of the more "exclusive" BitTorrent sites, which only allows outside membership on rare occasions - as opposed to the free-for-all philosophy of The Pirate Bay. According to Alexa.com, Demonoid.com is the 403rd most popularly ranked Internet site.

According to BREIN, it appears the Leaseweb waited to the bitter end before divulging Demonoid.com's owner. Leaseweb had until tomorrow to comply with the demand, or face a fine of 50,000 Euros a day. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Leaseweb also divulged the banking information of Demonoid.com's owner.

"Hosting provider Leaseweb today complied with the demands of Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN regarding the illegal website Demonoid.com," BREIN's press statement reads. "BREIN had summoned Leaseweb in a legal procedure demanding that Demonoid.com would be made inaccessible and the identity details of the owner would be provided to BREIN. The hearing was to take place in the District Court of Amsterdam tomorrow."

"Leaseweb signed a cease-and-desist undertaking which stipulates that it will keep Demonoid offline under penalty of 50.000 Euro per day. In addition Leaseweb supplied the name, address and bank details of their client to BREIN. These actions comply with the demands of BREIN which therefor does not continue with the hearing."

Interestingly enough, Leaseweb fought to protect the identity of their other client, Everlasting.nu, but not Demoinoid. In a similar action, BREIN also demanded the owner's identity of Everlasting.nu, and to block access. While Leaseweb appealed the cease and desist demand for Everlating.nu, a similar courtesy was not granted to Demonoid.com for reasons unknown.

It's likely that Demonoid.com has been preparing for this event, as last week the domain transferred from their Dutch webhost to Canada - thereby negating the threat of going offline. At time of publication, Leaseweb did not responded to our request for comment.

The administration of Demonoid.com, now outside the jurisdiction of BREIN, appeared unaware of the concession from Leaseweb, stating to Slyck.com, "...we know the same as you about the matter, so there is not much we can add."

Although Leaseweb signed the cease and desist demand which would serve to take Demonoid offline, this portion of BREIN's victory serves little effect as Demonoid.com's webhost is now in Canada. However, the revelation of Demonoid.com's personal identity and bank information may prove more damaging.
http://www.slyck.com/story1533_Lease...noidcoms_Owner





No soup for you

Hollywood Executives Call for End to Residual Payments
Michael Cieply

In an unusually blunt session here today, several of Hollywood’s highest-ranking executives called for the end of the entertainment industry’s decades-old system of paying what are called residuals to writers, actors and directors for the re-use of movie and television programs after their initial showings.

The executives stopped short of saying they would demand an immediate end to residual payments in the upcoming, probably difficult negotiations with writers, actors and directors. But they were emphatic in calling for the dismantling of a system under which specific payments are made when movies and shows are released on DVD, shown abroad or otherwise resold. Instead, they want to pool such revenue and recover their costs before sharing any of the profit with the talent.

“There are no ancillary markets any more; it’s all one market,” said Barry Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers. “This is the time to do it.”

The briefing at the headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, an industry bargaining group, was conducted by Mr. Meyer, Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS, and Anne Sweeney, president of the Walt Disney-ABC Television Group, along with the alliance’s president, J. Nicholas Counter. It was intended to set the stage for Monday’s opening of contract talks with the Writers Guild of America unions on both coasts.

A spokesman for the Writers Guild of America West had no immediate response. But representatives of that guild and other unions said they expect to extend their compensation arrangements to new media rather than retreating from existing formulas.

The industry’s contract with the writers expires on Oct. 31, while contracts with the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America the following June 30. With these deadlines looming, networks and studios have been scrambling to lock up additional episodes of shows that could be aired in the event of a strike, and movies that could be finished before the actors’ deadline. The industry executives declined to discuss specific contract proposals. But they said they would adamantly oppose any move to extend residual-like payments to the sale of movies and shows on the Web or in other new media. They repeated an earlier call for a study that would, in effect, defer decisions about such distribution channels for as long as three years.

“We need complete flexibility,” said Ms. Sweeney, who described broadcasters as being in a desperate scramble for revenue as consumers increasingly turn to online sources for programs that are often stripped of advertising. “Guild restraints limit our ability to do what we need to do,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/bu...cnd-guild.html





Music Licensing Companies Come Calling for Royalties

Local venues, artists miffed
John A. Torres

Six months after raising the curtain on their gourmet coffee shop in the beachside Indian Harbour Place shopping center, Laurie and Jim Hall decided to offer live music on Friday and Saturday nights.

The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.
No problem.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.

"At the time, the shop was losing money, so we had to break it up into payments," said Laurie Hall. But the Halls paid, and the music continued.

Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians -- those who did not play original music -- and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing.

This aggressive -- but legal -- posture being taken by music licensing companies has the potential to unplug live music in many restaurants, bars and coffee shops in Brevard County.

It comes on the heels of a massive music industry crackdown during the past several years on illegal downloads from the Internet. Whether it's a professional recording taken from a Web site or an accordion player singing a Jimmy Buffet tune in a small venue, the industry is working to collect royalties for whoever wrote the songs.

"They have threatened to shut down my place," said Lou Andrus, owner of the popular beachside nightclub Lou's Blues.

Copyright laws

When a songwriter signs with one of the licensing companies -- the country's three biggest are BMI, SESAC and ASCAP -- his or her music is copyrighted.

Unless Hall pays the three major companies, and even some of the smaller ones, she would be breaking the law by having musicians perform songs written by others.

"It makes me so angry," Hall said. "People like playing here because it's not a bar, there's no smoke and it's a clean environment. I feel like the greedy music industry is extorting money from us and hurting these musicians just starting out."

In addition to the $400 she has already paid ASCAP, she routinely receives annual bills from BMI for $305 and from SESAC for between $250 and $300.

She doesn't understand why a little coffee shop is in the same "eating/drinking establishment" category as places where music is more front and center, such as Lou's Blues or Meg O'Malley's in downtown Melbourne. Hall said she likely will start offering music just one night a week.

SESAC spokesman Shawn Williams said in e-mail responses to questions that it is his company's responsibility to enforce copyright laws, many of which were enacted nearly a century ago.

"The copyright law requires each business that publicly performs music to obtain permission prior to performing any copyrighted music," Williams said, adding that the owners of East Coast Coffee need to decide whether music "is important to their operations and overall profitability. We have many license agreements with small establishments."

Williams defends the money collected.

"This provides the majority of income to songwriters," he said.

Run-ins

Andrus, the owner of Lou's Blues, said he has had many run-ins with the copyright companies over the years.

"It started 15 years ago when I had a guy come out to our other place, Cantina dos Amigos, and play Mexican music on his guitar on the patio," Andrus said. "They came after me for money. Are they really sending royalty checks to the songwriter in Mexico?"
Andrus said he pays BMI and ASCAP about $3,000 a year but is ignoring the smaller companies that seek royalties from him.

"There are so many damned companies you don't know who to pay," he said. "One guy called and said I had to pay him if I played any gospel music at all. It's really a mess."

Hall insists that her coffee shop makes no extra money when the musicians play. Unlike a bar where patrons may imbibe several cocktails during the course of the night, her customers normally order one cup of coffee per performance.

But Andrus and others who refuse to pay could find themselves paying anyway -- in the form of fines.

"The law provides damages ranging from $750 to $150,000 for each song performed without proper authorization," Williams said.

And in no way do the songs have to be performed live, or even on the radio, to elicit calls for royalties.

Andrus said a friend of his who owned a restaurant that did not feature music was contacted by a company looking to charge him because it owned the rights to a Hank Williams Jr. song, "Are You Ready for Some Football?" The song preceded every "Monday Night Football" telecast, which the restaurant carried on its televisions.

He said his friend simply chose to turn the volume down when the song came on.

The licensing companies use a variety of methods to find out whether copyrighted music is being used.

"ASCAP representatives may visit establishments and find that they advertise live entertainment," explained Richard Reimer, senior vice president of ASCAP, in an e-mail. "Local newspapers carry advertisements for venues that present live entertainment and, of course, the Internet is a valuable resource as well."

Fewer gigs

Singer/songwriter Al Urezzio, who played at East Coast Coffee, said he recently lost his steady gig at the Getaway Lounge in Suntree because the owners were being asked to pay copyright fees as well.

Now Urezzio, who performs as "Grumpy Al," is relegated to performing only his original compositions. That means his options on where to perform are limited.

"This is really bull," said Urezzio, who owns the Burger Inn on U.S. 1 in Melbourne. "East Coast called and told me to only play originals from now on."

Chad Fagg, one half of the pop-rock duo "Just Blue," also is without a steady place to perform. Like Urezzio, the group was told recently that they could no longer play at the East Coast Coffee -- where they've performed for four months -- unless they played only original music.

"It's very disappointing, and it's frustrating," Fagg said. "They gave us a shot before anyone else would. I understand it's about royalties, but it's such a small place."

Other crackdowns

Nightclubs and coffee shops are not the only places affected by the industry crackdown.

Neil Butler, owner of Hawk's Gym in Melbourne, said he has had to pay a few hundred dollars a year to licensing companies in order to pipe in satellite music to his fitness center. Commercial radio is free to play because the radio stations have already paid the necessary fees.

Professional guitarist and singer Eddy Fischer, who performs in the group "Robin and Eddy," has been a member of ASCAP since he was 17. Having performed with members of The Monkees and The Mammas and Pappas, Fischer figured it was a good idea to protect himself. But even he thinks the industry might be going a bit too far.

"I think this is a little out of line," he said a day before playing his new age-style folk music at the Halls' coffee shop. "It seems kind of rough that little coffee houses with no stage or no lights that were not built for live music have to come up with that kind of money."

But ASCAP's Reimer said the licensing fees are "affordable for any small nightclub, restaurant, tavern or coffee house." He said there was little option available other than seeking permissions directly from the songwriters.

Andrus agreed business owners really don't have a choice.

"It's extortion, it's intimidating. It's such a scam."
http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbc...707080343/1006





RIAA to Feds: Make XM-Sirius Pay More, Restrict Listeners' Recording
Anne Broache

The Recording Industry Association of America has already mounted a court challenge against XM Satellite Radio over gadgets like the Pioneer Inno that allow consumers to trap individual songs originally played on air in alleged violation of copyright.

Now the industry group is urging that issue to be one of the deciding factors for federal regulators weighing the proposed multibillion-dollar union of XM and its sole competitor, Sirius Satellite radio.

In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, the RIAA urged the agency to "make clear that its approval of a merger is conditioned upon the continued protection of sound recordings from unlawful infringement."

Under copyright law, separate licenses exist for the "performance" of a song and for the recording or "distribution" of it. Satellite and Internet radio broadcasters (unlike traditional radio) are already required to pay performance-based royalties.

But the RIAA said it's concerned that both satellite radio companies have invested in technologies that allow them to shortchange artists on the distribution side "by giving users the ability to download copyrighted sound recordings to portable devices, effectively transforming a radio-like service into a digital distribution subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster."

A merger could bolster those investments and "seriously threaten the viability of the music industry as a whole," the RIAA wrote. The group also called on the FCC to require the merged companies to pay higher royalty rates in general to the record industry, arguing the firms are "no longer new, struggling companies" that can get away with paying what it called "below-market rates."

The RIAA has already earned some U.S. senators' blessings this year for a bill that would impose new limits on the broadcasters, including a requirement that they cloak their streams with copy-protection technology, but the proposal hasn't gone anywhere yet.

XM and consumer advocacy groups that have come to its defense insist that the devices in question don't violate copyright law because they operate within a listener's home recording and fair use rights.

The RIAA's comments came on the final day for submitting comments about the public-interest implications of the XM-Sirius deal in general. As of this blog post, more than 5,000 comments had been posted to the FCC's online database. According to a press release distributed Monday afternoon by a firm representing the radio companies, more than 3,500 of those comments came from individuals supporting the deal.

The FCC is still accepting comments for at least another month on a more specific question: whether, if it finds the XM-Sirius deal is hunky-dory for the public, it should waive a decade-old rule prohibiting a single operator from controlling all of the satellite radio spectrum.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-974...47-1040_3-0-10





U.S. Court Denies Webcasters' Stay Petition

A federal appeals court has denied a petition by U.S. Internet radio stations seeking to delay a royalty rate hike due July 15 they say could kill the fledgling industry.

While the July 11 ruling by the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was a setback, the SaveNetRadio coalition of Webcasters vowed it would continue fighting the hikes in Congress.

Late last month, thousands of U.S. Internet radio stations, organized by SaveNetRadio, held a "Day of Silence" to protest the hikes in performance royalties paid to musicians and record companies.

Under a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in March, Webcasters will pay a performance royalty of $0.0008 for each listener of each song in 2006, rising to $0.0019 in 2010. The first payment, backdated to Jan. 1, 2006, is due on July 15.

The new ruling means the six biggest Internet radio stations -- Pandora, Yahoo, Live365, RealNetworks Inc., Time Warner Inc's AOL and Viacom Inc's MTV Online -- will pay 47 percent of their anticipated 2006 combined revenue of $37.5 million in performance royalties, said SaveNetRadio.

"We are disappointed that the Court failed to acknowledge the irreparable and quite frankly, devastating effect these new royalties will have on the Internet radio industry," said Jake Ward, a spokesperson for the SaveNetRadio coalition of Webcasters, net radio listeners and artists.

SoundExchange -- a non-profit group representing more than 20,000 artists, 2,500 independent record labels and four major record companies -- collects the royalties from Internet and satellite radio, as well as digital cable.

Ward said the ruling by the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington puts the ball squarely in the hands of Congress, which has already received more than half million messages urging members to pass legislation to cut the royalty rate to 7.5 percent of a company's annual revenue, bringing Internet radio in line with the rate by satellite radio.
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/...yID=nN12340366





Reprieve on Royalty Increase Being Pursued for Internet Radio
Jeff Leeds

Internet radio programmers who warned that a dispute over royalties could cause the death of their medium have received a stay.

A substantial increase in the royalties that online stations must pay for playing music was set to take effect tomorrow. But amid an outcry from online listeners and Congressional pressure, representatives for the recording industry indicated this week that they might not demand all the payments called for under the new royalty program, which was established in March by the federal Copyright Royalty Board.

Previously, Internet radio stations paid 0.0762 cent per play of each song, and small Webcasters, who generate little or no advertising, were charged based on a percentage of their revenue to relieve them of onerous royalty bills. But the new rate system eliminated that protection and called for the rate per play to more than double by 2010. It also required a separate fee of $500 a station, a potentially hefty charge for big Webcasters that offer thousands of customized stations.

In a new proposal disclosed yesterday, SoundExchange, an industry-backed organization that collects royalties for record labels and artists, said that it would agree to cap the minimum fee at $50,000 a year — if Webcasters provided more data about which songs they play and take steps to prevent listeners from using their computers to copy or store the radio streams.

But the two sides still disagree on other aspects of the new rates. Big Internet companies that offer online radio, including Yahoo and RealNetworks, had been battling the planned increase. National Public Radio, which streams music and other programming online, had also rallied listeners to protest the rates.

The reprieve came as federal lawmakers had begun discussing legislation that would enact reduced fees. But there had been no indication of when the legislation would come up for a vote.

The stations also lost a separate bid to delay or stop the new rates in court. A federal appeals panel this week declined to put off the rates — a decision that had appeared to seal the fate of Webcasters who worried that the royalty charges would put them out of business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/business/14music.html





All Shook Up, Right Down to the Musical Core
Richard Siklos

SO omnipotent is the Apple digital music machine that just the possibility of one of its main suppliers holding back some of its music from Apple’s iTunes music store is enough to make headlines and send shock waves.

That is what happened last week when the Universal Music Group let Apple know that it would no longer grant the company guaranteed access to its coming releases. Officially, Universal had no comment, but an executive briefed on the negotiations said the music company was merely interested in keeping its options open as it does with most other retailers in the brick-and-mortar world.

The upshot is that Universal will provide music to iTunes on an “at will” basis. Thus, if someone offers Universal a boatload of cash for the right to sell the latest Bon Jovi or Rihanna singles exclusively on a rival download service, Universal is saying that it is open for business.

This bit of news could shake up the digital music business because Universal, owned by Vivendi, is the world’s largest music conglomerate, representing one of every three albums sold in the United States. And it underscores the longstanding and increasing tension between Apple and the entertainment industry, not to mention the scores of rivals who spend days and nights plotting for ways to chip away at the primacy of the Apple iPod. (That primacy has already bolstered sales of Macintosh computers and, if all goes as Steve Jobs plans, will soon spread to mobile phones and home video.)

Theoretically, Apple may be concerned because of Universal’s market clout; an Apple spokesman did not return calls seeking comment. On the other hand, Universal is not about to turn its back on Apple, given that 15 percent of its global sales come from digital downloads.

“It looks like a little bit of saber-rattling,” said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst who covers the consumer audio business for IDC. “We’re not seeing ultimatums being dished out here. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.”

But there is little question who is benefiting the most from the symbiosis so far. Mr. Jobs’s “iSpawn” holds more than 70 percent of the market for portable music players and more than 80 percent of the online music sales business — a fairly unassailable lead, as contenders like Samsung, Sony and Microsoft have found. You can almost imagine Mr. Jobs shrugging at Universal’s new terms: “Go right ahead.”

But as more music sales move online, the volume is turning up not just among hardware players but also among digital music service rivals that include Amazon, Yahoo Music, Napster and Rhapsody. According to figures released last week by Nielsen SoundScan, physical album sales decreased by 15 percent from Jan. 1 to July 1 this year, while sales of digital tracks, though still a much smaller business, rose 49 percent.

In this environment, the music industry has a tempestuous relationship with Mr. Jobs, more respect-resent than love-hate. Label chiefs respect that he has revolutionized the online and portable music businesses at a time when so many others have flopped, and file-sharers and sites like Russia’s AllofMP3.com — a site that labels have accused of piracy — have wreaked havoc on the industry’s business models. (AllofMP3 was conveniently shuttered last week as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia prepared to visit President Bush.) But the chiefs resent Mr. Jobs’s rigidity in areas like pricing — 99 cents a track, take it or leave it — and iTunes’ proprietary digital-rights management software, which has made songs sold there impossible to play on rival devices.

Most of all, they envy that Mr. Jobs is in a much higher-margin business of selling gadgets. Ms. Kevorkian of IDC said the label chiefs might still hold out hope that Apple will share someday the spoils of each iPod sold — along the lines of how Microsoft agreed to pay $1 for each of its Zune players, introduced last year. But only a million Zunes have been sold, while iPod sales have topped 100 million.

Mr. Jobs ruffled some industry feathers in February by suggesting in an open letter that music labels ought to drop their requirement for digital-rights management protection because only a small percentage of the music on his customers’ iPods was bought through the music store — the rest was from uploads of people’s own collections. So far, only one of the four big music companies, EMI, has sided with Mr. Jobs and lifted the digital-rights management protection on its online catalog, selling those singles for $1.29 each. (Keep in mind that the protection does not exist on physical CDs, which is how the industry got into its file-sharing pickle in the first place.)

Although his anti-protection measure stance is somewhat self-serving — European antitrust regulators had been circling the closed iTunes system — there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Mr. Jobs may be on to something. And, if so, the other big label groups — Universal, Warner Music and Sony/BMG — could follow suit and offer protection-free tunes, although perhaps not with their entire catalogs, as EMI has done.

What is astonishing about the music industry, versus other forms of media, is the amount of entrepreneurial fervor it attracts at every level — from indie labels to Web and satellite radio to fan sites and consumer electronics giants and mobile phone operators. This partly explains why Universal has at least raised the possibility that iTunes and the iPod might not forever be the only game in town.

Certainly there is no shortage of pretenders to the throne. Although they have struggled to gain traction, the digital music outlets of retail giants like Wal-Mart Stores or Best Buy compete aggressively and can’t be counted out.

A few new ventures are starting free download services supported by advertising. And one start-up gizmo that James L. McQuivey of Forrester Research is eyeing is Slacker, which will combine a portable MP3 player with a wide range of Internet radio stations from which consumers can sample music. A key difference, Mr. McQuivey said, is that the Slacker could be much friendlier to music merchandising than the current iTunes/iPod setup.

AMAZON, meanwhile, has announced plans to enter the online music store fray by introducing a service next year that will sell only songs that are free of digital-rights management protection. That could give it a leg up if, as expected, the other big music labels start to offer some of their music on that basis.

Although Amazon has had its digital media stumbles, it has the dual advantage of knowing its customers’ cultural habits and being a popular online destination where people go to buy electronics and CDs. Indeed, you could imagine Amazon cutting an exclusive deal to offer a hot Universal track for a week or two when combined with the purchase of an MP3 player.

That might not be great for iTunes, but it would probably be good for sales of iPods, which stand as a triumph of Mr. Jobs’s trademark design and simplicity. Having spent years trying to keep the computer operating system of his Macintosh computers separate from the much bigger Microsoft Windows, Mr. Jobs has learned that interoperability can work to his benefit.

Oddly, Universal or anyone else doing exclusive deals with iTunes’ rivals could end up reducing the clout of iTunes but spurring more sales of iPods — and that means more music to Mr. Jobs’s ears.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/bu.../08frenzy.html





NAB Refutes University of Texas Airplay Study
FMQB

Earlier this year, University of Texas at Dallas economics professor Stan Liebowitz published a study arguing that radio airplay actually derails music sales because if Americans weren't listening to the radio in their cars, they might be buying more CDs or digital recordings. "I am not disputing that radio is very good in picking which songs are going to become very popular," Liebowitz explained, according to Business Week. "But if radio didn't exist, we could see a 50 percent to 60 percent increase in record sales."

Now, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has released a response to the study, which they call "bogus." NAB EVP Dennis Wharton stated, "Everything's bigger in Texas, including the imagination of professors who claim that radio airplay of music does NOT boost record sales. There are certain alleged 'studies' that can be rejected out of hand as nonsense, and this one belongs at the top of the charts."

In responding to Liebowitz's study, the NAB cited statements made by record label executives recognizing the promotional value of radio airplay:

"I have yet to see the big reaction you want to see to a hit until it goes on the radio. I'm a big, big fan of radio." - Richard Palmese, Executive Vice President of Promotion, RCA, 2007.

"Radio has proven itself time and time again to be the biggest vehicle to expose new music." - Ken Lane, Senior Vice President for Promotion, Island Def Jam Music Group, 2005.

"It is clearly the number one way that we're getting our music exposed. Nothing else affects retail sales the way terrestrial radio does." - Tom Biery, Senior Vice President for Promotion, Warner Bros. Records, 2005.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=435728





Microholography Milks 500GB Out of DVD-Sized Discs
Todd Haselton

A group of scientists working together with the Institute of Optics and Optical Technologies at the Technical University of Berlin claim to have discovered a way to store 500GB worth of data on DVD-sized discs. The scientists are members of the Microholas Project, coordinated by Dr. Susanna Orlic, which plans to double the storage capacity to 1TB by 2010.

The Project aims to implement a microholographic recording techniques which record data to nanostructures in the recording process. By combining multilayer storage and holographic multiplexing, "microholography" allows data to be stored in three dimensions. The technology works by replacing the two-dimensional pit-land structures currently found on CDs and DVDs with microgratings, which are "holographically induced" using two laser beams. In other words, instead of recording to a series of bumps and pits like standard CDs, the new technology creates three-dimensional holographic grids that can be used for reading and writing data throughout the physical structure of the disc.

In order to store data in multi-layer form, the beam is "focused to different depths inside the photopolymer layer," which means that the beam can actually be raised and lowered to write to different altitudes of the three-dimensional holograohic grid.

As you might expect, the project is bullish on its prospects. The discs are predicted to be inexpensive to produce, which the project hopes will translate into manufacturer interest. Of course, there's no word on what the recording devices would cost, and that's a major part of the equation.

Blu-ray discs currently store 50GB of data on a dual-layer disc, whereas HD-DVD can store 30GB on its dual-layer offering. Both formats have greater storage potential thanks to the possibility of adding additional layers. By 2010, we expect to see 100GB and 60GB Blu-ray and HD DVD discs (respectively) available for recording use on PCs.

Microholographic discs (MHD) are transparent and are the same physical size as CDs and DVDs, but the discs being created by the Microholas Project effectively have ten layers with five different wavelengths. The "prototype" discs are recordable and sport a 50Mb/s data rate, but the group expects an "Advanced Device" with 1TB of storage and data transfer speeds in excess of 200Mb/s by 2010.

1TB optical discs sure would beat the old sneakernet!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...zed-discs.html





Sony BMG Sues CD Software Firm
AP

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is suing a company that developed antipiracy software for CDs, claiming the technology was defective and cost the record company millions of dollars to settle consumer complaints and government investigations.

Sony BMG filed a summons in a New York state court against The Amergence Group Inc., formerly SunnComm International, which developed the MediaMax CD copy-protection technology.

Sony BMG is seeking to recover some $12 million in damages from the Phoenix-based technology company, according to court papers filed July 3.

The music company accuses Amergence of negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the terms of its license agreement by delivering software that "did not perform as warranted."

In a statement, The Amergence Group vowed to fight what it described as unwarranted allegations by Sony BMG.

The company also suggested that lawsuits against Sony BMG over CD copy-protection primarily stemmed from Sony's use of another technology.

New York-based Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, declined to elaborate on the suit. Sony BMG is home to names such as Bruce Springsteen, Carrie Underwood and Modest Mouse.

It began including MediaMax on some of its compact discs in August 2003 and shipped about 4 million CDs equipped with the technology in 2005.

The program restricted the number of copies of a CD that a user could make. Some users reported problems when the CDs were played on their computers.

The record company also drew complaints over another type of copy-protection software that restricted CD duplication.

The fallout over the copy-protected CDs sparked lawsuits and investigations.

Last fall, the company agreed to pay a total of $5.75 million to settle the litigation and resolve investigations by officials in several states.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ninav-business





Dangerous Java Flaw Threatens Virtually Everything
Liam Tung

Google's Security team has discovered vulnerabilities in the Sun Java Runtime Environment that threatens the security of all platforms, browsers and even mobile devices.

"This is as bad as it gets," said Chris Gatford, a security expert from penetration testing firm Pure Hacking.

"It’s a pretty significant weakness, which will have a considerable impact if the exploit codes come to fruition quickly. It could affect a lot of organizations and users," Gatford told ZDNet Australia.

Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) analyst, Robert Lowe, warned that anyone using the Java Runtime Environment or Java Development Kit is at risk.

"Delivery of exploits in this manner is attractive to attackers because even though the browser may be fully patched, some people neglect to also patch programs invoked by browsers to render specific types of content," said Lowe.

According to Gatford, the bugs threaten pretty much every modern device.

"Java runs on everything: cell phones, PDAs, and PCs. This is the problem when you have a vulnerability in something so modular--it affects so many different devices.

"Also, this exploit is browser independent, as long as it invokes a vulnerable Java Runtime Environment," said Gatford.

Pure Hacking’s Gatford said the problem is compounded by the slim chance of an enterprise patching Java Runtime vulnerabilities.

"It would be an extremely difficult and laborious process for an organization trying to patch Java Runtime across the enterprise," he said.
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/securi...2028389,00.htm





All-Nighter PCs Cost U.S. Businesses $1.7 Billion
Jasmin Malik Chua

Forcing your PC to pull another pointless all-nighter isn't just polluting, it's also a waste of money. Make that a lot of money. Nearly half of all corporate computers in the United States don't get turned off at night, costing U.S. businesses $1.72 billion in annual energy costs and spewing 14.4 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year, according to a new report.

Let's give those numbers some context: A midsize company with around 10,000 PCs wastes more than $165,000 per year in electricity costs for computers left on overnight, while contributing 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Giving those same computers a breather every night would have roughly the same effect as taking 2.58 million cars off the road, which is more than the number of autos zipping around the entire state of Maryland.

"Few problems match an impact so large with a solution so simple," says Sumir Karayi, chief executive officer 1E, a provider of power management software that, along with the Alliance to Save Energy, commissioned the study. "A computer uses energy even when it appears to be idle. Reducing that waste can help US businesses reduce costs and prevent tons of damaging greenhouse gases from being emitted into our atmosphere.

Part of the problem: worker apathy and insufficient business systems. "Ideally, everyone would shut down their PCs at the end of the working day, but the research released shows that this just doesn't happen," Karayi says.

According to the report, some employees assume—usually erroneously—that their PCs need to be left on overnight so that their IT departments can deploy security patches and software updates. Others hold the misconception that their PCs will automatically go to sleep. (Unless you tweak your energy-savings profile to do so, it's not going to happen.)

Worse, an alarming number of respondents admitted that they just didn't care.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007...ighter_pcs.php





How Gore got his solar panels

An Inconvenient Turbine: Conservation vs. Preservation

Homeowners who go green face neighbors' objections
Sara Schaefer Muñoz

In neighborhoods across the country, there's a battle brewing: the environmentalists vs. the aesthetes.

As "green"-minded homeowners move to put in new energy-efficient windows, solar panels and light-reflecting roofs, they are bumping up against neighbors and local boards that object, saying the additions defy historic-district regulations, will look ugly or damage property values.

In Arizona, a man was recently ordered by his homeowners' association to take down a solar water-heating device from his roof or face a daily fine. In upstate New York, neighbors fought the installation of a wind turbine tower on a resident's 11-acre property, delaying the project by nearly a year. Even former vice president and outspoken environmental advocate Al Gore had trouble getting solar panels and a geothermal unit approved for his Nashville home. A local zoning board initially wouldn't consider the application for the solar panels. It then took an appeal, several redesigns and a property inspection before they were approved eight months later. (The community recently revised its ordinance to allow the devices.)

David Bannatyne was tired of the drafty, stubborn windows in his early 19th-century home in Concord, Mass., and was especially fed up with paying his $5,000 heating bill each winter.

But when he applied for permission to put in 17 new, energy-efficient windows last fall, the town's Historic Districts Commission denied his request, concerned that the windows wouldn't blend in with the home's historic character. After some debate, Mr. Bannatyne agreed to restore the windows instead. While he says they're now easier to open, he says his heating bills haven't changed. "I'm not doing the global warming issue any favors by keeping these windows," he says.

Environmental groups say that the often burdensome and contentious process for those who live in regulated developments or historic districts prevents more people from making energy-saving changes to their homes. "It's a hurdle. If people know there's such a delay, they say, 'Forget about it,' " says Nils Petermann, a research associate with the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

The clashes come as states and utilities are increasingly offering incentives for energy-efficient improvements. At the same time, the number of designated historic districts and homeowners associations continues to grow, and with them the number and scope of local governing bodies that can restrict the changes people make to home exteriors.

There were 412,900 locally designated historic properties reported in 2006, up from 304,000 five years earlier, according to the office in the National Park Service that encourages local preservation. And the number of condominium, co-op and homeowners associations -- which are usually governed by an elected board of residents and can control everything from pets to exterior paint color -- has grown to about 300,000 from 240,000 five years ago, according to the Community Associations Institute, an education and advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va.

Because the issue of green improvements versus aesthetics is cropping up in communities around the country, the institute earlier this year put together a committee to review its policy guidelines on energy-efficient improvements. "Renewable energy and aesthetics don't have to be mutually exclusive," says institute spokesman Frank Rathbun. "But agreeing to projects without regard to the architectural guidelines of the community can create divisiveness and can affect property values."

In the case of Mr. Bannatyne's windows, local officials point out that restored windows can be just as energy-efficient as new ones if done properly. And they say windows, especially, preserve a building's historic value, says Carol Kowalski, the town's staff planner at the time of Mr. Bannatyne's application.

"The worst things you can do to a historic building, besides arson, is take out historic windows," she says.

Some states are trying to make energy-efficient improvements easier. California has long restricted homeowners' associations from blocking solar-panel installations, and New Jersey and Arizona passed similar legislation this year. A bill in Connecticut would override zoning restrictions and make it easier for people to put in wind turbines on their property. It wasn't passed, but lawmakers hope to revive it next session.

Matt Burdick, a 33-year-old communications director in Chandler, Ariz., pushed for the Arizona measure after his community association pressured him to remove a solar water heater he installed last September. Mr. Burdick had splurged on a swimming pool for his children, ages 7 and 10, and because he wanted to get the maximum use of it year-round, he put in the solar heater to keep the water warm and avoid an estimated $200 a month in pool heating costs.

Soon after, he started receiving notices from his homeowners association. Finally faced with a $50 daily fine, he says, he took down the seven panels in April, and is waiting for the new law to go into effect in September. Meanwhile, the panels are sitting in his tool shed. "This is a great way to make use of solar energy -- it avoids using a fossil fuel," he says. "People are losing sight of the big picture."

The property manager of Mr. Burdick's association did not return several phone calls seeking comment.

Responding to concerns about aesthetics, some companies have been introducing products designed to be unobtrusive. Atlantis Energy Systems Inc. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is expanding its line of solar roof tiles -- which generate solar energy but are cut to look like standard roof tiles, instead of the traditional single solar panel.

Energy-efficient window-makers, too, are pitching products that blend in with older homes: Jeld-Wen Inc. this year introduced a new double-hung window that can fit into existing older frames but still provide better insulation. Houston-based Standard Renewable Energy uses a racking system that positions solar panels to look flush against the roof. The company provides homeowners with a complete "green" service -- from consultation to installation of items like solar panels -- and will also go before an association or zoning board to help sell the project.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118420050252864047.html





Can China Reform Itself?
Joseph Kahn

PHONY fertilizer destroys crops. Stores shelves are filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose is passed off as honey. Exports slump when European regulators find dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.

More product safety scandals in China? Not this time. These quality problems prompted a sluggish United States government to tighten food and drug regulation 101 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the act that created the Food and Drug Administration.

Like America’s industrializing economy a century ago, China’s is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act like pirates. Both countries suffered epidemics of fatal fakes, and both have had regulators who were too inept, corrupt or hamstrung to do much about it.

The question now is whether Chinese factories, caught exporting poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients, filthy shellfish, bogus pet food and faulty tires, can react in time to head off more damage to their reputation.

Or, to put it another way, are the latest incidents enough to push China toward its own Progressive Era?

The answer, say people who have studied the country’s regulatory system, is a cautious yes. But first, they say, Beijing must take a fresh approach to inspecting and policing its often unruly economy.

Chinese exporters sold nearly $1 trillion worth of goods overseas last year. Fakes and shoddy goods, by most measures, made up no more than a tiny fraction of that total. Yet the string of product safety scandals reflects a persistent roguish undercurrent in the Chinese economy that extensive media coverage, new laws and tougher enforcement have not eliminated.

Teddy Roosevelt’s government had to overcome ideological opposition to regulating private-sector commerce.

China has a different political challenge: Its authoritarian government, though under the control of one party, has struggled to develop a modern, unified regulatory system that can supervise a dynamic market economy.

“Competition inside our bureaucracy has led to a diffusion of power and a tendency to shirk responsibility,” says Mao Shoulong, a public policy expert at People’s University in Beijing. “Cracking down on individual criminals doesn’t solve the problem. We need to fix the whole system.”

Safety lapses are a serious side effect of China’s gradual and still incomplete efforts to separate politics and business. To spur economic growth in the 1980s, top leaders gave local-level officials more power. The goal was to undercut socialist conservatives in the central government who exercised tight controls. Regulatory power was also scattered.

Growth surged. Entrepreneurs, foreign investors and peasant farmers assumed a dominant role in production. But safety, as well as labor and environmental standards, fell by the wayside.

Scores of people died after ingesting bathtub baijiu, or rice wine, that substituted cheap industrial-grade alcohol for the real stuff. Condiments used as spices for hot-pot cooking contained paraffin wax. Vermicelli noodles carried a cancer-causing agent, as did a popular red dye, called Sudan Red, that was used by Kentucky Fried Chicken and Heinz, among other companies.

Hundreds of parents in Liaoning Province were so frustrated by the local government’s response to a spate of food poisonings at a school cafeteria in 2003 that they blockaded the local railroad.

Perhaps the most sensational case occurred in 2004, when small factories in central China produced cheap infant milk formula that lacked protein. Some 50 infants in Anhui Province died from malnutrition after their parents and some doctors mistook their symptoms — bloated faces and hands — as a sign of overfeeding.

Since then, regulatory efforts have been strengthened, but often with limited results. As many as 17 bureaucracies have overlapping responsibilities in just the food and drug sphere, and they jealously guard their power. The Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, and the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine have all vied for monitoring roles.

The reason: They wanted to collect license fees and fines to supplement their measly budgets. No less significantly, inspectors and their bosses could collect bribes in exchange for favors.

“It came down to turf warfare between departments,” said Roger Skinner, a retired British regulator who advised the Chinese government on improving food safety on behalf of the World Health Organization. “If they can’t enforce, they will lose revenue.”

Realizing they had created a muddle of competing bureaucracies, top leaders in 2003 formed the State Food and Drug Administration, named after its American counterpart, that on paper had “super-ministerial authority” to coordinate all the others that monitored the politically sensitive food and drug sphere.

The agency quickly fell victim to infighting, however, and lost clout in 2005, when its first director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was forced out. He was later convicted of taking bribes for speeding approval of new drugs. After the latest string of safety scandals erupted, Mr. Zheng was sentenced to death.

Blurred lines of responsibility and weak investigative powers partly explain why Chinese regulators gave little help to their American counterparts in the most fatal example of China’s safety problems reaching foreign shores.

In 1997 and again last year, the Americans sought information about why Chinese chemical companies had exported counterfeit glycerin, containing poisonous diethylene glycol, that ended up in medical products in Haiti and Panama. Scores of people who consumed the products in both countries died.

The diethylene glycol was made in Chinese chemical factories, but ended up in pharmaceutical products. That meant it fell into a regulatory void. No agency wanted to take control.

“You get buck-passing, frankly, between ministries,” said Mr. Skinner, the British regulator. “One ministry says, ‘It wasn’t my job to do that, it was this other ministry.’ ”

Even so, many experts argue that the capitalist excesses that have thrived during China’s economic transition have already sparked corrective action, not totally unlike the Progressive Era changes in the United States.

President Hu Jintao has pushed through a series of measures under the slogan of “scientific development” that aim to strengthen central regulators and economic planners, reduce abuses of low-wage workers, and protect the degraded environment.

He has met plenty of resistance, and it remains unclear how much he will pull back from China’s fast-growth development model.

Though some political and corporate forces argue that China needs to grow richer before it can address labor and environmental problems, there are few vested interests that defend the rights of fly-by-night factories to inject poison into medicine or leave the protein out of infant formula. With China’s reputation having taken a hit in the United States, resistance to tightening standards seems likely to fade.

“I think Chinese leaders are deeply alarmed,” said Dali Yang, a Chinese governance expert at the East Asian Institute in Singapore. “They will not let a tiny percentage of bad exports damage their reputation.”

Mr. Yang said that big Chinese cities have already demonstrated that they can do a better job monitoring food and drug safety than less developed counties and rural areas. Retail and restaurant chains and brand-name manufacturers have also gained market share versus small-scale operations, partly because Chinese consumers want to avoid fake or dangerous goods.

The state-run media has been given unusual latitude to expose shoddy goods. One of the most popular shows on China Central Television, “Weekly Quality Report,” investigates accidents, poisonings and cheap fakes. Recent topics include defective motorcycle helmets, a faux rabies vaccine, faulty tires and toxic food additives.

Even the United States F.D.A., which China considers a model of regulatory might, has issues that might sound familiar in Beijing. Its bureaucrats have complained that tight budgets and competition with 11 other federal regulatory agencies have made it harder to police the food supply.

And while that agency was created in the regulatory rush of 1906, it took more than 55 years, until the Kennedy administration, for the F.D.A. to acquire the powers it sought to ensure a safe drug supply.

“I’d be surprised,” Mr. Yang said, “if it takes China that long.”

Jake Hooker contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/we...08kahn.html?hp





In Fear and Scandal, Some Find a New Drum to Beat
Andrew Martin

THERE was a time the words “Made in China” immediately evoked “shoddy.” Lately, many Americans are thinking “danger.”

After reports of toothpaste laced with poison, tires that fall apart on the highway, contaminated fish and pet food, who wouldn’t be scared?

But for some people, those fears are a dream come true. Politicians, catfish farmers, consumer activists, to name a few.

For years, these groups have been trying to raise alarms about the wholesomeness of products from China as they pursue their own causes. Now, they revel in the chance to give China a few choice shots.

Southern catfish and shrimp farmers, for example, have invoked images of Asian ponds bubbling with antibiotics and pollutants but have gotten little notice from government regulators.

“We’ve been seeing prohibited chemicals and other additives in fish for quite a long time,” said Dick Stevens, chief executive of Consolidated Catfish in Mississippi. “We’ve just kind of gotten a blank look when we’ve said that to the agencies.”

Ranchers in the Great Plains, and the politicians who represent them, have been campaigning to require country-of-origin labeling on agricultural products, on the theory that “U.S.A.” gives them an edge. In 2002, a law was passed that required such labeling on most agricultural products, but the meat and grocery industries successfully campaigned to keep it from going into effect, except for seafood. Now China has unwittingly given their cause a boost.

“I think you see in this Chinese scandal that there are real risks to people, to pets, from problems in the food supply,” said Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota. “People believe they have a right to know where their food is from.”

William Marler, a Seattle lawyer, says the reports of contaminated food from China have opened all sorts of opportunities. He specializes in representing clients who have gotten sick from eating tainted food. His most recent case was filed against the manufacturer of a product called “Veggie Booty,” a snack popular with children. In some bags, the “veggie” seasoning — made in China — was contaminated with salmonella, which sickened at least 57 people.

“My guess is that with increased globalization, and the billions of dollars at play, and with the denial of the Chinese that there even is a problem, I had better brush up on my Chinese,” Mr. Marler wrote on his blog.

On Capitol Hill, China’s problems have also prompted I-told-you-so’s from consumer advocates and members of Congress who objected to China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization in the late 1990s. Most of the objections at the time concerned human rights, labor and the environment. Now the question is safety.

“We have very strict food and drug standards that we enforce,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, who opposed China’s admission to the World Trade Organization. “Importers are always trying to chip away at the edges of that safety net.”

The long-term impact of the scandals, of course, will depend on how many more defective products surface and, as grim as it sounds, whether any more people or pets are hurt, sickened or killed. Still, here’s a reasonable guess: a request by the Chinese to ship cooked chicken into the United States, which the Department of Agriculture is considering, will be shelved.

Meanwhile, other groups also stand to benefit. Members of Congress who have been calling for stricter standards for the nation’s food-safety system now have another example of what can go wrong when oversight fails. And protectionists have another argument against free-trade agreements.

But the underlying reality is that Chinese imports are going to continue growing in this country. They are simply too cheap and ubiquitous to resist.

Sara Bongiorni knows this now. She decided that her family would try to live an entire year without using products that were made in China, and her findings are detailed in a new book, “A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy.”

“There’s no way you can live anywhere near a normal life without buying things from China,” Ms. Bongiorni says. She notes, for example, that nearly all telephones and cellular phones are made there.

A bit sheepishly, she admits that she, too, has benefited from the recent scandals. Her book was released a week and a half ago, as the reports were piling up.

“I feel weird when people say, ‘Great timing!’ ” she said. “I think, ‘These are all kind of bad things.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/we.../08martin.html





China Executes Safety Chief After Health Scandal
AP

China executed a former Food and Drug Administration safety chief for taking bribes following its investigation into safety scandals involving poisoned Chinese products.

The Supreme People’s Court approved the death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, who was convicted of taking bribes worth some 6.5 million yuan ($850,000) from eight companies and dereliction of duty, Xinhua news agency said.

His execution marked the first time China has imposed a death sentence on an official of his rank since 2000.

"Zheng Xiaoyu’s grave irresponsibility in pharmaceutical safety inspection and failure to conscientiously carry out his duties seriously damaged the interests of the state and people," Xinhua cited the high court as stating.

"The social impact has been utterly malign," the court said, adding that Zheng’s confession and handing over of bribes were not enough to justify mercy.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1058775





An Escape From the Slush Pile: A Web Site Tries Out New Comics
George Gene Gustines

DC Comics, the venerable publisher of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, will introduce today an online imprint that amounts to a virtual slush pile, accepting submissions from the public and paying for the best comics that come in.

The imprint, called Zudacomics.com, will permit aspiring cartoonists to register at its Web site and submit an eight-panel sample of their work. Starting in October and each month thereafter, editors at DC Comics will select 10 entries, post them for public view and invite people to vote for their favorite. Editors may also declare as many as six submissions to be instant winners during the calendar year.

“We’ve always found interesting stuff in submissions,” said Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics. “One of the problems that comics have today, I think, is that open door is much more closed. This creates a more open door.”

Most people who produce online comics do so as labors of love. Some post their work online free, hoping to catch a publisher’s eye or gain a following, but Zuda will offer a rare chance to become a paid professional.

Each winner will be awarded a one-year contract to produce their online series, DC Comics executives said. The company, a division of the Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner, views the initiative as a chance to increase its library of intellectual properties, which can be lucrative as films, television shows and toys. DC Comics will also have the right to print the comics in collected editions.

“We’re not looking for a specific type of material — we’re actively looking for everything,” said Ron Perazza, the director of creative services for DC and one of Zuda’s chief architects. “We’re going into this with no ego. We can’t possibly know what an entire community will want to read,” he said.

The only standardized part of a submission will be its presentation, which will consist of eight screen shots. “Everyone has the same size page and the same number of pages,” Mr. Perazza said. Beyond that, “the community vets what they want and that’s what we decide to publish,” he said.

Having the marketing muscle of a major publisher and paying producers for their work sets Zuda apart from most online comics. A site like www.act-i-vate.com, a collective of by-invitation-only comics creators, is a place for the artists to hone their craft and one-up each other.

Closer to the Zuda model is DrunkDuck.com. The site, which was acquired last year by Platinum Studios, allows creators under contract to share in deals for things like downloadable content, comics-related ring tones or toys.

Then there are those creators who go it alone, like the husband-and-wife team of Phil and Kaja Foglio, who publish “Girl Genius,” about a teenage girl who is heir to a family of mad scientists. The comic, in the traditional printed format, sold 7,500 to 9,000 copies an issue. Now that the Foglios have stopped printing and instead post the comic online, they say they have 100,000 readers.

“We lost some readers who said, ‘I enjoy having the comic books,’ but that’s more than made up by people who never would’ve seen it all,” Mr. Foglio said.

Like book publishing, the comic book industry has a history of authors who vaulted to prominence after their work was plucked from a heap of unsolicited manuscripts. “One of my proudest moments as an editor was buying a Marc DeMatteis story out of a slush pile,” said Mr. Levitz of DC. Mr. DeMatteis has gone on to write countless titles for DC, Marvel and other publishers.

Mr. Levitz said the Internet presents an easy place for spotting fresh talent. “We’ve seen a real wellspring of creativity” by people posting their online comics, he said. “And it’s been a different kind of material than publishers have been putting out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/bu.../09comics.html





Fans Get to Talk About ‘Transformers,’ and the Knives Are Unsheathed
Laura M. Holson

Hollywood is a town of talkers, not listeners. That’s why studios handsomely pay consultants to parse the results of focus groups and audience exit polls or eavesdrop on online chat rooms.

Only rarely do the filmmakers themselves talk directly to fans but Don Murphy, one of the producers of the summer blockbuster “Transformers,” decided to do just that.

Four years ago, Mr. Murphy, a comic-book lover since growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, turned a forum on his personal Web site (donmurphy.net) into a rolling conversation about the movie, which was released on July 2. And much to the delight of some of the fans who posted on the site and engaged with Mr. Murphy, they actually had some influence over changes in the script and casting.

The site would seem to be a perfect example of a modern media company reaching out to potential audience members in a new, interactive conversation. But in an unorthodox twist — one that might give media companies some pause — Mr. Murphy’s site quickly became a home not only for fans to debate whether Megatron’s form should be a tank or a gun (he ended up as an alien jet) but a place to vent frustration with the movie’s production as well as with the executives who worked on the film.

The site also helped expose the internal politics of making movies, where credit is hard fought and studios seek to distance themselves from things or people they can’t control.

“With ‘Transformers’ we had this really rabid following,” said Mr. Murphy, whose films include “Natural Born Killers” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” “To be frank, I wanted to have some way where we could at least hear what people think.”

Other filmmakers, like Peter Jackson and Kevin Smith, have fostered close relationships with their fans, And Michael Bay, who directed “Transformers,” has said he spent a lot of time early on looking at online postings to understand what fans might like.

But Mr. Murphy, who started the forum in June 2003 and can be alternatively deferential and combative, took a more confrontational approach.

Mr. Murphy would answer questions about studio meetings, who was being hired or what characters would be included in the film and solicited complaints from fans so he could share them with Mr. Bay. And once he almost banned a poster who used all capital letters.

“I had my own persona, the angry sheriff,” said Mr. Murphy of his Web site. “I will mock fans if that is what I have to do.”

With a decades-old property as beloved as “Transformers,” fans were bound to want to have their say. Jarek Zabczynski, a 26-year-old self-described struggling filmmaker who lives in upstate New York, first went on DonMurphy.net after hearing Mr. Murphy was interested in feedback.

“He would start replying to people and I thought, ‘This guy is really reading this stuff,” said Mr. Zabczynski. “I checked that board more than my e-mail. We formed a tight community.”

For some, Mr. Murphy’s directness had its appeal. One poster from England, Stanley Joel, wrote in an e-mail that the site was “refreshing in that you could pretty much say what you liked within reason, and ‘within reason’ was usually determined on the fly.”

Mr. Murphy and a fellow producer, Tom DeSanto, had initially shopped a “Transformers” treatment around Hollywood in 2003 but got no takers. Instead Paramount Pictures wanted to develop a “Transformers” idea of its own.

Upon hearing those plans, Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks bought the “Transformer” treatment from Mr. Murphy and Mr. DeSanto and then partnered with Paramount to co-finance the film. The two were named producers along with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a former Warner Brothers executive, and Ian Bryce, who both handled day-to-day producing.

Mr. Murphy said the studios were worried from the start about how his site might be perceived.

“There was concern that it was going to be an official site,” he said. “All three of the partners — Paramount, DreamWorks and Hasbro — said I needed to make it clear it was the Don Murphy board. I was never intending for it to be an official Web site or that I was a spokesman for the film.”

To put some distance between “Transformers” and Mr. Murphy’s personal and sometimes caustic musings, he said he called the message board, “The Movies,” although the majority of the postings were about “Transformers.” Mr. Murphy included a disclaimer too, saying the site was not approved by the studio. And last year he almost shut it altogether as vitriolic fans criticized every aspect of the production.

Mr. Murphy’s site and its nearly 950,000 posts caused a rift between Mr. Murphy, the studios and his fellow producers because some of the angry attacks were lobbed at them, particularly Mr. di Bonaventura, who had a tense relationship with Mr. Murphy, according to people involved with the film who asked not to be named because they still work with both producers..

Studio executives wanted Mr. Murphy to stop talking altogether because, they felt, his status as a producer would result in the criticism in his forum reflecting poorly on “Transformers.” Indeed, some fans there referred to Mr. di Bonaventura as Scorponok, a vicious, Scorpion-like killer robot from the film.

Mr. di Bonaventura was on vacation and declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he frequented domestic and international Web sites, which allowed him to communicate with fans without having his job “prejudice their reactions.”

For his part, Mr. Murphy, declined to discuss his relationship with Mr. di Bonaventura but handed over administration of the site to a colleague last year.

“The whole thing was to make it clear that it was not anything other than one guy shooting his mouth off,” said Mr. Murphy.

Mr. Bay, the director, also had a forum on his personal site (www.shootfortheedit.com). But posting came with general rules: do not ask for a job or post a script, no personal insults or gossip, and take it easy on the swearing.

According to Mr. Bay’s site, he posted 21 messages under his own name. By contrast Mr. Murphy was credited with 3,039 posts on DonMurphy.net, or just over two posts per day. About 80 percent of those were related to “Transformers,” Mr. Murphy said.

Mr. Bay used his site to quell inaccuracies about “Transformers,” some of them posted by users on DonMurphy.net. In one 2006 posting in response to script leaks, Mr. Bay told fans that the names of the characters rumored on the Internet were aliases. Mr. Joel wrote that he specifically liked to comment on leaked “Transformer” information “in the vain hope that it’d be changed or taken into account for potential sequels.”

With the movie bringing in $152 million at the domestic box office since July 2 — one of the most successful openings ever — it would seem past transgressions would be forgotten.

But despite a successful debut (or perhaps because of it) a war broke out on the Paramount lot last week over which producers deserved the most credit. Mr. Bay posted a message on his site chiding Mr. DeSanto and Mr. Murphy for trying to grab creative credit. (The posting was quickly taken down, but it showed up on fan sites and on news blogs.)

On Thursday a publicist for Mr. di Bonaventura questioned why the two producers were being written about. And on Friday, Paramount sent a statement to The New York Times marked “urgent,” crediting only Mr. di Bonaventura and Mr. Bryce as the two producers who did the work on the film.

In his interview Mr. Murphy did not take creative credit, but instead said he saw his role as a liaison to the legions of “Transformers” fans. Still, in the past, he used his site to promote his role in making the movie On May 23, he posted quotes from a story published on the fan site, IESB.net, commending him and Mr. DeSanto. Further, the story mentioned that there were “certain people trying to take sole credit for bringing ‘Transformers’ to the big screen.” Users on Mr. Murphy’s site surmised that meant Mr. di Bonaventura.

Whatever the conflict behind the scenes, fans still seemed to have had an impact onscreen. Most notable, they pressed for and got Peter Cullen to be the voice of Optimus Prime, the heroic robot in the film. (Mr. Cullen was the voice in the popular television show.) Mr. Murphy said too that there was a general consensus among fans that Arcee, a female autobot, should not be featured in the movie. She was not.

That inspired a loyalty that can’t be bought with a 30-second television spot. Already Mr. Zabczynski has seen “Transformers” twice and is recommending it to his pals.

“Friends say, ‘Why were you wasting your time on a message board?’ ” said Mr. Zabczynski. “But it’s a humbling experience because in a small way, you can be a part of something.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/bu...ia/09fans.html





Transformers Dominate Culinary Rats at Box Office
Brooks Barnes

The robot aliens of “Transformers” are burning rubber at the box office, selling a hefty $152.5 million in tickets at American theaters since that film’s debut last Monday.

The receipts over the holiday week were strong enough to break a handful of records and establish “Transformers” as a potential franchise for its co-producers, DreamWorks and Paramount. With international ticket sales included, “Transformers” drew $246.1 million, easily recouping its production and marketing costs.

“Transformers,” about a war on Earth between two robotic forces, notched the biggest Fourth of July gross in history with $29.1 million in tickets sold on that day, beating “Spider-Man 2,” in 2004, according to Paramount and box-office analysts. The studio also said the movie scored the biggest nonsequel-opening ever, passing “Spider-Man” and “The Passion of the Christ.”

Ticket sales are sharply higher than some analysts predicted for the picture, which is based on Hasbro’s somewhat faded line of vehicles that transform into robots. Some studio executives worried that “Transformers,” from the director Michael Bay and the producer Steven Spielberg, would be deemed too violent by parents and not violent enough by core fans of the robot mythology.

“Between the action and the sense of humor and fun, it has amazing playability with all types of audiences,” said Rob Moore, Paramount’s president for worldwide marketing and distribution. “One of the surprises is that the response from moms coming out of the theater has been great.”

The Fourth of July is one of the most important dates on Hollywood’s calendar, and strong ticket sales then should provide momentum in the coming weeks, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers, a box-office-tracking company. This summer is backloaded with a cluster of big-budget movies, including “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” from Warner Brothers and “The Bourne Ultimatum” from Universal.

The animated “Ratatouille,” from Walt Disney’s Pixar, held up well in its second week, selling an estimated $29 million in tickets over the weekend for the No. 2 spot. “Live Free or Die Hard,” the revival of the Bruce Willis action franchise, dropped 48 percent from its opening weekend, but still captured third place with $17 million. “License to Wed” ($10.4 million) and “Evan Almighty” ($8.1 million) rounded out the Top 5.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/movies/09box.html





'Harry Potter' Film Takes In $44.8 Million, Breaking Record
Russ Britt

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" set a new record for a Wednesday debut at the box office, as the fifth installment in Warner Bros. Studios' hugely successful franchise racked up $44 million in ticket receipts.

Box-office tracker Media By Numbers said the figure includes roughly $12 million in midnight screenings from early Wednesday morning. The film's debut in 4,181 theaters beat the previous Wednesday opening record set by "Spider-Man 2," which made $40.4 million in 2004.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118425796644464804.html





D’ough!

The Simpsons' Big Screen Test
Nick Curtis

First conceived 18 years ago, it took 15 people four years to write and cost a rumoured $100 million to make. On 27 July, The Simpsons Movie finally opens simultaneously in the UK and America, following a premiere in Springfield, Vermont (population 9,300), which won a competition of 13 other Springfields to host the event.

This is the most significant change in the lives of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie and the other animated citizens of Springfield since they first made the jump from scratchy, one-minute animations filling in between sketches on the Tracey Ullman Show, to a regular halfhour slot on the Fox network in 1989.

Al Jean was one of the first writers that the Simpsons' original creator, Matt Groening, hired to develop his dysfunctional cartoon family, and he is both executive producer and chief writer of the new movie. He is also phenomenally tight-lipped.

Nobody outside the Simpsons' inner sanctum has seen more than the opening 10 minutes of the film. Here we see the rock band Green Day pelted with stones and then drowned after hectoring their audience about pollution during a free concert. Homer and Bart dare each other to wilder and more stupid acts which culminate in a flash of Bart's penis as he skateboards naked to Krusty Burger.

Grandpa Abe Simpson, meanwhile, suffers a disturbing visionary paroxysm in church, while Lisa meets the ideal Irish boy of her dreams. The internet is raging with rumours that, beyond this point, the film surges into a story about global warming (with Homer setting off a nuclear accident in Monty Burns's power plant) and religious fundamentalism.

"Both of those are a little wide of the mark," says Jean, 45. "But there is an environmental and a religious theme. There are also storylines in which Bart realises Homer may not be the ideal father, and in which Lisa meets her perfect man, except that complications naturally ensue. I will say that the main theme of the movie is that Homer should listen more to his wife." Which is pretty much the theme of every Simpson's episode, let's face it. But some further details can be revealed.

Groening let slip recently that Homer falls in love with a pig, and Jean tells me that the film sees Arnold Schwarzenegger become president ("We didn't want to make Bush the president, because in two years that'd mean the film was out of date") and that there is a cameo from a "very special, very popular guest star". Who? "I'm not gonna say." Is it Madonna? "Well I will say it's not Madonna, but I won't say any more." Since the Simpsons TV show has already bagged Michael Jackson, Tony Blair and Stephen Hawking, the mind boggles.

There will also be some two-dimensional cameos in the film as well. Jean tells me that, when a mob prepares to lynch Homer, the camera pans across the face of almost every small character or bit player to have appeared in the TV series. That's more than 320. It's an animated tracking shot to rival the recordbreaking live-action ones of Welles and Altman.

Which is one of the fun things about making a film rather than a TV series. "We knew we could do fuller stories, go deeper into characters, and we were adamant that it had to be entertaining for someone who had never, or only rarely seen the show," says Jean. "But also, y'know, I think we just all really liked the idea of making a movie."

Not that it was easy. Groening says that a joke has to amuse the creators around 350 times before it makes it into the TV show, and that for the film it was three times that. "It's TEN times that," insists Jean. "We started in November 2003, talked about the story for six months, then wrote a first draft, and that has been rewritten at least 100 times, right up to about a week ago."

The rewrites took account of test readings and screenings, and also time: to keep the film to a trim 87 minutes some celebrity cameos (probably those of Minnie Driver and Erin Brockovich) have hit the cutting room floor. But each rewrite also had to conform to the essential lore of The Simpsons: "That Homer does inconsiderate things but he would never consciously hurt Marge, while Marge thinks Homer is the handsomest man who ever lived." And the final script had to appeal to adults and children in equal measure.

Although rooted in slapstick, The Simpsons has always been extremely sophisticated: I can't think of another show enjoyed by children that also has openly gay characters (Monty Burns' assistant, Smithers), deals with death (Ned Flanders's wife, Maude), or satirises religion almost as often as it pokes fun at its parent company, Fox.

"We have always assumed that kids will watch it because of the form, but after that we just wrote it for ourselves," says Jean. "We've never said, this is too smart for a kid to get, don't put it in. I'm sure that's one of the keys to the show's success."

The Simpsons is now America's longest-running sitcom, and the world's longest-running and most widely syndicated animated show. Not so long ago Homer Simpson was voted by Channel 4 viewers as the greatest television character ever. I'm relieved to reveal that if the 10 minutes I saw are anything to go by, it may also be the first TV show to spawn a movie that equals the small-screen original. And it's not finished yet. Jean confirms the 19th season will begin recording in September, and hopes to make at least one more Simpsons film, if the core voice cast (Dan Castellanata, Harry Shearer, Nancy Cartwright, et al, who get a reported six-figure sum per episode) can be kept on board. Groening has talked about 20-plus years of TV, and a cinematic trilogy.

Groening famously modelled Bart on himself and named Homer and Marge after his own mother and father, then issued an apology to all parents when he had his own two sons, saying he hadn't realised how hard it was. Jean also has two children, aged 16 and two; has fatherhood changed his view of his second, yellow TV family?

"When we started out, we did a lot of Bart-based stories," he concedes. "Then we started doing more Homer stories, which people thought was deliberate, but which was probably down to the fact that we found them easier to think up and relate to. These days ..." - and he makes an all-enveloping gesture that takes in 18 years of producing cutting-edge, hilarious television, and four years and 100 rewrites trying to translate it onto film - "I sympathise more with Grandpa."
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/film/review-23403996-details/The+Simpsons'+big+screen+test/review.do?reviewId=23403996





Nintendo Wii May be Scarce for Holidays

Nintendo's hit Wii video game consoles will still be scarce this holiday season, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

Nintendo promised that some 100 new games for the Wii, known for its motion-sensitive controller which can be swung like a bat or brandished like a sword, will debut by the end of the year. It also showed off a pistol-style controller and motion-sensitive pad for dancing and walking.

But not everyone may be able to get even the basic console in time for the year's main buying season.

"There is no guarantee that we are not going to have 'out-of-stocks' this holiday season," George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications for Nintendo of America, said in an interview. "If you see one, buy it. Don't assume that you can come back later and find one."

Harrison added that the company was ramping up production, but that parts manufacturers were still trying to gauge how much they need to produce to keep up with demand.

"We're trying to figure out what's the reasonable monthly level, and as we've seen every time we ship product to the market, whether it's in Japan or here in the U.S. or in Europe, it sells out in a matter of days," Harrison said.

The Wii's quirky remote and a relatively low price tag have made the Wii stand out compared with the powerful Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp. and PlayStation 3 from Sony Corp.

At the kick-off to E3, the industry's most important event of the year, Nintendo rolled out a number of new controllers.

The Wii Zapper, which forms a gun from Nintendo's standard controllers, will debut this year and offer better play for shooting and war game fans, a hard core audience that has been secondary to Nintendo's focus on casual games.

A new pressure-sensing mat, dubbed the Balance Board, will come out next year—after this year's holiday buying season. The mat can sense when a person moves and leans, letting players head virtual soccer balls "thrown" at them, for instance.

A steering wheel for racing games is due out in the first half of next year.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2157431,00.asp





In the Blink of a Byte, Future Becomes Past
Noam Cohen

The Internet can seem an all-knowing, mysterious oracle. Type in a question, hit a button and an answer magically appears.

Yet oracles earn their robes not for providing trivia (“Caesar, did you know that “ides” is a Latin term denoting half a month?”), but for predicting the future, however Delphically. And for a brief period recently, the Internet seemed to have crossed that threshold.

The backdrop was the bizarre tale of the professional wrestler Christopher Benoit who during one weekend last month killed his wife, Nancy, and later his son and himself. The police didn’t find the bodies until Monday afternoon, June 25, but a Wikipedia entry on Mr. Benoit had reported his wife’s death matter-of-factly 13 hours earlier.

Was there some error with the time stamped on the article? Was a witness choosing to speak under cover of anonymity? Or was the killer posting a final warning? Intriguingly, the IP address used to write the prophetic posting was traced to Stamford, Conn., which happens to be the home of World Wrestling Entertainment, the employer of Mr. Benoit.

As a furor grew, the anonymous user of Wikipedia who posted the Nancy Benoit information (known by the IP address 69.120.111.23) came forward to say, “I did the wrong thing by posting it on Wikipedia,” adding, “I was just as shocked as everyone when I heard that this actually would happen in real life.”

The police nonetheless questioned that person. Investigators “checked it out very thoroughly” and concluded “it was pure coincidence,” said Lt. Belinda McCastle of the Sheriff’s Department of Fayetteville, Ga., where the killings occurred. She declined to release the name of the owner of the IP address 69.120.111.23.

The Benoit case, minus that part about predicting the future, isn’t unique. There was the case of the film director and actress Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered in Greenwich Village last year. Editors at The New York Times were given a tip, and in the course of reading about her on Wikipedia (yes, newspaper editors read Wikipedia), saw that her death had already been listed. In fact, it was a full day later before the news became public knowledge, as we usually think of it.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported a similar experience in 2005, when editors there found the only confirmation of the death of the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin on Wikipedia.

Robin Hanson of George Mason University, an expert on using future markets to track public sentiment, said an e-mail exchange that these examples are hardly evidence of predicting the future. Rather, he suggested, it was “a bit newspaper-centric to say that news has not broke ‘publicly’ if it is being discussed online in rumors but has not appeared in a newspaper.” He added that “with more and more kinds of media, there are more and more intermediate levels of info availability.”

This is the crucial dividing line: between reporting on events in as close to real time as possible — which can prove jarring to society, and journalists in particular, but hardly supernatural — and predicting things around the bend.

As the Benoit case and others show, it may be human nature to confuse the two. The classic grifter swindle portrayed in the 1973 movie “The Sting” fools its target by holding out the possibility of using the telegraph to “predict” horse-race results.

But there are businesses that see the odds in getting information as close to real time as possible using Internet searches. At the core of this research is the hope of tapping into something intuitive about people — the way some people believe animals sense an earthquake coming and scatter.

Bill Tancer, the general manager of Hitwise, a company that analyzes search results, calls the field “searchonomics.” Thus far, he has tested his theories in a manner that resembles so-called future markets — which trade bets on future events like elections and sporting events — by treating search requests as the equivalent of votes, or “buys,” and then adjusting for other factors. (The reality TV show “Dancing With the Stars” has been his unwitting laboratory — to mixed results, he concedes.)

But these tools can be used for weightier matters. Tracking searches of the word “unemployment” can provide clues to trends in the nation’s unemployment rate, Mr. Tancer said. Likewise, Altos Research, a Silicon Valley start-up, collects and tracks millions of real estate listings to assess the housing market before the government releases its figures.

This information serves a Wall Street function as “closer to real time” data for investors, said Michael Simonsen, Altos’s president and chief executive.

“We are really early in the predictive power of the Internet; financial markets are getting a hang of it,” he says. “We have miles to go in all the nuances in capturing information.”

A more nuanced analysis was made by Mr. Tancer, who tracked searches in 2005 concerning avian flu. By comparing different terms, from the technical name “H5N1” to “avian flu” to the more basic “bird flu” he tried to show how a spike in interest first appeared among what he presumes was the scientific community (H5N1 searchers) and then quickly spread to the general public.

Armed with this insight, it may be easier to see when concern over a potential epidemic is going to “go big.” But these insights will be culled from millions of data points, not from single Wikipedia entries like the one for Mr. Benoit.

It is eerie to note, however, that the anonymous poster about Ms. Shelley’s death had earlier in the year edited the Wikipedia entry about the so-called Butterfly Effect, the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can influence the weather in Florida. It’s as if that user — 216.165.95.5 — knew that someone typing something into a computer can influence an editor in a newsroom far away.

Or it may have been a coincidence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/bu...ia/09link.html





N.H. Gov. Signs Bill That Rejects Federal Real ID Law

Says financial, personal costs too high for state's residents
Marc L. Songini

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch last week signed into law a bill that forbids New Hampshire government agencies from complying with the controversial federal national identification act, or Real ID bill.

The New Hampshire Legislature had overwhelming passed the bill this past spring and handed it off to Lynch, who signed it on June 27.

"Real ID is intended to make us all safer, which I think we can all agree is a laudable goal," said Lynch in a statement. "However, I strongly believe Real ID's proposed haphazard implementation and onerous provisions would have the exact opposite effect. The federal government obviously did not think this burdensome system through and that is why we in New Hampshire are right to reject it."

Among the reasons for opposing the legislation, Lynch said, were its implementation costs, the likelihood that it would compromise the privacy of citizens and the burden likely to be imposed on state employees who must comply with its guidelines.

The ever-evolving Real ID law, first passed by Congress in 2005, currently requires that all state driver's licenses and other identification cards include a digital photograph and a bar code that can be scanned by electronic readers. Such a federally approved ID card or document would be required for people entering a federal building, nuclear power plant and commercial airplane.

The law currently would bar access to such facilities without a Real ID card. However, New Hampshire legislators are hoping widespread opposition to the federal law will cause it to collapse.

"Today, we are sending a strong message to the federal government -- we are not about to be coerced into another unfunded federal mandate, especially not one that we will pay for with our privacy," stated Lynch.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9026324





Armed Autonomous Robots Cause Concern

A MOVE to arm police robots with stun guns has been condemned by weapons researchers.

On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns. The US military already uses PackBot, made by iRobot of Massachusetts, to carry lethal weapons, but the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.

"The victim would have to receive shocks for longer, or repeatedly, to give police time to reach the scene and restrain them, which carries greater risk to their health," warns non-lethal weapons researcher Neil Davison, of the University of Bradford, UK.
"If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...e-concern.html





Data on Americans Mined for Terror Risk
Lara Jakes Jordan

The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices.

In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.

The chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Justice Department said the database was "ripe for abuse." The American Civil Liberties Union immediately derided the quality of the information that could be used to score someone as a terror threat.
The report, sent to Congress this week, marked the department's first public detailing of six of its data-mining tools, which look for patterns to catch criminals. The disclosure was required by lawmakers when they renewed the USA Patriot Act in 2005. It comes as the Justice Department faces sharp criticism from Congress and civil liberties advocates for violating peoples' privacy rights in terror and spy investigations.

Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said the databases are strictly regulated to protect privacy rights and civil liberties.

"Each of these initiatives is extremely valuable for investigators, allowing them to analyze and process lawfully acquired information more effectively in order to detect potential criminal activity and focus resources appropriately," Boyd said in a statement.

All but one of the databases — the one to track terrorists — have been up and running for several years, the report showed. The lone exception is the System to Assess Risk, or STAR, program to rate the threat posed by people already identified as suspected terrorists or named on terror watch lists.

The system, still under construction, is designed to help counterterror investigators save time by narrowing the field of people who pose the greatest potential threat and will not label anyone a terrorist, Boyd said.

But it could be based, in part at least, on commercial or public information that might not be accurate — potentially ranking an innocent person as a terror threat. Watch lists, for example, have mistakenly identified people as suspects based on their similar names or birthdates to terrorists.

The Justice report also leaves open the possibility that the STAR program might draw up lists of terror suspects based on information from other sources, including from Data Mart. The report described Data Mart as a collector of government information, but also travel data from the Airlines Reporting Corp. and other information from private data-aggregators like Choicepoint. Private data aggregators often sell commercial credit records as well as other databases, like voter and vehicle registration.

"When you put bad information into a system and you don't have any mechanism of ensuring the information is of high quality, you're certain to get bad information spit out on the back end," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani. "And that has profoundly negative consequences for the individuals who are wrongly identified as potential terrorists."

The five other databases detailed in the report include:

_An identity theft intelligence program, used since 2003, to examine and analyze consumer complaints to identify major identity theft rings in a given geographic area.

_A health care fraud system that looks at billing records in government and private insurance claims databases to identify fraud or over-billing by health care providers. It also has been running since 2003.

_A database created in 2005 that looks at consumer complaints to the Food and Drug Administration to identify larger trends about fraud by Internet pharmacies.

_A housing fraud program that analyzes public data on real estate transactions to identify fraudulent housing purchases, including so-called property flipping. The database was built in 1999.

_A system that compares National Insurance Crime Bureau information against other data to crack down on fake car accident insurance claims and identify major offenders.

The 38-page report was four months late in being sent to Congress for required oversight. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy said it "raises more questions than it answers."

"Unfortunately, the Congress and the American public know very little about these and other data mining programs, making them ripe for abuse," said Leahy, D-Vt.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dl...451/-1/LOCAL17





Judges OK Warrantless Monitoring of Web Use

Privacy rules don't apply to Internet messages, court says
Bob Egelko

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of pen registers in 1979, saying callers have no right to conceal from the government the numbers they communicate electronically to the phone companies that carry their calls.

Federal law requires court approval for a pen register. But because it is not considered a search, authorities do not need a search warrant, which would require them to show that the surveillance is likely to produce evidence of a crime.

They also do not need a wiretap order, which would require them to show that less intrusive methods of surveillance have failed or would be futile.

In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

Likewise, the court said, although the government learns what computer sites someone visited, "it does not find out the contents of the messages or the particular pages on the Web sites the person viewed."

The search is no more intrusive than officers' examination of a list of phone numbers or the outside of a mailed package, neither of which requires a warrant, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling.

Defense lawyer Michael Crowley disagreed. His client, Dennis Alba, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of operating a laboratory in Escondido that manufactured the drug ecstasy.

Some of the evidence against Alba came from agents' tracking of his computer use. The court upheld his conviction and sentence.

Expert evidence in Alba's case showed that the Web addresses obtained by federal agents included page numbers that allowed the agents to determine what someone read online, Crowley said.

The ruling "further erodes our privacy," the attorney said. "The great political marketplace of ideas is the Internet, and the government has unbridled access to it."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...AGMNQSJDA1.DTL





New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown
Cara Buckley

By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.

If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

“This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation,” New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in an interview last week. “We want to make it less vulnerable.”

But critics question the plan’s efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city.

For a while, it appeared that New York could not even afford such a system. Last summer, Mr. Kelly said that the program was in peril after the city’s share of Homeland Security urban grant money was cut by nearly 40 percent.

But Mr. Kelly said last week that the department had since obtained $25 million toward the estimated $90 million cost of the plan. Fifteen million dollars came from Homeland Security grants, he said, while another $10 million came from the city, more than enough to install 116 license plate readers in fixed and mobile locations, including cars and helicopters, in the coming months.

The readers have been ordered, and Mr. Kelly said he hoped the rest of the money would come from additional federal grants.

The license plate readers would check the plates’ numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Mr. Kelly said.

But the downtown security plan involves much more than keeping track of license plates. Three thousand surveillance cameras would be installed below Canal Street by the end of 2008, about two-thirds of them owned by downtown companies. Some of those are already in place. Pivoting gates would be installed at critical intersections; they would swing out to block traffic or a suspect car at the push of a button.

Unlike the 250 or so cameras the police have already placed in high-crime areas throughout the city, which capture moving images that have to be downloaded, the security initiative cameras would transmit live information instantly.

The operation will cost an estimated $8 million to run the first year, Mr. Kelly said. Its headquarters will be in Lower Manhattan, he said, though the police were still negotiating where exactly it will be. The police and corporate security agents will work together in the center, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police. The plan does not need City Council approval, he said.

The Police Department is still considering whether to use face-recognition technology, an inexact science that matches images against those in an electronic database, or biohazard detectors in its Lower Manhattan network, Mr. Browne said.

The entire operation is forecast to be in place and running by 2010, in time for the projected completion of several new buildings in the financial district, including the new Goldman Sachs world headquarters.

Civil liberties advocates said they were worried about misuse of technology that tracks the movement of thousands of cars and people,

Would this mean that every Wall Street broker, every tourist munching a hot dog near the United States Court House and every sightseer at ground zero would constantly be under surveillance?

“This program marks a whole new level of police monitoring of New Yorkers and is being done without any public input, outside oversight, or privacy protections for the hundreds of thousands of people who will end up in N.Y.P.D. computers," Christopher Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in an e-mail message.

He said he worried about what would happen to the images once they were archived, how they would be used by the police and who else would have access to them.

Already, according to a report last year by the civil liberties group, there are nearly 4,200 public and private surveillance cameras below 14th Street, a fivefold increase since 1998, with virtually no oversight over what becomes of the recordings.

Mr. Browne said that the Police Department would have control over how the material is used. He said that the cameras would be recording in “areas where there’s no expectation of privacy” and that law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear.

“It would be used to intercept a threat coming our way, but not to collect data indiscriminately on individuals,” he said.

Mr. Browne said software tracking the cameras’ images would be designed to pick up suspicious behavior. If, for example, a bag is left unattended for a certain length of time, or a suspicious car is detected repeatedly circling the same block, the system will send out an alert, he said.

Still, there are questions about whether such surveillance devices indeed serve their purpose.

There is little evidence to suggest that security cameras deter crime or terrorists, said James J. Carafano, a senior fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington.

For all its comprehensiveness, London’s Ring of Steel, which was built in the early 1990s to deter Irish Republican Army attacks, did not prevent the July 7, 2005, subway bombings or the attempted car bombings in London last month. But the British authorities said the cameras did prove useful in retracing the paths of the suspects’ cars last month, leading to several arrests.

While having 3,000 cameras whirring at the same time means loads of information will be captured, it also means there will be a lot of useless data to sift through.

“The more hay you have, the harder it is to find the needle,” said Mr. Carafano.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/ny...09ring.html?hp





FBI Employees Face Criminal Probe Over Patriot Act Abuse
Ryan Singel

FBI personnel who used misleading emergency letters to acquire thousands of Americans' phone records are the subject of a criminal investigation, top bureau officials told civil liberties groups Monday.

The unprecedented criminal probe, revealed at an outreach meeting led by FBI director Robert Mueller and general counsel Valerie Caproni at FBI headquarters, is looking at the actions of an antiterrorism team known as the Communications Analysis Unit, according to two people who attended the meeting independently and who informed Wired News, requesting anonymity.

The privately disclosed investigation would mark the first time government officials have faced possible prosecution for misuse of Patriot Act investigative tools, and highlights the seriousness of recent reports about the FBI's misuse of a powerful self-issued subpoena known as a National Security Letter.

Unit employees, who are not authorized to request records in investigations, sent form letters to telephone companies to acquire detailed billing information on specific phone numbers by falsely promising that subpoenas were already in the works.

According to a third source, FBI officials also said at the meeting that some bureau employees have already been granted immunity from prosecution in the investigation. The third source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, did not recall, however, that FBI officials described the investigation as "criminal."

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko confirmed that the meeting took place but declined to comment on the content of the conversation, saying only, "The FBI does not confirm or deny investigations."

Neither the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General nor the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility returned calls for comment.

While the scope of the alleged investigation is unknown, investigators could be examining whether the unit violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or committed fraud by falsely swearing that subpoenas were being prepared.

National Security Letters are self-issued subpoenas that allow investigators in terrorism and espionage cases to require phone companies, banks, credit reporting agencies and internet service providers to turn over records on Americans considered "relevant" to an investigation. Those records are then fed into three computer systems, including a shared data-mining tool known as the Investigative Data Warehouse.

Though warned in 2001 to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 National Security Letters in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans.

Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, have downplayed the gravity of the reported errors while attempting to mollify critics by promising to strengthen internal oversight.

The Communications Analysis Unit, part of the FBI's Communications Exploitation Section based in the agency's headquarters building, is tasked with analyzing terrorist communications and providing intelligence to the FBI's Counterterrorism Division. However, because it only supports investigators, unit employees cannot issue subpoenas and instead need to have counterterrorism investigators do so.

However, the Justice Department's Inspector General reported (.pdf) in March that the office issued 739 "exigent letters" to AT&T, Verizon and MCI seeking information on more than 3,000 phone numbers. The letters stated: "Due to exigent circumstances, it is requested that records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided. Subpoenas requesting this information have been submitted to the U.S. Attorney's Office who will process and serve them formally to (Phone Company Name) as expeditiously as possible."

However, no such subpoenas had been filed with U.S. Attorneys and only later were some of the requests followed up with proper legal process, according to the Inspector General's report.

Several of the letters included requests for records for more than 100 phone numbers.

Bassem Youssef, the current head of the Communications Analysis Unit, told Congress in March that key FBI lawyers knew about the problem in 2005, when he notified them and put an end to the false letters.

Youssef first noticed the problem with the letters in 2005 when he took over the unit and quickly brought the matter to the attention of his supervisor and the FBI's Office of the General Counsel, according to a March letter (.pdf) sent by his lawyer, Stephen Kohn, to Sen. Chuck Grassley.

"At all times, the (National Security Law Branch) and the FBI (Office of the General Counsel) knew that the field offices and operational units were non-compliant in obtaining the legal documentation," Kohn wrote.

Youssef is currently suing the FBI for retaliating against him for complaining that the bureau was wasting his Arabic-language skills and antiterrorism experience. He attempted to get proper National Security Letters filed to provide post-facto legal backing for the exigent letters but was hampered by uncooperative field offices, according to the Senate letter.

Kohn did not respond to requests for comment.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/ne...tinvestigation





Stasi

Debate on Terror Threat Stirs Germany
Mark Landler

While the British public reacted to the latest terrorist strike there with stoicism and a practiced determination to get on with their lives, Germany has erupted in a rancorous dispute over how to deal with a terrorist threat that has yet to materialize here.

The debate, which has simmered for months, flared up again in the wake of the botched car bombings in London, after Germany’s top security official, Wolfgang Schäuble, said Germany should consider detaining potential terrorists and sanctioning the killing of terrorist leaders abroad.

Mr. Schäuble, a conservative politician who is the country’s interior minister, also said that the police should be allowed to conduct clandestine searches of private computers by way of the Internet, a practice now forbidden.

“The old categories no longer apply,” Mr. Schäuble said in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. “We have to clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting the new threats.”

Mr. Schäuble’s remarks, which were confirmed by his spokesman, have set off a storm of protest from opposition leaders, and even from Social Democratic members of his own “grand coalition” government.

They say his proposals would erode personal rights and jeopardize the rule of law in Germany. Some critics accuse him of playing up the threat of an attack on German soil to push through draconian measures.

“He would lead the country down a very dangerous path,” said the co-chairman of the opposition Green Party, Reinhard Bütikofer. “He is advising the exact opposite of what Prime Minister Gordon Brown has demonstrated so admirably: a combination of determination and equanimity.”

No other major European country has publicly debated its anti-terrorism laws in the wake of the failed British attacks. Among the few notable responses of any kind came from France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who restated his support for installing 1,000 video surveillance cameras in Paris — a longstanding proposal that has languished for lack of financing.

Both the timing, and the nature, of the debate in Germany trouble some counter-terrorism experts in Europe.

“One of the time-honored tactics of terrorists is to draw governments into over-reacting,” said Gijs de Vries, a Dutchman and a former counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union. “Governments should resist public pressure to pile on new measures after each incident.”

To be sure, Mr. Schäuble, 64, has been calling for more muscular policies to combat terrorism since he joined the current government in 2005. A seasoned official who has been in a wheelchair since surviving an assassination attempt in 1990, Mr. Schäuble is regarded as one of the political heavyweights in the cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

He also seems to enjoy the backing of Ms. Merkel, though she has not addressed his specific proposals.

“We have threats that we didn’t even know 10 years ago,” Ms. Merkel said in an interview on German television on Tuesday. “I want an interior minister who will grapple with these new threats.”

Speaking in Der Spiegel, Mr. Schäuble likened the recent British plot to a failed attempt to bomb two regional trains in Cologne last summer. In both cases, he said, the threat came from an unexpected source, and was carried out by a terrorist cell that may have formed “spontaneously,” though he cautioned that the British investigation was in its early stages.

The suspects in the Cologne plot — two Lebanese men — met only a few months before mounting their attack, which failed when the explosives they had hidden in suitcases failed to detonate. Authorities said the men were angered by satirical cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed that were published in Denmark.

For Mr. Schäuble, the conclusion from the two cases is inescapable: “The fight against international terrorism cannot be mastered by the classic methods of the police, in any event,” he said.

Among the methods that he believes Germans should at least debate are preventative detention of people suspected of terrorist activities — a practice he says Germany now uses with hooligans before soccer games — and assassinations of the leaders of terrorist organizations.

In the interview, Mr. Schäuble said Germany was cooperating more closely than ever with the United States. He said he had invited the American secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, to his home, though he did not say if the Bush administration had influenced his views.

Mr. Schäuble’s aides said he was not surprised by the sharp reaction to his remarks, and even welcomed it.

“He’s trying to force our society to face up to these really difficult questions — for example, killing a terrorist,” said Christian Sachs, a spokesman for the interior ministry. “The German public has tried to stick its head in the sand, ignoring this dimension of this unorthodox war.”

Germany has been debating the balance between liberty and security ever since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which were the product of a plot hatched in Hamburg by a circle of militant Muslims under the noses of the German security services.

For reasons having to do with its dark history, though, since the end of World War II Germany has placed a particular emphasis on the rights of individuals.

Already, Mr. Schäuble’s campaign is drawing unflattering historical parallels, though less to the Nazi era than to Communist East Germany.

On the Internet, T-shirts are sold that are emblazoned with Mr. Schäuble’s image and the slogan, “Stasi 2.0” — a reference to the nickname of the feared State Security Ministry of the former East Germany.

The Cologne case is the closest Germany is known to have come to a large-scale terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001, and Mr. Schäuble said the country escaped that one only through luck.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/wo...curity.html?hp





Queasy

Chertoff Explains 'Gut Feeling' About Terror Attack

No 'Specific Intelligence,' but 'Threat Is Very Alive'
Pierre Thomas and Theresa Cook

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has downplayed comments he made Tuesday on the U.S. terror situation. "We don't have specific intelligence about an attack, that is, a particular attack against the homeland, that is imminent or scheduled for the summer," he told ABC News.

Chertoff noted, "It's important as we go into the summer season, which is typically a time people like to relax, to remind people that this threat is very alive, and the enemy is continuing to try to improve itself and carry out its attacks."

In a Tuesday meeting with the Chicago Tribune's editorial board, Chertoff said he believes "we are entering a period this summer of increased risk."

But his explanation for that assessment - "a gut feeling" based on past terrorist patterns - prompted a flurry of questions about what the secretary might know.

Chertoff indicated to the Tribune that the assessment is "not of a specific threat, but of increased vulnerability," but the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sent Chertoff a letter today, asking him to "clarify your comments by providing concrete direction" to Congress and law enforcement agencies.

"What color code in the Homeland Security advisory system is associated with a 'gut feeling?'" asked Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

"What sectors should be on alert as a result of your 'gut feeling'? What cities should be asking their law enforcement to work double shifts because of your 'gut feeling,'" Thompson asked.

"Are the American people supposed to purchase duct tape and plastic sheeting because of your 'gut feeling?'"

After authorities in the U.K. thwarted terror plots in London and Glasgow last week, Chertoff said he had seen "no specific, credible information suggesting that this incident is connected to a threat to the homeland." He also said there were no plans to change the U.S. terror threat level, which currently stands at yellow, or elevated.

But ABC News has reported that an increased number of law enforcement and intelligence officials are concerned that al Qaeda or other extremist groups are ramping up efforts to carry out attacks on targets in Europe, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Intelligence officials say some of those groups have been at training camps in remote tribal area locations of Pakistan the same regions that might be home to senior al Qaeda leaders in hiding.

Sources have also told ABC News that recent intelligence points to a pattern of large groups of Islamic radicals flowing into terrorist camps in Pakistan for training, then leaving for unknown destination countries.

That training push, government officials believe, is hard evidence that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on targets around the globe. The problem, they say, is that details on the when, where and how of the attacks are sketchy.

But Chertoff said his department is maintaining focus.

"We respond promptly to any information, any intelligence," Chertoff told ABC News. "If we have something specific to tell the public or to communicate to local officials, we do it promptly and immediately."

"But as it stands now, we're looking at a general situation, and we don't have specific threat information," Chertoff added. "But that doesn't mean that we're not going to watch it and that tomorrow, or next week, or in two weeks, something new might not arise."
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/LegalCenter...3367404&page=1





British Press Assails Curbs on Reporting
Eric Pfanner

With his picture splashed across the front pages of British newspapers, Mohammed Asha, a doctor in the National Health Service, over the last few days became the human face of a suspected plot to bomb a London nightclub and an attack at Glasgow Airport.

According to the British police, the photos should never have appeared.

Britain has some of the tightest restrictions on reporting in the Western world, limiting news organizations’ ability to publish pictures or articles about the subjects of criminal investigations. The rules are intended to ensure fair trials by keeping potentially prejudicial information from would-be jurors.

But critics say the restrictions seem increasingly out of step in an era when Britons can turn to the Internet or other sources for unfiltered information on prominent subjects like terrorism. And, based on their coverage of the recent events, news organizations seem unclear about how to apply the rules.

“I’m a bit bemused by the coverage,” said Richard Parkes, a lawyer specializing in media matters in London. “There seem to be conflicting signals given out by the press.”

Last Monday, Scotland Yard asked media organizations not to publish pictures or artists’ impressions of people involved in the case, saying that identification of the suspects could be an issue in any trial, according to editors who received the e-mail request.

A glance at the front pages and at television screens a day later showed that British news organizations were divided in their response.

Several tabloid newspapers, including The Sun and The Mirror, prominently featured pictures of Mr. Asha, one of the suspects named in news reports, on Page 1.

The Telegraph, a broadsheet, also published a picture of Mr. Asha on the front page. The Times used a photo inside the paper, but pixilated it to make the image unrecognizable. The Guardian, on Page 1, had a picture of Mr. Asha’s father, interviewed in Jordan, where he held a photo of his son. The picture-within-a-picture, however, was pixilated.

British television reports in general were also blurring the faces of the terrorism suspects.

Several newspapers, contacted last week, declined to discuss their decisions, saying it was an internal matter. The Telegraph said in a statement that the photographs it used had “been published legitimately and in the public interest.”

The stakes in publishing can be high. According to media lawyers, editors can be jailed for violating the Contempt of Court Act, which says that news organizations should not publish anything other than basic information like an accused person’s name and age, as well as the charge against him or her. In criminal cases, including terrorism investigations, the restrictions take effect as soon as a suspect is arrested.

A spokesman for Britain’s attorney general, who is ultimately responsible for enforcing the law, said in a statement that the coverage was “under review.”

In these cases, the police did not even release the suspects’ names, leaving reporters to dig them up on their own. By midweek, most of the eight suspects who had been detained, including Mr. Asha, had been named in news reports.

On Thursday, the police repeated their request, sending out another message to editors and adding that they were worried that continued speculation about the case could damage any prosecutions.

British newspaper editors have spoken out recently against the restrictions. Especially in terror cases, where the authorities have the right to hold suspects as long as 28 days without charges, journalists chafe at the restrictions.

“It is crucial that the media strive to discover the detail of any alleged plots, and do not simply adhere to bland official statements as if publishing in some kind of police state,” Steve Dyson, editor of The Birmingham Mail, wrote in an opinion piece in The Guardian last winter after news organizations reported a suspected plot to kidnap a British soldier.

Media lawyers say there may be other reasons, in addition to the desire to guarantee fair trials, why the authorities might not want news organizations to print photos of terrorism suspects. The police, for example, might be concerned that repeated lineups of photos of young men of Middle East origin could fuel racist sentiment against British Muslims.

Last week, a spokesman for the British Transport Police asked a reporter not to write about a controlled explosion that had been carried out on a suspicious package near a London Underground station, saying the authorities wanted to avoid alarming the public in the wake of the foiled bombings in London and Glasgow.

Roderick Dadak, a partner in the law firm of Lewis Silkin in London, which works with clients in the media industry, said, “What’s worrying is that the police and the attorney general seem to be trying to make it even more difficult” for news organizations to report on terror cases.

The scramble for details about terror investigations, in the absence of updates from the authorities, holds another danger for media companies, lawyers say.

Several British news organizations had to make libel payouts when they wrongly identified people as suspects in a plot to blow up airliners last summer. In one case, newspapers had used a photo of the wrong person.

Another challenge to Britain’s rules is the rise of “citizen journalism.” Photos taken on mobile phones or digital cameras have figured prominently in recent coverage of terrorist incidents, including the Glasgow Airport attack. Because many bystanders have sent images on to other people, lawyers said, it is harder to argue that a media organization should not be allowed to publish them.

The lawyers say that British journalists may feel increasing pressure to keep up with reporting on the Internet, where foreign journalists do not necessarily feel bound by the same restrictions.

Lawyers also said that the pervasiveness of the Internet made it increasingly difficult to insulate jurors from reports on a case or background information on a suspect.

“What does the judge do: Say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may not Google the suspect’? ” Mr. Parkes asked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/bu...9coverage.html





The Computer Virus Turns 25

The computer virus turns 25 years old this year. It's been a rocky quarter-century, but according to Richard Ford and Eugene Spafford, two computer scientists writing in this week's issue of the journal Science, viruses can look forward to a long, fruitful life. The researchers say that in today's hyper-connected world, when everything's got a chip in it and is running software, stopping malware is basically an impossible task. (Their article is not online.)

The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."

When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Ford and Spafford note that in the years since, as viruses spread to other computer platforms and throughout the world, wreaking billions in damages, there has been little progress in fighting them. There is a scientific reason for this: "Building a computer program that can tell with absolute certainty whether any other program contains a virus is equivalent to a famous computer science conundrum called the 'halting problem,'" they write. The halting problem concerns the difficulty of spotting whether a program will terminate or continue to run forever. "It has no solution in the general case and has no approximate solution for our current computing environments without also generating too many false results," they write.

Ford and Spafford also take on the idea that Microsoft is to blame for our current virus ills. Certainly MS has neglected to secure Windows, but any platform that obtains ubiquity will become a target for attack, they note. Some say the solution is to have a diverse computing environment -- if the world ran all kinds of different platforms, rather than a Windows monoculture, viruses would spread much less slowly. But diversity, Ford and Spafford point out, creates its own problems -- if the Mac, Linux and Windows all had roughly equal share, you'd need anti-virus teams working to protect all three platforms, any one of which could serve as a weak point for wider network destruction. Platform diversity, that is, increases the "attack surface," they write.

Worse still is the potential for completely computer-free computer viruses. They point to a chain e-mail message that counseled people to delete a particular file from their computer to keep it secure. "The file they deleted was critical to the system," it turned out. The "virus" that caused its deletion was "executing" only in people's minds. And you can't get a virus checker for the brain.

So right: Happy birthday, computer virus. Many happy returns!
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007...day/index.html





Spammers Overcome Hotmail and Yahoo CAPTCHA Systems
John Pospisil

It appears that spammers have found a way of automatically creating Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts, having already created more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo use "captcha" systems to stop email accounts from being automatically generated; accounts aren't created until a new user correctly identifies letters depicted in an image. Captcha systems are designed to ensure that the letters are not easily recognized by machines.

BitDefender says that a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email, which suggests that spammers have found a way to overcome Microsoft's and Yahoo's CAPTCHA systems.

According to BitDefender, every active copy of the Trojan accesses an email account, then pulls encrypted spam e-mails from a website, decrypts them and sends them to presumably valid addresses taken from yet another website.

The spam e-mail currently being distributed is trying to lead users to a site that advertises pharmacy products. Common spammer techniques are used in the e-mail body, such as bayesian poisoning and a random e-mail subject.

"There are only about 500 or so new accounts being created every hour," said Viorel Canja, the head of the BitDefender Antivirus Lab.

"But still, we've seen 15,000+ Hotmail accounts being used so far. It's hard to estimate how many spam e-mails have already been sent."

BitDefender claims to be the first security company to detect Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A and add a signature.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...ptcha-systems/





Media Defender to Spam P2P Networks With 16,000,000 Tracks from One Artist
enigmax

Spam comes in many shapes and forms and today we have news that anti-piracy company Media Defender has hooked up with telecoms company Sprint and Atlantic Records to give away 16 million free tracks on P2P networks. However, don’t get too excited, its 16 million tracks from one artist.

It’s being reported that Telecoms company Sprint has signed on the dotted line to form a partnership between themselves, Atlantic Records and Media Defender’s ArtistDirect.

The partnership is all about advertising. Sprint has bought the rights to have their name and logo embedded into tracks from the Atlantic Records hip-hop artist Plies.

It appears that Atlantic will supply Media Defender with a small number of Plies tracks, which will then be embedded with the Sprint logo which will appear on PC screens and digital devices playing the tracks. In return for a reported six-figure investment shared between the anti-piracy outfit, Atlantic Records and Plies, Media Defender will then flood P2P networks with the tracks over a 3 month period. Previously, Media Defender worked with Suretone Records to spam P2P networks with partial songs and videos in an attempt to generate traffic to their client’s website.

ArtistDirect’s CEO Jon Diamond said the project has a three-pronged approach of generating advertising revenue for record labels, linking brands to a particular artist to reach a certain demographic and in the process, limiting piracy.

However, most file-sharers want a plain MP3 track with nothing added and are unlikely to want tracks which cause advertising pop-ups or similar on their PC. As ‘vanilla’ MP3’s of tracks from the same artist will be widely available on the same P2P networks, it’s likely that file-sharers will be drawn towards those downloads instead of the ‘infected’ versions offered by Media Defender. So, this strategy will most likely NOT limit piracy.

Besides setting up fake BitTorrent trackers and fake video download sites, Media Defender is currently in talks with other artists and is likely to announce similar partnerships shortly.
http://torrentfreak.com/media-defend...om-one-artist/





Wow. Maybe they’ll make us an offer

Media Defender Buys P2P.net: Preparing for Their Next Scam?
Ernesto

The infamous anti-piracy organization Media Defender recently bought the P2P.net domain. Currently P2P.net redirects to Google and at this point it is still unclear what their plans are for the domain. However, it is likely that they will use it for one of their pirate traps such a the fake video download service Miivi or the fake BitTorrent trackers they run.

P2P.net (not P2Pnet.net) was up for auction at eBay earlier this year. Initially it wasn’t sold because the original owner wanted a higher price for the domain. It turns out that Media Defender was one of the interested parties, and they probably paid thousands of dollars to get the domain in their possession. Because of the huge amount of money that’s involved it is not likely that the domain will stay unused for a long time.

Last week we discovered that Media Defender actively tried to lure people into downloading blockbuster movies from their fake download site, Miivi.com. As expected, only a few hours after we made the news public the site was taken offline.

Media Defender later told Ars Technica that Miivi was an internal project to test out an online video project, but we know better. We’re convinced that they will try this, or a similar trick again in the near future.

Media Defender is hired by companies like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA to track down people who try to download copyrighted content. They record IP-addresses from BitTorrent trackers and other P2P networks. But they also utilize more proactive methods such as uploading fake .torrent files and setting up fake video download sites.

Luckily most BitTorrent site admins are aware of their shady practices and remove these fake files from their sites before they can do any harm. Pirate Bay admin Brokep offered his help to other BitTorrent admins to help them identifying and removing these fake files, he told TorrentFreak:

“Since the Miivi-incident we can’t keep quiet about them anymore. We want their employers to stop using them so they go bankrupt”

To our friends at Media Defender from all of us here at TorrentFreak… We’re watching you…

Update: Media Defender decided to redirect P2P.net to this article, thanks guys.
http://torrentfreak.com/media-defend...heir-next-scam





Moody's Questions Private-Equity Rationale

LBO firms don't always invest for the long haul, rating agency says
Alistair Barr

Private-equity firms may not always invest for the long term, and the strong performance of the buyout business could be fueled by the benign credit environment rather than management expertise, rating agency Moody's Investors Service said in a report released on Monday.

In theory, leveraged buyouts impose discipline on companies because they have to make higher interest payments. Going private is also supposed to help companies invest over a longer time horizon, free from the pressure of quarterly earnings targets and the costs of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Buyout firms' ability to attract and retain top executives is also often cited as a reason for higher returns, Moody's noted.

But the rating agency questioned some of those assumptions in its report, arguing that sometimes buyout firms have less incentive to inject capital into a business than strategic owners such as public companies.

"While Moody's would agree that leverage is likely to impose discipline and provide higher equity returns, the current environment does not suggest that private equity firms are investing over a longer term horizon than do public companies, despite not being driven by the pressure to publicly report quarterly earnings," Christina Padgett of Moody's wrote in the report.

"We also question whether there is sufficient evidence to prove that the higher returns provided to private equity are driven by stronger management teams or because, in a benign and liquid credit environment, leverage by itself can provide substantial returns to shareholders," she added. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...437E0A 4D7%7D





Can Linux Adoption Ever be Accurately Gauged?
Roy Schestowitz

Determining usage and growth of Free software has always been a challenge. For over a decade, arguments have been held – sometimes flamewars – whose central point was the usage level of software that is freely distributed. While market share can be estimated based on sales numbers, Free software usually replaces existing software that is proprietary, i.e. its ownership lies with a vendor and it is usually treated as an integral part of another product.

When discussing Free software, the term "installed base" seems rather popular. It is installation, not embedment or preinstallation, that tailors a product to the owner's personal needs. Unfortunately, installed base, as opposed to market share, proves to be a tricky thing to gauge.

At the center of this debate, one typically finds the GNU/Linux operating system. Many perceive Linux the greatest contender with the capability to bring Free software to the mainstream. Linux is commonly obtained through exchange of CDs, which can then be modified, pass from user to user, and be used to deploy the same software on multiple computers. The content of these CDs is usually (albeit not always) downloaded from the Internet. Lesser-known Linux distributions are sometimes obtained through peers or via BitTorrent, which cannot be properly tracked. These channels of communication are decentralized by nature.

Endless attempts have been made to count Linux users. User base vanity harbors confidence and leads to better support from the industry. Attempts to quantify growth have included Web sites whose sole purpose is to have Linux users register and provide details about their computers. Even the most prominent among these Web sites met very limited success. They were not able to keep up with change, let alone attract and grab the attention of all Linux users. Most Linux users were simply apathetic toward this cause.

In more recent years, the ubiquity of interconnected devices and computers has played an important role in statistics. Computing units that offer Web access have generated large piles of data. Statistical analysis of this data was thought to be another opportunity to study presence and geography of Linux users around the planet. It has, however, been a very deficient analysis. For a variety of reasons, too many assumptions were made, which led to flawed conclusions. To this date, no proper and valid analysis has been carried out.

Looking more closely at some difficulties in interpreting Web statistics, there are numerous factors to consider. There are obvious problems. The sample of selectively chosen Web sites often contains particular audiences which, on average, do not represent the entire population. Additionally, due to diversity in the identity of Linux, as it comes in as just one among a large number of distributions, identification strings are hard to understand. As such, many Linux users are simply being treated as though they use an “unknown” operating system. This “unknown” component is statistically significant, yet it tends to be ignored and discarded.

There are more problems that need to be taken into consideration. For example, data gathered by Web sites neglects to identify computers that are operated behind proxies, or even Squid. This data also assumes that everyone identifies himself or herself in a truly honest fashion. In fact, that certain Web sites were designed to reject access from every Web browser other than Internet Explorer. As a result, many Linux users are forced to pretend (by altering HTTP headers) that they use a typical Windows setup. This is known as spoofing or forging and it is a matter of convenience.

The last factor to consider here are the botnets (zombie PCs) that travel the World Wide Web. It's a relentless Web journey and this happens without the awareness of the rightful owner of the computer. This troublesome phenomenon means that large levels of Web traffic is devoured in a very wasteful fashion. It does not accurately reflect human consumption of information. Botnets act to 'pollute' log data and therefore tweak statistics. It rarely (if ever) works in favor of secure operating systems and Web browsers.

Web statistics and the research that revolves around them suffer from yet another false assumption. One must not simply accept the contention that all computers are connected to the Internet nowadays. If they are, their users do not necessarily visit an identical number of Web sites or consume an equal number of pages. Different operating systems are used in different settings. They serve a particular purpose and facilitate working tasks that might not require the Internet at all.

To use an example, Hollywood is considered a place where production studios adopt Linux, even on the desktop. In a recent interview with the press, CinePaint's Project Manager said that "Linux is the default operating [system] on desktops and servers at major animation and visual effects studios, with maybe 98 percent [or more] penetration." These computers, which include user-facing workstations, get used heavily for design and rendering work, but probably not for Web surfing.

There have been other projects that are intended to keep track of the number of Linux users by setting up a communication channel that connects a computer to the Linux distributor's servers. These projects are neither mature nor widely adopted.

On the other hand, the increasing adoption of online software repositories has made this process more feasible without it being considered "spying." And yet, the lack of a registration process leaves room for dynamic addressing, so a single unique user is still hard to identify. The user will remain a moving target on the network as long as system registration is an absent component. Free software is adverse to such privacy-compromising steps, so they are unlikely to ever become mandatory.

Last year, in an interview with Red Herring, Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth commented about the activity on his company's repositories. At the time, at least 8 million distinct users or addresses with a particular version of his Linux distribution could be identified. That was only months after the release of this distribution, which many of us had already known as "Ubuntu."

Regardless of the adoption rate of Linux on the desktop, Linux enjoys double-figure inter-quarter growth on the server side. This trend has sustained itself for several years. There are, however, great difficulties to overcome when it comes to tracking how widespread – not just profitable – Linux has become on in the datacenter. Market figures regularly come from analysts, but these figures are based purely on sales. They only gauge revenue. They fail to account for the fact that Linux is free and is becoming easier to set up each year. Many companies take the do-it-yourself route and build their own server farms. They do not require much assistance, so deployment can be completed without a Linux purchase – per se – ever being made. The true growth of Linux will therefore stay an enigma for quite some time to come.

At the end of the day, let’s remember that Free software was not created to thrive in profits. There is no marketing department to boast of growth, either. Yet whether we use a search engine, or connect to a mail server, or acquire some snazzy gadget, Linux is likely to be there. The desktop, however, is perceived as an ultimate destination. It has the most visibility. Laptops and desktops can demonstrate that Linux has come and that it is here to stay and thrive. The back room usually escapes people's attention, despite a gradual shift in paradigm, which encourages adoption of remote services and thinner clients.

Counting the number of Linux users might always remain an impossibility. Should you mind?
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osr...le.php/3687616





Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
Anna Haynes

Assignment Zero

Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing." All in all, Assignment Zero produced about 80 stories, essays and interviews about crowdsourcing; we'll reprint 12 of the best. The stories appear here exactly as Assignment Zero produced them. They have not been edited for facts or style.

- - -

With additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore
Edited by Vivian Martin

In which a member of crowdsourced journalism's "working class" shares a ground-level view of the motivations, the frustrations, and the potential of this movement

It's true that crowdsourcing can bring new life to journalism: through replacement, with pro-am collaborations replacing coverage lost to newsroom cuts; through exploitation, with newspaper execs "harvesting" the wisdom of their community; or through bypass, with the "people formerly known as the audience" banding together to tackle investigations that -- for varied reasons -- the mainstream press is less eager to address.

But fundamentally, crowdsourced journalism's promise must be realized by the crowd; if a project doesn't suit the "users," it won't fly. So hearing from -- and listening to -- these users is key.

The most-heard voices on crowdsourced journalism come from those at the top: for Assignment Zero we've interviewed such leaders as NOLA.com's Jon Donley, the NorthWest Voice's Mary Lou Fulton* and NOWPUBLIC's Michael Tippett; evangelists Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis; CPA-wielding TPM Cafe warrior Mrs. Panstreppon and Daily Kos leader-rallier SusanG.

As a common worker bee from within the "crowd," I offer a user's perspective -- on how it's been to forage for information on these projects; on why and where we want to contribute; and on where crowdsourced journalism needs to go next.

Before Assignment Zero, I worked, or tried to work, on six crowdsourced journalism projects. They were of widely varying scope, and aren't composed of the usual suspects; in a sense, I've been laboring in crowdsourced journalism's "long tail." (These six projects are covered in a companion article.)

The results of my efforts were mixed. Some parts were rewarding: I enjoyed digging to uncover lobbyist connections to earmarked appropriations in the Earmarks Project, plus there's a certain satisfaction in publicly exposing stonewalling, and a different satisfaction in finally getting an answer.

But I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high "social good" return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in -- either from being unable to get or enter the data, or from not following through where I probably would have, had there been support. (Support is crucial: if not for my editor's encouragement at a bleak moment, you wouldn't be reading this now.) And in the projects where I did contribute, my work had no visible effect -- because of no follow-up or no publicity, or because what I provided just wasn't very significant. All in all, I likely could have spent the time more productively at home on my own weblog.

In short: There was plenty of room for improvement.

So, why bother?

Answer: Because there is plenty of room for improvement. I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn't measure up -- you know there's potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you're pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time that potential will blossom.

What does this blooming potential look like, from the contributors' perspective?

For some people -- for most people -- it'll take the form of the political activist crowdsourced journalism that goes on at sites like TPM Muckraker and Daily Kos; as SusanG noted, sometimes it'll be as "many eyes," poring over documents; other times as "many ears and voices," reaching out to our representatives, asking them questions, and bringing this information back to the hive; and still other times as "swarm journalism," attacking the varied pieces of a story in a ravening piranha horde.

This form of crowdsourced journalism has been wildly successful in attracting motivated contributors, and for good reason: it's easy to feel that what you're doing has value, when what you're doing is defending your country.

Others will gravitate toward a group endeavor with individual appeal, such as taking part in a project to question some of the web's most interesting people, as Assignment Zero's 80 interviews now show.

And for those of us who wish to shine the light more locally, I'd like to believe a third crowdsourcing model has yet to emerge: it would employ crowdsourcing's group strengths to help citizens tackle the watchdog journalism that cries to be done in their own communities. A support organization for geographically distributed local watchdogging, it would offer editorial services, reporting advice, training in analyzing budgets and the like, discussion with peers, access to tools, and a "home away from home" to showcase and critique the work. The projects could be coordinated, with each participant running the same analysis on their own city or town.

There's clearly a need for the reportorial product; as the NYC Indypendent's Chris Anderson said:
"I would like to see crowdsourcing reach deep down into the bowels of local city governments....[The suburbs] need good investigative journalism as much as anywhere else. More probably. There's a lot of corruption in those places, and the mainstream press is dropping the ball."

Citizen journalist nonpareil Mrs. Panstreppon agrees:
"I think local crowdsourcing is an excellent idea.... We are suffering from a lack of news about local and state government because [the local paper] has been undergoing severe budget cuts...."

And ordinary citizens agree too. Said the Arizona Star's Debbie Kornmiller:
"the people I hear from think the government is corrupt -- local, national.... And where the criticism is, is that we don't do enough to uncover that corruption."

To tackle this reporting, we'll need support services: without this support, citizen journalists up against entrenched power structures will likely end up at best nowhere, at worst toast. We'll need purely practical support, too; for example, those who don't share Mrs. P.'s accounting background could sorely use help interpreting financial documents.

This support doesn't yet exist. Current citizen journalism training sites like New Voices, NewsU, and the community news self-help portal Knight Citizen News Network don't cover watchdogging; they're designed for a different job. They give lessons in basic journalism -- offering helpful tips on writing for a community web site, where a friendly community holds sway. Where citizen muckrakers need a one-on-one with Machiavelli, they offer Scouting merit badges.

"Real journalism consists of what someone doesn't want published, all the rest is public relations." -- George Orwell

"Never, never, never let them intimidate you." -- David Halberstam

"There ain't nothin' for testicular enhancement like having [a group] behind you." -- anonymous friend

I want to report news, not PR. I want the powers that be to quiver at my approach, not the other way around. I want to cover the stories that won't be covered by a tame local press, but I know I'll get nowhere by going it alone; I need a network to teach me what I need, to support me in these efforts, to look at what I'm doing and tell me where I'm going wrong, to suggest angles worth pursuing.

Chris Anderson questioned whether citizen journalism that's not overtly political yields enough psychic reward to thrive:
"politics are a passion of the bloodstream, and the gut. These other things [good journalism, objective knowledge] are a little more...abstract maybe?"

But truth can be a passion of the bloodstream and gut as well. A journalist once told me "[Investigative] reporting is like crack." He's right; I've tried it.

I want more.

But to go there, I need backup.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/n...ew_from_crowds





A Handwritten Daily Paper in India Faces the Digital Future
Scott Carney

The fax machine on 76-year-old Editor-in-Chief Syed Fazlulla's crowded desk is by far the most sophisticated technology in the room. It whizzes and burps forth a stream of scribbled notes from a correspondent in New Delhi.

Fazlulla, who is deep into creating the next issue of the handcrafted The Musalman daily newspaper, frowns as he deciphers the handwriting and searches for a cover story. After some consideration, he passes the page to his brother who translates it into Urdu. He in turn sends the text to the back room where writers take calligraphy quills in hand and begin.

Here in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque, a team of six puts out this hand-penned paper. Four of them are katibs -- writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. It takes three hours using a pen, ink and ruler to transform a sheet of paper into news and art.

"I write because I love the language," says Rehaman Hussein, a mustached katib who has written the paper's front page for more than 20 years. "Urdu is a clean language. It is the language of our Koran."

But the Musalman's future is uncertain because the art of Urdu calligraphy is a fast-fading tradition. The newspaper has no clear successor who would produce it in its handwritten form when Fazlulla can no longer do the job. The issue is a source of tension between him and his son Syed Nasarulla, who runs a greeting-card business out of a loft directly above his father's office. He would only reluctantly take the paper's reins.

"I understand Urdu, but have no interest in calligraphy," Nasarulla said. "There is no practical reason we have not gone to computers. If my father asks me to take over I will take over, but there will be changes."

In the meantime, the office is a center for the South Indian Muslim community and hosts a stream of renowned poets, religious leaders and royalty who contribute to the pages, or just hang out, drink chai and recite their most recent works to the staff. The Musalman publishes Urdu poetry and messages on devotion to God and communal harmony daily.

The newspaper's content is not exactly hard-hitting. It covers the basics of local politics and the writers translate stories from English papers into Urdu. Still, the paper is widely read and appreciated by Muslims in Tripplicane and Chennai where the paper has a circulation of 20,000.

While the Musalman is a Muslim newspaper, it is a hub of South Asian liberalism, employing both women and non-Muslims. Half the katibs are women and the chief reporter is Hindu. Staff members say that Indira Gandhi, former prime minister of India, once called the business the epitome of what modern India should be.

Fazlulla believes the handwritten pages are crucial to the paper and to the tradition of handwritten Urdu.

For centuries, handwriting was the definitive mark of social status, education and liberal values in India. Calligraphers mastered the swooping Urdu script in ivory-tower institutions and penned copies of the Koran for wealthy patrons. The pinnacle of a katib's achievement meant a seat at court and a chance to earn the sultan's ear.

Similar to spoken Hindi, Urdu is a mixture of Arabic, Persian and local Indian languages. It originated in the army camps of Muslim rulers in Delhi and has been the language of poets and artists because its rich roots draw on so many traditions across various cultures.

But when British colonizers swept across India importing printing presses and English, Urdu ceased to be the official court language. It was spoken primarily by the Muslim community, but katibs could still make a living because no Urdu typeface existed.

That changed in 1997 with the first widely circulated Urdu computer font. Nowadays, people learn to read and write Urdu mostly as a hobby.

"The real masters are all dead, or they are so old that they are blind and their hands won't work anymore," Fazlulla said.

But the Musalman has survived and operates much as it has since it was founded in 1927. The biggest change came in the 1950s when Fazlulla unloaded a massive offset printer from a cargo ship. He salvaged the machine from a defunct American newspaper, and the paper has used it ever since.

Each katib is responsible for one page. If someone is sick, the others pull double shifts -- there are no replacements anywhere in the city. When calligraphers make mistakes they rewrite everything from scratch. They earn 60 rupees (about $1.50) per page.

The final proofs are transferred onto a black and white negative, then pressed onto printing plates. The paper is sold for one cent on the streets of Chennai.

The paper's popularity may not be enough to save the handwritten calligraphy tradition when the last of the katibs retires. Fazlulla worries what the digital revolution might mean for the future of his paper and his brand of calligraphy.

"Urdu is sweeter when written by hand," he said.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifesty..._calligraphers





Write Articles, Not Blog Postings
Jakob Nielsen

Summary:
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

I recently served as a "consultant's consultant," advising a world leader in his field on what to do about his website. In particular, this expert asked me whether he should start a weblog. I said no.

You probably already know my own Internet strategy, so it might not surprise you that I recommended that he should instead invest his time in writing thorough articles that he published on a regular schedule. Given limited time, this means not spending the effort to post numerous short comments on ongoing blogosphere discussions.

Weblogs have their role in business, particularly as project blogs, as exemplified on several award-winning intranets. Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.

Avoid Commodity Status
For many B2B sites with long sales cycles, quick hits to commodity-level content are insufficient. Instead, these sites need to build up long-term customer relationships based on respect.

Take my own business, for example. When I talk with people at my usability conferences, they often say that they've wanted to attend for ages, and only recently secured their boss's approval to come. To address this issue, we added a "convince your boss" section to our conference sites, explaining the benefits of spending money on usability training. Still, realistically, I expect to wait 3-5 years before meeting new readers of my site in person.

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.

Demonstrate Leadership
For the sake of argument, let's say that you're the world leader in your field. We'll quantify that as being the #1 expert among the 1,000 people with websites in your field. In other words, you are in the 99.9th percentile.

(Although you might think you have many more than 1,000 competitors, the Web thrives on specialized content, so it's better to conceptualize yourself as leading a smaller subdiscipline, unless you're so good that you're #1 out of millions of people.)

We can measure expertise as some combination of intelligence, education, experience, correct methodology, professionalism (say, avoiding profanities and politics), and willingness to be frank. The exact metric doesn't matter here; let's just assume there's a way to quantify how good people are within their field.

Assuming that you're this good, you have to show it to gain customers. And blogs aren't the way, as we'll see once we plot the distribution of postings as opposed to writers.

Variability of Blog Posting Quality
Assume that the 1,000 people each write 10 blog postings. The resulting 10,000 postings will follow a much broader distribution, because the quality of postings is extremely variable.

Let's assume that a given writer's posting quality is normally distributed, with a mean representing that person's level of expertise and a standard deviation 3 times as large as the SD for expertise among people. I don't know what the actual number is, so this is just a rough estimate. But it's reasonable to assume that posting quality is more variable than expertise for several reasons:

• Sometimes people toss off a posting in a minute. Other times they spend hours.
• Sometimes a writer happens to know a lot about the topic at hand, possibly because they've just spent several months working on that exact problem. Other times people know nothing--which doesn't keep them from voicing their opinions :-)
• Sometimes people are lucky and get a blinding insight. Other times they post more out of duty than anything else.

Even if you're the world's top expert, your worst posting will be below average, which will negatively impact on your brand equity. If you do start a blog despite my advice, at least screen your postings: wait an hour or two, then reread your comments and avoid uploading any that are average or poor. (Even average content undermines your brand. Don't contribute to information pollution by posting material that isn't above the average of other people's writings.)

In my simulation, our expert's best posting happens to be #25 from the top. The expert's second-best posting was ranked #300 from the top. It might seem fine to be the author of postings #9,700 and #9,975 out of a group of 10,000 blog postings. But in fact, it's nowhere near good enough.

The beauty of the blogosphere is that it's a self-organizing system. Whenever something good appears, other blogs link to it and it gets promoted in the system and gains higher visibility. Thus, the 24 postings that are better than our expert's very best attempt will gain higher prominence, even though they're written by people with lower overall expertise.

Prospective new customers don't even have time to read 24 postings, so they'll never make it down the list of rank-ordered blog postings to reach our expert's best.

Beating the Internet
It's almost impossible to fight the Internet: you're up against millions of people who are willing to work for free. But you have to do so, because if you work within the prevailing Web paradigm you're letting the search engines take 98% of your content's value. That's okay if you're not in the content business. Our pistachio site doesn't mind that it's not making money off its recipe for delicious pistachio ice cream. Just as long as it sells nuts.

If you're an expert who wants to live from adding to the world's knowledge, you must go beyond the mainstream Web model of single page visits driven by search traffic. It's easy enough to build a website that freeloaders will use, but that shouldn't be your approach. You must change the game and create content that's so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it.

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time.

Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content.

In-Depth Content Is Value-Add Content
It might take you only an hour to write a blog posting on some current controversy, but a thousand other people can do that as well (in fact, they'll sometimes do it better, as shown above). And customers don't want to pay for such a tiny increment of knowledge. Sure, sometimes a single paragraph holds the idea that can increase a site's conversion rate so much that a reader should have paid a million dollars to read it. But they don't know that in advance, so they won't pay.

In contrast, in-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn't add up to Shakespeare. They'll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren't integrated and that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic -- even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

Thorough content's added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money. This is the true measure of a sustainable business.

You have to identify opportunities with a non-linear utility function: where paying customers assign more than 10 times higher value to something that costs 10 times as much to produce. The old open-source manifesto "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" holds much truth: when you're the duke, you can't trade in coffee beans, because the bazaar dealers will always undercut your price. You should build a cathedral, because a thousand tents can't compete with the Notre Dame.

The fatter the report became, the more it has sold. Of course, page count (the blue line) is only a rough indication of the amount of insight, which is what customers are really paying for. The new edition has a large number of eyetracking heatmaps, showing how users read various newsletters, and these many illustrations eat up pages ferociously. Still, there's no doubt that each report edition contains significantly more information than previous editions.

The report's price has increased less than its page count: as we keep doing this research, we become more efficient. You could argue that customers are getting more for their money, and that's why they're buying more. But this argument works only if customers in fact assign extra value to more comprehensive reports. So either way, I conclude that in-depth content sells.

Why are paying customers (the people who matter) attracted by detailed information? Because systematic and comprehensive coverage is more actionable. It also protects them against the risk of losses caused when something important is overlooked.

In my report example, consider an Internet marketing manager who's in charge of the company's email newsletter. The report's price is trivial compared to millions of dollars many companies would gain from increased subscription rates, increased open rates, increased clickthrough rates, and enhanced customer loyalty from content that's both better appreciated and read more often. To improve these key performance metrics for her newsletter, the manager could spend a week surfing the Web and reading a thousand short pieces about newsletter design. The result? A scattered set of imprecise advice that neglects many important issues. Instead, that manager could spend a day gaining much deeper insights from reading a single, well-structured report with all-inclusive coverage of the topic. Saving 4 days is worth a lot in business, which is another reason to target business customers with value-added information.

In-depth content provides more value in less time than numerous superficial postings. That's why business customers have empirically been willing to pay, and that's why you should emphasize fewer, better pieces as your content strategy.

Expertise vs. Content Usability
This has been a very long article, stuffed with charts and statistical concepts -- like standard deviations and utility functions -- that I know most readers find difficult. Recommending in-depth content flies in the face of all guidelines for Web writing, which call for fewer words and scannable information.

The content usability guidelines are correct: they are indeed the way to make a site easier for most people. Thus, you should follow the guidelines -- rather than emulate this article -- for normal business websites and intranets. (When I say "business sites," I include government sites and non-profits. as well as e-commerce and corporate marketing sites.)

For most sites, the content is not the point. Instead, you want to answer customers' questions as rapidly as possible so that they'll advance in the sales cycle and start buying (or donate, or sign up for your newsletter, or whatever else you want them to do).

Elite, expertise-driven sites are the exception to the rule. For these sites, you don't care about 90% of users, because they want a lower level of quality than you provide and they'll never pay for your services. People looking for the quick hit and free advice are not your customers. Let them eat cake; let them read Wikipedia.

Still, even if you run an expertise-driven site, you should follow the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks. The small percentage of users who are qualified prospects still read in an F-pattern, so a headline's first words are more important than its last words, just as they are for normal sites.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html





Is The Page View Dead?
Louis Hau

Pity the poor page view.

Nielsen/NetRatings dealt the aging Internet-audience metric its latest blow when the company said Tuesday that it would no longer provide page-view rankings for Web sites.

Instead, NetRatings said it will be adding new measurements, including total time spent on a site and total visits, to provide what it believes will be a more comprehensive snapshot of how much visitors are using a given Web site.

Why the switch? NetRatings cited the broadening use of online video players and so-called "Ajax" (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications that deliver photos, online maps, e-mail and other services and content without having to go to another Web page. As a result, counting page views can significantly underestimate how much a Web surfer is using a site, particularly at Ajax-heavy portal sites like Yahoo!, Google and Time Warner's AOL.

That, in turn, has profound implications for marketers as they determine how much they should spend to advertise on a particular Web property.

In a statement, Scott Ross, director of product development for NetRatings' NetView service, said that total minutes spent on a site per month "is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using [Ajax] and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming.''

But the move drew a mixed response from online advertising experts, who note that many Web sites make no use of Ajax technologies.

James Kiernan, vice president and group director of digital media and innovation at MediaVest USA in New York, said the time is right to evaluate better ways of measuring online audience engagement, but added that he felt it was premature to drop page-viewing rankings.

"Just to take away that metric, which media buyers have been relying on, is surprising,'' Kiernan said.

Sheryl Draizen, general manager of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, said that "obviously it's great that Nielsen is innovating" and agreed that time spent on a site is a crucial metric.

But she added that the industry needs to be cautious because "I don't think we've done enough work yet to come up with what is the replacement for the page view ... It may be that time spent is the right one, but I don't know if we know that yet." (Forbes.com Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller is IAB's chairman.)

Rival online audience-measurement firm comScore most frequently uses monthly unique visitors to compile its Web site traffic rankings. But it also uses other metrics, including total time spent, and last year began collecting data on video streams initiated by users at sites such as Google's YouTube, which it said provided a more accurate picture of the online video audience than unique visitors did.

In a December statement discussing new Web traffic data, comScore President and Chief Executive Magid Abraham acknowledged that the "Internet experience today is much more dynamic thanks to Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax," adding that while page views "will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site's value, it's clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures."

Draizen said that regardless of how NetRatings and comScore measure the online audience, "it's not the methodology, it's about the transparency behind the methodology." Unlike Nielsen's TV ratings and Arbitron's measurement of the radio audience, NetRatings and rival online measurement firm comScore haven't submitted to third-party audits of their methodologies.

But following a meeting in May with officials from the IAB and the Media Rating Council, both firms indicated that they are willing to at least consider cooperating with third-party audits.

All of these efforts highlight the fact that the Internet provides marketers with far more data about consumer behavior than any other medium. The trick is making sense of it all. The stakes couldn't be higher: Research firm eMarketer projects U.S. online advertising to total $21.7 billion in 2007, up 28% from last year.

But the total online ad market still accounts for only a small percentage of overall ad expenditures. Draizen estimates the Internet's share of total ad spending hovers around 6%, which she said reflects just a fraction of its reach among consumers.

"We are still a relatively new medium,'' Draizen said. "We need to make sure the foundation of the new medium is on very solid footing for long-term growth."
http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/10/int...pageviews.html





Sites Let Preteens Network Online
AP

This past spring, 10-year-old Adam Young joined other tweens on Club Penguin, playing games, throwing virtual snowballs and chatting with fellow kids who appear onscreen as plump cartoon penguins. A few weeks later, Adam asked Mom to pay $5 a month for extra features, such as decorating his online persona's igloo.

Karen Young demanded to learn more about what some have billed as ''training wheels'' for the next MySpace generation. She spent time on the site with Adam and consulted with her sister, the mother of another daily visitor.

''I said, `Well, what is it? What does it involve?''' Young recalled. ''I wanted him to show me what he wanted and what it was about.''

Drawing preteens as young as 6 or 7, sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz are forcing parents to decide at what age they are willing to let their children roam about and interact with friends online. They, along with schools, are having to teach earlier lessons on safety, etiquette and balance with offline activities.

''It's kind of like what happened in the real world with Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies,'' said Monique Nelson, executive vice president of Web Wise Kids, a nonprofit focused on Internet safety for children. ''Their friends are doing it, so like kids who follow like sheep, they go online and go on these sites.''

According to comScore Media Metrix, U.S. visitors to Club Penguin nearly tripled over the past year, while Webkinz' grew 13 times.

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech, said kids' identities begin to blossom by 8 and they start wanting to meet other children, so these sites may become their introduction to social networking. But she said kids that age would get much more ''going to the swimming pool and meeting friends face to face,'' making parental oversight of online usage ever-important.

Young, a first-grade teacher in Louisville, Ky., ultimately deemed the environment relatively safe and agreed to pay for a membership. Unlike News Corp.'s MySpace, the anything-goes site frequented by Young's older son, Club Penguin limits what kids can say to one another, reducing the risks of predators and online bullying.

That sentiment was echoed by Tony Bayliss, father of 7-year-old Maisie in England. Club Penguin is the only site Bayliss lets Maisie visit unsupervised; Bayliss also has a cartoon penguin of his own and visits his daughter online while traveling.

''It's what the future is,'' Bayliss said of the online environment. ''It's what she's going to be using for the rest of her life.''

Club Penguin was started more than a year ago as ''an online playground for kids,'' said Lane Merrifield, the site's co-founder and chief executive. ''How can we take the fun pieces of these more grown-up and adult (social-networking) sites and surround them in a safe environment?''

Kids win gold coins by playing games such as sled racing and, with a paid membership, buy virtual items like furniture and clothing. Kids can attend parties and make friends by adding other penguins to their buddy lists.

The site, from Canada's New Horizon Interactive Ltd., does not try to keep out older users -- after all, anyone can lie about age. Rather, it builds in controls meant to curb outside contact and harassment. The company says it has never had a problem with predators.

Parents can choose an ''ultimate safe'' mode, meaning chat messages sent and received are limited to prewritten phrases, such as ''How are you today?''

In the standard mode, kids can type messages like any other chat program, but only the sender sees messages containing foul language and even innocent-sounding words such as ''mom'' -- to prevent someone from asking, ''Is your mom home?'' Senders would think they are being ignored and not try tricks to bypass filters.

The filters also catch numbers that might form a phone number a kid is trying to share, even if someone tries to replace ''1'' with ''one.''

Veterans can apply to become ''secret agents,'' responsible for patrolling the site and reporting bad behavior, and violations can get a kid banned for a day or longer.

Likewise, Webkinz limits chats by permitting only prewritten phrases, and e-cards go only to those already on friends lists.

Kids take quizzes or perform chores to earn ''KinzCash'' to buy furniture for their virtual room and food for their virtual pet. They must return to the site regularly to keep their pets fed and healthy; otherwise, it's a trip to Dr. Quack for medical care, though the pets themselves never die.

Unlike Club Penguin, though, access to the Canadian-based site from Ganz is restricted to those who buy a Webkinz plush toy at a retail store for about $15, many of which have been selling out because of high demand. Think Beanie Babies with an online component. A code on each toy unlocks the site for a year.

Both sites do require some reading skills, though younger kids can participate with older siblings or parents.

Other popular tween online hangouts include Millsberry, a General Mills Inc. site that promotes good eating but features product placements for its cereals, and Numedeon Inc.'s Whyville, where tweens play games and earn clams.

Although these social-networking precursors for tweens tend to incorporate more safety measures than MySpace, Facebook and other sites geared toward teenagers and adults, experts warn that parents can't simply sign their kids on and leave them there, especially during the summer months when kids have more time to spend online.

''We want them to develop and grow physically, spiritually and emotionally,'' Meszaros said. ''If they are on the computer three or four hours a day, that's time they could be doing other things. Parents need to be monitoring.''

Step one is to decide whether kids should be there at all.

Jane Healy, author of ''Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds -- for Better and Worse,'' said kids may feel they are ''going to be a hopeless social failure'' if they can't participate.

Advocates say the controlled environment can teach kids important lessons about typing, communicating, caring for pets and budgeting -- they must learn to work and save for the trampoline they want for their virtual room.

But Healy said these sites also teach kids to be ''a good consuming member of the consuming culture (and) to need stuff to be considered successful or good.''

She urges caution in opening the door to ''powerful forces out there trying to intrude into your family life and personal relations with your child.'' Not only do these sites introduce commercialism, she said, but they also can take kids away from offline environments where they can learn to pick up body language and facial expressions.

Software tools are available to help parents control Internet activities, including use of these sites. Monitoring software can record a kid's chat conversations and whereabouts -- secretly if the parent wishes. Other tools, some available for free, aim to block porn or limit when or how long a child can be online.

Parents should at least keep computers in an open room and surf the Web side-by-side with their kids now and then. A discussion on time limits is important because rules are far easier to impose from the beginning, and Club Penguin will soon introduce a feature for parents to set such limits on the site.

''As soon as the egg timer comes up, we're going to have a list of activities they can do outside,'' Merrifield said.

Parents should also start addressing safety and online etiquette.

''They can't be there every time they go online .... so it's even more important to spend more time up front teaching them how to be safe and smart,'' said Susan Sachs, chief operating officer with the nonprofit Common Sense Media.

It helps that many parents are now using the Internet not just for work but also for recreation, information sharing and other social interaction.

''When kids start to use technology, (parents) can be much more part of the process, as opposed to, `Gee, this is all new and strange to me. I don't want you using it,''' said Peter Grunwald, a researcher who specializes in kids and technology.

Nonetheless, Grunwald said, ''kids are using online services at an earlier age, and that means parents do have to exercise their role as parents and be mindful of it at an earlier age than, say, seven, eight or nine years ago.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...ng-Tweens.html





35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking
Malene Charlotte Larsen

There are many different perspectives to put on online social networking and it is important to know where one is coming from when talking about social networking and youth. The perspective(s) one has will be very different whether one is a parent with a teenage daughter on MySpace, a marketing executive interested in the target group “14 to 20,” a journalist looking for the next big news story on young people and new media, a youngster using a social networking site as part of everyday life or a researcher investigating how young people are using social networking sites.

In this article I try to list the different perspectives I can think of. Mostly, the list is based on my own experiences with Danish social networking sites for youngsters between the age of 12 and 18.

The following 35 perspectives on online social networking sites can be sorted into different overall categories (or different actors or discourses). As a researcher I certainly do not agree with all of the mentioned perspectives, but some of them do represent the opinions (or prejudices) I hear when I am out giving lectures on social networking to adults. After my list, I propose six overarching categories.

But first, here are thirty-five perspectives on online social networking:

The consumer perspective
Social networking sites are money-making machines creating a need for added value among young people causing them to spend all their pocket money on extra features such as VIP profiles, widgets, gifts for friends and so on.

The youth perspective
Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them “practice” youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.

The friendship perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.

The identity perspective
Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each other’s identities.

The body and sex perspective
Social networking sites are sexual playgrounds for young people where they portray themselves in a provocative or soft porn-style manner. It is all about appearance and body making the youngsters superficial and shallow.

The paedophile and predator perspective
Social networking sites are an El Dorado for paedophiles and predators who want to harm young people. The people behind the sites are not in control of safety and do not put enough effort into keeping predators out of the sites.

The bullying perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people bully and threaten each other and the sites are reinforcing and urging bullying between young people.

The reassurance perspective
Social networking sites are forums for reassurance and confirmatory messages between young people constantly reminding them that they are all right and someone likes them.

The genre perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people imitate and copy different genres, e.g. fashion magazines, music videos, song lyrics, commercials etc. which can be found in their profile texts.

The branding perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people learn the mechanism of branding and learn to sell and brand themselves in a positive manner.

The network perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people learn the crucial importance of being able to network which they can benefit from in their future professional life.

The love perspective
Social networking sites allow young people to express themselves in a loving manner, thus creating a space for a love discourse that do not exist outside cyberspace.

The source critique perspective
Social networking sites force young people to be sceptical of what they see and read online. They know that people can create faker profiles which make them extra aware of the identity of the people they communicate with.

The sincerity perspective
Social networking sites make young people present themselves in a sincere manner in order to avoid being mistaken for a faker. This also creates a sincerity discourse among the users and people who do not follow this are disciplined.

The democratic perspective
Social networking sites are places that allow young people to have a voice in society. Here, they can be heard and express their opinions.

The materialistic perspective
Social networking sites are all about materialism and about having the right brands. Youngsters need to be successful with the right clothes and things in order to be accepted on social networking sites.

The language perspective
Social networking sites aggravate the written language of young people. They develop bad habits of misspelling on purpose, which makes them unable to write correctly. On the other hand, their online language is really creative and they do know how to tell right from wrong.

The public perspective
Social networking sites are “open diaries” of young people, but they do not think about the fact that the whole world can read their text and see their pictures online.

The surveillance perspective
Social networking sites are surveillance. Everything young people write online are saved and can be used (against them) by marketing people, future employers and so on.

The group work perspective
Social networking sites reinforce group work mechanism and young people often work together on profiles and are often willing to help each other.

The time consuming perspectives
Social networking sites are places where young people spend way to much time preventing them from performing healthy spare time activities such as sports and outdoor time.

The anti-social perspective
Social networking sites make young people anti-social and incapable of communication with others face to face. They lose important social competences.

The social perspective
Social networking sites make young people more social and help them communicate with others. Especially, the sites help youngsters cope with shyness or loneliness.

The generation-gap perspective
Social networking sites are creating a greater gap between young people and adults such as their parents and teachers who do not understand the youngsters’ need to be online all the time.

The learning perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people gain important IT competences such as HTML design, layout and graphics.

The entertainment perspective
Social networking sites are places young people use for entertainment just like any other medium. Here they watch videos, play games, upload pictures, listen to music etc. Thus, for many youngsters social networking sites have replaced the function that the tv set had for previous generations.

The communication tool perspective
Social networking sites are merely a communication tool for young people and they use the sites similar to how they use their mobile phones. In this connection I can mention that the most frequent message I have seen displayed in young people’s guest books is “Hi, what are you doing?”

The creative perspective
Social networking sites allow youngsters to be really creative and mix and play with different types of content. My colleague Thomas Ryberg refers to this as ‘patchwork’ or ‘remix’ culture in his upcoming PhD thesis on young people, ICT and learning.

The space and place perspective
Social networking sites are spaces that allow young people to create their own place(s). And those places are as real and important as the offline places where they meet. Also, young people talk about social networking sites as places referring to them as e.g.. “in here”.

The Nexus of Practice perspective
A social networking site could be seen as a ‘Nexus of Practice’. This concept comes from Ron Scollon and it “simultaneously signifies a genre of activity and the group of people who engage in that activity.” (Scollon, 2001). People are rather loosely connected in a ‘nexus of practice’ and I think it is a good metaphor for social networking. (I used the term defining Arto in my thesis.)

The Community of Practice perspective
Social networking sites are therefore not communities in the original sense of the word. However, they do provide the possibility that young people can join in more closely connected interest groups which in Etienne Wenger’s terms could be labelled Communities of Practice (CoP’s). Thus, a social networking site could be viewed as a ‘Nexus of Practice’ with numerous ‘CoP’s’ incorporated.

The collection perspective
Social networking sites are places for young people’s collection mania. Here they collect friends, guest book messages, picture comments etc. (Thanks to Jette Agerbo for pointing out this perspective on her blog.)

The fun perspective
Social networking sites are “just for fun”. Jette Agerbo also mentions this perspective calling it the ‘play perspective’. However, I must say that I do not include the more game or play oriented websites (like Habbo Hotel or Netstationen) in my definition of social networking sites. But of course some youngsters could be using a social networking site as a way of playing or just having fun.

The technological perspective
Social networking sites are part of the Web 2.0 and social software technology generation in which case focus on the technological possibilities is predominant.

The hardcore business perspective
Social networking sites are hardcore business for the big corporations behind the sites (like Fox). I don’t think I quite covered that perspective in my last list mentioning the consumer perspective.

I have touched upon many of these perspectives during my research, but some of the views are still to be explored. However, I must say that I certainly do not agree with all of the mentioned perspectives, but some of them do represent the opinions (or prejudices) I hear when I am out giving lectures to adults.

Different Categories

It is important to know that all of these different perspectives belong to different overall categories (or different actors or discourses). Based on my - currently 35 - different perspectives I propose the following six overarching categories:

Research perspectives

It this category we find e.g. the identity perspective, the youth perspective, the language perspective, the genre perspective, the materialistic perspective, the learning perspective, the creative perspective, the Community of Practice perspective and so on. All of those perspectives could (and should) be a way of researching online social networking and youth. (I am on it )

User perspectives

In this category we find the point-of-view from the users of social networking, e.g. the social perspective, the friendship perspective, the democratic perspective, the love perspective, the reassurance perspective, the sincerity perspective, the public perspective etc. Those perspectives could also be viewed as different motives that the users have for using social networking sites.

Professional or learning perspectives

To this category belongs the perspectives that consider the learning possibilities of social networking or see how it can be used in a (future) professional life. We have here the network perspective, the group work perspective, the source critique perspective, the technological perspective, the creative perspective, the Community of Practice perspective and more.

Adult or parents perspectives

In this category we have the voices from the worried parents or other adults who have a hard time understanding why the youngsters spend so much time in front of the screen. This is for example the time-consuming perspective, the anti-social perspective, the generation gap perspective, the language perspective, the consumer perspective, the public perspective etc.

Moral panic or news media perspectives

Some perspectives emerge out of a public concern or a news media discourse where creating selling headlines comes into play. Thus, we have in this category the paedophile and predator perspective, the bullying perspective, the sex perspective, the network perspective, the youth perspective, the public perspective and so on.

Marketing perspectives

In this category we find the marketing or business perspectives such as the consumer perspective, the materialistic perspective, the branding perspective, the surveillance perspective and the hardcore business perspective.

Conclusion
As can be seen from the above, some of the perspectives will fit into more than one category and could be taken up by several actors. But I do think it is important to know where one is coming from when talking about online social networking and youth. In any case, mapping out the different perspectives has been a good exercise for me as a researcher.
http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.c....cfm?colid=432





AOL to Pay $3 Million Settlement Over Cancellation Policy
Michael Liedtke

Averting a looming court battle over how it has handled the exodus from its Internet dial-up service, AOL has agreed to make it easier for its remaining customers to leave as part of a $3 million settlement with 48 states and the District of Columbia.

The resolution announced Wednesday was driven by a deluge of complaints from AOL customers who said they tried to close their accounts, only to be thwarted in their attempts or discover they were still being billed for services that they thought had been canceled.

The outcry triggered a multistate investigation that would have culminated in a lawsuit if AOL hadn't agreed to ante up and change its ways, said David Tiede, a deputy attorney general in California.

California was among the states that played a leading role in the settlement. New York and Florida were the only states that didn't participate in the inquiry.

AOL, the Internet division of Time Warner Inc., didn't acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Company spokeswoman Amy Call downplayed the impact of the settlement, saying AOL had already voluntarily improved the way it handled cancellations during 2005 and 2006. ''This just codifies those safeguards,'' she said.

As part of the settlement, AOL agreed to maintain an online channel for processing cancellations. Although it has long been one of the Internet's best-known companies, AOL didn't set up an online cancellation system until last August. Previously, all cancellation requests had to be made by fax, mail or telephone.

Subscribers who phoned AOL to cancel their service sometimes were greeted by aggressive customer service representatives who were paid bonuses of up to $3,000 if they found a way to retain the business, according to the multistate settlement. Customers complained that AOL's incentive system created an obstructive culture that made service cancellations difficult.

''Consumers who called were put on hold or transferred repeatedly until they hung up in disgust,'' said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who described AOL's practices as ''outlandish and underhanded.''

The settlement requires AOL to issue refunds to consumers who can show they were still charged monthly fees after trying to cancel their services. AOL's fees currently range from $9.95 to $25.90 per month. Tiede said the multistate investigation didn't estimate how much money AOL might have to refund.

The $3 million settlement will be divided among the 48 states and the District of Columbia to cover the costs of their inquiry into AOL's practices and finance other consumer protection efforts.

AOL ended March with 12 million U.S. subscribers, down from 21 million less than two years ago.

Customers have been defecting with greater frequency since last August, when AOL began giving away e-mail accounts and software that was previously available only to subscribers. The decision, prompted by free services from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., removed one of the main reasons many customers had been clinging to their AOL accounts, even if they lived in households with high-speed Internet access.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown predicted Wednesday's multistate agreement ''will minimize the potential for consumer confusion during the transition to free e-mail accounts.''

This isn't the first time AOL has run into legal trouble for frustrating customers who wanted to dump the Internet access service.

In 2005, AOL paid $1.25 million in penalties and costs to resolve a similar complaint in New York. In 2003, the company agreed to improve the way it dealt with customer cancellation requests as part of a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into allegations about unfair billing practices.

In a separate development, investors hurt by accounting shenanigans that inflated AOL's advertising revenue from 1998 to 2002 will begin to receive payments from a $2.65 billion class action settlement later this month.

The initial distribution of the money was held up last month after a technology company, BizProLink LLC, filed an appeal seeking a share of the proceeds.
http://www.onelocalnews.com/howellti...news&id=132289





Halfway Through '07, Album Sales Down By 15%
FMQB

Nielsen SoundScan has released record sales figures for the first half of 2007 and they don't paint a pretty picture for the CD business. Album sales fell by 15.1 percent in the first six months of the year, when compared to the first half of 2006. The gap between years keeps growing, as the first half of 2006 saw a four percent drop and the first half of 2005 saw a 10 percent drop, compared to each previous year.

However, the bright spot is that digital music sales continue to increase. Downloads are up by almost 49 percent compared to the first six months of '06, and an incredible 659 percent since 2004.

In addition to downloads, another major factor affecting the decline of CD sales was the closing of over a thousand retail stores thanks to Tower Records and Musicland closing up shop.

The top selling albums in the first half of the year were: Daughtry's self-titled debut, Norah Jones - Not Too Late, Akon's Konvicted, Minutes To Midnight from Linkin Park and Carrie Underwood's Some Hearts. Universal Music Group held the largest share of the market with 31.6 percent.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=434784





Prince Points the Way to a Brighter Future for Music
Eliot Van Buskirk

In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote that Prince was the only musician in the world capable of moving music forward. Davis was referring to musical prowess, but he may as well have been talking about Prince's business acumen, as evidenced by his recent album giveaway -- the latest in a long series of innovative maneuvers, including his escape from a Warner Music Group contract in 1994, early support for P2P trading and status as one of the first major artists to sell music from his website.

Davis' last, best hope for the future of music most recently outraged the music establishment by giving away CDs of his Planet Earth album to British fans who purchased last week's Mail on Sunday newspaper. In light of the giveaway, Sony/BMG refused to distribute the album in Great Britain, provoking outbursts from music retailers who had been cut out of the action.

Paul Quirk, co-chairman of Britain's Entertainment Retailers Association, threatened: "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores."

Part of the problem, according to retailers, is that Prince's move helped solidify a growing perception on the part of consumers that music is free.

Jack Horner, creative and joint managing director for Frukt, a music-marketing agency, said that while "people like (Prince) play a key part in helping figure out what the models may be in the music business of tomorrow, by giving away a whole album on the front of a newspaper, there is a very clear devaluing of music, which is not a positive message to send out right now."

Neither the Mail on Sunday or Prince's camp would divulge how much the newspaper paid Prince for the right to give his album away, but it's clear Prince was paid upfront, and that nearly 3 million Mail on Sunday readers -- plus everyone who bought tickets to one of his shows -- received the CD for free. The giveaway almost certainly contributed to Prince selling out 15 of his 21 shows at London's O2 Arena within the first hour of ticket sales. The venue (formerly the Millennium Dome) holds around 20,000 people. If the remaining six shows sell out, the series will gross over $26 million.

Combined with the undisclosed fee paid by the Mail on Sunday, it's not a bad take for someone who's involved in a "very clear devaluing of music."

Prince's latest gambit also succeeded by acknowledging that copies, not songs, are just about worthless in the digital age. The longer an album is on sale, the more likely it is that people can find somewhere to make a copy from a friend's CD or a stranger's shared-files folder. When copies approach worthlessness, only the original has value, and that's what Prince sold to the Mail on Sunday: the right to be Patient Zero in the copying game.

As with blogging and so many other things digital, music distribution could become a competition to see who posts things first. In a sense, music distribution would no longer be about space -- it would be about time.

More bands and labels are likely to explore the idea of squeezing extra value out of their music by selling off the right to be first, as traditional sources of revenue continue to dry up. Universal's recent insistence on an "at will" contract with Apple music store, for instance, is thought to be part of a plan for the world's largest record label to start selling the exclusive rights to debut certain albums. And nowhere is it written in stone that music stores are the only candidates for buying those rights.

Artists have licensed music to advertisers for decades, of course, but this goes a step further: allowing the licensee to function as the music's distributor (at least initially). If this idea catches on, artists and labels looking to duplicate Prince's success will have to proceed with caution if they want to avoid accusations of selling out.

In the '90s, a popular slogan for posters and graffiti in and around my college radio station was "Corporate Rock Sucks," and although that attitude no longer seems prevalent, fans still routinely revolt when they hear one of their favorite songs used in a car ad.

Prince ensured that the Mail on Sunday version of his album looks identical to the one sold in stores, giving it the clear appearance of coming with the paper, rather than being of the paper. Companies that want to make a business out of music sponsorships, like RCRD LBL (an upcoming collaboration between Engadget's Pete Rojas and Downtown Records), will have to negotiate sponsorships with similar care. If they do, brands, fans and bands large and small stand to benefit.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...eningpost_0709





Pirated Music Helps Radio Develop Playlists
Sarah McBride

The music industry has long blamed illegal file sharing for the slump in music sales. But now, a key part of the industry is trying to harness file sharing to boost its own bottom line.

Earlier this year, Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s Premiere Radio Networks unit began marketing data on the most popular downloads from illegal file-sharing networks to help radio stations shape their playlists. The theory is that the songs attracting the most downloads online will also win the most listeners on the radio, helping stations sell more advertising. In turn, the service may even help the record labels, because radio airplay is still the biggest factor influencing record sales.

Premiere's Mediabase market-research unit is working on the venture with the file-sharing research service BigChampagne LLC. BigChampagne collects the data while a Premiere sales force of about 10 people pitches the information to radio companies and stations. Premiere declined to disclose how much it charges.

The service has already had an impact. The Huey song "Pop, Lock and Drop It" was in light rotation in April at Power 106, a big Emmis Communications Corp.-owned hip-hop station in Los Angeles, and listeners weren't requesting it much. The station's own research on the best music mix to play indicated the song wasn't catching on with listeners. But data from BigChampagne showed the song was hot on file-sharing networks, including in Los Angeles. Emmanuel "E-man" Coquia, the station's music director, decided to stick with it. Now, three months later, "Pop, Lock and Drop It" is prominent on the station's playlist.

Using data on stolen music to help mold playlists may strike some as ironic. File sharing has likely contributed to the continuing decline in the music business. U.S. music sales were down 7% last year after a 3% drop the year before, according to the London-based music trade group IFPI. But BigChampagne's clients say ignoring file sharing wouldn't make sense. "It's a fact of life at this time," says Rich Meyer, Mediabase's president and executive vice president at Premiere.

Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne's vice president for sales and marketing, adds that the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into peoples' taste the downloads offer. He also notes that the company incorporates legal, paid downloads from sites like iTunes into its data, though they represent a tiny fraction of all downloads.

Currently, says Emmis radio head Rick Cummings, the downloading information is one more tool to figure out what to play. It's not yet as helpful as the phone calls known in the business as "call-out" research, in which people listen to clips of songs and rate them, he says. But at some point, the download data are "going to be the primary method of research."

It's getting harder and harder to do passive call-out research, Mr. Cummings says, because "people don't have time, they have their phone blocked." He notes that it also "takes a while to play 20, 30 hooks," a reference to researchers' practice of playing the catchiest part of a song for survey participants.

But Emmis perseveres with the calls, in part because it reaches a slightly different listener that way -- people who don't necessarily buy or download music regularly but who like to listen to the radio and who make up a large part of the station's audience. Filesharers tend to be bigger music fans than radio listeners and generally warm to new songs faster. But basing a playlist exclusively on downloaders' tastes could end up alienating more passive listeners, Mr. Cummings says.

It also isn't easy to tell which medium influences the other more. "When a radio station adds a song, you oftentimes see an immediate bump in downloading activity" in that city, says Rich Meyer, president of Mediabase.

That was the case with "Party Like a Rockstar" by Shop Boyz. Like "Pop, Lock and Drop It," the song wasn't requested much by listeners or popping up in the call-out research, even though it was doing well on BigChampagne. In April, "we were wondering, if this record is supposedly the next big record, why is it taking longer than usual" to catch on, recalls Mr. Coquia. But just about then, requests started swinging up, especially those texted in by cellphone. Power 106 increased airplay somewhat, and downloads in the Los Angeles area kicked up a bit. By May, the song was in heavy rotation on Power 106 -- 18 spins a day -- and downloading continued to increase. "It's still strong, it's still requesting, it's still very big buzz," says Mr. Coquia.

Universal Music Group, the record company that distributes Shop Boyz, also looks at file-sharing data, largely for help figuring out which songs are working best or what to pitch to radio. But executives have mixed feelings about the information. "It's troubling that there is so much activity [that] it's useful" for research, says Larry Kenswil, executive vice president for business strategy.

In "Like This," a follow-up to his hit track "This Is Why I'm Hot," Shawn Mims alludes to scoring music online. Describing a woman who tells him she liked his last song, he sings, "She got it on her phone, Top 10 download, No. 1 ringtone." The new song's history also demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between file sharing and airplay. "When we stayed steady on it, downloads increased," Mr. Coquia says. The station played it occasionally starting in April but now plays it about eight to nine times a day.

Since the business was launched, Mediabase has cut deals with stations at sister company Clear Channel Radio, as well as group-wide deals with Radio One Inc. and Emmis. According to BigChampagne's Mr. Fleischer, the partnership has already surpassed its target of signing up 100 radio stations this year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118420443945664247.html





Mininova Enters List of 100 Most Popular Sites on the Internet
Ernesto

Mininova is the fist BitTorrent site to enter the list of 100 most visited sites on the Internet, joining sites like Google, Yahoo! and Digg. A great accomplishment proving that BitTorrent’s popularity and Mininova in particular continues to grow.

Mininova went head to head with Torrentspy for over a year but over the past few months Mininova clearly took the lead. This week they reached the same level as the popular social bookmarking website Digg.com, and their growth doesn’t seem to stop here.

The Alexa 100 is a list of the domains that generate the most traffic on the Internet. The fact that Mininova managed the top 100 is even more impressive if you take into account that over 25 local Google domains are among these 100 domains. Other popular sites in the Alexa 100 are Yahoo!, YouTube, Myspace, Wikipedia and EBay.

A the moment Mininova has 2,000,000 daily visitors who generate nearly 20,000,000 pageviews. Mininova continues to grow and served over a billion .torrent downloads in less than six months.

Most other BitTorrent sites aren’t doing too bad either. The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and Demonoid are all listed among the top 500 most visited sites, and more sites will probably join them in the months to come. Even Isohunt and Torrentspy continued to grow last month, despite the negative publicity. Here’s a combined graph of the traffic rank of the five most popular BitTorrent sites at the moment.

Compared to last year, all these sites continued to grow and attracted more visitors. Will it ever stop?

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-ent...-the-internet/





Lightning Strikes Reported by iPod Users
Linda A. Johnson

Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes. A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player's wires.

Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.

Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices such as beepers, Walkman players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.

Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from West Yarmouth, Mass., who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cell phones. They are described on his Web site, http://www.struckbylightning.org.

Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices don't attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.

"It's going to hit where it's going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity," said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ER doctor at University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices — or metal jewelry or coins in a pocket — can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.

A spokeswoman for Apple Inc., the maker of iPods, declined to comment. Packaging for iPods and some other music players do include warnings against using them in the rain.

Lightning strikes can occur even if a storm is many miles away, so lightning safety experts have been pushing the slogan "When thunder roars, go indoors," said Cooper.

Jason Bunch, 18, says it wasn't even raining last July, but there was a storm off in the distance. Lightning struck a nearby tree, shot off and hit him.

Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colo., still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and "a bad line up the side of my body," even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.

"It was a real miracle" he survived, said his mother, Kelly Risheill.

The Canadian jogger suffered worse injuries, according to a report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The man, a 39-year-old dentist from the Vancouver area, was listening to an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm when, according to witnesses, lightning hit a tree a couple of feet away and jumped to his body. The strike threw the man about eight feet and caused second-degree burns on his chest and left leg.

The electric current left red burn lines running from where the iPod had been strapped to his chest up the sides of his neck. It ruptured both ear drums, dislocated tiny ear bones that transmit sound waves, and broke the man's jaw in four places, said Dr. Eric Heffernan, an imaging specialist at Vancouver General Hospital.

The injury happened two summers ago and despite treatment, the man still has less than 50 percent of normal hearing on each side, must wear hearing aids and can't hear high-pitched sounds.

"He's a part-time musician, so that's kind of messed up his hobby as well," Heffernan said.

Like the Colorado teen, the Canadian patient, who declined to be interviewed or identified, has no memory of the lightning strike.

In another case a few years ago, electric current from a lightning strike ran through a man's pager, burning both him and his girlfriend who was leaning against him, said Dr. Vince Mosesso, an emergency doctor at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Eardrum ruptures are considered the most common ear injury in lightning-strike victims, occurring in 5 percent to 50 percent of patients, according to various estimates — whether or not an electronic device is involved. A broken jaw is rare, doctors say.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070711/...hEkbjwbSlk24cA