Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 27th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"They will have entire digital jukeboxes of covertly acquired telephone conversations, and suddenly someone in Eastern Europe is going to be very wealthy." – Philip R. Zimmermann


"German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls." – John Markoff






































May 27th, ’06










Search whomever and whenever you want – as long as it’s not ever us

F.B.I. Raid Divides G.O.P. Lawmakers and White House
Carl Hulse

After years of quietly acceding to the Bush administration's assertions of executive power, the Republican-led Congress hit a limit this weekend.

Resentment boiled among senior Republicans for a second day on Tuesday after a team of warrant-bearing agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned up at a closed House office building on Saturday evening, demanded entry to the office of a lawmaker and spent the night going through his files.

The episode prompted cries of constitutional foul from Republicans — even though the lawmaker in question, Representative William J. Jefferson of Louisiana, is a Democrat whose involvement in a bribery case has made him an obvious partisan political target.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert raised the issue personally with President Bush on Tuesday. The Senate Rules Committee is examining the episode.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, predicted that the separation-of-powers conflict would go to the Supreme Court. "I have to believe at the end of the day it is going to end up across the street," Mr. Boehner told reporters gathered in his conference room, which looks out on the Capitol plaza and the court building.

A court challenge would place all three branches of government in the fray over whether the obscure "speech and debate" clause of the Constitution, which offers some legal immunity for lawmakers in the conduct of their official duties, could be interpreted to prohibit a search by the executive branch on Congressional property.

Lawmakers and outside analysts said that while the execution of a warrant on a Congressional office might be surprising — this appears to be the first time it has happened — it fit the Bush administration's pattern of asserting broad executive authority, sometimes at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches.

Pursuing a course advocated by Vice President Dick Cheney, the administration has sought to establish primacy on domestic and foreign policy, not infrequently keeping much of Congress out of the loop unless forced to consult.

"It is consistent with a unilateral approach to the use of authority in Washington, D.C.," Philip J. Cooper, a professor at Portland State University who has studied the administration's approach to executive power, said of the search.

"This administration," Dr. Cooper said, "has very systematically and from the beginning acted in a way to interpret its executive powers as broadly as possible and to interpret the power of Congress as narrowly as possible as compared to the executive."

Some Republicans agreed privately that the search was in line with what they saw as the philosophy of the Justice Department in the Bush administration. They said the department had often pushed the limits on legal interpretations involving issues like the treatment of terrorism detainees and surveillance.

Republicans may have a potential self-interest beyond defending the institutional prerogatives of the legislative branch. With some of the party's own lawmakers and aides under scrutiny in corruption inquiries tied to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the former lawmaker Randy Cunningham, Republicans would no doubt like to head off the possibility of embarrassing searches of their members' offices.

But lawmakers of both parties said they had no interest in protecting criminal activities or Mr. Jefferson. Their fear, they said, is that the search set a dangerous precedent that could be used by future administrations to intimidate or harass a supposedly coequal branch of the government.

"No member is above the law, but the institution has a right to protect itself against the executive department going into our offices," said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House. "We all have in our offices information, letters, correspondence, speeches, etc., that we have written, some of which we may have given to the public, put on the public record, some may not be, which is confidential information, just as the White House has confidential information."

Mr. Hoyer and other Congressional leaders said they were uncertain of what their legal or procedural response might be, though several said a "protocol" for carrying out such a search should be worked out between the Justice Department and Congress. Such an arrangement could cover things like prior consultation with leaders or other notice, how the search would be conducted, who would be present and other details.

"I think it is necessary for us to assert our own prerogatives," said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the deputy Republican whip.

There is no sign that Congressional Republicans' discontent over this particular matter may spread into a more general challenge to the administration's expansive view of executive authority. But the friction has underscored the growing willingness of Republicans on Capitol Hill to distance themselves from the administration at a time when Mr. Bush's poll numbers are touching new lows, prompting the White House to try to repair relations with Congress.

At the Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales sought to smooth ruffled Congressional feathers. Mr. Gonzales said that private discussions were taking place to resolve the dispute and that he and his agency "have a great deal of respect for the Congress as a co-equal branch of government."

He and other officials suggested that the search had been made necessary by a lack of response to an earlier subpoena. "We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the Department of Justice is doing its job in investigating criminal wrongdoing, and we have an obligation to the American people to pursue the evidence where it exists," Mr. Gonzales said.

Members of Congress are mindful that much of the public is not familiar with the speech and debate clause, which, among other things, requires that lawmakers be "privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same." Many people may wonder why a Congressional office cannot be searched in a criminal case and what members of Congress are complaining about.

To many lawmakers, that is secondary to the larger separation-of-powers principle they see at risk.

"I clearly have serious concerns about what happened," Mr. Boehner said, "and whether the people at the Justice Department have looked at the Constitution."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/wa... tner=homepage





One Month of Torrents is Worth More Than The GDP of France
Donny's Blog

We have all heard how the RIAA is suing people over piracy, giving figures such as "300 million dollars a year" in lost revenues due to piracy. However, what you might not have heard is that this figure is actually lowballed - they are actually losing significantly more!

Lately we've been hearing more and more about the RIAA suing people over downloading music. Many people are skeptical of of the figures of lost revenue the RIAA reports, giving arguments like not every song downloaded equals a song that would have been bought. With all of this talk, I decided to investigate the cost of piracy, using the perfectly reasonable figures given by the RIAA: $150,000 per infringement.

The Copyright Act permits a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement, and the RIAA has been using that figure when they've sued individuals. However, they claim that they only lose 300 million per year due to piracy, which would equate to only 2000 songs downloaded per year. Clearly something is wrong - to find out the real cost of piracy, I went to http://www.thepiratebay.org to find out how many songs are downloaded in a month, in order to make a more accurate estimate of the losses to the music industry.

First, I used the "Browse Torrents" link to view only music torrents. By browsing through the torrents, I found that (as of the time of writing) the torrents on pages 330 through 409 were all posted in January 2006. Then I wrote a quick Java program to download all those pages, parse it for the size of the torrent and the number of people who downloaded it, and made an educated guess as to how many infringements there were. If you want, you can see the raw output of my program. Here are the results:

In January 2006, there were approximately 2370 music torrents posted. By estimating that each music file is 5 megs, we can estimate the number of infringements as the number of downloads multiplied by the estimated number of songs. I ran my program, and when I saw the results I was shocked! Using those figures, there were approximately 76,272,931 infringements caused by the torrents posted in January! Using the RIAA's value of $150,000 per infringement, the total cost to the music industry was $11,440,939,650,000!

Now, it may be hard to grasp just how large a value that is, so I have provided a friendly chart which compares the net worth of Bill Gates, the 2005 Gross Domestic Product of France, and the cost of one month of torrents from one site:

Yea, you see that line in the bottom left, where you can't even see what color it is because it's too small? That's Bill Gates' net worth (46.5 billion according to Forbes 2005) compared to the cost of piracy, using figures from the RIAA.

With monthly losses of eleven trillion caused by one torrent site, it's a wonder we have a music industry at all. Please RIAA, keep on suing people, and stop letting them settle for less! Take it to the courts, make sure you get the full billion from that eleven year old girl, or the 80 year grandmother! It's well deserved, and it's the only way we can keep the music industry alive!
http://donnysblog.com/one-month-of-t...-riaa-rant.php





Newzbin.com Closes User Registration
Thomas Mennecke

Newzbin.com is often regarded as one of the larger Usenet (newsgroup) indexing sites, whose importance has become more substantial in recent months. Like BitTorrent or eDonkey2000 indexing sites, the entertainment industry has pursued websites that index NZB files. The effort is part of an ongoing campaign to lessen the effects of Internet piracy.

The success of this campaign remains dubious, as many of the targeted indexing sites resided in the United States. Although international efforts to close indexing sites have netted some major victories such as SuprNova and ShareReactor, enclaves such as ThePirateBay.org continue to cause headaches for the entertainment industry.

Newsgroup indexing sites were considered largely immune from the entertainment industry’s legal pursuit; however this notion quickly changed in February of 2006. On February 23, the MPAA targeted five BitTorrent and one eDonkey2000 indexing sites – fairly standard business. However for the first time, three newsgroup indexing sites were named in the MPAA’s federal lawsuit.

Since the arrival of NZB technology and simplistic newsgroup clients, this ancient Internet technology is quickly approaching mainstream usage. Newsgroup indexing sites categorize NZB files, which contain all the information necessary to find and download the necessary message archive automatically. The days of digging through headers and newsgroups (other than for browsing) were over, and clients such as Grabit were retrofitted to accommodate this new technology.

This situation has put Newzbin.com in a difficult position. While the site benefits from a large traffic draw, it has found itself walking a fine legal line. Based in the United Kingdom, it has thus far avoided the MPAA’s legal push against similar websites. However to mitigate any potential legal trouble, Newzbin.com closed their forums on March 16. They have yet to reopen.

In a move seemingly unrelated to the current political and legal climate surrounding file-sharing, Newzbin.com announced today they will no longer accept new registrations.

“With immediate effect, we are no longer accepting any new user signups/registrations.”

Large service oriented sites like ThePirateBay.org share similar technical requirements as Newzbin.com, which take an enormous amount of bandwidth, software and hardware power to successfully operate. As the newsgroups become more popular, administrators are constantly battling to keep equipment online – or face dreaded downtime.

“The primary reason is that we simply feel we have enough members now. The hardware behind the site is not going to cope with much more load without significant overhaul, and we want to keep the site quick and responsive for our existing members.”

How long this policy will stay in effect has not been determined, as the administrators of Newzbin.com hint this change may not be permanent. It is also possible a “invite” type registration of 10-20 people per day may also be implemented.

“How long this will last is undetermined; it most likely will not be permanent, but we don't know how long it will remain in force….We may move to a restricted signup (probably 10 or 20 per day, something like that) in the future if it looks workable, or perhaps a "introduce a member" scheme.”
http://slyck.com/news.php?story=1194





TV Networks Fight Back Amid Online Turmoil

Television is last medium to hit the Net, but it may be first to get it right
Michael Rogers

This week marks the start of the television “up-front,” when advertisers traditionally buy much of their commercial time for the upcoming season.

No one’s quite sure how it will go this year: advertisers are worried about the rapid proliferation of the digital video recorders that let viewers zap their commercials, so they may see television as less valuable. Marketers are also reserving more of the dollars they once spent on television for the Internet. But at the same time, the television folks are embracing the Internet, with one big advantage: as the last medium to come to the Web, they have some history to look back on. And both print and the music industry provide key lessons in what not to do.

Magazines and newspapers were the first on the Web in the mid-1990s and adopted the then-reigning ethos: everything for free. We can always start charging later, went one theory.

More visionary folks saw that the Internet would someday be an incredibly powerful advertising medium: We’re going to make it up on advertising. But it turned out there is enormous competition for ad dollars on the Web — community sites, games, search engines, and soon even application software, all competitors that print never had to face in the real world.

While many magazines and newspapers are attracting a large Web audience and lots of advertising, the revenue may never match what they made in the real world. Print’s future on the Web: downsizing.

Next up was the music industry. Early on there were smart people in the recording industry who saw the potential of legal downloading: What business wouldn’t like to sell direct to the consumer with no physical distribution costs?

But the industry was both complacent and overly concerned about upsetting the existing CD distribution chain. Thus they dragged their feet on downloading and were entirely overwhelmed — with no legal alternative to offer — when Napster appeared in 1999. Seven years later, illegal downloads still vastly outnumber legal online sales.

Now that video-capable broadband reaches more than half of American homes, it’s television’s turn to leap. And they’re doing something that’s collectively very smart.

Five networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and WB — have announced a panoply of varied Internet initiatives that include both streaming and downloading, both for-pay and advertiser-supported, and even a deal with BitTorrent, the current number-one technology used by those offering illegal video downloads.

Some of the approaches virtually ignore the local stations (the current distributors); others cut them in on the deal. When you step back, it almost looks like an industry-wide research project, throwing a half-dozen business models at the wall to see which ones stick. As soon as winners emerge, you can bet the rest will follow — television executives are, if nothing else, very good at copying each other.

But what’s the Internet upside for television? Print and music, of course, get to shed the costs of physical distribution — no more mailing magazines or shipping CDs.

Television, on the other hand, is already electronically distributed, in a way that makes lots of money for the networks and stations. But there’s a different benefit for television — getting out from under the cable and satellite owners. It didn’t take long, for example, for network TV executives to figure out that interactive advertising was going to be controlled by the set-top box.

In other words, if CBS sells an ad where the viewer clicks on Ashlee Simpson’s sweater to buy it, under the current distribution model the cable or satellite company is going to get a cut of the action. With video delivered on the Web, the network could get 100 percent of the deal.

So when do we all start watching television on the Web? Certainly not anytime soon.

Computer manufacturers need to sell more media-centric machines, such as Media Center PCs, that connect directly to the big screen in the living room. Delivery to cell-phones must also be standardized and simplified. Apple could provide a boost when it finally provides a living-room Mac with full television compatibility— not to mention a video iPod phone.

Television producers have to be convinced that digital rights management systems will protect them from the illegal downloading of the music industry. And then Internet picture quality needs to improve. That last is inevitable: video compression and bandwidth will only get better. And MP3s and iTunes have already demonstrated that consumers will give up some quality in return for convenience and control.

Finally, it’s once again worth looking at history. Ten years after newspapers went onto the Web, print circulation is beginning to drop substantially for many papers, while their Internet properties grow by double digits. On the music side, the value of legal downloads tripled in 2005 even as CD sales fell 7 percent, and neither trend is slowing.

It’s only logical to assume that five or 10 years out, the television landscape will see a similar shift. Cable, broadcast, satellite — plus the new telephone company fiber-optic systems — will still deliver lots of video, especially high definition. But both consumer video buying and advertising spending will increasingly move to the Internet.

It’s still very early days for the television industry on the Internet, but so far it seems to be doing an excellent job at keeping its business options open. Ironically enough, even though Internet entrepreneurs have always glorified the “first-mover advantage,” television may demonstrate that the last to arrive at the party may occasionally still have the best time.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12759674/





An Online Market Blooms for Video Clip Reruns
Bob Tedeschi

YOU might not care that a student pilot in Idaho flipped his plane while landing last month and left himself with an injured hand and a cranky flying instructor. You might care even less to know that a local news station got film of the plane lying belly up in a field, and that the clip is now available online.

But someone cares. And on the Internet these days, as long as someone cares, cash flows.

In this case, the beneficiary is KTVX, an ABC affiliate in northern Utah owned by Clear Channel Communications. Until recently the station was like other local broadcasters in that it had little use for its news clips aside from posting them on its Web site for a couple of days and then relegating them to the digital vault. Now a new online service, ClipSyndicate, is finding Web sites like AeroSpaceNews.com that are happy to show these reruns and share the advertising revenue that may follow.

The idea behind ClipSyndicate is to give local television stations, which have long watched as online upstarts have stolen viewers and advertising dollars, their own foothold on the Web. Local stations have failed miserably in attracting audiences to their Web sites. But given the fascination with online video, that model is now serendipitously flipping. After all, why struggle to build an audience of your own when new Internet businesses will find video-starved viewers for you in the far-flung corners of the Web?

"Web sites and bloggers would love to add video, and news outlets would love to give it to them, but they haven't figured out a way to do it without getting ripped off," said Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner, a technology consulting firm. "So this addresses a major pain point."

ClipSyndicate, a service of the online video search company Critical Mention, indexes videos from Bloomberg, The Associated Press and other news outlets. Web publishers then visit ClipSyndicate.com and search for clips they like. ClipSyndicate allows Web sites to show the clips only as long as they are not broadcast companies themselves (and as long as they do not also show pornography).

Publishers either pay an undisclosed fee to ClipSyndicate each time they show a clip — then display their own ads with the clip — or they can run the videos with ads sold by ClipSyndicate and earn 5 percent of the advertising revenue. The video's owners, meanwhile, receive 30 percent of whatever revenue is generated from each clip.

Mr. Weiner, of Gartner, said ClipSyndicate was the only service of its kind at the moment, but he expected many competing online video companies, like Veoh and Revver to introduce similar initiatives.

Television networks are also embarking on efforts that can help them find more eyeballs for their local stations' video assets, without having to share the proceeds with an outside company.

Take NBC Universal, for one. Late last month the company said it would form the National Broadband Company, a joint venture between the network and its roughly 230 affiliates. NBBC, as the venture is known, will syndicate video from the affiliates, the NBC Universal library and other content on sites throughout the Web.

According to Mike Steib, who is overseeing the formation of NBBC, the venture will, among other things, collect and categorize clips according to their type, so NBBC can offer an entire channel of consumer news, for instance, for other sites and its own affiliates to show online.

Mr. Steib said the company was still signing up affiliates to distribute its videos, and NBBC was also determining how to derive revenue from the clips, be it from a pay-per-view approach, advertising, or both. The venture, though, is getting closer to an official introduction.

"It'll happen in a handful of months," Mr. Steib said. "I'm using a sand wedge, not a driver."

The ClipSyndicate service has not yet signed up major advertisers to show its ads, but Sean Morgan, Critical Mention's chief executive, said he did not expect any difficulty in attracting marketers. "We haven't put any advertisers on yet because we're still focused on aggregating content, but all the advertisers we're talking to say it sounds like it's going to work," he said.

Mr. Weiner, of Gartner, agreed that ClipSyndicate would be interesting to marketers. "It gives stations a viral audience that's potentially as large as what they'd get through their commercial medium," he said. "And because a significant part of the audience may be outside the local area, regional or national advertisers have a reason to be part of the mix."

That may not yet be the case with KTVX, but the station is certainly gaining a wider audience than before. According to Jason Gould, general manager of Inergize Digital Media, a unit of Clear Channel that manages the online operations of Clear Channel stations and others, the service provides "a whole new revenue stream."

The company had sought ways to generate revenue from the roughly 500 stories its affiliated stations broadcast daily — and the trove of videos from the past two years — but with little success. While some of the stories can be shown on the Web sites of other stations within Inergize's stable, "there hasn't been a mechanism for us to take them to the marketplace beyond our stations," Mr. Gould said. "So ClipSyndicate was a no-brainer to jump into."

Internet companies that show the videos are also pleased so far with the service. "This has worked beautifully for us," said Richard D. Stamberger, chief executive of SmartBrief, which distributes e-mail newsletters to roughly one million subscribers, and who recently began including videos from ClipSyndicate in those newsletters.

Subscribers have clicked on links to the videos at the same rate they click on links to text stories in the newsletters, which typically focus on a particular industry. But since marketers pay more for video ads than text ads, Mr. Stamberger said the videos would probably help SmartBrief's revenues.

"We haven't sold any ads yet but our initial conversations with advertisers have been very positive," Mr. Stamberger said. "This is right on the money in terms of hitting the market just as video is exploding."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/te...gy/22ecom.html





Politicos Propose New Action On Net Neutrality
Anne Broache

The push for new laws mandating Net neutrality principles appears to be gaining steam on Capitol Hill.

The leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released a five-page bill on Thursday that would embed new provisions requiring so-called network neutrality in existing federal antitrust laws.

Unlike existing proposals in both houses of Congress, the bill was endorsed not only by Democrats but by Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican. Michigan Democrat John Conyers, who serves as the committee's co-chairman, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren and Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher co-sponsored the measure.

Called the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act," the bill is designed to "provide an insurance policy for Internet users against being harmed by broadband network operators abusing their market power to discriminate against content and service providers," Sensenbrenner said in a statement.

Citing government statistics that 98 percent of Americans have at most two choices for broadband service, Sensenbrenner said such a "virtual duopoly" is ripe for anticompetitive practices, and "a clear antitrust remedy is needed."

Net neutrality, which critics charge is impossible to define, centers on the idea that broadband providers must not be permitted to favor some Web sites or Internet services over others. Network operators argue that they should be entitled to charge bandwidth hogs extra for faster transmission and prioritized placement in order to help finance vast build-outs of broadband infrastructure.

The Judiciary bill would make it illegal under antitrust law for network operators to impose such fees or to fail to provide their services on "reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms." It also borrows language from an earlier House proposal co-sponsored by Boucher that would, for instance, bar broadband providers from blocking, impairing or degrading sites or services and from stopping users from attaching the devices of their choice to the network.

The committee's action was not unexpected, as members had voiced concern over the issue--and asserted their jurisdiction to make new rules--at a recent hearing convened by the committee's antitrust task force.

At a press conference on Thursday, Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been a vocal proponent of similar legislation in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was unaware of the proposals in the rival committee and couldn't comment. He said he remained determined to reintroduce a Net neutrality amendment when a pending telecommunications bill goes to the floor for a vote by the full slate of legislators.

That proposal, which enjoyed support mostly from fellow Democrats, was soundly defeated twice by fairly large margins during earlier votes on a broadband bill in his committee.

"Our goal is to have a full debate and record...where every member stands" on Net neutrality, Markey said at an outdoor press conference where Grammy-nominated musician Moby also spoke out in favor of the bill.

Sparking controversy
Net neutrality became an arguably unintended focus during the first round of the Senate Commerce Committee's sweeping attempt to rewrite the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The hearing was supposed to focus on components of the bill dealing with video franchising and the Universal Service Fund, with a separate hearing on Net neutrality scheduled for May 25. But a handful of senators and witnesses testifying before them couldn't resist voicing their opinions on what has become an increasingly volatile topic.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said he planned to introduce an amendment that would deal with Net neutrality, though it was unclear Thursday what shape that would take. "It's complicated, no doubt about it, but I think Internet freedom is very, very important," he said. That action likely wouldn't come until later, with a vote on the bill tentatively scheduled for June 20.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer, also a Democrat, said that if Congress didn't take action to protect Net neutrality principles, "We're going to put a lot of people in the slow lane--as a matter of fact, we're going to have a lot of people not able to access the Internet, and it's a very unfair system."

Right now, the Senate's telecommunications bill contains a provision that would direct the Federal Communications Commission to keep an eye on incidents that could be considered violations of Net neutrality and report to Congress on its findings. That's exactly the right approach, Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, told the senators Thursday.

"This is the kind of issue that is most appropriately studied a lot more," he said.

Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, said he'd hate to see the Senate's proposal get "hung up" over the topic of Net neutrality but acknowledged the politicians wouldn't succeed in getting broad approval unless they "find a way to accommodate the legitimate interests being put forward on both sides."

Meanwhile, resistance to such new laws is also growing. On Wednesday, several of the world's largest hardware makers sent a letter to Congress decrying new Net neutrality laws.

Republican Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas also have joined the opposition against the idea of legislating Net neutrality. In a one-page letter to their Senate colleagues dated May 16, they argued that doing so would "penalize broadband access providers for making major improvements to the Internet."

The senators also charged that such rules would "deprive parents of new technologies they may use to protect their families from online harm."

As of now, the issue of Net neutrality is being addressed by Congress in a couple of other forms aside from the Markey amendment and the new House Judiciary bill, but each of those measures would have a number of hurdles to clear before becoming law. The first standalone bill came in March from Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and prescribes the same kind of detailed rules found in the latest proposals. Critics of the laws charge that they amount to unprecedented regulation of the Internet.

The House broadband bill that Markey would like to amend includes a provision that would permit the FCC to police violations of its broadband policy statement, which outlines expectations that broadband providers will allow their users to view sites, run applications and connect devices to the network as they wish, within legal bounds. Net neutrality proponents have criticized that approach as too weak to prevent what they decry as a "fast lane" for those who can afford to pay extra to network operators.
http://news.com.com/Politicos+propos...3-6074108.html





Google Faces Lawsuit Over Search Suggestions
Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

A Belgian company has refiled a lawsuit over search terms offered by Google's toolbar that it claims directs users to pirated software.

The suit, originally filed in February, was refiled Wednesday by ServersCheck BVBA, a small company that makes network monitoring software, over Google's "Suggest" feature, included in the latest version of its search toolbar for Web browsers. When a user types in keywords for a search, the toolbar shows a drop-down menu of guesses related to those words.

If ServersCheck is entered, Google generates suggested search terms such as "serverscheck crack," "serverscheck pro crack," and "serverscheck keygen," which lead to pirated software, said Maarten Van Laere, chief executive officer of ServersCheck.

Van Laere said he was told by Google that Web sites with illegal content would be removed from their index, but that it couldn't tweak the Suggest feature. So Van Laere filed suit, an action he said is an expensive option for a small company against a behemoth such as Google.

He's trying to get Google to change the Suggest results. Van Laere uses Google's tool for analyzing Web traffic and found that about 93 percent of ServerCheck's customers come to their Web site by way of the popular search engine.

"We don't have any problems with the fact that in Google you can find illegal copies of our software," Van Laere said. "There are people who will never buy the product at the end of the day.

"But people that are looking for your company's name in good faith are then being suggested by Google to go and look for a crack. That is a complete different ballgame," Van Laere said.
Censorship Concerns

In response to the suit, a Google attorney told a Belgian newspaper on Wednesday that they could not filter the results of Google Suggest, citing censorship concerns.

Van Laere said the defense isn't accurate, since it appears that Google Suggest will not try to complete tracking numbers for shipping items or offer alternate suggestions for sexually-related terms. In a test, Google Suggest did not offer any related words for the terms "pornography," "naked" and "sex."

An attorney based in Belgium for Google was not immediately available for comment.

The latest problem is not the only run-in ServersCheck has had with Google. In its original lawsuit, ServersCheck complained that Google was allowing a competitor to use its brand name in an advertisement, falsely claiming that ServersCheck's software could be downloaded, Van Laere said.

Google agreed while the suit was making its way through court to halt advertisements on its AdWords service that used ServersCheck's name, Van Laere said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2006...pcworld/125758





XM Defends Against RIAA Claims

XM calls the record industry's lawsuit from last week regarding being able to record satellite radio programming to a new wave of devices meritless.

In an open, passionate letter posted lasted week on their Web site, XM Satellite Radio has come out swinging against the RIAA, who is suing the satellite radio provider over its latest receiver/recorder devices (like the Pioneer Inno) which can save up to 50 hours of XM programming for later listening. The suit seeks damages against XM for every instance of a song copied by XM customers to one of these devices.

In their letter, XM states the new portable devices they’ve released are completely legal and that the RIAA has in effect filed a lawsuit to stop people’s “ability to choose when and where you can listen”. Seeing the lawsuit as “meritless”, XM compares products like the Pionner Inno to other devices over the decades, like VCRs and Tivo, which have recorded copyrighted programming off the airs for personal use.

XM said they will “vigorously defend these radios in court and before Congress” and that they expect to prevail.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news_p...ndly10489.html





Sony Rootkit Settlement Gets Final Nod
Anne Broache

A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to a settlement in a class action suit against Sony BMG Music Entertainment over anticopying software the company had embedded in some music CDs.

The agreement (click for PDF) covers anyone who bought, received or used CDs containing what was revealed to be flawed digital rights management (DRM) software after Aug. 1, 2003. Those customers can file a claim and receive certain benefits, such as a nonprotected replacement CD, free downloads of music from that CD and additional cash payments.

The court action picked up last fall when security researchers discovered vulnerabilities posed by two pieces of software, First4Internet's XCP and SunnComm's MediaMax, which are automatically installed on a user's computer upon loading certain Sony BMG music CDs. The software's presence was masked by a "rootkit" that can make the PC more vulnerable to viruses and other hacker attacks.

The software also allegedly transmitted information about the listener's computer use back to Sony BMG, although a company-commissioned privacy assessment later determined that it collected only "non-personal information tied to a particular album and its usage."

At least 15 different lawsuits were filed by class action lawyers against the record label, and the New York cases were eventually consolidated into one proceeding. The parties reached a preliminary settlement with Sony BMG in December, leaving it up to a judge in a U.S. District Court in New York to make it official.

Sony BMG had already begun taking steps to remedy the situation. It yanked the affected discs off the shelves, suspended production of CDs containing the technology and issued a recall of the 4.7 million XCP CDs, offering MP3 downloads in return.

Under the terms of the final settlement, Sony BMG definitively agreed to continue halting manufacture or distribution of CDs containing the two programs. (It stopped using XCP on its products in November 2005 and ceased using MediaMax about a month later, according to court filings.)

For the duration of the settlement, which lasts until the end of 2007, the company is expected to take a number of steps before putting any new copy protection software on its wares. These steps would include submitting the software for review by an independent security expert and including a brief, written description of the copy protection tool on any CD that contains it.

Sony BMG told CNET News.com on Monday that it was "pleased" that the settlement in this case had secured the court's final approval.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn, whose organization participated in the settlement negotiation process on behalf of the plaintiffs, urged anyone in possession of the offending CDs to stake their claims against Sony. Doing so, she predicted, may send a message to Sony BMG and other music labels to "think twice before wrapping songs in DRM."

Sony BMG still faces a separate lawsuit "over materially the same subject matter" from the Texas attorney general, as well as inquiries from the Federal Trade Commission and other state attorneys general, according to the text of the settlement. That document indicated that the company would pursue similar settlements in those cases, too.
http://news.com.com/Sony+rootkit+set...3-6075370.html





Sony Introduces New Digital Projector
Gary Gentile

After more than a decade of talking about it, movie theaters and studios are finally rolling out digital projectors that show sharper, brighter images without cracks, pops or hisses.

This weekend, Sony Electronics will enter the field with a projector that displays the sharpest resolution envisioned under a set of standards issued for digital cinema.

Movie studios last year agreed on such technology standards, which will allow components made by different manufacturers to be interoperable. Those components include the projector itself, the computer that stores the movie and sound, software that compresses the huge digital files and security systems that prevent piracy.

And, after years of debate about who would pay for the systems, studios and companies that sell digital cinema systems agreed to share the cost.

Studios stand to save millions each year by delivering digital versions of their films to theaters instead of the clunky film prints that get scratched and dirty after only a few weeks and have to be replaced.

But the studios agreed to forgo those savings for 10 years in order to finance the cost of replacing current 35-millimeter film projectors with digital cinema systems.

Two financing groups have been established to install projectors that display images with "2K" resolution, or about 2 million pixels — dots of light that make up a digital image. The main benefit of 2K projection is a more stable, consistent image, although one trade-off is that color is often not as deep and rich as that provided by film.

Both groups hope to have hundreds of systems installed by the end of this year and as many as half of the nation's 36,000 screens within the next 10 years.

This weekend, Sony will begin a test of its new "4K" projector, which displays images at 8 million pixels horizontally.

The company has installed one of the projectors at a theater in Los Angeles that will show Sony Pictures' "The Da Vinci Code." The company, in conjunction with National CineMedia, a joint venture of AMC Entertainment Inc., Cinemark USA Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group, will install projectors in two other theaters next month in yet to be determined locations.

Movies can be distributed in one of several ways. In the current test, the Sony projector will play the movie from a computer disk. Movies can also be beamed to theaters via satellite or sent over fiber-optic cables, as is the case with a similar test in Japan being conducted by Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures.

The 4K projectors promise richer color and better contrast that draws moviegoers into the image. The major difference, however, will be seen by those who sit closest to the movie screen, who will see sharper images without noticing individual pixels, which can occur in a theater with 2K projection.

Sony recently tested its system using a clip from the 1965 classic "The Sound of Music." When it was projected in 4K, viewers were able to pick out two hairs sticking up from Julie Andrews' head and see details of the weave in her dress.

"Anything that enhances the visual experience, that better supports the artistry, the story of the motion picture being exhibited, anything that raises the bar of higher quality is a benefit to the moviegoer," said Andrew Stucker, general manager of the digital cinema systems group at Sony Electronics.

The increased quality is strongly desired by theater owners, who are looking for ways to attract more business, especially as home theater systems become more sophisticated.

"There's a strong desire to differentiate cinema from home and that's where 4K comes in," said Michael Karagosian of MKPE Consulting.

But in the end, Karagosian suggests, moviegoers will not base their decision to visit the local megaplex on technology alone.

"It's a social experience and at bottom line it's about the content," he said. "I may remodel my kitchen, but I still like to go out to eat once in a while."

Digital projectors are installed in about 500 U.S. theaters today. That number is expected to rise to about 1,500 by the end of the year.

Current digital projection systems cost about $100,000, with 4K systems expected to be higher initially, although the price should come down once the market develops.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060518/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





Hollywood Reportedly In Agreement To Delay Forced Quality Downgrades For Blu-ray, HD DVD
Ken Fisher

As the DVD format welcomes two potential heirs to its kingship as the commercial video medium of choice, there are mounting concerns that these new heirs are nothing but pretenders. Blu-ray and HD DVD—the two competing "standards" for the next-generation of video discs—are both shackled with technologically-forged chains, but those chains may be broken by a consumer electronics industry wary of how their existence could hamper sales.

One of the most controversial aspects of these next-generation products is something called the Image Constraint Token (ICT), a security "feature" that allows studios to force-downgrade video quality on players that lack a special video output that was designed to thwart piracy. This "HDMI" connector standard is part of a "protected pathway" for video that was meant to combat piracy by making it impossible for pirates to tap into high-definition video output and press "Record," as it were. Many fear, however, that the only success HDMI will have is in making honest users miserable, inasmuch as consumers could be left with a product that plays at low quality or not at all if HDMI is not present on one's player or TV.

The conundrum isn't apparently lost on the consumer electronics industry or Hollywood. According to German-language Spiegel Online, there is reportedly a behind-the-scenes, unofficial agreement between Hollywood and some consumer electronics manufacturers, including Microsoft and Sony, not to use ICT until 2010, or possibly even 2012. Without providing more details, the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is. But the agreement is there nonetheless, presumably to help the industry transition to HDMI. This could explain why the very same studios that pushed for HDMI and ICT have recently announced that they would not use it for the time being.

The report's claims could also shed some light on two of the more baffling consumer electronics moves as of late. Sony stunned onlookers when it announced that the low-end PlayStation 3, which will retail for US$499, will not have HDMI. This put Sony in the awkward position of downplaying HDMI as a "must have" feature for a next-generation optical disc player. Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, sidestepped the lack of HDMI by painting it as a high-end standard that wouldn't be aesthetically appreciated by many consumers.

"The only difference is HDMI – and at this point, I don't think many people's TV's have that. The ultimate result, to my eyes anyway, is there's not a discernible difference between what you get between HDMI and other forms of high definition," he said.

On one level, he's correct. Few consumers will appreciate the difference between 1080i on a component cable (analog) and 1080p on HDMI. What he ignored is the real trade-off: without HDMI, that 1920x1080 (1080i/p) or 1280 x 720 (720p) picture, analog or not, could be rendered at a less impressive 960x540 (540p) if the ICT was present and obeyed. While 540p is indeed better than today's DVD standard, few consumers would spend $500-$1000 on a new player and as much as $10 more per movie to get it. If part of Sony's big pitch for the PS3 is "hey, this thing is also futureproof because it does Blu-ray!," then ditching support for HDMI doesn't make sense in a world where the absence of HDMI could negate much of the promise of Blu-ray.

Then there's Microsoft. The company launched the Xbox 360 last November sans HD DVD drive, which turned out to be a wise thing to do, as both HD DVD and Blu-ray were delayed by setbacks with the new AACS security system. Microsoft nevertheless intends to support HD DVD on the Xbox 360 by shipping an external HD DVD player for the console in time for the 2006 holiday season. The add-on drive will connect to the Xbox via a USB 2.0 cable, but the console currently lacks an HDMI connector, just like the low-end PS3. Microsoft has not announced support for HDMI for the Xbox 360, though speculation is ripe that the company will release a dongle for the console after Lik-Sang posted a product page for it. For that dongle to do the trick, however, Microsoft would need to be able to add HDMI support via a firmware update, and their current proprietary output connector would need to meet HDMI standards. It is not yet clear if HDMI can be added to the Xbox 360 without a hardware revision, but that question may be seen as "moot" if in fact HDMI won't be a barrier to true 720 or 1080i/p until 4 to 6 years from now.

If indeed there is an "agreement" of sorts between companies like Microsoft and Sony and the studios (including Sony's own entertainment interests), this could certainly help to explain why these consoles are shipping today without HDMI support. But such unofficial agreements are gentlemanly in nature: at any time, all bets could be off. In the meantime, it appears as though Hollywood is playing it safe, hoping to keep the boogeyman of HDMI at bay while consumers weigh their options. Whether or not the strategy is ultimately about keeping users happy or lulling them into a false sense of security remains to be seen, but we're fairly certain that ICT was designed to be used, and used it will be.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880.html





Samsung Debuts Hybrid Hard Drive
Barry Levine

Imagine a Windows laptop that could boot up as much as 25 seconds more quickly than usual, last up to 30 minutes longer on battery power, and be as much as five times more reliable than existing PCs. That is Samsung's vision for the value of its new Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), a next-generation drive that combines flash memory with traditional rotating magnetic storage.

The company announced the drive on Wednesday and will be showing it at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle, Washington, next week.

The magnetic storage part of the drive will provide the high storage densities found in standard hard-drive technology, while the flash part of the drive will provide the reliability, the fast read-write access, and the low power consumption, Samsung said.

Vista Coordination

When flash memory is being used, the hard drive remains idle which, according to Samsung, can save battery power and make the drive less susceptible to damage. The hard drive spins to "flush out" memory a few times every 10 to 20 minutes, then returns to its idle state unless it is needed.

Microsoft sees the product as complementing the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

"Hybrid hard disks and Windows ReadyDrive Technology are integrated advancements that improve the performance and reliability of computers using Windows Vista, especially notebook computers," said Mike Sievert, Microsoft's corporate vice president in the Windows Client Marketing division, in a statement.

It is expected that the hybrid drives will be marketed under the ReadyDrive brand name and released in coordination with Vista's rollout.

Experts Divided

Industry observers were divided on the value and viability of this hybrid approach. "These kinds of drives have the best of both worlds and this could be a great drive for consumers wanting to use their PCs for entertainment," said Nicole d'Onofrio, an analyst at research firm Current Analysis. "I estimate we'll see other manufacturers with hybrids by the end of this year or beginning of 2007."

But Joseph Unsworth, a principal analyst at Gartner, questioned whether Intel's upcoming Robson technology could overtake this market need. "Robson offers flash right on the chipset," he said. "We're going to see a lot of notebooks with Robson, and you don't need Vista to run it." He said he expects Robson to be out in first quarter of 2007.

Gartner analyst John Monroe downplayed the value of the Samsung HHD technology. "There is nothing new in having cache on a hard drive -- it's been done for years," he said. "The basic difference here is that it is bigger and nonvolatile. The main reason you would need it is because Vista takes so long to boot."

With mobile devices, it might have some value, he said. "But probably not with desktop machines, which are often left on."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060518/... kBHNlYwMxNjk1





Google's Goal: A Worldwide Web of Books
Leslie Walker

It's odd to hear Vinton Cerf, regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, to gush over ink-on-paper books.

The electronic pioneer and computer scientist, who now works as Google's chief Internet evangelist, is also a bibliophile who has a collection of about 10,000 hard-copy volumes lining shelves at his home in McLean.

These days, Cerf is busy promoting Google's plan to marry his two passions -- books and the Internet -- by digitizing millions of library books. He recently dropped by my office to explain the controversial plan and talk about its implications for book lovers.

As Cerf talked about his personal book collection and the limitations of having knowledge fixed on paper, he got me thinking about how reading will be transformed when static libraries join the more dynamic world of cross-referenced knowledge on the Web.

For starters, Cerf said, libraries are not exactly easy to navigate.

"Think for a moment about the dead-tree problem," he said. "When you stand in your own personal library looking for something and you realize that A, you can't remember which book it was in, and B, there's no way you can go through manually looking at all the pages, then you think, 'God, I wish all this stuff was online.' "

That's the stated goal of Google's library project, to create a massive electronic card catalog that will help people find information in published books, much as Google already does with Web pages.

Google has vowed to create a full-text index of seven-million books in the University of Michigan library, along with millions more in the university libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. The idea is similar to Amazon.com's "search inside the book" feature, eventually allowing anyone using Google's free book search ( http://books.google.com/ ) not only to see sample pages from books but also search their contents and find excerpts matching search terms.

Google is not alone in trying to digitize library books. Yahoo, Microsoft and other Internet players have joined a collaborative effort called the Open Content Alliance, which is planning to digitize not only library books but other types of multimedia, as well, making them all accessible on the Web.

Google, however, has embarked on a solo book project that is much further along than the collaborative effort. The Internet search leader has developed technology for bulk scanning of books and started scanning them at the University of Michigan, much to the consternation of the publishing industry. The Authors Guild and a group of publishers have accused the search giant of copyright infringement in two lawsuits filed last fall.

Several of those same publishers were -- and still are -- Google's partners in a program announced in the fall of 2004 to scan in-print books provided by publishers. That plan called for making books searchable online and sharing with publishers the revenue Google gets from showing text ads alongside book search results.

But publishers cried foul a few months later when Google announced it was expanding its book search to include millions of library tomes. Unlike the initial plan, the library project involves scanning many books that are either clearly under copyright or for which the copyright status is unclear.

Google contends the project falls within the "fair use" exemption to copyright law, because it is not providing full access to copyrighted books, merely letting people search inside and see excerpts. Google's book search service, still in trial mode, allows people to only read the full text of books in the public domain and shows sample pages from books for which publishers have granted Google sampling rights.

But for most books it is scanning, Google argues the copyright status is unclear and therefore shows more limited excerpts. Google refers to them as "snippets," raggedy images of a few lines of text from inside, with information about who published each book and when.

But at least five publishing houses disagree that the "snippets" constitute fair use. In a lawsuit filed in October, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster and three other publishers charged that Google is violating copyright law because, in order to prepare the snippets, it is making and storing on computers unauthorized full copies of their books. And while Google tells the public its goal is simply to make books searchable, the suit alleges that Google's aim is to get more visitors so it can sell more ads.

"The question you have to ask is whether book search is an asset to Google," said Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs for the Association of American Publishers. "Of course it is. It's one way it can differentiate itself from the competition."

Cerf thinks publishers fail to appreciate that Google probably will help them sell more books by making them searchable. Helping people locate a book and know what's in it, he said, are key steps toward getting them to buy it. And for many books are available for sale, Google provides links to Amazon.com and other online sellers. Google does not sell books.

For now, Google is showing no ads alongside search results involving books from libraries, only books provided by publishers. In those cases, publishers are receiving a share of the ad revenue.

Google also recently announced it will soon allow publishers and copyright holders to sell full electronic access to books through Google book search, either by letting people read the text online or downloading copies. Google will take a 30 percent commission on any fees publishers collect.

What Google has not announced, but is likely to one day, are ways it might help publishers and authors enhance pages from printed books once they are online.

Cerf refers to this as "books that talk to each other," an idea to make them more like the rest of the Web where pages are cross-linked and visitors can annotate and tag text as is done with Web logs.

"Because the Internet is a computing environment, a software environment, it's possible to create a much richer kind of information than what we are typically accustomed to in books," Cerf said. Digitized books, he said, can be searched and updated easily, linked to related material, and enhanced with audio and video. But they can also be changed, which means that the book you read a year ago may look different the next time you consult it.

As his attention turned back to his personal book collection, his eyes lit up as he imagined searching its contents from a BlackBerry. Listening to him, I couldn't help thinking how inevitable it is that library books will move online and come alive with hyperlinks and annotations, the way the Web already is.

And then everyone, not just the Vinton Cerfs of the world, will have access to vast personal libraries from the comforts of home.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051702016.html





The Eternal Value of Privacy
Bruce Schneier

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70886-0.html





Government To Force Handover Of Encryption Keys
Tom Espiner

The UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys, a move which has outraged some security and civil rights experts.

The powers are contained within Part 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). RIPA was introduced in 2000, but the government has held back from bringing Part 3 into effect. Now, more than five years after the original act was passed, the Home Office is seeking to exercise the powers within Part Three of RIPA.

Some security experts are concerned that the plan could criminalise innocent people and drive businesses out of the UK. But the Home Office, which has just launched a consultation process, says the powers contained in Part 3 are needed to combat an increased use of encryption by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists.

"The use of encryption is... proliferating," Liam Byrne, Home Office minister of state told Parliament last week. "Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government has concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of Part 3 of RIPA... which is not presently in force."

Part 3 of RIPA gives the police powers to order the disclosure of encryption keys, or force suspects to decrypt encrypted data.

Anyone who refuses to hand over a key to the police would face up to two years' imprisonment. Under current anti-terrorism legislation, terrorist suspects now face up to five years for withholding keys.

If Part 3 is passed, financial institutions could be compelled to give up the encryption keys they use for banking transactions, experts have warned.

"The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business," Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

"The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction," Clayton added. "With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you're an international banker you'll plonk your headquarters in Zurich."

Opponents of the RIP Act have argued that the police could struggle to enforce Part 3, as people can argue that they don't possess the key to unlock encrypted data in their possession.

"It is, as ever, almost impossible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that some random-looking data is in fact ciphertext, and then prove that the accused actually has the key for it, and that he has refused a proper order to divulge it," pointed out encryption expert Peter Fairbrother on ukcrypto, a public email discussion list.

Clayton backed up this point. "The police can say 'We think he's a terrorist' or 'We think he's trading in kiddie porn', and the suspect can say, 'No, they're love letters, sorry, I've lost the key'. How much evidence do you need [to convict]? If you can't decrypt [the data], then by definition you don't know what it is," said Clayton.

The Home Office on Wednesday told ZDNet UK that it would not reach a decision about whether Part 3 will be amended until the consultation process has been completed.

"We are in consultation, and [are] looking into proposals on amendments to RIPA," said a Home Office spokeswoman. "The Home Office is waiting for the results of the consultation" before making any decisions, she said.

The Home Office said last week that the focus on key disclosure and forced decryption was necessary due to "the threat to public safety posed by terrorist use of encryption technology".

Clayton, on the other hand, argues that terrorist cells do not use master keys in the same way as governments and businesses.

"Terrorist cells use master keys on a one-to-one basis, rather than using them to generate pass keys for a series of communications. With a one-to-one key, you may as well just force the terrorist suspect to decrypt that communication, or use other methods of decryption," said Clayton.

"My suggestion is to turn on all of Part 3, except the part about trying to seize keys. That won't create such a furore in financial circles," he said.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39269746,00.htm





Voice Encryption May Draw U.S. Scrutiny
John Markoff

Philip R. Zimmermann wants to protect online privacy. Who could object to that?

He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

Now he is again inviting government scrutiny. On Sunday, he released a free Windows software program, Zfone, that encrypts a computer-to-computer voice conversation so both parties can be confident that no one is listening in. It became available earlier this year to Macintosh and Linux users of the system known as voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP.

What sets Zfone apart from comparable systems is that it does not require a web of computers to hold the keys, or long numbers, used in most encryption schemes. Instead, it performs the key exchange inside the digital voice channel while the call is being set up, so no third party has the keys.

Zfone's introduction comes as reports continue to emerge about the government's electronic surveillance efforts. A lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group, contends that AT&T has given the National Security Agency real-time access to Internet communications.

In the wake of 9/11, there were calls for the government to institute new barriers to cryptography, to avoid its use in communications by enemies of the United States. Easily accessible cryptography for Internet calling may intensify that debate.

"I'm afraid it will put front and center an issue that had been resolved in the individual's favor in the 1990's," said James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based public policy group.

The Federal Communications Commission has begun adopting regulations that would force Internet service providers and VoIP companies to adopt the technology that permits law enforcement officials to monitor conventional telephone calls. But for now, at least, F.C.C. regulation exempts programs that operate directly between computers, not through a hub.

"From the F.C.C.'s perspective you can't regulate point-to-point communications, which I think will let Phil off the hook," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington.

Zfone may face more of a challenge in Europe, where the British government is preparing to give the police the legal authority to compel both organizations and individuals to disclose encryption keys.

But Mr. Zimmermann, 52, does not see those fearing government surveillance — or trying to evade it — as the primary market. The next phase of the Internet's spyware epidemic, he contends, will be software designed to eavesdrop on Internet telephone calls made by corporate users.

"They will have entire digital jukeboxes of covertly acquired telephone conversations, and suddenly someone in Eastern Europe is going to be very wealthy," he said.

While Mr. Zimmerman is giving away his software so far, his goal is to attract VoIP software and hardware developers to license his technology and embed it in their products.

Zfone can automatically encrypt any call between users of freely available VoIP software programs like X-Lite, Gizmo or SJphone. It can be downloaded at www.philzimmermann.com.

The system does not work with Skype, the VoIP system acquired by eBay, which uses its own encryption scheme. But at a conference last week in Cyprus, German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls, according to Anthony M. Rutkowski, vice president for regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign, a company that offers security for Internet and phone operations.

Mr. Zimmermann said he had not yet tested Zfone's compatibility with Vonage, another popular VoIP service.

Mr. Zimmermann contends that the nation is better off with strong cryptography. Indeed, Zfone can be considered an asset, he said, because it allows people to have secret conversations without hiding their Internet protocol addresses, which could be traceable geographically. Those observed having a secured conversation could come under suspicion, of course. But for that reason, he argued, sophisticated criminals or terrorists are unlikely to use the technology.

"I'm sympathetic to the needs of the intelligence community to catch the bad guys," he said. "I specifically protect the content the criminals want, while simultaneously not interfering with the traffic analysis that the N.S.A. is trying to do. You could make the case that I'm being socially responsible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/te...22privacy.html





England further isolates itself

UK Law Will Criminalise IT Pros, Say Experts
Graeme Wearden and Tom Espiner

IT and security professionals who make network monitoring tools publicly available or disclose details of unpatched vulnerabilities could be convicted under a proposed UK law, experts have warned.

The Police and Justice Bill will update the UK's existing Computer Misuse Act (CMA), bringing in new powers to address the rise of organised cybercriminals and offences such as denial-of-service attacks. It was passed by the House of Commons earlier this month, and will be considered by the House Of Lords over the next couple of months.

Leading figures in the UK technology sector believe that the bill, as it currently stands, would outlaw a range of innocent activities.

Section 41 of the bill would amend the CMA to include a new offence of "making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in computer misuse offences".

It reads:

A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article —

(a) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3 [of the Computer Misuse Act]; or
(b) believing that it is likely to be so used.

Dr Richard Clayton of Cambridge University believes that part (b), as currently laid out, would catch a wide range of IT tools and activities that are not meant to be used in hacking, but potentially could be.

Clayton cited the Perl scripting language, created by Larry Wall in 1987, as an example of a useful technology that could fall foul of the law.

"Perl is almost universally used on a daily basis to permit the Internet to function," said Clayton. "I doubt if there is a sysadmin on the planet who hasn't written a Perl program at some time or another. Equally, almost every hacker who commits an offence under section 1 or section 3 of the CMA will use Perl as part of their toolkit. Unless Larry is especially stupid, and there is very little evidence for that, he will form the opinion that hackers are likely to use his Perl system. Locking Larry up is surely not desirable."

People who distribute networking vulnerability scanning tools such as nmap or Nessus could also be caught up in part (b), Clayton warned.

"The effect will be that people will stop offering these tools on their sites. Why should the only place to fetch Perl and nmap be from hacker sites in Eastern Europe, where the risk is that they carry Trojans? This makes the Internet less safe," argued Clayton.

Malcolm Hutty, regulation officer at the London Internet Exchange, shares Clayton's fears about the bill. He believes it would make people much more reluctant to make useful software tools available to the public.

"We are concerned that the scope of [section 41 of] the bill is too broad, and could criminalise a lot of innocent people," said Hutty.

He said organisations such as LINX have been urging the Home Office to have the bill altered. Some amendments were made following these lobbying efforts, but Hutty believes the government should have gone further.

He also believes that section 41 could be interpreted as including the supply of information about security vulnerabilities, as that advice could be used to commit a criminal offence.

"You could reveal details of a security flaw, and someone could hear that and decide that not everyone would be patched yet," said Hutty, adding that this could even include media outlets which reported on security flaws.

The Home Office denies suggestions that the bill will criminalise systems administrators by outlawing software which could be used in cybercrime attacks.

"There is a hacking amendment, but it doesn't criminalise those innocent of hacking attacks," said a Home Office spokeswoman. "[It] shifts the emphasis on to those intending to deliberately develop tools for criminal use."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9270045,00.htm





Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible
Adam Liptak

The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday.

"There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Mr. Gonzales said on the ABC News program "This Week."

"That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation," he continued. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."

Asked whether he was open to the possibility that The New York Times should be prosecuted for its disclosures in December concerning a National Security Agency surveillance program, Mr. Gonzales said his department was trying to determine "the appropriate course of action in that particular case."

"I'm not going to talk about it specifically," he said. "We have an obligation to enforce the law and to prosecute those who engage in criminal activity."

Though he did not name the statutes that might allow such prosecutions, Mr. Gonzales was apparently referring to espionage laws that in some circumstances forbid the possession and publication of information concerning the national defense, government codes and "communications intelligence activities."

Those laws are the basis of a pending case against two lobbyists, but they have never been used to prosecute journalists.

Some legal scholars say that even if the plain language of the laws could be read to reach journalists, the laws were never intended to apply to the press. In any event, these scholars say, prosecuting reporters under the laws might violate the First Amendment.

Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment.

"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."

Mr. Gonzales sidestepped a question concerning whether the administration had been reviewing reporters' telephone records in an effort to identify their confidential sources.

"To the extent that we engage in electronic surveillance or surveillance of content, as the president says, we don't engage in domestic-to-domestic surveillance without a court order," he said. "And obviously if, in fact, there is a basis under the Constitution to go to a federal judge and satisfy the constitutional standards of probable cause and we get a court order, that will be pursued."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/wa...2gonzales.html





Apple Sues iPod Rival Over Patents

Apple Computer, maker of the iPod music player, is suing Creative Technology, raising the stakes in the legal dispute over competing devices.

Apple claims Creative Labs, the U.S. division of Creative Technology, infringes four patents in its hand-held digital players. The suit was filed in a Wisconsin District Court on May 15, the same day Creative filed a lawsuit and a trade complaint against Apple.

"Creative proactively held discussions with Apple in our efforts to explore amicable solutions," Phil O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Creative, said. "At no time during these discussions or at any other time did Apple mention to us the patents it raised in its lawsuit."

Creative filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking an order to block imports of the iPod, most of which are made in China. A lawsuit the company filed against Apple in District Court in San Francisco is likely to be put on hold while the trade complaint is heard.

The iPod controls 77 percent of the U.S. market, compared with less than 10 percent for Creative.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...iness/ipod.php





Can you spot the spot?

Broadcasters Are Becoming Bigger Stage Parents To Brands Seeking Roles
Stuart Elliott and Julie Bosman

For decades, the broadcast television networks have urged advertisers to buy time during the commercial breaks in dramas, sitcoms, reality series and other programs. This week, as the broadcasters present their prime-time schedules for the 2006-07 season, they are working almost as hard to promote the opportunities inside their shows as outside them.

Those opportunities come in the form of what is called branded entertainment or product integration. They include mentioning brands in lines of dialogue, placing products in scenes so they are visible to viewers, and giving advertisers roles in plots of shows, whether it is a desperate housewife showing off a Buick at a shopping mall or a would-be apprentice trying to sell a new flavor of Crest toothpaste.

The goal of branded entertainment is to expose ads to viewers in ways that are more difficult to zip through or zap than traditional commercials. Devices like digital video recorders and iPods are making it easier than ever to avoid or ignore conventional sales pitches.

Although product integration has been available for years, it is playing a larger role in the presentations the networks have been making during what is known as upfront week. The name derives from the fact that the broadcasters are promoting their lineups - and hoping to make deals with marketers - ahead of the autumn season.

The networks that have so far devoted significant portions of their presentations to branded entertainment are My Network TV, a new venture of News Corp., and Univision Communications networks aimed at Hispanic consumers.

"With commercials getting lost in the clutter, with viewers changing channels, this is another way to get your product out there," said Shari Anne Brill, vice president and programming director at Carat USA in New York, part of the Carat media agency owned by Aegis Group.

"For the networks, it's an opportunity for them to have another revenue stream," Brill said, in addition to the sale of conventional commercial time.

That is particularly important for broadcast networks, which unlike their cable counterparts do not derive revenue from subscriber fees.

The debate over product integration has raged almost as long as the practice has been in vogue. Critics call it invasive and wonder whether the sponsors gain influence over the contents of the programs in which they appear.

Marketers and agencies, for their part, say they try to be sensitive to viewer sensibilities and not step over the line into exploitation. If an advertiser does go overboard, "it can come across as assault and battery on the consumer," Brill said, adding that the goal is to avoid being "heavy-handed."

The writers who create scripts for series, and their union, have been vocal in opposition to branded entertainment and stepped up the public outcry at a news conference Wednesday.

Seven writers and producers, sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, West, appeared at the news conference at Le Parker Meridien hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Their intent was to put network executives and advertisers on notice about a trend they described as intrusive and creatively inhibiting.

To make their point, the writers played video clips of what they deemed the more egregious examples, from reality shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and scripted dramas like "7th Heaven." In one clip, an actor proposed marriage by inserting an engagement ring into the filling of an Oreo cookie.

The writers did not make specific demands but said they wanted more involvement in the decision-making process for branded entertainment.

Money is a factor, too. Although the president of the union chapter, Patric Verrone, said that "it's not just about compensation," many writers want a share of the revenue generated for the networks from product integration.

That revenue can only rise if marketers take advantage of all the opportunities peddled to them in the upfront week. For instance, during the My Network TV presentation Tuesday, Bob Cesa, executive vice president for advertising sales, spoke about what he called "flexible branded integration, sponsor placement and virtual insertion" of product images. He showed a video clip demonstrating how brands like Apple, Cadillac, Cartier, Evian, Lexus and Nokia could be incorporated into scenes in episodes of his network's series.

At the presentation Wednesday by Univision Communications, Bert Medina, senior vice president and operating manager for the TeleFutura network, discussed product integration in a new weeknight game show, "¿Qué Dice la Gente?" a Spanish-language version of "Family Feud," and "Objetivo Fama," a combination talent and reality series.

Alina Falcón, executive vice president and operating manager for the Univision network, described what she called "even more exciting opportunities to link your brands" to shows on her network, which include "Belleza Latina," a combination beauty pageant and reality series; "Cantando por un Sueño," or "Singing for a Dream"; "Bailando por un Sueño," or "Dancing for a Dream"; and "Sábado Gigante," a venerable Saturday variety-game show.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...iness/adco.php





Surfing Dishonestly To A Higher Test Score
Jonathan D. Glater

At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e- mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in.

At the journalism school at San Jose State University in California, students tried to use spell checkers on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.

And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.

"If they'd spend as much time studying," said an exasperated Ron Yasbin, dean of the UNLV College of Sciences, "they'd all be A students."

With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. College officials are struggling to outwit would-be cheaters this exam season with a range of strategies - cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.

Some students said they thought cheating these days was more a product of the mind-set, not the tools at hand.

"Some people put a premium on where they're going to go in the future, and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at UCLA. She added that pressure to succeed sometimes "makes people do things that they shouldn't do."

In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 U.S. campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke.

Whatever the reasons for cheating, college officials say the battle against it is wearing them out.

Though Brian Carlisle, associate dean of students at UCLA, said most students did not cheat, he spoke wearily about cases of academic dishonesty.

He told of the student who loaded his notes onto the Sidekick portable e-mail device last autumn, students who have sought help from friends with such devices and students who have pre-programmed calculators with formulas.

The use of iPods is also a concern, Carlisle added, pointing out that with a wireless earpiece, these would be hard to detect. The telltale iPod headphone wire proved the downfall of a Pepperdine University student a few years ago, after he had dictated his notes into the portable music player and tried to listen to them during an exam.

"I have taught for 30 years and each year something new comes on the scene," Sonia Sorrell, the professor who caught the student, said in an e-mail message.

At the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the building's wireless hotspot is cut during finals to thwart Internet access.

Richard Craig, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State, who caught students using spell check last year, said that for tests, he arranged the classroom desks so that the students faced away from him but he could see their desktop screens.

"It was just a devilishly simple way to handle it," Craig said.

In some classes at Butler University in Indianapolis, professors use software that allows them to observe the programs running on computers students are taking tests on, so they can make sure no one is seeking answers on the Internet. And some institutions even install cameras in examination rooms.

To take a final exam last week, Alyssa Soares, a third-year law student at UCLA, had to switch on software that cut her laptop's Internet access, wireless capability and even the ability to read her own saved files. Her computer, effectively, became a glorified typewriter. Soares said she did not mind.

"This is making sure everyone is on a level playing field," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...ness/cheat.php





US Government Restricts China PCs

The US State Department says the 16,000 computers it bought from a Chinese firm with links to the Beijing government will not be used for classified work.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin said the department would also alter its procurement process to ensure US information security was guaranteed.

His comments came after Rep Frank Wolf expressed national security concerns.

The company Lenovo insisted such concerns were unwarranted and said the computers posed no security risk.

Last year, Lenovo - the world's number three PC maker - bought the IBM PC Division and moved its executive headquarters from China to the US.

A Chinese government agency owns 28 percent of Lenovo, while IBM still has about a 13 percent stake in the company.

'Classified network'

In a letter to Mr Wolf, Mr Griffin said government security experts had recommended the computers "be utilised on unclassified systems only".

He said the government was committed to ensuring the purchase would not "compromise our information and communication channels".

And he said the state department would change the way it buys its technology "in light of the changing ownership of IT equipment providers."

His letter did not refer to Mr Wolf's specific concern that at least 900 of the computers were to be used "as part of the classified network deployed in the United States and around the world in embassies and consulates".

Mr Wolf, Republican chairman of the committee that oversees the department's funds, told reporters that China's spying efforts were "frightening".

It was "no secret that the US is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services", he said, adding: "No American government agency should want to purchase from them".

'No security risk'

But Lenovo insisted the state department computers, which were made at former IBM facilities in North Carolina and Mexico, posed no security threat.

"We are absolutely confident in the security of our manufacturing process," Jeff Carlisle, the firm's vice-president of government relations, said.

"These computers do not present a risk to US security."

He said the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an arm of the Chinese government, had a "minority interest" in the company and was not involved in its day-to-day operations.

"We're not a state-owned enterprise," Mr Carlisle added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...as/4997288.stm





Your Telco Owes You $1,000
This Damn Blog

If your telephone company is one of the companies that decided to take financial compensation from the federal government in exchange for illegally proving your records to them it seems to me that they owe you $1,000. Now IANAL but this seems pretty damn clear cut to me.

The Stored Wire and Electronic Communications and Transactional Records Access, Section 2703(c) outlines exactly five reasons that a phone company can disclose your records to the fed:

a warrant
a court order
the customer’s consent
for telemarketing enforcement
administrative subpoena

Keep in mind that the NSA does not have subpoena power and it is easy to see that not only is your federal government breaking the law by stripping you of your expectation of privacy in your papers and effects but that the Telcos are breaking the law by supplying this info to the Fed.

Section 2707 of the Communications Act says that the phone company are liable for $1000 per individual violation of the Act and outlines a private right of action to any customer “aggrieved by any violation.”

So there you go, a clear cut explanation of why your phone company ( unless you are lucky enough to be a Qwest customer ) owes you $1,000. If there is one thing that big corporations understand is profit and loss - I think handing out millions of thousand dollar checks will get their attention.
http://www.thisdamnblog.com/your-tel...s-you-1000.php





DIY Phone Club Channels PC Past
Elizabeth Biddlecombe

Matt Hamrick hates standard-issue mobile phones almost as much as he loves tinkering with them to make them better.

The software security expert reckons he's spent around $3,000 over the past two years trying to get his calendar and e-mail to sync between his Apple computer and his phone.

"The phones aren't getting any better," he says. "I've been looking for a phone that would meet my requirements for 10 years now."

That quest gained new momentum this month when the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, a group Hamrick co-founded, attracted about 40 people to its first meeting.

The fledgling organization owes its name and inspiration to the famous Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s, which many historians now credit with innovations that paved the way for the personal computing revolution. Members hope something equally climactic will arise from their new association.

Hamrick admits that some of his requirements are advanced. For instance, he would like to be able to access more than just one of his many different e-mail accounts.

Other things he'd like: a stopwatch that doesn't stop when the phone goes into power-save mode, voicemails delivered to his phone, a broader choice of messaging systems than just AOL's Instant Messenger.

In short, Hamrick wants his phone to be even more of a computer than it is now. He wants a platform that's open enough to run applications he writes himself. But he also sees some basic problems that need fixing.

Hamrick and others feel that innovation is being locked away by the established phone manufacturers in much the same way that computer development was monopolized by IBM 30 years ago.

"The barrier for entry for people just testing out new ideas is pretty high," says Hamrick.

It is often prohibitively expensive for independent developers to get their hands on trial gear. In addition, while Hamrick bears manufacturers no grudge, he says they "have no great motivation to open up the field to more-capable devices."

This and similar complaints have led some people to start making their own mobiles, and others to predict that operators might even start catering to the DIY phone set (see Larry Cohen's open phone proposal).

But Tamara Colby, a product marketer at a Silicon Valley startup, says the new club is "not about bashing the handset makers" but taking advantage of the convergence of cellular and internet protocol networks.

"It's about sharing ideas and thinking about what we can do with phones that they don't already do. The phone is going through a complete metamorphosis," she says.

Lee Felsenstein, co-founder of The Fonly Institute and onetime moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, points out that "the parallels are not exact" between the clubs. Most people attending the original club did not have access to computers. Mobile phones are ubiquitous today.

But he adds that the Homebrew Computer Club was about "dealing with forbidden knowledge." (For a video clip about the club click here.) The degree of information sharing was a hallmark of the club and paved the way for today's open-source movement.

"That was, in effect, our innovation," says Felsenstein.

That ethic is a key tenet of the mobile phone club. At the inaugural meeting, organizer Hamrick talked about his own SqueakyMoPho development project. Craig Hughes, CTO at gumstix, spoke on his company's single-board computers that can be used for making handsets. Shuman Zhai, a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Lab, talked about his new ShapeWriter input method.

Zhai said that these innovators can think in new ways about mobile phones since they are unfettered by the legacy issues that embroil established manufacturers. "I wouldn't be surprised if something quite dramatic could be done," he says.

Whether the innovators go on to set up new companies or sell their ideas to existing ones is their choice, according to Hamrick. He even theorizes that there could be a secondary market for handset customization on top of what is already offered by the operators and handset makers.

The next meeting is planned for June. Hamrick hopes that those people who can't attend in person will use the website to find like-minded types and set up similar clubs elsewhere. That's one trick the original homebrewers couldn't do.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70929-0.html





MIT Plans To Convert Cell Phone Users Into Podcasters
Robyn Peterson

A new research project at MIT's Media Lab aims to turn every cell phone or PDA carrying member of the public into a podcaster, and every mobile device into a virtual podcasting studio.

The first reportedly working prototype was built on a Motorola A1000 cell phone, and is currently being tested in Spain as part of the Electronic Lens project. A live demo of the new project, which has been dubbed "RadioActive," should be available soon.

According to Judith Donath, director of the Sociable Media Group at MIT, the inspiration arose out of a complaint from one of her students.

"She received [a lot of] phone calls from people who didn't really have anything to say, but were bored," Donath said. "They were walking or driving, so they took out their phone and called their friends looking for entertainment."

By and large, more people are turning to their mobile devices for entertainment, says Donath, but rather than call, and potentially annoy, a friend, it would be ideal to "conveniently drop into an [ongoing] discussion and drop out when you're done."

The RadioActive project, which Donath created with student Aaron Zinman, defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system, or mobile audio forum. In this system, voice messages, which are short audio sound bytes, are exchanged between groups of users via mobile devices, like cell phones or PDAs, as a method of "discussion-on-demand."

The messages are then collected in threads similar to how a common Internet discussion forum, like discuss.pcmag.com or even Slashdot, organizes text posts. Each message contains a subject, body, and author, as well as other metadata, and can range the spectrum from quick blurbs to full-length podcasts.

Since it can be time consuming to listen to long threads of voice messages as compared to scanning text in a discussion forum, community moderation has been incorporated into the system. "If lots of people say [a message] is not interesting, it's important that it fade into the background," Donath explained.

Just like an email application or an RSS reader, RadioActive supplies its users with an inbox, which displays the first message of discussion threads that have been subscribed to or are contextually relevant. For instance, location may be one factor the system takes into account when determining contextual relevance. In this scenario, threads relating to New York City restaurants may appear in the inbox as the user walks around Manhattan.

The user can then navigate through messages in an active manner, by using the graphical interface (GUI) with a keyboard or voice command, or in a passive manner, in the so-called "Radio" mode. In the GUI, visual cues are displayed that allow the user to quickly determine interest level, size, age, and whether or not the message has been heard. The user can then play messages in a specific thread or jump between threads. In Radio mode, the system plays messages sequentially so that the user can concentrate on other tasks, like driving.
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/...=178692,00.asp





MIT 'Big Brother' Project Studies Origins of Language
Bary Alyssa Johnson

In a bid to understand the underlying processes of early cognitive development in children, a number of big names in the IT storage arena have agreed to donate their time, expertise, and a jointly built peta-byte (1 million gigabyte) disk storage system to aid MIT in its work on the Human Speechome Project.

"This is a research project about how children acquire language," said Alexandra Kahn, spokesperson for MIT Media Lab. "The storage element comes in because there's so much data being amassed in this project that new approaches to data storage, management, and mining are being developed."

The Human Speechome Project is being run by MIT Media Lab's Associate Professor Deb Roy, head of the Cognitive Machines research group. The National Science Foundation provided some funding for the project, and Bell Microproducts, Seagate Technology, Marvell, and Zetera have donated a colossal high-tech storage system.

"The project has three components: research into early childhood; data visualization and mining tools; high-performance computing and storage infrastructure to analyze data," said Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab, during a recent Webcast. "It's a great marriage between industry and the academic world."

The project, which commenced in mid-2005 and is slated to run until 2008, will record and analyze approximately 400,000 hours of audio and video data in order to understand how humans acquire language in the context of their primary social setting. To accomplish this, Roy has volunteered his own home and family as research subjects; he has installed a surveillance system of sorts in his home to study his 9-month-old son's educational undertakings.

Roy has installed 11 omni-directional video cameras and 14 ceiling-mounted microphones to capture all activity that goes on in his home. The audio and video data are stored temporarily in Roy's basement before being transferred to the media lab for thorough analyses. Roy's team has been working to develop speech- and video-processing algorithms to analyze and identify behavioral communication patterns found in the data.

"Equally exciting are the 'spin-off' opportunities that could result from this research," Moss said in a prepared statement. "The innovative tools that are being developed for storing and mining...speech and video data offer enormous potential for breaking open new business opportunities in a broad range of industries--from security to Internet commerce."

To take advantage of such opportunities, Bell Microproducts, Seagate, Marvell, and Zetera have collaborated to create and donate a peta-byte disk storage system that MIT will use for the project. MIT identified a number of core requirements for the storage system including scalability in excess of 1 terabyte, 100-percent data redundancy, file access by computers using multiple operating systems, virtualized storage fabric, and more.

"What we're seeing here is an indication of the future," Moss said during the Webcast. "We have close collaboration on a large-scale project of global significance between the academic and industrial world. From an industrial perspective there are more questions, issues, and innovations to be dealt with than any single company can handle."

Zetera has contributed its Z-SAN technology as the core architecture for MIT's storage system. Zetera's Z-SAN architecture uses Internetworking Protocol (IP) as the storage fabric and was designed to enable Storage-over-IP (SoIP). Zetera says it expects SoIP to transform the storage industry similar to how VoiP has changed the field of telecommunications.

Bell Microproduct's Hammer Storage division has integrated its Z-Rack Storage enclosures to up the ante in terms of performance using Ethernet switches. Marvell has offered Ethernet-based switching technology via its Orion Processor and Prestera edge and core XGE Ethernet switches. Lastly, Seagate has contributed SATA hard disk drives.

"DVDs have been considered a high-capacity storage drive until now," Moss said. "The storage array for the Speechome Project will hold the equivalent of 200,000 DVDs which is more feature films than Hollywood has filmed since 1895."

The IT infrastructure for MIT's Speechome Project will include 3,000+ SATA drives, 300 Z-Rack storage enclosures, 100 10G/GbE switches and 400 blade processors upon completion. Duplicate copies of all audio and video feed will protect against potential data loss.

"This project is about storage intensiveness," said David Reinsel, program director at IDC. "It's not about consumers needing peta-bytes of storage, but it is indicative of the types of projects that can be done by research labs like MIT, where we are trying to capture digitally a ton of information from a ton of different sources and process that to look for meaningful trends and results."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1963240,00.asp





Rootkit Trojans

Alert Raised for MS Word Zero-Day Attack
Ryan Naraine

A zero-day flaw in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word software program is being used in an active exploit by sophisticated hackers in China and Taiwan, according to warnings from anti-virus researchers.

Symantec's DeepSight Threat Analyst Team has escalated its ThreatCon level after confirming the unpatched vulnerability is being used "against select targets."

The exploit arrives as an ordinary Microsoft Word document attachment to an e-mail. However, when the document is launched by the user the vulnerability is triggered to drop a backdoor with rootkit features to mask itself from anti-virus scanners.

The SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center) said in a diary entry that it received reports of the exploit from an unnamed organization that was targeted. "The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software," said Chris Carboni, an ISC incident handler tracking the attack.

When the .doc attachment is opened, it exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Word and infects a fully patched Windows system. The exploit functioned as a dropper, extracting and launching a Trojan that immediately overwrites the original Word document with a "clean," uninfected copy.

"As a result of the exploit, Word crashes, informs the user of a problem, and offers to attempt to re-open the file. If the user agrees, the new 'clean' file is opened without incident," the ISC explained.

Microsoft has been notified and is working with security researchers to investigate the bug.

Roger Thompson, chief technical officer at Atlanta-based Exploit Prevention Labs, said the attack "feels like espionage, perhaps industrial."

After looking at a sample of the malware code, Thompson said the backdoor is programmed to call back to a server in China to report information about what the infected system looks like.

In addition to providing reconnaissance, the backdoor can connect to specified addresses to receive commands from the malicious attacker.

Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure said a successful exploit allows the attacker to create, read, write, delete and search for files and directories; access and modify the Registry; manipulate services; start and kill processes; take screenshots; enumerate open windows; create its own application window; and lock, restart or shut down Windows.

The ISC said the attack was traced to the Far East, with domains and IP addresses associated with the Trojan registered in China and Taiwan. "The [attack] e-mails received originated from a server in that region. The attackers appear to be aware that they have been 'outed,' and have been routinely changing the IP address associated with the URL above," the Storm Center said.

Symantec's DeepSight team said the exploit successfully executes shellcode when it is processed by Microsoft Word 2003. The malicious file caused Microsoft Word 2000 to crash, but shellcode execution did not occur.

As a temporary mitigation method, Symantec is recommending that Microsoft Word document e-mail attachments be blocked at the network perimeter. "Furthermore, extreme caution should be exercised while processing Microsoft Word attachments received as an unexpected e-mail Attachment," company officials said.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965042,00.asp





For Tiny Screens, Some Big Dreams
Lorne Manly

IN a nondescript office park, hard by a freeway and other markers of suburbia like Circuit City and Trader Joe's, a band of creative souls is working on another staple of the American experience: new forms of entertainment for people to fill the few remaining gaps in their media-oversaturated days.

Digital Chocolate is this company's name, and the business focuses solely on developing games and applications for mobile phones. Although it has some trappings of a Silicon Valley start-up, circa 1999 — one recent morning a 20-something employee rolled up for work here on a skateboard — Digital Chocolate differs in one significant way. Its founder and chief executive, Trip Hawkins, is not a typical bootstrapping young entrepreneur.

Mr. Hawkins, 52, was employee No. 68 at Apple Computer before he left that company in 1982 to start Electronic Arts, now the pre-eminent video game maker. Never shy about expressing his opinions, Mr. Hawkins, not surprisingly, brandishes a theory about programming for the mobile phone.

"Content is just a means to an end, so there's something to talk about," he said. In other words, social connection trumps all.

Accordingly, Digital Chocolate's creations appear decidedly low-tech, the easiest-to-use games possible without fancy graphics or elaborate storytelling. And its newest games and entertainments are designed to foster conversation, flirting and in the case of M.L.S.N. Sports Picks (for Mobile League Sports Network), a little friendly trash talking.

In this interactive sports game show, which costs $2.99 a month, people can compete against friends by predicting outcomes of sporting events, like how many points Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs will score in his next game. The system keeps track of the standings for bragging rights.

That resulting connection, that social interaction, can be much more lucrative than costly, classic content, in Mr. Hawkins's estimation. The first big mobile hit will be a completely original creation, he contends. "If you're going to really establish something as a new medium, you can't do that with content that is derivative and a second-class version of another medium," Mr. Hawkins said.

Needless to say, plenty of entertainment and media companies do not share that pointed opinion. From Hollywood to the Bristol, Conn., campus of ESPN, companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt their current brands in television, movies, games and news and information to the tiny screens of mobile phones, and creating new programming.

The creative team behind "Lost" on ABC plans to produce video diary segments, two to three minutes long, for cellphones. CBS is pushing ahead with a made-for-mobile soap opera. Last week, HBO's "Entourage" began shooting mini mobile episodes focusing on the exploits of two of its characters, Turtle and Johnny Drama. And NBC is creating casual games based on the fractured, deadpan humor of "The Office"; they will be available this summer.

Ultimately, whoever guesses correctly the kind of bite-sized, time-wasting distractions people want to snack on over their phones could be showered with a bonanza of profits, at a time when technology is squeezing the traditional businesses of media and entertainment companies.

Still unclear, however, is how eager Americans will be for all this mobile phone content and how much they will want to spend on top of already-hefty monthly cellphone bills. "Consumers right now are not really looking at the phone as more than a way to communicate," said Linda Barrabee, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a research firm based in Boston.

In the United States, analysts estimate that only about five million people own third-generation, or 3G, phones, the ones designed to play decent-quality video and music. Only about two million have signed up for data and video packages, which cost anywhere from $10 to $25 a month.

The Yankee Group estimates that pure mobile entertainment — games, music and video — accounted for about $500 million last year, less than 5 percent the wireless carriers' data revenue. And the data revenue represented a small fraction of voice revenue. While people are watching video on their phones in increasing numbers, another researcher, eMarketer, predicts that even by 2009, fewer than 10 million subscribers will be willing to pay for premium services.

STUDYING such numbers convinced Mr. Hawkins to tailor his games to a more lucrative piece of the mobile phone business. (He started Digital Chocolate in 2003 with an investment of $8.3 million from two venture capital firms as well as Robert W. Pittman, the former chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner; an additional $13 million, from other investors, came in 2004.)

"Because it's when you're mobile, you're the most socially needy and vulnerable and insecure, and that's when the one platform you have is the mobile, wireless platform," Mr. Hawkins said.

Digital Chocolate's summer release, The Hook-Up: Ava Flirting, allows players to create an avatar, an image representing the user in a virtual reality, and interact with others' avatars, in a PG-13 setting. People willing to spend $2.99 a month can decide everything from their avatar's hair color to shoe choice and then socialize in settings ranging from a hip nightclub to a library. Then they can compare notes with friends about their adventures.

There is also the potential, if the two avatars hit it off and are willing, to exchange text messages and perhaps meet in real life.

While he says he believes that this kind of original material will be the most successful form of mobile programming, Mr. Hawkins concedes that conventional media offerings — movies, music and games — will also find a market on cellphones, just not a particularly valuable one.

"Of course you're going to use the devices and the network for a variety of things," he said. "But it's not going to be your favorite way to watch a TV show or watch a movie or listen to high-fidelity music, or play an immersive game. There are bigger screens, there are bigger boxes, with more power electronics in them, that are in environments that are more conducive to a high-fidelity experience." Entertainment and video game companies, he added, "have big businesses they need to protect, so it's just a natural tendency to play defense."

Mr. Hawkins's disdain of established entertainment company behavior, however, may be in part recognition of his competitive situation. He finds himself up against bigger companies like Electronic Arts, which has solidified its lead in the mobile game marketplace through mobile versions of hits like Madden NFL and Need for Speed and the $680 million acquisition last year of Jamdat Mobile, home to Tetris. He has also been wrong before. His early 1990's foray into digital video console and games development, 3DO, floundered, and eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2003.

Digital Chocolate does not disclose revenues, but it has said it expects to be profitable in the next year.

At traditional media conglomerates, some early financial figures on mobile-content revenue, though small, cheer top executives. In a conference call last month with analysts, Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, said the company's deal with Verizon Wireless to show CBS material — including video clips of "Survivor" and "The Late Show With David Letterman" — on its VCast network will bring in about $3 million in subscription revenue this year.

Peter F. Chernin, president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, said at a Milken Institute conference last month that the short-form series spun off from the Fox series "24" was profitable thanks to payments from wireless carriers around the world. (He declined to disclose the profits.) And for its newest miniaturized series, "Prison Break: Proof of Innocence," Fox sold a sponsorship and product integration package to Toyota.

There is some common ground between wildcatters like Mr. Hawkins and Fortune 500 executives in trying to crack the elusive code for moneymaking products in this new medium. In theory, everyone agrees that merely plunking down reformatted programming from other media, like television, does not work because that does not make the most of the mobile phone's particular attributes, like text messaging.

BUT the big entertainment and game companies are loath to toss away the brand names in which they've invested so heavily just to start fresh in a new medium. Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music/Logo Group, said that in the short term, with an audience unfamiliar with what is possible on a phone, well-known brands can cut through the clutter of games, ring tones, wallpaper and other cellphone accessories. More people will gravitate toward outtakes from "Punk'd," the MTV show in which the actor Ashton Kutcher plays pranks on unsuspecting victims, than will embrace a made-for-mobile program like the new "Dingo Ate My Video," in which odd-looking puppets dissect music videos with loving derision.

Salil Dalvi, vice president for digital media/wireless at NBC Universal, frames the issue a bit more bluntly. "Why would we throw away the huge brand equity from 'Access Hollywood?' " he said.

As with many early efforts in a burgeoning medium, the first mobile shows and games borrow more from the past than truly inhabit their new homes. And the creative quality can sometimes be questionable. The early reviews of Fox's miniaturized series, for which the company trademarked the term "mobisode," have not been particularly strong. The biggest knock on "24: Conspiracy" was the lack of involvement of the show's writers and cast.

Fox executives, however, point proudly to an Emmy nomination in the new category of broadband and mobile content, and are pleased with the new "Prison Break" episodes made for cellphones. But the latest batch of "24" mobile content is merely regular TV episodes boiled down to two-minute bite-sized chunks.

The "24" experience of creating second-tier material for cellphones weighed on the thinking of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the executive producers of "Lost," as executives at ABC and its parent, the Walt Disney Company, urged them to venture into wireless storytelling. "Conceptually for us, the key was it had to be up to the quality standards of the series, and that required me and Damon to oversee it," Mr. Cuse said.

The executive producers insisted on using their cast members. ABC, after much wrangling, hammered out deals with the various Hollywood unions, including the Screen Actors Guild. "For us, putting two strange, non-S.A.G. people on the island isn't 'Lost,' " he said. "We don't want people to feel cheated or ripped off."

The point of departure for their cellphone series, called "The Lost Diaries," will be the discovery of a video camera. That will allow Mr. Cuse and Mr. Lindelof — who plan to write the two- to three-minute episodes — to use the tiny screens of cellphones to provide more intimate portraits. "It allows you to get deeper into the character, like a diary entry allows you to see deeper into someone's life," Mr. Cuse said.

This kind of experimentation has begun to yield some insights into what kinds of content appeal to consumers and how that programming should be delivered. Ryan Hughes, director of content and programming at Verizon Wireless, said that comedy and entertainment shorts do much better than news clips.

Jeremy Laws, a senior vice president of the Universal Studios Consumer Products Group who runs its mobile entertainment unit, said games with clear identities, like its Battlestar Galactica single-shooter game and offshoots of the "Fast and Furious" series, were doing well.

Eric Kessler, president of sales and marketing at HBO, said it discovered that subscribers to HBO Mobile on Cingular Wireless (paying $4.95 a month) wanted recaps of its Sunday night original television series — immediately. The results were five-minute versions of "The Sopranos" and "Big Love." made available the next day.

AT the media company that is arguably embracing the mobile world most aggressively — ESPN — there appears to be no limit to the amount of personalized information that consumers demand. It has made a big bet on Mobile ESPN, deciding to sell a special phone under its own brand name and to handle all the customer support.

For monthly fees ranging from $39.99 to $199.99, subscribers can get game updates, breaking news and other material. To watch video and to get news alerts, they have to pay an additional $24.99 a month.

Even though the editors and product managers understood that the first buyers for this phone would be die-hard sports fans, "I don't think we realized how voracious sports fans are," especially those in fantasy sports leagues, said J. Kieren Portley, product realization manager for Mobile ESPN.

As Mr. Portley, the Mobile ESPN editor Anthony Mormile and others adapt material to the phone, they have learned some tricks of the trade. Wide-angle shots are to be avoided, while slow-motion clips are to be welcomed. The sweet spot for video clips appears to be between 45 and 75 seconds. Short clips of confrontational conversations, like the big finish on the talk show "Pardon the Interruption," are popular, and the network's hosts and guests can satiate users' hunger by providing punchy, informal commentary that they do not have time to deliver on the air.

Just how lucrative ESPN and other companies' mobile efforts will be remains murky. In a conference call earlier this month, Tom Staggs, Disney's chief financial officer, told analysts that the ESPN phone had not quite performed to financial expectations, but he expected lower pricing and new marketing to remedy that.

All content providers face an unclear business model, with subscriptions, à la carte sales and ad-supported free models jockeying for position. They also have to deal with carriers who have different technical specifications and provide, in effect, the world's smallest retail mall because of the tiny nature of their phones' screens. And they must figure out the role that user-generated content will play in the mix.

"Most content providers get it," said John R. Burbank, vice president for marketing at Cingular Wireless, referring to their understanding that they must create compelling new content. "But the fact is, no one knows what 'it' is.

"We don't know the secret formula, and it's not going to be something that will be divined by sitting in a room and thinking about it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/bu...rtner=homepage





Never Mind the Clip-On Ties, Geek Squad Can Fix Your PC
Damon Darlin

Robert Stephens, the founder of the Geek Squad, has made a very good living solving the problems of technophobes and people who thought they were technically adept.

So it may have seemed a bit odd to interview him at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., a weekend festival of technology tinkerers who play polo on Segways or build steam-engine robots and pool heaters out of barbecue grills. These people, after all, are ardent do-it-yourselfers, people who derive real joy from never ever having to hire help.

"The do-it-yourself crowd is a dying breed," Mr. Stephens said as blasts from a nearby flamethrower mounted on an old fire truck periodically punctuated the conversation. He wasn't being nasty, because his technicians were at the ready to support the fair exhibitors just in case. He made that statement because it explains why the company he founded as a college student in 1994 has grown and grown.

When he sold the Geek Squad to Best Buy in 2002, his computer repair company had 60 employees, or agents. Today, it has 12,000 men and women dressed in black pants, white shirts, a black clip-on tie and white socks who arrive at customers' homes in black and white Volkswagen Beetles.

The conversation with Mr. Stephens, who is chief inspector of the Geek Squad for Best Buy, helps to explain the success and, indeed, the proliferation of services that do what most Americans are unwilling to do themselves. It is not confined to oil changes, maid service or hiring a gardener or handyman. Almost every time you buy electronics you are offered a service contract either by the manufacturer or the retailer.

Beyond service contracts, though, consumers need some insight into how to be smarter about deciding when to call for help. It all boils down to the classic choice between time and money.

Sure, one can point to another giant of retailing, Home Depot, and argue that there is better evidence that the do-it-yourself trend is strong. Mr. Stephens has economics on his side. Economists say people who call in a technician, even one who will charge, as the Geek Squad does, $159 to install a wireless network or $229 to wipe out a computer virus, can be acting rationally. These tasks may not be worth your time. Indeed, Home Depot has hedged its bets and is increasingly marketing its installation services for contractors to hang your kitchen cabinets or roof your garage.

Economists say industrialized societies are spending less on the basics of life — food, clothing and shelter — and more on leisure pursuits. Indeed, Robert Fogel, the Nobel-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago, has gone so far as to predict that by 2040 it will take the average American household only 300 hours of work a year to supply its basic needs.

As leisure time becomes more valued, Americans are loath to give it up. We spend money to get more of it. How much we are willing to spend depends on what we make as well as a more intuitive process of how we measure what our leisure time is worth.

The results from two online calculators that determine what your time is worth may surprise you. Try http://hughchou.org/calc/realwage.php or http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor..._time/main.asp. First, your hourly rate may be lower than you think. For instance, someone making $70,000 a year, but who puts in 50 hours a week and commutes an hour each way, may discover the hourly rate is not $33, but about half that.

So does that mean you hire a handyman only when he costs less than $16 an hour? It's more complicated than that. With only about 12 hours of true leisure time a day, each precious hour is bought with more than 5 hours of work. According to the calculator, each hour of spare time would then be worth about $85.

How an economist measures the value of leisure time is inexact because do-it-yourselfers sometimes have a stronger motivation than saving money. They enjoy the process. Because seeking joy is less understood than seeking money, economists are still struggling to decide whether growing tomatoes or making drapes is rational.

Putting a little joy into repair work is what motivated Mr. Stephens. "Computers were the best thing that happened to my generation," said Mr. Stephens, 37. As a student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990's, Mr. Stephens said he didn't have a lot of money. "So I started fixing things. I saw people buying computers, so that's why I went into tech support."

He had yearned to do something glamorous until he had an insight: "The world is dominated by plumbers and drywall contractors — the boring businesses," he said. "What if a creative person went into a boring business?" By age 24, he had created the Geek Squad.

"The best thing that happened to me was that I had no money," he said. It forced him to be creative. The uniform, which pokes fun at the image of the socially awkward tech-proficient person, was a way to establish a brand and concept that would be harder for others to copy. "I wanted it to look low-tech, like the guy at the service station, Ernie, who you knew all your life."

The flat fee for services, rather than an hourly rate, was an effort to avoid the expense of paperwork and monitoring the staff for fraud.

Mr. Stephens sees the world of service moving toward flat fees. "We are a flat-rate society because people are willing to pay for simplification," he said.

It is easier for consumers to understand and they are less likely to feel cheated, he said. "People hate the hourly rate. They hated it when it applied to cellphones and Internet service."

Not all on-call technicians work that way. Rescuecom, a franchise of computer technicians with 100 offices nationwide, charges hourly rates between $88 for an appointment and $250 for an emergency call. "Support is in an abysmal state," said David A. Milman, the chief executive and founder. "You have manufacturers slicing and dicing the price of computers. There is no way they can afford to provide free support."

Both Dell and Hewlett-Packard, the top PC sellers, provide enhanced customer support for a fee. Dell, for instance, will walk you through setting up a home network for $99.

Mr. Milman said he thought consumers ought to make the decision to seek professional help not on the value of their time, but on the value of the data that is on their computer.

The Geek Squad divides the world into three distinct sets of consumers. One is, of course, the do-it-yourselfers. Another is the "do it for me" crowd, those who have made the calculation that they have better use of their time. And the third set, which Mr. Stephens calls the "I thought I could do myselfers," holds some unrecognized potential.

This is the group that starts out calling customer service when faced with a technical stumbling block, only to find themselves sitting on the phone, immobile, for several hours as the problem is lobbed from one call center employee to another. After that, he said, they are more willing to consider an alternative. "They've sat on the phone one time too many," Mr. Stephens said.

Many of the hardware makers offer service contracts, because they are quite lucrative. But they are lucrative only if they can avoid sending someone to your home to fix the problem. They are designed so you end up paying extra — with your time.

That's not to say that a flat-fee service isn't also designed to help you part with your money. Mr. Stephens the Geek Squad, as part of Best Buy, turning into consultants who advise Best Buy customers on products before buying. He said that's going to become more important as Americans try to figure out how to expand home networks to link the television, PC, stereo and storage devices. "You'll see Best Buy pushing installation services," he said. "For me, service is nothing but a profit center."

And what if, by some miracle, technology becomes easier to use? No worries, he said. "The easier computers got, the more they needed us when they crash." That's because people did more things with their computers and sought help to do even more.

"Sure you can do it yourself, but it is a lot like changing your oil," he said. "Why would you?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/te...y/20money.html





It's Here; It's There; It's Spyware
Dan Mitchell

FOR all the improvements in computer security, using the Internet is growing only more dangerous — both at home and at work.

The annual Web@Work survey, conducted by Harris Interactive for the security firm Websense, found that the number of companies reporting spyware infestations had jumped 50 percent in the last year alone, and now nearly 92 percent of companies report that they have found spyware on their networks (websense.com).

Spyware is a somewhat loose term, and can mean anything from often innocuous Web cookies to Trojan programs that can hijack a computer.

But more dangerous varieties of spyware are on the rise, said Michael Newman, a vice president at Websense. He told John Gordon of "Future Tense" on American Public Media (futuretense.publicradio.org) that information technology managers were increasingly finding keylogging software on their systems. This "particularly malicious" type of spyware detects every keystroke made on a computer and can pick up passwords and other sensitive information, Mr. Newman said.

Pornography sites are among the most dangerous, with many of them replete with pop-up ads and spyware. The good news is that the number of employees reported to have visited a porn site at work dropped to 12 percent from 17 percent the last year. Of those, 95 percent said their visits to porn sites were "accidental." Whoops!

Meanwhile, SiteAdvisor, the Web safety service recently acquired by the security firm McAfee, reported this week that search engines offered little protection from dangerous sites (siteadvisor.com). This includes paid and unpaid search results. In fact, SiteAdvisor found, sponsored results on average contain two to four times the number of malicious sites as do regular results.

Some of the most popular kinds of searches lead Internet users to dangerous sites, SiteAdvisor reported. Often, the sites offer downloads like file-sharing software and screensavers that contain malicious programs. Up to 72 percent of the results from keywords like "Bearshare" or "screensaver" lead to sites that pose a risk.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/te.../20online.html





This Knee Doesn't Jerk at Every Deal
Ken Belson

Qwest Communications, the smallest of the four big Bell phone companies, has been largely out of the spotlight in the year since it lost a bidding war for MCI to Verizon Communications and settled government investigations into accounting issues.

Yet Richard C. Notebaert, Qwest's chief executive, has been anything but idle. He has cut costs and debt, added broadband and wireless customers and, in the first quarter, turned a profit without relying on one-time gains.

While Mr. Notebaert has not gone after anything the size of MCI, Qwest has sought smaller, complementary targets, including OnFiber Communications, which provides high-speed data connections for companies and the government.

Qwest also made headlines last week when its former chief executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, said that he denied a government request in 2001 to hand over customer records. That came after USA Today reported that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth had cooperated. The paper also said that Mr. Notebaert continued Mr. Nacchio's policy after he took over for him in 2002.

Mr. Notebaert will not comment on national security issues.

But, in an interview last week, he did discuss other challenges facing Qwest. Following are excerpts:

Q. You said on your most recent earnings call that Qwest had turned a corner. What corner?

A. We don't talk about turning the corner because I don't think you ever do. But we had a number of milestones. For example, revenue in 2002 was declining at nearly 8 percent and now we're positive. We've had negative cash flow. Last year we did $904 million of cash flow adjusted and this year we'll do $450 million to $600 million more. Then getting all that litigation with the government squared away. And now, to hit profitability, without any adjustments, that feels very good to everybody.

Q. There's been consolidation in the industry, but Qwest has not really found a partner in the big dance. Does Qwest need to do a deal?

A. We have two filters that we run everything through. Whether you're a buyer or a seller, you run it through the same filter. What is the strategic complement of what you're going to do? And then, secondly, what's your price point?

We are constantly looking at all the companies that you would think of and some you probably are not. For example, a systems integrator or hosting companies as well as traditional people in the communications business. We're very, very, very disciplined. We have lots of organic growth opportunity just doing what we do. So we don't have to knee- jerk into anything.

Q. Might you be more of an acquisition target?

A. If I looked at it as a consultant or an adviser, I would look at Qwest today and say most of the things that made me uncomfortable before are gone. Again, the government — at every level we're O.K. The debt load's down, profitability's up. Everything's squared away and there's no threat of bankruptcy, which you might have thought about a few years ago. And the company has solid performance characteristics. And it's throwing off good cash. It's profitable. And it's got a wonderful group of employees. So I don't think we're unattractive.

Q. On the wireless side, you resell Sprint. A huge portion of the profits at Verizon come from Verizon Wireless. Would it make sense to own your own wireless business?

A. Well, it doesn't matter. We don't. You play the hand you're dealt.

Q. There are midtier wireless operators that are increasingly national.

A. There's a company like U.S. Cellular that's outstanding. To go out and buy them would be challenging to say the least.

Q. You resell DirecTV, but given what AT&T and Verizon are doing with television and the enormous capital that involves, do you see Qwest going down that road?

A. You still have to push high bandwidth out to the customer. The key is to do it in a very disciplined way so that your return on invested capital is there. About 35 percent of our capital investment this year will be bandwidth improvements.

Q. Wall Street compares you with Verizon and AT&T, which have video projects. Do you think you're viewed negatively because you don't?

A. There is nothing wrong with being a fast follower. In fact, there are a lot of advantages to being a fast follower versus the bleeding edge. Instead of generic 2.0, I'll be at 2.5.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/te...interview.html





Pixar's 'Cars' Got Its Kicks on Route 66
Phil Patton

THE cars of "Cars," the animated Pixar film that opens nationally on June 9, were designed on Route 66.

But not entirely — they were also designed at Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., where 800 animators and other dreamers work on 3,000 computers inside a former fruit processing plant. But to hear Michael Wallis, a historian of the highways, tell it, they were inspired by research expeditions to racetracks, styling studios and car shows.

Inspiration also flowed from the ruins of a Packard plant on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit and from the Detroit Institute of Arts, with its car-factory murals by Diego Rivera — and from what's left of the legendary Route 66, an artery through the heart of the American Dream.

A tour guide and author of "Route 66: The Mother Road," among other books, Mr. Wallis led the Pixar crew along Route 66.

The most lovable character in "Cars" is Mater, a rusty tow truck with the voice of Larry the Cable Guy. That's Mater, as in "Tow-Mater," an aptly cornball pun. Mr. Wallis recalls the time and place he was created. "There was an old wrecker in an empty lot by Route 66 in Galena, Kan.," he said. "Joe Ranft, the studio's head of story and a key member of the Pixar team, stopped and noticed it, and Mater was born."

Acting as a consultant for the Pixar team — Mr. Ranft; John Lasseter, the director; and other top animators — Mr. Wallis played Beatrice to their Dante.

Just as auto designers have produced cars that come close to cartoons — think of the gangsteresque Chrysler PT Cruiser, the pull-toy Volkswagen New Beetle, the biceps-bulging Chrysler 300 — the designers of cartoons have turned to creating cars.

It is not as easy as it seems, Mr. Lasseter said. In January 2005, he came to the Detroit auto show and spoke about his project at the AutoWeek Design Forum. The crucial decision, he said, was to forgo the usual idea of the "face" of a car, with the headlights serving as the eyes and the grille as the mouth. He moved the eyes to the windshield to keep the cars from looking empty and driverless.

The team took constant pains "to keep the cars from looking rubbery, " Mr. Lasseter said. Much effort and computer-processing power went into rendering realistically shifting reflections on the cars' metal surfaces, from the rust of old trucks to the metal-flake custom cars, using a computer technique called ray tracing.

The release of "Cars" was delayed seven months during the negotiations that led to Disney's recent purchase of Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. The formal premiere is Friday on four giant screens erected on Turn 2 of Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C. That location is courtesy of Humpy Wheeler, president and general manager of the speedway and Nascar's éminence grise, who provides the movie voice of Tex, a 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with long horns above his grille. Richard Petty, the racing legend, also has a speaking role.

The cars tend to types. George Carlin plays Fillmore, a VW bus whose front license plate suggests a beatnik's goatee. Sarge is a Jeep, Flo a waitress (inspired, Mr. Wallis says, by a real waitress, Dawn Welch, at the Rock Café in Stroud, Okla.). A 1957 Motorama show car, Flo boasts (through chrome lips) of selling "the best gas in 50 states."

Ramone, the '59 Chevy Impala lowrider, has the voice of Cheech Marin, the stoner comedian. Lightning McQueen's archrival, Chick Hicks, is a tough, intimidating competitor in the vein of the late Dale Earnhardt.

The more you know about cars and car movies the richer the experience of watching. Paul Newman gives voice to Doc Hudson, a wise retired racer turned mechanic. It helps if you know that the Hudson Hornet, for which the Pixar team dug up vintage paint chips to assure realism, was once a Nascar racer and that Newman acted in a film called "Hud." Yes, the car has blue eyes.

The sheriff of Radiator Springs is a 1949 Mercury, and its voice is Mr. Wallis's. The author is delighted with his role. "That car has always been one of my favorites, and it fits my personality," he said. "My rapidly whitening mustache looks more like that Mercury's grille every day."

Mr. Lasseter recounted how the idea for the film was born in the summer of 2000 when, exhausted after nearly a decade of work on films like "Toy Story" and "Monsters, Inc.," he decided to take a cross-country road trip with his wife and five sons.

A large man habitually garbed in a capacious Hawaiian shirt — a look that suggests a perpetual fantasy vacation — Mr. Lasseter is the son of a onetime Chevrolet parts manager in Whittier, Calif. He had long wanted to make a film about the car culture.

When he returned to the studio from his vacation, he plunged into the new project. One of the first things he did was contact Mr. Wallis, who led the Pixar animators on two trips across Route 66 to research the film. Bypassed by Interstate 40 and other modern highways, Route 66 — the pieces that remain — has been reborn as a tourist road. Real motels and restaurants served as models for those in Radiator Springs, like the Cozy Cone Motel and V-8 Cafe.

"They saw the teepee-shaped motels and gas stations," Mr. Wallis said in the rawhide tones he uses on his road tours. "They felt the wind through the winter wheat. They gulped it all in."

The theme is a tried and true one that grew out of Mr. Lasseter's own experience: getting out of the fast lane and understanding that the journey is the reward — a phrase often used both by Mr. Lasseter and by Steven P. Jobs, Pixar's co-founder.

The film follows its hero, Lightning McQueen, a Corvettelike racer with the voice of Owen Wilson, as it travels the racing circuit from town to town, combining the narrative device of the road trip with bursts of action. But the racecar gets sidetracked in Radiator Springs.

"He's speedy and arrogant," Mr. Wallis said. "In our bypassed town we teach him to slow down. In turn, he inspires us to rebuild our town."

Mr. Wallis, along with his wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, also wrote a book about the making of the film. The lush pastel and color pencil sketches in "The Art of Cars" (Chronicle, $40) show that Pixar's ideas have roots in the hand, not just in the computer. Sketches by Nat McLaughlin for flowers in the film — their blossoms shaped like taillights — are works of art.

Mr. Lasseter and his group visited design studios for the Big Three automakers in Detroit but particularly hit it off with J Mays, the Ford Motor Company's group vice president for design. "We are on the same wavelength," Mr. Mays said.

He said he had admired the cars in "The Incredibles," another Pixar film, because they demonstrated a knowledge of auto history and design. "You could see they had done a lot of research," said Mr. Mays, who is thanked in the credits for "Cars."

Mr. Mays and Mr. Lasseter bonded and exchanged studio visits. Mr. Lasseter learned how real cars are designed. Mr. Mays was impressed with Pixar's obsessive attention to detail. "They want to get things right even if no one can tell," he said. "If it was wrong, they would know."

The cars in "Cars" are much more sophisticated than those in "The Incredibles." Computers used for the new film are four times as fast as those, and 1,000 times as fast as the ones for "Toy Story." What gives the cars character is the way they move on their wheels, like creatures on feet.

Of course, designing cars for computer animation is not designing for the real world, but it has similarities. To orchestrate the motion, Pixar used a shared platform, a system not unlike a real carmaker's. The film's cars have a common software "chassis," a "universal rig" of 100 animation controls known as avars. Suspensions are customized: the 50's cars are looser and bouncier.

Pixar had to design a whole landscape. In a world of cars, Mr. Lasseter explained, "a restaurant is a gas station and a doctor is a mechanic." The town of Radiator Springs includes a tire (shoe) store run by Luigi, a Fiat with a hairpiece whose voice is that of Tony Shalhoub of the television series "Monk."

The Western landscape of so many auto advertisements is echoed in the film's Ornament Valley, where mountains look like tailfins. The vista was inspired by a visit to Don Sommer of Clawson, Mich., who collects vintage hood ornaments and whose company, American Arrow, makes reproductions. The Cadillac Range of mountains was inspired by a visit to the Cadilllac Ranch art installation near Amarillo, Tex.

For Route 66, Mr. Wallis loaded the animators into rented white Cadillacs. "We rode three big new Detroit sleds," he said. The animators decorated the cars by attaching items found on the roadside: sheaves of wheat, bunches of thistles, sunflowers, snake skins and a road-kill armadillo. "We called this stuff Okie hood ornaments," Mr. Wallis said.

At trip's end, he said, "We buried it all in the high desert," adding: "We had a ceremony. I spoke some words and one of the animators, Bud Luckey, played a few bars on his harmonica. I'll never forget it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/au...es/21AUTO.html





What a field day for the heat

Police Requests for Corporate Data Multiply

Businesses juggle law-enforcement demands for information about customers, suppliers
Robert Block

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement efforts to secure corporate information about clients and suppliers have reached such levels that some companies have had to create special units that do nothing but deal with these demands, a process often called "subpoena management."

Banks, Internet-service providers and other companies that possess large amounts of data on their customers say that police and intelligence agencies have been increasingly coming to them looking for tidbits of information that could help them stop everything from money launderers to pedophiles and terrorists.

"Corporate counsel that used to see law-enforcement-related requests five times a year are now getting them sometimes dozens of times a day," says Susan Hackett, a senior vice president and top attorney for the Association of Corporate Counsel, which represents the legal departments of leading U.S. companies.

In short, phone companies currently caught up in a controversy over reports that they gave the National Security Agency access to records of customers' calls are hardly the only businesses fretting over how to cooperate with the government in the war on terror. Internet and financial companies also are frequently targeted by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, forcing them into situations where they must choose between customers' rights to privacy and their own corporate desire to help the government without being seen as agents of the government.

The situation is made even more complicated when the companies are government contractors, vying for federal business or in an industry subject to complicated regulation.

Time Warner Inc.'s America Online Inc. employs more than a dozen people, including several former prosecutors, handling almost 12,000 requests a year from federal state and local police agencies. The unit works 24 hours a day, seven days a week and maintains a special hotline that police or federal agents can call to help them with their queries and tailor their requests. For the last five years the company has published a "Law Enforcement Training Manual" complete with information about how long the company retains basic subscriber information and unread email, to sample subpoena and court-order wordings to speed processing of the police demands.

According to AOL executives, the most common requests in criminal cases relate to crimes against children, including abuse, abductions, and child pornography. Close behind are cases dealing with identity theft and other computer crimes. Sometimes the police requests are highly targeted and scrupulously legalistic, while other times they were seen by the company as little more than sloppy fishing expeditions. AOL says that most requests get turned down.

"We have a very rigorous review process here," said John Ryan, AOL's vice president and associate general counsel. "Every request that comes in from law enforcement is vetted, and before any information is turned over an attorney with years of experience reviews it and determines whether or not any turn-around or process is required. I can say -- ballpark figure -- for every five requests that come in maybe one will fit the standard to a certain level and will be honored."

In other cases, companies have no choice but to surrender records. New powers granted to the government under the Patriot Act mean that Washington can secretly access people's records from businesses without having to provide any notification or seek a judge's permission. Companies are in fact prohibited by the law from disclosing that they had received such requests.

The Justice Department last month reported that the FBI last year issued 9,200 administrative subpoenas known as National Security Letters, seeking information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks, credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval. The records are supposed to be about people in terrorism and espionage investigations, but the FBI is not required to show how they are connected to any terrorism case.

Some companies have been wrestling with how far to cooperate with government investigations even before 9-11. AOL first noticed law-enforcement agencies' burgeoning interest in their members' online activities in the mid-90s in child-porn cases. FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc. struggled with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency over the agencies' attempts to get unfettered access to the shippers' systems as part of the war against drug traffickers.

Since 2001, the pressure on them has grown as the amount of electronic information provided to or compiled by companies has grown to include everything from customer names and addresses to shopping preferences and pastime activities. The Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and Justice as well as the CIA have increasingly viewed this data as a veritable treasure trove that can be tapped to help thwart crimes and identify potential terrorist attacks in the making.

Ms. Hackett of the organization of corporate counsel said that corporate lawyers often spend their energies negotiating with the government to limit the scope of their demands rather than to refuse them outright. "Companies want to be cooperative, but also have to protect their interests and their clients, and the best way to do that is determine upfront, right away about what the government is going to get and when," she said. "Often the government agrees because it doesn't want to go public with a fight."

Fights are sometimes inevitable. Last year, the Justice Department demanded that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft MSN and Google hand over customer search records in a bid to prove that filtering software doesn't screen kids from online porn. Google refused, saying that the government was abusing its subpoena power by seeking information that had nothing to do with criminal prosecution. A judge ultimately ruled that Google need turn over only 50,000 Web addresses, not the one million originally subpoenaed.

But even when companies can push back they are not always willing to do so. Because they are so heavily regulated, phone companies have a long history of contact with the federal government. And the government has long been one of the telecom companies' biggest customers offering multimillion contracts for services. One key federal technology-service contract called "Networx" worth roughly $20 billion is up for grabs now. It's likely it will parceled out to several telecom companies over the next year or so.

--Dionne Searcey and Jay Solomon contributed to this article
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Lawyer Demands U Fla Cops' Documents On Fiction Writer
Cory Doctorow

Mitchell L Silverman, an attorney in Hollywood, Florida, was so outraged by the story of University of Florida cops leaning on a grad student who published fiction on his LiveJournal recounting a murder that he's filed an official request with the U Fla police for copies of all the police notes on the file. The cops have a legal obligation to disclose these records under state law.

Philip Sandifer is the U Fla grad student in Gainesville from whom the campus police demanded DNA and fingerprints. Sandifer had published a short story about a murderer who cites his crimes in a letter to the Special Forces as qualifications for a job with them. The cops' rationale was that even if it was fiction, you can't be too safe, and besides, they didn't think that English students should be writing about murder.

It looks like the original complaint came from people whom Sandifer had argued with over Wikipedia -- a message-board for disgruntled Wikipedians contains a discussion of Sandifer's story and the mischief that could be had by complaining the university about it, noting, "it wouldn't take much to put him in a position where he either decides to leave Wikipedia or decides that he doesn't need a Ph.D. after all." Sandifer told the police about this, but they continued to pressure him for DNA samples, threatening to obtain them from his garbage if he refused to comply.

The U Fla police refused to speak with me, and (via a university spokesman) denied asking for Sandifer's prints and DNA and condemning his writing -- but Sandifer's story is corroborated by his advisor, Sid Dobrin, who was present during one of their interviews with him.

Silverman is acting on his own in this request for documents -- he's not Sandifer's attorney. He's just an outraged Floridan who wants to know why the cops in his state are policing fiction. Link
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/24...nds_u_fla.html





Open Letter to Ministers Oda and Bernier

Canadian Federation of Students, Ottawa, 17 Apr 06

The Honourable Maxime Bernier P.C., M.P.
Minister of Industry
5th floor, West Tower
C.D. Howe Building
235 Queen St.
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0H5


The Honourable Bev Oda P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage
25 Eddy Street
Gatineau, Quebec
K1A 0M5


April 17, 2006


Dear Ministers,


Re: Copyright Legislation


I am writing on behalf of over one-half million members of the Canadian Federation of Students.


In the next year, Parliament will likely examine a Bill to amend the Copyright Act. Students in Canada are greatly concerned about reasonable access to information and knowledge as digital technology increasingly plays an instrumental role in learning and research. Canada’s students have concerns with respect to calls from other stakeholders for legislation that would restrict access to materials on the internet and impose unwarranted and unmanageable fees on libraries, educational institutions and students. We are writing to urge the Canadian government to reject proposals for restrictive copyright laws, and to instead embrace policies that will support Canada’s vibrant and open knowledge community.


Bill C-60, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, died on the order paper with the fall of the 38th Parliament. While students in Canada were pleased with some of the proposed amendments, the bill could have gone much further to promote Canada’s best interests.


Specifically, our issues include:


1. Legal Protection for Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) Developments over the past year have demonstrated that legal protection of TPMs and DRM is unnecessary and would be harmful to Canada’s students. Lobbyists are stating such protections are necessary as an incentive to use such technologies and build “new business models” around them. However, even without special legal protection, the content industry is increasingly rolling out TPMs and DRM. As the Sony BMG “rootkit” DRM amply demonstrated, these technologies are being used not to control copying, but to segment markets and to tie consumers to specific devices, and are dangerous to consumers’ privacy. DRM and TPMs replaces copyright’s balanced allocation of rights
with one dictated by the content distributor. These often infringe on students’ rights to
practice fair dealing with digital works, such as reverse engineering. We call on the
Canadian government to refrain from legislating special protection for DRM and TPMs.


If the government chooses to so legislate, it should do so in a way that:


• Is consistent, and does not replace, copyright law;


• Recognizes appropriate limits on the invasiveness and scope of such technologies; and


• Does not outlaw the “tools” and “devices” that are essential to academic research but that may be used to circumvent TPMs or tamper with DRM.


2. Internet Service Provider (ISP) Liability – “notice and takedown” vs. “notice and notice”:


Previous discussions on this issue have focused on two methods of insulating ISPs from liability for the infringing activities of their customers: “notice and takedown” and “notice and notice”. We urge the government to adopt the “notice and notice” approach to ISP liability, as was outlined in Bill C-60. We oppose a “notice and takedown” procedure, because:


• it aims to silence an alleged infringer without proving infringement;


• it bypasses the mechanisms IP law has developed to arrest use of allegedly infringing material prior to a judgment;


• notice and takedown inhibits freedom of speech; and


• there is evidence that this system is already abused in the United States.


We urge the government to maintain the current “notice and notice” procedure as it was
proposed in Bill C-60. This procedure is preferable because:


• it achieves exactly what the law requires: notice of the allegation of infringement;


• it is up to the content user at that point to decide whether or not to continue with the allegedly infringing activity; and


• the ISP remains neutral in the dispute, and can focus on providing Internet services, not taking sides in a dispute to which it is not a party.


3. Fair Dealing


A shortcoming of the current copyright law to address is the narrow scope of Canada’s “fair dealing” defense. Students in Canada would like to see fair dealing revised to be more in line with the “fair use” defense enjoyed by students in the United States, Canadian students ask this government to amend the Act as follows:


• Eliminate fair dealing’s restrictive, categorical approach (“for the purposes of...”) in favour of an “inclusive” approach (“for purposes including...“)


• Harmonize Canadian laws with American laws to clarify that fair dealing may include making multiple copies of copyrighted materials for classroom use


• Clarify that fair dealing embraces reverse engineering, parody, and the educational use of digital materials.


4. Digital Interlibrary Loan and Distance Learning


Canadian educational institutions are increasingly relying on distance education tools to improve the opportunities for learning enjoyed by Canadian students. Copyright law must support, not impede, this development. Canada’s students increasingly rely on interlibrary loan. Libraries and students need the flexibility and support that this service can provide. We supported Bill C-60’s approach to digital interlibrary loan and distance education, but reject the wastefully burdensome and technologically-partisan manner in which it sought to curtail these user rights. In our view, the Act should not unfairly and needlessly hinder educational institutions, libraries and students. We call on this government to clarify that distance learning and digital interlibrary loan are user rights, and to implement them in a manner that is fair, productive, and technologically neutral.


5. Statutory Damages


We call on this government to reform Canada’s statutory damages regime. Statutory damages have no place in license bargaining between collectives and Canada’s public institutions. Statutory damages are an effective tool to address enforcement of IP rights in commercial piracy cases. Educational institutions, libraries and archives are not commercial pirates. They should not suffer the threat of statutory damages. Students are concerned that the collectives and the major publishing and recording industries– entities motivated by profit–have been wielding too much influence in the process to-date, thereby drowning the legitimate concerns of teachers, researchers, librarians, and students.


In drafting new legislation, we ask members of Parliament to establish widespread consultations with diverse stakeholders on the matter. The last round of consultations was already five years ago and there have been many technological advances and legal developments since then. Students have previously not participated in such consultations and we ask that we be represented in such consultations.


We would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with you.


Sincerely,


[Signed in original]


Angela Regnier
National Deputy Chairperson
Canadian Federation of Students


cc: Patricia Neri, Director General, Copyright Policy, Department of Canadian Heritage, Susan Bincoletto, Director General, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, Industry Canada
http://action.web.ca/home/cfs/en_ale...ee 5fa6fe93a4