Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 4th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"The vandalism is just plain childish. The term-limit pledge (that was changed by Meehan's staff) is a much more serious case. That's someone trying to alter the public record. To knowingly remove a truthful statement is just wrong." – Geoffry Bowker


"From now on, I'm only going to have my plays directed by lawyers." – Paul Rudnick


"We currently have thousands of cameras set up to watch citizens, but if citizens themselves take photos, the authorities take that as some sort of risk." – Brian Walters


"Thats it. You now have a fully usable windows xp pro lite." – mikedopp


"It is going to be about one month before malware comes out to take advantage of this [BIOS vulnerability]." – Greg Hoglund


"Ideals are one thing. Laws are another." – Itala Schmelz


"These people didn't — they didn't throw out anything." – Linda Cowan




































February 4th, ’06





Leading Canadian Music Label Challenges RIAA Lawsuits
Michael Geist

Nettwerk Music Group, Canada's leading privately owned record label (and a label that refuses to use copy-controls), has taken the remarkable step of joining the fight against the RIAA's strategy of lawsuits against alleged file sharers. The company, which represents some of Canada's top artists including Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, and Barenaked Ladies, has intervened in a lawsuit against a Texas teenager. The RIAA claimed thousands in damages based on alleged downloads, including Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi."

Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride says in response:

"Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem. Litigation is not 'artist development.' Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love. The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests."

Nettwerk Music Group has agreed to pay the total expense of all legal fees as well as any fines should the family lose the case against the RIAA.

Wow.

Update: So "wow" isn't particularly analytical and I think this calls for a bit more. Bob Lefsetz, of the Lefsetz Letter, comments this morning that this may be the beginning of the end of the RIAA suits. Perhaps, though the cracks in the recording industry strategy can be seen with IFPI's recent acknowledgment that file sharing usage is largely unchanged over the past two years despite more than 20,000 suits along with the growing number of Canadian artists, including Matthew Good, Steve Paige of the Barenaked Ladies, and Jane Siberry, who are speaking out against the suits or seeking alternative approaches.

While I think this is a good thing, better would be the prospect of shifting the dynamics of two important debates. At the moment, copyright reform is often treated as synonymous with addressing file sharing (ie. see the Toronto Star response to the Bulte piece last weekend). This has been one of the most unfortunate side effects of file sharing as a meaningful debate on the future of music in Canada as well as the best path for copyright reform is lost amid the cries of sharing, stealing, and private copying.

We need a real discussion of music in Canada that goes beyond file sharing to include private copying, fair use, the limits on the use of DRM, the transparency of collectives, canadian content requirements in the Internet era, and support for the artists. It is a debate that must include the independent labels who are responsible for 90 percent of new Canadian music, the artists from all perspectives, and user interests. It is a debate that is about much more than file sharing.

We also need a real discussion of about copyright reform that goes beyond file sharing to include using new technologies in our schools, encouraging new creativity, as well as protecting privacy and security. It is a debate that would look to the recent Google cache decision in the United States and question whether we would get the same result in Canada. It is a debate that would look at crown copyright, statutory damages, and fair use.

If we begin to get these debates, Nettwerk's move won't be the beginning of the end. It will be the beginning of something much bigger.

Update II: The mainstream media in Canada is starting to pick up on this story with articles in the Toronto Star, Canada.com, and the CBC.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...mid=113&ns ub





Canadian Music Giant Funds Battle Against RIAA
Andrew Orlowski

Canada's biggest record label, publisher and management company is helping out a family sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)for copyright infringement.

The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening, it says, because the songs downloaded by the Gruebel family include Avril Lavigne, a Nettwerk management client. Nettwerk will fund the Gruebel's defense.

"The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests," said Nettwerk chief executive Terry McBride in a statement.

"Litigation is not 'artist development'. Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love."

Chicago lawyer Charles Lee Mudd will defend the Gruebels.

Mudd said the RIAA has "misapplied" the law and that lawsuits should be a "shield, not a sword".

The RIAA has demanded the family pay a $9,000 penalty, reduced to $4,500 if they pay up promptly. Nettwerk has vowed to foot the legal bill if it loses the case.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01...erk_sues_riaa/





Group Pays For Lawyer In Lawsuit Over Piracy
AP

Patricia Santangelo just wanted to save money, but the mother of five quickly realized that acting as her own lawyer against the music companies accusing her of illegal downloading was a big- time money-burner.

Fortunately for her, it didn't take long for the Internet crowd to help her out. Santangelo, who is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for allegedly pirating songs, said yesterday that pending court approval, she is hiring attorney Jordan Glass to defend her in the civil case being brought here.

The Wappingers Falls woman says she never downloaded any songs and if it was done on her computer by her children or their friends, it's the fault of a file-sharing program for allowing them to do it. Because Santangelo's defense was emptying her bank account, she had dropped her previous lawyer. When she appeared in court on Dec. 22, she was the attorney of record, all alone at the defense table.

Fortunately for Santangelo, her case has created a stir online among critics of the RIAA's tactics.

They contend that music downloaders have the right to use the peer- to-peer networks.

Jon Newton, founder of a Web site critical of the record companies, said yesterday that $5,699.63 had been raised online for Santangelo in a campaign he started. That money enabled her to hire Glass.
http://www.recordonline.com/archive/...own-01-27.html





UK Court To Unmask 'File-Sharers'

Ten internet service providers have been ordered to hand over the details of 150 UK customers accused of illegally sharing software.

The High Court order follows a 12-month covert investigation by the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast).

Among the internet providers are BT, NTL, Telewest and Tiscali.

Over the next two weeks, they are expected to provide the names, addresses and other personal details of the alleged file-sharers.

'First wave'

An undercover investigator working for Fast in a project codenamed Operation Tracker identified 150 people suspected of illegally sharing software.

Most file-sharers use false names and e-mail addresses. So the software anti-piracy group went to the High Court to force the internet providers to hand over customer details.

The federation said it would approach the police and Crown Prosecution Service once it has the personal information.

"We can easily take down links, but this does not tackle the root causes of software piracy, because the links will reappear elsewhere in a matter of hours," said John Lovelock, director general at Fast.

"Instead, we plan to take action a lot further, making an example of the perpetrators to stop them from stealing and passing on the intellectual property of our members for good."

The federation accuses the 150 individuals of breaking copyright law by uploading software and sharing it online.

Penalties for the illegal communication to the public of copyrighted works, including software, can attract a maximum punishment of up to two years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, Fast's senior legal counsel, said the court action was "only the first wave of an ongoing strategy".

"We expect to be bringing these actions anytime and anywhere we see software being misused," he said.

According to the anti-piracy trade group, the Business Software Alliance, about a quarter of software used in the UK is an unlicensed, counterfeit or pirated copy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4663388.stm





19 Charged in Alleged Software Piracy Plot
Megan Reichgott

A federal grand jury has indicted 19 people on charges they used the Internet to pirate more than $6.5 million worth of copyrighted computer software, games and movies.

The indictment outlines an alleged plot by defendants from nine states, Australia and Barbados to illegally distribute newly released titles, including movies like "The Incredibles" and "The Aviator," and games like "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005."

A grand jury in Chicago returned the indictment late Tuesday following undercover investigations in Chicago, Charlotte, N.C., and San Jose, Calif.

"Online thieves who steal merchandise that companies work hard to produce and protect might think that cyberspace cloaks them in anonymity and makes them invulnerable to prosecution, but we have the ability to infiltrate their secret networks and hold them accountable for their criminal conduct," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said in a statement.

The defendants, many of whom worked in high-tech jobs, were members of "RISCISO," a "warez" community founded in 1993, according to the indictment. Warez groups are underground associations that use the Internet to illegally distribute copyrighted software.

The allegedly pirated works included movies, games, graphics, desktop publishing programs and spreadsheet applications, authorities said.

Each defendant was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which carries a five-year maximum prison sentence. Fifteen also were charged with copyright infringement, which carries a three-year maximum.

Arraignments had not been scheduled by Wednesday, and none of the defendants was in custody, but authorities said they had begun extraditing two of the defendants who lived in Australia and Barbados.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...e_down&chan=db





RIAA Files 750 P2P Lawsuits
Jim Welte

The move against individual users of file-sharing services brings the total number of filings to nearly 17,000.

The music industry continued its battle against peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharers by filing lawsuits against 750 individuals yesterday, targeting people using applications like LimeWire and Kazaa to illegally download music.

In addition to these "John Doe" lawsuits filed against people whose Internet service provider protects their anonymity, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it also filed lawsuits against 112 named individuals in January.

In a statement RIAA President Cary Sherman claimed his group will continue to "hold illegal downloaders accountable" as music companies roll out more and more legal download services.

"Prosecuting song-lifting is integral to helping protect the ability of record companies to invest in the up-and-coming bands of tomorrow and level the playing field for legal online services," he said. "The illegal downloading of music is just as wrong as shoplifting from a local store. It's against the law, and breaking the law must carry consequences."

The move brings the total of RIAA lawsuits filed against individuals to more than 16,800.
http://www.mp3.com/stories/3103.html





Fan Memo To Music Industry: Lower Prices
David Bauder

Music executives love to blame illegal downloading for their industry's woes. But, based on the results of a new nationwide poll, they might want to look in the mirror.

Eighty percent of the respondents consider it stealing to download music for free without the copyright holder's permission, and 92 percent say they've never done it, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of music fans say compact discs are too expensive, and 58 percent say music in general is getting worse.

"Less talented people are able to get a song out there and make a quick million and you never hear from them again," said Kate Simkins, 30, of Cape Cod, Mass.

Ipsos' telephone poll of 1,000 adults, including 963 music listeners, from all states except Alaska and Hawaii was conducted Jan. 23-25 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The music industry has spent several years in turmoil, as downloading and the popularity of iPods upend its traditional business model. A total of 618.9 million CD albums were sold during 2005, sharply down from the 762.8 million sold in 2001, according to Nielsen Soundscan.

At the same time, 352.7 million tracks were sold digitally in 2005, a category that wasn't even measured five years ago. Digital sales of music and ring tones offer new revenue opportunities, but often at the expense of more lucrative CD sales.

Although buying music digitally hasn't exactly become widespread - only 15 percent of poll respondents said they have done it - there appears to be a growing acceptance of this type of transaction. The poll found that 71 percent of music fans believe that a 99-cent download of a song is a fair price or outright bargain.

Even though millions of tracks are downloaded for free each week on peer-to-peer networks, a sense of queasiness remains.

"Somebody is putting their art out there. They should be compensated for it," said Mickey Johnson, 41, from Charleston, Tenn.

The industry would be wise to embrace downloading, said Greg Hoerger, 42, of Minneapolis, who suggested that customers could receive five or six free downloads from an artist when they buy a CD.

For fans like Hoerger and Simkins, buying a CD for about $20 is no bargain. They'd rather download one or two favorite songs to their iPods. The digital music revolution also has other benefits, Simkins said: with the iPod, she no longer has to have cassettes or CDs cluttering her car.

The last CD she bought, a few months ago, was by the Killers. "It was on sale," she said.

Many fans also say they just don't like what they're hearing. It may not be surprising to hear older fans say music just isn't what it used to be when they were growing up. But the poll also found that 49 percent of music fans ages 18-to-34 - the target audience for the music business - say music is getting worse.

"Even if our parents didn't like how loud rock 'n' roll was, or that it was revolutionary, at least they could listen to some of it," said Christina Tjoelker, 49, from Snohomish, Wash. "It wasn't gross. It wasn't disgusting. It wasn't about beating up women or shooting the police."

The last CD she bought was Neil Diamond's new one, "because Oprah was raving about it," she said.

Overall, music fans were split on why music sales have been declining for the past five years: 33 percent said it was because of illegal downloads, 29 percent said it was because of competition from other forms of entertainment, 21 percent blamed it on the quality of music getting worse and 13 percent said it was because CDs are too expensive.

FM radio is still the main way most fans find out about new music, according to the poll. Television shows are a distant second.

Rock 'n' roll is the most popular style of music, cited by 26 percent of the fans. It runs neck-and-neck with country among fans ages 35 or over.

Rap music is the source of the biggest generation gap. Among fans under age 35, 18 percent called rap or hip-hop their favorite style of music, the poll found. Only 2 percent of people ages 35 and over said the same thing.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=D EFAULT





L.A. City Attorney Sues Makers Of 'Grand Theft Auto' Over Hidden Porn
AP

The city attorney's office has sued the makers of ``Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas'' for allegedly hiding pornographic material inside the video game, officials said.

Rocky Delgadillo said his office sued Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., for making misleading statements in marketing the game and engaging in unfair competition.

A telephone call made after business hours to a Take-Two spokesman in New York was not returned.

The game, released in October 2004, features characters that commit crimes such as murder, drug dealing and pimping. The game also had an embedded ``mini game'' in which characters could engage in explicit sexual acts.

The industry board that rates video games gave it a mature rating but would have given it an adults-only rating if it knew of the explicit content, Delgadillo said.

The game's rating was later changed and retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy Co., pulled copies from their store shelves.

But the game was re-rated only after more than 12 million units had been sold, generating about $600 million in retail sales. The city attorney's office estimated that more than 200,000 units have been sold to date in California, generating more than $10 million in retail sales.

``Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products -- whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume,'' Delgadillo said.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, was part of an ongoing investigation into the marketing of video games, authorities said. The game also spurred several states to crack down on sales of mature-rated games to minors.

Delgadillo is seeking civil penalties from Rockstar Games Take-Two Interactive. He also is requesting that Take-Two and Rockstar take action to ensure full disclosure to consumers about the content of their video games.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13728065.htm





DVD Jon on Sony BMG Infringement
Jon Lech Johansen

I recently discussed Sony BMG’s infringement of my copyright with a lawyer. I have not taken any action against Sony BMG so far for the following reasons:

» Statutory damages are only available if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office before the infringement occurred.
» Proving actual damages of any substantial amount will be very difficult due to the fact that the work was licensed under the GPL.

I will be registering my future works with the Copyright Office and releasing my works under a different license (possibly GPL + a liquidated damages clause).
http://nanocrew.net/2006/01/31/sony-bmg-infringement/





US Tech Firms That Abet China Censors Face Scrutiny
Paul Eckert

Google Inc's decision to block politically sensitive terms on its new Chinese search site has drawn the scrutiny of U.S. lawmakers, who next month will probe American technology companies that help Beijing's censors.

Representatives from Google and other Internet companies have been called to a Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing on Wednesday and to a February 16 session of the House of Representatives subcommittee on Global Human Rights.

The hearings follow Google's announcement on Tuesday that the company would block taboo terms in China such as democracy, Tibet, Falun Gong, and not offer e-mail, chat and Web log (blog) publishing services that could be used for political protest.

The moves by lawmakers come as Internet experts are evaluating the effectiveness of the self- censorship, which one Chinese blogger called Google's "eunuch version" -- a reference to the emasculated palace servants of historic China.

Human Rights Subcommittee Chairman Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, has invited Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco, as well as State Department officials and press freedom watchdog groups to the Feb 16. hearing, he said in a statement.

Smith, a frequent critic of China's human rights practices, seized on Google's corporate motto, "Don't be evil," saying in a statement that the firm "would enable evil by cooperating with China's censorship policies just to make a buck."

Smith told Reuters: "The question is not whether companies should be promoting democracy. The real question is should they partner with the secret police in cracking down on dissidents and enabling human rights abuses?"

Code Of Conduct

Freedom of speech advocates, who have been critical of U.S. companies that have compromised with Chinese authorities, are pressing for U.S. legislation establishing a code of conduct for Internet companies working in countries deemed repressive in annual U.S. State Department human rights reports.

"Our lobbying within the United States is calling for a bipartisan effort to support us in getting the legislation passed," said Tala Dowlatshahi, the New York representative of Reporters Without Borders, a France-based watchdog group.

She said the group was also pressing shareholder groups of those companies to insist on upholding "ethics, principles and universal standards" enshrined in the Geneva Convention.

The legislation envisioned by Reporters Without Borders was spelled out in a January 6 online campaign calls on U.S. firms to refrain from hosting e-mail servers, filtering search engines, hosting blogs and discussion forums in repressive countries.

The proposal would either ban U.S. firms from selling Internet censorship software to repressive states or force them to make censorship of some terms impossible.

It would also require firms to get Department of Commerce permission to sell Internet censorship equipment or conduct related training in countries deemed repressive by the State Department.

In Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told Reuters that China's government had already been censoring the search engine.

The decision to block sensitive terms on the China site "is not something I enjoy," Brin said, "but I think it was a reasonable decision."
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/pro...126&ID=5452535





Microsoft Clarifies Policy On Censoring Blogs
Ina Fried

Under fire after censoring a Chinese blogger, Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new policy for dealing with government requests to block content that violates local laws.

Microsoft's new MSN Spaces policy states that the company will remove content only when it "receives a legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws" or when the content violates MSN contract terms. When it does take down content, it will only be done in the country issuing the order, and the company said it will also "ensure that users know why that content was blocked."

"We really felt a need to step back and make sure that we are being thoughtful," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a telephone interview from Lisbon, Portugal, where the new policy was announced at a forum for government leaders.

The move follows a torrent of criticism that was directed at Microsoft after it removed an MSN Spaces blog posted by Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti.

Even some within Microsoft, including corporate blogger Robert Scoble, had spoken up in Anti's defense.

"Guys over at MSN: Sorry, I don't agree with your being used as a state-run thug," Scoble said in a blog posting of his own. "It's one thing to pull a list of words out of a blog using an algorithm. It's another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger's work."

Microsoft had previously acknowledged that it had filtered certain words, including "democracy" and "freedom," out of its MSN page in China.

Working within
Smith said the new policy was the result of discussions inside the company as well as with government leaders and advocacy groups, including meetings he had last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Among those he met with was Mary Robinson, the former Irish president and former head of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Smith reiterated the stance taken by Microsoft, and many of its rivals, that it is better to be doing business in China under the restrictions than to boycott the country. Google, for example, last week launched a censored Chinese version of its Web site.

"We certainly think it is better for us to be present around the world rather than not," Smith said. "I emphatically think it is good for us to be offering these services. Part of being present is the obligation to comply with local law."

Smith said more dialogue is needed and added that Microsoft hopes to see the arrival of a broader, industrywide standard on how to handle government regulations.

"This is not a single-country issue, and this is not a single-company issue," Smith said. "At the end of the day, we are going to need a broad set of principles for (the) full range of Internet technology. More steps will be needed to address other technologies."

In addition to engaging in dialogue, Microsoft has been working over the past few weeks on the technology needed to allow the company to block access to a site from within one country, while allowing those in other countries to view the same content, he said.

When Microsoft does block a site, it will post a notice saying that it did so in response to a valid legal order from a local authority. Smith said the new policies will be applied "prospectively," meaning from now on, but declined to say whether Anti's blog, in particular, would be allowed to be seen from other countries.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+clarif...3-6033343.html





How to Outwit the World's Internet Censors
Tom Zeller Jr.

When Google announced last week that it would censor its new search service in China, the company became, to many, the latest component in that country's sophisticated system of information control.

With strategies ranging from automated keyword filtering and Web site blocking to Internet traffic surveillance, the Chinese government is unmatched in its ability to censor and monitor its citizens online.

Of course, no system is perfect.

The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.

A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.

It's not perfect. You never know, for instance, how trustworthy any proxy really is, and servers go up and down unpredictably. But people regularly use proxy servers for all kind of reasons — from the political to the pornographic.

Every day in China, Mr. Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.

Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.

Even two small commercial companies, Dynamic Internet Technology and UltraReach Internet, offer software or Web services that try to poke holes in China's "great firewall."

Of course, these precious few leaks are most likely little consolation for the dozens of Chinese citizens languishing in prison for saying or doing the wrong thing online. And they are all the more reason that human rights workers keep discussions of circumvention tactics short — and vague.

"I don't ever want to make it any harder for people," Mr. Palfrey said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/we...w/29basic.html





US Plans To 'Fight The Net' Revealed
Adam Brookes

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.

Credibility problem

Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.

But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.

The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.

It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support.

It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from "third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials".

It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.

'Fight the net'

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence.

"Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."

US digital ambition

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...as/4655196.stm





Researchers: Rootkits Headed For BIOS
Robert Lemos

Insider attacks and industrial espionage could become more stealthy by hiding malicious code in the core system functions available in a motherboard's flash memory, researchers said on Wednesday at the Black Hat Federal conference.

A collection of functions for power management, known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), has its own high-level interpreted language that could be used to code a rootkit and store key attack functions in the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) in flash memory, according to John Heasman, principal security consultant for U.K.-based Next-Generation Security Software.

The researcher tested basic features, such as elevating privileges and reading physical memory, using malicious procedures that replaced legitimate functions stored in flash memory.

"Rootkits are becoming more of a threat in general--BIOS is just the next step," Heasman said during a presentation at the conference. "While this is not a threat now, it is a warning to people to look out."

The worries come as security professionals are increasingly worried about rootkits. Earlier this month, a security researcher warned that the digital-rights management software, which experts say resembled a rootkit, used by music giant Sony BMG remained on hundreds of thousands of servers. Last year, the first rootkit for the Mac OS X was released to the Internet.

While some attacks have attempted to affect a computer's flash memory, most notably the CIH or Chernobyl virus in 1998, the ability to use the high-level programming language available for creating ACPI functions has opened up the attack to far more programmers.

One rootkit expert at the conference predicted that the technology will become a fundamental part of rootkits in the near future.

"It is going to be about one month before malware comes out to take advantage of this," said Greg Hoglund, CEO of reverse engineering firm HBGary and editor of Rootkit.com. "This is so easy to do. You have widely available tools, free compilers for the ACPI language, and high-level languages to write the code in."

The firmware on most modern motherboards has tables associating commands in the ACPI Machine Language (AML) to hardware commands. New functionality can be programmed in a higher level ACPI Source Language (ASL) and compiled into machine language and then flashed into the tables.

However, the ability to flash the memory depends on whether the motherboard allows the BIOS to be changed by default or if a jumper or setting in the machine setup program has to be changed. Security professionals at the conference disagree over how many machines would have the ability to write to flash memory turned on by the manufacturer. While Hoglund believed that most computers would not have protections against writing to flash memory turned on by default, NGSSoftware's Heasman disagreed.

"The obstacles to deployment are numerous," Heasman said. "Almost all machines have a physical protection, such as a jumper on the motherboard, against flashing."

Yet, an insider attacker could flash their laptop before they leave a company and then use the rootkit, which would survive reinstallation of the operating system. The insider could then gain access to the corporate network at a later time.

Because the amount of memory that could be used by an attacker in the BIOS firmware is small, it is unlikely that an entire rootkit will be stored in the motherboard's memory. Instead, only specific functions and bootstrap code would likely be hidden there.

Another benefit of programming to the ACPI Source Language is that, for the most part, the code can be ported easily to any platform.

"This is platform independent," Heasman said. "We can write a backdoor for Windows that will elevate privilege, and turn around and use the code on Linux."

The research into adding BIOS capabilities to rootkit software stresses the need for better rootkit detectors, argued another researcher who presented at Black Hat Federal on the topic of rootkits.

"John Heasman's presentation was very interesting and useful in convincing people that we need to change our thinking about rootkit/compromise detection," said Joanna Rutkowska, an independent security consultant with invisiblethings.org. "Today, many people believe that it's just enough to enumerate all the potential triggering points ... I don't agree with this approach, as it seems to be lots of places which can be used as a triggering point - John has just showed us how to use BIOS for this, but we can also think about advanced file infection and many others."

Instead, current detection software needs to focus on explicit integrity scanning of a compromised system, not look for specific compromised files that could be hidden with techniques such as flashing rootkit components into the BIOS, she said.

"This is only the triggering aspect of the malware," Rutkowska said. "Basically you can take any of the available malware and add a BIOS-level trigger, or installer, to them. However, after that malware is activated it needs to go to the operating system memory and needs to interact with OS somehow."

Defensive software should look to detect that activity explicitly, she said.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11372?ref=rss





ISP Sends Alert To Kama Sutra Victims
Tom Espiner

A British Internet service provider is notifying customers whose systems it believes may be infected with the Kama Sutra virus.

When a computer is infected by the worm, which also goes by Nyxem.E and other names, it visits an online Web counter that tallies up how many PCs have been infected. U.K.-based Easynet said it is monitoring traffic to this Web counter and sending a virus alert to every person who visits it.

ISPs have come under criticism for failing to responsibly monitor the data they pipe to home users and to share the responsibility for the ever- growing burden of virus and spam that is falling on businesses and consumers.

"ISPs do the equivalent of pumping out raw sewage into your home. You wouldn't expect to have to filter your own water, so why do home users have to filter their own data?" Paul Wood, a senior analyst at hosted e-mail and Web security company MessageLabs, said in November.

In May, the Federal Trade Commission, in tandem with some counterparts worldwide, said it planned to ask ISPs to help crack down on "zombie" networks of computers that send out spam.

F-Secure applauded Easynet's move in its blog, encouraging other ISPs to get in contact with customers who may be affected by an attack.

"We think it's a good idea that ISPs warn people about viruses in general, and I think it's a great idea that Easynet proactively took this step," F- Secure security expert Patrik Runald said. "Obviously, with 300 or 400 viruses being detected every day, ISPs can't warn their customers about all of them. But in this type of case, it's a really good idea."

The security company encouraged other ISPs to notify any customers whose systems may have been infected by the Kama Sutra worm before Feb. 3, when the virus is due to deliver its payload.

"We thought this was an excellent idea and wanted to promote it! We encourage other ISPs to do the same, as it will help users disinfect their machines before the 3rd of February," F-Secure wrote on its blog.

The payload is programmed to delete all Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint file types, as well as Adobe Systems PDF files, from a compromised PC. The multifaceted malicious software will also attempt to propagate itself, both through e-mail and as a network worm, which can be particularly damaging on closed networks.

"Nyxem is certainly malicious. It can be delivered via e-mail, but also as a network worm. It probes other PCs on a closed network to compromise them and send itself to the other computers, to infect as many hosts as possible," Jason Steer, a technical consultant at security company Ironport, said on Thursday.

The malicious software hides in attachment types not typically blocked by attachment filters.

Companies are unlikely to be directly affected by Kama Sutra if they are running up-to-date antivirus software, Ironport said, because the major antivirus vendors have now released patches. But the company warned on Thursday that businesses could experience secondary effects as the virus tries to propagate itself by harvesting e-mail addresses on an infected machine.

"The knock-on effects will come as compromised PCs try to communicate with businesses. This will cause additional e- mail and network traffic, and possible slow down e-mail response time," Steer said Thursday.
http://news.com.com/ISP+sends+alert+...3-6032820.html





The New Boom

Silicon Valley is roaring back to life, as startups mint millionaires and Web dreams take flight. But, no, this is not another bubble. Here's why.
Chris Anderson

Be careful what you wish for, all of you with the "Please, God, just one more bubble!" bumper stickers. It's getting wild again in Silicon Valley. In recent months, the breathtaking ascent of Google has lit a fire under its competitors, which include practically everyone in the online world. The result is all too familiar: seven-figure recruiting packages, snarled traffic on Highway 101, and a general sense that the boom is back.

A boom perhaps, but not (phew!) a bubble. There's a difference. Bubbles are inflated with hot air and speculation. They end with a wet pop, leaving behind messy splatters. Booms, on the other hand, tend to have strong foundations and gentle conclusions. Bubbles can be good: They spark a huge amount of investment that can make things easier for the next generation, even as they bankrupt the current one. But booms - with their more rational allocation of capital - are better. The problem is that exuberance can make it hard to tell one from the other.

Six years ago, people were likewise making the case that the dotcom frenzy was more boom than bubble, built as it was on the legitimate ground of the Internet revolution. And until late 1999 or so, maybe that was true. Then the Wall Street speculators gained the upper hand, and growth became malignant.

It's hard to know what "normal" prosperity looks like in Silicon Valley. This is, after all, the land of boom and bust - it's been alternating between greed and grief ever since the gold rush. But if there is such a thing as a healthy boom, we're living it now. Google may be trading above $400, but the Nasdaq as a whole has hardly budged in five years. Companies are once again minting millionaires, but venture capitalists are investing less than a fifth of what they were at the 2000 peak. About 50 technology companies went public last year, but more than 300 went public in 1999.

Of course, abundant venture capital and plentiful IPOs were once seen as evidence of vitality. Now, however, we know their true cost: The promise of heady valuations encourages venture capitalists to shower startups with money. And having placed such large bets, the VCs naturally want to fatten those startups for market. Fast cash and accelerated growth make a company lose touch with reality, the simplest explanation for the bubble's most notorious flameouts.

So why is the froth missing from the wave this time? Because the underlying economics are so much healthier, in three main ways.

First, technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace (and even accelerated at times) despite the bust. The dotcom business models of the 1990s may have been based on wild projections of broadband, advertising, and ecommerce trends. But the funny thing is, even after the bubble burst, those trends continued. These days, it's hard to find a technology-adoption projection from 1999 that hasn't come true. Meanwhile, the digital-media boom sparked by the iPod and iTunes has blown through even the most aggressive forecasts.

Today, broadband is mainstream, online shopping is commonplace, everyone has a wireless device or two, and Apple's latest music player was - for the fifth season in a row - the must-have holiday gift. The Internet and digital media are clearly not fads. Over the past decade, we've started to live a life only imagined in mid-'90s business plans. As a result, some silly bubble-era ideas are starting to actually make sense - perhaps a lot of sense.

Free phone calls over the Internet? That's Skype, which eBay just bought for nearly $4 billion. Online virtual communities? Now a global phenomenon in the form of massively multiplayer online games. Free music sites? MySpace, which rivals Google in traffic. (The boom's ultimate echo: The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com. Just so long as it doesn't ship 50-pound bags of chow.)

The second reason that this boom is so different from the last is that the sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. In the bad old days, companies bankrupted themselves building out their fiber-optic networks. Bad for investors, good for everyone else: We're now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate '90s-era investment and research.

Meanwhile, open source software has come of age, and computer hardware will soon cost less than the electricity it takes to run it. The result: industrial-strength servers that are cheaper than desktop PCs (sorry, Sun). Or, if you prefer, you can buy hardware and software even more cheaply as a hosted service (there's that inexpensive bandwidth again).

The result is that you can start a company today for a tiny fraction of what people spent five years ago. Joe Kraus, cofounder of the bubble-era search engine Excite, estimates that his new company, JotSpot, will make it to first revenues with a total investment of about $100,000 - less than 5 percent of what Excite burned through a decade earlier. Today companies are starting small and lean and staying that way - no more blowing all the first-round funding on PR stunts and rooftop parties. As a result, they're hitting break-even sooner.

In this new environment, startups can grow organically. That means less venture capital is needed - and that's the third reason this boom is different. Less venture capital leads to fewer venture capitalists hustling for early exits at high valuations. That, in turn, reduces the pressure to go public and translates to fewer undercooked companies launching IPOs on hype alone.

So there you have the recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble: a more receptive marketplace, lower costs, and lighter pressure from investors. Today, the typical exit strategy is to sell your startup to Yahoo! for a few million, not to maneuver for a rowdy IPO and an appearance on CNBC. Highway 101 is jammed with Prius- driving engineers, not biz-dev guys in Beemers. And most New York cab drivers are happily ignorant of what's hot in the Valley, just as they should be.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/boom.html





Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer
Jesse Green

FAIRYLAND was in turmoil. During a tech rehearsal for the October 2004 Off Off Broadway production of "Tam Lin" — a play about a clash between mortal and immortal worlds — a real-life clash threatened to derail the show. Exactly what happened has become, literally, a federal case, and the sides agree on very few details. Did the playwright, Nancy McClernan, insist that the director's staging was incompetent? Did the director, Edward Einhorn, refuse to alter it? Did the producer, Jonathan X. Flagg, smash some furniture on the set? One thing's clear: the morning after the tech rehearsal, after two months of unpaid work, Mr. Einhorn was fired.

In the time-honored way of the theater, Ms. McClernan and Mr. Flagg figured the show must go on. With the help of an assistant (who eventually received the program credit for direction), they supervised the remaining rehearsals, either largely restaging the play or retaining most of Mr. Einhorn's contributions, depending on whose side you believe. In any case, "Tam Lin" opened, ran for its scheduled 10 performances and closed. But the drama was not over. Soon playwright and producer were embroiled in a lawsuit that could ruin them personally and has huge implications for directors and playwrights everywhere.

The main interest of that suit, which Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan has scheduled for trial in April, is not whether an artist deserves to be paid for work his employers deem unsatisfactory. What's really at stake is something much larger, because Mr. Einhorn claims in his complaint that his staging contributions to "Tam Lin" — contributions that his former collaborators say they excised — constitute a copyrighted work of intellectual property, owned by him, and that the defendants must therefore pay for infringing the copyright. When the lawsuit was filed, in October 2005, a new run of the play was already in rehearsal, this time directed by Ms. McClernan herself, who had always intended to make "Tam Lin" an annual Halloween event. Because Mr. Einhorn says that even these new performances represented unauthorized use of his work, the potential tab, based on the maximum allowable statutory damage of $150,000 per infringement, is now up around $3 million, not including several other remedies he is requesting — along with his original $1,000 director's fee.

Under the circumstances, it seems questionable whether "Tam Lin," with its kidnapped prince, female hero and happy ending, will return in 2006. But many playwrights, including Ms. McClernan, feel that a more dangerous threat is lurking in Mr. Einhorn's copyright claim: the kidnapping of their plays. As a result, the famously collaborative process of theater-making is now shadowed by questions. Are directors engaged in anything akin to the kind of authorship protected by copyright laws? If so, what's to stop them from demanding payment whenever a play they once directed is revived? And what would that mean to the free flow of ideas in an art form that borrows heavily from all available sources?

John Weidman, president of the Dramatists Guild of America and the author of the books for "Pacific Overtures" and "Assassins," argued in American Theater magazine that "if a directors' copyright is ever established, it will drastically limit a playwright's ability to control the work which he creates." Such copyrights, he added, "would clearly operate as liens on a playwright's play" and have "a potentially devastating effect on the facility and vitality of theatrical production."

Whether or not the danger is so grave, no legal finding has yet established that a copyright for staging exists. And the "Tam Lin" case may not answer the question. The defendants' lawyer, Toby Butterfield, argues that the material Mr. Einhorn says he owns consists mostly of minor restatements of the author's original stage directions. "Instead of 'Exit,' it's 'Exit left,' " he said. "Instead of 'Picks up book,' it's 'Picks up red book.' What he created is so insubstantial that it doesn't rise to the level of a copyrightable work." Mr. Einhorn's lawyer, who is also his older brother and the co-founder with him of Untitled Theater Company No. 61, disagrees.

But two prominent cases involving charges of directorial plagiarism have offered tantalizing (or terrifying) hints of what the courts will eventually have to face. The first involved the director Gerald Gutierrez's 1992 Broadway production of "The Most Happy Fella." When a theater outside Chicago produced the musical in 1994, with the same star and the same sets (rented from the original producers), Mr. Gutierrez sued, saying the production contained so many details of his staging — not just poses and movement but also the particular rearrangement of scenes and dialogue he had created with the approval of the estate of the show's creator, Frank Loesser — that it amounted to theft.

Gary Griffin, the director of the Illinois production, said at the time that although he had watched a videotape of the Broadway show at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive of the New York Public Library, his version contained "huge departures" from Mr. Gutierrez's. (Contacted last week, Mr. Griffin, now represented on Broadway by "The Color Purple," said he did not feel comfortable commenting on the matter since Mr. Gutierrez had died, in 2003.) In any event, the suit was settled before trial; the theater paid Mr. Gutierrez an undisclosed sum and placed an ad in Variety blandly acknowledging his "contribution" to the production.

Because no judge ever ruled in the matter, the copyright issue was not directly addressed. But an even more dramatic case, a few years later, did get to court, at least briefly. In early 1996, the director Joe Mantello — whose staging of Terrence McNally's play "Love! Valour! Compassion!" had been widely praised off Broadway in 1994 and then on Broadway in 1995 — was told by a friend who knew the show well that a regional production, directed by Michael Hall at the Caldwell Theater Company in Boca Raton, Fla., was a dead-on copy.

Mr. Mantello flew to Florida, bought a ticket to the play and prepared to record, in a notebook he had brought for the purpose, any similarities he might discover. "I was writing almost continuously," he recalled recently. "Scene after scene, moment after moment, the staging was identical. If you ran a video of the two productions side by side, no rational person would say it was 'inspired by,' or an homage: 95 percent of the show was an exact replica. I'm not talking about attitude and interpretation. I'm talking about visual images, blocking, choice of music."

The opening scene in Mr. Mantello's New York production — a tableau of all the characters arranged on a green knoll around a doll house representing the home where they are spending the weekend — was replicated down to the placement and postures of the men, including one character's holding of a pillow. None of this was in Mr. McNally's script, which begins with the instruction "Bare stage."

Mr. Mantello's lawyer asked Mr. Hall and the Caldwell to acknowledge Mr. Mantello's work and to pay him a nominal fee. When they refused, claiming at first that nothing had been copied and then that the staging was part of what they licensed when they licensed the play itself, a lawsuit was filed. (Contacted by e-mail recently, Mr. Hall did not respond to questions about the case, citing a busy schedule.) By that point, Mr. Mantello, working from the stage manager's detailed "bible" of the New York production, had prepared a special copy of the script, recording his directorial contributions in the form of diagrams, descriptions and blocking notations. Like Mr. Gutierrez with "The Most Happy Fella," he then applied for a copyright on his annotated script; the application was accepted.

The Caldwell was already involved in a similar lawsuit brought by Loy Arcenas, the set designer of the Broadway production, but the case for a designer's ownership of his work is more straightforward. There was no such clarity about directors' rights, however. Ronald Shechtman, the lawyer who was advising Mr. Mantello, said that when he asked Mr. Hall on what basis he felt he had the right to copy another director's work, he answered, "On the basis of the history of the theater going back to the Greeks." Mr. Hall had support from people who felt this kind of thing happens all the time — which is true. Nevertheless, partway through discovery, the defendants decided to settle. Mr. Mantello was paid about $7,000; he donated the fee to his union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, which had covered his legal expenses. (A similar settlement was reached with Mr. Arcenas.)

But the Federal District Court in Florida, responding to a pretrial motion, had already weighed in on the most momentous part of the case. In an order dated July 22, 1997, Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp had denied, in part, the defendants' motion to dismiss, unconvinced by their argument that stage directions are inherently not copyrightable. "Once the plaintiff produced a copyright," the judge wrote, "the burden shifted to defendants to demonstrate why the claim of copyright is invalid." The presumption, in other words, was that the copyright did exist.

The legal implication of the judge's order has not been tested, and the unions representing directors and playwrights are left with their big guns silently pointing at each other. Ralph Sevush, executive director of the Dramatists Guild, has no conciliation to offer directors. "Our contracts specifically say that no one can make any changes in the playwright's material," he said, "and that anything added that the author approves becomes the author's property." Meanwhile, the collective bargaining agreement between the directors' and choreographers' union and all major producing organizations holds that "rights to the direction created by the director remain the sole and exclusive property of the director" and that "the director reserves the right to copyright those stage directions."

United States copyright law is notoriously complicated and open to interpretation. Though concepts and ideas, because they are not "fixed" in a tangible way, are clearly not protected by copyright, photography and choreography, for instance, are. Mr. Shechtman, who is married to the director Lynne Meadow, argues that direction can be seen as an amalgam of the two: the creation of stage pictures and movement. Mr. Sevush, of the Dramatists Guild, all but scoffs at the idea that a director, though he may be creative, is creating anything. He described the director's work as "moving around the copyrightable contributions of others."

Mr. Weidman, who worked with Mr. Mantello on the recent Broadway revival of "Assassins" — and who, in gratitude for his directorial contributions to the show, offered him a share of the authors' royalty, which Mr. Mantello declined — is more diplomatic. The director is an interpretive artist, he said, often doing brilliant work. For his work to be systematically copied by someone else, he agrees, is "manifestly unfair."

But that does not mean, he argued, that the director owns his work, any more than an actor does. Not everything creative is copyrightable. The repercussions, he said, would be too dire. If each director's staging of a relatively new play had copyright protection, very soon there would be no staging options left. The play would become so encumbered with licenses, or the risk of lawsuits, that it would be impossible to produce — a net loss to the culture. Even classic works like "Romeo and Juliet" might gradually be removed from the public domain, thus perverting the aim of copyright law, which is to increase the flow of ideas and artwork by providing an incentive to their creators. "If Leonard Bernstein had been in a position to copyright his interpretation of Mahler," Mr. Weidman asked, "would another conductor who thought that interpretation was right, and then conducted Mahler in the same way, be stealing from Bernstein?"

Mr. Mantello takes a middle ground. "The acknowledgement of what the director creates is very important to me," he said. "But with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. Not everything I do is a unique contribution. I would never try to copyright my staging of 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' for instance, which is so straightforward. But to protect myself if I'm working on a new piece, I now make a side agreement with the authors for a small participation in the subsidiary rights. In a collaboration, you don't want the participants to start going, 'Mine, mine, mine, yours, mine.' But that's the unfortunate result of having to use the legal system to marshal something that ought to be more fluid."

The contractual work-around described by Mr. Mantello avoids the copyright issue altogether and solves a lot of problems. But because it's not really available to any but the most successful directors, and because it doesn't protect against plagiarism, it won't stop the fight for directors' copyright from moving forward. The consequences are already apparent: as a result of Mr. Mantello's suit, publishers like Dramatists Play Service no longer include detailed stage directions and other helpful annotations in the scripts they provide to licensees. And Patrick Hoffman, the director of the Theater on Film and Tape Archive, said more directors and choreographers now request restrictions on viewings of their work. Until his death, you could not watch the tape of "The Most Happy Fella" without Mr. Gutierrez's permission.

Some of the consequences will be problematic for directors themselves. Though the "Most Happy Fella" case was settled without any admission of guilt, Mr. Griffin has been trailed by rumors about subsequent productions; his minimalist "My Fair Lady," performed at several regional theaters in 2002 and 2004, is often said to have resembled too closely a 2000 production directed by Amanda Dehnert at Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I. Mr. Griffin said the only thing about his version that "might be similar" was the use of Trude Rittman's two-piano reduction, "which has been around since the 50's." Ms. Dehnert, whose friends warned her to check out the production, said she wasn't the kind of person to assume the worst about a colleague. "It happens all the time that two people have the same good idea at the same time," she said.

The real drama, though, is the one being played out between playwrights, who according to tradition were kings in the theater, and directors, whose job didn't exist as such until semi-cultic figures like Stanislavski advanced the role. Since then, playwrights have looked on in horror as people who used to be glorified actors gradually usurped their power. The usurpers have long since conquered Hollywood, where writers are positioned so far below directors on the totem pole, they're basically underground. Now they are threatening the playwrights' ancestral home, claiming, with some anxiety of their own, not just power but also paternity. Mr. Einhorn put it this way: "A director gives physical and visual life to a text. In many ways, it is similar to that of an illustrator. I work with illustrators on my books" — he is the author of two "Wizard of Oz" sequels — "and I have had people comment, 'The book is half what you've written and half the beautiful pictures.' They are separate but interconnected. And even more so onstage, one could not exist without the other."

Well, if that's the case, where does it end? The "Tam Lin" lawsuit may not decide the matter, but it will probably inflame passions further. Mr. Shechtman is champing at the bit. "If it's truly a collaborative art form, then why is it only the author who participates in the subsidiary rights that flow from a successful New York production?" he asked. "The appropriate resolution is to give fair credit to all the artists' contributions. One day, it may end up that the author gets 80 percent, the director 10 percent, the original cast X and the designers Z. Because, at bottom, this is all about money."

No wonder playwrights are worried. Even the usually unflappable Paul Rudnick is rethinking his options. "From now on," he said, "I'm only going to have my plays directed by lawyers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/th...gree.html?_r=2





Recipe for Revolution: Take 11,000 Photos
Jori Finkel

THE next time you're stuck in traffic in downtown Los Angeles, you could find yourself in the perfect position to view Ruben Ochoa's newest work of art. A San Diego native who made his name locally by turning his family's beat-up van into a mobile art gallery, Mr. Ochoa has just completed a billboard celebrating the legacy of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It features a photograph of Siqueiros, who was a Communist Party leader as well as a painter, making a fist, his face streaked with paint, as two characters in the corner whitewash his image - a clear allusion to the censorship of Siqueiros's social realist murals in the past. Across the top runs the phrase "Ain't that revolutionary?"

Mr. Ochoa's billboard is one of many overtly political pieces created for "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life," a group show that opens at the Redcat gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday. For the exhibition, 17 artists were asked to respond to Siqueiros's photographic archive, some 11,000 pictures that served as source material for his murals or as documentation of his finished artwork.

Most of the artists lifted images from the archive to make pieces like photomontages for installation in the gallery. Three artists based in Los Angeles - Mr. Ochoa, Mark Bradford and Daniel Martinez - also signed on to make billboards. They are scheduled to be installed downtown by the end of the week.

Lauri Firstenberg, one of the show's two curators, says she views the billboards as an essential part of the show. "Siqueiros was above all a populist artist - making art for the public and positioning it in the public sphere," she said. "We always wanted to have a component of the exhibition that was not bound to the gallery but would interact with L.A.'s urban landscape."

Born in 1896, Siqueiros at one point interacted with the Los Angeles landscape himself. Driven into exile for political reasons in 1932, he took a job teaching at the Chouinard School of Art and painted "Street Meeting," the first of three California murals, on the campus. During that period he experimented with new materials (automobile paints, for example, a more durable alternative to traditional fresco materials) and new equipment (like spray guns, a faster way of applying paint than brushwork). He also seized on photography as a tool for painting, using photographs of a work in progress to help guide its composition. (Those pictures recently led to the Chouinard Foundation's rediscovery of "Street Meeting," a vision of black and white workers joining forces, which had long been presumed destroyed but in fact was buried under layers of paint and plaster in what is now a Korean church.)

Beginning in the 1930's, Siqueiros saved many of the photographs that he gathered and commissioned from friends, professionals, newspapers and news agencies. There were photographs of the murals and photographs that fed the murals, ranging from staged shots of models to documentary photographs showing class and race struggles like labor union protests in Mexico City and the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Other pictures - animals, landscapes and buildings - seem more neutral.

When Siqueiros died in 1974, there were more than 11,000 images. He specified in his will that his archive, housed at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, be made available free for public use, something like a Communist version of Corbis or Getty Images.

About half the archive can now also be viewed at the Web site e-flux.com, an arts portal based in New York. Its director, Anton Vidokle, the other curator of the Redcat show, says he thought of putting the archive online when he visited it three years ago. "I was blown away by the material," he said. "I haven't seen a group of pictures this ideological since my childhood in Moscow. Even a humble image like a drill bit is celebrated - it's seen as beautiful, glamorous, a tool for revolution."

About two years ago, Mr. Vidokle and Ms. Firstenberg began drawing up a list of international artists to approach for the show. Many were Mexican or Chicano. "It was important to work with artists who have a connection to Siqueiros," Mr. Vidokle said. "But it's not like I went into their studios and asked to check their passports."

And, as it happened, they did not so much choose the artists as the artists chose them. To line up the 17 artists in the show, more than half of Mexican descent, the curators approached a few dozen. The Los Angeles conceptual artist John Baldessari and the Cuban installation artist Carlos Garaicoa were among those who proved unavailable. "It's a sign of how busy our leading international artists are these days," Ms. Firstenberg said. "But it's also a sign, I think, of how contested Siqueiros's legacy is."

Even some artists who chose to participate expressed ambivalence. Many say they are attracted by Siqueiros's political engagement, but repelled by his particular brand of politics and his link to a failed assassination attempt on Trotsky. As the Los Angeles-based artist Rubén Ortiz Torres put it: "He's a very dogmatic character, a Stalinist who believed that power should be centralized. But my relationship to Siqueiros is like my relationship to my father, or to Mexico in general. It's not a choice between rejecting them or following them mindlessly."

For the show, Mr. Ortiz Torres animated several famous images in the archive, including the picture of a snarling dog taken by the Colombian photographer Leo Matiz. In the seven-minute video, one image morphs into another: a nude woman becomes the dog, which then becomes a war amputee. In part, Mr. Ortiz Torres said, the violent imagery reflects his ambivalence about Siqueiros. But he added that it also refers to Siqueiros's many innovations, from his rather cinematic use of perspective to his early use of liquid paint, which he once demonstrated to Jackson Pollock.

"Formally, this guy was amazing," Mr. Ortiz Torres said. "There would be no Pollock without Siqueiros. There would be no American art without Siqueiros."

Ken Gonzales-Day was drawn to another image in the archive: a 1970 picture of Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles in flames during the riots in which the journalist Reuben Salazar was shot. He placed the photograph at the base of a 12-foot-tall banner that shows a tower of smoke. "Everyone knows about the Watts riots and Rodney King, but the Salazar riots are overlooked because they involved Latinos, who tend to be invisible, the invisible issue, the invisible labor, in Los Angeles," Mr. Gonzales-Day said. "That's something I share with Siqueiros: the desire to make invisible social histories visible."

Perhaps the most aggressively political work in the show is a photomontage about the war in Iraq made by Martha Rosler, a Brooklyn artist known for her activism. Her panorama, from left to right, features a soldier running in the desert, a soldier running with a prosthetic leg, a group of rifles and a mess of statuary casts that resemble a pile of bones - forming a narrative that leads right to the graveyard. For the rifles, she took a picture of an antique rifle from the Siqueiros archive and multiplied the image using Photoshop.

Ms. Rosler praised the "Image Bank" exhibition for bringing politics into the contemporary art world - where, she said, conversations "lack any social resonance or else take place in such low whispers that you can't hear them."

Mr. Vidokle says that turning up the volume was exactly the point.

"It's very difficult for contemporary artists right now to be political," he said. "Just think about the last Whitney Biennial - it took place at the beginning of the war in Iraq, but almost none of the art referred to it."

Still, it's not always easy to carry out a Communist's dream in a capitalist society. To accompany his billboard, Mr. Ochoa had originally planned a gallery installation called "Paint the Town Red," which would have consisted of stacks of red spray-paint cans. It was supposed to be "a giveaway work - so people could take a can with them and paint something," he said. But the Redcat staff discouraged that notion, fearing that Frank Gehry's celebrated Disney Hall, where the gallery is situated, would be vandalized.

Another stumbling block, still not resolved, concerns the fate of the Web-based archive. Mr. Vidokle hopes to keep the archive online as long as e-flux is running. But Itala Schmelz, director of the Sala Siqueiros in Mexico City, says she is concerned about potential copyright claims by the photographers in the archive and wants it closed when the show ends in April.

Doesn't that go against the public spirit of Siqueiros's life and art? "Ideals are one thing," Ms. Schmelz said. "Laws are another."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/ar...ink.html?8hpib





In 200 Years of Family Letters, a Nation's Story
Kirk Johnson

To most college students, instant messages, or I.M.'s, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address. One flicker and gone.

Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his I.M.'s on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise.

Mr. Cowan comes from a long line of savers — really, really dedicated savers.

"It's in the genes," said his mother, Linda Cowan.

Beginning more than 200 years ago, Mr. Cowan's family has kept the messages — people called them letters in those days — written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling.

The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years, genealogy experts say. It has been stored in attics, sheds and storage lockers over the years, and most recently in the Cowans' home here in Boulder, where they were interviewed on a recent morning. Its contents cover the scandalous (a relative jailed for embezzlement), the intriguing (a runaway slave seeking refuge in the North) and the historic (the settling of Chicago).

Now the current owner of the collection, Mr. Cowan's grandmother, Mary Leslie Wolff, who is 82, is negotiating to donate the papers — called the Ames Family Historical Collection, for her father's branch of the tree — to a historical society somewhere back East, where the family began. Ms. Wolff declined to say where the collection might go because discussions were continuing.

Historians and librarians say the collection is probably as remarkable for its intellectual vigor as for its age and size. It is essentially a dialogue of history: one well- educated, middle-class family's long conversation, and its interaction with the issues that defined the early nation and its westward tide, including the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, the early rise of feminism and the discoveries of geology that were shaking religious assumptions about the age of the earth. The family's writers talked all of it through, often at length. Letters of 10 to 12 pages were common.

"Whenever anyone finds a record like this that speaks to one family in depth, it's a gold mine," said David S. Ouimette, who manages the genealogy collection for the Family History Library, run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.

"And it sounds like they weren't just observing the events of the day, they were participants," added Mr. Ouimette, who has not seen the collection. "That's what puts flesh on the bones."

One series of letters, for example, talks about a runaway slave named Mary Walker who took shelter with an abolitionist branch of the family in Philadelphia, the Leslies, during a visit by her master in the 1850's. Ms. Walker, after being hidden for a time, was eventually sent farther north to live with Leslie relatives in Massachusetts.

But the story did not end there. As the Civil War tore the country apart, the letters show an effort to reunite Ms. Walker with her family in North Carolina. A friend who was an officer in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army, then advancing south, was asked to look out for Ms. Walker's children, and he apparently succeeded, because they ultimately made their way north to join her.

Another series of letters offers a vivid early glimpse of the still-raw settlement of Chicago by a family member who had journeyed west from Philadelphia in 1836 to Missouri to see some land he had bought. The land was not much to speak of, wrote the author, Peter Leslie — Ms. Wolff's great-great grandfather — in a letter to his children. But when he arrived at what he called "Chicago on Lake Michigan," Mr. Leslie immediately knew a rising force when he saw it.

"The town has more natural advantages than any place I have yet seen and is destined to be the N. York of the West," he wrote in a letter describing the construction and the bustle of the new city, then a few years old. Hotels were springing up, land fever was in the air and ambition was everywhere.

"The people of the West have a town-making mania," he wrote. "This one must succeed."

Ms. Cowan, Ms. Wolff's daughter, said she had recently been working through the letters of Mr. Leslie's son, J. Peter Leslie, who was a geologist in Philadelphia later in the 19th century. Many of those letters, she said, read like a novel: you start one, and you just have to find out what happens next.

"Right now there's a relative in jail for embezzlement," she said. "He ran off to Canada, then his conscience got the better of him and he came back and gave himself up."

Why this family saved the things that many others threw away or lost remains a mystery, Ms. Wolff said. An early progenitor in Massachusetts apparently got the ball rolling in the 1700's; that branch's attic-size collection was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society many years ago.

Beginning in Massachusetts and Philadelphia, where the first immigrants of the family settled after arriving from Scotland, the letters piled up as the clan, like so many others of the day, gradually moved west — to Minnesota in the 1850's, then Colorado a century later.

"I think a lot of people have the urge, but at some point they just give up and throw it out," Ms. Wolff said.

Ms. Cowan spoke up. "These people didn't — they didn't throw out anything."

In today's era of the instantaneous and disposable, even the paper on which the letters were written can seem alien — so durable, at least through the 1850's vintage, that neither coal dust from furnace-room storage nor glue from an ancestor's zealous scrapbook-making apparently harmed it.

Even some of the subjects that gripped people back then can seem new again with time, like poetry. Family members transcribed poems they loved, or perhaps wrote themselves, into a book that Ms. Cowan said nobody had tried to go through yet.

"We don't even know what's in it," she said.

Mr. Cowan, a junior at Oberlin College in Ohio who said he thought of becoming an author someday, looked up sharply at the mention of unread 19th-century poetry.

"Whoa, can I check that out?" he asked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/na.../29letter.html





When Terry Met Jerry, Yahoo!
Richard Siklos

WHEN Yahoo Inc. announced nearly five years ago that Terry S. Semel, then a former leader of the Warner Brothers motion picture studio, would become its chairman and chief executive, the reaction both outside and within Yahoo was not exactly one of wild encouragement.

Despite a hugely successful career running companies that make movies, television shows and music, Mr. Semel was immediately labeled an "old media" guy. Worse, he was a Hollywood guy, and had barely touched a computer during the nearly two decades he oversaw Warner Brothers with Robert A. Daly.

Even though he had been making private Internet investments since resigning from the studio two years earlier, when people associated "Semel" and "Yahoo," they were more likely to think of an Australian comic named Yahoo Serious who starred in the 1988 Warner Brothers flop "Young Einstein." Mr. Semel's former boss at Time Warner, Gerald M. Levin, who had just completed his merger with America Online, laughed incredulously when he heard the news of Mr. Semel's new gig in April 2001, according to an executive who was with Mr. Levin at the time.

At Yahoo, where the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the evaporation of online advertising had just helped sink the company's market value from a peak of $127 billion to just $12.6 billion when he joined, the reception wasn't much warmer. Mr. Semel, then 58, had neither geek cred like that of Yahoo's co-founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, nor Silicon Valley venture-capitalist swagger. Mr. Semel looked like a self-assured but unassuming guy who originally hailed from Queens, which he was. Word spread quickly in Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., that — horrors! — he even wore a gold chain on his wrist. (This, too, was true, but the chain is not a fashion statement; it's a medical bracelet for a shellfish allergy.)

The story line at Yahoo is much different today. Having lost $98 million on revenue of $717 million in the year when Mr. Semel joined it, Yahoo earned $1.2 billion last year on sales of $5.3 billion. With a market capitalization nudging $50 billion, it is worth roughly the same as the newly Pixar-ized Walt Disney Company or the combined value of the recently split Viacom and CBS.

Dollars aside, Yahoo has the widest global reach of any Internet site. It counts more than 420 million registered users around the world, and it owns the most-used e- mail, instant-messaging and music Web sites on the planet. In the United States alone, Yahoo attracted 103 million unique visitors in December, making it the country's most-visited Web destination, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

"It's a 21st-century media company," Mr. Semel said in a recent interview. "The difference between the more traditional media companies and companies like Yahoo is all about technology, and the two — technology and media — totally marry each other."

Not all marriages go as planned, of course. It is highly symbolic that Mr. Semel was recently in the office of Time Warner's chief executive, Richard D. Parsons, proposing that Yahoo effectively take AOL off of Time Warner's hands, although Mr. Parsons was not interested. Depending on how it handles the rapid and daunting rise of Google's search-based juggernaut — not to mention Microsoft's new determination to rule the Web — Yahoo has a shot at being the digital media company to beat.

IN the past two years, Mr. Semel has netted $403 million by exercising Yahoo options and selling shares. He still owns shares and options worth more than $230 million. The stock fell back last month amid concerns about whether Yahoo's revenue can continue to grow by 30 percent or more a year. The old-media guys, most of whom light up cigars if they can hit double-digit earnings growth, wish they had his problems.

As he looks back over his five years running Yahoo, Mr. Semel makes no pretense of being a techno-guru, and he is often asked whether he really understands technology. "I'm never going to be a technologist, but I have to be conversant," he said, adding: "I was never an actor or a director or a singer — I had to understand the process well enough to help make decisions."

Although he has apartments in San Francisco and New York, home is still in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He commutes to Sunnyvale three or four days a week on the Gulfstream IV corporate jet that he and Mr. Daly bought from Warner Brothers when they resigned in 1999.

"Terry's a thoughtful, intelligent man and he did not take his media imperialist roots to Sunnyvale," said Barry Diller, the former Hollywood mogul who is now chairman and chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp. "And that's what got him on the road to fluency, which he's mastered. That's some feat for an old-media dog, speaking as one who could be similarly described."

To hear Mr. Semel describe it, the revival at Yahoo is attributable to the same methodical style and emphasis on team-building and consumer desires that allowed him and Mr. Daly to increase Warner Brothers' revenue to more than $11 billion from less than $1 billion over nearly two decades.

But he concedes that there were unexpected contrasts between the old and the new that were not immediately apparent to him — just as they seem to keep confounding many of his old-media colleagues.

While all media rely on good content and distribution as underpinnings of their success, he said that the interactive world emphasizes qualities that the offline world doesn't, including truly global reach, personalization and community. All media companies recite these concepts, but are heavily invested in and dependent on preserving existing relationships based on controlling both their content and the way it moves to people. What is more, they have not grown up in a world where technology can be as much of a competitive edge as hiring Steven Spielberg to direct a picture.

Perhaps the most glaring difference between Yahoo's vision of a media company and the visions of more conventional media groups is in the definition of content. In a world of high-speed connections to a growing web of material that audiences can consume or manipulate in endless ways, Yahoo strives to be a 24/7 global blockbuster of self-expression. "Terry has said he's been very clear about the fact that the habits and the desires of the consumer are the common theme between his last career and his current career," Mr. Yang said.

By the time he was hired, Yahoo already had the foundation for success — most notably its number of worldwide users, more than 200 million, who did everything from checking business news and sports scores to sending e-mail and instant messages, listening to music and shopping.

But beyond the powerful brand and a company full of whizzes, there was no clear business strategy. The first thing Mr. Semel did was to streamline 44 business units into 4. That helped to set corporate priorities. "Terry's relentless focus on focus is probably the most important thing we as a team or as a company are doing," Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Semel's first big decision — and probably his shrewdest — was to make advertising its mainstay business. At some of his earliest meetings at Yahoo, Mr. Semel recalled, some executives were advocating that the business instead pour its efforts into trying to extract monthly fees from its registered users.

"He was very early on in thinking, 'if we can keep the users growing and we can keep growing usage, we will be able to monetize this and we will be able to create value,' " said Mary Meeker, the Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. "It sounds like mom and apple pie, but that was something a lot of people did not get in 2001."

Mr. Semel was also keen to develop other revenue streams, including music services, games and premium e-mail accounts. Its absence in the dial-up Internet access business, where AOL and Microsoft had pole positions, seemed, in those days, a glaring disadvantage. Mr. Semel addressed this with his second smart move: establishing a partnership with SBC, now AT&T, to sell Yahoo-brand high-speed connections over souped-up phone lines. Yahoo later added Verizon, British Telecom and Rogers Communications in Canada, and now has 9.6 million subscribers, according to Morgan Stanley estimates. Each subscription generates an average of $3 a month for Yahoo.

Vital to its focus on advertising was Yahoo's decision, in 2003, to develop its own search business — built on the rapid-fire acquisitions of Inktomi and Overture, which itself had just bought AltaVista — to compete with Google. That freed Yahoo from having to license Google's search technology. "We hardly went to sleep after we started to understand their business," Mr. Semel said of Overture's service of placing sponsored links alongside relevant search results. (Overture has been rechristened as Yahoo Search Marketing.)

Two years after introducing its own search engine, Yahoo trails only Google in that field. But it has also had to acknowledge that it is less effective than its rival at instantly matching relevant ads to search results. And Yahoo's share of the search market slipped to 30 percent in December from 32 percent in the same month a year earlier, while Google's share rose to 40 percent from 35 percent, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Improving the financial return on search advertising, Mr. Semel says, is in the works.

Although search represents only 5 percent of activity on the Web, this is no small matter: the higher profit margins generated by Google's AdWords business are a big reason that Google's $128 billion market capitalization now dwarfs Yahoo's. (History will decide whether Google or, for that matter, Yahoo warrant their starry valuations in a market where the stocks of media companies with much higher revenues are being shunned by investors.)

Still, Mr. Semel contends that Yahoo's ability to blend brand and search advertising will set it apart as the Web continues its swift evolution. Susan L. Decker, Yahoo's finance chief, notes that most search advertisers are already online one way or another and tend to be small or midsized companies. But, she said, many major corporations are still spending only a small percentage of their marketing budgets online.

Without content that people want, of course, advertising is moot. Yahoo has gained attention in the past year for developing original programming, based out of a new Yahoo Media complex in Santa Monica, Calif.

Columnists have been hired for its news sites, reporters are hatching multimedia presentations and the inevitable online reality show is in the works. Yahoo wants to be the largest online video hub, streaming everything from news clips and movie trailers to Howard Stern stunts and NASA missions. Last year, it streamed four billion music videos, enough to fill the schedules of a lot of MTV channels.

Mr. Semel says he sees the company's original content efforts as small steps toward figuring out what works on the Internet. But he and his colleagues are clearly more enamored of the prospects for distributing so-called old-media content. "Yahoo wants to create an environment where people can find all the content they want," said Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer. "That's why we're going to be a great partner to the media companies."

PARTNER, sure, but rival, too. Consider the News Corporation's online moves, particularly its purchase of MySpace.com, a fast-growing social-networking Web site. The News Corporation intends for it to be the online equivalent of the early Fox network: an alternative that will draw young audiences from Yahoo and elsewhere.

More directly, America Online repositioned itself as a free portal last year, thus becoming a direct rival of Yahoo. "I think they're going to be tough competitors going forward," said Mr. Parsons, Time Warner's chief executive. He added that he considered AOL's portal competitive to Yahoo's, but he acknowledged that Yahoo had a lead in several areas, including its reach overseas.

Mr. Semel and his Yahoo colleagues are most eager to encourage their registered users, who represent roughly 40 percent of the one billion people now online globally, to create their own content. Yahoo executives say that social networks, blogs, message boards and sites where users from around the world share material — like the recent Yahoo acquisitions Flickr, a photo-sharing business, and Del.icio.us, where people swap information on favorite Web sites and other things — are the keys to a fast-emerging media market.

Across Yahoo's overflowing campus of purple cubicles in Sunnyvale, Calif., teams are working on a range of products — with names like Yahoo360, Y!Q, Yahoo Mindset, MyWeb 2.0 and Yahoo Answers — that use Web-searching as a ribbon for tying together virtual communities. MyWeb 2.0, for example, bills itself as a "social search engine" that lets users tag search results they may want to come back to and to share those results with cyberfriends.

At a media company like Warner Brothers, central factors for success include managing talent, financial acumen, guiding a "Batman" or a "Friends" to a debut and understanding how to market it. While many online efforts by media companies have focused on building direct and deeper connections with audiences, these have largely amounted to virtual fan clubs and stores for media brands and products.

Lately, Yahoo and other Internet companies have been enamored of the notion of connecting communities of people who, say, are fans of Batman but also share an affinity for mountain biking or Indian food. Thanks to new services intended to extend Yahoo's network beyond computer screens to phones, TV's and other gadgets, these communities can stay in constant contact.

Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search and marketplace, came up with the acronym FUSE to sum up Yahoo's social networking ambitions: to "find, use, share and expand all human knowledge." This sounds awfully high-minded for a company whose logo ends in an exclamation point, but it underscores another difference between old and new in a cynical age: "People come to work trying to change things," Mr. Weiner said.

They also come to work knowing that the Internet is a field of dreams without barriers to entry. If you don't build it, someone else will — most likely Google. Technology is what allows Yahoo to start these services and to tie them together on a global scale. "Almost from the first day I came to Yahoo," Mr. Semel said, "I realized that every strategy we were considering had to be related to the quality of our technology."

Farzad Nazem, a Yahoo veteran who is its chief technology officer, stressed that point. "Most of the old-media companies treat technology as an afterthought. It's part of the execution, but it's never part of the planning," he said. "In the new world, it's almost the reverse."

AND it's probably no surprise that, faced with the rapid rise of Google and growing competition from AOL and Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo has been hiring engineers and opening research centers. Last year it added 220 people a month and now employs about 10,000.

"We try to present a consumer-friendly and, as much as possible, a humanized version of the Internet," said Mr. Yang. "It's fair to say we don't go out and talk about ourselves as a tech company like Google or Microsoft. That is a very deliberate message we want to send out."

It is a message that played to Mr. Semel's strengths. Mr. Daly, the former Warner Brothers executive, remembers telling nay-sayers that they were wrong to underestimate his old friend:

"I told them, 'You don't understand Terry Semel. He knows what they need, and that is to bring a sense of not only leadership but marketing and how to put things together.' At Yahoo, he is the father."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/bu...y/29yahoo.html





Rewriting history under the dome

Online 'Encyclopedia' Allows Anyone To Edit Entries, And Congressional Staffers Do Just That To Bosses' Bios
Evan Lehmann

WASHINGTON -- The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan's campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

"Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform," the pre-edited entry said. "As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts."

The new entry reads in part: "Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004."

Vogel said, "It makes sense to me the biography we submit would be the biography we write."

The change doubled the length of the entry on Meehan, corrected errors and replaced "sloppy" writing, Vogel said. "Let the outside world edit it. It seemed right to start with greater depth than a paragraph with incorrect data from the '80s."

Wikipedia's online honor system has made it ripe for abuse by vandals. Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.

In November and December, The Sun has learned, users of the House's IP address were temporarily blocked from changing content because of violations described by the site as a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia."

"I'm not denying it," Jon Brandt, a spokesman for the Committee on House Administration, which oversees the House computer network, said when asked to confirm House ownership of the address.

For security reasons, Brandt declined to say to whom the address is assigned.

While vandalism is a problem, deleting factual information raises ethical concerns, said Geoffrey Bowker, director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.

"The vandalism is just plain childish," Bowker said. "The term-limit pledge (that was changed by Meehan's staff) is a much more serious case. That's someone trying to alter the public record.

"To knowingly remove a truthful statement is just wrong," he added. "It's not the place of any special-interest group to tamper with the facts available to the public."

Most of the 1,000 House changes were meant to enhance various encyclopedia entries. Slurs against Cantor and Frist, which have been removed, are the first examples of abuse that Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales has seen derived directly from the legislative branch of the U.S. government.

Wikipedia records every change to its site and who made it. The encyclopedia prefers that editors log in with a user name, but it's not necessary. Many editors make changes anonymously; Wikipedia identifies these users by tracking the number assigned to their Internet entry point, called an IP address.

But Wales said the deletion of factual information goes against the principles of Wikipedia, which promotes a "neutral point of view" policy.

"You don't delete it," Wales said. "If they wanted to put in their side of things, that would seem ethically relevant, rather than just omitting it."

Mistakes were inserted into the Meehan entry at different points of its evolution, according to an examination of the edits. One editor erroneously said Meehan attended Harvard College; another indicated it is likely that Meehan would run for Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat.

Wikipedia reaches around the globe, having 3.1 million articles published in more than 200 languages. The English-language version is the largest category, with more than 910,000 articles and 856 million words. That's more than six times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica -- the largest reference printed in English.

And people read it.

Yesterday, Wikipedia was ranked the 19th- busiest site on the Internet, according to alexa.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that tracks Webtraffic.

A new reference to Meehan's term-limit pledge was inserted in the Wikipedia entry in November by a person not using the House address.

On Dec. 27, someone using the House IP address reduced the reference to a single sentence: "(Meehan) also supported term limits, pledging to serve no more than four terms."

Vogel said he did not authorize the change.

No reference to Meehan's top-rated campaign account has been reintroduced.

The changes by Meehan's staff are not as "reprehensible" as inserting derogatory comments in someone else's entry, said Stephen Potts, former director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, which establishes conduct standards for the executive branch.

But the sheer breadth of changes emanating from the House reflects an abuse of public time and equipment, said Potter, now chairman of the Ethics Resource Center.

"That kind of usage, plus the fact that they're changing one person's material, is certainly wrong and ought to be at a minimum the focus of some disciplinary action," he said.
http://www.lowellsun.com/ci_3444567





Apple Offers College Lectures Via Podcasts
May Wong

In its latest move to broaden its iPod and iTunes franchises, Apple Computer Inc. has introduced "iTunes U," a nationwide expansion of a service that makes course lectures and other educational materials accessible via Apple's iTunes software.

The company behind the iPod portable players, the iTunes online music store and Macintosh computers had been working with six universities on the pilot project for more than a year and expanded the educational program this week, inviting other universities to sign up.

Internet access to college lectures is nothing new, but listening to them on portable gadgets is a more recent phenomenon of the digital age, spurred in part by the popularity of podcasts, or downloadable audio files.

The University of Missouri offered podcasts of lectures through its school network before it signed up with Apple last summer as a pilot school. But "iTunes U" offered a software and service package for free, said Keith Politte, the development officer at the university's School of Journalism.

The market dominance of Apple's iTunes Music Store and iPods, which helped spawn the podcast movement, also was key.

"Our students are digital natives. We seek to meet our students where they are, and iTunes is the interface that most of our students are already familiar with," Politte said.

Apple's service offers universities a customized version of the iTunes software, allowing schools to post podcasts, audio books or video content on their iTunes- affiliated Web sites. The iTunes-based material will be accessible on Windows-based or Macintosh computers and transferable to portable devices, including Apple's iPods.

The service lets institutions decide if they want to limit access to certain groups or open the material to the public.

For instance, Stanford University, which joined the pilot program last fall, gives the public free access not only to some lectures but also audio broadcasts of sporting events through its iTunes-affiliated site.

Schools and universities have historically been major contributors to Apple's computer sales. With iTunes U, Apple "is leveraging the ubiquity that we've established on campuses with iPods and iTunes," said Chris Bell, Apple's director of product marketing for iTunes.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Microsoft Tricks Hacker Into Jail
Kevin Poulsen

Nobody was ever arrested for leaking the secret source code for parts of the Windows operating system in 2004, but a hacker who sold a copy online afterward was sentenced to two years in federal prison Friday.

William "IllWill" Genovese, 29, will serve three years of supervised release following his prison term, during which he'll be subject to electronic monitoring through special software installed on his computer, under the terms handed down by federal Judge William Pauley in New York. He remains free on bail, and is scheduled to report to prison March 14.

Genovese ran a popular hacking-oriented community website called IllMob.org in February 2004 when two 200-MB files containing incomplete portions of the source code for the Windows 2000 and Windows NT operating systems hit the internet, flooding dodgy websites and peer-to-peer networks like some hard-core geek version of the Paris Hilton video.

Like many others, Genovese downloaded a copy. Unlike others, he posted a note to his website offering it for sale.

According to court records, an investigator hired by Microsoft took Genovese up on his offer and dropped two Hamiltons on the secret source code. The investigator then returned and arranged a second $20 transaction for an FBI agent, which led to Genovese's indictment under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act, which makes it a felony to sell a company's stolen trade secrets. After consulting with his public defender, Genovese pleaded guilty last August.

Genovese would have had a viable defense had he gone to trial, because the documents were widely available on peer-to-peer networks at the time of the sale, said Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor.

"This guy didn't participate in the misappropriation, and probably didn't conspire with anybody to misappropriate it," said Rasch, a vice president at security company Solutionary. "Once it's posted online, it's just not secret anymore. At some point it becomes public information."

But Genovese's public posting, coupled with his long rap sheet, made him an obvious target for prosecution. Government court filings show the Connecticut man has an extensive record of mostly petty crimes, beginning with a 1996 conviction for criminal trespass for spray painting a bridge, followed by a rash of thefts from motor vehicles and a burglary conviction. In 1999 he was convicted of "breaching the peace" by assaulting the mother of his child, according to court records.

At the time of the source-code sale, Genovese was on probation for computer trespass and eavesdropping after breaking into some private computers and installing keystroke-logging software.

"Basically, everything I do, I do ass-backwards," Genovese said in an instant-messaging interview ahead of Friday's sentencing. "I like drawing, so I spray paint. I like music, so I took some radios of kids I hated in high school. I like computers, so I hack."

Microsoft also asked for an "appropriate amount" of financial restitution, which the government estimated at $70,000. The judge declined.

The company has long maintained that the source code to Windows and other products are its crown jewels, and that making the code public could cause serious harm by stripping it of trade-secret status, and allowing competitors to duplicate the functionality of Microsoft software.

The company has also expressed fears that making its source code public could allow hackers to find security holes in Microsoft products - - though, so far, intruders are doing fine without the source.

Microsoft had no immediate comment on the case.

Genovese said Thursday that he shut down IllMob.org temporarily this week after Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Southwell cited it in his request that Genovese receive a 30-month sentence -- the maximum under federal sentencing guidelines.

In addition to providing free hacking tools, the website has played host to candid photos stolen from celebrity cell phones and Sidekicks. And Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst recently blamed IllMob for stealing and releasing his sex video last year.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...tw=rss.culture






Warner Bros. to Try File Sharing Of Films, TV Shows in Germany
Sarah McBride

In a move that shows Hollywood is examining the benefits of a technology it long reviled, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. is expected to announce today that it will sell movies and television shows online in Germany using peer-to-peer technology.

Warner Bros. is working with Bertelsmann AG and its subsidiary Arvato to create a service called In2Movies, to launch in March. The service will feature movies dubbed into German, including "Batman Begins" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," for a fee that Warner says will be similar to the cost of a DVD. It will also offer television shows like "The O.C." and locally made programs and movies. Users, who will have to register for the service, will be able to keep the movie indefinitely. But instead of getting a movie from a central server, pieces of it could come from other people on the network who also bought that movie.

The Arvato architecture is similar to that used by peer-to- peer systems like BitTorrent, a technology that enables millions of people to share copyrighted movies and other material online without paying for them. Peer-to-peer technology has long been blamed for enabling the theft of music and movies online. But with Internet and DVD piracy on the rise, the Hollywood studios are looking for ways to harness peer-to-peer and other Internet-based technologies.

"Studios can't just turn their backs and hope 'P2P' is going to go away tomorrow," says Kevin Tsujihara, president, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. In2Movies will use Arvato's new platform, called GNAB to deliver movies. GNAB adds security features onto the movies so they can't be pirated, makes sure the movie owners get paid each time a consumer on In2Movies buys a movie, and routes the movies through computers owned by In2Movies' users. By using the service, people will essentially agree to let In2Movies turn their own computers into miniservers to help distribute entertainment to others around the network.

In Germany, In2Movies will be competing with services that provide online access to filmed entertainment, among them an Internet movie-rental service run by Deutsche Telekom AG. It will also be going up against stores that sell physical DVDs.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...main_tff_t op





Programs in Peril
Andrew Sullivan

With a spiking number of security flaws, the programs you run every day are now a more enticing hacker target than your operating system.

The Windows OS has become battle-hardened over years of trial by fire, enduring relentless hacker attacks. Although sometimes- critical flaws continue to surface, security patches applied via automatic updates have made Windows a tougher nut to crack.

If hackers were still just kids out to cause trouble and make a name for themselves, this might be enough to divert them to less destructive pursuits. But these days money, not mayhem, motivates a determined core of Internet attackers. (See the exclusive PCWorld.com series "Web of Crime" for more on this new and unsettling trend.)

These hackers are looking for easier ways to break into your computer--and they're finding your applications.

Porous Programs

It could be your antivirus application that leaves you exposed to online threats. It could be the media player software that opens the door to your unsuspecting PC. Even playing a CD on your computer could prove dangerous, should the disc contain slipshod anticopying software.

And Mac users, wipe that smug look off your faces: Because these security flaws are found in applications rather than operating systems, you are at risk as well.

Desktop programs such as iTunes, RealPlayer, and even the security-conscious Firefox now account for more than 60 percent of serious vulnerabilities, according to the British security firm Qualys. See the chart "Keep an Eye on These Apps" for a tally of flaws in popular applications.

The trend has offset years of painstaking progress in improving Internet security, says Allan Paller of the SANS Institute, a Maryland cybersecurity research organization. "We're back to where we were six years ago," he warns.

Windows remains a popular hacker target simply because it's so prevalent on both consumer and corporate computers, and new, sometimes critical vulnerabilities still surface on a regular basis. One recent major Windows flaw involving.wmf image file handling could have given attackers remote control of your machine (Microsoft quickly released a patch, however).

Despite new holes, though, Microsoft products are still notably more secure than they used to be, according to John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner Research. The majority of security risks now surface in everyday apps like Web browsers, media players, and even must-have antivirus applications, according to SANS's recent report, "The Twenty Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities."

Browse With Care

Web browsers appear to be the most vulnerable applications today, drawing dozens of security warnings from the research firm Secunia. Compounding their flaws are problems afflicting the programs responsible for much of the Web's back end, including domain-name servers and the PHP scripting language that runs many discussion boards. A well-crafted attack could, for example, "poison" domain-name servers to redirect visitors from a legitimate Web site to a thieving phony site that takes advantage of browser holes to surreptitiously install malicious code on the users' computers.

Other browser vulnerabilities could allow Internet thugs to manipulate dialog boxes, for instance, so users might think that they're responding to an important system message when they're actually downloading malicious code.

Microsoft has blurred the line between Internet Explorer and the rest of Windows. Whether it's a deep-down part of the operating system or a distinct application, the dominant browser still has the most potential pitfalls. However, security holes in alternative programs such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera make them targets as well. Both IE competitors tend to fix new-found holes with quickly released patches, but remember: If you don't keep up with the updates, you're in danger.

Music to Hackers' Ears

Browser holes are like bull's-eyes for hackers, because most everyone surfs the Web. But those ubiquitous programs aren't the only popular applications to suffer from security risks. iTunes, RealPlayer, and other media players have multiple failings as well. Attackers could disguise their malicious code to look like a digital song or movie file, researchers say, or they could simply force the hapless media player to choke on an overly long Web address in order to take control of a vulnerable computer.

For the time being, however, flaws in media players are mostly a theoretical threat. Researchers have found viruses masquerading as MP3 files but have yet to put their finger on a serious attack against player programs. Don't wait for disaster to strike, though: If your media player has been alerting you about an available update, get it. Or check the software's version yourself (under the Help menu, usually) if your player doesn't give you a heads-up. Reducing the threat by uninstalling media players you don't use regularly is also a good idea.

Even must-have antivirus programs suffer from flaws. The number of vulnerabilities in antivirus and other security software is increasing at a faster rate than for Windows, according to a 2005 Yankee Group report that looked at government statistics.

While most every antivirus program updates itself quickly to close any newly discovered holes, an old antivirus utility can be worse than useless, SANS's Paller says.

Threat: Old Antivirus Apps

"The problem is, a lot of people get a free version of those things, and they don't subscribe," Paller explains. "They install it on their computer and think they're okay, and then they're dead--what looks like a nice gift of a free antivirus tool becomes a threat," he says.

If your subscription has run out, upgrade to the latest version of the application, resubscribe to another year of updates, or shop around for a new program. No-cost alternatives include AVG Free and Avast Home Edition. We put these and eight other antivirus utilities to the test in "The New Virus Fighters."

One threat that didn't make the SANS list was Sony BMG's clumsy attempt to prevent its songs from being distributed over peer- to-peer networks. Malicious software writers quickly developed a worm that exploited a file-hiding "rootkit" in the third-party copy- protection software used on 49 of Sony BMG's CD titles.

So what to do? Though new vulnerabilities pop up seemingly every day, the oldest ones still present the greatest threat, Gartner's Pescatore says. Taking even the most basic security precautions--namely, keeping your Web browser and your antivirus software up-to-date--can keep you ahead of the game.

Empty Advice?

Paller is less optimistic about the situation. Most Internet users have things other than online security on their minds, and the boilerplate advice dished out by well-intentioned advocates doesn't help much, he says.

"I think words like 'Be diligent' are stupid. I don't think people are diligent," he explains, "[and it's] because they're busy. So I think they're just going to have a lot of machines taken over and used and filled with spyware."

The situation won't change until consumers pressure software makers to place a greater emphasis on security, Paller adds. That's already happening in the corporate world, as buyers are writing security requirements into big contracts. On the consumer front, the success of products like Firefox that concentrate on security could inspire other vendors to step up their game.

Paller believes that a heavyweight such as Microsoft will eventually find a way to bundle software updates from other vendors along with its own--a scenario that might make life easier for users but could upset rivals already concerned about Microsoft's dominance.

Stay tuned.

Keep an Eye on These Apps

The most recent list of the top 20 Internet vulnerabilities from computer security research organization SANS highlighted a disturbing development: There are now more known security holes in desktop applications than in the Windows operating system.

Five Tips for Securing Your Programs

Here's how to stay safe and keep your applications up-to-date without spending the time to become an IT expert.

Turn on automatic updates: If a program supports this crucial feature, enable it. Windows Update takes care of patching Internet Explorer, and Firefox 1.5 has its own automatic update. You should have the program ask you before it applies the change, though, just to stay on top of what's going on with your computer.

Lock down IE: Update your browser settings for maximum security. Select Tools, Internet Options, click on the Security tab, and choose Custom Level for the Internet zone. Disable ActiveX controls, set Java permissions to high, and disable 'access to data sources across domains'. Also disallow 'paste operations via script'.

Try a third-party service: VersionTracker's Web site lists available patches for a wide range of applications on PCs, Macs, and even Palms. For $30 you can download VersionTracker Pro, which scans your installed programs and provides easy patch downloads for out-of-date apps. BigFix offers a free consumer program that looks for application flaws and other vulnerabilities

Stay informed: Get the latest security news and analysis delivered to your electronic doorstep by subscribing to an RSS feed from antivirus software maker Kaspersky or from Internet security company Sophos.

Do it yourself: Set a once-a-month calendar reminder to check for updates from within the program (if it allows that) or to look for patches at the maker's Web site. It's worth the nagging.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2006...NlYwN5bmNhdA--





Animé, Piracy And Profits

The Japanese-style animation business has figured out a way to live with piracy and keep fans buying

Movie execs this Christmas have one common request on their list to Santa: an end to piracy. But just in case he doesn't deliver, the showbiz world is doing whatever it can on its own to crack down, from placing spies in theaters to look for rogue video tapers to Sony recently bundling a program on its CDs that closed its music to copying -- but also opened up customers' PCs to all kinds of viruses.

As mainstream showbiz continues its cat-and-mouse quest to protect its intellectual property, one tiny niche has figured out a way around the problem: Anime, the Japanese style of animation that typically features saucer-eyed women and giant mechanical men, and manga, its print cousin.

Though small -- the retail market for both is worth just $625 million – this animated world is growing rapidly, with sales up 13 percent between 2002 and 2004. More, they've managed this growth by doing what Hollywood seems increasingly incapable of: winning over fans instead of fearing them.

The numbers in mainstream entertainment are bad: Hollywood box-office receipts are down 7 percent over last year's middling performance. Goldman Sachs forecasts virtually no growth in DVD sales for the major studios in 2006 and an outright decline in sales the year after that. The networks have seen a 7.4 percent drop in TV viewings by 18- to 49-year- olds so far this fall compared with last year.

Yet with anime and manga, its fans -- known as otaku -- keep showing up, cash in hand. (Translated literally, otaku is Japanese for "your household." But for obscure reasons, otaku morphed in modern Japan to connote a scarily hard-core fan; in the U.S. it's more benign and relates only to fans of anime and manga.)

This tidy little corner of the show-biz universe makes for a rare example of an entertainment niche that does more than not alienate its customers: It has found ways to keep them buying and buying.

In the process, anime and manga firms have taken on forms very different from Hollywood studios or publishing houses. They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people -- whether it's on a DVD or over a mobile phone or downloadable -- and see what happens. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.

"Companies in this space live and die by their ability not only to produce quality product but to retain street cred with the audience," says Mike Kiley, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Tokyopop, which dominates manga in the U.S.

One of the ways they do that is by tolerating the folks who have the potential to put them out of business: pirates trading anime online. And not just trading, but competing to see who can create the best subtitled version of a particular show.

This is open-source TV programming. "Fansubbers," as they're called, can spend more than a dozen hours collectively just to get a half-hour show ready for English speakers. TV watchers in Japan start the process by recording an anime show and uploading it to the Net. Bilingual fans around the world translate the dialogue and post an English version of the show on the Internet using BitTorrent, a piece of software that allows large files to be downloaded quickly

Companies in the industry watch to see what's hot online -- using the fansubbers as a first indicator to what might play well in the U.S. The more a show is being fansubbed, the more likely it is to be a hit. Once a U.S. company licenses the show, most fansubbers -- operating off a strict code of conduct -- scour the net to make sure their versions of the show don't show up anymore. That way, they say, they're ensuring that the companies that bring anime to the U.S. can make money on their DVDs -- and spread the religion.

So far, it's working. In Baltimore last summer, some 22,000 anime fans -- many dressed up as their favorite characters -- paid up to $55 each to attend the Otakon anime convention. By the second day of the three-day event, Baltimore's convention center had sold out and the scalpers started offering up tickets. Even women are starting to get into the once male- dominated action. Female fans now make up about half the attendees at the conferences.

True, it's a rather, shall we say, "elite" subset of fans who'll dress up in public as the miniskirted title character from Sailor Moon, but anime really has gone mainstream. The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim -- a late-night block of adult-oriented cartoons -- has managed for the majority of the year to be the top cable draw for 18- to 24-year-olds.

What draws them in? These cartoons all have a soap opera appeal: Plots build over the course of an unusually long season (typically 52 episodes), as characters die, fall in love, do dumb things.

On the manga side, sales have more than doubled since 2002, to $125 million in 2004, according to pop-culture market analysts ICv2.

Responding to the interest, CosmoGirl last summer began running its own manga strip on the back page of every issue. "We started hearing girls say their favorite books and favorite things to read were manga," says Ann Shoket, the magazine's executive editor. "The girls have drawn their own manga for us. Not just one weird girl -- a lot of girls."

In the U.S., the market for anime is dominated by AD Vision, a Houston-based importer and distributor, with a $150 million slice, or almost a quarter of total sales. A college dropout, CEO John Ledford started Gametronix, the predecessor to ADV, in 1991, importing Japanese videogames and hawking them out of a small storefront in Houston. The following year he bought the rights to the movie version of the videogame hit Devil Hunter Yohko.

Ledford spent around $55,000 licensing the work and producing it for the U.S. He made his money back in 90 days and never looked back. "I said, 'Hey, that's pretty good, let's try it again.' "

Since then, ADV has released more than 700 anime series on DVD. ADV gets about 90 percent of its $50 million in wholesale revenues from DVD sales, yet Ledford is determined to deliver content via whatever medium the fans want. "That's video-on-demand, that's mobile, that's going to our Web site and being able to buy an episode from us for four bucks."

Ledford thinks the key is simply keeping the fans happy -- make sure you do that and the fans will do much of your hard work for you. "The hard-core fan base is very rabid," he says. "They will get behind you as a company. You don't have to spend a dollar in marketing; you just have to be friends with them."
http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/13/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes





Overheard

Some things will never change…

12. @ 22:15 elmo406 wrote:

COME ON PEOPLE FOR CRYIN OUT LOUD IF YOU HAVE NO PIC OR NO SOUND PLZ MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL THE UP TO DATE CODEC I DONT WANNA SOUND OUT OF ORDER BUT SOME PEOPLE COMPLANE A LOT
http://www.mininova.org/com/165048





Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone
John Markoff

It sounds like a project that just about any technology-minded executive could get behind: distributing durable, cheap laptop computers in the developing world to help education. But in the year since Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, unveiled his prototype for a $100 laptop, he has found himself wrestling with Microsoft and the politics of software.

Mr. Negroponte has made significant progress, but he has also catalyzed the debate over the role of computing in poor nations — and ruffled a few feathers. He failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on including its Windows software in the laptop, leading Microsoft executives to start discussing what they say is a less expensive alternative: turning a specially configured cellular phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, demonstrated a mockup of his proposed cellular PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, and he mentioned it as a cheaper alternative to traditional PC's and laptops during a public discussion here at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Craig J. Mundie, Microsoft's vice president and chief technology officer, said in an interview here that the company was still developing the idea, but that both he and Mr. Gates believed that cellphones were a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations. "Everyone is going to have a cellphone," Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV's are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.

Mr. Mundie said there was no firm timing for the cellphone strategy, but that the company had encouraged such innovations in the past by building prototypes for consumer electronics manufacturers.

It is not clear to what extent Mr. Negroponte's decision to use free open-source software in the laptop instead of Windows spurred the alternative plan from Microsoft. But Mr. Gates has been privately bitter about it, and Mr. Mundie has been skeptical in public about the project's chance of success.

"I love what Nick is trying to do," Mr. Mundie said. "We have a lot of concerns about the sustainability of his approach."

This has not deterred Mr. Negroponte. At a private breakfast meeting on the digital divide at the forum on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.

Also on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte's nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations Development Program at a news conference here, under which the two will work together to develop technology and learning resources.

Mr. Negroponte is showing only a mockup of his laptop, which will have a carrying handle, built-in stereo speakers, a wireless data connection, a hand crank to generate power and a screen that is visible even in bright sunlight. He said that he hoped to be able to hand out working laptops to some participants at the forum in Davos next year.

He also acknowledged that months of discussions with Microsoft and Apple Computer about using their operating system software for his computer had been fruitless, and that as a result, the laptops would use a version of Linux, the open-source operating system.

According to several people familiar with the discussions, Microsoft had encouraged Mr. Negroponte to consider using the Windows CE version of its software, and Microsoft had been prepared to make an open-source version of the program available.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, had also offered a free version of his company's OS X operating system, but Mr. Negroponte rejected that idea because the software was largely not open- source, meaning users could not get free access to software and its source code, which they could then modify. Mr. Negroponte said in an interview here that he had resolved to use Linux not because it was free but because of its quality and maintainability.

"I chose open-source because it's better," he said. "I have 100 million programmers I can rely on."

At the same time, Mr. Negroponte, who is on the board of the Motorola Corporation, said he was not opposed to the idea of building a low-cost computer using a cellphone. He said his research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab had experimented with the idea of a cellphone that would project a computer display onto a wall and also project the image of a keyboard, sensing the motion of fingers over it. But the researchers decided the idea was less practical than a laptop.

Some business and development policy specialists have raised questions about Mr. Negroponte's laptop, pointing to the price of Internet connectivity, which can cost $24 to $50 a month in developing nations. But Mr. Negroponte said networking costs would not be an obstacle because the laptops would be made to connect automatically in a so-called mesh network, making it possible for up to 1,000 computers to wirelessly share just one or two land-based Internet connections.

The Media Lab researchers are also planning to approach an upcoming meeting of the international consortium overseeing G.S.M., or global system for mobile communications, for cellular phones about setting up a data standard that would allow low-cost and educational use of wireless network capacity.

"We call the concept 'standby bits,' " Mr. Negroponte said, explaining that the concept was similar to the way standby passengers on airlines can travel when there are empty seats. The laptops would send and receive Internet data only when higher-paying commercial data was not being transmitted.

At the Davos meeting, a number of participants raised questions about the wisdom of Mr. Negroponte's plan to persuade governments to underwrite the cost of the laptops.

Stuart Gannes, director of the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, said a better way to bring computers into poor countries would be to put them into the hands of entrepreneurs and make them revenue generators. "We need to look at technology as a way to bring cash into the poorest communities," Mr. Gannes said.

Mr. Negroponte said that "a lot of people were apprehensive" about the project before he won the backing from Quanta, but that he believed he had put the doubts to rest. Quanta manufactures about one-third of the world's laptop computers, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/te...=1&oref=slogin





The Media

How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness
David Carr

FOOL millions, make millions. Fool Oprah, lord help you.

James Frey, the author of "A Million Little Pieces" — which could yet become the first book ever to lead both the fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists — reported to the set of "Oprah" on Thursday to complete his public abasement. Ms. Winfrey turned on him with calculated efficiency, using him to mop up the floor and clean up her reputation at the same time.

She did not stop there, going on to lecture Nan A. Talese, the head of Doubleday, about the need for the book industry to be more careful in choosing what to stand behind — good advice, from someone who should know. Her show was a tutorial in how to take responsibility and deflect it to others at the same time; by the end, the truth and Ms. Winfrey were aggrieved in equal measure.

But the battle cry to reform the book industry was really just an effort to repair the specific damage to Ms. Winfrey's own lustrous brand. Last year, Ms. Winfrey had put some Oprah's Book Club lightning on "A Million Little Pieces" and it ended up selling 3.5 million copies. Even after the Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) blew giant holes in Mr. Frey's version of his life, Mr. Winfrey continued to defend him — calling in during "Larry King Live" in his defense — until it was clear that it was not just his reputation that was taking a pounding.

How was it that "A Million Little Pieces" came to pose an asymmetric threat to both the book industry and Ms. Winfrey? The book never seemed to be a big issue among people I talked to who were recovering from addictions — most of them thought he was full of beans. But for a broader aspirational audience, his triumph over addiction was both unbelievable and totally believable.

And no one knows the cycle of triumph, abasement and rehabilitation better than Ms. Winfrey, who embodies bootstrap excellence. Perhaps that may be part of the reason she fell so hard for James Frey, who threw off his chains without, as Newsweek pointed out, any of those "wussy 12-step programs."

ALTHOUGH Mr. Frey, unlike Ms. Winfrey, was a child of privilege who had to walk a long way to find trouble and inflict it on himself, his book's underlying message about the strength of individual will and stubbornness — he seemed to sober up out of spite more than anything else — was too compelling to put down for Ms. Winfrey, who had been told that she was doing it the wrong way ever since she started to build her media empire.

But, in her own way, in her own time, she came to understand that she had been had by Mr. Frey. Thursday, she opened the show by looking directly into the camera and saying, "I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not is what I believe."

But what started as a mea culpa soon turned into j'accuse. Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs. A Greek chorus of media types (including from The New York Times), ostensibly on hand to provide third-party context to examine Ms. Winfrey's enthrallment with a con, mostly fell into step as well. Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist who had written that Ms. Winfrey was "deluded," was beaming and describing her as "mensch of the year."

By the time the program was over, she was surrounded by carnage, but she did not have a hair out of place. "I believe the truth matters," she concluded to thunderous applause.

And so it does. With network news crippled and major newspapers suspect, Ms. Winfrey is regarded as a bulwark of veracity. But as this episode proves, she can be had when a narrative bends to her belief system or touches on her sense of moral outrage.

Just last September, she visited New Orleans after the flood and spoke with Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Chief Edwin P. Compass III about life inside the Superdome. "We had little babies in there, some of the little babies getting raped," the mayor said. "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Not much of that was true either, but there was no well-considered corrective, no royal summons for the mayor and police chief to come to Chicago and explain themselves. In that case, the damage done was to the reputation of a flooded city, not the Brand Called Oprah.

How strong is that brand? Consider that Ms. Winfrey is about to set new standards and principles for an industry that she does not belong to. "The book industry has been deeply embarrassed and I think that her show pointed up the disconnect between publishing and the real world," said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.

If Mr. Frey is the pathogen, then Ms. Winfrey will be the catalyst. Look for a great deal of noise about fact-checking and the book industry's sacred trust with the reader.

"I think whether it is going to be a fig leaf or an honest attempt to make sure we are a bastion of accuracy, something is going to happen," said David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins (a subsidiary of the News Corporation).

But Ms. Winfrey will not fix the book business any more than she fixed television when she dumped the tabloid elements of her show years ago. She is a cultural Dustbuster, someone who cleans up messes by living her values and focusing on what is good and right. Her willingness to put both her wealth and her mouth on the line has improved lives in South Africa, raised much-needed money for New Orleans and made any number of afflictions household names.

She is also a force for good because she reminds people staring at the television that there is a big wide world of words out there. Sales of "Night," Elie Wiesel's holocaust memoir, are already beginning to soar as her next book club selection, demonstrating that her taste and title-making abilities are undiminished.

But she won't repair the book business by a wag of the finger. The most important thing that Ms. Winfrey can do for publishing is pick better books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/bu...ia/30carr.html





Philadelphia, EarthLink Finalize Contract For Wi-Fi Network
AP

EarthLink Inc. has finalized a 10-year contract to provide wireless Internet service across Philadelphia, a city official said Monday.

Philadelphia was the first large city to announce plans to build a wireless Internet network and provide low-cost access to residents as a way to span the digital divide. Smaller
cities already have networks in operation.

In Philadelphia, EarthLink will own the network and charge a wholesale rate of $9 a month to Internet service providers that would then resell access to the public, according to Dianah Neff, the city's chief information officer.

The contract doesn't specify the monthly rate that would be charged to consumers, but Neff said the wholesale price is low enough to enable ISPs to offer low-cost services. City officials had been trying to keep the monthly price to $20 or less.

The contract will go before the City Council for approval in February. Construction should start right after the contract is signed. EarthLink will build the network initially over a 15-square-mile area in Northeast Philadelphia to prove the system will work, Neff said. If successful, citywide access could be turned on by spring 2007.

Under the terms of the agreement, which can be renewed, Atlanta-based EarthLink will carry the cost to build the Wi-Fi network to cover 135 square miles.

EarthLink also will pay the city and Wireless Philadelphia, the nonprofit handling the project, a fee to mount equipment on city infrastructure, such as lamp posts.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13748639.htm





World-Wide-Wi-Fi

Wireless: Want To Pay, Or Not? A Plan With A Choice
Eric Sylvers

With the proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots, it has become increasingly convenient to tote around a laptop, sit down at a coffee shop, airport or hotel and pay for a wireless, high-speed connection to the Internet.

Fon, a two-month old company in Madrid, now wants to create a worldwide Wi-Fi network out of all the Wi-Fi connections people have in their homes. Much as you might pay to connect to a T-Mobile hot spot at a Starbucks, with Fon you could connect to somebody's home Wi-Fi connection.

Fon, which was created by Martin Varsavsky - an Argentine who has already founded several successful Internet companies, like Jazztel and Ya.com - has signed up 3,000 users since November.

Varsavsky said in an interview that he hoped his company would have more hot spots by the end of 2006 than anybody else. "That is very ambitious," Varsavsky conceded, "but we already registered 3,000 people in two months, and T-Mobile, which has the biggest network of hot spots, has 24,000 and it took them four years. With Fon, the potential is enormous because every person who has a Wi-Fi connection in their home can quickly and easily become a hot spot for others to use."

Fon already has registered users - or foneros, as Varsavsky calls them - in 53 countries, with almost one-third of them in Spain. France and the United States rank second and third, with several hundred users each.

The principle behind Fon is that users have a choice to be freeloaders or to pay for access. After downloading the Fon software from www.en.fon.com and installing it on a home router - it works only with Cisco Linksys routers for now - they can decide how to set up their accounts. The two main options are between being a "Linus" or a "Bill," referring to Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of Linux, and Bill Gates of Microsoft. The "Bill" option will be introduced in March.

As a Linus, you make your hot spot available to registered users for free, and you can use other people's hot spots for free. As a Bill, you charge people to use your hot spot, but you also must pay to use the hot spots of others.

A user can also choose to be an "alien," a person who does not offer a Wi-Fi connection but pays to use other people's connections.

Fon works on Windows and Linux operating systems. A hot spot will work even if a computer is off, as long as the router is on, preferably near a window so that it maximizes its range.

"I'm sure some money can be made with this, but I don't know how many people will be willing to pay," said Varsavsky, who has invested E700,000, or $850,000, in Fon. The company has 18 employees, received no outside funding and has so far marketed itself only on the Internet.

Fon's plan is to take a 50 percent commission on the fee that the Bills and the Aliens pay to connect to the Internet.

The first 120 days are free. After that, it may cost E1 for a 30-minute connection and E5 for 24 hours - far cheaper than most commercial wireless networks today - though the prices are not set.

Ian Keene, a London-based vice president with the consultancy firm Gartner, wondered if there was really a need for Fon in an era of growing public hot spots.

"More and more cities are providing extensive free Wi-Fi access," Keene said. "Unofficially, people are already using the Wi-Fi hot spots that aren't password-protected, so I'm not too sure Fon will be useful for a lot of people."

Keene also questioned the security of this type of ad hoc network, as well as its legal implications. Many Internet service providers have clauses in their contracts prohibiting clients from sharing their access.

"This has been an issue with some services providers in the United States," Varsavsky said, "but once they understand Fon better, they will realize it can be an asset for them.

"Instead of selling Wi-Fi access only in somebody's house, they can market it as being a worldwide connection when coupled with Fon."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/...wireless31.php





Seamless Peer 2 Peer and OrionsWave Collaborate on Phenom(TM) Software Development
Press release

Seamless Wi-Fi, Inc. subsidiary Seamless Peer 2 Peer, Inc. announced today that has entered into a software development agreement with OrionsWave which will ensure final release integrity of Phenom™ P2P, secure collaborative communications software for Seamless Peer 2 Peer and Seamless Skyy-Fi, Inc. The agreed upon development schedule predicates completion by the end of the second quarter of 2006.

Nils Lahr, the CEO of OrionsWave, said, "As experts in our field, we take on interesting challenges that we believe will help change the world. The Seamless Phenom system we are working on is a challenging opportunity that will result in a focused and extremely powerful system that will solve acute pain points in the growing collaborative communications industry."

OrionsWave has extensive experience in developing unique and robust digital communications systems, such as helping architect real-time digital media delivery from submarine to satellite to studio for 'Return to the Titanic' and consulting for Arnold Schwarzenegger on many of his projects including the Arnold Classic. OrionsWave team members have done extensive special project work for the U.S. Air Force in addition to helping launch the first digital studio in the world, CNNfn, along with creating other CNN website technologies.

OrionsWave has dedicated digital media expert Jeremy Zullo to the Phenom project due to his extensive experience in architecting large software solutions. Jeremy helped invent the first Java-based system to enable real-time trading and secure media delivery over the Internet for Bloomberg and he has held senior engineering positions in many Silicon Valley startups.

Highlighted Links

Seamless Wi-Fi Inc.
Mr. Luke Rippy, President of Seamless Peer 2 Peer, said, "We are extremely fortunate and excited to work with a team drawing on the skills and capabilities of Nils, Jeremy and their associates. They will be integral to building Phenom into the most robust and secure P2P collaborative communications solution available."

Phenom™ Encryption Software V2.0 is a Peer 2 Peer Virtual Private Network for Wi-Fi networks, LANs and WANs that provides Chat, Peer-Mail, File Transfer and Remote PC Control applications. Phenom utilizes public-key authentication and encryption using the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The previous development firm, Software Technology and Consulting, Inc., failed to fulfill the parameters of its contract by the December 15, 2005 due date.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...ease_id=107641






U.K. Battles Web TV Regulation
Graeme Wearden

The U.K. government is fighting an attempt by the European Commission to change the way television is regulated in Europe amid fears that this could lead to the regulation of Internet content.

James Purnell, the broadcasting minister, plans to lobby a number of European countries this week against proposed changes to the Television Without Frontiers directive.

This directive governs TV services throughout Europe, but as it was introduced in 1989, the legislation does not include any references to the Web. As the broadband boom is encouraging media companies to stream television and video services across the Internet, the European Commission has proposed updating the directive to reflect this.

The Commission has proposed that TV services over the Internet, or to mobile phones, would be subject only to "a basic set of minimum principles" that would seek to protect minors, prevent incitement to racial hatred and outlaw surreptitious advertising.

Purnell, though, has indicated that the U.K. government will oppose the EC's actions. He instead supports a continuation of today's system of self- regulation.

"There is no benefit to the consumer that justifies this move. This increased scope could mean significant regulation of the Internet and stifle the growth of new media services. That would raise prices for consumers and deprive them of potential new services," Purnell said last week, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Earlier this month, culture secretary Tessa Jowell told the Oxford Media Convention that the Commission's existing proposals were "as a whole...still unacceptable".

The Commission's draft proposals are due to be debated later this week by EU member states.

The Sunday Telegraph also claimed that Google was planning to lead the charge against the updated directive. Sources at Google denied on Monday that this was the case, insisting that the search giant is just one of many concerned companies.

The Commission's proposal is controversial because it touches on the sensitive issue of Internet regulation. In the U.K., communications regulator Ofcom's purview does not extend to the Internet. However, it does play a key role in enforcing broadcasting regulations such as the watershed, which prevents material of an adult nature being broadcast before 9 p.m.

Restrictions such as the watershed become increasingly irrelevant in an online world, where users can choose to watch an extremely wide range of content at any hour of the day or night, streamed from almost anywhere in the world.

Just more than a year ago, U.K. Internet service providers urged Ofcom not to get involved in the regulation of TV programs over the Web.

However, Internet companies are prepared to live with regulation and restriction if it helps them to compete in new, valuable markets--as illustrated last week by Google's decision to restrict its services for Chinese users.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+battles+Web...3-6032794.html





Google Case Highlights the Risks and Rewards of Data Retention
Michael Geist

The Internet community has been buzzing for the past ten days about the U.S. Department of Justice' s demand for search data from the world' s leading search engines. Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft have all reportedly complied with the request, however, Google refused, paving the way for a major court battle.

While much of the focus has been on the privacy implications of the USDOJ request, the story highlights a much bigger issue - the significant risks and rewards that arise from retaining enormous amounts of data.

Canadians have become accustomed to protecting their personal information by safeguarding their identification cards, shredding bank statements, or trusting their health provider to protect their medical files, yet they have limited control over search engines, Internet service providers, and e-commerce companies that retain an ever-expanding mountain of data that can reveal personal preferences, interests, and habits.

The USDOJ demand stems from an attempt to prove that legislation, rather than technologies such as content filtering, would be more effective at blocking children' s access to "harmful" materials. In order to prove its case, it sought data from the leading search engines that would allow it to gauge the amount of available pornography on the Internet as well as the frequency with which Internet users search for such content.

The authorities' initial data request was stunning for its sheer breadth. The USDOJ requested all web addresses (URLs) contained in the Google database as well as a record of "all queries that have been entered into your company' s search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005." In other words, it wanted a list chronicling every website in Google database along with literally every search request over a two-month period.

When it faced resistance, the USDOJ agreed to a narrower request that included a random sample of one million web addresses as well as a list of every search string during a one-week period.

Although none of this data relates to a specific individual - it covers hundreds of millions of Internet users - the request has still produced a chilling effect as many begin to question whether search requests thought to be anonymous could ultimately be tracked back to them.

In a broader context, the demand also highlights the growing challenge associated with data retention. All companies, particularly those operating online, recognize the value of retaining information about their users. Some information is essential to providing customer service, while other data can be used to provide users with a customized experience by eliminating the need to re-enter passwords, automatically posting relevant content, or sending permission-based email marketing that accurately reflects the users' interests.

The value of information extends beyond personal data. Once aggregated, retailers can spot trends among demographic groups, ISPs can gauge usage patterns, and search engines can identify what is on the minds of the world' s Internet users.

Given its value, it comes as little surprise to find that companies retain such data for lengthy periods, using sophisticated data mining technologies to analyze the information. While these previous examples illustrate the rewards of data retention (which benefit both companies and their customers), significant risks also exist.

The same data can be mined for purposes that extend far beyond the reasons for which it was initially provided. The Google case provides a classic illustration in this regard as mere search terms take on a new significance in the hands of Department of Justice lawyers.

Some data is not consciously provided at all - it is simply gathered automatically with little thought given to its potential uses. For example, private parties may demand ISP server logs that are generated automatically to assist with new defamation or copyright lawsuits.

One of the biggest risks associated with data retention comes not from requests that proceed through the legal system, but from security vulnerabilities that puts sensitive data into the hands of hackers. Last year, more than 50 million people in North America received notifications that their personal information had been placed at risk due to a security breach.

Policy makers worldwide have scarcely begun to reconcile the risks and rewards of data retention. In the immediate aftermath of the Google issue, at least one U.S. politician has called for new legislation to set limits on data retention and establishes a positive obligation to destroy data under certain circumstances. In Europe, the debate has centered on mandating data retention to assist law enforcement.

While Canadian privacy law establishes general obligations on data retention and destruction, there are few clear legal obligations to either retain or destroy information. In light of recent events, it is time to search for some solutions.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...k=view&id=1089