Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 21st, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet." – Senator Scott Ludlam


"I really have not involved myself in Bob Dylan's toilet, and by the way I haven't involved myself in anyone else's toilet in Malibu." – Mayor Andy Stern


"All told, IE8 is a vast improvement on its predecessor - but then that really is damning with faint praise. New features such as Accelerators and Web Clips show promise, but Microsoft will certainly need to vastly improve the latter if they're not to become another also-ran." – Barry Collins



































March 21st, 2009




Music Sales Up 10% in 2008, Thanks to Downloads (and Vinyl)

Music sales in the US grew 10.5 percent overall during 2008, with online single-track sales growing by 27 percent.
Jacqui Cheng

The music industry finished 2008 with positive sales growth numbers overall, but the grim CD death march continues apace. Overall unit purchases of music in the US increased by 10.5 percent year-over-year since 2007, according to new data released by Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS, and Nielsen RingScan, but the growth is coming completely from downloads—and from vinyl.

More than 1.5 billion songs were sold during 2008, accounting for the 10.5 percent growth since the previous year. One billion digital tracks were sold online, which indicated 27 percent growth since 2007. But the trend toward digital singles continues to hurt full CD album sales—428 million albums (including LPs, CDs, and online albums) were sold in 2008, down 14 percent from the year before.

Album sales were not down across all formats. LPs and vinyl albums were up by a whopping 89 percent, but as the saying goes, 89 times zero is still zero. (LPs and vinyl albums accounted for just 1.88 million sales in 2008).

Comparatively, 65.8 million online albums were sold in 2008, a 32 percent increase year-over-year. Physical CD purchases—both from online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores—bore the brunt of the album sales crash, it seems.

(For anyone who cares, holiday album sales were down 19 percent year-over-year. Guess people just didn't feel that nagging desire to listen to Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" over and over this year. Again, that is.)

Nielsen's 2008 data reflects the same trends we saw at the end of 2007—online sales are still surging while CD sales continue to tank. And, concerning albums, a number of musicians blame services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 for enabling customers to pick apart their carefully-pieced-together collections.

The way that consumers buy music has changed drastically since the advent of the online music store. While sales are booming, artists and record companies alike are still finding ways to convince music buyers to spend money on more than that one track stuck in their heads. But in an a la carte world, the downloadable single might now be king. (From January – Jack)
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/20...-and-vinyl.ars





Report: 17 Million People Stopped Buying CDs in 2008

Not only are CD sales still falling, but a whopping 17 million customers stopped buying CDs altogether in 2008. The economic downturn is cited as one reason for the sharp decline, but new services offer viable ways for the music industry to survive this rocky transition period.
David Chartier

While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of music listening is actually on the rise. While digital music purchases remain strong, the numbers show that there is still much more work to be done in the industry's transition to a new, more diverse set of business models.

Sympathy for the devil?

NPD's annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008.

NPD saw all demographics pulling back on CD purchases, but the most significant groups were teenagers and those over 50.

The primary reason for cutting down on CD purchases was a simple slashing of entertainment budgets across all demographics. Cheaper prices for digital albums also affected consumers' thinking about physical CD prices (which suddenly seem more expensive), but the pick-and-chose nature of buying individual songs and instant delivery also provided a boost for digital downloads.

Gaming also helped to steal attention away from music, as the industry experienced record billion-dollar growth in 2007 and 2008.

As CD sales continue their nosedive into oblivion and the worldwide recession takes hold, the companies that used to make physical media are feeling the effects. Last week, laid-off workers in a French Sony media plant effectively held boss Serge Foucher and head of Human Resources Roland Bentz hostage overnight by blocking the factory doors. The employees, who made tapes and other recordable media, were upset over the terms of their severance package (they would only get thousands of euros in relocation assistance and up to a year of severance pay, which was apparently offensive to their "dignity"). The executives were allowed to leave the building after agreeing to restart talks over the terms.

Not all news is grim

One trend that may finally be going mainstream is music streaming services. NPD's report notes that awareness and usage of Pandora doubled year-over-year to 18 percent of Internet users. Social network music streaming is also on the rise, as usage rose from 15 to 19 percent year-over-year. Nearly half of US teens are "engaging with music on social networks" now, so new revenue opportunities like premium account memberships and advertising are following.

Finally, NPD's report notes that "the music industry now has to redouble efforts to intercept and engage these listeners" in order to harness new revenue options like "upselling music, videos, concert tickets, and related merchandise." This is an idea that MySpace Music launched with last September, as the service offers merchandise like band t-shirts and Amazon goods when users purchase DRM-free MP3s.

The music industry is certainly experiencing a tough transition into the digital realm, but there's still money to made off of recorded music. The iTunes Store reached a digital music milestone in 2008 by passing Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US. There are now 36 million digital music customers, and digital music downloads now account for 33 percent of all music tracks purchased in the US.

Convincing customers to buy complete albums, though, now relies on overall album quality, not on forcing people to buy full CDs—and that means overall industry revenues may not recover to the levels seen during the CD boom years anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/20...-and-vinyl.ars





Requiem for a Frog: SpiralFrog Shuts Down
Greg Sandoval

SpiralFrog, the pioneering ad-supported music service, quietly closed down on Thursday.SpiralFrog's site went dark at about 4 p.m. PDT.

A source close to the company told CNET News that SpiralFrog has ceased operations and assets have been surrendered to creditors. To keep operations going last year, the company issued secured notes in order to borrow at least $9 million from several hedge funds and others.

SpiralFrog representatives weren't immediately available for comment.

New York-based SpiralFrog made a splash in August 2006 by attempting to offer music free of charge to the public while supporting the site through ad sales. Media outlets such as The New York Times, Reuters, and USA Today questioned whether the site might one day challenge Apple's iTunes.

Some argued that SpiralFrog's business model was the answer to illegal file sharing.

But the model has yet to be proven. SpiralFrog is the second ad-supported service to shut down in 2009. Ruckus, which catered to college students, also shuttered operations.

The deaths of these companies come at a time when executives at some of the top labels are questioning whether ad-supported sites boost music sales or cannibalize them.

In SpiralFrog's situation, the company couldn't overcome "a macro-economic perfect storm" says a source close to the company. The sagging global economy, combined with "the collapse of the capital markets" and rapid compression of the ad markets," led to the company's demise, said the source.

That only tells part of the story, however. In truth, the service never caught on with music fans. SpiralFrog's downloads were locked in Digital Rights Management at a time when most of the front-running music services, such as iTunes and Amazon, were freeing songs from copy-protection software, enabling them to play on numerous devices.

In addition, SpiralFrog's music library was always much more limited than iTunes, Imeem, or other competitors. After signing a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, the largest of the four major record companies, in the summer of 2006, nearly two more years would pass before the start-up signed a second top label: EMI.

This meant that SpiralFrog never was able to offer songs from Sony Entertainment Group or Warner Music Group, which account for a large chunk of overall music sales.

The company saw two CEOs come and go, conflicts between managers and founder, Joe Mohen, and perhaps most significantly, the company struggled with debt.

A year ago I wrote that SpiralFrog was borrowing money to fund operations and avoided a debt crisis by renegotiating the loan terms. At the time, SpiralFrog had borrowed more than $9 million, but in March 2008 was given an additional year to repay it.

According to a story published last month in Digital Music News, SpiralFrog's debt was coming due and the story suggested the company may not have the means to repay it.

Here's the obvious question raised by the demise of SpiralFrog and Ruckus; is the ad-supported music sector seeing a shakeout?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10200722-93.html





Orkut and out

Brazilian Authorities Take Down Music Community
Leila Cobo

As part of its ongoing battle against online piracy, IFPI's Brazilian chapter (ABPD) in conjunction with the country's Cinema and Music Anti Piracy Organization (APCM) joined with Google Brazil to take down what executives are calling the "biggest community exchanging links to illegal music files in Latin America."

The online, music-dedicated community was part of social network Orkut, which has 60 million registered users. The community, called Discografa, had one million registered users who exchanged links to illegal music files. The IFPI estimates links were available to over 2 million tracks. Taking down Discografia involved cooperation from Google Brazil, which owns and houses Orkut.

"We are happy that Google Brazil is working with the music community to maintain a healthy copyright environment online," said Raul Vazquez, regional director for IFPI Latin America.

Efforts to take down Discografia have been ongoing for at least six months. At the core of the conversations was the impact that its demise could have on users of the social network. However, Google was finally convinced in part due to the heavy volume of links to illegal files.

This is the first time one of Google's Latin American operations shuts down a music community exchanging links to illegal files.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...4adb75c79b5094





Next time use BT

DVD Region Code Blocks British Prime Minister from Enjoying Obama's Gift
Darren Murph

"Oh, bollocks." No, we can't definitively prove that Gordon Brown said that after witnessing a "Wrong Region" code when inserting a DVD given to him by Barack Obama, but we're sure something of the sort was uttered. You see, the ridiculous DVD region coding system recently prevented the British Prime Minister from viewing a set of 25 "American classics" on DVD, all of which were bestowed upon him by President Obama during a recent visit to Washington, D.C. We hate to bludgeon a dead mule, but seriously, when will the DRM madness end? Er, on second thought, maybe this is precisely what's necessary to keep those region-free player outlets in business, and thus, the economy strong.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/20/d...enjoying-obam/





Behind the Scenes at Mininova
enigmax

Most BitTorrent sites operate in the shadows, with operators who rarely speak in public and guard their identities closely. Mininova is not one of those sites and in a new interview, company directors Erik Dubbelboer and Niek van der Maas reveal a little more about running one of the world’s biggest BitTorrent sites.

Most visitors to Mininova will be completely unaware that this is not your regular torrent site. Unlike many private torrent sites - operating on the fringes of legality and trying to keep a fairly low profile (whilst gathering donations in order to stay alive) - Mininova is a very successful and fully-fledged tax-paying business with a revenue of well over a million dollar a year.

Operating out of its new offices in Utrecht, The Netherlands, Mininova and its five company directors go about their daily business with unparalleled openness. In a new interview with ORF.at, they further peel away the mystique usually associated with running a huge torrent site.

Erik Dubbelboer, President of Mininova told ORF that although some people believe that The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent site, in truth Mininova is quite bigger in terms of page views. The site is commercially-driven now, however, it hasn’t always been that way. Erik explained that in the beginning there was no plan to have Mininova operate as a company. “We wanted to make a cool website and experiment with the exciting Bittorrent technology,” he told ORF

But of course, the site was a huge success and now receives a staggering number of visitors. Managing Director Niek van der Maas explained that this substantial traffic is used to drive the site’s main source of revenue - advertising, including deals with companies like Yahoo.

The increased popularity of the site has allowed the Mininova team to grow. “We have turned Mininova from our hobby into a profession,” said Erik. Indeed, the site now has five young employees (average age of 24) who are all studying computer science.

While other torrent site admins choose to stay in the shadows, Mininova’s owners operate openly as they believe that under current law in The Netherlands their operations are entirely legal. Unlike other large ‘open’ sites, such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova does not operate a public tracker, and unlike their Swedish counterparts they operate a proper copyright takedown request system. If a copyright holder wants a torrent removed, they can write to the site and the necessary action is taken promptly.

Unfortunately, even this isn’t enough to keep anti-piracy outfits at arms length and like The Pirate Bay before them, Mininova also faces legal action. BREIN, the prominent Dutch anti-piracy group (which has already run many torrent sites out of The Netherlands) had been in secret talks with Mininova for over a year, ostensibly trying to reach a negotiated settlement.

But it wasn’t to be. BREIN wanted Mininova to proactively filter their search engine, something the site was not prepared to do. At the time, Erik told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN.

“We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.” The court showdown with BREIN will take place May 20th. Mininova is being defended by lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who is known for his legal victory while representing KaZaA in The Netherlands.

Erik told ORF that he believes the first major process in the case will try to determine if the type of service operated by Mininova is legal or not. He noted that there are key differences between their case and the recent one involving The Pirate Bay - the action in The Netherlands is a civil suit, while the case in Sweden was a criminal trial directed at the individuals, not the site itself.

Erik went on to say that he’d spoken recently with Peter Sunde about the TPB case, one which Peter firmly believes they will win. Erik says they speak with Gottfrid too on technical issues but other than that, there is no cooperation between the sites. When asked how he felt the court would rule in The Pirate Bay case, Erik said it was too difficult to call.

One of the reasons that sites like Mininova exist is due to the changing viewing habits of tech-savvy individuals, something which torrent sites have embraced while mainstream media continue to lag behind. “I would like to see content when I have time for it - not only at the time when it’s broadcasted,” Erik told ORF. “Some companies are starting to think and rethink, asking us how they can benefit from our “content distribution” model. They recognize that the fight against file-sharing is hopeless,” he said.

In a further indication that BitTorrent is able to move from the PC screen to the living room, regular visitors to Mininova will have noticed the recent addition of a link labeled ‘New: Devices Overview‘. Listed here are various BitTorrent-compatible ’set-top box’ type devices recommended by Mininova. Erik Dubbelboer says that at the recent CeBIT trade show, several manufacturers showed an interest in having a ‘Powered by Mininova’ logo/license for their devices, including Hauppauge who are perhaps best known for their PC TV tuner cards.

Mininova is very interested in experimenting with new business models for content creators, Dubbelboer said. He said that most people download copyrighted files because it’s so easy and convenient, not because they’re free. One thing is certain, BitTorrent is a great distribution model which allows many artists just setting out to get their work in front of millions of people.

Silence is Sexy is one band that has teamed up with Mininova to distribute their latest album for free, with great success. They even put up a ‘Powered by Mininova’ banner at one of their latest concerts.

This year will be an exciting one for the Mininova team. On the one hand they are still experiencing a substantial increase in visitor numbers as well as interest from content producers and device manufacturers. However, the legal battle with MPAA’s affiliate BREIN may ruin this party if the worst case scenario becomes truth. Let’s hope for the best.
http://torrentfreak.com/behind-the-s...ninova-090316/





The Pirate Bay User Pages Blocked by Google, Firefox
enigmax

A few hours ago, certain sections of The Pirate Bay were flagged by Google as containing malware and were subsequently blocked. Similar warnings are being shown by Firefox, which states that the world’s largest tracker is an “attack site”. The Pirate Bay team are working on the problem now.

Right now, trying to access certain sections of The Pirate Bay via Google or using the Firefox browser is proving worrisome. While other parts of the site appear to function normally, the ‘user’ sections of the site (such sections are identifiable via this type of URL: http://thepiratebay.org/user/XXXX) appear to have some significant problems. Accessing the site via Firefox generates the following message.

A Google search on the same pages returns, “This site may harm your computer.”

So what exactly is the problem? TorrentFreak spoke with Peter Sunde (brokep) who told us that right now they don’t have a clear idea of what is causing the problem although they are working hard on fixing it. Current thinking by some says that the problems are being caused by malicious ads from third parties which are embedded in the site.

Google has made its own analysis and is reporting that the /user sections of the TPB site were listed once for suspicious activity, yesterday 14th March 2009. Of 699 pages tested, it found that 2 pages resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. Google goes on to say that the malicious software includes 68 scripting exploits although they report that a successful infection resulted in zero new processes on the target machine.

The malicious software in question is said to be hosted on 3 domains; savelocity.com, seekerfeed.com, and xoads.com, with another 6 reported as distribution intermediaries including parkneed.com, yieldmanager.com and zxxds.net.

This type of problem is nothing new on torrent sites. Last year we reported how Google and Firefox blocked Empornium, the world’s largest porn tracker, when they suffered similar problems at the hands of outsiders. Just yesterday, the h33t.com torrent site suffered a similar problem, but that now appears to be fixed after we tipped off the staff there.

We will add to this post during the day to include the latest updates.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...google-090315/





Broadband FOI Request Denied
Mitchell Bingemann

THE Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has denied a Freedom of Information request to access a report that documents the proposals for the Government's $15 billion national broadband network.

Late last month, technology website Tech Wired filed an FOI request to obtain a report that details recommendations on submissions to build the NBN.

The report was conducted by a specially formed broadband expert panel and handed to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy in January this year.

But the department yesterday knocked back the release of the report, saying the documents were exempt under sections 34 and 36 of the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the department, exemptions under sections 34 and 36 relate to documents produced for the purposes of cabinet consideration and those which are not in the public's interest to be disclosed.

The department's reasons for refusal were listed in a 17-page document sent to Tech Wired.
It is understood that Tech Wired paid a 25 per cent deposit of $908 to access the report. The total costs of obtaining the documents would have been $3,631.99.

"The disclosure of the contents of the panel of experts' report before the completion of the process, particularly any negotiation phase, has the potential to prejudice the outcome of the process.

"As such, the Government will not be commenting on the contents of the report," Senator Conroy said upon receiving the report in late January.

Senator Conroy has said he has "ambitions" to announce a winning bid for the NBN by the end of March.

He has committed to releasing the report in full once the NBN contract is awarded.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Brits Say No! to ISPs as Corporate Copyright Cops
p2pnet news

ISPs shouldn’t have to act as enforcers for the corporate entertainment industry, say most Britons.

Only 20.7% of of 472 respondents in an ISPreview survey thought providers, “should tackle repeated illegal file sharing by imposing restrictions upon P2P access”.

Moreover, just 14.8%, “were in favour of restricting broadband service speed as a punishment for repeat offenders,” and only 26.9%, “supported the idea of sending even more warning letters if the first one failed,” it says

And if indeed it’s the prerogative of ISPs to work for the movie studios and record labels, “Unsurprisingly 22.4% didn’t know how ISPs should solve the problem,” says the report, going on:

“The results come just over one month after Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report published its response to the consultation on peer-to-peer file sharing, which set out an intention to legislate by requiring UK ISPs to ‘notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights-holders) that their conduct is unlawful.”

The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA), “argues that ISPs cannot prevent illegal downloading because they ‘are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope’,” says the report.
http://p2pnet.net/story/18795





Irish ISPs Reject Labels' 'Three Strikes' Demand
Andre Paine

The Internet Service Providers' Association of Ireland (ISPAI) has issued a statement rebuffing the majors' "spurious" threats of legal action over broadband subscribers who are infringing copyright.

Following an out of court settlement with Irish ISP Eircom in January, the Irish Recorded Music Association, representing the four majors, wrote to other ISPs demanding that they implement a 'three-strikes' scheme such as that being introduced in France to inform users if they are infringing copyright, cut off repeat offenders, and block Web sites that provide access to copyrighted material.

IRMA stated that Eircom has already accepted the demands and threatens legal action against other ISPs who do not introduce such measures.

However, ISPAI has now responded with a statement insisting that the labels' demands could threaten users' privacy and damage Ireland's e-commerce sector.

"This [threatened] legal action is spurious and there is no evidence of wrong-doing by Internet service providers," said ISPAI general manager Paul Durrant. "These actions could impact on user privacy, damage the development of new Internet services, and hurt Ireland's standing as an e-commerce hub."

ISPAI's board of directors and the general manager consulted with the membership, who voted on a majority basis to approve the current position. ISPAI members include BT, O2, 3, Vodafone, Satellite Broadband Ireland, Irish Broadband and Eircom.

ISPAI said that it will continue to cooperate within the existing legal parameters of Irish law, which "provides an avenue for the pursuit of people breaching copyright through the courts."

The statement adds: "The ISPAI and its members have never condoned the use of its members' services for theft of copyrighted works of any kind, and continue to operate within the existing legal framework which has provisions for taking action where appropriate.

"Over two years ago ISPAI initiated meetings with the relevant music industry representative body to explore the issues but this was not followed up by the music industry."

The statement added that ISPAI could not ignore the protection of privacy of user communications in Irish and European law "merely because it does not suit another private party."

"ISPAI is disappointed that the great potential of the Internet, to provide opportunities to connect with users in new ways and develop new business models, is being missed by the music recording industry," added Durrant.

"We continue to be open to working with content owners in an industry where innovative new services are rapidly developing."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...729c488530e3ba





Government Outlines Digital Rights Agency Proposal
Caitlin Fitzsimmons

The government today fleshed out the digital rights agency proposed in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report and called for comment from the industry and consumers.

The agency would establish a co-regulatory approach for navigating online copyright issues for film and music content, including illegal file sharing.

"Consumers are no longer prepared to be told when and where they can access the content that they want," the discussion paper said.

"They do not see why a TV show that is airing in the US should not be available in the UK. They are not willing to wait to see a film at home until several months after it has passed through the cinemas. They don't accept the logic that says that if you have bought a CD you cannot then copy that music onto your iPod. And of course with digital content perfect copies can be made with very little time and at virtually no cost."

David Lammy, minister of state for intellectual property, said the rights agency could be a real step forward.

"The real prize here is a rights agency that sorts out the complexities that keep consumers on the right side of the law, and ensure artists get properly paid," Lammy said.

"We need to make it easier for consumers to do the right thing."

The paper published by the Intellectual Property Office today was described as a "straw man" - meaning it is designed to provoke debate rather than represent policy. The government called on creators, commercial rights holders and consumer groups to submit responses.

Lord Carter, the minister for technology, communications and broadcasting, warned earlier in the week that if everyone "torched" the straw man it would be a sign that the industry did not have enough commonality for a co-regulatory approach to work, in which case the government would either introduce comprehensive legislation or abandon the industry to its fate.

Today he added: "Britain's creative industries are respected and admired the world over and are hugely important to our national competitiveness. But in the new digital age, copyright infringement has become easier and more socially acceptable, so it's clear we need some form of legislative backstop for the protection of rights as well as new and innovative ways to access legal content."

The paper covers how to change consumer behaviour and deal with persistent breaches of civil copyright law, how to support industry efforts in developing new and attractive legal ways for consumers to access content, how to enable technical copyright-support solutions that work for both consumers and content creators, and whether the agency should have back-up legal powers held by Ofcom and how it should be funded.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009...-rights-agency





Bandwidth and Service Limits Proposed to Curb Illegal Downloads
MarkJ

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published a draft set of proposals for tackling illegal broadband file sharing downloads by persistent infringers, among other things. The proposals form part of a discussion piece concerning the role that a UK Digital Rights Agency (DRA) could play.

Readers may recall that the DRA was first proposed in Lord Carters Digital Britain report during late January - Digital Britain Report – UK Illegal File Sharing Solution Proposals. Back then there were only two firm legislative proposals put forward for tackling the problem:

Requiring ISPs to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights- holders) that their conduct is unlawful.

Require ISPs to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order.
However many copyright holders feel that such measures alone are not enough to tackle those who persist in such activity. One earlier proposal, that of disconnecting the customer from their ISP, has already been ruled out by most.

The new discussion piece, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions, in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked or users might find their service speeds seriously restricted:

Quote from Proposals :

Development of codes of practice around enforcement measures to prevent and reduce online copyright infringement. These would need to be strong enough to be likely to make a real impact on the problem, and could include, for example, such approaches as protocol blocking or bandwidth, in relation to persistent infringers.

It's not clear whether a bandwidth restriction would only impact P2P or not, although we'd hope that would be the idea. The DRA would also seek to provide a far greater facility for tackling the problem and dealing with consumer disagreements, as outlined below:

* A commitment to explain to the public the consequences of unlawful use of copyright material. This is an important task - no matter how much effort goes into trying stop people from engaging in piracy it will only work in the long run if they understand the damage infringement has on the artists and the ongoing availability of the rich content they value.

* Facilitation of negotiation and rights clearance and discussion around standards where the different interests would find that useful. Taking into account competition concerns, there should be plenty for an agency to do in terms of making deals easier, rather than trying to get involved itself – almost certainly neither possible nor wanted by either side.

* A place where people could go to resolve disputes quickly and economically, and where consumers will find a champion where needed.

* A forum for dialogue. We sometimes underestimate the value of providing a place where those from a different industrial perspective can meet and gain appreciation of other positions and drivers, and in many ways this will underpin all other activity.

* A gateway in to the legal remedies being set out in P2P legislation, and to an informed discussion on other potential ways to deal with persistent infringement, such as road-testing technical measures.

One particularly interesting aspect of the new proposals is that it would not be limited to tackling unlawful peer to peer activity. Instead the DRA would be geared towards finding effective ways of reducing the overall levels of online copyright infringement over time, allowing for changing behaviours and technologies (i.e. it might tackle Newsgroups, FTP and other services where illegal usage takes place on a users account).

"Should there be no agreement between industry on the utilisation of such measures," says the document, "it would be for the regulator – Ofcom – to chose whether to impose such measures, judging their appropriateness and need within the policy principles within which they work."

Typically all of these proposals rest on ISPs being able to reach some kind of agreement with the creative industry. Should that fail then the "less attractive" option would be for tougher measures to be introduced through legislation. "This would be necessary if there were little prospect of an effective rights agency," says the paper.

The paper stresses that the DRA wouldn't just be setup to tackle illegal broadband ISP file sharing (P2P), it would also be a vision for facilitating a change of approach as to how content is provided, packaged and sold to consumers. That means things such as helping legal music download channels to flourish alongside ISPs.

Sadly the more complicated issues, such as how you can reliably and accurately identify illegal downloader’s on mass without being caught out by fake, redirected and or spoofed IPs and encryption isn't really touched on.

Similarly there are limits to how far UK ISPs are able to peek into the activity of their users without breaking laws, running up excessive costs or hitting technical hurdles. We would hope that this aspect is given serious attention in the main draft.

Feedback will now be taken on the paper until 30th March 2009 and the full report should follow later.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkFZEpAAklKwISRGAs.html





Companies Want No Set Internet Speeds in Stimulus
Kim Dixon

Telecom companies vying for $7.2 billion in broadband funds included in President Obama's economic stimulus plan urged regulators not to mandate a super-fast Internet speed as a criterion for winning the money.

Critics of this approach, though, say no government standards led to the United States lagging its industrialized peers in average broadband speed, viewed as a key driver of economic development.

Telecommunications, Internet firms and others are lobbying to shape the still unwritten rules that will govern how regulators dole out the billions.

"Speed is a movable target," said Dave Malfara, speaking for Comptel, an industry group that represents smaller rivals to companies such as AT&T Inc.

"One of the fears that we have is that a definition would be too high" and the cost of providing such fast service would eat into profits, he said at a public meeting on the funding.

The Wireless Communications Association, which represents wireless broadband companies including AT&T and Clearwire Corp, agreed with that view.

Companies say Internet speeds should be set by the market, but public interest groups say that is one reason why the United States is behind Japan, France and Korea, among others, in broadband speeds, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"The government's role is to set some targets and some policy goals and to push the market," said Mark Lloyd, vice president of strategy for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "We've relied on market forces for the last 15 years. ... We have a market failure here."

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission defines broadband speed at about 768 kilobits per second, slow by most standards, most experts agree.

Conventional dial-up is about 56 kilobits per second, but cable companies offer high-speed Internet at typically a minimum of 1 megabit per second, and in most cases, more than that.

The U.S. departments of commerce and agriculture will disperse broadband funding, intended to bring technology to unserved and underserved areas.

Small to midsize carriers with inroads in rural areas are the most likely to seek the funds, Wall Street analysts said. These carriers include CenturyTel Inc, Windstream Corp and Frontier Communications Corp.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031901966.html





Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming Performance for PC-Viewers

What’s Going on with Netflix Streaming Performance?

I noticed about 3 weeks ago my streaming video performance from Netflix has become unbearably slow. I’m on a 7 mbps Qwest DSL line in Tucson, AZ and my previous experience with Netflix “Watch Instantly” service had generally been excellent, almost never showing the buffering screen for a movie on either my PC or Xbox 360 and playing at the highest quality.

On the Xbox 360 for the last few weeks I can get playback to start quickly but everything I’ve tried to watch will stop 10 seconds into the playback and “adjust the quality” for about 5 mins, before resuming playback in the absolutely lowest quality setting — the quality approximately looks like a 320×200 resolution image is being upscaled on my 65″ TV — it’s so muddy every scene almost looks like it’s shot with a fuzzy “Dream” filter or something.

The odd part is that if I stop the playback on the Xbox 360, go to my computer and try and play the same media, I get presented with a “Your connection is not fast enough to start playback immediately…” notice and usually a wait time of 1hr or more. The overall slow down combined with the huge discrepency between the two experiences (Netflix-enabled device and my PC) made me decide to start Googling and see if I could figure out what was going on — I smelled shenanigans…

Detecting if Netflix is Throttling Streaming Video

I immediately ran into this post from another person who has a Qwest DSL line and piss-poor performance from Netflix and their streaming service. The original poster mentions:

I have been on the phone with netflix tech support only to be told they are aware there is a problem and their engineering department in California is looking into it. The problem is some people like myself who have high speed dsl (avg 1.5 mbs) find out their download speed from netflix is about 60% slower for some reason.

This post was from February 12, a month ago; so whatever the Netflix “engineers” have been doing, isn’t working. One of the most interesting bits of information is the tip the poster gives on accessing the secret diagnostic menu on the Netflix streaming player by holding the SHIFT key and Right-clicking to bring it up.

From there you can select:
Status window
Media info MessageBox
Show log info

Bringing up the Status window I noticed my download performance was a far cry from my 7 mbps speed, but rather a measly 0.48 mbps, about 1/14th the speed of my line:

I decided to pop open the “Show log file” screen to see if I could get more information about where my video stream was coming from to help determine if it was my connection (and my fault) or Netflix’s problem.

After opening the log file, 26 lines down I found the line:

CAxPlayerCtrl::SetMediaURL: “http://netflix-699.vo.llnwd.net/s/d3...eb2d 0“

So I did a tracert from my PC to the base llnwd.net URL to see what came up, here’s what I got:
Tracing route to netflix-699.vo.llnwd.net [68.142.79.69]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms home [192.168.1.1]
2 36 ms 34 ms 33 ms tcsn-dsl-gw13-205.tcsn.qwest.net [SNIP]
3 35 ms 33 ms 35 ms tcsn-agw1.inet.qwest.net [SNIP]
4 33 ms 35 ms 33 ms tcs-core-01.inet.qwest.net [SNIP]
5 * 47 ms 47 ms lap-brdr-03.inet.qwest.net [67.14.22.74]
6 45 ms 47 ms 45 ms 63.146.26.50
7 49 ms 51 ms 49 ms 64.213.78.254
8 48 ms 51 ms 48 ms ve6.fr3.lax.llnw.net [69.28.171.205]
9 46 ms 66 ms 45 ms cdn-68-142-79-69.lax.llnw.net [68.142.79.69]

Trace complete.

With an average of a 50ms response time, I’m going to go ahead and say my 7 mbps Qwest DSL service is working as advertised, and there is something fishy going on with the Netflix service.

I then copy-pasted the URL from above into my browser and decided to literally try and download the WMV, surprisingly enough it started to download, at exactly the same speed I was seeing from the player:

My first thought was “maybe Netflix is throttling per-thread” like a lot of download sites do, so I popped open the Firefox “Download Them All” addon and re-started the download. This time, with 4 concurrent threads, I got 306 KB/sec, almost 6x the performance (roughly 2.5 mbps):

I figured I’d bump the threads up to 10 and see how far we get here, apparently Netflix isn’t running out of bandwidth, it’s just throttling me to hell and back.

After turning Download Them All up to the maximum of 10 threads and relaunching the download, I saw my speed spike over 700 KB/sec (roughly 5.6 mbps):

Now we have confirmed that Netflix is throttling instant streaming PC-users to a rediculous 50 or 60 KB/sec cap… I was about to make the qualification of “at peak times” but after seeing my ability to easily increase my download speed from the Netflix streaming server by a factor of 14, I have to imagine the servers have quite a bit of room to grow at the moment and could offer me better performance than this.

To further clarify, I think throttling is likely a valid strategy for Netflix to employee to stop servers from maxing out and crashing — the problem here is the 50-60 KB/sec cap that produces unusable results with a “Watch Instantly” service — you could easily drive down the street to a video store, take your time choosing, and have it back in your house before your video were done buffering with the Netflix Watch Instantly service — and view it at a higher resolution as well. This is the core of the problem, Netflix is throttling PC viewers (And likely others) so aggressively they aren’t delivering the service they advertise. And when we work around this trottle manually (with DTA) we see that the servers scale bandwidth (and potentially video streaming performance) without a problem — so what’s going on here?

OK, Netflix is Throttling Streaming, but Why?

Netflix already has a reputation for silently throttling their customers, but what would cause them to throttle performance so hard that the service is basically unusable for any customers that are either watching “too much” instantly streaming video from the Netflix service (as determined by Netflix of course) or just trying to watching movies at times of very heavy server loads?

My guess is that Netflix didn’t have the infrastructure to support the rollout of the Xbox 360 Netflix streaming dashboard update that went out a few months ago. I’d also further a guess that due to contractual obligations with Microsoft, Netflix had to guarantee a certain level of service to the Xbox 360 users above and beyond what the PC-streaming viewers got, making the Xbox 360 a prioritized device when it came to throttling instant video streaming requests from one of the Netflix servers.

I would also further a guess that we won’t see this situation fixed for users of the Netflix “Watch Instantly” service until Q4 this year as Netflix tries to find the balance between spending themselves into bankrupcy and signing additional device deals with Sony (for the PS3), TiVo and possible some of the cable providers which will all require basic QoS conditions for those customers.

I would predict that my 2010, if Netflix signs 1 or 2 more significant partnerships, Friday and Saturday nights PC-based users of the streaming video service will barely be able to watch something without an hour of buffering at the lowest level.

Conspiracy Theory

… for those that like taking thoughts to the logical extreme — I could also see Netflix trying to degrade the PC-based streaming experience to drive people towards more “official” Netflix-enabled devices, like the Xbox 360, Roku box, hybrid Blu-ray media players and I’m sure 10 more devices that will hit the market this year.

You know the real shit of it all? I can absolutely see how this is probably better for Netflix’s bottom line, both in the sense that it improves relationships with exclusive contractee’s (Microsoft, Samsung, etc.) and drives consumers to look around for alternative solutions to their streaming problems which are very clearly outlined on the Watch Instantly web page in your browser.
http://www.breakitdownblog.com/netfl...or-pc-viewers/





Ericsson Pushes VDSL2 Data Transfers Above 500Mbps
Brett Winterford

Ericsson has achieved data transfer rates of more than 500Mbps in what it said is the world's first live demonstration of a new VDSL2-based technology.

The demonstration achieved data rates of more than 0.5 Gbps over twisted copper pairs using "vectorised" VDSL2, the latest technology for line bonding and crosstalk cancellation.

It showed aggregated rates of above 0.5Gbps at 500 metres, bonding six lines.

Vectorised VDSL2 is said to enable extremely high end-to-end transmission rates, improving VDSL2 performance by reducing noise originating from the other copper pairs in the same cable bundle.

This increases capacity and reach, boosting the number of customers that can be connected.

Vectoring technology also decouples the lines in a cable (from an interference point of view), substantially improving power management, which can reduce power consumption.

Standards for VDSL2 and line bonding are available today. The standardisation of vectoring is ongoing and is expected by the end of 2009.

VDSL2-based technology offers unprecedented speeds on existing copper lines, opening up new opportunities for operators to provide customers with broadband services such as IPTV. It also makes it possible to use existing copper networks as a backhaul for radio base stations, accelerating future rollout of HSPA and LTE-based high-speed mobile broadband services, according to Ericsson CTO Håkan Eriksson.

But don't expect it to be a technology of choice for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN).

Colin Goodwin, strategic market manager for Ericsson Australia said the technology offers incredible speeds, but over relatively short distances.

"Its speed is best over thye hundreds of metres," he said. "But beyond 1km you will find that ADSL2+ is actually faster."

The technology might have been applicable to improving last mile speeds in a Fibre-to-the-Node deployment, he said, but Australian homes do not tend to have a great deal of spare copper in the last mile to fuse together.

"Relatively few residential subscribers would have the opportunity of having multiple copper pairs to their homes," he said.

The technology would also be irrelevant to Fibre-to-the-Home deployments, as fibre tends to be cheaper than copper for new roll-outs.

Where the technology does have great applications is among Fibre-to-the-Building deployments in commercial areas.

"You might have fibre connected from the DSLAM to the basement of an office building," Goodwin said. "You can then run bonded VDSL2+ up into all the other floors."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/98952,...e-500mbps.aspx





Breakthrough For Post-4G Communications

With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s.

The technology – known as ‘millimetre (mm)-wave’ or microwave photonics – has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields.

Despite the quantum leap in performance made possible by combining the latest radio and optics technologies to produce mm-wave components, it will probably only be a few years before there are real benefits for the average EU citizen.

This is thanks to research and development work being done by the EU-funded project IPHOBAC, which brings together partners from both academia and industry with the aim of developing a new class of components and systems for mm-wave applications.

The mm-wave band is the extremely high frequency part of the radio spectrum, from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz), and it gets it name from having a wavelength of one to 10mm. Until now, the band has been largely undeveloped, so the new technology makes available for exploitation more of the scarce and much-in-demand spectrum.

New products from Europe

IPHOBAC is not simply a ‘paper project’ where the technology is researched, but very much a practical exercise to develop and commercialise a new class of products with a ‘made in Europe’ label on them.

While several companies in Japan and the USA have been working on merging optical and radio frequency technologies, IPHOBAC is the world’s first fully integrated effort in the field, with a lot of different companies involved. This has resulted in the three-year project, which runs until end-2009, already having an impressive list of achievements to its name.

It recently unveiled a tiny component, a transmitter able to transmit a continuous signal not only through the entire mm-wave band but beyond. Its full range is 30 to 325GHz and even higher frequency operation is now under investigation. The first component worldwide able to deliver that range of performance, it will be used in both communications and radar systems. Other components developed by the project include 110GHz modulators, 110GHz photodetectors, 300GHz dual-mode lasers, 60GHz mode-locked lasers, and 60GHz transceivers.

Truly disruptive technology

Project coordinator Andreas Stöhr says millimetre-wave photonics is a truly disruptive technology for high frequency applications. “It offers unique capabilities such as ultra-wide tunability and low-phase noise which are not possible with competing technologies, such as electronics,” he says.

What this will mean in practical terms is not only ultra-fast wireless data transfer over telecommunications networks, but also a whole range of new applications (http://www.iphobac-survey.org).

One of these, a 60GHz Photonic Wireless System, was demonstrated at the ICT 2008 exhibition in Lyon and was voted into the Top Ten Best exhibits. The system allows wireless connectivity in full high definition (HD) between devices in the home, such as a set-top box, TV, PC, and mobile devices. It is the first home area network to demonstrate the speeds necessary for full wireless HD of up to 3Gb/s.

The system can also be used to provide multi-camera coverage of live events in HD. “There is no time to compress the signal as the director needs to see live feed from every camera to decide which picture to use, and ours is the only technology which can deliver fast enough data rates to transmit uncompressed HD video/audio signals,” says Stöhr.

The same technology has been demonstrated for access telecom networks and has delivered world record data rates of up to 12.5Gb/s over short- to medium-range wireless spans, or 1500 times the speed of upcoming 4G mobile networks.

One way in which the technology can be deployed in the relatively short term, according to Stöhr, is wirelessly supporting very fast broadband to remote areas. “You can have your fibre in the ground delivering 10Gb/s but we can deliver this by air to remote areas where there is no fibre or to bridge gaps in fibre networks,” he says.

Systems for outer space

The project is also developing systems for space applications, working with the European Space Agency. Stöhr said he could not reveal details as this has not yet been made public, save to say the systems will operate in the 100GHz band and are needed immediately.

There are various ongoing co-operation projects with industry to commercialise the components and systems, and some components are already at a pre-commercial stage and are being sold in limited numbers. There are also ongoing talks with some of the biggest names in telecommunications, including Siemens, Ericsson, Thales Communications and Malaysia Telecom.

“In just a few years time everybody will be able to see the results of the IPHOBAC project in telecommunications, in the home, in radio astronomy and in space. It is a completely new technology which will be used in many applications even medical ones where mm-wave devices to detect skin cancer are under investigation,” says Stöhr.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0308121655.htm





Computer Makers Prepare to Stake Bigger Claim in Phones
Ashlee Vance

The computer industry has hit upon its Next Big Thing. It is called a phone.

Emboldened by Apple’s success with its iPhone, many PC makers and chip companies are charging into the mobile-phone business, promising new devices that can pack the horsepower of standard computers into palm-size packages.

The companies are also shifting gears because their technological feats of the last two decades — smaller laptops with faster chips to deliver snazzier graphics — no longer impress consumers, who increasingly find their three-year-old computers adequate for everyday tasks.

“The action is really with the smartphones where everyone is competing to cram the most features into a phone,” said Linley Gwennap, a veteran chip industry analyst and head of the Linley Group. “I think of PCs as just kind of boring these days.”

The new smartphones promised by PC companies will, among other things, handle the full glory of the Internet, power two-way video conferences, and stream high-definition movies to your TV.

It is a development that spells serious competition for established cellphone makers and phone companies. Apple was the first to spot a sleepy industry, shaking up the handset category two years ago with the iPhone. Until recently, the handset makers were the ones reacting to the iPhone — and then with me-too products.

Now fellow PC makers are announcing plans for smartphones in a variety of sizes, shapes and abilities.

Acer, the big PC manufacturer, has gone from offering no cellphones to selling eight new models, with more to come this year.

“The smartphone market is the natural direction of our long-term mobile strategy,” Gianfranco Lanci, chief executive of Acer, a Taiwan-based company, said as he announced the products at last month’s World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. “We’re just taking on another dimension.”

Dell has also worked on prototype phones but has not committed to making a new product. And Asustek, the company that was first to market ultraportable laptops known as netbooks, has new smartphones coming.

The suppliers to the PC industry have also started shifting to the new market. Intel announced a deal to supply the cellphone maker LG with chips for new mobile devices. Nvidia, the PC graphics-chip titan, signed a deal to provide three smartphone makers — which supply handsets to brand-name manufacturers and carriers — with its new Tegra processor.

“The rise of the smartphone and things like graphics and 3D images weren’t important when the incumbents built this business,” said Michael Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia’s mobile business unit. “This is a once in a lifetime deal where a huge market changes the things that are important to it.”

With smartphones and PCs taking on many of the same functions, there is certainly a fear among PC makers that if they do not get into cellphones, cellphone makers will start building PCs. Acer has characterized the smartphone business as a volatile battlefield, saying it needs to fire first and go after the cellphone makers before they come after it. Indeed, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, has said it is weighing whether to get into the PC business.

The convergence of the two devices has long been predicted, but it took a confluence of industry changes for it to begin in earnest. For decades chip manufacturers rushed to leapfrog one another with faster processors, and computer makers scrambled to squeeze more functions into smaller boxes. But ever-faster chips eventually become impractical. Their blazing speed requires vast amounts of power and cooling.

The smartphones give the PC makers a chance to extend their newfound expertise in creating low-power products.

In particular, Acer hopes to ride its success selling laptops and netbooks into the mobile phone market through a mix of new software and wireless data plans.

It is working on software that will link all of its portable products together, synchronizing e-mail, contacts, media files and other information among the products. This could open up a way for carriers to sell more wireless 3G data services to consumers, since they could offer a single plan covering multiple devices.

It is an extension of the model that Dell and others are already trying, in which carriers essentially give $400 netbooks away to consumers in exchange for two-year contracts to data plans. Such plans can cost as much as $1,500 over their lifespan.

Deals that cover laptops as well as phones could prove troublesome for existing cellphone companies, as it would offer consumers a suite of products that were tightly integrated and supported. In addition, PC manufacturers come from an industry very familiar with low profit margins and tight cost structures, and would bring those pressures to bear on established cell manufacturers.

“Acer has learned to live and prosper on very thin margins,” said Aymar De Lencquesaing, the head of the company’s smart hand-held business group. “I think we bring this kind of experience to a market that has perhaps has not yet had to endure similar rigor.”

Both Acer and Nvidia have promised very low-cost smartphones, threatening the most lucrative part of the cellphone makers’ business.

At the same time, the phone market has been bombarded with operating systems from Microsoft, Google and Intel.

There is a concern among longstanding players in the industry that operating systems and phone designs are becoming commodities, and that the barrier to entering the marketplace is lower than when mobile-phone manufacturers were building each handset from scratch.

This gives companies like Motorola and Nokia an entirely new set of problems besides falling sales and shrinking margins.

“It’s cataclysmic for the phone guys, who were used to playing golf on Wednesday afternoons,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a research firm. “Those times start to look pretty good now.”

Not that such a move will be easy for the PC makers. The PC industry has a spotty record for expanding into consumer electronics. Dell stumbled with its MP3 player, and Hewlett-Packard’s line of televisions failed to catch on with consumers. Both products have been discontinued.

Also, the established mobile-phone makers have longstanding relationships with carriers, which remain reluctant to provide customer support for a wide array of devices from myriad manufacturers. Beyond that, traditional cellphone companies do not want to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Intel, which have grown over the years to dominate the PC business.

Perhaps most critically, traditional phone and mobile chip companies have expertise in making phones that work.

“It has to be a good cellphone first,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. “This is about as far away from PCs as raising elephants.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/te...gy/16cell.html





The iPhone Is Gaining Some Editing Skills
Brad Stone

More than 40 years ago, computer researchers came up with the concept of cutting and pasting text in a computer document. Electronic organizers and sophisticated phones have had those basic functions for years.

On stage at its headquarters here on Tuesday, an Apple executive announced that the iPhone would at long last be joining the cut, copy and paste party.

The news, which garnered applause from an assembled crowd of analysts, journalists and Apple employees, was much anticipated by iPhone owners. They will be able to select a piece of information in one program — say, a FedEx tracking number in an e-mail message — and then paste it elsewhere — on FedEx’s site in the Web browser, for example.

Apple has said that those features were tricky to add to the iPhone in a way that would be secure and easy to use.

The announcement was one of several Apple made as it previewed a software upgrade, iPhone OS 3.0, that it plans to release this summer.

The event was a shot across the bow of the other makers of mobile phone software, like Google, Palm, Research in Motion and Microsoft, which are bringing out their own smartphones in an increasingly competitive market.

“Apple wants to start reminding consumers of what is coming down the line and what they might expect from the iPhone,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with the research firm Interpret.

Among the new tricks of the updated software are features that will allow developers to create multiplayer games that work over a phone-to-phone wireless connection, and ways for iPhone applications to push messages to users even when they are not running.

That last improvement could unleash a new wave of creativity on the iPhone. Companies like ESPN can send scores to sports fans, and instant messaging can now become far more practical on the device.

The new software will also give developers new ways to make money on the iPhone, allowing them to do transactions within an application — for example, selling monthly subscriptions, new levels within a game or items in an online store.

Apple said the new operating system would be available to current iPhone users at no charge sometime this summer, when analysts expect the company to introduce new hardware and perhaps a less expensive version of the device. The new software will be sold for $9.95 to owners of the iPod Touch. The company says it now has a combined installed base of 30 million iPhones and iPod Touches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/te...s/18apple.html





Dell Unveils World's Thinnest Laptop
Gabriel Madway

Dell Inc unveiled its "luxury" Adamo laptop on Tuesday, calling it the world's thinnest notebook as it seeks to compete in the high-end ultraportable market defined by Apple Inc's MacBook Air.

The sleek, aluminum-encased notebook is 0.65-inches thick and comes with a 13.4-inch screen and a 128-gigabyte solid-state drive. Shipping begins on Tuesday.

Starting at $1,999, the Adamo is positioned as Dell's new high-end brand. Another configuration will sell for $2,699.

The device comes packed in a clear case along with an optional branded sleeve or tote bag from designer luggage and handbag label Tumi.

The Adamo is meant "to make a design statement, to surprise people that this is a Dell," said marketing executive John New. "This is for the customer that has that discerning taste, and is willing to pay a little more for that."

Dell has been working to generate buzz for Adamo, Latin for "to fall in love with." Word of the PC began to leak late last year, and the company hosted an event in January in Las Vegas where it provided a fleeting glimpse of the laptop as it was held aloft by a model.

Apple helped launch the so-called ultraportable category last year with MacBook Air which, at 0.76 inches, previously laid claim to the title of world's thinnest.

The Adamo at 4 pounds is heavier than the Air, which weighs 3 pounds and is priced from $1,799.

Most PC makers, including Lenovo Group, Hewlett Packard Co and Sony Corp also sell ultraportables.

Dell has been trying to reinvigorate its consumer brand amid efforts to diversify its revenue base. Business customers make up around 80 percent of Dell's revenue, while PCs account for roughly 60 percent.

Last week, Dell launched the $799 Studio One 19, a touchscreen all-in-one PC meant for family use in the kitchen or the living room. The Studio One 19 will be available first in Japan and then in other countries later in the spring.

Dell shares have slid 13 percent since the start of 2009, while Apple's have jumped 12 percent. Dell, however, has outperformed Hewlett-Packard, whose stock has dropped 20 percent since the year began.

(Editing by Edwin Chan; editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...52G1SZ20090317





Samsung: Solid State Will Match Hard Drive Price
Brooke Crothers

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.

In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," he said. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years." Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.

Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. "The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he said. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive." (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)

"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case, he said. So, the cost will double as you double the capacity, according to Beard.

This argument, however, works in favor of lower solid-state drive pricing too--as flash memory prices drop and densities and capacities increase. And Beard added that "there's a lot of pressure for OEMs (PC makers) to match the price to the traditional pricing in the hard-drive industry." Samsung is also a PC maker and faces the same pressures.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.

"Every major flash manufacturer posted major losses in Q4. So flash and SSD manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to make a profit," Beard said.

Where is the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for solid-state drives going to be later this year? "On the business side, the sweet spot is 64(GB) moving to 128. On the consumer side it's definitely 128 moving to 256," he said.

Samsung SSDs with a capacity of 256GB have been shipping since January. Dell offers these drives in some laptop models already. 256GB drives are just now "rolling out into mass production," Beard said. "We'll start shipping it to some of our smaller customers about right now."

Note: Currently, on a Dell Studio XPS 16, opting for a 128GB SSD instead of a 7200rpm 320GB HDD, adds $200 to the price of the system. Opting for a 256GB SSD, adds $400.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10196422-64.html





Product Reviews

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Barry Collins

Verdict: A vast improvement on Internet Explorer 7 but offers little to tempt back those who've been lured away by Firefox

With Internet Explorer stuck in an ominous decline, Microsoft needed to pull something out of the hat with IE8. The company's answer? A new focus on "Real-world performance" - a mixture of browser speed enhancements and features that Microsoft claims will accelerate everyday surfing. But will that stem the tide of defections to rivals such as Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Safari and Chrome?

Find out how to use the best of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 here

Microsoft claims IE8 is faster than its rivals on the 25 most-popular sites in the world - but it had to run a video in super slow-mo to show that IE8 rendered the Google homepage a few hundredths of a second faster than Firefox and Chrome.

Even Microsoft spokesmen concede "the naked eye can't see the difference" and our hands-on tests prove likewise.

But Internet Explorer's Achilles Heel has never been the speed at which its renders sites such as Amazon or Ebay: it's AJAX-heavy sites such as Google Docs and Zoho.com where it has struggled.

IE7 was 23 times slower than Google Chrome the last time we compared the browsers' performance with the SunSpider Javascript benchmark. IE8 shows emphatic improvement, but it's still a long way behind the pack.

IE8 recorded a SunSpider time of 5.53 seconds - five times slower than the Safari 4 beta and Chrome, and more than three times slower than Firefox 3.1 beta 3.

How does that translate to "real-world" performance? It took both Chrome and Firefox 3.1 only 19 seconds to open and start a 16-slide presentation in Google Docs, for instance, while Internet Explorer 8 took almost twice as long at 33 seconds. It's a sea change from IE7, but simply not enough to claim raw-performance parity, and that's a problem that's only going to be accentuated when Microsoft launches its own online apps with Office 14 next year.

Clips and accelerators

So what of the new features that Microsoft claims will make our day-to-day surfing more efficient? The most notable of these is Web Slices, a feature that allows you to clip parts of websites and add them to small, expandable windows in the toolbar, to keep track of things such as webmail accounts, Ebay auction items or Facebook status updates.

The Web Slice tab flashes orange when the content is updated, and you can alter the frequency of updates - although the maximum frequency of every 15 minutes might be a little slow for email accounts.

The Web Slices were, however, still very buggy during our tests. The Ebay Web Slice refused to install, while those that did work had scroll bars that dipped in and out of view, leaving us unable to skim through their content without awkwardly resizing the window. It's a potentially useful feature, but it relies on third-party websites to make their sites Web Clip compatible and it's horribly flawed at launch, although Microsoft insists it will improve.

Web Accelerators, on the other hand, are a definite productivity booster. Highlight a piece of text on a web page and up pops a little box that offers a variety of next steps, such as translating the text, looking it up on Wikipedia or copying text or links straight into an email.

This works particularly well for getting maps of addresses: simply highlight the postcode, choose Map with Live Search and a little thumbnail map of the destination appears, with the option to click through to a full map page. And, to Microsoft's credit, it's easy to swap out the company's own services for with third-party alternatives, such as Gmail and Yahoo Maps.

The search box in the top right-hand corner has also been smartened up, with the option to add a variety of different search providers, or search engines from your favourite sites. Choose Ebay, for example, and thumbnail pictures appear alongside auction listings that match your search terms; or type "weather London" and Windows Live delivers a mini-forecast direct from the search box. It's quick and clever but, once again, only worked intermittently.

Cluttered chrome

While Google is spearheading the minimalist look with the Spartan Chrome interface, Microsoft is rushing headlong in the opposite direction. Though the interface is largely unchanged from IE7, the addition of Web Clips to the Favourites Bar can leave the top of the browser window looking desperately cluttered, especially if you have several tabs open simultaneously. You can switch Toolbars on and off, but that rather defeats the object of the new features.

One innovative interface tweak is the grouping of tabs: if you choose to open a link in a new tab, both the parent tab and its offspring are highlighted in the same colour. Not only does this make it easy to see which tabs are related to another, but the whole coloured group can be shut down simultaneously. A nice touch for people who want to shut down several unused tabs in one swoop.

For those who don't want any trace of their internet history preserved, IE8 introduces the now obligatory privacy mode, dubbed InPrivate Browsing. An InPrivate logo appears in the address bar to reassure you that any site you visit won't be logged in your history or drop cookies on your system.

Behind the scenes

There's been a fair bit of work going on behind the scenes in Internet Explorer 8, too. The seismic shift is Microsoft's improved adherence to web standards, meaning that site owners will no longer have to bodge their sites to work with Microsoft's browser.

It's a welcome and long overdue move, but it could mean that sites optimised to work for older version of IE now appear "broken" in IE8. Microsoft offers two ways around this: a simple addition to the site's header that tells the browser to render it in IE7 mode for site owners, and a Compatibility Mode in the browser that allows users to force the old rendering engine on sites that haven't been updated.

It's a clumsy, but necessary evil, and means that Internet Explorer 8 can maintain support for older sites while upgrading its HTML and CSS parsing to an extent that it now passes the Acid2 standards test.

Microsoft might have a sniffy disdain for Chrome's clean design, but it's borrowed one of the browser's other innovations: dedicating a separate system process to each tab. Microsoft says this will make IE8 more robust, and an automatic crash recovery system, for example, retains text typed into webmail so that users don't have to retype lengthy messages if a tab crashes. We've been unable to replicate that in our tests, but we haven't experienced any problems with the browser's stability in the brief time we've had to test the final code.

Security has also been beefed up: domains are highlighted in the address bar (another Chrome steal) to help prevent phishing attacks, a cross-site scripting filter aims to prevent malware running - even from seemingly legitimate sources - and the SmartScreen Filter prevents users from entering data into potential phishing sites.

Good, but no cigar

All told, IE8 is a vast improvement on its predecessor - but then that really is damning with faint praise. New features such as Accelerators and Web Clips show promise, but Microsoft will certainly need to vastly improve the latter if they're not to become another also-ran.

Yet, there's little here to tempt back the Firefox converts. Raw performance remains an issue and there's nothing that screams "must-have". IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game, but still a long way short of the lead.

Internet Explorer 8 will be available for download here from 4pm on 19 March.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/249710/article.html





Pwn2Own 2009: Safari/MacBook Falls in Seconds
Ryan Naraine

Charlie Miller has done it again. For the second consecutive year, the security researcher hacked into a fully patched MacBook computer by exploiting a security vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser.

“It took a couple of seconds. They clicked on the link and I took control of the machine,” Miller said moments after his accomplishment.

The contest kicked off at exactly 3:15 PM and, within seconds, Miller launched his drive-by attack and claimed the $10,000 top prize. He also got to keep the MacBook machine.

Miller said he came to the CanSecWest security conference with a plan to hack into Safari and had tested the exploit carefully to ensure “it worked the first time.”

TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative has acquired the exclusive rights to the vulnerability and coordinate the disclosure and patch release process with Apple.

Technical details of the vulnerability will not be released until a patch is ready.

Several hackers are currently attempting exploits against Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox but those browsers are still standing.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2917





Steep Box-Office Drop for ‘Watchmen’
Brooks Barnes; Compiled by Julie Bloom

Ticket sales for “Watchmen,” right, the Warner Brothers film about misanthropic superheroes, plummeted 67 percent in its second weekend in theaters, indicating an uphill battle to profitability and placing it second over the weekend to newcomer “Race to Witch Mountain,” below right, according to Box Office Mojo, a box-office reporting service. “Watchmen” sold an estimated $18 million in tickets at North American theaters for a cumulative total of $86 million. Splashy, action-oriented movies geared toward a specific fan base typically do big business in their opening weekend and then fall off. But the drop for this picture was bigger than some analysts had predicted. Warner, however, remains hopeful. “There’s been a history of movies that take a big hit in the second weekend and then settle in and do just fine,” said Dan Fellman, the studio’s president for domestic distribution. “Overall I like what I see.” “Race to Witch Mountain,” starring Dwayne Johnson in a loose reboot of the 1970s-era Walt Disney Pictures franchise, sold $25 million in tickets. Third place went to the Universal Pictures horror remake “The Last House on the Left,” with $14.7 million in ticket sales. “Taken,” the 20th Century Fox thriller starring Liam Neeson, was fourth with $6.7 million ($127 million total). Fifth place was "Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail" (Lionsgate), which sold $5.1 million ($83 million).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/mo...XOFFI_BRF.html





Satellite Piracy Costing TV Industry Billions
Tony Wong

The modern day pirate doesn't sport a patch or walk with a limp.

His weapon of choice is an unassuming pizza-sized satellite dish that can literally harpoon signals from space - and provide lucrative and illicit profit.

And it's happening across the country. The Canadian Motion Pictures Distribution Association estimates that the total loss to the industry from satellite piracy in 2001 alone was about $1 billion - and that number is likely far higher today.

If pay television is to ever have a viable future, providers have to figure out a way to make sure they get paid.

But lately, satellite companies, including Bell ExpressVu and U.S. based DISH Network have been fighting back. The companies are switching to a tough new encryption system while using the threat of court action to target end users.

"We take this very seriously and we have taken a number of actions to counter signal theft," Bell spokesperson Julie Smithers said. "We are taking all appropriate steps to prosecute criminals."

Satellite companies like to remind users that theft of signal not only means less subscription revenue for providers but also a fall in ratings for stations, which translates into lost advertising revenue, and for artists who are given a portion of profits from subscriptions through the Canadian Television Fund.

Los Angeles-based media analysts The Carmel Group estimates there are at least two million illegal satellite television households in the U.S. and Canada, out of a universe of about 15 million legal households. And the number is growing exponentially.

"This could cripple the industry," said Carmel chair and analyst Jimmy Schaeffler. "This is the equivalent of someone driving up to a gas station, filling up their tank and driving away, and then doing it every month."

In the digital age, pirates are likely to look a lot like James, a middle-aged Toronto engineer with two children who happens to enjoy watching the Tennis Channel, which is not available on Canadian television.

"I can't believe I was actually paying for cable before," he enthuses. James has access to a universe of more than 200 channels on Dish Network, including current pay-per-view movies that are only available at the video store for a cost. Last summer he put up a second satellite at his cottage, with a dish and receiver from a computer store in downtown Toronto, that he purchased for less than $200.

James is currently watching a live tennis match in his living room, which is decorated with trophies from his local club. Flipping through channels on a black set-top box reveals that he has fully unscrambled access to dozens of Hollywood movies (currently playing is The Dark Knight and Milk) for which legitimate subscribers have to pay up to $5.99 each.

At the heart of the problem are "Free to Air" satellite receivers that are widely available throughout Canada. While the possession of the equipment is not a crime, modifying it to access subscription signals is.

Free to Air is a system widely available in Europe, where television and radio broadcasts are typically sent unencrypted. There are some 250 Free to Air channels in North America, typically for ethnic programming.

"The way piracy works in North America is when consumers turn their Free to Air receivers into Free to Air units that steal," says the Carmel Group report.

A USB port on the system allows consumers to change the internal programming of the module after downloading software from the Internet.

"What the manufacturers and retailers are doing may not be illegal, but it is wilful blindness," argues Luc Perrault, co-chair of the Coalition Against Satellite Signal Theft and a vice-president of the Weather Network. "These things are being imported by the container load in Canada and it's a serious issue."

The coalition, which represents Canadian cable and satellite providers, is lobbying government to toughen laws against piracy, including harsher sentences for pirates.

There have been some charges, but they aren't coming quickly enough for the industry. In 2007, Durham Regional Police charged three Whitby men with theft of telecommunications.

In what police say was the first bust of its kind in the province, authorities seized $20,000 in satellite receivers, dishes and computers. Web sites connected with the businesses were also shut down.

"This is theft - a criminal offence - no different than stealing goods from a retail store," said police.

Persons convicted of modifying, selling or distributing equipment for piracy are subject to fines of $5,000 per count and the possibility of imprisonment. But satellite providers say the penalties aren't tough enough.

The federal government recently announced new copyright legislation aimed at the downloading and copying of intellectual property such as DVDs.

However, theft of signal was not addressed.

"We didn't expect to be included, but it would have been nice," said Pierre Pontbriand, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, a coalition member.

Pontbriand says he would like to see more action against dealers who sell modified equipment.

CASS is also looking at ways to target websites that provide software that allows for illegal access to satellites.

In the United States, satellite providers are closely watching a lawsuit launched by EchoStar Communications against a California set-top distributor. EchoStar claims Oceanside, Calif.-based Viewtech has modified receivers to receive illegal programming. Viewtech has said the claims are "baseless."

So far, similar actions haven't happened in Canada, but the alliance against software theft thinks they have a simpler solution: They want authorities to outlaw FTA receivers that have USB access ports that allow them to download those signals.

"If you are simply using this to receive free channels over the air, why would you need to modify your receiver?" asks Perrault.

Schaeffler of the Carmel Group says doing that would be a "Brilliant idea. It would stop the problem outright."

The move would be controversial and would meet with opposition from manufacturers and retailers who stand to lose millions.

Don McEwen, North American sales manager for Mississauga based Fortec Star, which is named in the Carmel paper as one of the three largest distributors in North America, says USB ports are needed to modify equipment for different world markets. Making only one type of receiver for the North American market wouldn't be economically viable, he says.

"I think the solution they're proposing is to beat up on the little guys, rather than addressing the real problem, which is to spend the money to fix their system to protect it against hackers in the first place," says McEwen.

While other manufacturers target the black market, McEwen says his company has held meetings with satellite providers to see how they can work together. He says the vast majority of his clients use the equipment for legitimate programming.

"They have valid points about signal theft, but it's not the responsibility of the people who make the Free to Air boxes, it's the responsibility of the people who want their service protected to fix it."

Chris Frank, vice-president of programming for Bell ExpressVu says the company has "done everything to ensure the integrity of our platform. Secret services around the world spend billions of dollars upgrading encryption systems to make sure their data is secure," he told the Star's Chris Sorensen last year. "We are a commercial company, we can't spend billions, but we spend what it takes within reasonable bounds."

Frank would not say how many people steal from Bell; only that it was "speculative to try and figure it out. But the illegal reception is well within industry bounds."

So far, Bell's electronic countermeasures with a new ecryption route introduced last November, seem to be working, blocking access to many channels. DISH Network is also in the process of migrating to the new system.

"Dark days are coming and no one knows for how long," says Kenmoresp, a blogger on FTAbins, a website for satellite users. "This more than likely will not be a quick fix."

But hackers have been here before. In 2005 Bell announced they had put into place tough anti-piracy measures that were eventually cracked.

Hacker groups are currently working on the new system, and some feel it is only a matter of time before the code is broken.

Meanwhile, one final route that would have a powerful deterrent effect is to go after consumers who steal signal, and that's already happening.

In a get-tough policy, Bell has targeted end users by threatening legal action against customers who have been sold FTA receivers and were registered members of websites that promoted piracy.

"We are contacting you because the operation or possession of illegal signal theft equipment to access Bell ExpressVu's programming constitutes a violation," says a letter sent to customers of a distributor selling satellite equipment.

The letter states that Bell is willing to drop legal proceedings if the user pays a $1,000 fine and hands over the equipment to Bell.

But the new tactics aren't scaring some pirates.

"They'll have to pry the remote control out of my hands before I give it up," says James.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/602878





As the Sun Sets on P2P in the West …
Tom Koltai, p2pnet news view

Sharing is a community thing and has been since the time of Adam. (Think Apple / Eve, not Jobs)

But Ipoques’ latest report states that P2P file sharing is down 6.9% year on year.

They go on to explain that the drop is balanced by http traffic from sites like Rapidshare. Users are moving to this kind of site in droves, sick and tired of being harassed by companies such as Media Defender, BayTSP and DTECnet.

And sick of Governments legislating SafeHarbour Acts that require ISPs to disconnet the users.

Smart users figureif their download looks like port 80 http traffic, it’s less likely to be interdicted, interfered with, or have the brakes applied to it by ISPs who want to stay out of trouble with content companies.

At the Perceptric think tank, we have a theory: the harder and higher the level of interdiction, the greater the pushback from the p2p community.

Anecdotally, it’s the author’s hypothesis that the real P2P “buzz” is almost over — that interdiction, filtering, Denial of Service attacks are all pretty much about to become a moot point. After all, where’s the fun in collecting grains of pretty coloured pink sand on a beach when you live on the beach?

Lack of scarcity eventually cures the P2P download-desire from even the most dedicated downloader.

It rises in the East.

I regularly conduct tests of the P2P networks for anomalies, memes and themes.

A curious statistic is that P2P file users are now more likely to be located between the middle east and China.

This is the new P2P majority.

One of my recent efforts was to research all Tom Cruise movies spanning the period 1986 - 2009 to determine whether or jot P2P traffic hurts or assists box office sales.

Cruise’s most current movie, Valkyrie shows some interesting statistics. I noticed out of the 1,120 connections - 912 were from China.

My first thought was, “What are Chinese people doing watching Tom Cruise in English?”

China is an interesting study for anyone wanting to understand the potential benefit or harm of P2P activity on a country. It doesn’t have the same onerous ISP “Safe Harbour” reporting provisions imposed on it by the government.

The Chinese cinema industry now ranks third in the world behind Hollywood and Bollywood.

Up until mid-2004, prior to production, every script had to be submitted to the Film Censorship Committee of SARFT to be considered for a potential filming permit, thereby making the film “legal” for distribution in the 3200 Chinese cinemas.

Recently, film industry restrictions have been loosened somewhat to facilitate a growing Chinese film industry. However, before this breakthrough, many Chinese filmmakers worked “underground” with illicit “non-censored” Chinese movies being distributed via street markets and Chinese internet users.

Chinese cinema celebrated its centenary in 2005 with 250+ films produced that year setting a new record as television began to dominate the Chinese entertainment market in the early 1980s. In 2005 the Chinese economy grew a staggering 9.8%, but the film industry reported phenomenal growth: 22.6% for the same period.

Due to the decreased censorship, people’s interest in cinema was revived. Community sentiment went from “The film is merely government propaganda” in the 1990’s to the point where cinema ticket sales continue to grow at an aggregate 33% per annum

Even so, Chinese officials still consider western films add to a widening “cultural deficit” and as a result it’s impossible for Hollywood studios to vertically integrate through the value chain by owning a majority share in the theatres. As a result of this policy Hollywood has never reached market dominance.

So now I repeat the question – “What are Chinese people doing watching Tom Cruise in English?”

The Big Screen experience

At least 912 Chinese people who downloaded Cruise’s “Valkyrie” movie would have seen what a final solution revolution looked like in another place and time where the state had absolute power.

The statistics for Chinese film production in 2005 were »»»

3 - Blockbusters (over 100 million RMB Production budgets, (eg, The Promise)
10 - 10-50 million RMB
240 - 1.5-3 million RMB (These films are restricted to TV and/or DVD release only because of budget constraints).

Therefore, if Chinese people want a big screen experience during each calendar year, they’re restricted to a choice of 13 domestically produced movies - plus overseas Hollywood content.

The average wage in urban areas in 2006 was 1750 yuan a month, or just under $US60.00 per week, and the imperative according to western movies is that capitalists speak English.

So, if your daily entertainment budget (after feeding the family) equals $1.30 - are you likely to spend it on visiting the cinema? Or would you buy 20 blank DVD’s and visit a friend withs an Internet connection?

Hollywood may turn its back on China and figure it’s too hard to make a buck there. But the Chinese are definitely not turning their backs on Hollywood. And when a billion Chinese have their hard discs full of Hollywood content and act as seeders within P2P networks the total ubiquity of all content will not be far away.

And as we all know scarcity drives price.

So once all content is universally available, what will it be worth per unit?
http://p2pnet.net/story/18742





IMDb's Vision: Offer Streaming for Every Title
Daniel Terdiman

IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.

Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.

Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.

Ostensibly, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb--from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com. But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.

It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."

But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.

Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the talk that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.

Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.

And he said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.

At that rate, however, it's sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham said he imagined a time three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we'll shake our heads at where we were at.

"We'll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work," Needham said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-101...g=2547-1_3-0-5





Yahoo Reverses Its Web Strategy With Web Videos
Brian Stelter

For Yahoo’s original video strategy, this will be Take Two.

On Monday, the Web portal will announce the latest in a series of niche Web shows. The short segments about celebrity mothers, titled “Spotlight to Nightlight,” are a stark departure from the company’s initial forays into TV-style production for the Internet. This time, Yahoo’s executives say they have found a sustainable model for making original video online, in part by explicitly not competing with television.

During the middle of the decade, the technology company dreamed up plans for elaborate talk shows, sitcoms and other TV-type shows. But the expensive attempts to transport TV entertainment to the Internet “were all disasters,” said Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst for Global Equities Research. The attempted Hollywood makeover — which at one point even included plans for an interactive hidden-camera reality show — was scrapped in 2006.

Since then, Yahoo has acted as a distributor for audio, video and photographs from other media companies. And it has continued to produce its own Web shows, albeit quietly, without any of the fanfare that accompanied its earlier ambitions.

“We may have come at it from the wrong way in the previous era,” said Sibyl Goldman, the head of entertainment for Yahoo. Ms. Goldman said that some of those shows were developed even when they “didn’t target any existing need.”

“The one-way model — ‘We think this is great, we hope you come watch it’ — may have been more of a TV mindset,” she said.

Last year, Yahoo ended one of the last holdovers from the Hollywood era, a daily distillation of Web videos called “The 9.” Despite a sponsorship by Pepsi, the show was viewed as an experiment, not a “response to any specific audience demand,” said James Pitaro, a vice president who oversees media for Yahoo.

Now the Yahoo producers are doing the reverse, finding their biggest audiences and then building short Web shows for those groups of people. Instead of producing TV, Yahoo now recaps TV in a daily show called “Primetime in No Time.” Yahoo says the two- to five-minute-long show has an average of 400,000 daily streams, making it one of the most popular recurring series made for the Web.

The shift in strategy comes as the Web video market matures and media companies seek profitable projects in a battered advertising market. Yahoo, which can drive users to the videos from its popular home page, has signed up long-term advertising sponsors for each of its original shows; the TV recaps are sponsored by Verizon Wireless and the celebrity mother segments will be supported by State Farm Insurance.

State Farm had been looking for new ways to reach a female audience when it contacted Yahoo about a partnership, said Ed Gold, an advertising director for the insurance company. Some viewers may treat the “Spotlight to Nightlight” videos as disposable — nannies and zany baby names are among the topics — but Mr. Gold said they allow State Farm to “own the environment around the discussion.”

The segments will be hosted by Ali Landry, a former Miss USA. In a twist, the videos are being produced in both English and Spanish, owing in part to Ms. Landry’s fluency in both languages.

“Spotlight to Nightlight” was a natural extension of OMG, Yahoo’s upbeat entertainment project. Ms. Goldman said the producers of the nearly two-year-old site saw traffic spikes around stories about celebrity baby names and photos and “started programming more content” that related to the subject.

The ability to mine search queries and traffic data to better identify user interests is an advantage for companies like Yahoo, Mr. Chowdhry said. Besides TV and celebrity mothers, Yahoo also produces technology news videos for its finance Web site and game highlights for its sports site. While they may lack Hollywood ambition, they also lack risk for Yahoo’s bottom line, a plus for the company as it embarks on yet another reorganization.

“These are shows that identified needs,” Mr. Pitaro said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/te...t/16yahoo.html





No Smooth Ride on TV Networks’ Road to Diversity
Edward Wyatt

On the eve of Barack Obama’s election last fall as the first African-American president, television seemed to be leaning toward a post-racial future. In October two prominent cable networks — CNN and Comedy Central — began new programs that featured black hosts, a development that was notable because so few current programs on cable or broadcast channels have minority leads.

Five months later both programs — “Chocolate News,” featuring David Alan Grier on Comedy Central, and “D. L. Hughley Breaks the News” on CNN — have been discontinued. In addition, CW, the broadcast network that regularly features comedies with largely African-American casts, announced in February that it was renewing six popular series, but its two with mostly black performers — “Everybody Hates Chris” and “The Game” — were not among them. (The network says it is still deciding their fates.)

One of the few new series from last fall to feature a black lead, Fox’s situation comedy “Do Not Disturb,” was canceled after only three episodes because of low ratings. And when Jay Leno’s impending departure from “The Tonight Show” caused a shuffling among the late-night talk-show hosting chairs, the lineup remained a white male domain.

All of which raises some questions about whether television actually made any progress last fall in better reflecting the audience it serves, and whether viewers will see a return to old, monochromatic ways in the coming season. Comedy Central and CNN both said last week that their respective shows were not canceled; they simply were not continuing. Jenni Runyan, a spokeswoman for Comedy Central, whose executives declined to comment for this article, said “Chocolate News” completed its entire run of 10 episodes but was not renewed for a second season. She said the network does not talk about why shows are not renewed.

“Chocolate News” drew an average of 1.5 million viewers over its run, according to Comedy Central, down from the 2.1 million who watched the debut episode. Mr. Hughley’s show on CNN, which will continue through the end of the month, has drawn roughly 750,000 viewers per episode, CNN said.

CNN also declined to make executives available to comment. The network issued a statement saying that Mr. Hughley would remain a contributor for the network. The decision to discontinue his show, a comic take on the news that was shown on Saturday nights, came after he asked the network to move the show’s production from New York to Los Angeles, where his family lives.

Certainly both CNN and Comedy Central feature African-Americans and other minorities among their performers and news anchors. To some in the industry, however, these most recent developments were another verse of a much-heard song.

“I don’t know what to say to these networks that don’t put on shows with black leads,” said Larry Wilmore, who has a recurring role as the “senior black correspondent” on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and who was an executive producer on “The Bernie Mac Show,” which ran for five seasons on Fox.

Minority talents “are faring better in dramas as part of ensembles than as leads,” Mr. Wilmore said.

“I don’t think there is anything sinister going on,” he continued. “It is just an unfortunate coincidence and situation.”

In a report issued last December, the N.A.A.C.P. said that the number of minority actors in regular or recurring roles on three of the four major networks had decreased markedly in the 2006-7 television season from their peaks several seasons earlier. Only ABC showed an increase in the number of minority roles during that time, according to the report, which lamented the “gross underrepresentation of minorities” in scripted entertainment.

Among the pilots under development for next season, few have cast blacks or Hispanics as lead characters. Fox has already ordered a full season of episodes of “The Cleveland Show,” an animated spinoff of “Family Guy” that focuses on Cleveland Brown, an African-American character, and his family. Most of the members of that family are voiced by black actors, although Cleveland himself is the creation of Mike Henry, who is white.

Ron Taylor, the vice president for diversity development at Fox Entertainment Group, said that the choice of Mr. Henry was initially a concern at Fox, but that executives there quickly grew comfortable with his portrayal of the character, as well as with the ethnic diversity of the writing staff and the rest of the cast. Perhaps most notably, Cleveland’s white, redneck neighbor, Lester, is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, an African-American, who also voices Cleveland Jr.

Fox is also considering an African-American-led sitcom titled “Brothers” for its fall lineup. It features Daryl Mitchell, known as Chill, who was paralyzed in a 2001 motorcycle accident and uses a wheelchair, and Michael Strahan, the former Giants football star. ABC is considering “The Law,” a pilot starring Cedric Kyles, popularly known as Cedric the Entertainer. And CBS has cast the rapper L L Cool J in a planned spinoff of “NCIS,” its procedural crime drama.

But those are just 4 of the nearly 70 pilot projects under development by the four major networks. The relative dearth of mainstream television series with black lead performers makes the success of a producer like Tyler Perry, whose “House of Payne” on TBS is but one part of his comedy conglomerate, all the more remarkable.

The networks say they are addressing the issue both in front of and behind the cameras. Paula Madison, an executive vice president at NBC Universal who oversees its diversity efforts, said Hollywood tended to draw a fair number of aspiring writers and directors from film schools and graduate programs that are themselves not greatly diverse. NBC Universal has worked to counteract that by providing extra money for shows that add minority members to the writing and production staff.

“We are at the point where more and more people of color are working at higher levels,” Ms. Madison said. “That is making us more effective at having diversity in the room at the beginning, and in seeing diverse projects coming in the door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/ar...n/18minor.html





Trademarks

Sci Fi Channel Changing Name, Logo
James Hibberd

After 16 years, Sci Fi Channel is changing its name ... unless you say it aloud.

NBC Universal-owned cable network will become SyFy starting in June.

The phonics-friendly moniker is part of a network-wide rebranding campaign that has been in the works for more than a year. It's an evolution that also includes a new logo and tagline -- "Imagine Greater" -- and will be announced Monday at the network's "upfront" presentation to advertisers for the new programing season.

The changes attempt to address longtime marketing goals at the network, as well as practical challenges that have stemmed from using a generic term as a brand name.

"We love being sci-fi, and we're still embracing that," said network president Dave Howe on Friday. "But we're more than just space and aliens and the future -- the three things most people think of when they think of 'sci fi.'"

Though at first blush more fantastical-looking than the current name, "SyFy" aims to telegraph that the channel is a unique destination without being so different from the current title as to lose the network's core familiarity.

"What this does is hopefully give us the best of both worlds," Howe said. "You keep the heritage, but also open up to a broader range of content."

For years the network has sought ways to expand its image beyond its signature male-skewing space operas such as "Stargate" and "Battlestar Galactica." The network will unveil the branding campaign this summer along with the premiere of "Warehouse 13," a series about two FBI agents who hunt down paranormal objects.

Next year's "Battlestar" prequel "Caprica," which is a terrestrial drama rather than an outer-space adventure, will further support this brand expansion, an effort that began on the programing side a few years ago with the launch of drama "Eureka," about a town of geniuses.

The pragmatic aspect of the change is that from a business affairs standpoint, the network's genre-as-title has long been cumbersome.

"We're going to have upwards of 50 Sci Fi Channels in various territories, and yet you cannot trademark 'Sci Fi' anywhere in the world," Howe said. "A new logo design would not solve that particular challenge. We needed a brand name that was own-able, portable and extendable."

Howe knows some fans will dislike the change and see Syfy as a rejection of the network's core viewership. More than most channels, Sci Fi has an intense relationship with its audience. Clashes are unavoidable to some degree when you combine a network making businesses-minded decisions with a genre that has some of the most passionate and outspoken fans around.

"Our core audience will use it an opportunity to question our motives -- they always do," Howe said. "But what we're embracing is the total sci-fi landscape -- fantasy, paranormal, action-adventure, mystery ... it's imagination-based entertainment."

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...52F34W20090316





Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., a TV Technology Pioneer, Dies at 99
Dennis Hevesi

Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., a pioneer of television technology who with his boss, Allen B. DuMont, and others in the nascent industry perfected the cathode ray tube that eventually let little wooden boxes with grainy black-and-white screens bring moving images into millions of homes, died on March 5 at his home in Lacey, Wash. He was 99.

The cause was complications of a hip fracture, his son Judson said.

On April 30, 1939, visitors to the World’s Fair in Queens crowded around small fish-bowl-shaped screens of DuMont television sets to watch President Franklin D. Roosevelt — against a panorama of fountains and flags — officially declare the exposition open. Those televisions were largely made possible by the breakthrough work of Dr. DuMont, with his protégé, Dr. Goldsmith, by his side. At the time, fewer than 1,500 DuMont sets had been sold around the country.

“DuMont and Goldsmith helped pioneer turning oscilloscopes into full television displays,” Alexander Magoun, the author of “Television: The Life Story of a Technology” (Greenwood Press, 2007), said in an interview Wednesday.

Dr. Magoun, who is also the executive director of the David Sarnoff Library, an archive for the Radio Corporation America, in Princeton, said that other scientists, including those at RCA, had also made advances in the use of the cathode ray tube.

“During World War II,” Dr. Magoun said, “DuMont and Goldsmith shared their knowledge with RCA and other companies for using cathode ray tubes in radar displays and, after the war, for picture-tube displays.”

Cathode ray tubes had already been used for nearly 30 years by scientists and engineers for oscilloscopes, devices that create a graphic display of electronic signals. An electron gun inside the oscilloscope shoots a beam of electrons at materials called phosphors coating the inside of the tube’s face plate, causing them to light up and allowing analysis of the electrical signal.

“But in television, if you remember black-and-white TV,” Dr. Magoun explained, “you’re illuminating the entire picture tube screen so that you can watch moving video. DuMont and Goldsmith devised a variety of engineering and manufacturing techniques necessary to make that possible on a mass commercial basis.”

Dr. Goldsmith was research director for the Allen B. DuMont Laboratory from 1936 to 1965. Dr. DuMont, who died in 1965, opened the laboratory in the garage of his home in Upper Montclair, N.J., in 1931; it later moved to a former pickle factory in Passaic. By 1947, with revenues from the sale of his television sets, he had started the DuMont Television Network. It had three stations at the time: WABD (later WNEW) in New York, WDTV in Pittsburgh, and WTTG in Washington. The last three letters of WTTG, which is now part of the Fox network, were chosen by Dr. DuMont to honor his protégé.

Thomas Toliver Goldsmith Jr. was born in Greenville, S.C., on Jan. 9, 1910, the younger of two sons of Thomas and Charlotte Manly Goldsmith. His father was an insurance and real estate broker, and his mother was a concert pianist.

After building crystal radio sets as a teenager, Dr. Goldsmith graduated from Furman University in Greenville in 1931. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1936. For his doctoral research, he needed to build an oscilloscope. He contacted Dr. DuMont, bought a cathode ray tube and began a correspondence that soon led to his hiring at the DuMont Laboratory. Dr. Goldsmith taught physics at Furman from 1966 to 1986.

Besides his son, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Helen Wilcox; another son, Thomas III; a daughter, Virginia Beekman; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

The DuMont Television Network closed in 1955, partly because of a decline in sales of DuMont television sets, which had supported it. Five years later, the laboratory merged with Fairchild Camera.

The financial difficulties of the DuMont enterprises kept Dr. Goldsmith from making his mark in what decades later would be a booming industry. In 1947, he received patent No. 2,455,992 for a video game that allowed a player to shoot down an image of an airplane with a beam aimed at the screen.

“Here was an honored engineer in the television industry who worked for an undercapitalized company,” Dr. Magoun said. “Here is an interactive television video game in 1947 that the company simply could not afford to take further, beyond the patent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/ar...goldsmith.html





Ron Silver, 62, Persuasive Actor and Activist, Dies
Bruce Weber

Ron Silver, a versatile actor and independent-minded political activist who played Henry Kissinger, Alan Dershowitz and Angelo Dundee on the screen and supported Bill Clinton, Rudolph W. Giuliani and George W. Bush on the stump, died at home in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 62.

The cause was esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed two years ago, said his brother Mitchell.

Mr. Silver, who won a Tony Award in 1988 in David Mamet’s high-speed Hollywood sendup “Speed-the-Plow,” was known for playing verbally deft, charmingly manipulative characters, and his persona off stage was, if not Machiavellian, then certainly engaging and persuasive. Intellectually curious and informed — he spoke Spanish, studied Chinese and served on committees for the Council on Foreign Relations — he was nearly as connected in Washington as he was in Hollywood and on Broadway, and he had a life away from performing that few other actors could match. Actually he had a performing life that not many actors could match, either.

His résumé was ample on stage, in the movies and on television. His Kissinger was in a 1995 television movie, “Kissinger and Nixon.” In “Reversal of Fortune,” the 1990 movie directed by Barbet Schroeder about the high society trial of Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons), he played Mr. Dershowitz, Mr. von Bulow’s voluble lawyer. And he was Mr. Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s trusted cornerman, in the 2001 film “Ali.”

He played other real life characters, including Bobby Riggs, the tennis player and huckster who played — and lost to — Billie Jean King in a celebrated “battle of the sexes” match in 1973, which was recreated in a television movie, “When Billie Beat Bobby,” in 2001; and the rock ’n’ roll impresario Bill Graham, in a one-man show by Robert Greenfield, “Bill Graham Presents.”

Mr. Silver also appeared on Broadway in David Rabe’s play, “Hurlyburly,” another Hollywood satire, and in movies that included “Enemies: A Love Story” (1989), Paul Mazursky’s bittersweet comedy about a Holocaust survivor who somehow ends up with three wives, and “Blue Steel” (1990), directed by Kathryn Bigelow, about a commodities broker who becomes obsessed with a young policewoman (Jamie Lee Curtis) whom he witnessed shooting an armed burglar. On television he had recurring roles on several series, including “Rhoda,” “Chicago Hope,” “The West Wing” and “Veronica’s Closet.”

But Mr. Silver was busy as a nonperformer as well. An activist most frequently allied with left-wing issues, he was president of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors union, for most of the 1990s, and he was a co-founder of the Creative Coalition, a group that advocates for First Amendment rights, public education and arts support. He campaigned for Bill Clinton for president.

“I’m an actor by calling but an activist by inclination,” he said in a 1994 interview.

Still, he had contrary impulses, and he paid attention to them. He was an advocate for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan, and he supported Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for mayor of New York in 1994. In 2004, he made headlines when he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan, supporting the nomination of President George W. Bush for a second term, largely because of his stance against Islamic terrorism. He supported Mr. Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Ronald Arthur Silver was born in Manhattan on July 2, 1946. His father, Irving, was an executive in the men’s wear business. His mother, May Zimelman Silver, worked in the city school system as an aide and a substitute teacher. Young Ron attended New York City public schools, graduating from Stuyvesant High School. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, he studied Spanish; he received master’s degree in Asian studies at St. John’s University in Queens. He studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

Mr. Silver’s only marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his brother Mitchell, who lives in Newton, Mass., he is survived by his parents, who live in Manhattan; another brother, Keith, of Stamford, Conn.; a son, Adam, of Los Angeles; and a daughter, Alexandra, of Manhattan. His acting awed them, his politics confounded them, Mitchell Silver said.

“Ron’s politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics,” Mitchell Silver said. He paused and added: “He told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/mo...silver.html?hp





Natasha Richardson, 45, Stage and Film Star, Dies
Bruce Weber

Natasha Richardson, a Tony Award-winning actress whose career melded glamorous celebrity with the bloodline of theater royalty, died Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She had suffered head injuries in a skiing accident Monday north of Montreal, and was flown to New York on Tuesday. She was 45 and lived in Manhattan and in Millbrook, N.Y.

Alan Nierob, a spokesman for her husband, the actor Liam Neeson, announced Ms. Richardson’s death Wednesday night.

“Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha,” a statement said. “They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time.”

The statement did not disclose the cause of death or discuss Ms. Richardson’s medical condition.

The gravity of her injuries had prompted an outpouring of public interest and concern and flurries of rumor and speculation since Monday, when reports of her accident began filtering out of the Mont Tremblant ski resort in the Laurentian hills.

Ms. Richardson, who was not wearing a helmet, had fallen during a beginner’s skiing lesson, a resort spokeswoman, Lyne Lortie, said Tuesday. “It was a normal fall; she didn’t hit anyone or anything,” Ms. Lortie said. “She didn’t show any signs of injury. She was talking and she seemed all right.”

Still, an instructor and a ski patrol member accompanied her off the slopes, and when Ms. Richardson complained of a headache about an hour later in her hotel, she was taken by ambulance to a hospital nearby and later transferred to one in Montreal. She was flown to Lenox Hill on Tuesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, as television news vans stood outside, friends including Lauren Bacall and family members including Ms. Richardson’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and sister, the actress Joely Richardson, were observed arriving. Mr. Neeson was seen crouched beside her in an ambulance in Montreal the day before.

The news media attention harked back to the early 1990s, when the couple’s relationship was noted in newspapers. She was a blond, beautiful English actress, he was her ruggedly handsome Irish co-star, and the two were thought to be courting right on stage, during a New York production.

Ms. Richardson was an intense and absorbing actress who was unafraid of taking on demanding and emotionally raw roles. Classically trained, she was admired on both sides of the Atlantic for upholding the traditions of one of the great acting families of the modern age.

Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave, one of England’s finest tragedians. He passed his gifts, if not always his affection, to his daughters, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, and his son, Corin Redgrave. The night Vanessa was born, her father was playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

Ms. Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the film director Tony Richardson, known for “Tom Jones” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Married in the early 1960s, they were divorced in 1967. He died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 63.

Ms. Richardson came to critical prominence in England in 1985 as Nina, Chekhov’s naïve and vulnerable ingénue in “The Seagull,” a role her mother had played to great acclaim in 1964. It was a road production, and when it reached London, Vanessa Redgrave joined the cast as the narcissistic actress Arkadina. The production became legendary, but working with her mother intimidated her.

“She rehearsed like a tornado,” Ms. Richardson recalled in a 1993 interview with The New York Times Magazine. “It was completely crazy. She rolled on the floor in some scenes. I was terrified of being on stage with her.”

But almost no one doubts that Ms. Redgrave inspired her daughter as well. Like her mother, Ms. Richardson was known for disappearing into a role, for not capitalizing on her looks and for being drawn to characters under duress.

In the performance that made her a star in the United States, she played the title role on Broadway in a 1993 revival of “Anna Christie,” Eugene O’Neill’s grueling portrait of a waterfront slattern in confrontation with the abusive men in her life. Embracing the emotional wreckage that showed in her character’s face, she modeled her makeup each night on Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”

Her performance, nominated for a Tony Award, was vibrantly sensual, and her scenes with her co-star, Mr. Neeson, were acclaimed as sizzling and electric. The chemistry between them extended offstage as well; shortly after the run, Ms. Richardson separated from her husband, the producer Robert Fox. She and Mr. Neeson married in 1994.

Besides her husband, Ms. Richardson is survived by their two sons, Micheal Richard Antonio, 13, and Daniel Jack, 12, as well as her mother, her sister and a half-sister, Katherine Grimond.

Ms. Richardson’s Tony Award came in 1998, for best actress in a musical, for her performance as Sally Bowles, the gifted but desperately needy singer in decadent Weimar Berlin who is at the center of “Cabaret.”

It was a remarkable award: Ms. Richardson’s strengths did not include singing. But her reinvention of a role that was created by Liza Minnelli proved that a performer could act a song as well as sing it and make it equally affecting.

“Ms. Richardson, you see, isn’t selling the song; she’s selling the character,” Ben Brantley, writing in The Times, said of her delivery of the title song. “And as she forges ahead with the number, in a defiant, metallic voice, you can hear the promise of the lyrics tarnishing in Sally’s mouth. She’s willing herself to believe in them, and all too clearly losing the battle.”

Natasha Jane Richardson was born in London on May 11, 1963. She made her first film appearance at the age of 4, playing a bridesmaid at the wedding of her mother’s character in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” directed by her father. She attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and got her first job in an outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

She eventually moved to the United States, where “no one cares about the Redgrave baggage,” as she once said. She gave her greatest performances there.

In the movies she played the title character in Paul Schrader’s film “Patty Hearst” (1988), about the heiress and kidnap victim. She worked with Mr. Schrader again on “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), a creepy psychological drama with a screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan.

The same year, she also starred in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” an adaptation of the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood about subjugated women in a pseudo-Christian theocracy. In a 1993 television adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer,” she was Catherine Holly, a young woman (played by Elizabeth Taylor in the original movie) driven to the brink of insanity by the gruesome death of her young cousin. And she played the title role in the 1993 television movie “Zelda,” based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ferociously competitive and emotionally delicate wife.

Ms. Richardson’s more recent work has included more conventional Hollywood fare, including a remake of “The Parent Trap” (1998), the comedy “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) and the teen melodrama “Wild Child” (2008).

On stage, she appeared on Broadway in “Closer,” Patrick Marber’s play about infidelity and the Internet, and as Blanche DuBois in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Though the production did not draw much praise, Ms. Richardson’s performance did, as perhaps her grandfather had envisioned.

In 1985, a week before he died, Sir Michael, enfeebled by Parkinson’s disease, went to see Ms. Richardson as Ophelia in a production of “Hamlet.” Turning to his daughter Vanessa, Ms. Richardson’s mother, he uttered a brief review. “She’s a true actress,” he said.

Ian Austen, Patrick Healy and Liz Robbins contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/th...ardson.html?hp





Jessica Lange Falls in Minn. Cabin, Goes to Hospital
Paul Walsh

A month shy of her 60th birthday, Minnesota-born actress Jessica Lange reportedly took a tumble at her cabin near the town where she was born and suffered a host of injuries.

According to the gossip website tmz.com, Lange grabbed for a railing that was not secure and fell, breaking her shoulder and collarbone and dislocating her arm. She also suffered cuts and needed stitches at a nearby hospital, the website said. TMZ did not report when the fall occurred.

In recent months, she and longtime mate Sam Shepard sold their home in Stillwater.

A representative for Lange told People magazine, "She will be completely fine and expects to be released from the hospital imminently."

In a 2004 interview with AARP magazine, Lange said of her cabin, south of Cloquet: ""There is no place I'd rather be. The cabin is in the deep woods, on a hill overlooking a small lake.

"There is no sound except nature, which can be amazingly loud when you really listen. We can hear coyote, timber wolves, bear. I get up at 6:30 a.m., take my coffee, and sit on the dock and watch the hawks, eagles, loons, and blue heron."
http://www.startribune.com/entertain...D3aPc:_Yyc:aUU





When Death Comes to the Unprepared, an Online Life Can be Left in Limbo
Peter Svensson

When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg's death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

"I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off," Pagoria said. "I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn't been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out."

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they're also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There's even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant's father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Okla. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

"It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead," Bryant said. "It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed."

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

"I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It's not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn't sure about how many members it has — "probably close to a thousand." Nor does he know what's in the e-mails that have been created. Until they're sent out, they're encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there's an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while they're alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colo. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn't dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he'd spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Fla., was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan's online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy's accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn't be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person's e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within "the next hundred years or so" would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, "as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you're only 13."

___

On the Net:

http://www.deathswitch.com

http://www.slightlymorbid.com

http://www.courant.com/features/sns-...0,555598.story





Iran Blogger Dies in Evin Prison
BBC

Reports from Iran say Omid Mirsayafi, a blogger who had been jailed for insulting the country's ruling clerics, has died in Tehran's main prison.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran says Mr Mirsayafi, 29, died on Wednesday.

His lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah said officials at the Evin prison told him Mr Mirsayafi had committed suicide and he demanded and immediate inquiry.

There was no immediate comment from Iranian authorities.

In quotes published by AFP, Mr Dadkhah said another Evin prisoner with medical training "had warned officials in the jail of the state the young blogger was in".

The ICHRI says he suffered from severe depression.

Mr Mirsayafi was sentenced last month to 30 months in prison after being convicted of insulting supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other clerics.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...st/7953738.stm





Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die

Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients
Roni Caryn Rabin

Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive, a study has found.

The patients who were devout were three times as likely as less religious ones to be put on a mechanical ventilator to maintain breathing during the last week of life, and they were less likely to do any advance care planning, like signing a do-not-resuscitate order, preparing a living will or creating a health care proxy, the analysis found.

The study is to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“People think that spiritual patients are more likely to say their lives are in God’s hands — ’Let what happens happen’ — but in fact we know they want more aggressive care,” said Holly G. Prigerson, the study’s senior author and director of the Center for Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“To religious people, life is sacred and sanctified,” Dr. Prigerson said, “and there’s a sense they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible.”

Aggressive life-prolonging care comes at a cost, however, in terms of both dollars and human suffering. Medicare, the government’s health plan for the elderly, spends about one-third of its budget on people who are in the last year of life, and much of that on patients at the very end of life.

Aggressive end-of-life care can lead to a more painful process of dying, researchers have found, and greater shock and grief for the family members left behind.

The new study used both a questionnaire and interviews to assess the level of reliance on religious faith for comfort among 345 patients with advanced cancer. The patients, most of them belonging to Christian denominations, were followed until they died, about four months on average.

A vast majority of patients, religious or not, did not want heroic measures taken. Still, 11.3 percent of the most religious patients received mechanical ventilation during the last week of life, compared with only 3.6 percent of the least religious.

The most religious patients were also more likely than less religious ones to be resuscitated in the last week of life and to be treated in an intensive-care unit as they died, although those differences may have been due to chance.

“Doctors don’t always acknowledge, and I’m pretty sure patients are telling us, that God is really important in their lives,” said Dr. Gerard Silvestri, a cancer specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C., who has studied end-of-life decision making.

A study by Dr. Silvestri in 2003 found that while cancer patients listed their oncologist’s recommendation as the most influential factor affecting their decisions about medical care, their faith in God was the second-most-influential factor, ranking higher than the recommendations of their family doctors, their spouses and children, and even information about whether treatment would cure the disease.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/he...h/18faith.html





Chuck Norris Sues, Says His Tears No Cancer Cure
Christine Kearney

Tough-guy actor and martial arts expert Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.

Penguin published "The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World's Greatest Human" in November. Author Ian Spector and two Web sites he runs to promote the book, including www.truthaboutchuck.com, are also named in the suit.

The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.

It includes such humorous "facts" as "Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried" and "Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits," the suit said, as well as "Chuck Norris can charge a cell phone by rubbing it against his beard."

"Some of the 'facts' in the book are racist, lewd or portray Mr. Norris as engaged in illegal activities," the lawsuit alleges.

Norris, who rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s as the star of such films as "The Delta Force" and "Missing in Action," says the book's title would mislead readers into thinking the facts were true.

"Defendants have misappropriated and exploited Mr. Norris's name and likeness without authorization for their own commercial profit," said the lawsuit.

The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks unspecified monetary damages for trademark infringement, unjust enrichment and privacy rights.

Norris, whose real name is Carlos Ray Norris, claims in the suit he is protective of what his name is associated with. He has recently made U.S. headlines for backing Republican presidential candidate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

A spokesman for Penguin, owned by Britain's Pearson, was not immediately available for comment.

(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...29580420071222





At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products
Jenna Wortham

Benjamin Satterfield, a 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur, knows how fickle the Web’s tastemakers can be.

Last year he unveiled an online collaboration tool called Twiddla at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference here, which attracts thousands of influential Webheads. Twiddla won praise and even a prize at the conference’s Interactive Web Awards. But the spotlight quickly faded.

“We had millions of hits to the site,” Mr. Satterfield said. “Then it died off. I was in a trough of despair.”

This year, he tried to build something that would be used long after the conference buzz died down. He created Gigotron, a free Web and iPhone application that rounds up listings of nearby concerts.

The service is already running in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and Mr. Satterfield is about to take the wraps off a version tailored for the Austin music scene. “You know you’re going to get traction at South by Southwest,” he said.

Mr. Satterfield is one of many entrepreneurs who flock to the conference in the hope of capturing the attention of attendees and elevating their product or service out of obscurity.

Twitter, the chatty Web service that is quickly entering the mainstream, first hit it big during the 2007 conference because of giant screens installed around the convention center displaying Twitter messages from the crowd. Shawn O’Keefe, who has been helping organize the tech-oriented portion of South by Southwest for nearly a decade, said that in the early days the conference also helped give a lift to the makers of the blogging tools Blogger and Movable Type.

But wooing the technorati is a tricky business. Start-up companies are aware that in-your-face marketing is a good way to scare off the kinds of people who go to South by Southwest.

JagTag, a company based in Princeton, N.J., that incorporates barcodes into marketing campaigns for the benefit of camera-phone users, decided not to attend the conference. Instead, the company sent a single employee loaded with several thousand promotional postcards bearing barcodes. “We didn’t want to do a hard sell,” said Dudley Fitzpatrick, the chief executive. “We just wanted to show it to them.”

“I’ve just been dropping them off at tables where people were taking a break,” said Scott Falconer, the JagTag employee assigned to promote the company. Attendees who snapped a photo of the barcode and sent it to JagTag were rewarded with listings of parties and events around Austin.

To some, though, handing out pieces of paper seemed a little primitive and, well, uncool. Rohan Walder and Mark Sando, who traveled from London to represent Rawrip, the music discovery site they work for, were not impressed by the fliers in the free swag bag that attendees received.

“When we first got our gift bags, we went through and threw away every bit of paper,” Mr. Sando said. “You would think that at a digital conference, they’d think of more intelligent ways” to promote a company.

The team behind PeopleBrowsr, an online dashboard that tracks updates across social networking Web sites like Flickr and Twitter, elected not to overtly market their Web application at all. “If we had a booth, I would be slashing my wrists,” said Jodee Rich, the chief executive.

Instead, they decided to release a special version of their service for South by Southwest attendees that lets users track events here. They got a few write-ups from tech blogs before the conference, and they plan to spend their time in Austin gathering feedback on the tool.

“We’re not pushing to the community anymore. We’re no longer hiring girls to pass out cards,” Mr. Rich said. “The community either loves it or they don’t.”

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research who specializes in social media, put it succinctly: “Heavy marketing doesn’t work with the cool kids.” Those “cool kids” are the prominent bloggers or influential Twitterers whose endorsement could be valuable.

For Mr. Satterfield, even the best-laid plans were not a sure thing. Throughout the conference, cellphone coverage suffered as the influx of smartphone users overwhelmed networks. That could cut into the number of people trying out the new version of Gigotron during the music portion of the conference.

“I’m definitely worried,” Mr. Satterfield said, as the cellular network overload is “only going to get worse.” But he made arrangements to set up his own Wi-Fi router. That way, he said, “at least we’ll have a decent shot at getting some people to try it out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/te...southwest.html





Cisco Systems Acquires Maker of the Flip for $590 Million
Ashlee Vance

Pure Digital Technologies thought small and simple, and it paid off big time.

The tiny, eight-year-old start-up famed for its inexpensive and easy to use Flip video cameras has defeated a down economy. On Thursday, the 100-person company was bought by Cisco Systems, a technology infrastructure giant, for $590 million in stock. The deal caps off a bumpy and unpredictable rise for Pure Digital, which bested the Asian companies that dominate the camera industry from an office located above the Gump’s department store in the heart of San Francisco.

“At a time when everybody has just been hammered with stories of misery, this is a really fabulous tale of what is possible against all odds,” said Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, which invested in Pure Digital.

Over the last couple of years, Cisco has expanded beyond selling networking equipment for large computing centers, making inroads into the home via set-top boxes, routers and — most recently — digital stereos. The company has been clear about building upon these efforts by aiming much of its nearly $34 billion in cash at future acquisitions.

In Pure Digital, Cisco found a local talent to complement its consumer ambitions and extend its business videoconferencing technology to mobile devices.

Pure Digital started selling the Flip line of products in 2007 and has since shipped more than two million units, which cost $150 to $230, depending on the model. The device’s claim to fame has been its minimalism.

The Flip recorders have just a few buttons, weigh a few ounces and have 1.5-inch screens. In addition, they arrive without cables, relying on a built-in connector that plugs into a computer’s U.S.B. port for both recharging and transferring video files.

Along with the device, Pure Digital offers software that helps shift videos from a personal computer to online services like YouTube and Facebook with the click of a couple of buttons. The simple software, simple design and low cost opened digital camcorders to people put off by more complex devices but still hungry to pass around their videos.

“They were able to capitalize on an opportunity to reach consumers that had traditionally shied away from camcorders,” said Ross Rubin, an analyst for NPD Group.

Over the last few years, the sales of digital camcorders have either stayed flat or declined, according to Mr. Rubin. Meanwhile, Pure Digital tripled its sales of the Flip products over the last year and now holds close to one-fifth of the market. Sony, the market leader, has since mimicked Pure Digital’s products, as have a host of smaller competitors.

The no-nonsense Flip design set Pure Digital’s path on a new trajectory. “We became a profitable business from the day we launched Flip,” said Jonathan Kaplan, the company’s chief.

The company started off selling single-use digital still cameras at drugstores. Customers would rent the cameras and bring them to make prints.

The business worked, at first. But as nondisposable cameras became increasingly affordable, Pure Digital’s sales tumbled.

“The market demand for that product just melted away,” Mr. Moritz said. “We found ourselves selling disposable cameras into a market that was shrinking by the hour.”

The company next moved to single-use digital camcorders, also distributed through drugstores, where the videos could be burned onto DVDs.

Despite trying various approaches, Pure Digital remained in search of a big hit. Luckily, the company’s partners — and, somewhat surprisingly, computer hackers — helped to nudge it in the right direction.

For example, hackers were removing the memory chips from the single-use recorders so they could put videos onto their PCs. In addition, the drugstores asked Pure Digital to limit the accessories it shipped with its cameras, a demand that gave rise to the built-in U.S.B. connector.

With such prodding, Pure Digital’s staff hit upon the idea of a cheap, easy-to-use digital camera that could funnel videos between the device, PCs and Web sites. Ever since, the company maintained its simple approach while working to make products more attractive via colorful designs and better-quality video.

Cisco’s deep pockets could help Flip, financed by close to $70 million, succeed outside of the United States and Britain, according to Mr. Moritz. “You have to scale up your inventory to satisfy demand in lots of different countries, and that is a very expensive proposition,” he said.

Such a consumer play is still a curious one for Cisco. The company tends to operate in the background, providing products that companies use to link phones and computers to the Internet. But Cisco has also made large investments in videoconferencing. The more the Flip encourages consumers to videoconference, the more money the company looks to make selling the routers and switches needed to process the large video files flying off Flip devices and onto YouTube.

Less than 5 percent of Cisco’s $40 billion in annual sales comes from consumer products, said Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

Cisco is already familiar with Pure Digital’s product. The family of John T. Chambers, the chief executive at Cisco, owns eight of the Flip devices, and executives at the company often post their own videos to an internal version of YouTube.

In the future, it is expected that Cisco will release versions of the Flip recorders that can connect to wireless networks. There are other surprises in store as well, said Mr. Kaplan.

“The Flip will find its way into some very obvious places and maybe some not-so-obvious ones,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/te...es/20flip.html





Guy Hands Releases Daily Control Of Terra Firma
FMQB

British investment company Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., which includes EMI in its portfolio, has announced that founder Guy Hands will step down from his day-to-day duties as CEO of the private equity group. Hands will remain Chairman and Chief Investment Officer and Terra Firma's lawyer Tim Pryce will take over as CEO.

Hands said in a statement, "Having worked closely with Tim for nine years, I am delighted that he has agreed to take up this position. He will make an excellent CEO of Terra Firma. Tim has been an integral part of Terra Firma since its formation and has done an outstanding job in his previous roles at the firm. Terra Firma has grown significantly since its creation in 2002. Over this period, staff numbers have increased from approximately 60 to over 110 people, investor relationships have expanded from one U.K. party to over 200 relationships in 26 countries, and assets under management have grown from €2 billion to €11 billion while 80 percent of our portfolio businesses’ revenues are now from outside the U.K. As Chief Executive, Tim will be responsible for Terra Firma’s day to day operations while I will concentrate on investments, investors and developing the business internationally."

Earlier this month, Terra Firma reported a $1.76 billion loss for 2008, after writing down two of its major investments, including EMI. The company reportedly wrote off about half of its 2.6 billion Euro investment in EMI Group and announced it would give back approximately $100.5 million in Terra Firma investor bonuses, dating back to 2004.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1221651





Ex-CC & Google Execs Launch Goom Radio
FMQB

Goom Radio (www.goomradio.com) launched today with the mission of "reinventing radio for the Internet generation." Having already debuted in France in 2008, Goom Radio plans to launch its U.S. service later this year. The Goom Website promises "The best music, the best shows, and the best interviews with the top names in the entertainment industry. All hand-picked by the most talented DJs and artists, delivered to you. But it doesn't end there. We also give you all the tools and knowledge you need to create and influence your own radio station, all in Goom's proprietary HD sound."

The executive team is led by CEO Robert Williams, who was most recently President/Market Manager for Clear Channel-New York, and chief sales officer Drew Hilles, who served as a director for four years of dMarc Broadcasting, through an acquisition by Google.

The company will be based in Jersey City, out of the historic WHTZ (Z100)/New York studios. Former Z100 MD/night host Tim "Romeo" Herbster has been named Head of Programming for Goom Radio and "will help define the different Goom Radio stations and programming options."

"We have put together a stellar team, all with a strong background in radio and an eye toward the future of programming for the Internet generation," said Williams, "to establish Goom Radio as a unique alternative to what is currently available in the world of online music. Our objective is to create remarkable radio experiences, something we feel the current generation of online offerings has not really focused on, truly bringing together the best of both the radio and the Internet."

Goom's staff is rounded out with marketing leaders Hayeon Kim and Adam Klein, both formerly of Google. Goom Radio France launched in 2008 and is led by Emmanuel Jayr and Roberto Ciurleo, former executives at top French radio station NRJ.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1221370





Radio Has Over 234 Million Weekly Listeners
FMQB

Radio reaches more than 234 million persons age 12 and older over the course of a typical week, according to Arbitron's RADAR 100 National Radio Listening Report. RADAR 100 marks more than 40 years of Network Radio ratings.

Since the December 2007 RADAR 95 report, the RADAR national radio listening estimates and network radio audience reports have been based on PPM respondents from within commercialized PPM markets and on diary respondents from the rest of the country.

As additional radio markets transition to electronic measurement, Arbitron has found radio's total reach to be larger than in previous surveys. Listenership to RADAR Network Affiliate stations has also risen yearly. Over the course of a typical week, more than 212 million persons ages 12+ tune to the more than 7,700 RADAR Network Affiliated stations, up from 208 million listeners one year ago in RADAR 96.

RADAR 100 shows that radio reaches 92 percent of persons 12+ each week. Also, 89 percent of the youngest radio audience, teens ages 12-17 tune in each week. Network radio also reaches 84 percent of Adults ages 18-34.

RADAR 100 data also shows that 92 percent of both Black Non-Hispanic persons and Hispanic persons ages 12+ tune into radio over the course of a week. Radio reaches about 93 percent of both Black Non-Hispanics and Hispanics age 18-49 over the course of a week.

Radio reaches more than 94 percent of college graduates ages 25-54. Ninety-five percent of adults 25-54 with a college degree and an annual income of $50,000 or more tune into radio over the course of a week. Network affiliated stations reach nearly 85 percent of college graduates ages 18-49 with a household income of $75,000 or more. All radio stations reach 95 percent of this age group.

On Tuesday, March 23, Arbitron will release the complete RADAR 100 Radio Network Audience Report results.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1219234





New Scientist Pulls Story on Creationist Code

The New Scientist had a story by their book editor Amanda Gefter called "How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda". Today, it was pulled from their web site; the explanation being that they "received a complaint about the contents of the story."

You can still find a copy here, and we've copied the text until we find out what caused them to pull the story. Here's the opening:

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I'd share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science's clothing.

Here's some of the code words Gefter says give away a book's closeted ID agenda.

1. Scientific Materialism
2. The invocation of Cartesian dualism
3. Misguided interpretations of quantum physics (also a "New Age" giveaway)
4. The terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinist" (scientists refer to "evolution" and "biologists")
5. Referring to natural selection as "blind", "random" or an "undirected process"

Gafter concludes by saying, "It is crucial to the public's intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines."

We have no idea what caused this story to be pulled, and we can provide the full text if it becomes newsworthy.
http://www.examiner.com/x-4112-Skept...eationist-code





Cybersquatting Cases Hit Record in 2008

Companies and celebrities ranging from Arsenal football club to actress Scarlett Johansson filed a record number of "cybersquatting" cases in 2008 to stop others from profiting from their famous names, brands and events, a United Nations agency said on Sunday.

Web sites in dispute in 2008 included references to Madrid's 2016 Olympics bid, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), Yale University, Research in Motion's Blackberry as well as Arsenal and Johansson, and company names such as eBay, Google and Nestle.

The most common business sector in which complaints arose was pharmaceuticals, due to websites offering sales of medicines with protected names. Other top sectors for complaints were banking and finance, Internet and telecommunications, retail, and food, beverages and restaurants.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) handled 2,329 cases under its dispute procedure for Internet page names.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages the system of Web addresses with endings like .com and .gov, is preparing to launch many new series of suffixes.

These new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) will allow a vast increase in the number of Web addresses, providing new scope for trademarked names to be abused -- or at least making it harder for the trademark owners to monitor them.

"The creation of an unknowable and potentially vast number of new gTLDs raises significant issues for rights holders, as well as Internet users generally," WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry said in a statement.

The founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday the names system had become mired in politics and commercial games.

"It would have been interesting to look at systems that didn't involve domains," Tim Berners-Lee, who drafted a proposal 20 years ago that led to the Web, told an anniversary celebration.

Gurry said his U.N. agency was working with ICANN, a not-for-profit corporation based in California, on "pre- and post-delegation procedures" to check the proposed new suffixes and help avoid future litigation.

For instance a new suffix ".apple" could well upset the computer, phone and entertainment company Apple.

How such suffixes are used and by whom would be important -- a fruit-growing company using the .apple suffix would not have the same effect as a company registering a Website "ipod.apple."

Gurry told a news conference that trademarks that had no other meaning, such as Sony and Kodak, were stronger and easier to defend than those based on general words or names, which could be ambiguous.

(Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Laura MacInnis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...52E22G20090316





Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search
Ashlee Vance

In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo’s homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook.

It has achieved this by making it easier and cheaper than ever to analyze and access the unprecedented volumes of data churned out by the Internet. By mapping information spread across thousands of cheap computers and by creating an easier means for writing analytical queries, engineers no longer have to solve a grand computer science challenge every time they want to dig into data. Instead, they simply ask a question.

“It’s a breakthrough,” said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “I think this type of technology will solve a whole new class of problems and open new services.”

Three top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with a former executive from Oracle, are betting it will. They announced a start-up Monday called Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., that will try to bring Hadoop’s capabilities to industries as far afield as genomics, retailing and finance.

The core concepts behind the software were nurtured at Google.

By 2003, Google found it increasingly difficult to ingest and index the entire Internet on a regular basis. Adding to these woes, Google lacked a relatively easy to use means of analyzing its vast stores of information to figure out the quality of search results and how people behaved across its numerous online services.

To address those issues, a pair of Google engineers invented a technology called MapReduce that, when paired with the intricate file management technology the company uses to index and catalog the Web, solved the problem.

The MapReduce technology makes it possible to break large sets of data into little chunks, spread that information across thousands of computers, ask the computers questions and receive cohesive answers. Google rewrote its entire search index system to take advantage of MapReduce’s ability to analyze all of this information and its ability to keep complex jobs working even when lots of computers die.

MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.

“It’s a really big hammer,” said Christophe Bisciglia, 28, a former Google engineer and a founder of Cloudera. “When you have a really big hammer, everything becomes a nail.”

The technology opened the possibility of asking a question about Google’s data — like what did all the people search for before they searched for BMW — and it began ascertaining more and more about the relationships between groups of Web sites, pictures and documents. In short, Google got smarter.

The MapReduce technology helps do grunt work, too. For example, it grabs huge quantities of images — like satellite photos — from many sources and assembles that information into one picture. The result is improved versions of products like Google Maps and Google Earth.

Google has kept the inner workings of MapReduce and related file management software a secret, but it did publish papers on some of the underlying techniques. That bit of information was enough for Doug Cutting, who had been working as a software consultant, to create his own version of the technology, called Hadoop. (The name came from his son’s plush toy elephant, which has since been banished to a sock drawer.)

People at Yahoo had read the same papers as Mr. Cutting, and thought they needed to even the playing field with their search and advertising competitor. So Yahoo hired Mr. Cutting and set to work.

“The thinking was if we had a big team of guys, we could really make this rock,” Mr. Cutting said. “Within six months, Hadoop was a critical part of Yahoo and within a year or two it became supercritical.”

A Hadoop-powered analysis also determines what 300 million people a month see. Yahoo tracks peoples’ behavior to gauge what types of stories and other content they like and tries to alter its homepage accordingly. Similar software tries to match ads with certain types of stories. And the better the ad, the more Yahoo can charge for it.

Yahoo is estimated to have spent tens of millions of dollars developing Hadoop, which remains open-source software that anyone can use or modify.

It then began to spread through Silicon Valley and tech companies beyond.

Microsoft became a Hadoop fan when it bought a start-up called Powerset to improve its search system. Historically hostile to open-source software, Microsoft nevertheless altered internal policies to let members of the Powerset team continue developing Hadoop.

“We are realizing that we have real problems to solve that affect businesses, and business intelligence and data analytics is a huge part of that,” said Sam Ramji, the senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

Facebook uses it to manage the 40 billion photos it stores. “It’s how Facebook figures out how closely you are linked to every other person,” said Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer and a co-founder of Cloudera.

Eyealike, a start-up, relies on Hadoop for performing facial recognition on photos while Fox Interactive Media mines data with it. Google and I.B.M. have financed a program to teach Hadoop to university students.

Autodesk, a maker of design software, used it to create an online catalog of products like sinks, gutters and toilets to help builders plan projects.. The company looks to make money by tapping Hadoop for analysis on how popular certain items are and selling that detailed information to manufacturers.

These types of applications drew the Cloudera founders toward starting a business around Hadoop.

“What if Google decided to sell the ability to do amazing things with data instead of selling advertising?” Mr. Hammerbacher asked.

Mr. Hammerbacher and Mr. Bisciglia were joined by Amr Awadallah, a former Yahoo engineer, and Michael Olson, the company’s chief executive, who sold a an open-source software company to Oracle in 2006.

The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

The executives point out that things like data copies of the human genome, oil reservoirs and sales data require immense storage systems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/te...g/17cloud.html





Hearst Prints Final Seattle PI
Gina Keating

The Hearst Corp plans to roll out the final print edition of its ailing Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday then move it online, ending speculation about the fate of the 146-year-old newspaper as crumbling advertising and the Internet wallop the industry.

Hearst, which failed over two months to find a buyer for the venerable daily, on Monday said it will move 20 of the newspaper's workers to the new, free online business, while another 145 had taken severance packages.

The Post-Intelligencer, which Hearst said is the largest daily newspaper to migrate entirely to an online version, underscores the depth of a sector downturn as readers increasingly get their news online and a deepening recession undercuts advertising spending across the globe.

Newspapers from the storied Rocky Mountain News to the San Francisco Chronicle have either closed or are struggling to streamline enough to survive what analysts say may be a long-term slump, with U.S. newspaper ad revenue diving 15 percent in 2008.

"The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the decision to stop publishing the newspaper an extraordinarily difficult one," Frank Bennack, chief executive of the Hearst Corp, said.

"Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region."

Hearst may also close the San Francisco Chronicle -- which lost more than $50 million in 2008 and may lose more this year -- unless it can save money via layoffs and other cost cuts.

Over the weekend, the paper's largest union agreed to contract concessions and at least 150 union job cuts that Hearst said were essential to keeping the newspaper open.

Online, But Not a Newspaper

And last month, EW Scripps folded the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News in Denver. On Monday, a group of its former journalists and three investors announced they would launch an online news Website aimed at the Denver market, if they are able to sign up 50,000 subscribers by April 23.

The site, indenvertimes.com, will focus on local news and feature live interactive chats, mobile feeds and advanced technologies, the group said in a statement.

On Monday, Hearst stressed it will not try to create an online newspaper but instead aim for a "new type of digital business," creating an agency to sell local business advertising and setting up a community-focused news and information site.

The media giant plans to sell advertising on the products of partners from Yahoo to Google. The site will also host breaking news from City Hall, courts, blogs from prominent local residents, columns, and photo galleries, it said in a statement.

The Post-Intelligencer lost $14 million in 2008 and may lose more this year, Hearst had said.

The Seattle Times now becomes the only print newspaper remaining in the city. That paper is owned by the Blethen family, with Sacramento-based publisher McClatchy owning a minority stake.

(Additional reporting by Edwin Chan in Los Angeles and Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Edwin Chan, Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...52F5TB20090317





Why Newspapers Can’t Be Saved, But the News Can
Eric Etheridge

The Rocky Mountain News is dead. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its last issue Tuesday. The Detroit Free Press has cut home delivery to three days a week. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Inquirer and Daily News in Philadelphia have all declared bankruptcy.

According to Clay Shirky, this is what a revolution looks like.

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. . . . Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Shirky, a well-known Internet observer and analyst, has been writing for some time about the future of newspapers, or rather the lack of one (”2009 is going to be a bloodbath,” he told the Guardian in January).

On Friday night he dropped his latest description of the existential crisis papers face, a long essay (some 2,700 words) that has been much discussed and linked to all weekend.

Shirky notes that newspapers were not blind to the coming of the Internet and he briefly reviews a number of the experiments they have tried to find success online (described in greater detail by Jack Shafer in Slate back in January). But all the experiments have pretty much one thing in common:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes . . . was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.

Now that newspapers are staring to drop dead, the survivors are rapidly shuffling through these ideas again, desperate to stop the bleeding, “demanding to know ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’”

Shirky’s answer: “Nothing.”

Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Shirky, like many Internet enthusiasts, is future-positive. For him, it’s time to get on with the revolution. Forget about saving newspapers. Instead, experiment with new ways of doing journalism in the digital era.

There is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did . . .

Any experiment . . . designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Steven Berlin Johnson, another future-positive, also weighed on the fate of newspapers and news on Friday, providing a closer look at the experimentation that Shirky puts so much of faith in.

Johnson’s comments came in a speech he delivered at South by Southwest Interactive, an annual convention for Internet types in Austin. Johnson’s been knocking around the Internet for a while. In 1995, he started FEED, an early online magazine, and was its editor. Three years ago, he launched outside.in, “a hyperlocal news and information service.”

Johnson began by noting the explosion of coverage of Apple since the late ’80s, when as a college student he obsessively frequented the campus bookstore on the third week of every month, desperate for the new issue of MacWorld.

In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like Jon Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.)

Johnson’s reached for an “ecosystem metaphor” to describe this transformation:

The state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.

For Johnson, the path from desert to rain forest is one he sees repeating itself over and over again — when he compares the coverage of the 1992 and 2008 presidential elections, and when he looks at at local blogging over the last few years.

When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.

But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...-the-news-can/





Frayed Thread in a Free Society
Kathleen Parker

The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.

Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.

Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh's "drive-by media," are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.

There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.

But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic.

Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don't need newspapers. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently found that fewer than half of Americans -- 43 percent -- say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community "a lot." Only 33 percent say they would miss the local paper if it were no longer available.

A younger generation, meanwhile, has little understanding or appreciation of the relationship between a free press and a free society. Pew found that just 27 percent of Americans born since 1977 read a newspaper the previous day.

Such grim tidings are familiar to the 80 or so editors and publishers gathered the other day for the annual New England Newspaper Association meeting, where I was a speaker. But what to do about it? How does the newspaper industry survive in a climate in which the public doesn't know what it doesn't know? Or what it needs?

Constant criticism of the "elite media" is comical to most reporters, whose paychecks wouldn't cover Limbaugh's annual dry cleaning bill. The truly elite media are the people most Americans have never heard of -- the daily-grind reporters who turn out for city council and school board meetings. Or the investigative teams who chase leads for months to expose abuse or corruption.

These are the champions of the industry, not the food-fighters on TV or the grenade throwers on radio. Or the bloggers (with a few exceptions), who may be excellent critics and fact-checkers, but who rely on newspapers to provide their material.

As others have noted, the Internet can't quickly enough fill the void created by lost newspapers. In time, some markets simply won't have a town crier -- and then who will go to all those meetings where news is made? What will people not know? In such a vacuum, gossip rules the mob.

That newspapers have to adapt to a changed world is a given. But just how much the world has changed is sometimes hard for old-schoolers (like me) to wrap their minds around.

Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, tried to break the news gently to the crowd of mostly older men and a few women at the meeting.

In the not-distant future, says Jones, the news may be delivered via a video game. Forget the Internet. Forget blogs, tweets and tags. Forget Jim Cramer-style infotainment. Millions of people are already living in computerized parallel universes through games such as "The Sims" and "World of Warcraft" (WoW). We may have to toss the newspaper on those stoops -- in the virtual world of fake life.

More brandy, please.

For those who have been busy with real life, "The Sims" is apparently popular with women who can create a virtual doppelganger and live happily in the suburbs. For millions of guys, WoW is a role-playing game that combines fantasy with mythology. One can't help noting that males and females acting out fantasies are drawn to roles frowned upon in real life: suburban homemaking and warrior-hero play. Hmmmm.

While executives ponder the possibly strange future of news delivery, the more immediate challenge is how to keep institutions in place and profitable so that the news can be covered.

Whatever business models emerge, Jones says newspapers have to focus on their traditional core of fact-based, serious reporting. We might add to that formula the need for a serious populace informed about the fragile thread that connects a free press to a free future.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031302273.html





Mistrial by iPhone: Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials
John Schwartz

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment against it after a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial.

And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded that the judge declare a mistrial after a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming Monday. But the judge decided to let the trial continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based only on the facts that the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web, or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret.

A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a patent claim or medical condition, Google Maps can show how long it might take to drive from point A to point B, and news sites can write about a criminal defendant, his lawyers or expert witnesses.

“It’s really impossible to control it,” said Douglas L. Keene, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants.

Judges have long amended their habitual warning about seeking outside information during trials to include Internet searches. But with the Internet now as close as the juror’s pocket, the risk has grown more immediate — and instinctual. Attorneys have begun to routinely check the blogs and Web sites of prospective jurors.

Mr. Keene said jurors might think they were helping, not hurting, by digging deeper. “There are people who feel they can’t serve justice if they don’t find the answers to certain questions,” he said.

But the rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, are there to ensure that the facts that go before a jury have been subjected to scrutiny and challenge from both sides, said Olin Guy Wellborn III, a law professor at the University of Texas.

“That’s the beauty of the adversary system,” Professor Wellborn, co-author of a handbook on evidence law, said. “You lose all that when the jurors go out on their own.”

In the Florida case that resulted in a mistrial, Mr. Raben spent nearly eight weeks fighting charges that his client had illegally sold prescription drugs through Internet pharmacies. The arguments were completed and the jury was deliberating when one of them contacted the judge to say another juror had admitted to her that he had done some outside research on the case over the Internet.

As the judge questioned the juror about his research — which included evidence that the judge had specifically excluded — Mr. Rabin said he recalled thinking that if the juror had not broadly communicated his information with the rest of the jury, the trial could continue and the eight weeks would not be wasted. “We can just kick this juror off and go,” he said.

But then the judge found that eight other jurors had done the same thing — Google searches on the lawyers and the defendant, looking up news stories about the case, checking definitions on Wikipedia and searching for evidence that had been specifically excluded by the judge. One juror, asked about the research by the judge, said, “Well, I was curious,” according to Mr. Raben.

“It was a heartbreak,” Mr. Raben added.

Information flowing out of the jury box can be nearly as much trouble as the information flowing in; jurors accustomed to posting regular updates on their day-to-day experiences and thoughts can find themselves on a collision course with the law.

In the Arkansas case, Stoam Holdings, the company trying to overturn the $12.6 million judgment, said a juror, Johnathan Powell, had sent Twitter messages during the trial. Mr. Powell’s messages included, “oh and nobody buy Stoam. Its bad mojo and they’ll probably cease to Exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter,” and “So Johnathan, what did you do today? Oh nothing really, I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

Mr. Powell, 29, the manager of a one-hour photo booth at a Wal-Mart in Fayetteville, Ark., insisted in an interview that he had not sent any substantive messages about the case until the verdict had been delivered and he was released from his obligation not to discuss the case. “I was done when I mentioned the trial at all,” he said. “They’re welcome to pull my phone records.”

But juror research is a more troublesome issue than sending Twitter messages or blogging, Mr. Keene said, and raises new issues for judges in giving instructions.

“It’s important that they don’t know what’s excluded, and it’s important that they don’t know why it’s excluded,” Mr. Keene said. The court cannot even give a full explanation to jurors about research — say, to tell them what not to look for — and so instructions are usually delivered as blanket admonitions, he said.

The technological landscape has changed so much that today’s judge, Mr. Keene said, “has to explain why this is crucial, and not just go through boilerplate instructions.” And, he said, enforcement goes beyond what the judge can do, noting that “it’s up to juror 11 to make sure juror 12 stays in line.”

It does not always work out that way. Seth A. McDowell, a data support specialist who lives in Albuquerque and works for a financial advising firm, said he was serving on a jury last year when another juror admitted doing a Google search on the defendant, even though she acknowledged that she was not supposed to do so. She said she did not find anything, Mr. McDowell said.

Mr. McDowell, 35, said he thought about telling the judge, but decided against it. None of the other jurors did, either. Now, he said, after a bit of soul searching, he feels he might have made the wrong choice. But he remains somewhat torn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If everybody did the right thing, the trial, which took two days, would have gone on for another bazillion years.”

Mr. McDowell said he planned to attend law school in the fall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18juries.html?hp





Many See Privacy on Web as Big Issue, Survey Says
Stephanie Clifford

As arguments swirl over online privacy, a new survey indicates the issue is a dominant concern for Americans.

More than 90 percent of respondents called online privacy a “really” or “somewhat” important issue, according to the survey of more than 1,000 Americans conducted by TRUSTe, an organization that monitors the privacy practices of Web sites of companies like I.B.M., Yahoo and WebMD for a fee.

When asked if they were comfortable with behavioral targeting — when advertisers use a person’s browsing history or search history to decide which ad to show them — only 28 percent said they were. More than half said they were not. And more than 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “The Internet is not well regulated, and naïve users can easily be taken advantage of.”

The survey arrives at a fractious time. Debate over behavioral advertising has intensified, with industry groups trying to avoid government intervention by creating their own regulatory standards. Still, some Congressional representatives and the Federal Trade Commission are questioning whether there are enough safeguards around the practice.

Last month, the F.T.C. revised its suggestions for behavioral advertising rules for the industry, proposing, among other measures, that sites disclose when they are participating in behavioral advertising and obtain consumers’ permission to do so.

One F.T.C. commissioner, Jon Leibowitz, warned that if the industry did not respond, intervention would be next.

“Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can — and will — effectively protect consumers’ privacy,” Mr. Leibowitz said, or else “it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our commission.”

Some technology companies are making changes on their own. Yahoo recently shortened the amount of time it keeps data derived from searches. It is also including a link in some ads that explains how the viewer’s browsing history resulted in the ad shown.

Google, as it introduces its own behavioral advertising system, is allowing consumers to see what information it has gathered about them for advertising purposes. Given the concern over privacy in the TRUSTe survey, respondents’ knowledge of how to protect themselves online was relatively low, said Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group that supports a national consumer privacy law.

“There does seem to be a disconnect in awareness,” Ms. Cooper said after reviewing the survey. Consumers may not know “how much data is collected, and what the data is. There may be a high level of understanding but not enough to allow them to make an informed choice.”

For instance, only 15 percent of respondents read Web site privacy statements most of the time. Fewer than half frequently checked whether sites even had privacy statements, the survey said.

Respondents used various tactics to be more anonymous online. Forty-one percent used a Web browser that deleted cookies and the history of the sites they had visited. About the same number used software to use the Internet anonymously.

Around one-third of respondents said they chose “do not track” options on Web sites that offered them. Eleven percent used a proxy server to mask the Internet address of the computer they were using, and 36 percent gave false information when registering for Web sites.

More than half of respondents said government should be “wholly” or “very” responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy.

But there was a note of self-reliance, too: more than 75 percent of respondents said individuals themselves should also be wholly or very responsible for protecting their own privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/te...16privacy.html





Google Pulls Some Street Images
BBC

Google has removed dozens of photos from its new UK Street View service.

The street-mapping facility launched amid a fanfare of publicity but now the firm has been forced to pull some of the images after complaints.

It is thought the pictures removed contained revealing images of homes, a man entering a London sex shop, people being arrested and a man being sick.

A spokesperson for Google told the BBC that anyone could have their images removed if they asked.

"We've got millions of images, so the percentage removed was very small," Google's Laura Scott told the BBC.

"We want this to be a useful tool and it's people's right to have their image removed.

"The fact there are now gaps [in Street View] shows how responsive we are," she added.

Street View first launched in the United States in May 2007 and is already available in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain and Italy.

The Netherlands version of the service also launched on Thursday, bringing the total number of countries covered to nine.

The imagery available comprises video taken along 22,369 miles of UK streets by customised camera cars.

Street scenes in 25 UK cities from Aberdeen to Southampton can be viewed using the service.

Offending photos have been replaced by a black image with the message "This image is no longer available". However, many of the images can still be viewed by moving up or down a notch on the street.

Dr Ian Brown, a privacy expert at the Oxford Internet Institute, said he was not surprised that there were some offending images.

"This is exactly what you would expect from a service that relies on individuals to help Google not make mistakes," he said.

"They [Google] should have thought more carefully about how they designed the service to avoid exactly this sort of thing."

Dr Brown said Google could have taken images twice, on different days, so offending images could have been easily replaced and protected privacy better.

Google says it has gone to great lengths to ensure privacy, suggesting that the service only shows imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

It also uses face recognition technology to blur out faces and registration plates that appear in the images.

The Information Commissioner's Office ruled in 2008 that the blurring was sufficient to ensure that privacy was maintained.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7954596.stm





Gov't May Track All UK Facebook Traffic
Tom Espiner

The UK government is considering the mass surveillance and retention of all user communications on social-networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Home Office security minister Vernon Coaker said on Monday that the EU Data Retention Directive, under which ISPs must store communications data for 12 months, does not go far enough. Communications such as those on social networking sites and instant messaging could also be monitored, he said.

"Social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Bebo, are not covered by the directive," said Coaker, speaking at a meeting of the House of Commons Fourth Delegated Legislation Committee. "That is one reason why the government are looking at what we should do about the Intercept Modernisation Programme, because there are certain aspects of communications which are not covered by the directive."

Under the EU Data Retention Directive, from the 15 March, 2009, all UK internet service providers (ISPs) are required to store customer traffic data for a year. The Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is a government proposal, introduced last year, for legislation to use mass monitoring of traffic data as an anti-terrorism tool. The IMP has two strands: that the government use deep packet inspection to monitor the web communications of all UK citizens; and that all of the traffic data relating to those communications are stored in a centralised government database.

The UK government has previously said that communications interception was "vital", and has hinted that social-networking sites may be put under surveillance. However, responding to a question from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, Coaker said that all traffic data on social-networking sites and through instant messaging may be harvested and stored.

"The honourable member for Carshalton and Wallington will also know the controversy that currently surrounds the Intercept Modernisation Programme," said Coaker. "I look forward to his support when we present Intercept Modernisation Programme proposals, which may include requiring the retention of data on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and all other similar sites."

Deep packet inspection, the second strand of the IMP, involves intercepting and examining the contents of all data packets that flow over a network. In Monday's meeting, Coaker said the government still intends to have a consultation on whether to inspect and then store all internet traffic data in a centralised government database.

"What is the point of having a consultation if, as the honourable gentleman implies, the government have already made up their mind to have a central database?" said Coaker. "We have not made up our mind. We have said we will consult on a variety of options."

Opposition to the government's IMP proposal has been fierce. Cambridge University computer security expert Richard Clayton told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the government proposal to monitor social-networking traffic was "extremely intrusive".

"The question is whether it's necessary or proportionate, and the short answer is no, it doesn't look that way," said Clayton. "If the government wants to make us safer, having a few more police on the electronic beat would be a good idea."

Clayton said that the problem for the government is that the Data Retention Directive only applies to data held by internet service providers, but that a large number of people don't use ISPs' systems to communicate, instead using online services including webmail and social-networking sites. Servers may be located in different jurisdictions, said Clayton, and data-retention times may be short.

"The government wants to collect all of this data on everybody, just in case," said Clayton. "Suppose you use hotmail.pk, and you blow up the Houses of Parliament. The government would have to persuade the Pakistani authorities to turn over the logs, which may then turn out only to have been retained for three days."

However, Clayton believes that the cost of harvesting this information, which would involve all UK internet infrastructure providers and ISPs having 'black boxes' to monitor data, would be prohibitively expensive. Clayton said that taxpayers' money would be better spent on the police, who could target investigations to those they suspect of criminal activity, rather than on performing blanket surveillance of everybody.

"To deploy deep packet inspection equipment isn't cheap — the word 'billion' is appropriate," said Clayton. "It took the Home Office the best part of a year to find £3m for the Police e-Crime Unit. That's what is wrong with this picture."

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee also opposes the use of deep packet inspection to inspect people's data. Berners-Lee told ZDNet UK last week that the internet should not be "snooped" upon.

"If [third parties] are using the data for political ends or commercial interest, there we have to draw the line," Berners-Lee said. "There's a gap between running a successful internet service and looking inside data packets."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1...9629479,00.htm





Web Watchdog Changes Tack After Blacklist Leak
Fran Foo

THE communications regulator has been forced to change its internal processes after the address of a prohibited anti-abortion web page in its top-secret blacklist was widely distributed on the internet.

The move comes after the Australian Communications and Media Authority threatened a fine of up to $11,000 a day against a web host for displaying the banned web page link.

The host supplies services to popular internet community website Whirlpool.

The problem began on January 5 when a Melbourne internet user, known online as Foad, complained to ACMA about "offensive content" on an anti-abortion web page (not the entire website).

Two weeks later ACMA replied, confirming the web page contained prohibited or potentially prohibited content.

ACMA's response contained the link to the offending web page, which soon found its way to various blogs and forums, including Whirlpool.

ACMA has since learned from its mistake. "ACMA has modified its replies to complainants to omit the URLs of prohibited content and potential prohibited content," a spokesman said.

ACMA must advise complainants of the outcome of their complaints, the spokesman said, and it was usual to include the relevant URL in the response to ensure that complainants, particularly those who had complained about several URLs, were aware of the action ACMA had taken.

"ACMA is aware of only a handful of instances from the 6000 investigations completed since January 1, 2000, where a complainant has published ACMA's response," the spokesman said.

Other Australian websites and blogs continue to display the location of the banned web page, but ACMA says no action will be taken as "ACMA has not received any other complaints about links to the content concerned".

Whirlpool, which has 276,000 members who regularly provide comments on the internet and broadband in Australia, removed the web page after its web hosting company, Bulletproof Networks, received an "interim link deletion" notice from ACMA.

ACMA said it took action against Bulletproof in accordance with the Broadcast Services Act.

Whirlpool owner Simon Wright questioned why ACMA slapped the notice on Bulletproof instead of Whirlpool since it was the latter that had published the web page.

"ACMA should have contacted us first. We felt compelled to remove the link to avoid getting Bulletproof into trouble," Mr Wright said. "Threatening friendships is something mobs do, not governments."

Bulletproof spokesman Lorenzo Modesto said it had complied with the notice because it was the responsible thing to do when authorities came calling.

Bulletproof notified Whirlpool, which removed the link.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Banned Hyperlinks Could Cost You $11,000 a Day

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.

But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

Electronic Frontiers Australia said the leak of the Danish blacklist and ACMA's subsequent attempts to block people from viewing it showed how easy it would be for ACMA's own blacklist - which is secret - to be leaked onto the web once it is handed to ISPs for filtering.

"We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," EFA said.

"The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment."

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information.

The main issue raised was the Government's proposed internet censorship regime.

"This report demolished the Communications Minister's contention that Australia is just following other comparable democracies," Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam said.

"We are not. The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet.

"I agree with Reporters Without Borders. If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia's anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed."

EFA said the Government's "spin is starting to wear thin" and it could no longer be denied that the ACMA blacklist targets a huge range of material that is legal and even uncontroversial.

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has repeatedly claimed his proposed mandatory filters would target only "illegal" content - predominantly child pornography.

"As time goes on, pressure will only mount on the Government to expand the list, while money and effort are poured into an enormous black box that will neither help kids nor stem the flow of illegal material," EFA said.

"If the minister truly believes that children are seeking out, or being bombarded with, child pornography, then there's a dearth of both common sense and proper research in the ministerial suites."

Already, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, has said he hopes the sex industry will go broke as a result of the censorship scheme.

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon previous expressed his desire to have online gambling sites added to the blacklist but has since withdrawn his support for the scheme, saying it was dangerous and could be "counter-productive".

The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked.

The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation.

Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation.

Despite previously saying his scheme would be expanded to block "refused classification" content that includes sites depicting drug use, sex, crime, cruelty and violence, he said opponents of his plan were spreading "conspiracy theories".

The Government's internet censorship trials are due to begin shortly but critics have said they may not provide much useful data on the real-world implications because none of the major ISPs were chosen to take part.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/...?page=fullpage





Home Office Clueless Over its Own Anti-Child Porn Measures
Dawinderpal Sahota

The Home Office has admitted that it has been trying to force ISPs to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation's (IWF) blacklist, even though it doesn't know what the organisation does.

Speaking exclusively to Computer Shopper, a Home Office spokesman thought the IWF deletes illegal websites and doesn't look at the content they rate.

He also revealed that the government's measures to ensure that the IWF is blocking illegal content only consist of "meeting with the IWF fairly regularly for updates on how they're doing."

We asked if the IWF needed a licence in order to view and rate content legally, but the Home Office spokesman didn't realise that's what the organisation does. When we explained that the IWF has to view the content in order to rate it, he told us that "it's not illegal to delete such images, it's illegal to actually possess it, produce it or reproduce it - it's not illegal to delete it, which is what they [the IWF] do."

In fact, the IWF doesn't delete images. It is a self-appointed, self-regulated internet watchdog, which views user-submitted content and compiles a list of websites that it deems to contain illegal images. Some ISPs subscribe to this list and block access to the sites.

Despite being clueless about how the IWF rates content, the Home Office admitted it was forcing ISPs to sign up to the organisation's blacklist in order to meet targets it set itself.

In 2006, the Home Office minister Alan Campbell pledged that all ISPs will block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. Currently, ISPs covering 95 per cent of broadband users tackle the issue by subscribing to the IWF's blacklist.

The remaining five per cent of users are down to ISPs that refuse to sign up to the IWF's list. One of these ISPs, Zen Internet, has said that it has "concerns over its effectiveness".

When we asked the Home Office whether ISPs have an alternative to using the IWF's blacklist, the spokesman told us that there is none. He admitted that the government is telling ISPs that they have to block all child pornography websites and that they have to do it using the IWF's blacklist.

View the full transcript of our interview with the Home Office about tackling child abuse online.
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/news/...-measures.html





Who Protects The Internet?
James Geary

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie--a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman--patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

On one recent expedition, Rennie and his crew spent 12 days bobbing in about 250 feet of water 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall in southern England looking for a broken cable linking the U.K. and Ireland. Munching fresh doughnuts (a specialty of the ship’s cook), Rennie and his team worked 12-hour shifts exploring the rocky seafloor with a six-ton, $10-million remotely operated vehicle (ROV) affectionately known as "the Beast."
Long Arm of the Beast

The Beast is like a lunar lander on steroids. Working at depths of more than a mile, it can trundle along the seabed on caterpillar treads or, when its thrusters kick in, skim above canyons like a hovercraft, at a top speed of three knots. Rennie and his team of six control the Beast via a joystick, using its sonar, video cameras and metal detector to locate damaged cables. Plucking a cable from the ocean floor is akin to picking up a piece of thread in a blizzard while wearing a catcher’s mitt. Currents can be fierce, which makes it difficult to hold the Beast steady above the cable. Visibility can be close to nil, which means that even finding the cable in the first place can be a long and frustrating process of trial and error. But according to Rennie, "gripping and cutting is the trickiest." This delicate piece of submarine surgery has to be performed quickly and cleanly, using only a murky video image as a guide.

When Rennie found the U.K.-Ireland cable--fishermen had cut it after it became entangled in a dragnet--the Beast’s manipulator arm grabbed it, sliced it clean, and brought each end to the surface. On board the ship, the cable was repaired and x-rayed (Rennie needed to make sure the splice was set right, as with a broken bone), then tested and lowered to the seafloor. "There is no time for celebration when we fix a cable," Rennie says. "There is lots of pressure from cable owners to move quickly. They are losing revenue."

Most cable breaks go unnoticed by users. Maybe a YouTube clip will take someone a nanosecond longer to download, but that’s about all anyone might notice when a single cable snaps. There are so many different lines connecting so many different places—a map of the network looks like the inside of a baby grand: strand after strand of cable stretching across the ocean floor like so many piano wires that service providers can usually reroute around any break. But if several cables snap in chorus, as they did several times in the past two years, big problems result.

Last December 19, when three cables under the Mediterranean Sea were damaged, Internet service began to wink out across the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia. Egypt suffered terribly, losing as much as 80 percent of its network. E-mail and Web access were disrupted in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, while services fluttered in countries as far away as Malaysia and Taiwan. India’s enormous outsourcing industry—the customer-service backbone of the Western world—was also hampered, with the humble fax machine making a brief but crucial comeback until traffic was rerouted around the breaks. The same thing had also happened in January and February, disrupting Internet access to homes and businesses throughout the region for days.

The incidents reveal a surprising fact about the Internet: that it requires constant physical maintenance. Without people like Rennie patching cables, the entire network would gradually stop. First, traffic would slow to a crawl as more bits crammed into fewer and fewer cables. Then, after a while, isolated service failures like the ones in the Middle East would pop up. Eventually, as line after line went dark, U.S. businesses would be cut off from their outsourced functions abroad, international e-mail traffic would halt, and global financial transactions would cease. Pockets of connectivity would persist, but ultimately the Internet we rely on to stay in touch with the rest of the world would be reduced to the local-area network in your office.

On the next page, see our animated graphic of how the web works.

Where is the Web?

As Wi-Fi hotspots proliferate, making wireless connections commonplace, many people have come to regard the Internet as something that’s simply in the air. Ask the average person how it’s carried, and they are likely to mumble something about satellites.

But satellites carry less than 10 percent of all Internet traffic. The Internet is, in fact, inside the more than 500,000 miles of undersea cables like the ones Rennie fixes. It is in the hundreds of Internet hubs around the world, concrete landing points where these cables come ashore and branch back out again through terrestrial networks. It is in the hundreds of thousands of miles of land-based cables that crisscross the continents, bringing the Web to individual businesses and homes. The Internet is actually a vast physical infrastructure, awesome in its complexity--and its vulnerability.

"Most people don’t realize how information moves around the globe," says Paul Kurtz, a former member of the National Security and Homeland Security councils who now advises corporations and governments on critical infrastructure protection with Good Harbor Consulting. "The telecommunications network has morphed into the Internet, and there are vulnerabilities all along the line."

Cyber-attacks like those launched against the republic of Georgia during last summer’s war with Russia will continue to grab headlines, but attacks on the Internet’s physical infrastructure could be even more devastating. "Physical attacks are less likely, but they are more damaging and harder to recover from," says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for information-security firm SecureWorks in Atlanta. "We are so much better prepared for virtual attacks that [for terrorists] a physical attack is a very attractive alternative." Given how much of our financial, commercial and social lives have moved online, the repercussions from such an assault—and a resulting widespread failure—would be immense.

Choke Points

When the Middle East cables went down the first time back in January and February of last year--three cables were cut within a period of about 48 hours--observers assumed it was sabotage. Why? Because that kind of scenario had been rehearsed before.

"During the Cold War, lots of attention was paid to undersea cables," says James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Communications lines were prime military targets for both sides, and the strategic severing of cables was considered a prelude to full invasion. In the early 1970s, the U.S. even managed to successfully tap a cable on the ocean floor and eavesdrop on Soviet chatter.

None of the Middle East cuts were deliberate, however. The December outage appears to have been caused by undersea seismic activity and, in the January and February incidents, stray anchors were to blame. But according to Lewis, "the [January-February] cuts affected the ability of CentCom [U.S. military Central Command] to send communications from Afghanistan and Iraq. Video and data streams are crucial parts of military operations, and they need that fiber-optic cable infrastructure." CentCom quickly rerouted around the gaps, but the incident exposed a vulnerability.

The Middle East is particularly prone to faults because the ties that bind it to the rest of the Internet are thin when compared with the connection between the U.S. and northern Europe or Asia. The cables that went down last year carry upward of 75 percent of the traffic between Europe and the Middle East. The shortest cable here is 12,400 miles long, and traffic between sites in southern Europe and sites in Australia, China, Japan and other points east moves through only a handful of places. A single break in this region is immediately noticeable; two could be crippling; three could have been catastrophic if providers had not diverted traffic away from the cuts, located off the coast near Alexandria, Egypt, through Asia.

The Middle East is not the only place where the Internet’s undersea cable network hits a bottleneck. In December 2006, an earthquake ripped cables running through the Luzon Strait, in the South China Sea between Taiwan and the Philippines, disabling 90 percent of the region’s telecommunications capacity. Basic services were restored in a day or two, but full repairs to the cable system took more than a month.

Demand and Supply

The first undersea cable was laid in 1850, under the English Channel between Dover and Calais. It consisted of copper wire waterproofed by a layer of hard, inelastic rubber made from gutta-percha trees. Lead weights were attached to keep it on the seafloor. The cable carried telegraphs for three days—until French fishermen accidentally cut it.

Modern fiber-optic cables are more reliable and numerous. Today, between 250 and 300 cables beneath the ocean floor are active at any given moment. And as demand for bandwidth grows (international traffic increased 53 percent between mid-2007 and mid-2008, according to research firm TeleGeography), more and more are needed.

Some of the cables Rennie spends his days fixing reach land near Miami. Here, the cables are bundled and shunted along under the old Florida East Coast Railway that ran from Miami to Key West until 1935, when Hurricane Islamorada wiped it out. The East Coast line was known as the "overseas railroad" because of all the bridges and viaducts it had to cross to reach Key West. Now it is the preferred track for the undersea cables that surface in central Miami, home to Terremark, one of the most important telecom firms you’ve never heard of.

Terremark’s six-story, 750,000- square-foot headquarters has no windows. They’re unnecessary, since the main occupants of the building are computers: server racks owned by the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Facebook and the U.S. Department of Defense, not to mention the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that issues domain names, and VeriSign, which provides the infrastructure for secure online financial transactions.

The Terremark facility is among the most wired sites in the world. It is one of dozens of Internet exchanges in the U.S., located mostly on the coasts, that gather the undersea cables and disperse them over land across the country. They are the unmissable links in America’s--and the world’s--telecom network. Some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America goes through Terremark in Miami, for example, and according to TeleGeography, that traffic grew 112 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008.

The cables that enter Terremark from the Atlantic rise up through the floor at various spots like bouquets of plumbing. The main cables splay out along metal trellises to the 160 or so clients that have servers onsite.

Eventually, the cables all return to a glass-enclosed, spotlessly clean space known as the "meet-point room." The meet-point rooms--there are at least two of them on each floor of the building--are the gateways to the Internet. They are where the cables from individual carriers are patched into the land-based cable network that radiates out from Terremark, connecting service providers with other exchange points, and from there connecting to individual homes and businesses.

Constant Caretakers

Technicians are in the building at all times. They take care of the routine maintenance--tightening a loose connection here, rewiring a patch panel there--needed to keep the Internet running. Even in a hurricane, the building is staffed. Twenty-four hours before a storm hits, all essential personnel--generally, a team of 30 technicians--are already inside. They don’t come out until the hurricane has passed. And everything is monitored from a NASA-like network-operation center elsewhere in the building.

Terremark, like any Internet exchange, is vital to the network. That’s why the walls are made of seven-inch, steel-reinforced concrete that can withstand the 155mph winds of a Category 5 hurricane. That’s why environmental control is fanatically precise, keeping condensation off the circuits and the thousands of servers cool. That’s why on top of paying $630,000 a month for electricity, the building also maintains its own bank of diesel generators as a backup. And that’s why, if any disaster were to strike Miami, restoring Terremark’s power would have priority along with hospitals and the police. In short, it would be very bad if something happened at Terremark. "If a service provider goes down, it’s terrible," says Derrick Cardenas, Terremark’s regional vice president of commercial sales. "If we go down, it’s global."

Scale-Free Networks

Terremark and the other exchanges scattered across the country (Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are just a few of the other locations) are so vital because the Internet is a "scale-free network." In a scale-free network, connections are not randomly or evenly distributed. Some points have relatively few connections to other points (a single server in the basement of a small business, for example), and some points—known as hubs—have a relatively huge number of connections to other points (Terremark). This ratio of very connected hubs to less-connected points remains roughly the same no matter the network’s size (hence "scale-free"). The hubs are both a strength and a weakness. If one hub fails, the others can take up the slack. If several hubs go out of service, however, whole sections of the network can become isolated.

"The main feature of a scale-free network is that a few highly connected hubs hold the network together," says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University, who did some of the earliest studies of scale-free networks. "If you remove one hub, the network will not fall apart; the smaller hubs will maintain it. But if you [simultaneously] knock down a sufficient number of hubs, there will be quite a lot of damage."

Doomsday Scenario

Is there a guaranteed way to eliminate the threat? According to Barabasi, no. This is a property of scale-free networks, he says. "You can’t eliminate this vulnerability. There is no patch for it."

In the event of major hub failure, Barabasi believes the only option is damage control. He cites research by Adilson E. Motter, an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, showing that the selective removal of additional hubs immediately following a disaster can contain the damage around the stricken site. By shutting down the hubs most closely connected to the one under attack, you can prevent the failure from cascading through the entire network, Barabasi says. "If you shut down the hubs around an infected hub, the damage can be controlled."

Ultimately, the only real defense is to make Internet exchanges impregnable. Terremark’s newest facility is in Culpeper, Virginia, 60 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.—just outside the blast zone should a nuclear strike hit the capital. The facility is surrounded by a 10-foot-high earth berm, guards patrol the perimeter, and the staff includes Department of Defense–trained antiterrorism personnel.

"People have been worried about attacks on [hubs] since the Cold War," says Lewis of the CSIS. For instance, "since Eisenhower, the telecommunications network has been hardened against nuclear attack." What keeps SecureWorks’s Jackson awake at night is the prospect of a chemical, biological or dirty-bomb attack on a hub like Terremark. If no one can enter the building to staff the meet-point rooms, and everyone inside is already dead, it won’t be long before things start to fall apart. "There are so many different ways things could go wrong," he says. "Only one or two hardware faults can cause a cascade of failures that need constant manual intervention to resolve. You’d be lucky to limp along for two days until something catastrophic happens."

In Case of Code Red

Even something less than an all-out assault—a hybrid virtual and physical attack, for instance—might be enough to bring down an Internet exchange. If terrorists managed to gain remote access to a facility’s command-and-control system, they could, for example, cause the generators to overheat and explode. That would take out the cooling system and, soon enough, the meet-point rooms would be filled with the smell of burning motherboards.

If such attacks happened simultaneously at a sufficient number of hubs, the principles of scale-free networks dictate that the entire Internet could come down. Statistics on these types of assaults are hard to come by, but there were, for example, an average of 2,332 attempted virtual attacks each day on the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems of SecureWorks’s utility clients last September, according to the firm. Only a small fraction of these attacks targeted actual command-and-control systems, but the sheer number of attempts is itself a cause for concern.

In fact, a successful command-and-control attack has already taken place in the U.S. In March 2007, the Department of Homeland Security staged an assault on a massive diesel generator of the kind used to run power plants and Internet exchanges. Hackers managed to gain control of the machine and cause it to self-destruct. Even a single exchange attacked in this way would take months to repair, according to John Bambenek, an information-security researcher who scans the Web for cyber-attacks as an incident handler with the Internet Storm Center, an early-warning network staffed by volunteers. "If two or three went out, you would run into manpower problems," he says. "There is not enough staff anywhere to do it. We are not as redundant as we think we are."
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...otects-intrnet





Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm
John Markoff

An extraordinary behind-the-scenes struggle is taking place between computer security groups around the world and the brazen author of a malicious software program called Conficker.

The program grabbed global attention when it began spreading late last year and quickly infected millions of computers with software code that is intended to lash together the infected machines it controls into a powerful computer known as a botnet.

Since then, the program’s author has repeatedly updated its software in a cat-and-mouse game being fought with an informal international alliance of computer security firms and a network governance group known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Members refer to the alliance as the Conficker Cabal.

The existence of the botnet has brought together some of the world’s best computer security experts to prevent potential damage. The spread of the malicious software is on a scale that matches the worst of past viruses and worms, like the I Love You virus. Last month, Microsoft announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the Conficker author.

Botnets are used to send the vast majority of e-mail spam messages. Spam in turn is the basis for shady commercial promotions including schemes that frequently involve directing unwary users to Web sites that can plant malicious software, or malware, on computers.

Botnets can also be used to distribute other kinds of malware and generate attacks that can take commercial or government Web sites off-line.

One of the largest botnets tracked last year consisted of 1.5 million infected computers that were being used to automate the breaking of “captchas,” the squiggly letter tests that are used to force applicants for Web services to prove they are human.

The inability of the world’s best computer security technologists to gain the upper hand against anonymous but determined cybercriminals is viewed by a growing number of those involved in the fight as evidence of a fundamental security weakness in the global network.

“I walked up to a three-star general on Wednesday and asked him if he could help me deal with a million-node botnet,” said Rick Wesson, a computer security researcher involved in combating Conficker. “I didn’t get an answer.”

An examination of the program reveals that the zombie computers are programmed to try to contact a control system for instructions on April 1. There has been a range of speculation about the nature of the threat posed by the botnet, from a wake-up call to a devastating attack.

Researchers who have been painstakingly disassembling the Conficker code have not been able to determine where the author, or authors, is located, or whether the program is being maintained by one person or a group of hackers. The growing suspicion is that Conficker will ultimately be a computing-for-hire scheme. Researchers expect it will imitate the hottest fad in the computer industry, called cloud computing, in which companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems sell computing as a service over the Internet.

Earlier botnets were devised so they could be split up and rented via black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, according to security researchers.

The Conficker program is built so that after it takes up residence on infected computers, it can be programmed remotely by software to serve as a vast system for distributing spam or other malware.

Several people who have analyzed various versions of the program said Conficker’s authors were obviously monitoring the efforts to restrict the malicious program and had repeatedly demonstrated that their skills were at the leading edge of computer technology.

For example, the Conficker worm already had been through several versions when the alliance of computer security experts seized control of 250 Internet domain names the system was planning to use to forward instructions to millions of infected computers.

Shortly thereafter, in the first week of March, the fourth known version of the program, Conficker C, expanded the number of the sites it could use to 50,000. That step made it virtually impossible to stop the Conficker authors from communicating with their botnet.

“It’s worth noting that these are folks who are taking this seriously and not making many mistakes,” said Jose Nazario, a member of the international security group and a researcher at Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks. “They’re going for broke.”

Several members of the Conficker Cabal said that law enforcement officials had been slow to respond to the group’s efforts, but that a number of law enforcement agencies were now in “listen” mode.

“We’re aware of it,” said Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, “and we’re working with security companies to address the problem.”

A report scheduled to be released Thursday by SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., says that Conficker C constitutes a major rewrite of the software. Not only does it make it far more difficult to block communication with the program, but it gives the program added powers to disable many commercial antivirus programs as well as Microsoft’s security update features.

“Perhaps the most obvious frightening aspect of Conficker C is its clear potential to do harm,” said Phillip Porras, a research director at SRI International and one of the authors of the report. “Perhaps in the best case, Conficker may be used as a sustained and profitable platform for massive Internet fraud and theft.”

“In the worst case,” Mr. Porras said, “Conficker could be turned into a powerful offensive weapon for performing concerted information warfare attacks that could disrupt not just countries, but the Internet itself.”

The researchers, noting that the Conficker authors were using the most advanced computer security techniques, said the original version of the program contained a recent security feature developed by an M.I.T. computer scientist, Ron Rivest, that had been made public only weeks before. And when a revision was issued by Dr. Rivest’s group to correct a flaw, the Conficker authors revised their program to add the correction.

Although there have been clues that the Conficker authors may be located in Eastern Europe, evidence has not been conclusive. Security researchers, however, said this week that they were impressed by the authors’ productivity.

“If you suspect this person lives in Kiev,” Mr. Nazario said, “I would look for someone who has recently reported repetitive stress injury symptoms.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/te...19worm.html?em





Aussie Stumbles On 19,000 Exposed Credit Card Numbers
Ry Crozier

A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers, including up to 60 Australian numbers.

The discovery by a local IT industry worker was made by mistake and appears to be caused by a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone.

The cached data, viewed by iTnews, includes 22,000 credit card numbers, including CVVs, expiry dates, names and addresses.

Up to 19,000 of these numbers could be active. Most are customers in the US and Britain although some are Australian.

The credit card numbers are for accounts held with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo, Switch, Delta and Maestro/Cirrus.

Within the address bars of the cached pages are URLs of companies, including UK retailers of laboratory supplies, sports and health goods, apparel, photo imaging and clothing.

"I received a Google Alert for a name," said the worker who discovered the problem, speaking on condition of anonymity to iTnews.

"The alert started with a bunch of other numbers, so I went to the web page and it was just a virtual directory listing with a bunch of directories underneath and a load of files inside."

"It looks like the site might have been a payment processing gateway that handled credit card transactions for a bunch of websites before it went belly-up," the worker speculated.

The worker tried to report the find immediately to Visa and Mastercard, which have the lion's share of card numbers, but said neither returned calls.

iTnews has contacted the credit card providers for comment.

"We're investigating this report as a matter of priority, but it's too early to make any further comment," said a spokesperson for Visa.

The information will be handed to police tonight, the worker said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/99250,...d-numbers.aspx





Comcast: Exposed User Data Not From Internal Leak

Comcast now believes a phishing or malware scam is to blame for exposing hundreds of its customers' user names and passwords. A list containing around 8,000 names was discovered by a PC World reader this week and brought to the company's attention.

Information Exposed

The list, which had been posted on document sharing site Scribd, was found by Kevin Andreyo -- a educational technology specialist and university professor in Reading, Pa. Andreyo read our recent report on people search engines and decided to follow its suggestions to see what kind of dirt he could dig up on himself. While detailed personal information is common to those types of searches, Andreyo never expected to come across his actual user name and password for his Internet service provider.

"I thought, 'All right, this doesn’t seem like this should be available to the public,' " he says.

Andreyo went on to contact both Comcast and the FBI. The document is no longer online, though it still lives on in various cache and online history services.

Comcast's Investigation

Following its investigation, Comcast has concluded the list did not come from an internal leak, as had initially been speculated by some, but rather from a third-party attack -- most likely phishing- or malware-oriented.

"We're trying to figure out exactly how this information could have been assembled," Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas says. "We have no reason to believe, though, that any Comcast system was compromised."

Comcast is in the midst of contacting all of the customers whose data was exposed. After examining the list, the company believes the number of affected users is far less extreme than it first appeared: The majority of the user names, Douglas says, were either duplicates or old and inactive accounts. Only 700 of the 8,000 user names listed, he believes, were actually authentic and unique.

Comcast is now working with Internet crime investigators to determine how the data was obtained.

Community Concern

For Andreyo, the conclusion is of little comfort. He questions the phishing explanation -- he's confident his computing knowledge and active security systems would keep him protected from such threats -- but more troubling to him is the fact that he was the first to take action after viewing the list. By the time Andreyo came across the document during his search this week, it had been posted for at least two months. Within that time, nearly 350 people had viewed it, and a couple dozen had even downloaded it to their own PCs.

"I was surprised that, of all the people who had previously viewed it, no one thought to say, 'Hey, take this down. This is private information,' " Andreyo says.

While the incident reinforces the importance of actively monitoring your own data on the Net, Andreyo hopes it also spreads a broader message -- one about the importance of users looking out for one another, too.

"The community of Internet users really has to watch out for these privacy issues," he says, "and let site owners know when something shouldn't be out there."
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/2...ominternalleak





Choruss' Music Tax Plan: Bait-And-Switch

Back in December, when we revealed how Warner Music, through consultant Jim Griffin and his new organization "Choruss," were quietly pushing a music tax on universities, Warner and Griffin snapped back angrily, telling us it wasn't fair to criticize the plan, because it was still being "discussed." Yet, as we then asked: where is that discussion and why isn't it taking place with the actual stakeholders? To date, the answer has been a near deafening silence. Despite having reached out to both Griffin and Warner Music directly, neither has shown any interest to actually engage in any form of conversation.

Now we're beginning to learn why.

While we discussed, in detail, why any such music tax is problematic, the details coming out make it clear that this is much worse than originally imagined. In fact, it's so bad that it can be described accurately as a bait-and-switch program designed to make people (1) pay lots of money (2) believing they're now free to file share and then find out that (3) file sharing systems will still be sued out of existence and (4) the users themselves, despite paying, will still be liable for massive lawsuits. It's basically a plan to give the record labels tons of money, handed over by universities (so users have no chance to opt-out) without actually changing anything.

After months of silence on what he was working on behind closed doors and in backrooms, Griffin recently gave a prepared speech supposedly revealing some "details" on the plan -- but as IP attorney Bennett Lincoff points out, what Griffin and Choruss are proposing is to pull the wool over universities and the public's eyes. The plan, as we originally pointed out, isn't a license: it's merely a covenant not to sue -- and that leads to all sorts of problems.

First, considering that the RIAA has been cutting back on lawsuits, that's not particularly meaningful. It'll still pushing for 3 strikes policies that will cut users off from the internet, even if they've paid up through Choruss. Furthermore, as was made clear in the speech, the RIAA won't stop trying to shut down file sharing systems. So, people who think this is a good idea because it will let them use The Pirate Bay or Limewire may discover after getting locked into this program that the lawsuits continue and those services keep getting shut down. Next, since it's just a covenant for the labels not to sue, rather than a license, it doesn't cover all of the other rightsholders, such as songwriters and the music publishers -- meaning that those who file share will still be wide open to lawsuits from those parties.

This is quite a scheme that the record labels and Griffin may pull off:

• Convince universities to buy into the program with no input from students. Universities will buy into it because they think they're "helping" deal with the "problem" of file sharing... and to avoid Congress forcing them into such agreements
• Universities pass the cost on to students (of course), so students are forced to pay for this
• Record labels get a big chunk of money for no good reason
• New expensive bureaucracy (Choruss) gets set up to siphon more middleman cash away from musicians
• Record labels don't do anything different, since they already have started moving away from suing individuals (sorta)
• The public thinks that file sharing is now legal
• Record labels continue to sue and shut down favorite file sharing networks, leaving only crappy, limited and expensive "approved" systems
• Individuals who paid up start getting sued by other rightsholders not covered by this agreement and not getting any money from it

And most of the press will eat it up as a revolutionary agreement whereby the record labels "legalize" file sharing.

Now can you understand why Griffin and Warner Music aren't open to any real conversation and will slam anyone who actually offers to take part in a conversation? A real conversation might bring out these issues, and that's the last thing the record labels want. They want everyone to believe they're working to make file sharing legal, when all they're doing is constructing a massive wealth transfer from people to the labels providing almost no benefit to consumers at all.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...04264167.shtml





Sweden’s Pirate Party Stands in EU Elections

The Swedish Pirate Party is to stand in this summer’s European elections to battle for the freedom of information.
Af Christian Lindhardt

Læs også
Svenske pirater vil i EU-parlamentet (17. mar.)
Restrictive rules for patents and copyrights result in the detrimental monitoring of citizens, according to the Swedish Pirate Party, which is fielding 20 candidates in this summer’s European elections.

»If the politicians want to prevent ordinary citizens from sharing films, music and other forms of culture, they have to constantly expand the ability to monitor – because as soon as the authorities close down one culture-sharing facility, another pops up very quickly,« says Christian Engström, who is the primary candidate for the party.

Monitoring has already gone too far, Engström feels.

»There is a law on the way in Sweden which is already in force in Denmark. Rights owners to a film, for example, can demand the name of the person who pays for an internet connection if they are able to track a person uploading or downloading films illegally,« Engström says.

EU battle
The Swedish pirates say that the battle for freedom of information is to be fought in the European Union because: “It is here that most of the legislation in this field comes from.”

The party does not, however, want to get rid of all forms of rights to books, music and film. The dividing line should be between commercial and non-commercial use.

»Companies should be able to take out a patent on a television advertisement, but private citizens should be able to use books or music for their own use,« Engström explains.

Choose Swedish government
The Pirate Party also intends to act on the national Swedish political agenda, where it hopes to be the deciding factor in choosing a new government. In other words the party hopes to be able to decide which wing of the Swedish Parliament it should board, and which wing should be able to raise governmental flag.

»The issues that we represent are unfortunately not represented – or only marginally represented - as a result of ignorance, and we hope to be able to tow the legislative groupings in Sweden into the 21st century,« the party says on its home page.

In its first national elections in Sweden in 2006, the party became the third largest party – that is third largest below the electoral threshold – with 0.63 percent of the votes.

Polska Partia Piratow
Sweden is not the only country where pirates have gone marauding. There are pirate parties already established – or in the process of being established – in 20 other countries. Partido Pirata Español is the Spanish version. Piratenpartei Deutschland is found in Germany and the Polish pirates are called Polska Partia Piratow.

The Swedish party was founded in 2006 under its current chairman Rickard Falkvinge.
http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article671131.ece





Swedes Say No to Copyright Law: Poll

Support is weak among Swedes for the new IPRED copyright law designed to make it easier to investigate suspected cases of illegal file sharing, a new poll shows.

Almost half of Swedes, 48 percent of the 1,000 interviewed, consider the law to be wrong while only 32 percent are in favour, a new poll from Sifo shows.

The strongest opposition to the law can be found among young men, 15-29-years-old, Svenska Dagbladet writes. 79 percent of them oppose the law which will come into force on April 1st.

Those least negative to the law are the over-65s, with 27 percent against while 34 percent are in favour.

Those in the 50-54 age group are close to the average across the Swedish population with 45 percent registering their objections to the law.

The file sharing law, which is based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), will allow courts to order internet operators to hand over details that identify suspected illegal file-sharers.

Copyright holders would then be free to contact the file sharer in question and demand that they suspend their activities or risk prosecution.

When the bill was passed by parliament in February the debate was intense and criticism of the bill severe.

Opponents from the Left and Green parties claim the measure is a threat to democracy and personal integrity because it gives companies and copyright holders too much power to investigate and demand compensation from individuals for alleged copyright infringement.

The government contends that the law is necessary to protect the rights of film makers, authors, and artists by allowing them to earn a living from their creations.
http://www.thelocal.se/18260/20090317/





Pirates Class at University of Chicago Among Most Popular Courses for Spring

It covers Johnny Depp-style Caribbean pirates, plus software piracy, investment 'pirate' Bernard Madoff
Jodi S. Cohen

If you were looking for more proof that pirates are popular, here's some news from the University of Chicago:

More undergraduates registered for the anthropology class "Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates" than almost any other course for the spring quarter, which begins March 30.

"As eggheady as our students are, they also are very much of their generation and in touch with mainstream culture," said assistant anthropology professor Shannon Lee Dawdy, who teaches the class.

But don't expect this will be all Johnny Depp, all the time.

Students in the class, a first-time offering, will study traditional Caribbean pirates as well as contemporary software piracy and "pirates" such as Bernard Madoff, who recently pleaded guilty to defrauding thousands of investors.

The class also will take a trip to the Field Museum's "Real Pirates" exhibit.

"It is almost too fun for the University of Chicago, so I will make sure they read a bit of theory every week," Dawdy said.

Arrrrrrgh!!!

The top three classes requested by U. of C. students are an eclectic mix. Global warming topped the list, with 377 students requesting the course. Introduction to Microeconomics, taught by popular professor Allen Sanderson, was next, followed by a hands-on drama course.

"One never knows" which classes will be popular, said Michael Jones, an associate dean at the college.

To avoid sinking students' dreams of learning about pirates, Dawdy increased the size of her class to 150 students, up from the original maximum of 90.

As of Tuesday, all but one spot had been taken.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,3053082.story





Google Piles Into S92
Chris Keall

Stepping into local political debate for the first time, the search giant makes a submission on the draft ISP code of practice – and it doesn’t hold back, citing a rash of bogus copyright claims it has received in the US.

Google’s pointed comments come in a submission – dated March 6 but just made public – to the Telecommunications Carriers’ Forum working party, which the government has charged with creating an ISP code of practice to implement section 92a (s92) of the stalled Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act.

Remedy disproportionate to harm
In its opening salvo, the company says, "section 92A undermines the incredible social and economic benefits of the open and universally accessible internet, by providing for a remedy of account termination or disconnection that is disproportionate to the harm of copyright infringement online.”

It continues that s92 “puts users’ procedural and fundamental rights at risk, by threatening to terminate users’ internet access based on mere allegations and reverse the burden of proof onto a user to establish there was no infringement.”

Google's experience: majority of claims are bogus
This situation will place a “serious burden on ISPs,” says Google, as they attempt to weigh allegations received under s92.

Especially as in its own experience, most take-down notices come from those with dubious motivation.

It cites a recent independent study of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (US), which found that 57% of notices sent to Google for removal of material were sent by business targeting competitors and 37% of notices were not valid copyright claims.

ISPs would be overwhelmed
More, ISPs – charged with enforcing s92 under the act – are not equipped to sift the spurious accusation from the serious, says Google.

“Copyright law is often complex and context-sensitive, and only a court is qualified to adjudicate allegations of copyright infringement. In this context, the responsibility should not fall to ISPs to determine cases of infringement.”

Independent ajudicator needed
Echoing other TCF submissions and one of the TCF working party’s main aims in its current talks with rights holders, led by Rianz, Google would like to see an independent adjudicator appointed.

Google also critiques the draft code's approach to s92 compliance saying “There are numerous types of ISPs falling within the scope of the act, therefore a ‘one size fits all’ approach to section 92A compliance is impractical and could impose excessive cost and procedural requirements on ISPs. Google submits that the draft code should clarify and confirm that there may be a variety of ISP termination policies that meet the requirements of s92A."

Money for something
One a more meat-and-potatoes level, Google’s submission notes that the draft code makes mention of “processing fees” for claims, but does not detail their dollar value. This needs to be clarified, the company says.

DIY take-down
Google’s own content-sharing services, such as YouTube, have been the frequent target of take-down notices and lawsuits filed by rights holders. In its submission, the company details water-mark and tracking technologies it has introduced that help copyright holders trace where copies of their content appears, and to take it down illegal copies themselves.

The creative commons lobby will not be so thrilled with this section of Google's submission. But seeing content suddenly disappear from your website, as a copyright holder arbitrarily executes a take-down, beats a copyright holder asking your ISP to disconnect your account.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/google-piles-s92-81494





Consumers Want Unrestricted Internet Access: Survey

Nine in 10 people expect their Internet service providers to offer open and unrestricted access to the Web, a survey showed on Wednesday. The survey, commissioned by Google, Yahoo and Web telephone company Skype, came as the European Parliament and EU states hold talks on a joint deal to reform the bloc's telecoms rules to boost competition.

"EU lawmakers should make sure that national authorities have the powers they need to act in cases where traffic management by telecommunication companies constitute unnecessary, discriminatory and/or anti-competitive behavior," the companies said in a joint statement.

The survey by market researcher Synovate was conducted among 944 consumers in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

"Consumers clearly think that they should have access to all legitimate sites and services online. They do not want their access blocked or limited," said Synovate head Nigel Jackson.

He said most Internet users were not aware that their Internet service providers might be restricting access to these services in any way.

One in 10 of those polled in the survey in the UK said they were willing to fork out more for another Internet service provider if their company blocked or limited their service. The percentage was higher, at 15 percent for German consumers in the poll.

The European Parliament and EU governments have joint say over the telecoms measures which were authored by EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding and include the setting up of a new EU telecoms regulatory body.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...52H4YD20090318





Sony Reaches Deal to Share in Google’s E-Book Library
Brad Stone

Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.

Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired.

The books available to Reader owners were written before 1923 and include classics like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” by Mark Twain, and “The Awakening,” by Kate Chopin, as well as harder-to-find titles like “The Letters of Jane Austen.”
“We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, and our partnership with Google is another step in that direction,” said Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business division of Sony Electronics. “We would love to continue working with Google to see how we can get more content for Reader owners.”

The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Sony is hoping that the partnership and its newly expanded library help slow some of the Kindle’s momentum. Amazon currently has 250,000 books in its Kindle library, but it stresses that they are the books people are most interested in reading, like new releases and best sellers.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has said that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached.

Google has been working to encode books in a free, open electronic publishing format, ePub, which makes them easier to read on devices like the Reader. The company is aiming to gradually increase the number of copyright-free books in the Google Book Search catalog available to Sony and any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible.

Google is displaying only short snippets on its Web site of books that remain under copyright protection, which are the vast majority of the books it has scanned. Under a sweeping settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, which has yet to be approved by a judge, Google would have more freedom to sell copies and split the proceeds with rights holders.

Miguel Helft contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/te...gy/19sony.html





Amazon Invokes DMCA Against Kindle E-Books From Other Vendors
Declan McCullagh

MobileRead.com posted a letter this week that Amazon.com apparently sent regarding alleged copyright violations. This is an excerpt.

When President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law 11 years ago, he predicted it will "protect from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading export of the United States."

The DMCA turned out to be much broader than that. This week, an e-book Web site said Amazon.com invoked the 1998 law to prevent books from some non-Amazon sources from working on its Kindle reader.

Amazon sent a legal notice to MobileRead.com complaining that information relating to a computer utility written in the Python programming language "constitutes a violation" of the DMCA, according to a copy of the warning letter that the site posted. MobileRead.com is an e-book news and community site.

MobileRead.com forum moderator Alexander Turcic said in a post on Thursday that although he did not believe the program violated the law, the site would "voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it." Turcic said that, contrary to Amazon's claim, his site never "hosted" the software.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to the device.

It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat, and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog post about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting site is still available for download at http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip.

Kindlepid.py and a related piece of accompanying Python code don't allow piracy. Rather, they accomplish something akin to the opposite: they allow legally purchased books from other e-book stores to be used on the Kindle. (Amazon owns MobiPocket, one of those stores. Another would be OverDrive.com, which counts schools and libraries as customers.)

In theory, at least, this could threaten Amazon's business model, which provides wireless connectivity through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network and covers the cost through items purchased from the Amazon Kindle Store. Kindle customers can also e-mail themselves documents to be converted at 10 cents per conversion.

A copy of a MobileRead.com wiki page--now empty--saved in Google's cache says Kindlepid.py allows you to "obtain books from sites that use DRM (Digital Rights Management - encryption) on their books for specific devices. This includes book sellers and public libraries." It provides instructions on how to install and use the software.

MobileRead.com readers with Kindles were not pleased with Amazon. "What this script does is make the Kindle more useful," wrote one reader. "With Amazon using the DMCA to get rid of this, they are alienating their customers and causing prospective customers to purchase a different device."

And the Kindlefix.py code is already being mirrored, including in a post on Slashdot.org.

Section 1201 of the DMCA says: "No person shall... offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology... is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

One exception to the DMCA's general rule, however, comes a few paragraphs later. It says circumvention is permissible for "interoperability" of computer programs, with interoperability defined as the "ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged."

If Amazon were to press its case against Kindlefix.py, another legal claim could involve reverse engineering, which is prohibited by the Kindle terms of use. They say users may not "circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Device or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the Software, including, but not limited to, augmenting or substituting any digital rights management functionality of the Device or Software."

This isn't the only legal spat that's arisen over the Kindle 2. Last month, the Authors Guild claimed that the mechanical text-to-speech converter was a violation of copyright law.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10196424-38.html





Discovery Sues Amazon.com Over Kindle Patent
AP

Discovery Communications Inc. says the Kindle electronic book readers from Amazon.com Inc. violate a patent that Discovery registered in 2007. Discovery sued Amazon in Delaware on Tuesday.

Discovery spokeswoman Michelle Russo said the company is seeking "fair compensation" through damages, future royalty payments and legal fees but will not seek an injunction stopping sales of the Kindle.

An Amazon.com spokeswoman declined to comment.

Discovery, which runs the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet cable TV networks, said Amazon.com was "willful" in infringing the patent. Discovery says the patent covers the security of electronic book files.

Amazon.com shares were up 3.6 percent to $69.40 in afternoon trading, while Discovery shares were up 9 cents at $16.75.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...Kindle-Pa.html





Apple Confirms Presence of Proprietary Chip in Shuffle Headphones, Licensing Fee
Nilay Patel

A flurry of news broke out over yesterday regarding the proprietary headphones required by Apple's new iPod shuffle, and now that Monday's here and everyone's back in the office, some things are starting to get cleared up. For starters, both Macworld and Boing Boing Gadgets have confirmed with Apple and various third-party vendors that the new shuffle headphones do in fact contain a proprietary control chip, and that would-be headphone makers have to pay to license it from Apple as part of the Made for iPod program. Yep, that's bad news, confirmed -- but all hope for inexpensive accessories isn't lost, as we're told that the chip isn't encrypted or otherwise locked down in any way, so it's easily cloned by companies who'd rather not pay. Still, eschewing Made for iPod certification pretty much dooms a product to niche status in the Apple universe, so it's a pretty weak consolation -- when this all shakes out, we're guessing only Apple-taxed headphones will be widely available for the shuffle, and that makes the value proposition somewhat hard to see. Just say no, people.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/16/a...fle-headphone/





Fashion Robot to Hit Tokyo Catwalks

From IT labs to photo grabs, a Japanese humanoid robot will soon be strutting her hard- and soft-ware stuff on the fashion catwalk.

The sleek HRP-4C runs on battery-powered motors located in her body and face, allowing the expressions, gait and poses of a supermodel, but on a stormtrooper-like silver and black frame.

The current 43 kg (95 lb), 158 cm (5 ft 2 inch) Cybernetic model has slimmed-down from an earlier 58 kg (128 lb) robot ahead of a Tokyo fashion show debut on March 23.

Its new shape is designed to match the average Japanese woman and has eyes, face and hair based on Japanese "anime" comics, said Masayoshi Kataoka of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, which developed the robotic model.

There are no immediate plans to bring the $2 million HRP-4C to market.

Japan, home to almost half of the world's 800,000 industrial robots, expects a $10 billion industry in the future, particularly as helpers for its growing elderly population.

But designers of the posing humanoid says she is wired just for entertaining, not housework.

(Editing by Rodney Joyce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...52G30820090317





Study Shows First-Time Online Donors Often Do Not Return
Stephanie Strom

People who go online to donate to charity for the first time often do not return to the Internet to make later gifts, according to a new study examining the experience of 24 nonprofit groups.

The findings suggest that while the Internet can be a valuable fund-raising tool for charities, particularly in soliciting gifts after disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it is not a replacement for direct mail or other forms of fund-raising.

“Online giving is higher than offline giving, and the demographics of online givers are more attractive — better educated, higher income,” said Tobias Smith, director of online communications at CARE, which took part in the study and works on issues faced by poor women. “But how you get people to routinely give online is a nut no one has yet cracked.”

The study was done by Target Analytics, a unit of Blackbaud Inc., which provides software and services to nonprofit groups.

Of those who did make additional gifts after an initial online donation in 2006, according to 12 organizations offering data in January, 37 percent never gave another gift via the Internet, while 18 percent gave electronically in one year and through other channels in another.

Charities have been using the Internet for fund-raising for more than a decade with mixed results.

“People are asking us all the time why we don’t reduce mailing costs and save paper with online fund-raising, but the simple fact is that people come online to give a gift once and don’t repeat,” said Jennifer Tierney, development director at Doctors Without Borders in New York, which took part in the study.

The 24 nonprofit organizations had 9.5 million donors and total revenues of $747 million.

Charity fund-raisers offered several possible explanations for the study’s findings. Many donors using the Internet to make their first gift to an organization are responding to a disaster like the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, and those givers may not be interested in supporting a group’s continuing work.

Another issue is that nonprofit groups tend to add donors acquired online to their direct mail lists, which encourages those donors to give in more conventional ways.

“Direct mail may not be a Maserati, but it’s very effective because it is very highly evolved,” said Lori Held, membership marketing director at Trout Unlimited. “We know how to ask for money using the mail, but most organizations are still trying to figure out how to do that online.”

Nonprofit groups face a number of challenges in trying to reach donors electronically, Ms. Held and others said.

For one thing, they must have a team dedicated to fine-tuning and improving their Web site and another team for e-mail marketing, both of which are added expenses. Nonprofit solicitation materials often get caught in systems that trap spam and other unwanted e-mail. Other systems eliminate the compelling images that are so effective in direct mail.

Still, the demographics of online donors are enticing for charities. The study found that of the donors who made at least one online gift in 2008, roughly a third had incomes greater than $100,000, while about one-quarter of those giving in other ways fell into that category.

“I think what we’re learning is that we need to be less worried about what channels these donors use and offer them a variety of channels through which they can give,” said Mr. Smith of CARE.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18charity.html





Bob Dylan's Toilet Smell Blows in the Wind

Bob Dylan has sung about wind many times -- winds of change, the "Idiot Wind," and the winds that hit heavy on the borderline.

But some of his California neighbors on Tuesday were singing a new tune about what is blowin' in the wind from his Malibu toilet.

A family living near the 67-year-old folk and rock icon's house in the posh California beachside community of Malibu have complained to city officials about an outdoor portable toilet, which is apparently used by guards on Dylan's compound.

Cindy and David Emminger say the toilet wafts fumes from waste treatment chemicals, and that the smell carried by breezes from the Pacific Ocean makes their family feel ill.

"It's a scandal - 'Mr Civil Rights' is killing our civil rights," David Emminger told the Los Angeles Times.

A helicopter from a local television station hovered over Dylan's property this week, capturing video of the offending toilet.

But Malibu Mayor Andy Stern said other neighbors report smelling nothing from the toilet, and that he has left the matter to the enforcers of the city's code on objectionable odors.

"I really have not involved myself in Bob Dylan's toilet, and by the way I haven't involved myself in anyone else's toilet in Malibu," Stern told Reuters.

A spokesman for Dylan did not return calls.

Dylan, whose latest album "Together Through Life" is due out on April 28, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. His hit songs include "Like a Rolling Stone," "All Along the Watchtower" and "Blowin' In the Wind."

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...52G6E120090317

















Until next week,

- js.



















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