Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 28th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine....

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine with Pac-Man hacked onto it without disturbing any of the "tamper-evident" seals supposedly meant to protect it from hackers...

Any questions?..." – Brad Friedman


"I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community - the people who pay the taxes." – North Carolina State Sen. David Hoyle, D-43rd
































It’s Tough Being an Oligarch

The Belgium ISP had been up in arms since a subscribing household was clocked using 2.7 TBs of “unlimited” bandwidth in a single month. The company was so nervous they launched a PR offensive and posted the anxiety provoking stats. Commentators worldwide decried the unidentified user, even on tech sites, saying the pig was ruining it for the rest of us.

People wondered how it could be. How could any household suck up so much bandwidth?

The poor guys at Telenet sounded so hard up I thought I’d have a look, and you know, see if I could help them out.

Turns out, well, it’s easily done. Probably a bunch of roommates sharing a connection. That’s all. You wouldn’t even need a frat house (but that might be more fun).

Allow me.

I once did 110 gigs in just over nine days (11.78GB/day-avg) when Oink had a free leach and I had a slow 1.25 MB connection. That was quite a while ago. Since then my ADSL speed’s increased four-fold to 5 megs down so I could do nearly 1.5 TB/mo now or more than half the Belgian’s totals by myself if I had a reason, and free leach at a good private tracker is a great reason. With higher speed cable in a house share I could see this happening occasionally, and unremarkably. The Telenet customer(s) had 30 megs down, or 24x my old speed. They could have done it the same way I did in 2006: by maxing out their connection for nine days straight and then shutting down for the rest of the month. Not even news as far as I’m concerned.

What is worth remarking on however is the fact that the minuscule totals of an ISP’s least active customers garner neither headlines nor refunds, nor do ISPs offer rollover gigs when their breathless PR results in the inevitable capping, which as you’ve probably guessed is what this nonsense is all about.

Fairness has nothing to do with it. It’s about money. It’s about charging more. Mostly it’s about ducking responsibility by blaming customers instead of upgrading equipment. It’s shock and awe. Screaming press releases and forum posts of gluttonous subscribers making life hell for hapless oligarchs.

Please.

















Enjoy,

Jack

















August 28th, 2010




FTC Drops LimeWire ID Theft Investigation

Regulators dropped an investigation into whether LimeWire file-sharing software put users' personal information at risk of identity theft, according to a letter sent to the company earlier this month.

In the letter, the Federal Trade Commission said research showed consumers continue to inadvertently share sensitive documents via peer-to-peer software like LimeWire. The FTC also said it is imperative that distributors of such software "act more responsibly and provide safeguards against inadvertent sharing."

The Commission said it decided not to recommend any further action as newer versions of LimeWire's software had better safeguards.

But it said LimeWire still has to improve its service further for less savvy consumers.

"We remain concerned, however, about consumers who are still using insecure legacy versions and are therefore subject to a risk of inadvertent sharing of sensitive, personal information," it said in the letter dated August 19.

"We expect LimeWire to continue to advise consumers to upgrade legacy versions of its software because of the potential safety benefits of doing so."

LimeWire said in a statement that the regulators' decision spoke to the initiatives the company had already undertaken to protect users.

"We have incorporated many safeguards and have taken active steps to educate users of current and older software versions to avoid disclosure of sensitive information.

LimeWire has been in a separate long-running dispute with major record companies over online music piracy. In June, record companies accused the company and its founder, Mark Groton, of fraudulently trying to evade hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over copyright infringement.

The labels are owned by major music companies including Vivendi's (VIV.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment (SNE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Warner Music Group (WMG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Terra Firma's TERA.UL EMI Group.

LimeWire created its service in 2000 and has said it has more than 50 million monthly users. These users accounted for 58 percent of people who said they downloaded music from a peer-to-peer service in 2009, a survey by NPD Group said.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Richard Chang; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67Q07620100827





RIAA: U.S. Copyright Law 'Isn't Working'
Declan McCullagh

The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it "isn't working" for content creators any longer.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers' unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.

"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."

The complex--and controversial--1998 law grew out of years of negotiations with broadband providers, Internet companies, and content industries. One key section says companies are generally not liable for hosting copyright-infringing materials posted by their companies, as long as they follow certain removal procedures, once contacted by the owner.

In response to a question from CNET, Sherman said it may be necessary for the U.S. Congress to enact a new law formalizing agreements with intermediaries such as broadband providers, Web hosts, payment processors, and search engines.

The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries, Sherman said: "We're working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we'd like to extend that kind of relationship--not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers."

But, Sherman said, "if legislation is an appropriate way to facilitate that kind of cooperation, fine."

Lance Kavanaugh, product counsel for YouTube, disagreed that copyright law is broken. "It's our view that the DMCA is functioning exactly the way Congress intended it to," he said.

The United States leads the world in the creation of innovative new Web ideas, Kavanaugh said, in part as a result of the compromises made when drafting that law: "There's legal plumbing to allow that to happen, to allow those small companies to innovate without [the] crushing fear of lawsuits, as long as they follow certain rules. Congress was prescient. They struck the right balance."

Last week, the RIAA and a dozen other music industry groups called on Google and Verizon to crack down on piracy, saying in a letter that "the current legal and regulatory regime is not working for America's creators."

Sherman acknowledged on Monday that YouTube is now doing a fine job of filtering and removing copyright-infringing videos. But, he said, Google "could stop filtering tomorrow and have no liability," as long as its YouTube subsidiary replied promptly to notifications.

And, he suggested, it could do far more: "If you enter in 'Beyonce MP3,' chances are, the first thing you'll see is illegal sites."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20014468-38.html





RIAA: DMCA Isn't Working - Don't Tell that to Jailbreakers
Thomas Mennecke

The DMCA isn't working - at least for Cary Sherman and the RIAA. After 10 years since the rise of Napster and mainstream P2P, the hysteria that once accompanied file-sharing has since died down, but the legacy it created lives on. The DMCA was signed into law just one year before the launch of Napster, and its origins are itself composed of years worth of negotiations that preceded it. In essence, the DMCA was created during a time when existing technology might as well been carved from rock - a period known as the early 90s.

There was no Napster, P2P, MP3 files, or iPhones back then. Computers and monitors were bulking heaps, running the pinnacle of OS technology, Windows 3.1. No one ever envisioned the massive BitTorrent networks that would dominate the Internet or the level of music or movie trading that accompanies it. The question is…does an old document designed for a different technological era still apply today?

We've managed to keep the Constitution as the basis of US law for 234 years, so the DMCA's comparatively diminutive age shouldn't be an issue. But is it?

According to the RIAA, yes. Although the DMCA is often criticized and damned to hell by file-sharers, it has also granted several provisions that make life easier for the online world. Chiefly, it grants safe harbor to ISPs, granting them impunity for any illegal transmission that may traverse their networks. That includes such illegal transmissions like a P2P upload of a copyrighted work - something the RIAA doesn't like.

From CNet: "The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he [Cary Sherman] said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum... "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."

As crappy as the DMCA might be, such as "preventing" research into breaking DRM (Digital Rights Management), it’s managed to throw a few gems as well. Of course there are the safe harbor provisions, something ISPs will have to be bonkers to give up, and the recent iPhone jailbreaking exemption granted by the US Copyright Office.

Cary made no mention of that particularity, but we can't help but think that Apple’s sentiment is nearly identical to the RIAA’s
http://www.slyck.com/story2029_RIAA_...Jailbreak ers





Joel Tenenbaum to Appeal Filesharing Fine
Eamonn Forde

Joel Tenenbaum, who was convicted of illegally sharing 30 songs online, is to appeal a 90% reduction in the damages he has to pay by way of settlement.

He was originally ordered by a court in Boston to pay $675k (£435k), but this was later reduced to $67.5k (£43.5k) last month after a judge deemed the initial fine to be “unconstitutional”.

Tenenbaum says he still cannot pay this, even though it is just 10% of the original fine set by the court. The Boston Globe reports that Tenenbaum's attorney will now appeal the reduced fine in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The RIAA, acting on behalf of the US record labels, has stated that it will appeal the fine reduction, terming it “erroneous and unprecedented”.
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?s...de=1042327&c=1





Filesharing “Bully” Lawyer Facing Disiplinary Tribunal
John Lister

Legal regulators have decided a solicitor accused of bullying computer users with threats over filesharing claims should be investigated by a disciplinary body. Andrew Crossley works for ACS Law Solicitors, which has sent thousands of letters calling for compensation payments, including from users who claim to be innocent.

As we noted last year, Which? Computing (a magazine produced by independent consumer watchdog the Consumers Association) reported that more than 20 readers had written in to say they’d been falsely accused of sharing PC games.

The accusations are based on customer details obtained by the lawyers from internet service providers, linked to the IP addresses on record as having shared the files. The magazine believes that with false accusations the most likely explanation (beyond simple mistakes) is that wireless connections had been left unsecured and “piggybacked” by other users.

The letters demanded that the recipients pay £500 compensation and £25 costs (around US$800 at current exchange rates). Given the number of recipients, the company has demanded a total of more than £3 million. It appears few if any of the recipients have subsequently been successfully prosecuted over the claims.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has now decided to refer Crossley to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. It may be some time before that leads to any action: a similar case involving the legal company that preceded ACS as the lawyers for the games companies has yet to produce a hearing date.

Deborah Prince, the legal head for Which?, said of the Crossley referral: “We welcome this decision because we’ve received so many complaints from consumers who believe they been treated appallingly by this law firm. We also believe that it’s time for the profession to take action against law firms, and those responsible for them, which behave in a way we believe most right-thinking people would view as both aggressive and bullying.”
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...nary-tribunal/





D.I.Y. Music Labels Embrace D.I.Y. Film
Melena Ryzik

ON a midsummer night a few dozen people, many in glasses and with messenger bags, gathered at Zebulon, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to watch a new low-budget movie called “The Builder.” The story of a contemplative Irish immigrant, it moved slowly, driven by atmosphere rather than dialogue, but the audience watched patiently at small candle-lit tables, beers in hand. It was the antithesis of a typical summer-movie outing, but that was sort of the point.

“It’s just great to see people with drinks and candles,” said R. Alverson, the film’s director. “It’s so much more personal than seeing it in a theater.”

Everything about “The Builder” seems personal. Mr. Alverson, a musician-turned-filmmaker, made it with friends and untrained actors for $5,000, including the cost of camera gear. To release it, he turned to Jagjaguwar, an indie rock label in Bloomington, Ind., whose roster of musicians includes Bon Iver, Okkervil River and Mr. Alverson’s former band. Jagjaguwar put “The Builder” out on DVD, organized a few screenings and hoped for the best.

“As a film distributor, we have no experience,” said Chris Swanson, who helps run the label. “We’re approaching it the same way we did music, like, find a nice room and put the work on display in a dignified manner.”

The audience was small, but Jagjaguwar had already agreed to finance Mr. Alverson’s next feature. It views him as an artistic investment: helping him develop his oeuvre is akin to supporting a band from the release of its first seven-inch.

“I realized his artistic voice is far more conducive to film, and if he had a continuum of work, it would have real meaning,” Mr. Swanson said. “And our audience knows how to take it in.”

Jagjaguwar is one of a number of indie music labels and hybrid companies that have turned to film distribution, some following the model laid out by seminal punk labels like Dischord and Touch and Go: stay small and informal, know your audience, and put out stuff you like. In the last few years, both the independent film world and the independent music world have stratified, shrunk by digital sales, a crowded entertainment market and the collapse of major specialty divisions. Money is harder to come by now. But experimentation can rule, and a few players have found that there’s a niche, and a clear overlap, in putting out D.I.Y. music and D.I.Y. film.

“The mediums aren’t exactly the same, but the ways of doing things, getting the word out, I think there’s a lot of similarities,” said David Fenkel of Oscilloscope Pictures, which he founded with Adam Yauch, who is much better known as MCA of the Beastie Boys. “A theatrical campaign is not that much different than going on tour with a musician, and creating an event,” Mr. Fenkel said, calling the evolution from music to film “natural” and “awesome.” In its two-year existence, Oscilloscope has released a slate of attention-getting features and documentaries and even won Oscar nominations for “The Messenger” and “Burma VJ.”

This summer, Drag City, a Chicago label, distributed “Trash Humpers,” the fifth feature by Harmony Korine (the screenwriter of Larry Clark’s “Kids”). “We were very glad to take it on,” said Rian Murphy, Drag City’s sales director, “because it is something new and different, and we like that kind of thing, and because it doesn’t have to do with the record business right now, which is kind of in a bummer.” Drag City, which represents musicians like Joanna Newsom and Silver Jews, bought prints of the film and “made sure they were in constant motion” around the country.

“Trash Humpers” was “not held to the traditional channels for distributing a movie,” Mr. Murphy said, “because we don’t know what those are.”

He added: “If someone e-mails us, and they’re not a complete lunatic, or if they are a complete lunatic, and they have money and a screen....”

As a result, the film has played at a beer bar in Chattanooga, Tenn., a bookstore in Houston and the George Eastman House in Rochester, extending its life beyond the art house. (How many screens? Mr. Murphy didn’t know; the company barely even signs contracts with its artists. “It changes the atmosphere,” he said.) The “Trash Humpers” DVD is due in September.

Working on the film, Mr. Murphy said, helped Drag City answer a question it had lately been pondering: “If you have an apparatus which is designed to meet a demand, does it matter what kind of demand you’re meeting?” In this case the answer was no: cult content is cult content. But that calculation must be tweaked when there is relatively little demand.

Last year Matt Grady started Factory 25, a distribution company that releases vinyl records with its movies. With DVD sales jeopardized by digital downloads, Mr. Grady knew he would need another angle to appeal to consumers, but he didn’t want to sacrifice the physical object. So he packaged DVDs with limited edition LPs. “I wanted to make it cool, like a fetish item that people would want,” he said.

In most cases the album is the film’s soundtrack, but for “Make-Out With Violence,” a teen zombie movie that is opening on Friday at the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn, Factory 25 is featuring the music of a band, the Non-Commissioned Officers, formed by the lead actors. The band got together during the shoot and has since toured and played Bonnaroo, the music festival in rural Tennessee.

Still, neither the film nor the group is particularly well known. A typical run for Mr. Grady — Factory 25’s sole employee — means 1,000 DVD-LPs. He needs to sell about 400 to break even. He also sells his releases on iTunes and offers downloads from his own site. His hope is to build Factory 25’s reputation with a catalog of films that would be hard to find elsewhere, keeping collectors in mind. “I’m putting out a black metal documentary — for something very genre-specific, people will want a physical thing,” he said. “I’m definitely looking for titles that have a specific audience, a core following that will want it.”

That is also a goal for Todd Sklar, who borrows from the music world more directly: he takes films on tour. Starting in 2008 with his own movie, a college comedy, Mr. Sklar, 26, traveled around the country in a van with a few buddies, crashing on couches and setting up screenings for unreleased films, including festival favorites. Last year his company, Range Life, took 14 films to 40 cities, using its 1986 Toyota as a mobile office. He has built up a network of cinephile and media contacts at each stop but is still fine-tuning his business plan.

“We make money for the films, but as a company we’re just staying afloat,” said Mr. Sklar, who moved to New York in February. To supplement its income Range Life has leveraged its D.I.Y. credibility to promote movies like the Banksy documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” This fall it will take eight films to 85 cities.

Janet Pierson, the producer of the film festival and conference for SXSW in Austin, Tex., said that it was too soon to tell what might work in the shifting creative landscape but that many were energized by the possibilities. “The music and film business, none of them can count on what sustained them for a number of decades, so they’re all trying to figure out what can we do, how can we connect with audiences,” she said.

As Oscilloscope and countless resolute indie bands show, success can be found on the margins of the mainstream. “It’s about taste,” Mr. Fenkel of Oscilloscope said. “Finding films and releasing films because you want to release them and you want to do right by them, and that’s what the priority is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/movies/22indie.html





Hey, Big Spender: Hollywood Isn’t in the Mood
Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

JOEL SILVER stands on the Warner Brothers lot and points to the remnants of a house where he filmed parts of four “Lethal Weapon” movies. “We blasted a toilet out of that window,” he says, smiling proudly. “Over there, we drove a car straight into the living room.”

Ah, the glory days.

Behind Mr. Silver, the flamboyant producer of some of the biggest action hits of the last 30 years, is the modest set for one of his current films, an R-rated comedy with no stars, almost no budget and — for now — no title. Not that Mr. Silver was ready to call the production small. “It’s a little movie, but it’s a big little movie,” he says.

And therein lies Mr. Silver’s challenge: How does a larger-than-life, free-spending producer fit into a movie business that has been tightening up — and cutting some of its more grandiose characters down to size?

In the new Hollywood, stars count for less, whether in front of the camera or behind it. Financial firepower and technological wizardry matter more. And a generation of producers — whose principal assets were their industry connections and a remarkable degree of personal force — are having to adapt.

Mr. Silver, 58, has been a dominant studio moviemaker for over three decades, delivering blockbuster franchises like “Lethal Weapon,” “Die Hard” and “The Matrix.” The 59 movies he has produced have generated almost $10 billion in ticket sales, adjusting for inflation. The money he has made for Warner alone has won him lavish treatment from the studio — not just in compensation, but also in perks. To make him happy, Warner once went so far as to send movie props to his Brentwood mansion for his son’s birthday party.

Warner, at least in years past, has ignored Mr. Silver at its own peril. Six years ago, Jeff Robinov, then a top production executive at the studio, was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident. As he recovered, Mr. Robinov heard that Mr. Silver was exaggerating the severity of the accident — and telling people that Mr. Robinov was unable to function.

When Mr. Robinov asked Mr. Silver why he was doing this, the producer said it was because the Warner executive hadn’t been returning his calls promptly.

Despite such antics, producers like Mr. Silver used to be able to count on one studio or another to support them in near perpetuity. So what if they fell on hard times — as Mr. Silver has, recently delivering a string of flops like “Speed Racer” (one of the biggest money-losers in Warner’s 87-year history), “Ninja Assassin,” “Whiteout” and the aptly titled “The Losers.”

Studios no longer take such losses lightly. Bleeding from plummeting DVD sales and higher marketing costs, they’ve started reducing producer deals. Warner alone has cut the number of producers it carries by 20 percent over the last two years and has said more reductions are on the way. The producers Warner now favors are mostly young and inexpensive or come with financial backing of their own from outsiders, like Legendary Pictures, which teamed up with Warner to make “The Dark Knight.”

Warner has also been building up the production companies of directors and actors like Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and Todd Phillips, all of whom now challenge Mr. Silver in a pecking order that changed when old images of Hollywood producers — who survived by wit, will and the occasional outrageous moment — began fading to black.

A particularly difficult point for both Warner and Mr. Silver is the cost of his production deals. In a frothier time, the lucrative arrangements struck by Mr. Silver allowed him to get a cut of the revenue from his films. That means he is entitled to about 8 cents of every dollar the studio takes in for his pictures, whether they are bombs or runaway hits.

Warner is also required to distribute films from Mr. Silver’s production company Dark Castle, which self-finances horror and other low-budget movies with $240 million in private funding. In theory, the deal gives Warner films from an experienced producer without risking its own production money. In practice, the arrangement has sometimes backfired, as it did earlier this year with “Splice,” a thriller about a pair of scientists who use genetic manipulation to create a monstrous child.

Mr. Silver acquired rights to “Splice” at little cost. But Warner spent about $26 million to market the film, only to see it come up short, with just $17 million at the domestic box office.

Against backdrops like this, Hollywood studios are nudging entrenched producers away from prized but risky projects, if only to avoid paying them millions of dollars in participation fees while the studio loses money.

For instance, Mr. Silver was entrusted for years with developing “Wonder Woman” into a big-budget movie. Warner recently took the superheroine away from him, to exert more control and to allow other, less expensive producers to take a shot at it.

So even though Hollywood has always been the fabled land of comebacks and second acts — and Mr. Silver recently found success with “Sherlock Holmes” — the megaproducer also knows that his head may be perilously close to the chopping block. His deal with Warner, which provides for a staff of about 20, expires in December 2011; negotiations for a new contract haven’t started.

Mr. Robinov, now president of Warner’s motion picture division, declined to comment on whether the studio would renew Mr. Silver’s deal or simply pressure him into a more restrictive contract.

“Joel is an incredible cinephile, who is incredibly intelligent and incredibly passionate about his job,” says Mr. Robinov. “That’s a lot to bring to the party.”

For his part, Mr. Silver is playing the role of the stoic.

“Maybe I will continue with Warner and maybe I won’t,” he says over a dinner of goulash and brussels sprouts inside his trailer. “I hope I do.”

Still, some of his powerful friends seem worried. At the very least, they are rallying around him.

“Warner’s is very fortunate to have Joel Silver,” said Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t take a bullet from anybody. He’s a good guy,” says Terry Semel, Warner’s former chairman. “Even home-run hitters have cold streaks. It’s the nature of sports and it’s the nature of movies.”

BRUCE BERMAN, the chief executive of Village Roadshow Pictures, who has known Mr. Silver since 1979 when they worked together on “Xanadu,” says no producer working in Hollywood better understands the pull of mass entertainment.

“That’s incredibly valuable,” he says. Even so, Mr. Berman allows that his pal “is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world.”

Mr. Silver, burly and bearded, has been parodied in several movies, most recently by Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder,” but he is far from the only megawatt producer under pressure or needing to figure out a new way forward.

Brian Grazer, who operates under a deal at Universal Pictures, stumbled in the spring with “Robin Hood,” which managed to squeeze about $310 million at the global box office but cost more than $200 million to make — when including higher-than-normal start-up costs and excluding tax credits — and more than $100 million to market.

Scott Rudin has one of the most buzzed-about movies of the fall in “The Social Network,” but Walt Disney Studios, where he is based, has made clear that its new strategy leaves little room for the kind of highbrow films in which he specializes.

Even Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of such fare as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, is struggling to move beyond four high-profile disappointments in a row, including “G-Force” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” both of which required Disney to take quarterly write-downs.

Mr. Silver’s fortunes may be turning. Warner is bullish on his next movie, “Unknown White Male,” a Dark Castle thriller starring Liam Neeson that is scheduled for release in January. And Mr. Silver rightly points out that “Sherlock Holmes” was a smash hit that cost $80 million to make and sold more than $523 million of tickets globally. Mr. Silver is starting production on a sequel.

“Sherlock Holmes,” however, comes with an asterisk on Mr. Silver’s résumé. The picture was already well under way when he came on board.

Warner and the longtime producer on the project, Lionel Wigram, wanted Robert Downey Jr. to play the lead role. Mr. Downey said yes — but only if his wife, Susan Downey, helped produce it.

That created a pickle: Mrs. Downey worked for Mr. Silver, who told Warner that he would lend out his executive — but only if he was brought on the project, too. Mr. Robinov said O.K., in part because of Mr. Silver’s close relationship with Guy Ritchie, who directed the movie.

Mr. Downey says he owes the resuscitation of his career to Mr. Silver, who cast him in the 2005 thriller “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” despite the actor’s prison and drug record.

“Joel just kept telling me, ‘We’ve got to get a gun in your hand,’ ” Mr. Downey says. “Joel is one of the few relationships I care to have with a producer. Look, he’s vast and voracious, and he definitely has the ability to break into a scream about a point he would like to make. But he can also be incredibly warm and generous.”

Questions about money — how to get it, how to spend it, how to pay it back — have loomed unusually large in Mr. Silver’s Hollywood life.

“Fantasies about spending are irresistible, the best!” Mr. Silver was quoted as saying in the production notes for “Brewster’s Millions,” a 1985 fable in which Richard Pryor was supposed to waste $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit a much larger fortune. “Who wouldn’t want to indulge the luxury of squandering millions and millions of dollars?”

In 1989, Mr. Silver used the Warner jet to fly a bevy of pals and business associates to party at Auldbrass Plantation, his South Carolina home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Hollywood, still in its boom years, saw such extravagance as part of his charm.

“I’m not in this business to make art; I’m in it to make money to buy art,” ran a much-quoted Silver quip that the producer now regrets as a shade too glib. His art collection, however, includes a 20-ton sculpture by Richard Serra; it is kept on the grounds of Mr. Silver’s Brentwood estate, Casa de la Plata (Spanish for “House of Silver”).

Expensive taste — he also owns a Malibu house and is chauffeured around Hollywood in a Maybach sedan — has at times appeared to leave Mr. Silver pressed for funds.

Bertram H. Fields, the Hollywood überlawyer who has long worked for Mr. Silver, says Mr. Silver has relied on a longstanding series of loans from Warner. He declined to describe the size of the loans but said that Mr. Silver had the ability to repay them.

Filings with the secretary of state of California show that Mr. Silver’s debt is secured against his interest in various films, including, most recently, “Splice.” Mr. Fields says the financial relationship between Mr. Silver and Warner is comfortable.

“He’s their prime supplier and they do lend him money,” he says. “It’s kind of a running account between them.”

Mr. Silver, who on occasion rumbles through the courts with the same animal spirit he brings to the Warner lot, is now suing Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, and a pair of movie companies, Alliance Films and Momentum Pictures USA, for $35 million.

In a complaint filed in May, Mr. Silver contended that Goldman and the film companies had breached an obligation to pay him that sum for his interest in Dark Castle after he helped Goldman find financing for an acquisition of Alliance.

Lawyers for Goldman and the film companies filed a response opposing all of Mr. Silver’s claims, calling some of them “absurd.” A Goldman spokeswoman and a law firm representing Goldman, Alliance and Momentum declined to comment.

EVEN brief chats with Mr. Silver are embroidered with a cinéaste’s knowledge. During a recent conversation in his Warner office, he recounted, beat for beat, Adolphe Menjou’s long walk through a newsroom and virtually every aspect of a paper’s daily life in a memorable scene from the 1931 version of “The Front Page.”

Inevitably, the talk also turned to the costly trappings of the office, which was built for Frank Sinatra in 1963. It had fallen into disrepair, Mr. Silver explains, so he persuaded Warner to allow him to refurbish it.

Now, the office boasts accouterments like eel-skin furniture and exterior walls washed to look like William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon. (An adjoining part of the complex was once used by Mr. Hearst’s lover, Marion Davies.) Among the trophies on the inside are photographs of Mr. Sinatra in his rat-pack heyday and the head of a zebra that Mr. Silver is quick to note was bought, not stalked.

“I hunted that with a credit card,” he says.

Mr. Silver grew up middle class in South Orange, N.J., the son of a public-relations-executive father and a journalist mother. (She wrote a food column for the New Jersey section of The New York Times.)

Mr. Silver had a number of passions during his New Jersey years — one of them was Frisbee. In the fall of 1968, while in high school, he jokingly proposed adding a Frisbee game he had created with some friends to the school curriculum. After the game spread to local colleges, Ultimate Frisbee was born.

But, at heart, Mr. Silver was a movie lover first, taking in “Lawrence of Arabia” at a Times Square theater in Manhattan and obscure art films at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Silver recalls watching film credits scroll by on television and looking up the names of crew members in the Los Angeles telephone book. “That’s how fascinated I was with movies,” he recalls.

Mostly, however, he was drawn to the producers, men like David O. Selznick. “I was fascinated with the lifestyle of these guys — how they lived, how they ran the show,” he says. “These guys lived like Saudi princes.”

After arriving in Hollywood in the 1970s, Mr. Silver got his break from the producer Lawrence A. Gordon, who needed an assistant. Mr. Gordon eventually employed him as an executive at his company and later worked with him as a partner. Mr. Silver quickly absorbed Hollywood’s rough-and-tumble ways. In 1991, he and Mr. Gordon parted ways and still do not speak to each other.

Mr. Silver now has over 25 films in active development, including a splashy adaptation of “Logan’s Run,” a 1976 movie about a futuristic society in which humans are terminated when they turn 30. Another project involves the comic book character Sgt. Rock.

“The core of the movie business remains intact,” says Mr. Silver. “And it’s not descending in scope. Studios want movies that are bigger than ever.”

PERHAPS, but studios also want small — something that Mr. Silver is trying to address with Project X, that unnamed teenage comedy in production on the Warner back lot.

Wearing a pair of his limited-edition Bathing Apes sneakers, Mr. Silver monitors a rehearsal of a fight sequence in the film. An actress, Kirby Bliss Blanton, runs over to him and gives him a hug.

“I love you!” she beams, before walking away.

Mr. Silver is startled by the hug, but it barely registers because he is too focused on other things, like a tricky scene coming up involving nudity.

“There aren’t a lot of guys like me left,” Mr. Silver says during a break. “But I’m a war horse. I’ve been through it all. And you know something about war horses? Through the sleet, through the snow — they just keep going.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/bu.../29silver.html





Halo Reach Code Leaked to Filesharing Sites

What appears to be the entire code for Bungie's Halo Reach game has turned up on a number of file sharing sites.

The hotly-anticipated multi-player shooter had been hosted on a private area of the Microsoft Live site in order for journalists to preview the release, but Microsoft has admitted that a security breach has meant that pirates have been able to bypass personal download codes given to writers.

Disk images of the game are now appearing on a number of public torrent and P2P sites as well as on popular NZB aggregators and Usenet binaries newsgroups.

As Halo Reach is primarily an on-line multi-player affair, and turning up on Xbox servers brandishing a copy of the illegally-obtained game will almost certainly earn you a life-time ban, we can't see that this particular leak will do too much damage.

It is, of course, rather embarrassing for Microsoft who allowed the leak and Bungie who will be fighting a losing battle to keep plot spoilers from flooding the Internet before the game's official launch on September 14th.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/8/23/hal...sharing-sites/





Iranian Government Runs Public Warez Server
Ernesto

The Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology is directly connected to the Iranian Government. Aside from evaluating and advising policy makers on science and technology issues, the largest research outfit in the country also provides a warez server where Photoshop, MS Office and many other applications can be downloaded for free, totally legal thanks to Iran’s lenient copyright policy.

In most of the western world the actions of the Iranian Government are often met with skepticism. Foreign governments get an uneasy feeling when Iran opens a nuclear facility, fearing it might lead to a nuclear arms program that would be an international threat.

Aside from nuclear issues, Iran has gained a bad reputation for censoring the public in its own country. These censorship issues reached new highs last year during the election protests, where the Government went as far as cutting citizens’ Internet access.

For copyright holders worldwide, the Iranian Government poses a significant threat. The country’s copyright law is set up to protect all copyrighted works produced by Iranians, but not those by creators from other countries.

Since 2001 Iran has been a member of the WIPO, and has acceded to several WIPO intellectual property treaties. However, the Iranian Government never signed the WIPO copyright treaty and other international copyright agreements that would make copying of foreign products unlawful.

This means that Iranians can share movies, music and applications as much as they like, as long as the copyright is not owned by an Iranian. In fact, even Government agencies actively help to distribute these works among the public, most notably the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST).

From a publicly accessible FTP-server Iranian citizens have free access to a wide range of software, including multiple versions of Microsoft Office (97 to 2010) and Adobe’s Photoshop (5.5 to CS3). All the ‘pirated’ files come complete with serials, cracks and keygens and can be downloaded for free.

To make the search for new warez even more convenient, all the files are neatly categorized in folders. Those looking for image editing software should take a look in the ‘Graphics’ folder which includes Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere and dozens of other titles.

Iranian web-designers should definitely take a look in the ‘Web Design’ folder, and the ‘Multimedia’ folder is of interest to those looking to play, burn or convert video and audio files. TorrentFreak’s personal recommendation is the ‘Screensaver’ folder, which includes beautiful waterfall and aquarium animations.

Again, all of this is perfectly legal to download, for Iranians at least. Luckily Iran is full of bright and young people who are eager to learn but don’t always have the means to pay for software. For some of them free software is the path to a better life for them and their families

Whether Adobe, Microsoft and other copyright holders will be happy with the software giveaway is another question. We doubt that it’s worth another war though.

Update: A few minutes after we published the article the public FTP was passworded. So much for free warez…. This still works though…

Update: Now all folders seem to be secured… For non-Iranians at least.

Update: Here’s the public FTP of the Tehran Polytechnic University.
http://torrentfreak.com/iranian-gove...server-100824/





Wireless Net Neutrality so Bad, Verizon Already Agreed to it
Nate Anderson

Verizon's Tom Tauke left the DC swamp this week for a stint in Aspen's alpine environs, where the Technology Policy Institute is hosting a conference. But the change of air didn't change what's on Tauke's mind: the fallout from the net neutrality policy framework agreed to by both Google and Verizon.

Much of that fallout has focused on wireless—the Google/Verizon framework refuses to apply even minimal nondiscrimination rules to wireless (only "transparency" would apply). Verizon and other wireless vendors have recently been flogging the "wireless is different" mantra everywhere it can be flogged, and Tauke took his cat-o-nine-tails up to Aspen this week to flog the idea once more.

"[The wireless rules] caused a bit of controversy," Tauke said yesterday. "Of course, we indicated that transparency of course should apply to wireless. But we acknowledged wireless is different for a variety of reasons. First, the physics: with wireline, we know there will be this connection in the home. It doesn’t move. With wireless, all of a sudden people all gather in one place—in Washington, DC, they all gather on the mall, or there is a traffic jam. That creates a much different situation when it comes to running a network. There also is in wireless, no single technology standard; there is a variety."

Physics! I mean, we're talking laws of nature here! Bedrock principles of the universe! Wireless operators simply cannot abide even the loopholed nondiscrimination provisions that would apply to wireline networks. In fact, any attempt to force such nondiscrimination provisions on Verizon's wireless networks would likely be illegal, violate the First Amendment, and represent a secret Google attempt to enrich itself at Verizon's expense.

How do we know? Because Verizon made all of these points clearly to the Federal Communications Commission back in 2007. That was back when a big new chunk of prime 700MHz spectrum came up for auction, and Google had asked the FCC to impose openness conditions on the main winner.

The FCC agreed at last to do so, rejecting "Verizon Wireless’s assertion that the requirements we adopt here are designed to unjustly enrich Google." It also rejected "arguments by Verizon Wireless that the requirements that we adopt today for devices and applications for the Upper 700MHz C Block violate the First Amendment."

And it was having none of this "physics" argument about wireless capacity. Winners of the so-called nationwide C Block "cannot exclude applications or devices solely on the basis that such applications or devices would unreasonably increase bandwidth demands. We anticipate that demand can be adequately managed through feasible facility improvements or technology-neutral capacity pricing that does not discriminate against subscribers using third-party devices or applications." In other words, the winner could build more towers, add more radios, increase backhaul, or implement usage-based pricing. What the winner could not do was simply start blocking traffic to ease the burden.

Given Verizon's stance at the time and its stance now, it might be surprising to recall that it was actually Verizon who took home the C Block license (after flirting with a lawsuit against the FCC) and at last agreed to its openness conditions. According to the FCC, Verizon agreed not to "block, degrade, or interfere with the ability of end users to download and utilize applications of their choosing on the licensee’s C Block network, subject to reasonable network management."

It's not as though Tauke forgot about this little bit of history; in fact, in his speech he touts Verizon's C Block bidding as an example of its commitment to openness.

All of the complaining about the Google/Verizon proposal "is a little ironic because there is only one company in the US that has a requirement for open access as a wireless entity, and that of course is Verizon," Tauke said.

We bid on the C-block spectrum in the 700 megahertz auction. That spectrum carried with it requirement of no blocking and no discrimination, a tougher standard than has ever been imposed on the wireline business. Now we made the decision to bid for that spectrum and operate under those rules. The FCC had adopted a policy which said if one nationwide carrier is building out 4G under this set of rules, that is going to ensure that the Internet will be open to anybody, and that this will ensure that the marketplace will be driven toward openness. Look what’s happened since the FCC adopted that policy 24 months ago: openness has become the standard in the wireless industry. So for those reasons, our conclusion was transparency was important, but in this rapidly changing market, more rules didn’t make sense.

What's odd about Tauke's points is how completely they would appear to undermine his basic argument. Verizon has already made a multibillion dollar bet that it can make plenty of cash on spectrum constrained by a few basic neutrality rules, so arguments about the "physics" of the issue ring a bit hollow. Academic observers like Rob Frieden agree, saying that "the rationale for exempting wireless does not pass the smell test."

Second, Tauke appears to agree that FCC policy has pushed the entire industry to openness, and that this openness is a good thing; the idea that basic openness principles will destroy private investment (one of Verizon's stated concerns) would thus appear to need far more nuance than it is usually given.

Google grows up, sheds rich-kid idealism

Tauke's speech also highlighted the shocking about-face in Google's approach to this entire issue. For instance, the new Google/Verizon proposal notes that wireless services should be exempt from all nondiscrimination rules thanks to the "competitive and still-developing nature of wireless broadband." Tauke played this idea up in his talk, saying that wireless users are simply spoiled for choice.

"There is a lot of choice in wireline—more than some people acknowledge," he said. "But, across the country, people can have six or more wireless carriers that serve their area or nationwide. In some cases, in supposedly hard-to-serve areas, you could have up to 20 carriers getting universal service support to serve these areas. There are just a lot of players in the wireless space. So, if a customer doesn’t like the policies of a particular carrier, they are able to move relatively easily."

Just a few years back, when the 700MHz auction rules were being finalized, Google couldn't disagree more. "In the US, wireless spectrum for mobile phones and data is controlled by a small group of companies, leaving consumers with very few service providers from which to choose," wrote the company. Given that reality, Google believed the FCC had to push the carriers into opening up their networks—and the company was ready to plunk down $4.6 billion of its own money if no one else stepped up to bid.

Google's change of heart on competition wasn't due to the presence of more competition; in fact, according to a recent report on mobile competition from the FCC, concentration in the wireless sector has gone up significantly over the last few years.

And, while Tauke talks up the industry's love of openness, the Google-of-a-few-years-back reminded us all that "deep packet inspection 'has been deployed far and wide' by various wireless last-mile network operators. Further, the contractual terms imposed by major wireless carriers purport to prohibit the use of peer-to-peer applications, Web broadcasts, server or host applications, tethering, and the use of wireless as a substitute for wired broadband."

As we documented a few weeks ago, Google's sharp about-face on these issues has been whiplash-inducing. A couple of years ago it argued for FCC openness rules on wireless, it said the wireless industry faced limited competition, and it was willing to put up $4.6 billion for its ideas. Much of that has now gone by the wayside.

"Internet" is not the future of broadband

So, what's the vision for broadband in America under the new Google/Verizon proposal? It's not Internet access, and Tauke reminds us what's at stake with the "managed services" issue.

"Certainly nobody believes that the promise of broadband is Internet access and video, which is what we have today," said Tauke. The future is "'other services' that should be available over the broadband pipe. They need unique creativity and partnerships to make them work. It’s the communications company partnering with the power company to do the smart grid. It’s the communications partnering with the health care provider to do heart monitoring at home. That requires a different set of rules than the rules that govern the best-efforts Internet."

Welcome to the future: it's one in which you can call your ISP and get Internet access, sure, but you'll also have the privilege of signing up for a home health monitoring package, a TV package, a VPN package for your home office, and many more wonderful things that "we cannot even envision now." If you like your cable bill, you're going to love this brave new world. ISPs are determined not to become a dumb pipe; there's too much money in other services.

All these services will probably use Internet Protocol, and yes, they'll all run over the same wire into your home. But they are completely different from the Internet and all the companies that offer the exact same services in "over-the-top" (that is, over the Internet) fashion. Verizon tells us that one is the "broadband platform" and one is "the open Internet."

All of this talk in industry circles about "convergence"—in which functions collapse into a single device (like a smartphone) and services collapse into a single offering (a broadband pipe)—is nonsense; the real future of the Internet is "divergence." The best-effort Internet isn't going away, but in Verizon's view, the future is hundreds of new managed services, each with its associated fee (and many with their own associated, specialized devices). If you don't want to pay, you're free to continue using services delivered over the "open Internet" and keep using your computer.

"Yes, we want to protect the Internet but we also want to offer consumers more services, and giving consumers more services is a good thing," said Tauke. "And giving consumers more choices is a positive thing."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...reed-to-it.ars





Fixing the Broken ISP Model

How a small British company is providing a solution to a big problem

The business model for providing Internet services is broken. Content owners are paying specialist content delivery networks more and more to deliver content which consumers expect for free, leaving the ISP squeezed in the middle with no incentive to invest in more infrastructure to improve quality of service needed for video. That is, until a small British company suddenly found itself in a unique position with the right technology at the right time to fix it.

Richard Gibbs, Vice President for worldwide consulting at Velocix, part of Alcatel-Lucent, explained how his company formerly known as Cachelogic, started off as a proxy cache vendor in 2003 designed to provide end-to-end visibility for the Internet service provider (ISP). That period of time saw many ISPs struggle to cope with the vast amounts of peer-to-peer traffic that was being transmitted across their networks.

At the same time, Akamai, the original Content Delivery Network (CDN) company was approaching the problem differently, solving the issue of latency with the delivery of web pages by contracting with content owners and placing its servers in the telco's server rooms.

"We saw, in our peer-to-peer experience, huge growth in large media. From 100MB files to gigabytes. CDNs were not designed or built to handle that amount of data," he said.

Cachelogic learned from peer-to-peer and worked by breaking objects up into smaller chunks, adding integrity checks and allowing each segment to be sourced from multiple points in a hierarchy of cache points throughout the ISP's network.

By this point, his company was competing against the likes of Akamai, Limelight and Level 3. But it was when working with the BBC in developing iPlayer that the very broken cost economics in the content delivery space become evident.

BBC iPlayer is an Internet television and radio service that allows viewers in the United Kingdom to watch live TV over the Internet or back episodes for up to seven days.

A consumer watching a service such as iPlayer would pay his local ISP a fixed amount a month for Internet access. On the other side, content owners were paying CDN vendors such as Akamai between 10 and 20 US cents (3.25-6.50 baht) a gigabyte for it to be delivered. ISPs were going through immense price compression, while the content owners were getting incremental costs - as the service's popularity grew, some ISPs had to throttle iPlayer, which was not what the BBC or anyone else wanted.

By installing its cache technology in many ISPs, as a CDN provider, Velocix was able to offer much lower prices for content delivery, from 10 to 20 cents down to 1 to 2 cents per gigabyte.

"Traditional CDN could not compete with us in the market, which bought us to the realisation that we should be packaging and producing the technology rather than just providing a CDN service," said Gibbs.

The economic problem is also fixed. By being partnering with Velocix, ISPs can sign distribution contracts themselves with content owners. Since the ISPs are getting paid for delivery and providing quality of service, this gives the service providers an incentive to invest more and build better services.

Beyond that, ISPs can form part of a federation network. Today a good example is HBO. They contract with only a few ISPs such as Verizon and the Velocix platform allows Verizon to aggregate content from HBO and federate it out to other smaller regional Velocix-equipped ISPs who want to share in this ecosystem but are too small to contract with HBO directly.

Another key difference is that while other CDNs want to deliver content as deep as they can, that usually only means at the point of peering - in other words, installing a server in a rack at the ISP's data centre. Because Velocix grew out of a caching technology, it is embedded much deeper in the network, at various nodes much throughout the network closer to the subscriber. It can learn the ISP's cost information and help deliver the content with the greatest efficiency. Verizon has Velocix equipment in over 500 locations across the US, for instance.

The next step is CDN interconnect. Velocix can effectively become the middleman and allow federation of content from different networks to be streamed over in a controlled, cost-effective way. For instance, a Velocix customer in North America can take very localised content, say from Spain, to deliver to the Spanish-speaking population in the US. Content can be moved around different ISPs, cached, federated and controlled with full accounting and control.

The unique selling point, Gibbs stressed, is that Velocix allows all of this to be done for one to two US cents per gigabyte, at least in the US and Europe. Prices in Malaysia and New Zealand are still in the 10 to 20 cent range.

The acquisition of Velocix by Alcatel-Lucent bought global scale and carrier-grade technology. Previously Velocix had its hands full, struggling to keep up with demand. Alcatel provides it with a worldwide sales and support network as well as the promise of mobile.

Globally, there are many service providers with older technology that want a technology refresh to move to a cost-effective IPTV-based service.

Gibbs spoke fondly of Microsoft Silverlight. Modern protocols are moving to HTTP as the protocol of choice for rich media. Silverlight smooth streaming (and Apple live stream) takes content and cuts it up into chunks. Silverlight often encodes a stream at many different bitrates, such as 800KBPS, 1.5MBPS, 2.5MBPS or even 5 and 10MBPS. Velocix's CDN is intelligent and recognises those chunks and meshes and federates them throughout nodes in the network.

The move to HD and 3D content will make the offerings all the more relevant. Digital rights management will also mean that people will in the future buy a video and expect to be able to watch it on a PC, move downstairs to continue watching it on an Internet-enabled TV and perhaps watch it again later on an iPhone. The challenge of delivering 30MBPS Blu-ray quality on a large screen TV is quite different than an 800KBPS stream over wireless to an iPhone.

The real excitement will come with LTE-Advanced and local IP breakout. Today, CDNs are not too relevant in the wireless space, as IP addresses are assigned on a national or at best regional basis. With 3GPP release 10, local IP breakout will allow devices to get an IP address and break out into an all-IP network at the base station rather than through a circuit to the central data centre. This will see delivery caches move from the centre of the network to the edge, right to the base stations, too.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/tech...oken-isp-model





Salisbury to Test Fiber-Optic Cable System
Stuart Watson

One local on-ramp to the Internet just got a lot bigger and lightning fast.

The city of Salisbury begins beta testing of a brand new fiber-optic cable system next month.

Salisbury and North Carolina's Municipal League have overcome strong objections from a powerful state senator, Sen. David Hoyle of Gaston County, who supports the cable companies who say local government competition is unfair.

After the implosion of the textile industry, Salisbury is trying to weave a new future with new fibers; fiber-optic cable.

The town has spent $50 million in bond money to string 250 miles of fiber, 50 miles of it underground.

The city will provide television, telephone and Internet service at speeds ten times faster than Time Warner's Roadrunner Internet service and AT&T's U-verse.

But Senator Hoyle is not a fan.

"They've been sold a bill of goods by a crowd of consultants who say this is the best thing since sliced bread and mayonnaise," says Hoyle.

The veteran state senator says cities should leave broadband to the cable companies.

"It's not fair for any government unit to compete with private enterprise," he says.

In the last legislative session Sen. Hoyle tried to put a moratorium on any more local governments expanding into municipal broadband.

When the I-Team asked him if the cable industry drew up the bill, Senator Hoyle responded, "Yes, along with my help."

When asked about criticism that he was "carrying water" for the cable companies, Hoyle replied, "I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community - the people who pay the taxes."

Senator Hoyle says local governments have an unfair advantage over cable companies because towns and cities do not pay taxes on their cable systems.

But Salisbury and other North Carolina cities have their own powerful ally in Raleigh: the Municipal League, which supports the expansion of fiber-optic cable.

"It's the next modern infrastructure," says lobbyist Paul Meyer. "If we're wrong, the rest of the world is wrong."

Opponents of municipal broadband point to the towns of Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville which took over a failed cable system, MI Connection, and have lost millions of dollars on it.

But proponents of fiber-optic cable say there's no comparison in bandwidth and service.

"I think this is a different kettle of fish," says Meyer.

Broadband backers won a round in the last legislative session, blocking Hoyle's ban on more municipal broadband while taxes could be studied.

So Salisbury is expected to take its new system, called Fibrant, for a test run next month and roll it out sometime this fall.

The town promises basic Internet service at 15MB per second at rates ten percent lower than competitors.
http://www.wcnc.com/news/local/Salis...le-system.html





Germany to Roll Out ID Cards with Embedded RFID

The production of the RFID chips, an integral element of the new generation of German identity cards, has started after the government gave a 10 year contract to the chipmaker NXP in the Netherlands. Citizens will receive the mandatory new ID cards from the first of November.
German RFID identity card

Various German authorities will be able to identify persons fast and reliable by scanning the RFID citizen card. These will be the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.

The new ID card will contain all personal data on the security chip that can be accessed over a wireless connection.

The new card allows German authorities to identify people with speed and accuracy, the government said. These authorities include the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.

German companies like Infineon and the Dutch NXP, which operates a large scale development and manufacturing base in Hamburg, Germany are global leaders in making RFID security chips. The new electronic ID card, which will gradually replace the old mandatory German ID cards, is one of the largest scale roll-outs of RFID cards with extended official and identification functionality.

The card will also have extended functionality, including the ability to enable citizens to identify themselves in the internet by using the ID card with a reading device at home. After registering an online account bonded to the ID card, are able to do secure online shopping, downloading music and most importantly interact with government authorities online, for example.

Biometric passports in a number of countries are equipped with RFID chips, containing a digital picture and fingerprints, and have been around for nearly 5 years after the United States required such passports for any person entering the country.

There are some concerns that the use of RFID chips will pose a security or privacy risk, however.

Early versions of the electronic passports, using RFID chips with a protocol called "basic access control" (BAC), where successfully hacked by university researchers and security experts.

The German ID card is using the BAC protocol as well, but only for the basic data which is printed on the front of the card, the picture and the name. Other fields are protected by a stronger proprietary protocol.

Illegal access to the stored data would be useful to create perfectly forged passports and for criminals to use hijacked identities for supposedly secure transactions online.

The responsible German ministry, however, cites the many advantages of employing a RFID chip, such as a longer card lifetime, the option to connect them to other future devices like RFID-reading mobile phones, and saving cost by being compatible with the existing infrastructure for the RFID passports.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/4453...in-germany.htm





Mistake? What Mistake?
Karl Ritter

Swedish prosecutors defended their handling of a rape allegation against the founder of WikiLeaks, saying Sunday that they had made no mistakes in issuing an arrest warrant and withdrawing it less than a day later.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said the short-lived warrant had damaged his group nonetheless.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority said an "on-call" prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange late Friday only to see it revoked the next day by a higher-ranked prosecutor, who found no grounds to suspect him of rape.

"The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor," said Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the authority.

She declined to specify what the new material was, but said there was "absolutely nothing" that suggested errors had been made by either prosecutor.

Assange was in Sweden last week seeking legal protection for the webiste, which angered the Obama administration by publishing thousands of leaked documents about U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks is preparing to release of a fresh batch of classified U.S. documents from the Afghan war, despite warnings from the Pentagon that they could endanger American soldiers and their Afghan helpers.

The secretive Australian remains under suspicion of a lesser crime of molestation, which would not lead to an arrest warrant. Molestation covers a wide of range of offenses under Swedish law, including inappropriate physical contact with another adult, and can result in fines or up to one year in prison.

Assange called the allegations "without basis" in a Twitter posting and questioned the motives behind them in an interview with a Swedish newspaper.

The tabloid Aftonbladet quoted Assange as saying the allegations had caused damage even though the rape suspicion was dropped, because WikiLeaks' "enemies" could use them to discredit the site.

"I don't know who's behind this but we have been warned that for example the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us," he said in comments translated to Swedish. "I have also been warned about sex traps."

There was no immediate reaction Sunday from the Pentagon on Assange's comments.

Assange rejected the molestation accusation and said he has never — in Sweden or elsewhere — "had sex with anyone without the full consent of both parties."
http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=3033





The WikiLeaks Story and Criminal Liability Under the Espionage Laws

The following is a guest post by Gilead Light, a member of the white collar criminal defense group with law firm Venable LLP in Washington. He has worked on numerous criminal defense representations, including a jury trial on charges of espionage and other national security violations.

The legal pursuit of WikiLeaks, a trans-national website devoted to publishing secret government documents worldwide, is reaching a boiling point. After publishing tens of thousands of classified U.S. documents revealing details of the war in Afghanistan, the group is now promising to publish more of the same.

The alleged actions of the leaker, reputed to be U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning, are likely violations of the U.S. Espionage laws. Manning was already charged under the Espionage Act with the submission to WikiLeaks earlier this year of a classified video showing the death of two journalists in Iraq.

But what about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange? Is a website that actively encourages people to leak classified information immune from prosecution? The answer is more complicated than one may think, largely due to the jumbled and archaic system of laws that currently protect classified information and criminalize its dissemination.

There is no clear answer as to whether WikiLeaks and Assange are liable for espionage. Precedent, most notably the Pentagon Papers case, would seem to indicate that WikiLeaks is protected from publishing leaked documents by the First Amendment. The government rarely attempts to prosecute a member of the media for publishing the fruits of someone else’s leaks.

But is WikiLeaks truly part of the “media?” Can a website that devotes itself exclusively to leaking documents compare itself to the New York Times? Clearly the Justice Department is reexamining whether or not Assange and his website can face criminal prosecution under U.S. law.

There is wording in some Espionage statutes suggesting that anyone who “publishes” information that relates to the national defense is liable for an espionage act violation. So even if WikiLeaks qualifies as “media,” Assange still might not be protected by the First Amendment. Even in the Pentagon Papers opinion, Supreme Court Justice Byron White stated that in certain situations, the publication of national defense information could subject media outlets to espionage prosecutions, despite First Amendment protections.

Furthermore, could the fact that Assange actually solicits these leaks translate into liability for conspiracy to commit espionage? Hypothetically, if any evidence is uncovered that Assange, after receiving the initial Iraq video showing the death of these journalists, actually solicited additional information from Bradley or anyone else and encouraged them to leak, then he may face conspiracy liability. This would of course be difficult to prove, unless Manning agreed to testify.

Add to this the numerous jurisdictional problems posed by the fact that Assange lives overseas, and one can be sure that successful prosecution of Assange would be challenging.

If Assange and WikiLeaks are not liable for espionage, should they be?

For American politicians and the intelligence world, the question can be expanded: If Assange and WikiLeaks are not liable, should they be? This question begs a closer look at the current system of laws protecting National Security information. As U.S. Senator Ben Cardin said in May during Senate hearings on the topic, the current statutory framework is an outdated “patchwork” that has failed to change along with current technology and the digital information age.

As relics of WWI and the Cold War era, the Espionage laws generally target those who seek to disclose classified information to aid a foreign government, or who have reason to believe that the information will either injure the United States or aid a foreign goverment.

Most commentators agree that the current Espionage laws can still effectively punish and deter the classic nation v. nation spy cases, as proven by the successful prosecutions of Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames. But problems arise when the government is faced with an actor who discloses classified information for other reasons, or to someone other than a foreign agent. This is the problem facing the government in prosecuting WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks case highlights the central flaw in espionage laws, namely that they are grossly outdated, drafted in an age when all information was tangible and not electronic. The laws never envisioned anything like the Secure Internet Protocol Router network (SIPRnet) that thousands of government personnel across the globe routinely use to access troves of classified documents. Manning is alleged to have accessed SIPRnet, which is essentially a private, classified world-wide-web, to find documents to leak to Wiki.

The other problem stems from inconsistencies in the various statutes criminalizing the misuse of national security information. Some statutes refer to materials “relating to the national defense” (which sometimes, but not always, refers to information deemed classified by the government). Other statutes refer only to information actually marked classified. Some statutes criminalize giving information to an agent of a foreign government, others only to those “not entitled to receive” the information.

WikiLeaks would argue that, no matter the language in the statute, it would enjoy First Amendment protection from all prosecutions. Assange considers WikiLeaks a whistleblower protection intermediary. Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them.

Ultimately, if Congress wants to shut down WikiLeaks, it may have to draft new legislation which more explicitly criminalizes the solicitation of leaks of classified information, if that is in fact what happened. But there is still no guarantee that such a law would be upheld by the Supreme Court. An antiquated intelligence law combined with the media protection laws, may make WikiLeaks invulnerable to prosecution.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...spionage-laws/





WikiLeaks Builds a Legal Shield in Sweden
Mia Shanley

Two young Swedes hammer away at computers in a space that is part garage, part college dorm, littered with cables, Coke cans and an empty bottle of ketchup.

It looks like an unlikely place for the U.S. Pentagon to be worried about.

But this cramped room in a Stockholm suburb acts as a nerve center for WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website which has published thousands of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to post many more.

The site's elusive founder, Julian Assange, has been spending lots of time lately in Sweden, whose media laws are among the world's most protective for journalists. WikiLeaks did not respond to a request for an interview with Assange.

Media commentators and lawyers say WikiLeaks needs a safe haven, particularly after it attracted the ire of the Pentagon when it released secret U.S. military files last month.

The choice of Sweden gives WikiLeaks a better shot at fulfilling the 39-year old Australian's self-proclaimed mission to make the world more transparent.

Jonathan Coad, head of litigation at London-based Swan Turton, says it would be hard for the U.S. government to challenge Sweden's free speech act.

"I don't think there is a mechanism that allows America to do anything about this," Coad said, citing the difficulty in preventing leaks in an online world of global publishing.

Sweden has also suddenly become a source of trouble for Assange after two women filed complaints of molestation.

One complaint led to an arrest warrant for suspected rape, but that was quickly dropped after an initial investigation. The prosecutor's office is still pursuing the second complaint.

Assange, who has denied the accusations, has said he was warned by Australian intelligence that he could face a campaign to discredit him. The chief prosecutor and a lawyer for the two women have dismissed such talk.

Still, Assange is finding plenty of friends in Sweden.

The Pirate Party, whose platform calls for reform of copyright law, has agreed to host WikiLeaks' servers.

"Anyone who wants to attack WikiLeaks will now have to attack a political party in Sweden, which raises the bar for any legal action against them," Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told Reuters.

More Leaks

Hidden behind a large black door, the server room is accessed by walking through a parking lot and down an alley. The servers are rented from a web hotel called PRQ.

PRQ's owner, Mikael Viborg, has never met Assange.

But a week before the launch of the website's "Afghan War Diary" -- described as one of the largest security breaches in U.S. military history -- Viborg received a request for a big boost in capacity.

"They increased it about 10-fold," he said. "They were probably expecting heavy traffic."

WikiLeaks, which is not connected to the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has said it has 15,000 more documents.

It released a memo from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency this week, although that document, which talked about possible perceptions of U.S. policy, did not generate much controversy.

WikiLeaks also leaked in April a classified U.S. military video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.

As Assange and his site become more active, Sweden offers tough laws to protect freedom of speech. For instance, it makes source protection a legal obligation for journalists.

Kristinn Hraffnson, who speaks on behalf of the website from nearby Iceland, said WikiLeaks wants a publishing certificate for Sweden, which is needed to receive journalistic protection.

Assange also recently signed a contract to write a column for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet.

David vs Goliath?

Lawyers said WikiLeaks could still face legal wrangles if challenged to reveal sources or hand over material.

Per Eric Alvsing, a lawyer at Swedish firm Vinge, said an informant's identity is protected by the constitution but anything considered libelous or concerning national security could allow for exceptions.

"Our conclusion is that even if WikiLeaks has obtained a Swedish certificate of publication, they have not obtained bullet-proof protection," Alvsing said.

Whether WikiLeaks ever does get tested in a Swedish court its strategy appears to be to use anything at its disposal to further its goals.

"WikiLeaks is using its power and practical and legal invulnerability -- which it thinks it has -- to change the course of history," said Coad of British firm Swan Turton.

"It's extraordinary -- a David and Goliath battle."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67P2U320100826





The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
Adam Cohen

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000





Sen. John McCain Wants to Allow U.S. Citizens to be Arrested, Held Indefinitely

Last week, John McCain introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate which, if passed, would actually allow U.S. citizens to be arrested and detained indefinitely, all without Miranda rights or ever being charged with a crime.

The stated purpose of S. 3081 (The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act) reads: “To provide for the interrogation and detention of enemy belligerents who commit hostile acts against the United States, to establish certain limitations on the prosecution of such belligerents for such acts, and for
other purposes.”

The bill has nine co-sponsors including Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).

Section 5 of S. 3081 states:

“An individual, including a citizen of the United
States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent
under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article
5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of
Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal
charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities
against the United States or its coalition partners in which
the individual has engaged, or which the individual has
purposely and materially supported, consistent with the
law of war and any authorization for the use of military
force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.”

This bill, introduced by McCain, who despite overwhelming evidence, claims to be a “conservative,” would not only take away our right to a trial, but would also allow the federal government to arrest and imprison anyone the current administration deems hostile.

Of course, that would be the same administration whose Homeland Security Secretary has classified veterans, retired law enforcement, Ron Paul supporters, and conservatives as “terrorists.”

If it was not clear before, it should be now that John McCain has as little respect for the Constitution as he does for our borders.
http://www.examiner.com/conservative...d-indefinitely





Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans
Andy Greenberg

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.

The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)

“It’s no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

AS&E’s Reiss counters privacy critics by pointing out that the ZBV scans don’t capture nearly as much detail of human bodies as their airport counterparts. The company’s marketing materials say that its “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.”

Though Reiss admits that the systems “to a large degree will penetrate clothing,” he points to the lack of features in images of humans like the one shown at right, far less detail than is obtained from the airport scans. “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be,” he says.

But EPIC’s Rotenberg says that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images. Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment. Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...t-roving-vans/





Senate To Sneak Through Internet Kill Switch Bill

Legislation likely to be attached to Defense Authorization bill in bid to pass cybersecurity before midterms
Paul Joseph Watson

The Senate is attempting to sneak through the infamous Internet kill switch cybersecurity bill by attaching it to another piece of legislation that is almost guaranteed to pass – the defense authorization bill – in an underhanded ploy to avoid the difficult task of passing cybersecurity on its own.

“It’s hard to get a measure like cybersecurity legislation passed on its own,” Democratic Senator Thomas Carper, who is co-chair of a Senate subcommittee with cybersecurity oversight, told Government Information Security.

That’s why lawmakers pushing cybersecurity have resolved to introduce the legislation as a “rider” to a Senate defense bill that is likely to be easily passed before the midterm elections.

Senators are still working to merge two different versions of the cybersecurity bill, one sponsored by Senator Joe Lieberman and another sponsored by Democrat Jay Rockefeller, into a single omnibus package, in preparation for a final vote when the Senate returns to session in mid-September.

“We’re very close to where we need to be in developing a joint proposal,” said Carper.

Lawmakers are in a race to pass cybersecurity before the midterms because if they wait until Congress returns after the November 2nd vote, the chances of getting the bill through “would significantly dim should the Republicans pick up a significant number of seats”. That leaves a four week window from the middle of September to the start of election campaigning for Senators to sneak through the legislation.

Lieberman’s version of the cybersecurity bill includes language that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the world wide web for at least four months with no congressional oversight in the event of a cyber attack on critical infrastructure systems in the U.S.

Senators argue that they will be able to attach the Internet kill switch bill to the Defense Authorization Act because cybersecurity is a component of national security. However, the primary justifications behind treating “cybersecurity” as a national security matter are completely overblown and erroneous.

Proponents of cybersecurity have constantly argued that government needs to have more power over the Internet because cyber-terrorists could hack in and dismantle the entire U.S. power grid, large industrial plants, and the national water supply. This is a complete misnomer because, as a recent Wired News article highlighted, power grid and drinking water systems, “Are rarely connected directly to the public internet. And that makes gaining access to grid-controlling networks a challenge for all but the most dedicated, motivated and skilled — nation-states, in other words.”

As we documented in our piece on the issue, the threat from cyber-terrorists to the U.S. power grid or water supply is minimal. The perpetrators of an attack on such infrastructure would have to have direct physical access to the systems that operate these plants to cause any damage. Any perceived threat from the public Internet to these systems is therefore completely contrived and strips bare the real agenda behind cybersecurity – to enable the government to regulate free speech on the Internet.

This was revealed when Senator Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley that the real motivation behind cybersecurity was to mimic the Communist Chinese system of Internet policing.

“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.

As we have documented, the Communist Chinese government does not disconnect parts of the Internet because of genuine security concerns, it habitually does so only to oppress and silence victims of government abuse and atrocities, and to strangle dissent against the state.

The decision to try and sneak through the Internet kill switch bill as part of another package of legislation is undoubtedly a reaction to increasing awareness about how the terms of the bill would completely undermine the foundations of the Internet as an outlet of truly unregulated free speech.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/senate-t...ll.html?reddit





[b]Research Experiment Disrupts Internet, for Some

An experiment run by RIPE NCC in collaboration with Duke University briefly disrupts about 1 percent of Internet traffic
Robert McMillan

An experiment run by Duke University and a European group responsible for managing Internet resources went wrong Friday, disrupting a small percentage of Internet traffic.

The damage could have been far worse however, and the incident shows just how fragile one of the Internet's core protocols really is, security experts say.

The problem started just before 9 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time Friday and lasted less than half an hour. It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) -- used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the Internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was soon passed from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems.

"During this announcement, some Internet service providers reported problems with their networking infrastructure," wrote RIPE NCC's Erik Romijn in a note posted to the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) discussion list. "Immediately after discovering this, we stopped the announcement and started investigating the problem. Our investigation has shown that the problem was likely to have been caused by certain router types incorrectly modifying the experimental attribute and then further announcing the malformed route to their peers."

That shouldn't have happened on systems that were properly configured to support BGP, Romijn said, but nonetheless for a brief period Friday morning, about 1 percent of all the Internet's traffic was affected by the snafu, as routers could not properly process the BGP routes they were being sent.

"Over 3,500 prefixes (announced blocks of IP addresses) became unstable at the exact moment this 'experiment' started," wrote Earl Zmijewski, a general manager with Internet security firm Renesys. "Not surprisingly, they were located all over the world: 832 in the US, 336 in Russia, 277 in Argentina, 256 in Romania and so forth. We saw over 60 countries impacted."

Security experts have warned for years that attackers could cause serious Internet disruptions by messing with BGP routes. Two years ago, YouTube was temporarily cut off from the Internet after a Pakistani BGP route that censored the video service was inadvertently spread worldwide.

Earlier this year, bad routes announced out of China ended up briefly disrupting some Internet traffic.

The damage from Friday's experiment was minimal, but if someone had been able to intentionally announce bad routes, it would have been much worse, said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with security firm Trend Micro.

It's unclear why RIPE NCC and Duke were trying out these new route formats.

One of the researchers behind the experiment, Duke assistant professor Xiaowei Yang, declined to talk in detail about the experiment, citing legal concerns. But she said that the work was for a research paper, and the BGP data that was sent was "100 percent standard compliant."

"It is an experiment initiated by my student and I," she wrote in an e-mail message. "It unexpectedly triggered some vendor bugs."

RIPE NCC could not immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...ernet-for.html





Military Computer Attack Confirmed
Brian Knowlton

A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to “a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

“It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary,” Mr. Lynn wrote.

The incident was first reported in November 2008 by the Danger Room blog of Wired magazine, and then in greater detail by The Los Angeles Times, which said that the matter was sufficiently grave that President George W. Bush was briefed on it. The newspaper mentioned suspicions of Russian involvement.

But Mr. Lynn’s article was the first official confirmation. He also put a name — Operation Buckshot Yankee — to the Pentagon operation to counter the attack, and said that the episode “marked a turning point in U.S. cyber-defense strategy.” In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.

Mr. Lynn described the extraordinary difficulty of protecting military digital communications over a web of 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices in dozens of countries against farflung adversaries who, with modest means and a reasonable degree of ingenuity, can inflict outsized damage. Traditional notions of deterrence do not apply.

“A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States’s global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target,” he wrote.

Security officials also face the problem of counterfeit hardware that may have remotely operated “kill switches” or “back doors” built in to allow manipulation from afar, as well as the problem of software with rogue code meant to cause sudden malfunctions.

Against the array of threats, Mr. Lynn said, the National Security Agency had pioneered systems — “part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter” — that are meant to automatically counter intrusions in real time.

His article appeared intended partly to raise awareness of the threat to United States cybersecurity — “the frequency and sophistication of intrusions into U.S. military networks have increased exponentially,” he wrote — and partly to make the case for a larger Pentagon role in cyberdefense.

Various efforts at cyberdefense by the military have been drawn under a single organization, the U.S. Cyber Command, which began operations in late May at Fort Meade, Maryland, under a four-star general, Keith B. Alexander.

But under proposed legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would take the leading role in the defense of civilian systems.

Though the Cyber Command has greater capabilities, the military operates within the United States only if ordered to do so by the president.

Another concern is whether the Pentagon, or government in general, has the nimbleness for such work. Mr. Lynn acknowledged that “it takes the Pentagon 81 months to make a new computer system operational after it is first funded.” By contrast, he noted, “the iPhone was developed in 24 months.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/te...y/26cyber.html





25% of New Worms are Designed to Spread Through USB Devices

In 2010, 25 percent of new worms have been specifically designed to spread through USB storage devices connected to computers, according to PandaLabs. These types of threats can copy themselves to any device capable of storing information such as cell phones, external hard drives, DVDs, flash memories and MP3/4 players.

This distribution technique is highly effective. With survey responses from more than 10,470 companies across 20 countries, it was revealed that approximately 48 percent of SMBs (with up to 1,000 computers) admit to having been infected by some type of malware over the last year. As further proof, 27 percent confirmed that the source of the infection was a USB device connected to a computer.

So far, these types of infections are still outnumbered by those that spread via email, but it is a growing trend. "There are now so many devices on the market that can be connected via USB to a computer: digital cameras, cell phones, MP3 or MP4 players," says Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "This is clearly very convenient for users, but since all these devices have memory cards or internal memory, it is feasible that your cell phone could be carrying a virus without your knowledge."

How does it work?

There is an increasing amount of malware which, like the dangerous Conficker worm, spreads via removable devices and drives such as memory sticks, MP3 players and digital cameras.

The basic technique used is as follows: Windows uses the Autorun.inf file on these drives or devices to know which action to take whenever they are connected to a computer. This file, which is on the root directory of the device, offers the option to automatically run part of the content on the device when it connects to a computer.

By modifying Autorun.inf with specific commands, cyber-crooks can enable malware stored on the USB drive to run automatically when the device connects to a computer, thus immediately infecting the computer in question.

To prevent this, Panda Security has developed Panda USB Vaccine, a free product which offers a double layer of preventive protection, disabling the AutoRun feature on computers as well as on USB drives and other devices.
http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1444





UPDATED: Fox News Scrubbing Wikipedia Entry on $1 Mil. Donation
Ismay

As you all know, Fox News parent News Corps secretly donated $1 million to the republican governors association back in June...one of the largest donations in history by a media organization.

Not only does this put a cloud on their slogan "fair and balanced" when covering the upcoming gubernatorial elections, it is made worse by the fact that, to date, Fox News has YET to cover the controversy. Even though every other major media outlet has.

It is no secret that Fox News spends a lot time scrubbing thier own Wikipedia articles, but we have managed to get some issues on the page "Fox News Controversies".

However, here is what is happening on the News Corp. donation scandal:

* Ismay's diary :: ::
*

On the Fox News main page, someone put this inocuous little statement, heavily referenced, under the controversy section:

In June 2010, News Corporation donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association

Oh HELLS no! Two FNC scrubbers were on the case and according to the history page had that puppy removed.

(As an added bonus, there is a poll they added under "Accusations of Conservative Bias" that says Fox is NOT BIASED compared to the other networks. The poll? Rasmussen. A few minutes ago someone added the fact that Ras works for FN and shows the aggregate that their polls are slightly biased...but expect that to come down by tomorrow.)

We gave up on the Fox News main page, and simply added a balanced blurb on the "Fox News Controversies" page, which even INCLUDED the official Fox News and News Corps defense of the donation. It was removed.

The discussion page and the history page on the "Fox News Controversies" section is funny. First the argument was the controversy was "minor", then the argument was it wasn't covered by any other media. When a wikipedia editor listed EVERY media outlet that covered it, then the argument was it required "consensus" from everybody before it could be in the article...and the latest arguement? That NEWS CORPS is not really Fox News so it doesn't belong there.

Yeah...even though the whole controversy is around FN bias, and how they fail to even address the issue, and the fact that they won't allow ANY Dem governor to come on their show and discuss the matter, etc.

Right now, the scandal is scrubbed on Wikipedia.

A REQUEST FOR COMMENTS forum has been called to resolve this matter in the talk section (bottom):http://en.wikipedia.org/...

It's essentially two guys against Fox...so if you have an account on Wikipedia, please contribute and let your voice be heard! Wikipedia is always a top search result of just about any topic, so this does matter--Fox knows it.

Thanks!

UPDATED: As expected.. the FOX NEWS scrubbers twisted the statement on Rasmussen on the main page. It was turned into this gem:

Fox News often cites Rasmussen polls that while recognized for their accuracy in predicting races has been noted for picking up anti-spending, anti-big government, and other conservative sentiments in likely voters that it polls which has been accused by some Democrats and the left blogosphere of possibly being designed to "undermine Democratic politicians and the party's national agenda."

Sickening

UPDATED2: Rec list thanks! --the fact that they can delete something so heavily referenced is ridiculous. They are certainly using their army, so I'm glad the truth has a little backup-at least for a little while. Wikipedia only works if everyone is vigilant against deception. PS-sorry about the poll, it was a snark on bad pollsters like a certain one hired for Fox.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/8/21/895233/-UPDATED:-Fox-News-Scrubbing-Wikipedia-Entry-on-$1-Mil.-Donation-





Legal Threat Demands We Shut Down Techdirt
from the first-test-of-the-SPEECH-Act? dept

Here at Techdirt, unfortunately, we get an average of about one legal threat per month. The threats are almost always frivolous -- and often made in anger without the individual realizing why the threats are frivolous. While some sites take the position that they will publish any and all legal threats, we have always tried to give the threatening party the benefit of the doubt, and to recognize that they made their demands in a moment of excess anger and misunderstanding. As such, we generally explain our position as to why any legal action would be a mistake -- and in nearly every case, we never hear back from the person who threatened us.

However, we have recently received a legal threat that we feel deserves attention and airing for a variety of reasons.

1. Unlike most threats, this one came directly from lawyers representing the individual, rather than from the individual directly.
2. The threats are quite incredible, demanding that we shut down the entire site of Techdirt, due to a comment (or, potentially, comments) that the client did not like.
3. The lawyer fails to identify, other than a single snippet and a date, what post or specific comments are objectionable and why (beyond a suggestion of anti-semitism, which while despicable, is not illegal). I guess, since they are demanding we shut down the entire site or be sued, such details are not considered pertinent.
4. As we detail on this site on a somewhat regular basis, sites like ours are protected by Section 230 of the CDA from libel charges against statements made by users of the site. So any legal action against us is entirely pointless.
5. Most importantly, this threat is coming from the UK, and the lawyers insist that they will take it to court in the UK. This makes it rather timely and newsworthy for an entirely different reason. Just a few weeks ago we wrote about the new SPEECH Act that was passed into law to protect against libel tourism. As the Congressional record shows, the law was specifically designed to protect US businesses from libel judgments that violate Section 230 -- and the bill's backers explicitly call out libel judgments made in the UK. In other words, the SPEECH Act explicitly protects us from exactly the sort of threat that these lawyers and their client are making against us:

The purpose of this provision is to ensure that libel tourists do not attempt to chill speech by suing a third-party interactive computer service, rather than the actual author of the offending statement.

In such circumstances, the service provider would likely take down the allegedly offending material rather than face a lawsuit. Providing immunity removes this unhealthy incentive to take down material under improper pressure.

6. Separate from the Section 230 defenses, we are also protected due to a lack of personal jurisdiction, which, again, is supported by the recently passed SPEECH Act. It is entirely possible that the lawyers were unaware of the SPEECH Act, but it does seem like a law firm making legal threats in a foreign country should be expected to have researched the legal barriers to making such a claim before using billable hours to make threats they cannot back up.
7. Finally, it's important to note that a part of the SPEECH Act allows sites protected under this law to seek attorneys' fees should they be targeted in such a lawsuit. Rest assured that we would explore the option to the fullest, if need be.

Separately, I will note that on the same day that I received the legal threat letter from this law firm of Addlestone Keane, I also received an email from someone claiming to be both a regular Techdirt reader and a friend of the client, Jeffrey Morris, saying that he was contacting me to ask if I could, out of the kindness of my heart, remove the comments that are bothering Mr. Morris. Of course, the paper threat letter sent by Mr. Morris' lawyers was sent five days prior to this email from Mr. Morris' friend. Our policy at Techdirt is that we do not remove comments on such requests, other than comments that we judge to be spam, so we would not have removed the comments, anyway. However, it is odd that Mr. Morris would first have his lawyers pull out the "nuclear option" and demand that we shut down our entire site, and then days later have a friend reach out to make a personal plea.

As such, given the newsworthy nature of an example of where the brand new law (thankfully) protects us, as well as the fact that we do not feel it is decent or right for anyone to demand we shut down our entire site or be sued halfway around the world, because he does not appreciate a comment someone made about him, we are publishing the letter that was sent to us. Thanks in part to the new law, we have no obligation to respond to Mr. Morris, his friend or the lawyers at Addlestone Keane, who (one would hope) will better advise their clients not to pursue such fruitless legal threats in the future. Should Mr. Morris and his solicitors decide that they wish to proceed with such a pointless and wasteful lawsuit against us, which will only serve to cost Mr. Morris significant legal sums with no hope of recovery, we will continue to report on it, safe in the knowledge that it has no bearing on us. The only potential issue I could foresee would be that any UK judgment against us could prevent me from traveling to the UK in the future, which would be unfortunate, as I have quite enjoyed past visits to the UK. But perhaps such ridiculous outcomes will help the UK realize that it's really about time to update its incredibly outdated libel laws and begin respecting free speech rights.

While I don't think it's all that relevant to this discussion, for those who do want to see it, this is the post that the story is about. Even though the law firm failed to point it out, the friend's email did link to it. You will note that the post is from 2004, though there are more recent comments on it, purporting to be from disgruntled former employees of Mr. Morris, which seem to be the concern. There are also, as noted in the legal threat letter, a series of bizarre, nonsensical comments in the same thread, which mostly make the thread somewhat unreadable. Frankly, I am always somewhat amazed when people get upset about situations like this. It seems quite unlikely that random, semi-coherent, anti-semitic comments, buried in a thread on a random blog post from six years ago are going to have any actual impact on your business. People say mean things, it's true, but when put into context, who is actually likely to believe any such comments? People seem to think that if someone says something bad about you online, others will automatically believe it.

Instead of worrying about how people might view such marginal, buried, angry comments on an ancient blog post, it might make more sense to first consider how people might view an excessive legal threat that has no weight against a site based in another country.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...02110771.shtml





FCC Appeals Ruling on Indecency Restrictions
Gautham Nagesh

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is appealing a federal court ruling that its indecency policy is unconstitutional, arguing the decision makes it all but impossible for the agency to enforce restrictions on broadcasting nudity or profanity.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York struck down the FCC's indecency policy last month, calling it a violation of the First Amendment. The court said the rule forces broadcasters to self-censor in order to avoid fines for accidentally broadcasting nudity or profanity.

The FCC filed a petition Thursday morning asking the court to reconsider the decision.

"The three-judge panel's decision in July raised serious concerns about the Commission's ability to protect children and families from indecent broadcast programming," FCC general counsel Austin Schlick said. "The Commission remains committed to empowering parents and protecting children, and looks forward to the court of appeals' further consideration of our arguments."

The matter is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court, which upheld the FCC's policy last year on procedural grounds but did not address the constitutional arguments.

The case stems from live broadcasts of the Billboard Music Awards in 2002 and 2003, during which musician Cher and reality television performer Nicole Ritchie used unscripted expletives.

The FCC changed its indecency policy in 2004 following a similar incident at the Golden Globes involving U2 lead singer Bono. The agency began to levy record fines against broadcasters for fleeting expletives uttered on live television.

The Commission ruled in 2006 that, under its new policy, both Billboard broadcasts were indecent. Fox, which broadcast the awards shows, responded by appealing that decision. In its appeal Fox was joined by other broadcasters who opposed the FCC's stricter enforcement policies.

The court of appeals initially ruled in favor of the broadcasters, claiming the FCC had failed to properly articulate a reason for the rule changes, but their decision was reversed by the Supreme Court. The court of appeals then ruled in favor of Fox on constitutional grounds, setting the stage for the FCC's latest appeal.

“The FCC’s challenge of the Second Circuit ruling is an important step in the right direction. Without Supreme Court action, the Second Circuit ruling would kick down the door for indecent content to be aired at any time of day over the public airwaves — even in front of children,” said Parents Television Council President Tim Winter.

The FCC's filing argues that the appeals court ignored the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1978 case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, which gave the FCC the power to regulate broadcasts during hours children are likely to be watching or listening. That case concerned a broadcast of comedian George Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words" routine, which itself formed the basis for much of the FCC's enforcement policy during the next decade by serving as a list of words banned from daytime broadcasts.

The Pacifica decision also found that context is crucial to determining which content is indecent, while the FCC's brief claims the court of appeals decision would force the Commission to return to a list of banned words or something similar that labels certain content as profane regardless of context.

"The panel’s decision appears effectively to preclude the Commission from enforcing federal broadcast indecency restrictions unless it can develop a new policy that deemphasizes context (in order to survive the panel’s vagueness analysis), and yet simultaneously respects the Supreme Court’s endorsement of a contextual analysis," the petition states.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...decency-policy





In the Living Room, Hooked on Pay TV
Matt Richtel and Brian Stelter

It is a fantasy shared by many Americans: dropping cable television and its fat monthly bills and turning instead to the wide-open frontier of Internet video.

Some are finding that the reality is not that simple.

Just ask Bill Mitchell, a 40-year-old engineer in Winston-Salem, N.C. He canceled his Time Warner cable service and connected his flat-panel television to the Internet to watch sitcoms and his other favorite shows, using products from Apple and Boxee.

His experiment lasted 12 months. Recently, grudgingly, he returned to his $130-a-month cable subscription, partly because his family wanted programming that was not available online.

“The problem is, we’re hooked on shows on HBO and Showtime, like ‘True Blood’ and ‘Dexter,’ ” he said, adding that he wishes he could buy only the shows he wants instead of big bundles of channels he doesn’t. “It’s so frustrating.”

These are confusing times in the living room. The proliferation of Internet video has led to much talk of “cord-cutting” — a term that has come to mean canceling traditional pay TV and replacing it with programming from a grab bag of online sources.

But so far Americans are not doing this in any meaningful numbers. “Nor is there any evidence of it emerging in the near future,” said Bruce Leichtman, the president of Leichtman Research Group, which studies consumer media habits.

This is all the more remarkable, industry analysts say, because it seems to defy the way the Internet has disrupted and challenged virtually every other major form of media — from music to newspapers to books.

In part that is because the television business took action to avoid the same fate. Heavyweight distributors and producers have protected their business models by ensuring that some must-see shows and live sporting events cannot legally be seen online.

Technology companies are pushing alternatives like Web-connected set-top boxes. But these are still not as easy as signing up for cable or satellite service, particularly for those who want to watch on a big flat-screen TV and not a computer.

And so, in the battle for the living room, 2010 seems to be the year that the incumbent is strengthening its foothold.

A New York Times/CBS News poll this month found that 88 percent of respondents paid for traditional TV service. Just 15 percent of those subscribers had considered replacing it with Internet video services like Hulu and YouTube.

Younger people, though, are more intrigued by the possibility: respondents under the age of 45 were significantly more likely than older ones to say they had considered replacing their pay TV service. The poll was conducted Aug. 3-5 with 847 respondents and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Even through the downturn, the number of people subscribing to pay TV continued to grow. Cable, satellite and fiber-optic providers added 677,000 customers in the first quarter of this year, according to the investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein.

The firm’s preliminary numbers for the second quarter, which is traditionally weak, show a slight drop in subscribers. Satellite providers and Verizon’s FiOS service have been stealing market share from cable.

The cable and satellite companies say that their customers are reluctant to pay more — the Comcast chief executive, Brian L. Roberts, described customers who paid only for video, without a bundle of other services, as “very price-sensitive” — but insist that cord-cutting has not been an especially disruptive trend.

To keep customers, especially the price-sensitive ones, the carriers are getting creative. They are trying to bring the living-room experience to every other screen in a customer’s home, including laptops and tablets. Last week Verizon became the latest carrier to announce plans for an app that puts live TV on the iPad, pushing out the walls of cable TV’s walled garden a bit.

Cablevision, in the New York City area, is running similar trials for tablets and smartphones, Tom Rutledge, the chief operating officer, said in an earnings call this month. “Our vision is that we will provide our full service, everything we offer in the home,” Mr. Rutledge said, “on any device that can display TV or act as a TV in the home.”

Craig Moffett, a cable industry analyst at Bernstein, says the fortunes of pay TV companies are nevertheless destined to flag, given customers’ dissatisfaction with prices, as well as the persistent efforts by technology companies to come up with alternatives.

Entrepreneurs will “keep storming the castle until somebody figures it out,” Mr. Moffett wrote in a recent note to investors. But he also called cord-cutting “perhaps the most overhyped and overanticipated phenomenon in tech history.”

Plenty of people say they have foresworn cable for good. They are largely young adults who know their way around the Internet and have grown accustomed to watching video on computers and other devices.

The Times/CBS News survey found that people under the age of 45 were about four times as likely as those 45 and over to say Internet video services could effectively replace cable.

“I pay for the Internet; why would I pay for cable?” said Breck Yunits, 26, who lives in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco in a house he shares with four roommates. They regularly gather at night around the dinner table and use his Hewlett-Packard laptop to watch “The Office,” “Arrested Development” and other shows on sites like Hulu, NBC.com and MTV.com.

The roommates split a $40 Internet bill, and one roommate pays around $10 a month for a Netflix subscription. In the past they have also grabbed illegal copies of movies using BitTorrent, a file-sharing system. Mr. Yunits, a freelance computer programmer, said his girlfriend liked some of what was legally available only on pay TV, so he might eventually “be a candidate for it.”

“Personally I would never get cable because the shows online have gotten so good,” he said. “You get to watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it.”

But people like Mr. Yunits are still few and far between, in part because it is simply too hard for most people to cobble together an alternative to pay TV’s offerings.

Take Hulu, which attracts tens of millions of users a month. People can watch most broadcast shows on Hulu, but few cable shows, because they are carefully protected by media companies that rely on subscriber revenue. “American Idol,” the biggest entertainment show in the country, cannot legally be watched online at all.

Meanwhile there has not been much traction for a host of services like Boxee, which aim to connect televisions to the Internet and help people find things to watch. There is, though, interest in the possibilities: a global survey by Nielsen published this month found that one in five people was eager to buy a Net-connected TV in the next year.

Another alternative comes from video game consoles, like the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PlayStation 3. They are in millions of living rooms and are adding video programming, like Netflix’s streaming service. But to date, research shows, they are not undermining cable or satellite — merely complementing it with pay-per-view TV episodes and some movie streams.

Instead of cord-cutting, Mr. Leichtman said there was a greater potential for what he called cord-slicing, cutting back on one part of the monthly cable bill, like pay-per-view movies, while keeping the basic service.

Any relief would be welcome to John Akerson, 46, a friend of Mr. Mitchell’s in Winston-Salem, who pays $100 a month to Time Warner Cable so he and his wife, Jen, can spend two to three hours a night watching ESPN highlights, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” and local newscasts.

Because of the cost and periodic service glitches, he says that he has “a deep resentment bordering on hate” for the cable company. But other options have not worked out, even though Mr. Mitchell gave him a tutorial on using an Apple TV device.

Mr. Akerson finds it almost laughable that he and his wife have not been able to figure out an alternative, given that both of them are technically adept.

“I guess it comes down to laziness on my part,” he said of his failure to find an alternative to Time Warner Cable. That and, if he switches, “I’m definitely not going to be able to get ‘True Blood.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/bu...a/23couch.html





Crowded Field for Bringing Web Video to TVs
Jenna Wortham

If you want to watch Internet video on most televisions, you need a gadget that pulls it in. And a growing number of technology companies want to sell it to you.

Start-ups and tech giants alike are offering what they say are easy ways to pipe shows and movies to a TV, hoping to win over people who might want a cheaper or more diverse alternative to cable and satellite service.

These companies have a lot of convincing to do. Most people do not have the tech-savviness to tackle the hardware and software setup that these products often require. And the companies are not able to offer access to many shows and channels that are on traditional pay TV, nor bundle services like phone service and Internet access at a discounted rate, as TV service providers do.

But there are also several perks, beginning with the cost. Many of these products do not require monthly subscriptions, and those that do rarely cost more than $20 a month. And they try to make up for the lack of some programming by organizing the Internet’s offerings through an easy-to-navigate menu.

“People don’t want 400 overpriced channels,” said Phil Wiser, co-founder and president of Sezmi, a start-up that thinks it has a shot at the big screen in the living room. “Consumers are ready to make a new decision about how they are paying for television.”

Sezmi, based in Belmont, Calif., offers a hybrid system that delivers content in several ways. The system, which sells for $150 at Best Buy, has a DVR and pulls in both over-the-air TV broadcasts and on-demand content from the Internet.

Sezmi, which is slowly being introduced in major cities like San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles before a national rollout, offers two service plans. Customers can pay $5 a month for a programming guide and access to a catalog of pay-as-you-go shows and movies. A $20 plan adds cable programming, including channels like Bravo, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

One major hurdle for a company like Sezmi, analysts say, is that many consumers are now used to buying their cable, telephone and Internet services in a bundle.

“These services by and large will be limited by the fact that they are one-trick ponies,” said Mike Jude, an analyst with Frost and Sullivan.

But Mr. Wiser says Sezmi is working with Internet service providers to try to offer Sezmi packaged with broadband and telephone service: “We’re trying to be everything.”

Others companies, like Boxee, think they can draw a sizeable audience without having to offer prime-time programming. Boxee’s free software pulls in online video from many sources around the Internet, including CNN.com. But the software requires viewers to watch on a computer, or hook the computer to a TV. In November the company will get around that problem by introducing a set-top box that runs its software.

Then there are companies that are taking a more symbiotic approach. Roku, for example, makes a slim box starting at $70 that can wirelessly stream movies and TV shows from Netflix and other sources, but does not aim to be a cable replacement.

“We’re more complementary, for people who are shaving down their cable services or trimming the breadth of what they get,” said Brian Jaquet, a spokesman for the company.

A service called Kylo, introduced in February, is gearing up for a wave of Internet-connected television sets with free software that allows users to search for online video using a browser on their television screens.

All of these services are relatively new, so most have not yet gained any significant traction. But analysts say that even the larger companies that are hoping to make inroads in this area have not found much success.

That is in part because many big media companies have been reluctant to make their best programming available online. That would give people fewer reasons to pay for expensive monthly cable and satellite services, which would in turn hurt the content companies.

The video site Hulu does not want people viewing its content on TV sets, so it has used technological means to block Kylo and Boxee users. Boxee has found ways to circumvent this. Hulu is a joint venture of the News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, NBC Universal and Providence Equity Partners.

Even Apple has struggled with Apple TV, a $229 set-top box that is its attempt to bring its iTunes software and store to the heart of home entertainment.

“People love Apple, but we’ve seen a low adoption of their Apple TV,” said Jonathan Hurd, director of Altman Vilandrie, a Boston consulting firm that studies media habits. “Setup is a big factor. It’s typically more complicated than the average consumer is willing to put up with.”

There is speculation that Apple may be gearing up to take another shot at the market with a new device. And Google is diving in this fall. It has teamed up with several partners to develop its Google TV platform.

The Google software, which will pull together Web content and television channels in one programming guide, will be built into high-definition televisions made by Sony and set-top boxes from Logitech. It will be powered by a chip from Intel and by Google’s Android software, originally designed for smartphones.

Of course, many living rooms already have all the technology necessary for watching free online shows. Game consoles like the PlayStation 3, the Wii and the Xbox can be connected to the Internet and can funnel online videos to the television.

Consumers might be more prone to making the Internet switch than they were a few years ago, Mr. Hurd said. According to a recent survey conducted by his company, fewer than 40 percent of viewers under the age of 24 watch television during prime time. And the number of people watching television shows on the Internet has doubled in the last year.

“The biggest threat to the traditional companies is on-demand video,” said Mr. Hurd. “The opportunity is there for a new entrant to come up with a compelling slice of on-demand content.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/te...23startup.html





Jackson Gillis, Prolific Writer of TV Drama, Dies at 93
Bruce Weber

Cops and detectives, doctors and lawyers, spies and cowboys, heroes, superheroes and semi-superheroes. These are staples of television drama, and one of the unsung people who stapled them was Jackson Gillis, a prolific slogger in the trenches of television writing whose career spanned more than four decades and whose scripts put words in the mouths of Superman, Perry Mason, Columbo, Wonder Woman, Zorro, Tarzan, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, Jessica Fletcher and, in a manner of speaking, Lassie.

Mr. Gillis died of pneumonia in Moscow, Idaho, on Aug. 19, his daughter, Candida, said. He was 93.

Mr. Gillis was not an award winner — he was nominated for a single Emmy, in 1972, for an episode of “Columbo” — but his résumé traces a remarkable path through the evolution of prime time. His niche was the plot-driven tale of distress, in which danger disturbs the serene status quo, is cranked up to crisis dimensions and is resolved with dispatch by the protagonist, all in a neat half-hour, or, more often, an hour.

The formula, of course, stayed remarkably consistent during his career — and it has remained so — but Mr. Gillis showed he could adapt to the tenor of the times.

In the 1950s, his dialogue, in “The Adventures of Superman” and “Lassie,” for example, was replete with homespun clichés (if sometimes winkingly so) and not especially subtle repartee. In the 1960s, when he wrote for shows like “I Spy” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” with their wisecracking secret agents, he incorporated the hip lingo that television, however tentatively, invoked to reflect the decade. Later, in “Columbo,” he helped define the low-key nature of the title character (played by Peter Falk), with lines that were understated and wry.

Jackson Clark Gillis was born in Kalama, Wash., on Aug. 21, 1916. His father, Ridgway, a highway engineer, moved the family to California when Jackson was a teenager; his mother, the former Marjorie Lyman, was a piano teacher. He went to Fresno State University and graduated from Stanford. He acted after college, working in Britain and at the Barter Theater in Virginia. (Gregory Peck was also in the company at the time.)

“One play he did was by George Bernard Shaw, who came to see the play and sent him a postcard afterward criticizing his exit,” his daughter wrote in an e-mail. “I have the postcard.”

Mr. Gillis served as an Army intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II. After his discharge, he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, and he began writing for radio, including the mysteries “The Whistler” and “Let George Do It.”

He shifted to television in the early 1950s; his first regular assignment was for a cop show, “I’m the Law,” which starred George Raft as a New York City police detective. He wrote numerous episodes of “The Adventures of Superman,” beginning in 1953, and from 1954 to 1960 he was a frequent contributor of heroic canine feats and communicative barks for “Lassie.”

He spent several years writing for “Perry Mason,” beginning in 1959. He also wrote popular serials for children that appeared on “The Mickey Mouse Club”: “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” about boys living on a ranch, and two adventures featuring the teenage amateur detective brothers the Hardy Boys, “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” and “The Mystery of the Ghost Farm.”

Mr. Gillis’s 62-year marriage to Patricia Cassidy, whom he met when they were fellow actors at the Barter Theater, ended with her death in 2003. In addition to his daughter, who lives in Moscow, he is survived by a brother, William, of Walnut Creek, Calif., and a grandson.

Candida Gillis said in a telephone interview that as she was growing up, the soundtrack of the house was the constant rat-a-tat of her father’s typewriter, and certainly what is most impressive about Mr. Gillis’s career is its sheer breadth. He worked on “Racket Squad,” “Sugarfoot,” “The Fugitive,” “Lost in Space,” “The Wild, Wild West,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Mannix,” “The Mod Squad,” “Bonanza,” “Ironside,” “Land of the Giants,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Medical Center,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Police Woman” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

His daughter described him as a freelance worker bee who was never a Hollywood insider. When he brought her to the studio, he would warn her not to stare at anyone she recognized.

“He was not impressed by the business,” she said, adding that he didn’t watch much television himself.

“He watched football,” Ms. Gillis said. “He thought most of what was on TV was junk.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/ar.../29gillis.html





It's Gamers vs. Game Companies

Companies struggle to balance copyright technologies with players' interests.
Erica Naone

Computer game companies use increasingly complicated software to protect against piracy. But these efforts can frustrate gamers, who protest that the protections restrict legitimate game play. Last week, Ubisoft, a company accused of using a draconian and convoluted protection scheme, backed down by announcing that its new game RUSE would use a less restrictive scheme.

The change highlights the tension between gamers and game companies regarding copy protection schemes. And it shows how companies struggle to balance fears over copyright infringement and the demands of their customers.

Legitimate copies of games, like other pieces of software, usually come with a unique code that unlocks it. But game companies are concerned about rampant sharing of pirated games online and the speed with which hackers can break ordinary "digital rights management" (DRM) schemes.

Earlier this year, Ubisoft launched a game called Assassin's Creed 2 with a controversial new "always-on" DRM scheme. The game required a player to be online so that it could check in with the company's servers to verify that the gamer had a genuine copy. Some players grumbled about the scheme before it even launched, and worried that the game would be unplayable if the company's servers went down, or if players didn't have a network connection. There was more trouble once the game went live--Ubisoft's servers couldn't handle the load of players, which meant that many people who had bought the game couldn't play it.

Richard Esguerra, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), says tensions tend to erupt when a DRM scheme violates customers' sense of ownership. "Gamers have an idea that if you bought it, you own it, and that's what's being violated here," he says.

Esguerra says an "always-on" DRM scheme can unfairly affect those who live in rural areas and lack consistent connectivity. He adds that such DRM schemes can render a game worthless if the company behind it goes bust or decides to stop supporting that title. Some games, such as World of Warcraft, need a connection to provide integral features. But Esguerra thinks players are offended when the connection isn't essential to the game play.

Russ Crupnick, vice president and senior industry analyst for NPD Group, says the intricacies of DRM technologies don't matter to most consumers unless the system gets in the way. The key for companies, he says, is to find a system that's unobtrusive.

Ferdinand Schober, a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech who previously worked at Microsoft on the popular games Gears of War and Halo, says some companies are pursuing ever more restrictive DRM. One possibility is "executable content"--forcing players to download new pieces of a game as they progress through it. He says that hints on forums and in game code have led him to believe that companies are experimenting with this technology.

Ultimately, Schober says, companies are moving toward a model where hackers wouldn't just have to break through protections on a game, they'd also have to crack company servers. The unfortunate consequence, he says, is that it's getting more difficult for legitimate gamers to use and keep the products they buy.

But there are alternatives to DRM in the works as well. The IEEE Standards Association, which develops industry standards for a variety of technologies, is working to define "digital personal property." The goal, says Paul Sweazey, who heads the organization's working group, is to restore some of the qualities of physical property--making it possible to lend or resell digital property.

Sweazey stresses that the group just started meeting, but he explains that the idea is to sell games and other pieces of software in two parts--an encrypted file and a "play key" that allows it to be used. The play key could be stored in an online bank run by any organization, and could be accessed through a URL. To share the product, the player would simply share the URL. Anyone with access to the URL could claim the play key for himself, Sweazey says, meaning that users would be unlikely to share the URL on the open Internet.

Game makers are exploring other ways to encourage players to buy legitimate copies of a game, or to make money without relying on selling legitimate copies. These include adding special features that can only be accessed through official versions, and providing downloadable content for legitimate copies that expands a game's story or adds additional side quests and characters. Some games, such as those that run through Facebook, like Zynga's Farmville, are free to play but earn revenue by selling virtual items within the game.

Some game companies use copy protection that experts agree protect content effectively without restricting players. Schober and Esguerra both point to the DRM used by Valve's Steam, a site that sells downloadable games and allows online play. Schober notes that Steam is designed to be simple to use--gamers can download files ahead of release, and when the game becomes available, they get the codes needed to unlock them. This avoids situations such as the pounding that Ubisoft's servers received at the release of Assassin's Creed.
http://www.technologyreview.com/prin...ec tion=Media





Money for Nothing, and Your Kicks for Free
Julian Murdoch

How Warner Bros. and Turbine plan to change the world one micro-transaction at a time with games like Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online.

The April announcement of Warner Bros. acquiring independent Turbine was hardly shocking. Venture-capital backed since before the dotcom boom, Turbine had been rumored to be looking for suitors and a liquidity event for its investors for a year. Warner, on the other hand, has been on an acquisition binge, gobbling up Monolith (F.E.A.R.), Snowblind (Champions of Norrath, the upcoming The Lord of the Rings role-playing game, War in the North), Rocksteady (Batman: Arkham Asylum), Telltale Games (Lego You-Name-It) and scooping up faltering Midway along the way. Turbine could simply be another feather in Warner's cap.

The PR spin surrounding the deal has been standard fare, but this acquisition is different-and it's smarter. Not only is Turbine the only developer of persistent worlds in the mix, but as of June, they're also the only developer in Warner's portfolio giving their games away for free.

In September 2009, Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online abandoned the pure subscription model for a hybrid model focused squarely on microtransactions. Much of the content became free-to-play. Individual dungeons, content expansions, and an endless list of consumables and upgrades became available through an in-game storefront, while a monthly subscription offering blends the old "everything's unlocked" model with a new "buy it when you need it" mentality.

And now, Turbine's crown jewel, The Lord of the Rings Online, is following suit. And Warner couldn't be happier.

"We believe that the free-to-play model is a superior financial model," says Martin Tremblay, president of Warner Interactive. And they put their money where their mouth is. The acquisition of Turbine is rumored to be worth more than $160 million, with incentives for performance included.

One hundred and sixty million dollars for a company that just decided to give away their best game.

The Rise of Free-to-Play

To understand the genesis of the "free-to-play" revolution that's taken over Turbine, it's important to know the most prominent husband-and-wife team in game design, Kate and Fernando Paiz. As executive producers of The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, respectively, they're directly responsible for morphing the shape of Turbine's games-and quite possibly the future of the MMO industry. It all started with There.com.

There.com was an early virtual world along the lines of Second Life focused on microtransactions. It shuttered this March. "There.com was too early. It was breaking ground and wasn't mature," Kate Paiz says. And when the couple migrated to Turbine, it wasn't to bring a There.com model to Turbine-it was to get away from it. "It's ironic that all our executive producers came from There.com," Fernando Paiz admits. "When we started here, we were doing nothing with microtransactions."

It's not that the topic never came up-MMO developers are keenly aware that the biggest problem in their business is convincing people to pay $15 a month. It just didn't feel right. "I remember five years ago taking the temperature of the room on microtransactions in an executive meeting," Fernando Paiz recalls. "And the reaction-even my reaction-was 'over my dead body-we're not going to cheapen this game.' We weren't ready, and neither was the consumer."

But do microtransactions "cheapen" a game?

The DDO Success Story

Fernando Paiz, who was at the helm for Dungeons & Dragons Online's change in business model, was keenly focused on not ruining the game he and his wife had helped craft. Critically, the power level and balance impact of in-store items is constantly scrutinized. The man behind that scrutinizing is Tom George, Turbine's director of e-commerce. In most MMO companies, he'd be in charge of selling the occasional upgrade pack and a bunch of T-shirts. At Turbine, he's the gateway for what is now the core revenue stream for the company-selling Turbine Points, and getting players to spend those points in game.

"My No. 1 goal is to get people to play the game-and to keep playing the game," George says. "Unless we do that, there's nothing they can give us-money, referrals-that will actually matter." There's a subtle difference between Tom's focus and that of someone at a traditional MMO, though. While Dungeons & Dragons Online still has plenty of subscribers-many of them lifetime subscribers-what they get for their money is a stipend of Turbine Points along with a package of perks like storage and content that nonsubscribers have to buy à la carte. "The nature of MMOs historically has been that they're designed to keep you playing longer, because you need to put in time for a monthly subscription. To have you grind and grind, because you need to subscribe month to month."

With a hybrid model, it's far easier for players to jump in and out of the game from month to month, without feeling the pressure of justifying a monthly expense. "In the real world, it's hard to get a group together," says Adam Mersky, Turbine's head of communications and community relations. "If I can drop $5 on an evening to avoid the pain points and get one good evening of play, that's important."

Perhaps most important, Turbine isn't turning their games into "he with the most cash wins" fests either. For the most part, everything available in the store is available through other means in the game, and players can earn Turbine Points through game activities. It will be entirely possible to experience the entire epic storyline of the original The Lord of the Rings Online content, and hit the level cap, without spending a dime.

"We're bringing the North American cultural gamer view to this," Fernando Paiz explains. "So that's why we focus on things like paying for content. I pay three bucks to buy Rock Band songs all the time. That's way better than having to buy magic rock-out juice to win at high-level Rock Band."

When DDO went free-to-play, it was a risky move. Many industry observers saw it as a desperation play, to breathe life into a flagging franchise. Even Turbine had reservations. While not boasting millions of subscribers, a substantial player base was paying a monthly subscription. Seeing what they'd been paying for suddenly open to the unwashed masses was a big concern. "We were prepared for losing a big chunk when we announced," says Mersky. "But we didn't."

Instead what happened is unprecedented for a 4-year-old MMO-the population more than doubled. According to industry watcher NPD, Dungeons & Dragons Online market penetration doubled in 2009, from 4 percent to 8 percent, and DDO only went free in September. More impressively, DDO added 2 million new players, reacquired 20 percent of its former players who had left the game, and doubled the number of monthly subscribers-now called "VIPs."

And the nature of the player base has shifted as well. DDO's average player age dropped by a decade. In the PC gaming market-one which has been chronically aging-that's a big deal.

And what are all those people buying? Time.

A quick look at DDO's best sellers shows people looking to level up a bit faster, not die in dungeons, and get better loot. The items in question-potions, scrolls, tomes-are generally fairly minor in game terms. They're conveniences that streamline the process, rather than upset the carefully constructed skinner-box of challenge, repetition, reward, and reinforcement that drives all MMOs.

"There are just inherent pain points in MMOs that get in the way of your entertainment," George explains. "Sometimes that's just not having enough money to subscribe, or maybe it's not having enough time to craft to get the things in the game you'd really like, or to go on raids for certain loot...we can monetize around those pain points."

Monetizing around pain points? George's office is stacked with charts and tables, showing exactly what types of players are buying what items from the store, plans for new pricing schemes, and package deals. It's clear to me that in George's office a strange and emergent science is under practice, one that is intimately dependent on, but fundamentally different from, designing good games.

It's that science that has driven monthly revenues for Dungeons & Dragons Online up 500 percent in a matter of months.

Is it any wonder that The Lord of the Rings Online is following suit, or that Tremblay's eyebrows were raised in Spock-like interest?

The Long View

For Tremblay, Turbine's success with a hybrid microtransaction model isn't just about making the next big MMO out of juicy Warner Bros. IP. It's about changing the way they do business. "Turbine has a clear merchandising platform that can be used across our entire portfolio of games," Tremblay suggests. When pressed, he refuses to close off any avenues. "It can be used for a Batman game, for other LOTR games, for a Harry Potter game, or even for the F.E.A.R. franchise." Care to pay by the bullet? It might be in your future.

Tremblay, and indeed the Turbinites we talked to, are quick to point out that "Turbine Way" of doing business is about more than just setting up a store to sell healing potions for pennies a pop. "The way they manage their community within the website, with forums, with blogs, with input from what happens in-game showing up on your iPhone or your iPad, it's almost a social networking approach to gaming," he explains. "It's not just e-commerce, with a store, but it's also managing and understanding their community. Nobody else is doing it like Turbine at the moment."

What's clear is that the move toward free-to-play and Warner's acquisition is far from coincidental; it's the whole reason for the transaction. Crowley, Tremblay's counterpart at Turbine, put it plainly. "People naturally have to draw a correlation between the Warner deal and our move to free-to-play. I think it's a strong recognition of the importance of these new business models."

Crowley pauses, looking around his office for what may be one of the last times-the company is moving out of the human-hostile converted warehouse they've been in for years into a larger facility actually designed for, you know, people. It's a move that will be a bit more lavish now that Warner is paying the rent. "This isn't anomalous. This is a significant and fundamental change in the ecosystem."

It's a bold claim, but it's impossible to argue with the stunning rebound of Dungeons & Dragons Online. Whether lightning strikes twice-and then rolls, ball-like, through the rest of Warner Interactive, remains to be seen.
http://www.gamepro.com/article/featu...icks-for-free/





Don’t Tell the Creative Department, but Software Can Produce Ads, Too
Stuart Elliott

For decades — maybe even since computers began arriving in workplaces in the 1960s — there have been predictions that machines will be able to perform the creative tasks that usually require human beings. An agency in Paris is offering a new twist on those venerable forecasts, to make a point about the creative process.

BETC Euro RSCG, part of the Euro RSCG Worldwide division of Havas, has developed software that can produce elementary advertisements. The software is called CAI, pronounced Kay, for Creative Artificial Intelligence.

CAI can be programmed to produce ads by selecting a product category (say, soft drinks) and type of product (for instance, coffee, energy drinks, fruit juice, milk, tea or water).

Next up are questions about objectives. Do you want to generate awareness? Create loyalty? Increase purchase? Introduce a product? Recruit customers? CAI then wants to know the demographic target for the ad by sex and age.

Last come questions on the intended benefits of the product. For milk, for example, qualities like fresh, healthy and organic are offered. CAI ponders all those requirements, then produces three possible ads that meets them.

CAI can randomly generate an estimated 200,000 ads. In a recent demonstration, the software brought forth bland and formulaic — but perfectly acceptable — ads that could run in magazines or newspapers, as banners on Web sites or on billboards.

And that is the point being made by the executive who came up with the idea for CAI.

The initial response to CAI is “playful,” Stephane Xiberras, president and executive creative director at BETC Euro RSCG, wrote in an e-mail message, as people “try to create campaigns for perfumes or for chips, and it’s true that it generates fun ads.”

“After this first reaction, they get a little scared,” he said, “when they see that a software program can create the same (mediocre) results in just 10 seconds as several hours of strategic meetings and production.”

And that is, according to Mr. Xiberras, “a pretty scary thing.”

Another year of working on CAI “could turn it into a real tool for agencies and clients,” he said, because the software “sometimes leads to random accidents that could stimulate the creative process.”

It also “provides good examples of what not to do,” he added.

Even so, humans ought not to be replaced by software, Mr. Xiberras said.

“Our industry has been living in a paradox for several years,” he explained. “In a world where it is increasingly difficult to get brands’ messages to emerge, there is a growing standardization of advertising.”

The contention that most ads are “no more than a reconstitution of already existing ideas and forms” led to the development of the software.

Mr. Xiberras wrote the copy for the ads for CAI and Claire Maoui, an art director, found the thousands of images. Clarisse Lacarrau, international planner, and Elodie Andurand, account director, handled the strategic planning aspects.

And Abder Zeghoud, Web developer, and Vincent Malone, executive creative director, worked on the programming side.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...oduce-ads-too/





Scholars Test Web Alternative To the Venerable Peer Review
Patricia Cohen

For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”

That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

The Shakespeare Quarterly trial, along with a handful of other trailblazing digital experiments, goes to the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. Traditional peer review has shaped the way new research has been screened for quality and then how it is communicated; it has defined the border between the public and an exclusive group of specialized experts.

Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress, compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects.

The quarterly’s experiment has so far inspired at least one other journal — Postmedieval — to plan a similar trial for next year.

Just a few years ago these sorts of developments would have been unthinkable, said Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. “Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete,” he said.

Ms. Rowe, who served as guest editor for The Shakespeare Quarterly’s special issue devoted to Shakespeare and new media, said: “The traditional process is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field. It represents a settlement for a particular moment, not a perfect ideal.”

Each type of review has benefits and drawbacks.

The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years.

Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants. Open review more closely resembles Wikipedia behind the scenes, where anyone with an interest can post a comment. This open-door policy has made Wikipedia, on balance, a crucial reference resource.

Ms. Rowe said the goal is not necessarily to replace peer review but to use other, more open methods as well.

In some respects scientists and economists who have created online repositories for unpublished working papers, like repec.org, have more quickly adapted to digital life. Just this month, mathematicians used blogs and wikis to evaluate a supposed mathematical proof in the space of a week — the scholarly equivalent of warp speed.

In the humanities, in which the monograph has been king, there is more inertia. “We have never done it that way before,” should be academia’s motto, said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College.

Ms. Fitzpatrick was a founder of the MediaCommons network in 2007. She posted chapters of her own book “Planned Obsolescence” on the site, and she used the comments readers provided to revise the manuscript for NYU Press. She also included the project in the package she presented to the committee that promoted her to full professor this year.

Many professors, of course, are wary of turning peer review into an ‘’American Idol”-like competition. They question whether people would be as frank in public, and they worry that comments would be short and episodic, rather than comprehensive and conceptual, and that know-nothings would predominate.

After all, the development of peer review was an outgrowth of the professionalization of disciplines from mathematics to history — a way of keeping eager but uninformed amateurs out.

“Knowledge is not democratic,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist who analyzes peer review in her 2009 book, “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.” Evaluating originality and intellectual significance, she said, can be done only by those who are expert in a field.

At the same time she noted that the Web is already having an incalculable effect on academia, especially among younger professors. In her own discipline, for instance, the debates happening on the site Sociologica.mulino.it “are defined as being frontier knowledge even though they are not peer reviewed.”

The most daunting obstacle to opening up the process is that peer-review publishing is the path to a job and tenure, and no would-be professor wants to be the academic canary in the coal mine.

The first question that Alan Galey, a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, asked when deciding to participate in The Shakespeare Quarterly’s experiment was whether his essay would ultimately count toward tenure. “I went straight to the dean with it,” Mr. Galey said. (It would.)

Although initially cautious, Mr. Galey said he is now “entirely won over by the open peer review model.” The comments were more extensive and more insightful, he said, than he otherwise would have received on his essay, which discusses Shakespeare in the context of information theory.

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html





The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All
Celia McGee

For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.

A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” — became abbreviated, simply, as the “Green Book.” Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.

Until he met a friend’s elderly father-in-law at a funeral a few years ago, the Atlanta writer Calvin Alexander Ramsey had never heard of the guide. But he knew firsthand the reason it existed. During his family trips between Roxboro, N.C., and Baltimore, “we packed a big lunch so my parents didn’t have to worry about having to stop somewhere that might not serve us,” recalled Mr. Ramsey, who is now 60.

He is among the writers, artists, academics and curators returning a spotlight to the guide and its author, emblematic as it was of a period when black Americans — especially professionals, salesmen, entertainers and athletes — were increasingly on the move for work, play and family visits.

In addition to hotels, the guide often pointed them to “tourist homes,” privates residences made available by their African-American owners. Mr. Ramsey has written a play, “The Green Book,” about just such a home, in Jefferson City, Mo., where a black military officer and his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor all spend the night just before W. E. B. DuBois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. The play will inaugurate a staged-reading series on Sept. 15 at the restored Lincoln Theater in Washington, itself once a fixture of that city’s “black Broadway” on U Street.

Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who is now a faculty member at American University, will take on a cameo role. Mr. Bond recalled that his parents — his father, a college professor, became the first black president of Lincoln University, in southern Pennsylvania — used the book. “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat,” he said, “but where there was any place.”

In November, Carolrhoda Books will release Mr. Ramsey’s “Ruth and the Green Book,” a children’s book with illustrations by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green’s guide. “Most kids today hear about the Underground Railroad, but this other thing has gone unnoticed,” said Mr. Ramsey. “It just fell on me, really, to tell the story.”

Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end.

For a large swath of the nation’s history “the American democratic idea of getting out on the open road, finding yourself, heading for distant horizons was only a privilege for white people,” said Cotton Seiler, the author of “Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America,” who devoted a chapter of his book to the experience of black travelers.

William Daryl Williams, the director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati, in 2007 organized a traveling exhibition he called “The Dresser Trunk Project,” in which he and 11 other architects and artists used the “Green Book” to inform works that incorporated locations and artifacts from the history of black travel during segregation. Mr. Williams’s own piece, “Whitelaw Hotel,” referred to a well-known accommodation for African-Americans in Washington and included several pages from the “Green Book.”

Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a co-sponsor of “The Green Book” play reading, said the presence of the guide into the 1960s pointed out that at the same time people were countering segregation with sit-ins, the need to cope with everyday life remained.

He added: “The ‘Green Book’ tried to provide a tool to deal with those situations. It also allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism.”

Although Victor Green’s initial edition only encompassed metropolitan New York, the “Green Book” soon expanded to Bermuda (white dinner jackets were recommended for gentlemen), Mexico and Canada. The 15,000 copies Green eventually printed each year were sold as a marketing tool not just to black-owned businesses but to the white marketplace, implying that it made good economic sense to take advantage of the growing affluence and mobility of African Americans. Esso stations, unusual in franchising to African Americans, were a popular place to pick one up.

Mr. Bunch said he believes African American families are likely still have old copies sitting in attics and basements: “As segregation ended, people put such things away. They felt they didn’t need them anymore. It brought a sense of psychological liberation.”

Theater J in Washington, which specializes in Jewish-theme plays, is a co-producer of “The Green Book” reading. The “inconveniences” (as Green genteelly put it) of travel that African-Americans encountered were shared, albeit to a lesser extent and for a briefer period, by American Jews. In Mr. Ramsey’s play the Holocaust survivor comes to the tourist home after he’s appalled by a “No Negroes Allowed” sign posted in the lobby of the local hotel where he had planned to stay.

“The Jewish press has long published information about places that are restricted,” Green wrote in his book’s introduction, adding, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and Mr. Green ceased publication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/books/23green.html





Lexmark Sues 24 Cartridge Makers Over Patents
Erica Ogg

Printer manufacturer Lexmark is suing replacement cartridge makers that it says are infringing on its patents.

The Lexington, Ky.-based company on Friday filed a patent infringement complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Both suits accuse 24 companies that import replacement cartridges for Lexmark laser printers of violating 15 patents owned by Lexmark.

Both suits name the same 24 defendants. The ITC complaint--the now-standard venue for taking patent disputes against companies that import goods to the United States--asks that the defendants' products be banned from import and sale in the States. The federal lawsuit asks for an injunction on sales of the disputed products, as well as monetary damages.

This is not the first time Lexmark has battled the aftermarket-printing industry. In 2003, Lexmark famously tried to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an attempt to block a toner refill company from making replacement cartridges for Lexmark products.

Lexmark ultimately lost the case, but it hasn't been alone in its fight against cartridge makers. Hewlett-Packard has been similarly protective of its patents on ink formulas, filing several lawsuits over the past few years against third-party cartridge refill makers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20014467-260.html





The Third Replicator
Susan Blackmore

All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but apparently information can.

It is perhaps rather obvious to attribute this to the evolutionary algorithm or Darwinian process, as I will do, but I wish to emphasize one part of this process — copying. The reason information can increase like this is that, if the necessary raw materials are available, copying creates more information. Of course it is not new information, but if the copies vary (which they will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not all variants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable given limited resources), then we have the complete three-step process of natural selection (Dennett, 1995). From here novel designs and truly new information emerge. None of this can happen without copying.

I want to make three arguments here.

The first is that humans are unique because they are so good at imitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines.

The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another: that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) can build on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. This multilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity of design we see all around us.

The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

As I try to explain this I shall make some assertions and assumptions that some readers may find outrageous, but I am deliberately putting my case in its strongest form so that we can debate the issues people find most interesting or most troublesome.

Some may entirely reject the notion of replicators, and will therefore dismiss the whole enterprise. Others will accept that genes are replicators but reject the idea of memes. For example, Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb ( 2005) refer to “the dreaded memes” while Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005), who have contributed so much to the study of cultural evolution, assert that “cultural variants are not replicators.” They use the phrase “selfish memes” but still firmly reject memetics (Blackmore 2006). Similarly, in a previous “On The Human” post, William Benzon explains why he does not like the term “meme,” yet he needs some term to refer to the things that evolve and so he still uses it. As John S. Wilkins points out in response, there are several more classic objections: memes are not discrete (I would say some are not discrete), they do not form lineages (some do), memetic evolution appears to be Lamarckian (but only appears so), memes are not replicated but re-created or reproduced, or are not copied with sufficient fidelity (see discussions in Aunger 2000, Sterelny 2006, Wimsatt 2010). I have tackled all these, and more, elsewhere and concluded that the notion is still valid (Blackmore 1999, 2010a).

So I will press on, using the concept of memes as originally defined by Dawkins who invented the term; that is, memes are “that which is imitated” or whatever it is that is copied when people imitate each other. Memes include songs, stories, habits, skills, technologies, scientific theories, bogus medical treatments, financial systems, organizations — everything that makes up human culture. I can now, briefly, tell the story of how I think we arrived where we are today.

First there were genes. Perhaps we should not call genes the first replicator because there may have been precursors worthy of that name and possibly RNA-like replicators before the evolution of DNA (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). However, Dawkins (1976), who coined the term “replicator,” refers to genes this way and I shall do the same.

We should note here an important distinction for living things based on DNA, that the genes are the replicators while the animals and plants themselves are vehicles, interactors, or phenotypes: ephemeral creatures constructed with the aid of genetic information coded in tiny strands of DNA packaged safely inside them. Whether single-celled bacteria, great oak trees, or dogs and cats, in the gene-centered view of evolution they are all gene machines or Dawkins’s “lumbering robots.” The important point here is that the genetic information is faithfully copied down the generations, while the vehicles or interactors live and die without actually being copied. Put another way, this system copies the instructions for making a product rather than the product itself, a process that has many advantages (Blackmore 1999, 2001). This interesting distinction becomes important when we move on to higher replicators.

So what happened next? Earth might have remained a one-replicator planet but it did not. One of these gene machines, a social and bipedal ape, began to imitate. We do not know why, although shifting climate may have favored stealing skills from others rather than learning them anew (Richerson and Boyd 2005). Whatever the reason, our ancestors began to copy sounds, skills and habits from one to another. They passed on lighting fires, making stone tools, wearing clothes, decorating their bodies and all sorts of skills to do with living together as hunters and gatherers. The critical point here is, of course, that they copied these sounds, skills and habits, and this, I suggest, is what makes humans unique. No other species (as far as we know) can do this. Song birds can copy some sounds, some of the other great apes can imitate some actions, and most notably whales and dolphins can imitate, but none is capable of the widespread, generalized imitation that comes so easily to us. Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changes everything. It enables a new kind of evolution.

This is why I have called humans “Earth’s Pandoran species.” They let loose this second replicator and began the process of memetic evolution in which memes competed to be selected by humans to be copied again. The successful memes then influenced human genes by gene-meme co-evolution (Blackmore 1999, 2001). Note that I see this process as somewhat different from gene-culture co-evolution, partly because most theorists treat culture as an adaptation (e.g. Richerson and Boyd 2005), and agree with Wilson that genes “keep culture on a leash.” (Lumsden and Wilson 1981 p 13).

Benzon, in responding to Peter Railton’s post here at The Stone, points out the limits of this metaphor and proposes the “chess board and game” instead. I prefer a simple host-parasite analogy. Once our ancestors could imitate they created lots of memes that competed to use their brains for their own propagation. This drove these hominids to become better meme machines and to carry the (potentially huge and even dangerous) burden of larger brain size and energy use, eventually becoming symbiotic. Neither memes nor genes are a dog or a dog-owner. Neither is on a leash. They are both vast competing sets of information, all selfishly getting copied whenever and however they can.

To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is.

A sticking point concerns the equivalent of the meme-phenotype or vehicle. This has plagued memetics ever since its beginning: some arguing that memes must be inside human heads while words, technologies and all the rest are their phenotypes, or “phemotypes”; others arguing the opposite. I disagree with both (Blackmore 1999, 2001). By definition, whatever is copied is the meme and I suggest that, until very recently, there was no meme-phemotype distinction because memes were so new and so poorly replicated that they had not yet constructed stable vehicles. Now they have.

Think about songs, recipes, ways of building houses or clothes fashions. These can be copied and stored by voice, by gesture, in brains, or on paper with no clear replicator/vehicle distinction. But now consider a car factory or a printing press. Thousands of near-identical copies of cars, books, or newspapers are churned out. Those actual cars or books are not copied again but they compete for our attention and if they prove popular then more copies are made from the same template. This is much more like a replicator-vehicle system. It is “copy the instructions” not “copy the product.”

Of course cars and books are passive lumps of metal, paper and ink. They cannot copy, let alone vary and select information themselves. So could any of our modern meme products take the step our hominid ancestors did long ago and begin a new kind of copying? Yes. They could and they are. Our computers, all linked up through the Internet, are beginning to carry out all three of the critical processes required for a new evolutionary process to take off.

Computers handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variation and selection is still done by human beings, with their biologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement, communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already there are examples of computer programs recombining old texts to create new essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions, and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data. Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, Alta Vista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures.

This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting, and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. This copying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNA or humans copy memes. The information itself is also different, consisting of highly stable digital information stored and processed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit, signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the third replicator.

What should we expect of this dramatic step? It might make as much difference as the advent of human imitation did. Just as human meme machines spread over the planet, using up its resources and altering its ecosystems to suit their own needs, so the new teme machines will do the same, only faster. Indeed we might see our current ecological troubles not as primarily our fault, but as the inevitable consequence of earth’s transition to being a three-replicator planet. We willingly provide ever more energy to power the Internet, and there is enormous scope for teme machines to grow, evolve and create ever more extraordinary digital worlds, some aided by humans and others independent of them. We are still needed, not least to run the power stations, but as the temes proliferate, using ever more energy and resources, our own role becomes ever less significant, even though we set the whole new evolutionary process in motion in the first place.

Whether you consider this a tragedy for the planet or a marvelous, beautiful story of creation, is up to you.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...rd-replicator/





Three Unknown Features of the iPhone 4
David Pogue

It seems as though Apple dodged a bullet. Ever since the Steve Jobs press conference a couple of weeks ago, in which Apple offered free carrying casesbumpers (or full refunds) to anyone whose iPhone 4 exhibits the signal-drops-when-you-hold-the-phone-a-certain-way problem, the jeering and mockery online seems to have gone into hibernation.

Meanwhile, enough time has passed, and enough millions of people have been playing with their iPhones, that a critical mass of tricks and tips have started to pile up. Here's a look at three cool iOS 4 features that nobody, including Apple, seems to be talking about.

* Unified Contacts. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) can sync up with different accounts. The Contacts app might list three different sets of names and numbers: one stored on your phone, one from a MobileMe account, and a third from your corporate Exchange server at work. In the old days, certain names might show up in the All Contacts list two or three times, which isn't helpful.

In iOS 4, the iPhone displays each person's name only once in the All Contacts list. If you tap that name, you open up a Unified Info screen for that person. It includes all the details from ALL of the underlying cards from that person. All of the phone numbers, for example, are tidily rounded up into a single list.

To see which cards the iPhone is combining, scroll to the bottom of the card. There, the Linked Cards section shows you which cards have been unified.

Here, you can tap a listing to open the corresponding card in the corresponding account. You can also unlink one of the cards. For that matter, you can manually link a card, too; Tap Edit, tap Link Contact, and then choose a contact to link to this unified card -- even if the name isn't a perfect match.

In general, the iPhone tries to do the right thing. For example, if you edit the information on the Unified card, you're actually changing that information only on the card in the corresponding account. (Unless you add information to the Unified Info card. In that case, the new data tidbit is added to all of the underlying source-account cards.)

* FaceTime tricks. FaceTime is the feature that lets the iPhone 4 make free, high-quality video calls to other iPhone 4 owners, providing both of you are in a Wi-Fi hot spot with a good signal. Now Grandma can see the baby, or you can help someone shop from afar, or you can supervise brain surgery even from thousands of miles away. (If you're a brain surgeon, of course.)

Once the chat has begun, here's some of the fun you can have:

First, you can rotate the screen. FaceTime works in either portrait (upright) or landscape (widescreen) view; just turn your phone 90 degrees. (Of course, if your calling partner doesn't also turn her phone, she'll see your picture all squished and tiny, with big black areas filling the rest of the screen.)

Second, you can show what's in front of you. Sometimes, YOU are not the important thing; sometimes, you'll want to show your friend what you're looking at. That is, you'll want to turn on the camera on the back of the iPhone, the one pointing away from you, to show off the baby, the artwork, or the broken engine part.

That's easy enough; just tap the camera-rotation icon on your screen. The iPhone switches from the front camera to the back camera. Now you and your callee can both see what you're seeing. (It's a lot less awkward than using a laptop for this purpose, because the laptop's camera always faces away from you--so you can't see what you're showing.)

Third, you can mute the audio by tapping the little microphone icon. Great when you need to yell at the kids.

You can also "mute" the video--just switch into any other program (press the Home button, for example). Now the other guy's screen goes black. He can't see what you're doing when you leave the FaceTime screen. He can still hear you, though.

This feature was designed to let you check your calendar, look something up on the Web, or whatever, while you're still videochatting. But it's also a great trick when you need to adjust your clothing, pick your nose, or otherwise shield your activity from whomever's on the other end.

In the meantime, the call is, technically, still in progress--and a green banner at the top of the Home screen reminds you of that. Tap there, on the green bar, to return to the video call.

* Spoken books. The free iBooks app, which is Apple's answer to the Amazon Kindle, can actually read your books and PDF documents out loud to you.

To make this work, turn on VoiceOver, the text-to-speech feature that makes the iPhone usable by blind people. That is, open Settings -> General -> Accessibility and turn on VoiceOver. (There you can read about some of the other changes in your lifestyle that are required when VoiceOver is turned on; for example, you double-tap things instead of single-tapping them, because single-tapping makes the phone speak the name of whatever you're tapping.)

Then open a book. Tap the first line (to get the highlighting off the buttons at top).

Now swipe down the page with two fingers to make the iPhone start reading the book to you, out loud, with a synthesized voice. It even turns the pages automatically and keeps going until you tap with two fingers to stop it.

Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody's even realized this feature is in there.

Until now...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/te...gue-email.html





Tech Groups Oppose FM Radio In Cell Phones
FMQB

A group of technology associations is opposing the proposal by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the RIAA to require all mobile devices sold in the U.S. to include FM radio chips. The proposal is part of the negotiations between the NAB and the music industry over the Performance Rights Act, with the idea being that radio would agree to pay around $100 million a year in performance royalties, but in return it would get access to a larger market through the mandated FM radio chips in portable devices. However, six trade groups -- including the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), CTIA-The Wireless Association, Telecommunications Industry Association, TechAmerica, Information Technology Industry Council and Rural Cellular Association -- sent a letter to members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Monday, asking them to reject the proposal. They feel that it could harm the tech and mobile industries and that they should not be involved in the performance royalty debate in the first place.

"We strongly oppose any proposal to impose such a technology mandate on mobile devices and urge you to resist efforts to include such a mandate in legislation addressing the performance rights royalty issue," the letter reads. "It is simply wrong for two entrenched industries to resolve their differences by agreeing to burden a third industry - which has no relationship to or other interest in the performance royalty dispute - with a costly, ill-considered, and unnecessary new mandate. The proposed imposition of an FM chip mandate is not necessary for resolution of the dispute between performance artists and broadcasters and, if adopted, it would be bad policy for several reasons."

The letter points out that "mandating that every wireless device include an FM chip would raise the cost of producing wireless devices, with the likely outcome being that consumers would pay more for functionality they may not desire or ever use." It also says that the NAB and RIAA lack any expertise in the development of wireless devices and "are in no position to dictate what type of functionality is included in a wireless device. As devices continue to evolve, chip and antenna space is at a premium. Requiring that devices carry an FM chip may foreclose opportunities to include other functionality that may be more highly valued by consumers and harm competition among device makers by limiting opportunities for differentiation."

NAB EVP of Communications Dennis Wharton commented on the letter by saying, "Countries around the globe have added radio-enabled cell phones that are increasingly popular with consumers. The reality is that 239 million Americans tune in to free and local radio every week, and seven million new radio listeners were added just last year. Day in and day out, local radio stations serve as a reliable lifeline in times of crisis and weather emergencies. In an increasingly mobile society, it would be unfortunate if telco gatekeepers blocked access to public safety information offered by free and local radio."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1928403





Bob Dylan's No-Ticket Show No Sell-Out
Aidin Vaziri

Sixties rock hero's attempt to shake up concert industry ticketing policies fizzles

So how did Bob Dylan's great "ticketless" concert experiment go at the Warfield? You know, the one where the 69-year-old rock and roll veteran asked his fans to line up outside the venue for a few hours with $60 cash in hand to get inside -- eschewing extra fees, printer errors and scalper markups?

Just okay!

There was a substantial line outside the Warfield beginning Wednesday at noon -- abetted by the swarming local news vans -- but by the time the show kicked off a little after 8 p.m. the 2,250 capacity room was visibly undersold.

"I think it was not what everybody had hoped for but it was an experiment worth trying," said Goldenvoice Vice President David Lefkowitz. "The attention and buzz we created within the industry made it worth doing. But I think it just proves people are very used of the convenience of sitting at home and buying their tickets on a computer."

By comparison, much pricier tickets for Dylan's concert the night before at the Fox Theater in Oakland sold out within an hour, fees and all.

Lefkowitz thinks a few factors worked against the "ticketless" model, which admitted concert-goers on a first come first served basis.

"Some people may have been intimidated by the line," he said. "Some people maybe didn't like the idea of leaving home without a ticket; the uncertainty. Most of his fans probably have jobs so to get here before 6 or 7 p.m. was probably a stretch. It was challenging."

The idea came directly from Dylan, maybe as a nod to the old school way of doing things. But in the end it might just make everyone stop complaining about those oh-so-modern convenience charges that sometimes make a ticket cost double its face price.

Would Goldenvoice give the whole thing another shot; maybe with an artist who has a more fervent, foolhardy following?

"I would do it again given the right circumstances," said Lefkowitz. "Yeah, definitely."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/...entry_id=70917





A Hendrix Castle Where Musicians Still Kiss the Sky
Ben Sisario

Just down the street from the hot dogs of Gray’s Papaya, on a row of down-market Greenwich Village shops selling used CDs and a certain kind of glass pipe, 52 West Eighth Street is easy to miss. But a small sign marks hallowed musical ground: Electric Lady Studios.

Founded by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, it was an oddity for its time. Instead of following the usual studio model — a big, impersonal box tended by buttoned-down staff engineers — it was a psychedelic lair, with curved walls, groovy multicolored lights and sci-fi erotica murals to aid the creative flow. Hendrix died less than a month after its opening party on Aug. 26, 1970, but he left libraries of tape from his sessions there, and the list of greats who have worked at the studio includes the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin.

Something else about Electric Lady has turned out to be unusual: It has lasted. As a group of engineers and producers noted in a 40th-anniversary celebration on Tuesday, most other big-name studios in New York — the Hit Factory, the Record Plant, Sony Music Studios — have shut down in recent years, victims of the recording industry woes or simply of real estate pressure, but Electric Lady has defied the odds by staying alive, and staying top-tier.

Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s favored engineer and a force in the studio’s creation, has a simple explanation for its longevity.

“In a word: vibe,” he said, sitting in a small lounge by the control booth for one of Electric Lady’s three recording rooms. “We wanted to create an environment where Jimi could feel really happy, and feel that he could create anything.”

“It was this womblike, beautiful place,” he added, “where he could feel totally relaxed and create the music he wanted.”

The South African-born Mr. Kramer, whose slicked-back hair, trim goatee and punctilious manner give no indication of his résumé — working with Led Zeppelin, Kiss, the Rolling Stones and plenty more rock giants — was celebrating Electric Lady on Tuesday at a panel discussion organized by the Audio Engineering Society. Like Electric Lady itself, the meeting was an example of megafame hiding in plain sight, with men who have recorded some of the most famous and celebrated albums of the last 40 years yet are unknown to the public.

Seated with Mr. Kramer in Studio A, Electric Lady’s subterranean main room — which still has its original rounded walls and spiral ceiling — were Tony Platt, who mixed AC/DC’s “Back in Black” there in 1980; John Storyk, the architect and acoustician who designed the studio; and Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, the synthesizer wizards whom Stevie Wonder recruited in the early 1970s. Among the 80 or so audio professionals there, these famous-to-a-few figures overshadowed two panelists with much broader name recognition: Lenny Kaye, guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, and Janie Hendrix, Jimi’s stepsister.

With sentimentality and a precision appropriate for lifelong engineers, they told studio war stories (Jimi’s amp was there, against the wall; Stevie’s drums went right there); made the audience oooh and aaah with slideshow photos of old mixing consoles; and tried to pinpoint what it was about the place that gives it that all-important vibe. The spirit of the studio’s founder was cited more than once, along with the mix of high-tech equipment and mellow atmosphere.

“All the studios you see today come from being a friendly place to make art,” Mr. Margouleff said, holding back tears. “That was really what came out of this studio.”

For many artists Electric Lady has become a home away from home. The door to the upstairs bathroom has a small hole in it, just big enough to run a cable in there for when Keith Richards wants to cut his guitar parts in the most private kind of privacy. For Jimmy Page the personal imprimaturs of Hendrix and Mr. Kramer made all the difference when Led Zeppelin mixed parts of “Houses of the Holy” there in 1972.

“Eddie Kramer was a damn fine engineer,” Mr. Page said in a telephone interview this week. “If he was going to be working on a studio that had Hendrix’s name, he was going to make sure it was a good place with good acoustics so that musicians wanted to play in that room.”

Yet in the world of recording studios, where time is money and inspiration needs to flow for take after take, even intangibles like vibe have a specific function, and the design approach of Electric Lady has become commonplace today.

Mr. Storyk explained that in addition to the mood lighting, Hendrix called for visionary changes in studio design, like control rooms large enough for artists and engineers to work together closely. Those plans, along with complications like the high water table under the building, made for a protracted and expensive construction.

The studio’s original filing with the Buildings Department estimated its cost $125,000, but it ended up costing about $1 million, said Mr. Storyk, who got the Electric Lady job at 22 and has gone on to design numerous studios and performance spaces around the world.

“For the first time an artist was building a studio,” Mr. Storyk said. “This was happening in a few pockets all over the world, but none more famous than here with Jimi.”

Electric Lady’s artist-friendly innovations — along with the Hendrix mystique — have helped it survive in an era when large, all-purpose recording studios are giving way to smaller rooms with narrower focus. Echoing the Electric Lady model, many new studios, like Jay-Z’s Roc the Mic on West 27th Street in Manhattan (designed by Mr. Storyk) are tailored to the needs of a particular client.

Yet Electric Lady also had its lean years. As with most studios, it suffered as advances in technology allowed anyone to make cheap and reasonably high-quality recordings at home. By the early 2000s it had lost its sheen and nearly closed, but after a renovation and a change in management it is thriving again.

Lee Foster, the 32-year-old studio manager, said that when he took over five years ago, he began going through his record collection and inviting Electric Lady alumni to come back. Before long its rates were back up, and the three rooms were always booked. Recent sessions have included Eric Clapton, Coldplay, Rihanna, the Strokes and Sheryl Crow.

To make room for the Audio Engineering Society’s meeting, Mr. Foster said, the studio ended sessions early. But on Wednesday it was back to work, with Studio B booked by Kanye West.

Mr. Kramer is in Studio A this week. He’s mixing a new Jimi Hendrix album, he said, and he looked excited.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/ar...26hendrix.html





California Moves to Outlaw Online "e-Personation"
Nate Anderson

Hoping to administer a powerful sockdolager to online fraudsters, the California legislature passed a bill earlier this month that makes it illegal to impersonate someone else online.

Its backer, state senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), says that the old laws against fraud or defamation just aren't cutting it anymore. "In the age of the Internet, pretending to be someone else is as easy as using their name to create a new e-mail account. When that is done to cause harm, folks need a law on the books they can turn to," he said. "New laws are needed to crack down on this form of harassment."

California already has such a law, but it dates to 1872 and only covers faking someone's signature. The new bill extends the principle to Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail, and it makes "e-personation" (yes, we're groaning, too) a misdemeanor punishable by up to $1,000 in fines and a year in jail.

The bill's text is brief. In an effort to carve out freedom of speech exceptions, the bill outlaws only "credible" impersonations, and the impersonation must be done "for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person." Fake Steve Jobs should be OK, but "harm" is a fairly nebulous standard.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sees obvious potential for abuse here as corporations target those who might seek to parody their actions or impersonate them as a political gesture—in other words, the Yes Men. The Men (and presumably, some women) have pulled off a couple of terrific events in recent years, including one last year where they impersonated the US Chamber of Commerce, rented the National Press Club, and issued a major announcement reversing their current global warming policies.

The hoax fooled a number of real reporters, garnered tons of attention, and ended in bizarre fashion when an actual Chamber of Commerce employee showed up and tried to shut down the whole proceeding. The Chamber eventually sued the group.

Could similar online events be illegal under the new bill? Should they be? "Temporarily 'impersonating' corporations and public officials has become an important and powerful form of political activism, especially online," says EFF today. "Unfortunately, the targets of the criticism, like the Chamber, have responded with improper legal threats and lawsuits. It would be a shame if Senator Simitian’s bill added another tool to their anti-speech arsenal."

As for the issue of "credible" interpretations, EFF says "that argument misses the point—identity correction depends on initial credibility, just as it also depends on prompt exposure."

The bill awaits Governor Schwarzenegger's signature. EFF encourages him not to sign.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ersonation.ars





Pac-Man Hacked Onto a Touch-Screen Voting Machine Without Breaking 'Tamper-Evident' Seals

Same systems to be used by millions of voters this November...
Brad Friedman

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine....

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine with Pac-Man hacked onto it without disturbing any of the "tamper-evident" seals supposedly meant to protect it from hackers...

Any questions?...

Sequoia's voting machines, used in some 20% of U.S. elections, employ Intellectual Property (IP) still owned by a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia itself is now owned by a Canadian firm called Dominion. (Though Dominion, like Sequoia itself before it, lied about the continuing Venezuelan/Chavez ties in its recent announcement of the acquisition, as detailed exclusively by The BRAD BLOG, to little notice, in June.)

The Pac-Man hack onto the Sequoia/Dominion voting machine was revealed this week. It was accomplished without breaking any of the "tamper-evident" seals that voting machine companies and election officials claim are used to ensure nobody can physically hack into them without being discovered.

"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."

Here's a video of Pac-Man running on the hacked Sequoia touch-screen voting machine...

This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as "tamperproof." It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use the machines.

For example, the AVC Edge miscounted votes in New Jersey in 2008, the same election during which the systems also failed to even boot up when polls opened at a Hoboken precinct, forcing voters, including the state's then-Governor John Corzine, to wait some 45 minutes before they could cast votes on them at all. Whether those votes were recorded accurately as per the voters' intent, once the machines finally booted up, is scientifically impossible to know. Use of any touch-screen voting machine is the equivalent of a 100% faith-based election. No votes cast during an election --- none --- can be verified as having been accurately recorded on such systems. Ever.

J. Alex Halderman and Ariel J. Feldman, the academic computer science and security experts who hacked the Sequoia machine, this time with Pac-Man, report that, "In 2008, the AVC Edge was used in 161 jurisdictions with almost 9 million registered voters, including large parts of Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia."

As first reported by The BRAD BLOG in 2006, Halderman and Feldman previously hacked a touch-screen voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (which became Premier Elections Solutions, which was then also purchased by Dominion, just like Sequoia). They hacked the Diebold/Premier system with a virus that was able to pass itself from one machine to the next and flip the results of an entire election with little chance of detection. That hack was demonstrated, among other places, live on Fox "News" shortly after it was announced. (Watch the video here.)

Short of adding "tamper-evident" seals to these machines --- the same seals that went undisturbed when Pac-Man was hacked onto the Sequoia AVC Edge machine --- very little has changed since 2006, and most of the same hackable (and often 100% unverifiable) electronic voting systems are still in use today, in both primary elections this year (such as the one where the unknown, unemployed, campaign-less Alvin Greene was said to have defeated four-term state legislator and circuit court Judge Vic Rawl for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination), as well as in the general elections this November.

The voting machines not made by Sequoia, as used in the other 80% of jurisdictions in the U.S., work largely the same way, and are largely equally as hackable.

Here are details and more pictures on the Pac-Man hack fom the Diebold/Virus and Sequoia/Pac-Man hackers themselves, though the way they explained it all on their YouTube posting when publishing the video above, tells you just about all that you need to know...
This is the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen DRE voting machine. In 2008, it was used in jurisdictions with almost 9 million voters. Alex Halderman and Ari Feldman replaced the voting software with Pac-Man. They did this in three afternoons, without breaking any tamper-evident seals. It would be easy to modify the software to steal votes, but that's been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7998





Notice of Ridiculous Activity






William Saxbe, Attorney General During Watergate Inquiry, Dies at 94
Anahad O’Connor

William B. Saxbe, a former United States senator from Ohio who was appointed as President Richard M. Nixon’s fourth attorney general after the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” died Tuesday at his home in Mechanicsburg, Ohio. He was 94 and had been in failing health for some time, said his son Charles R. Saxbe.

Mr. Saxbe was an unlikely pick for attorney general, a one-term Republican senator who had frequently criticized President Nixon, at one time saying that the president had “lost his senses” with his decision to bomb North Vietnamese cities. But Mr. Saxbe, after a fairly quick confirmation, would go on to handle the delicate Watergate controversy that led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation and oversee an important antitrust suit that ultimately broke the Bell System telephone monopoly.

Mr. Saxbe took over as attorney general in early January 1974, when the Nixon administration was consumed by crisis. President Nixon’s first attorney general, John N. Mitchell, was accused and later convicted of crimes related to Watergate. His second, Richard G. Kleindienst, resigned and later pleaded guilty in a peripheral matter. The third, Elliot L. Richardson, resigned from office on that fateful Saturday night, Oct. 20, 1973, when he refused to follow President Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who had just subpoenaed the president, seeking taped conversations.

When Mr. Richardson refused the order, the president gave the order to the deputy attorney general, who also refused and resigned in protest. The next person in line, the solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, complied with the president’s order, firing Mr. Cox.

According to his chief of staff, Alexander M. Haig Jr., the president was desperate for a replacement whose nomination would go smoothly, and he eventually settled on Mr. Saxbe. An outspoken, tobacco-chewing senator from central Ohio, Mr. Saxbe was known to go against his own party when it suited him, including ridiculing the Nixon administration several times, calling it “one of the most inept” in history.

Eleven days after the “massacre,” Mr. Saxbe drove up to the front of the White House in his Cadillac convertible — a pack of chewing tobacco on the passenger seat and his waterfowl shotgun in the trunk — for a meeting with the president.

“Nixon was so friendly I thought he was going to hug me,” Mr. Saxbe said in his 2000 autobiography, “I’ve Seen the Elephant.” “Some of his advisers thought I shouldn’t be nominated because of remarks the administration found abrasive. ‘Mr. President, I am afraid you will have to take me, warts and all,’ I said.”

When the Senate voted in December, it took less than 20 minutes to confirm Mr. Saxbe’s nomination, with only 10 senators opposing it.

For the most part, Mr. Saxbe’s relationship with Mr. Nixon was amicable in the months before the president’s resignation in 1974. But Mr. Saxbe would later rail against the president for “wrecking” the Republican Party, and he claimed he never forgave him for his lies.

As attorney general, Mr. Saxbe’s outspokenness would get him into trouble on more than one occasion, including when he publicly referred to Patricia Hearst — the newspaper heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army — as a “common criminal” for participating in a bank robbery led by the group. Mr. Saxbe was criticized for defying the legal code of conduct because Ms. Hearst had not been charged with a crime at the time.

Mr. Saxbe repaired some of the damage to his image with a 1974 antitrust lawsuit that eventually dismantled the American Telephone and Telegraph Company into a half-dozen companies. After Gerald Ford became president, Mr. Saxbe continued as attorney general for several months before stepping down in early 1975, when he was appointed ambassador to India. He served until 1977, before returning to his hometown, Mechanicsburg, to go into private law.

Born on June 24, 1916, William Bart Saxbe earned his bachelor’s and law degrees at Ohio State University. He began his political career while still in law school, winning a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1946. In 1953, he became speaker of the Ohio House, then moved on to the Ohio attorney general’s office and eventually, in 1968, the United States Senate.

Mr. Saxbe met his wife, Ardath Saxbe, known as Dolly, while the two were college students. At first just acquaintances, he recalled in his book, their relationship blossomed after Mr. Saxbe, never one to be shy, made a characteristically bold statement.

“On our way to class I asked her, ‘Do you like to neck?’ and she said ‘Yea.’ I’ll never forget it: I kissed her right in the middle of the Oval, the big common in the center of the campus.”

Besides his son Charles, of Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Saxbe is survived by his wife; a daughter, Juli Spitzer of Jackson Hole, Wyo.; another son, Dr. William B. Saxbe Jr., of Williamstown, Mass.; nine grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/us/25saxbe.html





New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back
David Pogue

Too bad there’s not a reality TV show called “America’s Most Freaked-Out Tech-Company Meetings,” where you watch classic panicked board meetings. For example, when the Apple employee left an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar. Or when Intel learned that its Pentium 5 chip contained a math error. Or when Microsoft was caught bribing bloggers with $2,500 laptops to promote Windows Vista.

One of the most exciting episodes, though, could have been shot at Amazon the day Apple announced the iPad.

Amazon makes the popular Kindle e-book reader. For awhile, it was pretty much the only game in e-book town. But the iPad has a touch screen, color, prettier software, audio and video playback, 100,000 apps — and at the time, it didn’t cost much more than the Kindle. For the Kindle, with its six-inch monochrome nontouch screen, the iPad was your basic (full-color) nightmare.

This week, Amazon unveiled what everyone (except Amazon) is calling the Kindle 3. You might call it Amazon’s iPad response. The Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small, light and inexpensive.

The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle. The new one measures 7.5 by 4.8 by 0.3 inches, yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always. Amazon’s designers did what they should have done a long time ago: they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin.

Now, the Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.

Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook. A Kindle model that can also get online using the cellular network, as earlier models do, costs $50 more. But the main thing you do with the wireless feature is download new books, so Wi-Fi is probably plenty for most people.

That $140 is quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).

Yes, of course, it’s a little silly to compare the Kindle with the iPad, a full-blown computer with infinitely greater powers. Although it’s worth pointing out, just in case you were indeed considering the iPad primarily for its e-book features, that the Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.

No, the Kindle’s real competition is the gaggle of extremely similar, rival e-book readers, all of which use the same E Ink screen technology.

E Ink is a satisfying to read but deeply flawed technology for e-book screens. It works by applying an electrical charge to millions of tiny black particles, causing them to freeze in a pattern of letters or grayscale images. The result really looks like ink on paper, because the black stuff is so close to the surface.

E Ink is great for battery life, too, since only turning pages uses power; otherwise, the image could sit on the screen forever without requiring any additional juice. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)

But E Ink has plenty of drawbacks, too. It’s slow to change the page image, for example. The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers, leaving its rivals in the dust (especially the Nook, which, despite five software upgrades since its debut, still lags). But the page turn moment still features a bizarre, black-white-black flashing sequence — a nonnegotiable characteristic of E Ink.

E Ink’s speed problems mean that it can never display video, either. And, of course, it can’t display color. Last month, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, responded to this point this way: “You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.” Yes, but color and video may well improve a new era of livelier e-books.

Still, Amazon has clearly put a lot of time into refining the new Kindle’s E Ink screen. The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.

In the world of copy-protected e-books, choosing a reader is a particularly momentous decision. You’re not just buying a portable reader. You’re also committing to a particular online e-book store, since in general, each company’s e-books don’t work on other companies’ readers. (The one exception: Sony and the Nook use the same copy-protection scheme.) Even on the new Kindle, you can’t read nonprotected books in the popular ePub format, as you can on its rivals.

(However, Amazon and Barnes & Noble each offer excellent reader programs for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android; in other words, you don’t actually have to buy a Kindle or a Nook to read those companies’ e-books. Buy a book once, read it on all your gadgets. Kindle books even wirelessly sync up, so each gadget remembers where you stopped — a feature that’s still on the Nook’s to-do list.)

Fortunately, the online stores are all pretty good (except Apple’s, whose book selection is still puny). The pricing seems to have evened out, too; in general, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony have exactly the same prices for New York Times best sellers. Sadly, lots of them are now $13, up from the flat $10 that Amazon used to charge for all best sellers.

Those prices seem high. The fact that e-books involve no printing, binding, shipping, distributing or taking back and shredding unsold copies ought to save you something. And it’s outrageous that that you can’t sell or even give away an e-book when you’re finished with it. You paid for it; why shouldn’t you be allowed to pass it on? (End of rant.)

The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them, which should just about cover your next flight delay. The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Of course, the Kindle’s rivals have their own attractive features. The Nook, for example, has a balky color touch screen beneath the E Ink screen, which you use for navigation. You can read any Nook book at no charge, one hour a day, when you’re in a Barnes & Noble store. You can even “lend” a book to a friend — although held to a two-week maximum, one time a title and only on books whose publishers have permitted this feature.

Sony Readers have touch screens; some models even have built-in illumination screens. (If you believe the rumors, new Reader models are on the way.)

Really, though, what makes the Kindle so successful isn’t what Amazon added to it; it’s what Amazon subtracted: size, weight and price. Nook’s two-screen setup makes it fussy and complicated. Sony’s additional screen layers make the E Ink less sharp.

In the meantime, certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.

No doubt about it — the next episodes of “America’s Most Freaked-Out Tech-Company Board Meetings” won’t be filmed at Amazon. They’ll be set at Amazon’s rivals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/te...h/26pogue.html





Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime
Matt Richtel

It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/te...y/25brain.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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