Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 30th, '06

[JackSpratts]

LOL, Internet War
Sophren

On December 20th, 2006, an internet raid was conducted on the radio show of white supremacist Hal Turner, known for his support of violence against minorities. During the show, an unusually large amount of prank calls were made, loosely organized through internet forums and IRC.

The following is a summary of events as described from a (now deleted) post at the VNN forums, as recorded here.

..

Thursday, Mr. Turner decided to go through the caller ID list he gets from his phone provider, Vonage, and post the numbers he believed were the pranksters. Out of the 12 numbers posted, 8 were obvious caller ID spoofs, and 4 were actual minors who didn't use online telephones like Skype, or were too dumb to hit *67. So Hal decided to pursue this as revenge by posting the numbers on his site and going after the website that coordinated the radio prank by sending off e-mails to have material on that site deleted and the IP addresses of the posters revealed. However, Mr. Turner claimed his lawyers did the emailing, when actually the e-mail was so misdirected, it was obvious that Mr. Turner did it himself.

Friday night, Mr. Turner got an unwelcome surprise. The online pranksters purchased background information and solicited other online databases to find Mr. Turner's house number. Yes, his actual house number, and decided to call him up for extra laughs. Mrs. Turner answered the phone and she wasn't too excited to hear from these pranksters. She threatened to call the police after the caller failed to identify his name and phone number for Mr. Turner to call back. She started to get angry, threatened to post the caller's phone number on the Internet and claim Mr. Turner was not available to take the call, however Mr. Turner got on the phone after a few minutes. The caller told Mr. Turner to remove all information on his website regarding the pranksters, the caller ID lists, and the comments area or his personal information, including his house number, would be posted online. At first, Mr. Turner acted like he would not submit to their demands, and hung up, however after a flood of random phone calls from people on the Internet started, Mr. Turner gave into the harassment, removing all the information that the caller demanded.

Mr. Turner got on his website and submitted to these pranksters demands, removing all the information they requested and replaced it with MERRY CHRISTMAS.

..


On Christmas Eve, he reposted the caller information, pledging to "punish [the crank callers] with a fury [they] have never encountered." Claiming the continued prank calling resulted in threats to his family, Turner issued his own threats:

The ONLY thing any of you are accomplishing is raising the level of brutality I intend to use when I take revenge.

Here is how I will mete out justice according to the action committed:

1) Some of you are going to get the shit beaten out of you.

2) Others are going to be beaten to death, and finally;

3) Others are going to have firebombs thrown through the windows of their houses WHILE THEY ARE HOME and when they - and their families come out, their throats will be cut.

This is the price I will exact for :

1) Harassing my wife (who has nothing to do with my radio show)
2) Recording the harassment of my wife and putting it on the net and
3) Harassing my senior citizen mother.

I am so motivated to to physical violence to these people that I don't even care to state my intentions publicly. Neither cops, nor Prosecutors, nor Judges will be able to stop me.
..

Using the legal system to get their identities is one thing, payback is quite another.

I don't have to win in court, I only need to win out of court.

Street justice. Get it?

..

I meant every word and I absolutely will carry out every word. Nothing on earth can prevent it.

You dare say I put myself in this position? Fuck you. You guys called MY show. You guys Crank Called and threatened MY wife. You guys crank called and threatened my mother.

I didn't start this, but I will God Damned well finish it.

Laugh all you like. We'll see how hard you laugh when my hand is crushing your windpipe and you're drowning on your own blood.
http://turnerchan.blogspot.com/2006/...ernet-war.html





HD disk format wars are over

A Clear Victor Emerges
Charlie Demerjian

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, the better choice(TM).

Yes, in a year where Sony rootkitted it's customers, lied to my face about their actions (hi John, still have your number, kisses), and fell flat with anything related to Blu-Ray, things couldn't get worse right? Well, the other camp, HD-DVD is only slightly less nasty, but still unacceptable. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both failed in the market.

MS and the media companies sold you out hoping to reap more and more profits. Let me just say I held out no hope that they would behave in anything less than a socially irresponsible fashion, but the depths of their depravity did end up shocking me.

Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest in this camp. From my dealing with them last CES where they said 'we have to screw our customers, we were asked nicely to', to the blaming of people up and down the food chain from them, it is a comic scenario. Pathetic.

Then comes the chipmakers, AMD and Intel, and the respective platforms, Live and VIIV. What laughable efforts those are. A year and a half ago, I said that Intel sold you out, and they did. The DRM infested nightmares of consumer rights removal that are the media platforms have one thing in common, the content mafia is quite adamant that they are still too insecure. The strategy from Intel was to start at a middle ground and push to the consumer side of things as time went on.

Instead, they started out as MS's bitch and were beaten into submission like a redheaded stepchild. Now they have the glorious job of jumping at the every whim of the media companies, way to hold your head high Intel! I would say the same for AMD, but to this day, I am not sure what Live does, if it really exists.

Both companies will tout absolutely huge sales figures, and MS will point to incredible Media Center sales, up thousands of percent this year alone. Let me clue you in on something, MCE used to mean that you needed a tuner, you had to meet certain requirements for power, speed and functionality. These boxes flopped so badly it was laughable, selling more restrictions for more money is not a bright marketing strategy.

Now, MCE is sold instead of XP home. The requirements? None really, so basically all sales that were home are now MCE. I defy you to find any retail customer who actually uses it in that fashion, maybe 1% do.

With the proliferation of MCE, both Live and VIIV stickers moved out into mainstream boxes. Damn those things sell like hotcakes, umm, what do they get me besides DRM infections again? No, really, I mean it, WTF do they do? Anyone? So, both Intel and AMD are jumping up and down over the 'successes' of their respective DRM for manufacturer kickback programs. Be still my beating heart.

Basically, what we have is a series of anti-consumer DRM infections masquerading as nothing in particular. They bring only net negatives to anyone dumb enough to pay money for them, and everything is better than these offerings. They sell in spite of the features they tout, not because of them. The manufacturers still have the balls to look you in the eye and say that they are selling because of the programs/features/DRM. Marketers, what a laugh riot.

In the end, every step in this chain of consumer woe that is Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Live, VIIV, HDCP, MCE and Vista is flopping. And that is where the better choice comes in. The consumers have voted with their dollars, and are staying away in droves. All the walls of the walled gardens are being built higher and higher, with the occasional brick landing on the head of someone who pulls out a credit card. Buy now, there is a brick with your name on it whistling down, operators are standing by.

In the mean time, Piracy, the better choice (tm) flourishes. If you take 10 minutes to look around, you will see that every HD movie is now available on P2P networks. I haven't bothered to get one, so I can't comment on the quality, but it sure looks like availability is there. What was an underground clique in the 1980s and 1990s has become mainstream and so vastly much easier to do that it is laughable. Before the technology hits 1% market penetration it is comprehensively cracked and better for the consumer than the legit versions.

The lawsuits, threats, purchased governance and stern speeches could not prevent the children of Warner Music from pirating, the less moneyed masses are a lost cause. (Funny how he wasn't sued though, kind of makes you wonder...) As of right now, anyone can get any music or movie they want, for free, much more easily than they can through legal DRM infected channels. Piracy, the better choice (tm).

If you try and purchase any of this content, you descend into a DRM nightmare of incompatibility and legal mires. Your monitor will not work with your Blu-Ray drive because your PC decided that a wobble bit was set wrong. You just pissed away $6K on a player, media center PC and HD TV for nothing, you lose. The Warner CEOs kids have a nice new car to play their pirated CDs in though.

On the other hand, if you downloaded that content, in HD no less, you save the $1000 on the Blu-Ray player, $30 on the movie, and it works seamlessly out of the box. The available content is much higher with piracy, and it is quite on-demand. You don't need to sign up, give them your details to be sold to marketers who call during dinner and spam you, you just get the content you want, when you want, how you want. There is no iTunes/Plays for (not) Sure incompatibility, it just works. Piracy, the better choice(tm).

On the down side, the RIAA/MPAA/PATSY/TOOLBOY have sued probably 10,000 people now, and each 'settlement' is, well lets just use $5000 for the sake of round numbers. Now, the conservative estimates of P2P usage was around 30 million people, but I am pretty damn sure that is far lower than the actual usage. Last time I saw anything serious, it was 35M and growing fast. Lets just assume that it is now 50M users.

10,000 * $5,000 = $50,000,000. The net cost to each P2P user, assuming everyone out there settles is $1. To look at it another way, if you look at it in the worst case light, you have a 1 in 5000 chance of getting nailed. A lot of people buy lottery tickets with far far worse odds than that, and spend more than $5000 doing so every few years. To be even more cynical, hands up everyone who personally knows someone who got sued by the RIAA. Now, hands up everyone who knows someone who downloaded music or movies. Any guesses which one is bigger? Piracy, the better choice (tm).

What do we end up with? A year or more where the CE industry pushed, pulled, legislated and litigated their way to obscurity. Along the way, they killed yet another promising consumer technology, well 5 or 6 actually, and made Intel and AMD their bitches. We all were on the verge of losing this format and DRM infection war until a dark horse champion emerged to snatch victory from the jaws of evil. Piracy, the better choice(tm).
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36574





Top 5 Reasons Blu Ray Will Never Be In My Home

If you google around, you will find lots of discussions on the Blue Ray format controversy. I decided to simply list my top 5 reasons (top 5 not all the reasons) why a Blue Ray DVD player will never enter my home.

1)Freedom and Spyware
I refuse, absolutely, and unconditionally, to be told when, where, how and in what type of machine I am permitted to watch a movie in my own home. Case closed, give it up. I could care less if you would pay me to have the player in my home, make me a movie star, whatever, no one, let alone a corporation, is going to tell me what to do. I also refuse to have my movie watching choices monitored (and potentially screened by who knows?), have my email sold to marketing companies who will them email me with $2.00 coupons for the latest $30 movie title it decided "You might like this". They can all swear up and down that "they take my privacy seriously", but I have the right not to believe them, and I don't. Not since a certain DRM inspired rootkit fiasco.

2)Internet Connection Required
The Blu-Ray FAQ
states that you don't need an internet connection for "basic playback"

Do I believe that, for now, maybe, however, the bait and switch will come. Otherwise, why bother with BD-Plus? BD-Plus allows vendors to download and update codes into your player? If an internet connection is NEVER required, BD-Plus is useless. At some point you will stick in a new Blu-Ray DVD and the machine will stop working and display on the screen "For your viewing pleasure, you will no longer be allowed to watch movies until server validation occurs" because the DVD uploaded the code telling the player you must phone home.

See, for YOUR sake and viewing pleasure, it must be PROVEN that you are behaving like a good little consumer, following their rules. Besides the implications in my first reason, it is impractical. Not everyone has broadband so is it required to install a second phone line, get local unlimited internet dialup access for the privilege of watching a movie. Once you connect once, will they NOW require you are always connected? Does the ISP cost get billed directly to the manufactuer? What if there is no access in the room you want to watch? Are you going to run phone wires through the walls, be forced to purchase a wireless router, etc. The list of problems with this requirement are simply too much to list, and they can change the rules at ANY time (Thanks to DRM)

3) Software Faults and Crackers
Ok, you have your friends over, you slide in the DVD (rented and unfortunately for you, scratched in a critical way causing confusion in the player) and all of a sudden you get a Message on your screen "This DVD can't be certified by our servers, you will NOT be allowed to watch this movie, we're sorry for the inconvenience. If you feel this message is being displayed in error...".

I believe, UNCONDITIONALLY, in your inability to create bug free software. Before you get upset at that, NO ONE, not just you, writes perfect software. As close as it may come is NASA where every line of code is reviewed by 3 people and they strive for 100% complete path testing. If you wanted to achieve that level of quality control, your DVD players would run in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They won't cost that much, you are not doing that much testing and there will be bugs that impact customers. I have 17 years professionally as a system test engineer, all telecom, and no matter how good it gets, ALL software has bugs.

This will be internet connected device, and is updateable through communication over the net to your servers. The software controls WILL be under attack by skilled crackers, your server(s) may well get compromised by skilled crackers, and when it does, and your server dutifully downloads all the wrong keys disabling thousands of machines, what will you do? After the first successful virus attack is made on Blue Ray devices will you provide, free of charge the anti-virus checker and subscriptions? How about a spyware checker, how about Trojan protection. And NONE of the above is done in ANY way to increase a users enjoyment of a movie.

4) Computer Compatibility
I use Linux. I have never used professionally anything other than UNIX or Linux, and at home, Linux only. 100% of my hardware purchases are made with Linux compatibility in mind. I will never use another OS, and since Blue Ray will ONLY work on a DRM infected operating system, it will never have a place in my computer. You aren't alone though, I will never use or own an IPOD, Download DRMed music from anywhere (I don't download any music actually) until and unless FULL Linux compatibility is available and I can listen to the music the way I want, when I want, on whatever player I decide. I threw this in so that you can see that personally, I am not just picking on Blue Ray out of the blue.

5) What do I get?
Seriously, I am not joking, what do I get. I currently have a DVI input big screen TV. You are going to cripple the full HD Effect to non HDMI inputs.

"Also, if this flag is activated, then the player must downgrade any signal that is leaving the device on an analog connection. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players honor this flag and will only output fvideo at 540p - and as we know 540p is not really high-definition. "

Does anyone reading this think that flag won't be set? I ALREADY get that quality from my upconvert DVD player. Why would I want to put up with #1 through #4 to get an experience I am already getting. Rich interactive experience you say, I say "Go Away". These are the 4 buttons I use when watching a movie. Start, Stop, Pause and Rewind. I have ZERO interest in joining an online discussion group to talk about the movie, or stream in interviews, or whatever other "rich experience" you might have in mind for me. I want to watch a movie, plain and simple.

Well, there you have the top 5. Notice how price isn't even a consideration? The technology makes it unsavory at ANY price. I never did get to the part where you can change the DRM rules as YOU PLEASE at any time and take away something a consumer COULD do in the past. I could make this a top ten, but why bother, isn't 5 reasons enough?

NOTE: HD-DVD is not much, but is a little better, than Blue Ray in my opinion, however, 4 and 5 apply to it, so I'll pass on that technology as well.

Happy Trails

Follow Up Story

TripleII

P.S. All this in a futile effort to eliminate piracy.

http://mostly-linux.blogspot.com/200...ver-be-in.html





AACS DRM Cracked by BackupHDDVD Tool?
Ryan Block

Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical (where you at, Jon?), as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well. Code and source posted in read link, let us know what you find!

Note: We're working on testing this ourselves, we'll report back with our findings asap.

[Thanks, Max and Adam]

Update: Well, it definitely does something. Click on for some pics and our experiences using the app.

So we have our Xbox 360 HD DVD plugged into our system with the Toshiba HD DVD / UFS 2.5 file system drivers going on, and are able to read the directory contents (drive G: ).

We pulled the TRAILER.EVO file down and named it encrypted_TRAILER.EVO. We then ran BackupHDDVD on the disc (Full Metal Jacket).

We quit after we hit TRAILER.EVO, since that's what we wanted to compare against.

We then ran a binary compare against the two. You'd think an unencrypted movie file would have more than just a few hex offsets changed by the unencryption process, but we haven't yet been able to test playing back the files, namely because WinDVD and PowerDVD both totally blow as demos. More shortly.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/a...kuphddvd-tool/





/.

BackupHDDVD FAQ
Black Acid

B a c k u p H D - D V D F A Q

-What is "Backup HDDVD" for?
It can do backup copies of HD DVD movies that YOU OWN! I don't want anyone to do piracy here! This software is a good way to protect your investment, because I have notice that this type of media seems very fragile, if it's scratched a little or dirty, it won't play. It seems less tolerent than DVD format. (Higher density!)

-What "Backup HDDVD" is doing exactly?
This is a java based command line utility that decrypt video files (.evo) from a HD DVD disk that you own, to your hard drive and you can play them back with a HD DVD player software.

-What are the system requirements to use "Backup HDDVD"
1 - A Windows based system
2 - A HDDVD disk drive
3 - A HDDVD player software (like PowerDVD)
4 - A HDDVD movie(s)
5 - Java rutime 1.5
6 - The possibility to access the content of the disk with a drive letter under windows.
(you may need UDF 2.5 file system driver for this)
7 - A lot of free hard disk space to backup your movies!

-Was your first HDDVD movie hard to decrypt?

It took me around a week to do. But I have wasted few days
trying to work on too complicated approach. In fact, it is very simple.

-How do you do that?

The program itself has nothing special. It simply implement the AACS decyption protocol. I have followed the freely available documents about AACS
Have a look at: www.aacsla.com The trick, is to find what they call the "Title keys". So I figure out how to extract them.

-How do you extract the "Title keys"?

I won't explain it in detail. Read the AACS doc first. You will understand. The title keys are located on the disk in encrypted form, but for a
content to be played, it has to be decrypted! So where is the decrypted version of the title key? Think about it...

-What kind of crypto algorithms are involved?
Standards algorithms:
ECC-160
AES-128
Look in the AACS doc for more details.

-What is the TKDB.cfg file?
This is the Title key Database file. It holds the decryption keys for the movies.

-What is the format of this file?
Field 1: SHA1 Hash of the VTKF000.AACS file on your HDDVD disk.
Next fields are pipe "|" delimited.
-Movie Title
-A variable number of Title key, pipe delimited
You have a key number followed by the key value like:
12-08A3DC61910280F2...

Key values are 128 bits long, so 16 bytes, or 32 hexadecimal characters long.

-The TKDB.cfg file provided with your program is empty or incomplete, what can I do?
Here is my TKDB.cfg:

CE6339246F34087AB355681DEB656D23DCD5BD86=Full Metal Jacket | 1-0000000000000000000000
0000000000
486198E3855B57CD40F6DC0C60645BDE8E1E9AC5=Van Helsing |19-0000000000000000000000
0000000000
3D357B0653A66176583C5218FD0149EAF8832FB0=The Last Samurai | 1-0000000000000000000000
0000000000

-What do you think of the technical aspects of AACS?

The design is not that bad, but it's too easy to have an insecure player implementation somewhere. And just one bad implementation is all it needs to get the keys! There will always be insecure implementations of a player somewhere! And the "Revocation system" is totaly useless if you use the Title key directly.

-Is there any known problems with the decryption?
Yes. I call this problem the "Nav chain" bug. I realize that I have a lot of frame skipping at playback after the decryption, so I hunted down the problem. To avoid the frame skipping, I patch the video file. This fix allows smooth playback of the movie, but there are some side effects.

-What are the side effects of the "Nav chain" bug fix?

You cannot do fast forward, or backward using the round dial, but you can still use the progress bar to navigate through the film. So it's not that bad... For some reason, the sub-titles don't seems to work anymore. It may be a side effect of the nav chain bug. But may be not...

-Why the "Nav chain" bug is called the "Nav chain" bug?

Well, it has something to do with the chaining of navigation pack. Look at some doc about standard DVD VOB file, you will see. If someone wants to help me with that bug, please do!

-Are you going to support Blu-Ray?

I don't own a Blu-Ray drive!

-Do you plan to do a user interface version?

No, other people will do. You have the source code, so enjoy it!

-Do you plan to do a Linux version?
See the previous answer.
I don't use any windows specific API and this is a java application!
A port to Linux will be easy.

-Can you send me some decryption keys? PLEASE!
No.

-I have a question for you, can I send you an e-mail?

If you have something like, a technical problem using the software, look in the forums talking about Backup HDDVD first. There will be a lot of information and everyone will help each other out. If there is a major flaw in the program, I will post another version, but honestly I realy want people to bring Backup HDDVD to a higher level without me!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comment... &cid=17385050





Trust is Hard to Gain, Easy to Lose
Blake Ross

Call me naive: I think you can make a lot of money, go public, even monopolize a market, and still retain a moral compass that points in the direction of Google’s stated top priority—users.

But Google lost me today:

Google is now displaying “tips” that point searchers to Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa for any search phrase that includes “calendar” (e.g. Yahoo calendar), “blog” and “photo sharing,” respectively. This is clearly bad for competitors, and it’s also a bad sign for Google. But I generally support anything that benefits users, including monopolistic packaging. I believe, for instance, that shipping Internet Explorer with Windows was a good move. So why are tips bad for users?

First, two notes. One, Yahoo and Ask already do this, but they didn’t build their businesses on the promise of being unconventionally trustworthy. And two, Google has been doing similar things for awhile. Search The Holiday and you’ll get a special box pointing to reviews of and tickets for the movie. The difference is that this is still a filter on the Web; the reviews link to their sources and the tickets link to Fandango. Google may share the Fandango revenue and certainly shuts out competitors, but as a user, I get better service than I would without the box.

The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class. If Google wants to make it faster and easier for users to manage events, create a blog or share photos, it could do what it does when you search GOOG: link to the best services. To prevent Google from being the gatekeeper, the company could identify the services algorithmically.

But if that sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because Google already works that way. After all, Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top. Search for “photo sharing” and you should already get the highest quality services. According to Google, Picasa is not one of them. These “tips,” then, can only be a tacit admission of failure: either the company does not believe in its own search technology, or it does not believe its products are good enough to rise to the top organically. I’d guess the latter. And if I were on the Calendar, Blogger or Picasa teams, I wouldn’t be celebrating the news that my employer has lost faith in me.

Implications for advertisers

Google has been advertising its own products through AdWords for some time, and I see nothing wrong with that. The protest that unjustifiably erupted three weeks ago questioned the positioning of these ads. As advertisers began making antitrust overtures, Walter H. from Google Marketing stepped in to sooth nerves (emphasis mine):
It’s important to note, however, that our ads are created and managed under the exact same guidelines, principles, practices and algorithms as the ads of any other advertiser…There are no algorithm changes to ’smooth the way’ for Google’s ads.

We’re quite proud of the advertising platform we’ve built and it simply makes sense for us to use it. At the same time, the trust of both our users and our advertisers is of paramount importance. We honor that responsibility, and work hard to earn and keep that trust.

What changed in three weeks?

While advertisers compete to be first in a string of lookalike ads that are often shunted to the side, Google now determines the precise position and appearance of ads tips that are not subject to any of the same rules. Its ads get icons while others don’t, and if you think that’s small potatoes, you are not an advertiser: images boost clickthrough. Google can make a Picasa ad say “Easier to use than Kodak,” but Kodak cannot create an ad that reads “Easier to use than Picasa.”1 And the kicker: neither the highest quality ads nor the highest quality search results can replace these tips.

In the end, would you rather be Blogger or TypePad on my screen?

A new kind of bundling

Google’s potential monopoly power is less threatening than Microsoft’s because changing operating systems is hard, while changing search engines is easy—so easy that every engine out there is desperately trying to stay in your face. And choosing an alternative to Microsoft’s bundled software used to be prohibitively complicated for the average person, not to mention time consuming—you had to go to a store and buy a boxed copy or spend the evening downloading it. Eventually everyone will be experienced enough to procure applications, and then word of mouth alone will bury the distribution advantages Google and Microsoft now enjoy.

But we’re not there yet, and in many ways, Google’s new age “bundling” is far worse than anything Microsoft did or even could do. Microsoft threw spaghetti at the wall and hoped it stuck, and likewise there’s nothing wrong with Google’s arbitrary front page ads. The difference here is that Google knows what users want and can discreetly recommend its products at the right time. Microsoft can’t easily hide a program packaged with Windows (and doing so would defeat the purpose), but competitors can only discover Google’s bundling, which might be transient or limited to certain regions, through trial and error searching.

Now let’s put away the tin foil hat and consider this: According to Nielsen NetRatings, the top ten search queries of 2006 were specific services like “Hotmail” (another view). So significant amounts of people, typically novices, use search engines as address bars. Three of the top ten were actual addresses like MySpace.com. If Google decided to show tips for “mail” or “space,” they would appear in these circumstances even though the user is usually en route to a particular destination (working example)2.

Would Google complain if Microsoft informed users about Live Search when they typed Google.com into Internet Explorer’s address bar? Don’t roll your eyes: it would just be another innocuous tip presented to a user en route to a destination. Google owns one of the Web’s command lines, and Microsoft owns the other.

Perhaps the most nefarious aspect of this feature is how it operates within our collective blind spots. Advertisers are happy that Google no longer invades the canonical Ad Results. Technology purists continue to see untainted Search Results. But does my mother make that distinction? How much does a result have to look like a Result to cross the line?

Google promised not to be the type of company that needs to ask.
http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/





Censorship

Genius Grant Please, or The NSFW HTML Attribute

Almost two years ago, in an attempt to combat the rising problem of comment spam, Google unveiled a new HTML attribute:

rel=”nofollow”

By including that attribute in hyperlinks, website administrators direct search engines not to give any credit to the linked content. The attribute is generally applied by most blog software to comment and trackback content before it is posted. This obviously minimizes the incentive for comment spamming as a means of improving a site’s PageRank status.

In the same spirit, I am now proposing a new attribute:

rel=”nsfw”

NSFW is an abbreviation often used to indicate that content is “not safe for work.” This new attribute should be applied to tags to indicate that the content is potentially “not safe for work.”

The attribute has several exciting implications for content creators and site visitors:

1. Content creators can now apply the attribute to hyperlinks. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to warn them, or stop them, before continuing on to URIs flagged with the attribute. Additionally, search engines will be able to use the proportion of flagged links to a URI as a better means of filtering results.
2. Content creators can now apply the attribute to image tags. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of images flagged with the attribute.
3. Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element.

This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.

So who wants to write the first Firefox extension?

We still need something more robust that will support other tags in some sensible way.
http://pj.doland.org/archives/041571.php





Court Not Buying FCC's Claims Over Indecency Fines
Contributed by Mike

As many of you are aware, the FCC in the last few years has spent an awful lot of time on television indecency issues -- though they seem to do so not because of any real offense, but because certain family groups flood the FCC with complaints, often long after a TV show actually aired. The FCC refuses to give TV broadcasters any guidelines or preview any content, noting that that would be "censorship." Instead, they give vague guidelines and will only fine you if you fail to meet the hidden standards.

The networks are fighting back in court, and it looks like the FCC isn't looking very good so far. In court hearings yesterday, the 3-judge panel blasted the FCC on a variety of points, noting that their hidden standards are really no different than censorship -- and, if anything, are worse, because it's just a game of "gotcha."

However, even more to the point, the judges questioned why the FCC feels the need to take over the parents' role in policing what children see on TV, noting that it's the parents' responsibility to monitor what their kids watch. Basically, they say that if parents are worried about what kids are watching in their bedrooms, the parents shouldn't allow TVs in kids' bedrooms.

In other words, it's the parents' responsibility to protect the children, not the government's. The judges also point out how silly it is to hold a separate standard for broadcast TV (the only thing the FCC really has the authority to regulate), when there's so much more on cable and satellite which the kids are probably watching anyway. While that could just open up the FCC to pushing for greater authority over cable and satellite TV (as some politicians would like), it's worth remembering that the FCC's mandate is only over public airwaves -- not private ones, and any change would face tremendous resistance.

While the case is still ongoing, it certainly looks like the court took a pretty hostile view to the FCC's usual reasons for fining broadcasters over indecency.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061221/153821.shtml





Book review

The Stories You Hid From Mom
John Leland

THE NEW BEDSIDE PLAYBOY
A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment

Edited by Hugh M. Hefner

Illustrated. 484 pages. Playboy Press. $19.95, paperback.

In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh M. Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” On first blush his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.

Yet the evidence presented in “The New Bedside Playboy: A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment” suggests a more ambitious grand plan. With its ribald jokes and cartoons, airbrushed “pictorials” and prose selections from America’s best-paid writers — all wrapped up into a glossy connoisseurship that Mr. Hefner called the “Playboy Philosophy” — the magazine can be seen as a mad plot: to create a race of men more boring and insecure than any before. As Mr. Hefner later proposed, “Playboy exists, in part, as a motivation for men to expend greater effort in their work, develop their capabilities further and climb higher on the ladder of success.”

The fix was in from the start. It held sway over American men until the arrival of a medium even more effective at replacing male curiosity with useless pudding: 24-hour sports television. Mr. Hefner introduces the current volume, which has no photographs of naked women, with the wisdom, attributed to an “anonymous sage,” that “most of man’s great pleasures can be found between a book’s covers and beneath a bed’s coverlet,” setting the appropriate tone for this silken time capsule.

Who cites anonymous sages these days? And who talks of coverlets? This collection, he promises, distills 53 years’ worth of “visual tonics,” “light fantastics,” “danses macabres” and “nostalgic frolicking in the snows of yesteryear.” By this he means mainly short stories, but there are also essays, reminiscences, four pages of “party jokes,” 21 mostly dirty cartoons and a long interview in which Saul Bellow is asked what he thought about the O. J. trial (“in California the whole justice system is in deep trouble”) and whether he has known any actors intimately (only Marilyn Monroe, and not in that sense).

Begun five years after the first Kinsey report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Playboy shifted performance anxiety into a realm guys could master, with a little help from a magazine: the right hi-fi gear, the right Bordeaux and the right literary references. It is with erotic aplomb that Mr. Hefner refers to his publication in “The New Bedside Playboy” as “America’s most sophisticated magazine.”

The mix of writers comprises a dream party guest list, albeit heavy on the Y chromosomes: Vladimir Nabokov, T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jimmy Breslin, Thom Jones, Norman Mailer, John Updike and dozens more boldface names. But if you have read any of these writers before, you have probably caught them in better form. No man who knows his way around a coverlet needs Nabokov to supply pickup lines like: “Yes, we Russians are sentimental eccentrics, but believe me, we can love with the passion of a Rasputin and the naïveté of a child. You are lonely and I am lonely. You are free and I am free. Who, then, can forbid us to spend several pleasant hours is a sheltered love nest?” A sheltered love nest? Tell me there’s not a plot afoot here.

In the 1950s and 1960s Cavalier, Nugget, Escapade and other euphemistically dubbed “men’s magazines” published some of the most adventurous new writing in the United States, jump-starting or sustaining the careers of Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, Jack Kerouac and others. The magazines could risk a little raunch, so they were in the right place for the earthier fiction emerging from the margins. The writers collected in “The New Bedside Playboy,” by contrast, are established brand names, apparently selling from the back of their files. One thing about the Playboy mystique: the paychecks were real. And it is good to know there is still a remunerative home for an Ian Fleming story that begins, “The stingray was about six feet from wing tip to wing tip and perhaps 10 feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail,” or a David Mamet rant that vents, in support of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association: “Well, then. We are not too far removed from the viciousness that follows curtailing freedom of the press; e.g., the Red scare of the Fifties and its attempts at rebirth. Neither are we too far removed from the terror that can visit itself on a disarmed populace: the Czechs of Prague Spring, the Jews of Europe under the Third Reich.” Without such diversions we’d have only the present.

Was there really a time when swingers imagined themselves in silk jammies chatting about Nabokov and Brubeck and the latest Cognac? No doubt. Ring-a-ding-ding. The right literary reference, the right hi-fi gear, and voilà: the freedom to go home alone, unswung, to a bit of light fiction, corny jokes and an airbrush that liberated the white-collar male from the uncomfortable burden of human curiosity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/books/28lela.html





Icy Reception
Angela Posada-Swafford

THE COMPUTER ROOM IN THE Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station still smells of fresh paint and new furniture. With its gray carpets, soft lighting, and a couple of artificial plants, it could be the lobby of a modestly prosperous law firm. But the brutal white reflection of an ice desert filtering through tiny tinted windows reminds me that I'm at the bottom of the globe, a long way from everywhere.

Even so, I click Send and an email message – with an ego shot of me standing at the metal post that marks the actual pole's location – flits off to the Internet. A year ago, it wouldn't have been so easy. Back then, messages downloaded at glacial speeds. (I know, I know. But that's what passes for humor down here.)

"Now we're transmitting 15 gigs per day, and every room has a data port with Ethernet service," says Pat Smith, manager of technology development for Antarctic infrastructures and logistics at the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the phones were upgraded to voice over IP. "It's been quite a ride. I mean, I was here in 1985 putting in the very first satellite links we had," Smith says. "Then we had a whopping 200 kilobytes a day." That's about 3 percent the size of an MP3 of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Like the rest of us, the 150 people who spend summers at the Pole always crave more bandwidth. They'd sure like to have BitTorrent to help endure winter's eternal night. But really, it's work that's pushing the scientists to build out connectivity at the station – a collection of facilities raised on hydraulic stilts that seems like the prototype for a Mars colony. By 2014, when a 33-foot-diameter submillimeter radio telescope, a neutrino detector, and other equipment come online, researchers expect to be generating a terabyte of data each day. "These telescope numbers are something that we would never have conceived of 10 years ago," Smith says, pointing at a chart of rapidly climbing red bars. "This is really driving what we're doing."

It's not an easy job. The Pole – aka 90 South – is 3,000 miles from the closest submarine cable connection in New Zealand. Amundsen-Scott relies on the aging Iridium communications constellation plus three miscellaneous satellites wobbling far enough out of their geosynchronous orbits to exchange signals with the station. For now, they provide high-speed service some 11 hours a day and low-speed connectivity the rest of the time. "People can check their bank accounts, pay bills, and buy stock over the Internet," says Erik Kawasaki, a network engineer. "In November, the satellite pass begins at around 3 am New Zealand time, so they have to wake up early to use it. That is about the only gripe."

After a three-hour plane ride back to McMurdo Station – the main US base in Antarctica – I settle in at one of 300 workstations to email yet another picture of me on the ice. The furniture at McMurdo is older, and the station is more crowded – less like Mars and more like a state university. But every so often, the same bone-chilling sense of distance seeps in. Clad in his Carhartt parka, laborer Edgardo Alfonso Vega leans over from the neighboring desk: "Once this season, we were cut off from the world for 27 hours. Something happened, and there was no off-continent connectivity. No phones, no Internet, no nothing," he says. "That's when we felt really, really isolated."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...osts.html?pg=2





Trying To Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic Will Backfire, Badly
Mike

Over the past couple of years, a bunch of ISPs have started (usually quietly) applying traffic shaping efforts to slow down your high bandwidth applications like BitTorrent. This is part of what the whole network neutrality debate is about, but this has more to do with the ISPs trying to keep out services that use up more bandwidth then they budgeted for. What it really represents is the inability of ISPs to recognize a simple fact: if you offer people bandwidth, they'll figure out ways to use it. The ISPs got into this big race with each other, and all promised unlimited bandwidth at cheap prices, making the calculation that the demand for bandwidth wouldn't increase very much, and most people wouldn't use very much at all. They were wrong. But, rather than admit that they made a mistake, they suddenly pretend that the "all you can eat" broadband they sold you is something different -- one where they can arbitrarily limit what you can do with that bandwidth. They sold you one thing, with the belief that you wouldn't actually use it, and now that you are, they're shoving in place temporary fixes to stop you from using what they sold you. Of course, there are many who believe the whole thing is simply a ruse to try to charge everyone more money, a concept that gained steam when a loose-lipped CTO from Qwest admitted that file sharing traffic isn't actually much of a burden for them, and he didn't understand other ISPs claiming it was such a problem.

The funny thing, though, is that whether or not it really is a burden, the idea of using traffic shaping is absolutely going to backfire. As we've already discussed, the more ISPs try to snoop on or "shape" your internet usage, the more that's going to be a great selling point for encryption. People are going to increasingly encrypt all of their internet usage, from regular surfing, to file sharing to VoIP -- as it makes it that much more difficult to figure out what kind of traffic is what and to do anything with it. Broadband Reports today is moderating something of a debate on whether or not encrypting BitTorrent is a good thing, with Wired taking the bad side and TorrentFreak (not surprisingly) taking the good side. Of course, it's really all a matter of perspective. It may be good for some people or bad for the others -- but what's most amusing, is that encrypting all of this traffic will simply add a lot of overhead for the ISPs to deal with. That means, for all their talk about how file sharing traffic was a burden on their network, by trying to slow it down with traffic shaping, they're only likely to increase the burden as everyone shifts to encrypted systems making it more difficult and more costly for them to do anything about it. Add to this that the traffic shaping hardware costs money that could have gone into simply upgrading their overall network, and it seems doubly problematic. They're left with an expensive solution that doesn't solve the issue and actually makes it worse, when they could have just spent more on upgrading their network to handle more capacity.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061226/100457.shtml





(A Fading Signal)
Miguel Helft

It may be the ultimate S O S — Morse Code is in distress.

The language of dots and dashes has been the lingua franca of amateur radio, a vibrant community of technology buffs and hobbyists who have provided a communications lifeline in emergencies and disasters.

But that community has been shaken by news that the government will no longer require Morse Code proficiency as a condition for an amateur license. It was deemed dispensable in part because other modes of communicating over ham radio, like voice, teletype and even video, have grown in popularity.

While the decision had been expected, some ham radio operators fear that their exclusive club has been opened to the unwashed masses — and that the very survival of Morse Code is in question.

“It’s part of the dumbing down of America,” said Nancy Kott, editor of World Radio magazine and a field representative for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Metamora, Mich. “We live in a society today that wants something for nothing.”

A woman in a mostly male world, Ms. Kott is one of about 660,000 licensed ham operators in the United States and is the American leader of Fists CW Club, an organization that calls itself the International Morse Preservation Society. (An “open fist” was the hand position typically used by telegraph operators when sending Morse, which is sometimes called Continuous Wave, or CW. And in ham radio slang, someone who sends fine code is said to have a good fist.)

Within 48 hours after the Federal Communication Commission’s move this month to drop the Morse requirement, a discussion on www.eham.net ran more than 380 messages and 57,000 words long, the equivalent of a short novel. The postings were divided roughly evenly between those lamenting and praising the commission’s decision.

“CW is just another mode and should not be afforded any special priority over others,” wrote K4UUG, who like many radio aficionados identified himself online using his radio call sign. “Proficiency should not be required for those who do not wish to use the mode.”

As part of its decision to eliminate the Morse requirement, the commission made essentially the same point.

Inside a hilltop trailer above Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., a couple of veteran coders seemed to be taking the commission’s decision in stride earlier this week. In a room cluttered with electronic equipment, they translated the dits and dahs that beeped in the background at dizzying speed, the chatter between someone in Canada, VE6NL to be precise, and someone off the coast of Antarctica, VP8CMH.

“It’s a bit like a foreign language,” said W6LD, whose real name is John Fore, a securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a prominent Silicon Valley firm. “You learn it and it’s fun to use it.”

With thumb and forefinger barely touching the two metal ends of a Morse paddle, W6NL, a k a David B. Leeson, unleashed his own stream of dits and dahs with the ease of a virtuoso, joining the global conversation. “I fell head over heels for amateur radio when I was 4 or 5 years old and heard Morse Code signals from afar at the station of a 14-year-old,” said Mr. Leeson, 69, a consulting professor of engineering at Stanford. “I still remember the thrill.”

The thrill turned into a hobby, and the hobby turned into a career in technology. In 1968, Mr. Leeson founded California Microwave, once a thriving telecommunications equipment company but now defunct. Now radio and Morse are just for fun, said Mr. Lesson, who is faculty adviser to the Stanford Amateur Radio Club, which once counted William R. Hewlett and David Packard as members.

Mr. Leeson and Mr. Fore are both active in radio contests, 48-hour competitions in which hams try to contact as many other hams as possible, often using Morse. Mr. Leeson has a station in the Galapagos Islands, where he goes several times a year with his wife, Barbara (K6BL), for contests. They once contacted as many as 17,000 other hams in a weekend. Mr. Fore, who is 50, and got his first license when he was 10, has a station in Aruba.

They embody the kind of utility-free passion for Morse that the futurist Paul Saffo said would ensure its survival.

“Freed from all pretense of practical relevance in an age of digital communications, Morse will now become the object of loving passion by radioheads, much as another ‘dead’ language, Latin, is kept alive today by Latin-speaking enthusiasts around the world,” Mr. Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote in his blog.

Morse Code was first devised in the 1830s for use with the telegraph. It later became an essential part of civilian, maritime and military radio communications. But the military has largely abandoned its use in favor of newer technologies, and the Coast Guard stopped listening for Morse S O S signals at sea during the 1990s.

The F.C.C. first lifted the Morse Code requirement for entry-level licenses in 1991. It later dropped proficiency requirements for higher-level licenses to five words a minute, from 20. And after international regulations stopped mandating knowledge of it in 2003, it was only a matter of time until Morse Code was no longer required in the United States. The requirement will formally be phased out sometime next year.

The demise of the Morse requirement, however, could be a boon for ham radio itself. After the F.C.C.’s decision, the American Radio Relay League, an organization representing ham radio operators, said demand for information about radio licenses surged from about 200 in a typical weekend to about 500.

“We are very pleased to see that,” said David Sumner (K1ZZ), the league’s chief executive.

That is no consolation for the most avid defenders of Morse.

“There is something magical about being able to put two wires together and start going dit-dit-dit dit-dit,” said Ms. Kott, or WZ8C. “We are just going to have to get on the air and do what we do and hope for the best.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/business/27morse.html





To Send a Page, Press #, Then Hope It Still Works
James Barron

Arkadiy Shats was gentle, examining the old patient and deciding he had no choice but to operate. The surgery went fast: no more than 10 seconds of juggling a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers.

The patient was a pager.

Remember pagers? They were the razzle-dazzle innovation that kept doctors tethered to patients, drug dealers tethered to customers, government officials tethered to underlings, reporters tethered to editors. In the 1980s and early 1990s, everybody carried them. They beeped. They chirped. Or, in what their manufacturers called their “silent” mode, they vibrated in pockets and purses, or clipped to belts.

Now try to find someone who has one. Beepers have become technological fossils, on the way to extinction in the world’s rush to cellphones and all-in-one devices that can handle e-mail messages and browse the Web. Beepers are a leftover from the days when a cellphone was a novelty the size of a brick with a battery that lasted minutes, not days. Cellphones were geeky, not glamorous.

Mr. Shats, 52, rode the wave of pager technology up, and now he is riding it down. He has spent the last 19 years in a cluttered room with a meat-locker door and shiny metal walls that are covered in takeout menus and schematic circuit diagrams. His job is to repair pagers, to bring these relics of the early digital age back to life for the few who cling to them.

He works for a company in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, called CPR Technology. The three letters once stood for Certified Pager Repair. Now the pager business is all but on life support, and the company makes more money retailing accessories for Nextel phones online and importing equipment that manufacturers can use to test electronics products before shipping them from the factory.

But CPR Technology still repairs pagers, one of only a few companies in the New York metropolitan region to still do so.

“There are a lot of people who will be using this until the end of time,” said the president of CPR Technology, Charlie Tepper, 46.

Still, the numbers show that the end of time may not be far off. About 45 million pagers were in use nationwide in 1999.

Now, the total is 7.4 million, down from 8.2 million a year ago, according to Brad Dye, a wireless messaging consultant who is editor and publisher of three newsletters including The Paging Information Resource.

He says the average monthly paging bill is about $9, while CTIA — the Wireless Association, a trade group that represents cellular companies, says the comparable figure for a cellphone is $49.30. CTIA says there are 219.4 million cellphone subscribers.

“It isn’t that people didn’t like pagers,” Mr. Dye said. “It’s just that it was hard for the paging industry to compete with cellphones.”

Once, pagers were a status symbol that demanded attention, their little screens displaying strings of numerals (although some pagers could also transmit letters). Was that a telephone number, or the primitive slang from the days before text messaging? Only the recipient knew whether a message was the code for “I love you” from a girlfriend or “the cops are coming” from a drug dealer’s lookout.

Now pagers are a punch line on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock,” which featured a character who described himself as the “beeper king” after working his way to the top of a pager business. Another character said he could not give up his beeper because he was expecting a call from 1985.

It is enough to make real-life beeper kings wince. But Robert G. Daigle, a vice president of Evalueserve, a research company that tracks communications trends, has a word for what has happened to pagers.

“They’ve been disintermediated,” he said. “It’s a big fancy business term you use to talk about people who are no longer needed in business.”

Nowadays the nation’s largest pager company is USA Mobility, which was born in 2004 in the merger of two smaller companies that had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001. A spokesman said USA Mobility now provides service to 4.2 million pagers nationwide.

Hospitals continue to use pagers, in part because, unlike cellphones, pager signals reach into buildings without causing concern about interfering with medical equipment. Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, for example, provides more than 3,000 pagers to doctors, residents and interns. But Mount Sinai knows it will have to come up with an alternative before too long.

“I think they will be a thing of the past in a couple of years,” said Eunice Davis, assistant director of telecommunications for Mount Sinai. “Not many companies make pagers.”

Motorola, which dominated the market for pagers in its heyday, stopped making them in 2001. But that created opportunities for technicians like Mr. Shats and engineering entrepreneurs like Mr. Tepper.

As Mr. Dye of The Paging Information Resource said: “The 40 million pagers that people quit using, they didn’t throw them all in the trash. A lot of those have been refurbished.”

Which is what happens inside Mr. Shats’s little room, where patterns dance across his oscilloscope as he connects probes to troubleshoot an ailing pager. The metal walls keep out electronic interference, including pager signals, Mr. Shats explained.

How old was the patient he was working on? His boss, Mr. Tepper, reached into a file and pulled out the manual for that model. “Copyright 1989,” he read.

Some of the repair equipment Mr. Shats uses is older than that. Just outside the room is a row of computers that can be used to reconfigure the electronic code that gives a pager its identity. The computers are so old that they run MS-DOS, not Windows. Mr. Tepper talked about the days when he ran a company, MetroPage, which marketed Nynex paging equipment through retail stores.

“The main clients were doctors, drug dealers and businessmen,” Mr. Tepper said. “We were behind a thick piece of plexiglass and had two dogs, a Rottweiler and a German shepherd.”

There were threats, which Mr. Tepper remembers as “if my pager isn’t on by the end of today, something’s going to happen.”

Since then, he has diversified.

“We would not be able to survive if we were only repairing pagers,” Mr. Tepper said. “Wouldn’t be possible. In our heyday, we had around eight or nine people working on double shifts,” Mr. Tepper said. “At one point, we had three delivery cars, drivers with two-way radios. We’d be running around, picking up pagers to be repaired and connected. We’d be here till midnight, making sure these things were fixed and out the door the next day.”

In the ’90s, Mr. Tepper and Mr. Shats took pagers apart and “reverse-engineered” their liquid-crystal displays, the windows that display the messages, so they could produce their own. Then Mr. Tepper found a factory in China to manufacture them.

For several years, CPR Technology sold 300,000 to 400,000 such displays to other pager repairers, Mr. Tepper said. That branch of his business has fallen by 90 percent in the last couple of years, he said. But he became an importer for a South Korean company that makes equipment used to test newfangled devices like Treo 650 cellphones.

These days he mostly leaves the repairs to Mr. Shats, who is not living the lonely life of a Maytag repairman. But things are not as exciting as, say, the time he opened a pager and discovered that it had become home to dozens of cockroaches.

“I closed very fast,” he said, “and put tape around it to keep them from getting out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/ny.../27beeper.html





Electronics Help Amazon Post Record-Setting Holiday Orders
AP

The Web retailer Amazon.com’s 2006 holiday season peaked with more than four million orders placed on Dec. 11, the company said Tuesday. That broke last year’s single-day record of more than 3.6 million orders, set on Dec. 12.

In its 12th holiday season, Amazon.com said that it again had its “best ever” sales and that it shipped more than 99 percent of orders in time to meet deadlines worldwide. As many as 3.4 million units went out in a single day.

The company said it sold 1,000 Microsoft Xbox 360 game consoles in 29 seconds as part of a promotion that cut the regular retail price by two-thirds. Demand for the discounted machines was so high that Amazon.com’s site bogged down briefly on Thanksgiving Day, generating complaints from shoppers. Amazon.com changed procedures for subsequent promotions.

Among the company’s best-selling consumer electronics items were Apple Computer iPods, Canon PowerShot Digital Elph cameras and Garmin navigational devices using global positioning system technology. Amazon.com also sold one of the most expensive digital music player to date, for $19,999.

Among the top-selling DVD titles was “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” starring Johnny Depp. Best-selling books included “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” by Senator Barack Obama, and “You: On a Diet” by Mehmet C. Oz and Michael F. Roizen.

On Tuesday, shares of Amazon.com dipped 44 cents, to $39.80.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/te.../27amazon.html





AT&T Offers Concessions on BellSouth Buyout
John Dunbar

AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company's $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp.

Approval by the full commission could happen as soon as Friday.

AT&T filed a letter of commitment with the agency Thursday night that adds a number of new conditions to the deal, including a promise to observe "network neutrality" principles, an offer of affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service and divestment of some wireless spectrum.

Final approval still requires a vote of the commissioners, which can happen at any time via computer. The proposed deal is the largest telecommunications merger in U.S. history.

AT&T offered the concessions after a little more than a week of marathon negotiations with lawyers who work for the two Democrats on the commission, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, documents show.

Consumer advocates are praising the compromise. Gene Kimmelman, vice president of federal and international affairs for Consumers Union, who has worked closely with the Democrats, said AT&T's new concessions are "an enormous improvement from where we were a month ago."

Commissioners Adelstein and Copps and representatives of AT&T were not immediately available for comment Thursday evening.

The agreement came together 10 days after Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell announced that he would not vote on the deal, despite being authorized to do so by the FCC's general counsel.

McDowell, a Republican, had decided not to participate in the negotiations because of his former position as a lobbyist for Comptel, a trade organization that opposes the merger.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who supported approval of the merger without conditions, was betting that McDowell would vote in favor of the deal following the legal opinion and break a 2-2 partisan deadlock.

But with McDowell's firm declaration that he would not vote, the pressure shifted to AT&T, which had hoped to close the transaction by the end of the year, a development that put the two Democrats in a much stronger position.

Pressure was added by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who, in a veiled warning to Democrats, said negotiations should proceed "fairly and openly and in a way that avoids imposing burdens that have nothing to do with the transaction."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4431728.html





AT&T Bends, Wins Deal OK

FCC approves BellSouth buyout after giant agrees to maintain `net neutrality' for 2 years
Jon Van

A compromise proposed by AT&T Inc. to win federal approval of its $85 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. signals how much the impending takeover of Congress by Democrats has shifted telecom's regulatory landscape.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition Friday upon reviewing the proposal submitted Thursday night by AT&T. The companies closed the deal Friday after winning the FCC's OK.

After opposing restrictions on its ability to prioritize Internet traffic it carries, AT&T agreed to "maintain neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service" for two years.

The concept of preserving "net neutrality" has been the paramount telecom issue for consumer advocates all year.

While specific Internet traffic abuses have been rare, activists fear that the economic interests of big telecom and cable companies that own Internet infrastructure will compel them to discriminate against smaller competitors whose Internet-based voice and video services undermine the cash cows operated by the giants.

For their part, large telecom carriers contend that they need flexibility to manage the trillions of bits and bytes that flow across their lines daily. Government restrictions intended to ward off potential anti-competitive moves could stifle technologic innovation, say executives at big telecom concerns.

AT&T's concessions sparked year-end celebrations Friday among consumer advocates who had been stymied through most of 2006 in their efforts to pass network neutrality laws in the Republican-controlled Congress.

"We are no longer having a debate about whether net neutrality should be the law of the land," said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group. "We are having a debate about how and when."

Another aspect of AT&T's compromise proposal would put a cap of $20 a month on its basic digital subscriber line high-speed Internet service for 30 months. At present consumers who want to buy DSL without also getting an AT&T phone line must pay a minimum of about $45 a month.

Gene Kimmelman, vice president of Consumers Union, said that customers who cannot afford AT&T's prices today should soon be able to "get fast connections to the Internet at a reasonable price."

The phone giant also agreed to freeze some rates it offers to customers who buy bulk service, to sell wireless spectrum licenses held by BellSouth and to "repatriate" some 3,000 jobs outsourced abroad by BellSouth.

AT&T's BellSouth takeover had received approval from state regulators and the Justice Department but was hung up by two Democratic members of the FCC who wanted consumer-friendly concessions.

The three Republican FCC members could not override the two Democrats because one of them, Robert McDowell, had served as a telecom industry lobbyist before his federal appointment, and recused himself for ethical reasons.

Several Democratic House members slated to take leadership positions in the coming Congress had warned the FCC against approving the takeover without some concessions.

While the symbolic significance of AT&T's compromise is considerable, some observers said the substance may be less so.

David Burstein, who operates the DSLPrime.com telecom newsletter, said that buried in AT&T's proposal is a sentence that exempts its own Internet-based television service from network neutrality restrictions.

"In a seemingly innocuous sentence, AT&T opened a huge loophole for itself," said Burstein. "In the future, they can take anything they want, call it IPTV, and have no restrictions. If someone objects, they'll tie it up in court for longer than their two-year neutrality commitment."

Most consumer advocates chose to focus on the positive aspects of AT&T's proposal rather than speculate on future neutrality evasions.

"This will be a win for the public," said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...i-business-hed





AT& T Completes BellSouth Takeover
Alan Sipress and Sara Kehaulani Goo

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday overcame a seven-month deadlock and approved AT&T's $85 billion purchase of BellSouth, creating a new corporate giant that will stand astride the telecommunications industry like none other in the generation since the old AT&T empire was broken up in 1984.

The acquisition, which closed yesterday, reunites large parts of AT&T's former domain by folding BellSouth's nine-state territory into AT&T's existing operations spanning the Midwest, Southwest and West Coast. It gives AT&T complete control of Cingular Wireless, the country's largest mobile-telephone provider, at a time when wireless is the newest frontier for reaching the Internet. Cingular is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth.

Unequaled in capital and geographic reach, the new AT&T could be a tough adversary for cable companies by offering television service over the Internet, possibly lowering rates for customers in its service area. Several conditions imposed on the acquisition to protect consumers could encourage the availability of affordable broadband. AT&T agreed to offer high-speed Internet for $19.95 a month over the next 30 months without requiring customers to purchase phone service from the company.

AT&T's size could also give it more power to set prices for telephone and other services -- although it agreed temporarily not to impose new charges on Web companies that use its lines -- and to influence political debate over telecommunications well beyond its service area. In the Washington area, where Verizon Communications is the primary phone company, the immediate impact of the merger is likely to be limited, FCC officials said.

"AT&T will be an engine for innovation, competition, and growth for our customers at home and abroad," chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr. said in a written statement. "In the Southeast, we will build on BellSouth's excellent record of serving customers and communities. And we are ready to lead the way in a new era of integrated wireless services nationwide."

The FCC had long been deadlocked over AT&T's purchase of BellSouth as Republican and Democratic commissioners sparred over what conditions to impose on the deal. But in the past 10 days, AT&T redoubled its efforts to break the impasse, pressing for a resolution before the end of the year. On Thursday, the company offered significant concessions to protect consumers and ensure competition and, with only minutes remaining before the close of the year's business, the board's two Democrats set aside their objections to join with two Republicans to approve the acquisition.

Kevin J. Martin, the FCC chairman and the deal's principal advocate on the commission, said it would help realize his goal of extending broadband Internet service across the nation by fostering competition. "This deployment is critical to our nation's competitiveness in the global economy and to our national security," Martin and fellow Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate said in a joint statement. "All consumers should expect to benefit from this technology."

AT&T's last-minute commitments include a two-year pledge to abide by "net neutrality" -- agreeing not to discriminate against Web companies in pricing or in access to lines. That was an about-face for the company, which has argued that it should be allowed to give priority to Internet firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft if they pay for it. Whitacre said last year that anyone expecting to use the phone lines free was "nuts."

Besides offering to sell stand-alone Internet service for $19.95 a month, AT&T also agreed to give up some wireless licenses suitable for high-speed Internet so that other companies could compete. The company also said it would freeze the rates for "special access" lines that serve some large businesses and move 3,000 BellSouth jobs to the United States from overseas.

"A historic merger warrants historic conditions," said Jonathan S. Adelstein, a Democrat on the commission who had refused to support the deal without consumer protections. "We won far more concessions to benefit the public than anyone predicted when this deal was announced."

With a market capitalization of $225 billion, the new AT&T will vastly outgun its leading competitor, Verizon, which was born six years ago in a $52 billion merger between GTE and Bell Atlantic.

But while the merger creates a new AT&T behemoth, the combined company is far different from the one that reigned for 70 years as a government-regulated monopoly and architect of the world's most advanced, comprehensive and affordable telephone system. That corporation, at the time the largest in the United States, had so cornered the market on communications that many Americans referred to it simply as the phone company.

Even as the new AT&T faces limited competition from other telephone operators, it is challenged by cable and computer companies playing in a far larger, more complicated marketplace encompassing television, broadband and wireless, as well as local and long-distance land-line telephone service. In recent years, cable companies have been more successful at poaching the phone business -- bundling it with TV and broadband and selling it to subscribers -- than traditional telephone operators have been in crossing over to television.

Earlier this month, a divided FCC approved a measure aimed at helping telephone companies move into cable television markets by significantly limiting what local officials can demand in return for franchises.

Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a Bethesda research firm, said AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth "reflects a natural oligopoly." In the early days, "public utilities were a natural monopoly. In our digital era today, competition is now not between the Bell companies, but between Bell and cable operators and some wireless [companies] in there."

Gigi B. Sohn, president of the Public Knowledge advocacy group, praised the FCC for approving the merger with strong conditions, especially on net neutrality, and urged the commission make sure that AT&T complies. In particular, she said the company might try to evade part of its net-neutrality commitment by claiming that the television service it provides over the Internet is akin to cable television and thus not subject to the condition.

Though the merger represents a landmark in U.S. telecommunications, it would be misleading to cast the corporate takeover as an epic tale of AT&T reconstituting itself from the wreckage of the 1984 breakup and its disastrous business decisions. The decline began with the divestiture, when AT&T gambled that it would be more lucrative to keep its long-distance business and cut loose the regional phone companies. But that meant jettisoning the huge number of employees and customers who gave the company political clout. In 1996, the regional companies and others won the right in Washington to compete for long-distance and the tide started turning against AT&T.

As intense competition forced prices for long-distance to fall, AT&T struggled to find a new calling and looked to cable. It again splintered six years ago, into four separately traded companies for broadband, wireless, business services and consumer services.

AT&T today is an utterly different corporation than the old Ma Bell, sharing little more than the name. The company that now flies the AT&T flag was until last year known as SBC Communications Inc. SBC, one of the original Baby Bells, gobbled up the relatively meager, sickly remains of the old AT&T, then took its venerated name before turning its appetite earlier this year to BellSouth.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...8.html?nav=trm





Local news

AT&T Launches TV Service in Danbury
AP

AT&T launched television service in Connecticut on Wednesday, using its phone lines to compete with cable TV companies in a battle for viewers that's being fought in federal court.

Neighborhoods in nine towns and cities, including Cheshire, Danbury, Newington, Stamford and Wethersfield, can subscribe to AT&T's "U-verse" that offers hundreds of channels. U-verse is a form of Internet protocol television, or IPTV, that provides programming over phone lines.

AT&T, which would not disclose how many customers are able to subscribe to the service, sees Connecticut as a wealthy market with customers who want an alternative to increasingly costly cable TV bills.

"We have to get people to realize AT&T is not just a phone company anymore," said Chad Townes, the company's vice president and general manager for Connecticut.

U-verse offers digital TV and high-speed Internet access, with the basic TV service starting at about $44. U-verse offers more than 300 channels.

Cable companies are fighting AT&T, accusing state regulators of establishing separate systems for AT&T and cable TV. AT&T does not face requirements such as a gross receipts tax and requirements to provide public access and service for all customers in its sales area.

Comcast, Cox Communications and others have previously had exclusive rights to provide television using cable. Satellite TV companies provide the sole competition.

Cable TV providers say the differences between their systems and AT&T's gives the competition an unfair advantage.

"All we are saying is we have to play by the same rules," said Paul Cianelli, president of the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents traditional cable providers.

AT&T has said it will pay local property and state sales taxes and $5 per subscriber to support public access operations. And it has said it will provide "nondiscriminatory access" to video services that will be available to low-income households in markets where it is building its network.

The state Office of Consumer Counsel, which represents cable customers, has joined the cable companies, saying the state Department of Public Utility Control erred by giving AT&T an advantage that could hamper the development of genuine competition and deprive poor neighborhoods of service.

The agency has sued AT&T and state regulators in state and federal courts. The litigation is pending.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1027014





Milestones

James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ Dies at 73
Jon Pareles

James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died early yesterday in Atlanta. He was 73 and lived in Beech Island, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga.

Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas.

Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.

Mr. Copsidas said that Mr. Brown had participated in an annual Christmas toy giveaway in Augusta on Friday but had been hospitalized on Saturday. After canceling performances planned for midweek, Mr. Brown on Sunday night got his doctor’s approval to perform on Saturday in New Jersey and on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s nightclub in New York.

Mr. Copsidas said Mr. Brown used one of his best-known slogans to convey his dedication to his fans: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.”

Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.

His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.

“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.

The funk Mr. Brown introduced in his 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” was both deeply rooted in Africa and thoroughly American. Songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Cold Sweat,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Hot Pants” found the percussive side of every instrument and meshed sharply syncopated patterns into kinetic polyrhythms that made people dance.

Mr. Brown’s innovations reverberated through the soul and rhythm-and-blues of the 1970s and the hip-hop of the next three decades. The beat of a 1970 instrumental “Funky Drummer” may well be the most widely sampled rhythm in hip-hop.

Mr. Brown’s stage moves — the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits — were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not. Mr. Brown was a political force, especially during the 1960s; his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” changed America’s racial vocabulary. He was never politically predictable; in 1972 he endorsed the re-election of Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Brown led a turbulent life, and served prison time as both a teenager and an adult. He was a stern taskmaster who fined his band members for missed notes or imperfect shoeshines. He was an entrepreneur who, at the end of the 1960s, owned his own publishing company, three radio stations and a Learjet (which he would later sell to pay back taxes). And he performed constantly: as many as 51 weeks a year in his prime.

Mr. Brown was born May 3, 1933, in a one-room shack in Barnwell, S.C. As he would later tell it, midwives thought he was stillborn, but his body stayed warm, and he was revived. When his parents separated four years later, he was left in the care of his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel in Augusta, Ga. As a boy he earned pennies buck-dancing for soldiers; he also picked cotton and shined shoes. He was dismissed from school because his clothes were too ragged.

He was imprisoned for petty theft in 1949 after breaking into a car, and paroled three years later. While in prison he sang in a gospel group. After he was released, he joined a group led by Bobby Byrd, which eventually called itself the Flames. At first, Mr. Brown played drums with the group and traded off lead vocals with other members. But with his powerful voice and frenzied, acrobatic dancing, he soon emerged as the frontman.

In 1955 the Flames recorded “Please Please Please” in the basement studio of a radio station in Macon, Ga. A talent scout heard it on local radio and signed the Flames to a recording contract with King Records. A second version, recorded in Cincinnati in 1956, became a million-selling single.

Nine follow-up singles were flops until, in 1958 a gospel-rooted ballad, “Try Me,” went to No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues chart. Mr. Brown followed up with more ballads, although the Flames’ stage shows would turn them into long, frenzied crescendos. His trademark routine of collapsing onstage, having a cape thrown over him and tossing it away for one more reprise, again and again, would leave audiences shouting for more.

In 1960 Mr. Brown’s version of “Think” put a choppy, Latin-flavored beat — hinting at the funk to come — behind a sustained vocal and pushed him back into the R&B Top 10 and the pop Top 40.

Mr. Brown had his first Top 20 pop hit in 1963 with “Prisoner of Love,” a ballad backed by an orchestra. But before those sessions he had done a series of shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the one on Oct. 24, 1962, was recorded. His label had not wanted to record the shows; Mr. Brown insisted. Released in 1963, “Live at the Apollo” — with screaming fans and galvanizing crescendos — revealed what the rhythm-and-blues circuit already knew, and became the No. 2 album nationwide.

James Brown and the Famous Flames toured nonstop through the 1960s. They were filmed in California for the “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released in 1965, which shows Mick Jagger trying to pick up Mr. Brown’s dance moves.

By the mid-1960s Mr. Brown was producing his own recording sessions. In February 1965, with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” he decided to shift the beat of his band: from the one-two-three-four backbeat to one-two-three-four. “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat,” Mr. Brown said in 1990. “Simple as that, really.”

Actually it wasn’t that simple; drums, rhythm guitar and horns all kicked the beat around from different angles. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” won a Grammy Award as best rhythm-and-blues song, and it was only the beginning of Mr. Brown’s rhythmic breakthroughs. Through the 1960s and into the ’70s, Mr. Brown would make his funk ever more complex while stripping harmony to a bare minimum in songs like “Cold Sweat.” He didn’t immediately abandon ballads; songs like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1966, mixed aching, bluesy lines with wrenching screams.

Amid the civil rights ferment of the 1960s Mr. Brown used his fame and music for social messages. He released “Don’t Be a Dropout” in 1966 and met with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to promote a stay-in-school initiative. Two years later “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” insisted, “We won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Mr. Brown was due to perform in Boston. Instead of canceling his show, he had it televised. Boston was spared the riots that took place in other cities. “Don’t just react in a way that’s going to destroy your community,” he urged.

By the late 1960s Mr. Brown’s funk was part of pop, R&B and jazz: in his own hits, in songs by the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, and in the music of Miles Davis. It was also creating a sensation in Africa, where it would shape the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, the juju of King Sunny Ade and the mbalax of Youssou N’Dour.

Musicians who left Mr. Brown’s bands would also have a direct role in 1970s and 1980s funk; the saxophonist Maceo Parker, the trombonist Fred Wesley and the bassist Bootsy Collins were part of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and Mr. Parker also worked with Prince.

Through the early 1970s Mr. Brown’s songs filled dance floors. His self-described “super heavy funk” gave him No. 1 R&B hits and Top 20 pop hits with “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and “Mother Popcorn” in 1969, “Super Bad Pts. 1 & 2” in 1970, “Hot Pants” and “Make It Funky” in 1971, “Get on the Good Foot Pt. 1” in 1972 and “The Payback Pt. 1” in 1974. He provided soundtracks for blaxploitation movies like “Black Caesar” and “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off,” and performed at the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.

The rise of disco — a much simplified version of Mr. Brown’s funk — knocked him out of the Top 40 in the late 1970s. But an appearance in “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 started a career resurgence, and in 1985 Mr. Brown had a pop hit, peaking at No. 4, with “Living in America,” the song he performed in the movie “Rocky IV.” It won him his second Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. That year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of its first members.

Meanwhile hip-hop had arrived, with Mr. Brown’s music often providing the beat. LL Cool J, Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys are among the more than 100 acts that have sampled Clyde Stubblefield’s drumming on “Funky Drummer” alone. In 1984 Mr. Brown collaborated with the influential rapper Afrika Bambaataa on the single “Unity.” He kept recording into the 21st century, including a 2002 studio album, “The Next Step.”

Mr. Brown maintained a nearly constant touring schedule despite a tumultuous personal life. During the 1970s the Internal Revenue Service demanded $4.5 million in unpaid taxes; the jet and radio stations were sold. His oldest son, Teddy, died in a car accident in 1973.

In 1988, intoxicated on PCP, he burst into an insurance seminar adjoining his own office in Augusta, then led police on a car chase across the South Carolina border. He was sentenced to prison for carrying a deadly weapon at a public gathering, attempting to flee a police officer and driving under the influence of drugs, and was released in 1991.

In 1998 after discharging a rifle and another car chase, he was sentenced to a 90-day drug rehabilitation program. He was officially pardoned by South Carolina in 2003, but arrested again in 2004 on charges of domestic violence against his fourth wife, Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer. “I would never hurt my wife,” he said in a statement at the time. “I love her very much.”

She survives him, along with their son, James Brown II, and at least five other children.

In 1999, Mr. Brown made a deal to receive more than $25 million in bonds against advance publishing royalties. This year, however, he sought to refinance the bonds with a new loan. The banker who had made the original deal, David Pullman, objected to the terms, and Mr. Brown filed a lawsuit against him in July.

But Mr. Brown’s status as an American archetype had long since been assured. A definitive collection, “Star Time” (Universal), was released in 1991. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, the same year that Michael Jackson presented him with a BET Award for lifetime achievement. In a 1990 interview with The New York Times, he said, “I was always 25 years ahead of my time.”

John O’Neil contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/ar...5ZburNwtV+K0GQ





Godfather of Soul, and C.E.O. of His Band
Kelefa Sanneh

What did James Brown do?

Even now, half a century after the release of his first single, “Please Please Please,” and days after his death of congestive heart failure, at 73, early on Christmas morning, that’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

He was a singer, of course, though he was perhaps better known for his grunts and his patter. “I wanna get up and do my thing. (Yeah!) Can I get into it? (Yeah!) Like a ... (What?) Like a ... (What?)” With an introduction like that, who cares if the song never starts?

He was a dancer, too, though that seemed less like the cause of his appeal and more like an effect of it. He moved as if he simply couldn’t help himself, and he toured that way too. His scheduled New Year’s Eve concert in New York was to be just one more date on his latest tour; tonight, for example, he had been scheduled for a concert in Waterbury, Conn. (Now that’s dedication.)

Most of all, he was an old-fashioned, hard-driving bandleader — which is to say, an anomaly. In an era of rock stars he often seemed like the second coming of Cab Calloway; the old big band had gotten smaller, but the man in front had only grown.

And while his rock ’n’ roll counterparts chafed at the idea of being mere entertainers, Mr. Brown never stopped bragging about being “the hardest-working man in show business.”

He was black and proud, he was a sex machine, but he was also a brilliant conductor, known for coaxing great performances out of the singers and musicians behind him. That, most of all, is what Mr. Brown did.

So celebrating the James Brown sound also means celebrating the musicians who created it. When he delayed the fourth and final beat of a measure, the drummer Clyde Stubblefield warped time in a way that helped inspire a whole constellation of rhythm-obsessed genres. Bobby Byrd (he of the famous “Yeah!” and “What?”), Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson: to love James Brown is to love them too. And not enough has been written about Jimmy Nolen, the visionary guitarist whose spidery licks helped inspire two generations of post-punk bands. (When people talk about “angular” guitars, they often mean “Jimmy-Nolen-ish.”)

In this sense the bandleader was also a brand leader: in the 1970s, especially, “James Brown” was not just a star, but an executive, a producer, a franchise. His name (sometimes his face too) on the record label meant you were getting a James-Brown-approved product. And if you went to see the J.B.’s, the backing band that morphed into a terrific stand-alone group, you were also seeing a reflection of Mr. Brown, even if he was nowhere near the building.

Bandleaders have always (of necessity) been businessmen too, but Mr. Brown was wise enough to be unembarrassed by the echo. There was a hint of corporate precision in the way he led those musicians onstage: each wiggle of the hip or flicker of the hand was an urgent memo from top management; each post-show conversation was a performance evaluation. Even his political program reflected this obsession; his vision of black power was in large part a vision of black spending power, and he saw no reason why a black nationalist shouldn’t also be an eager (and successful) black capitalist.

The musician as executive: this is the not-quite-new notion that defines the current musical era. Pop stars flaunt their corporate ties; rappers brag about their business acumen (real or, more often, imaginary); rock bands cheerfully acknowledge that they are brands on the run. And while some listeners may be nostalgic for a time when pop music was untainted by corporate chic, Mr. Brown’s career is a reminder that the old-fashioned bandleader and new-fangled pop-star C.E.O. really aren’t so far apart. When he called himself “the hardest-working man in show business,” the emphasis was on “working” and “business.”

If James Brown, the musician, has also been influential and enduring, it’s not just because of his evergreen hits, which still sound vigorous, even though they have been reissued and covered and sampled ad nauseam. And it’s not just because of all the styles he helped inspire, from Nigerian Afro-beat to Brazilian funk-rap.

It’s also because, decades before the rise of computer music, he proved that some virtuosos do their best work with no instruments at all. In that sense his true heirs today are producers like Timbaland: knob-twiddling masterminds who program sounds instead of conducting them, beat-obsessed visionaries who keep reinventing Mr. Brown’s propulsive templates, serial collaborators who understand the business of pop music.

No one could ever do all the things Mr. Brown did. But here is what’s more impressive: musicians are still finding new ways to do some of them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/ar...sann.html?8dpc





Asia Quakes Damage Cables; Internet, Banks Affected

Telecommunications around Asia were severely disrupted on Wednesday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged undersea cables, slowing Internet services and hindering financial transactions, particularly in the currency market.

Banks and businesses across the region reported problems with communications, with some telephone lines cut and Internet access slowing to a crawl.

South Korea's top fixed-line and broadband service provider, KT Corp, said in a statement that six submarine cables were knocked out by Tuesday night's earthquakes.

``Twenty-seven of our customers were hit, including banks and churches,'' a KT spokesman said. ``It is not known yet when we can fully restore the services.''

Banks in Seoul said foreign exchange trading had been affected.

``Trading of the Korean won has mostly halted due to the communication problem,'' said a dealer at one domestic bank.

Some disruption was also reported in the important Tokyo currency market but the EBS system that handles much dollar/yen trading appeared to be working.

Global information company Reuters Group Plc said all users of its services in Japan and South Korea had been affected.

One Tokyo foreign exchange trader said: ``There are many currencies in which market-making is being conducted via Reuters and such currencies such as the Australian dollar and the British pound are in a very tenuous situation now.''

State Secret

In China, trading in currencies and copper appeared to be normal and both the Shanghai stock market and money market were working.

But China Telecommunications Group, the country's biggest fixed-line telephone operator and parent of China Telecom Corp., said the earthquakes had affected lines ``from the Chinese mainland to places including the Taiwan area, the United States and Europe, and many have been cut.''

``Internet connections have been seriously affected, and phone links and dedicated business lines have also been affected to some degree,'' it said.

Officials declined to give further details. ``Undersea communications cables fall in the area of state secrets,'' said a ministry of communications official in Beijing.

The main quake, measured by Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau at magnitude 6.7 and at magnitude 7.1 by the U.S. Geological Survey, struck off Taiwan's southern coast at 1226 GMT on Tuesday. Two people were killed.

Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said two of four major undersea cables out of Taiwan had been affected. Voice circuits had been reduced to 40 per cent of capacity to the United States and just 2 per cent to most parts of Southeast Asia.

KDDI Corp., Japan's second-largest telecoms company, said communications along submarine cables out of Japan went through Taiwan before reaching Southeast Asian countries, which was leading to disruption.

But it said communications were unlikely to break down completely since there were alternative lines.

PCCW, Hong Kong's main fixed-line telecoms provider, said several undersea cables it part-owned had been damaged. ``Data transfer is down by half,'' a spokeswoman said.

Both Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), Southeast Asia's top phone company, and local rival StarHub Ltd., said customers were suffering slow access to Internet pages.

But SingTel said traffic was being diverted and repair work was in progress, adding: ``Our submarine cables linking to Europe and the U.S. are not affected.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world...rnet-asia.html





China Internet Users Fake Identity Numbers
UPI

Chinese officials say Internet users in the country are using false identity card numbers to mask their identities while accessing Web sites and games.

An official from the National Citizen Identity Information Center said software that generates fake identity information can be downloaded off the Internet for use in registering online game or Web site accounts, Xinhua, China's official government-run news agency, reported Tuesday.

"Chinese game companies and most of the Web sites that require personal information on registration do not check anything. Their 'real name registration systems' are simply no match for the identity card number generators," the official said.

"Even children can now access games and Web sites that contain unsuitable content using the identity card number generator," he said.

Huang Chenqing, secretary-general of the Internet Society of China, said: "A lot of Internet users just don't want to register under their real names for fear that they cannot do and say what they want on the 'Net as freely as before. What's more, some Internet users don't trust game companies and Web sites with their personal information."
http://www.playfuls.com/news_05632_C...y_Numbers.html





Stultification: How Sweet It Is
Mike Albo

WHENEVER someone asks where I’ll be for the holidays, I always do the same thing: roll my eyes and say, exasperatedly: “I guess I’m going home for Christmas. Hope I don’t go insane!”

It’s been part of my conversational repertory since my early 20s, the time when you start having to prove to yourself that you are a self-governing adult, but before you realize that adulthood basically involves complex and enervating tasks like Internet dating, shopping for jeans, trying to remember your 15 various log-on codes and passwords, and deciphering your Verizon bill.

Now I am 37 years old and I can’t wait to go insane at Christmas in that comfortable padded cell known as “home.” Instead of being tedious, going home has become an indulgent retreat from my fried-out issue-driven city life. It is a place where I line my mind and body with the fatty lard of my suburban youth and experience not one moment of regret.

For a brief week, I get to be as ugly and out of it as Americans are always accused of being, and no one has to see it.

I have almost no choice. Every year I arrive at my parents’ house in Springfield, Va., armed with my healthy self-edifying projects — big leafy Penguin classics, Chomsky-explains-it-all books and a backlog of fortifying magazines. And every year I think I am going to actually read a paragraph of one of these things. But then I walk in the front door, say ‘hi’ to my mom and dad, stand at the kitchen counter and start eating cheese.

That’s not all that’s in the house. In case there is a terrorist attack at the Price Club, my mother has stocked up on boxed food, durable bags of meatballs, bins of croutons, an entire spectrum of cereal, jug wine and other pleasures that would never be reviewed in food and wine supplements.

After inhaling some combination of sustenance entirely made of carbohydrates and trans fats, I will go upstairs and change into an infantilizing outfit of fleece sweat pants and an old high school T-shirt that says “Go Spartans!” on it.

Then I go back downstairs and begin to watch television. In this consumer Green Zone, I can finally, really, watch TV. I am unfettered, and free of my ironic eye, op-ed anger and Web site snark, I can enjoy TV the way it was meant to be enjoyed — sitting there with my mouth open, too lazy to get up and go to the bathroom.

There are no Whole Foods here, no Bikram yoga, no concerns about my personal carbon emissions. I lose touch, for once, with my online pals, bloggy buddies, Netflix friends and MySpace chums. Finally I am logged off from the incessant broadband stream of information of my daily life. I don’t have to eat properly, act locally, think globally, sync up, detoxify or Move On.

I don’t have to check the label of my carefully selected non-animal-tested facial scrub to make sure that there are no secret traces of benzene. I don’t have to take only two minutes of my time to provide a free mammogram to another low-income woman by simply signing an online petition.

Instead, I simply sit there, eating Edy’s ice cream and watching a marathon of lesbian "Next" episodes on MTV. For once, I have zero concern for the homeless, global warming, my future and Darfur. It’s like my brain has been deprived of vital nonnutrients. I sit there on the couch in the living room drinking up the lack of intellectual stimuli like a steamy hammam of nothing important.

Under my bed is a suitcase that contains my old diaries. There are entries from when I was a 19-year-old member of Queer Nation and Act Up, and I would come to the dinner table filled with a defiant anger, quoting Annie Sprinkle, the self-described post-porn modernist sex activist, while saying grace.

If that 19-year-old saw me now, he would roll his eyes. He would think I had been padded and stupefied by the entertainment-industrial complex. He would say that the American consumer machine has swallowed me up in its accommodating mouth.

But I seem to remember that 19-year-old needed this week to relax his white-knuckle grip on reality, too. He would creep down the stairs at 3 a.m., grab a stack of windmill cookies, and channel-surf through the late-night infomercials beaming from the screen like a soothing strobe light.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/fashion/24Home.html





Where "Check Please" is Your Call

At a new breed of "Robin Hood" restaurants, diners pay what they can afford -- and what they think the meal is worth
Peta Owens-Liston

Deciding between the spicy peanut stew and the pesto chicken, or the squash soup and the avocado, chicken, lime soup, are not the only decisions tempting patrons at the One World Café in Salt Lake City and the SAME (So All Might Eat) Café in Denver. They must also decide what the meal is worth.

These pay-as-you-can cafes have missions that are unapologetically altruistic—call it serving up fare Robin Hood style. "Our philosophy is that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves the chance to eat healthy, organic food while being treated with dignity," explains Brad Birky, who opened SAME with his wife, Libby, in October. Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service — sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden — for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give. "We're a hand up, not a hand out," says One World owner Denise Cerreta, who prides herself on the fact that everyone can afford a meal at her café.

An epiphany scribbled out on a cocktail napkin on a plane ride gave birth to SAME café (www.soallmayeat.org). Both Brad and Libby had been searching for a meaningful way to give back while making a living. Admitted volunteer junkies, they had been serving and eating with homeless shelter residents for the past eight years. "We loved the service aspect of giving to the community and attacking the issue of hunger," says Brad. "Plus we both love to cook." When they found out about One World, they flew to Salt Lake City to learn how it was run. Cerreta, in turn, spent a month helping the Birkys prepare for opening. One World has had more than 25 inquiries from others around the country interested in starting a similar café. Recently, the café formed a nonprofit www.oneworldeverybodyeats.comaimed at helping others replicate such a venture.

The cafes' clientele is as diverse as the from-scratch buffet-style dishes. Attorneys and CEOs, students, seniors and soccer moms, as well as those down on their luck are among the 150-200 customers that dine daily at One World. Sniffling from a cold, Mike Dega, an environmental engineer, came in looking for comfort food. "I feel like I'm getting a whole new set of nutrients here as opposed to processed food—plus all the spices and flavors here are a real turn-on."

The cafés' business models have won fans among the city's well-to-do residents, many of whom regularly dine there. At One World, patrons have given Cerreta a car, bought new dishes, arranged to professionally clean her carpets, supplied new tile for the restaurant bathrooms, and donated property for an organic garden and funded a new irrigation system for it. Last week, a gentleman left a $50 bill next to an empty bowl of soup at SAME. Since opening, one man has regularly come in and left money on the counter without eating, stating "I was blessed today so I though I'd pass it on." He's homeless.

Because customers decide on their portion sizes and the fact that most of the food is fresh (as opposed to stocked), very little food is wasted. At the end of the day at One World, only one garbage can needs to be emptied. "I can come in here and eat a ton after a (construction) shift for lunch and pay what I can, and then my mom, who eats a lot less, can just get the amount she wants and pay what she feels is fair," says regular Justin Wood, 25, who is sipping coffee and eating dessert with his mother on a Friday afternoon.

Paying the check by honor system has its risks; there are always those who will exploit the opportunity and eat for free — perhaps more so in big cities. At Babu, an Indian restaurant in New York City, the pay-what-you-feel-is-fair method resulted in too many people getting a free meal. One Friday night, a rowdy group of 10 young Indians walked in and took over the restaurant's large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; not even a tip for the wait staff. Babu now states their prices. Birky at SAME has yet to notice anyone not paying. And Cerreta has had to approach only a few people, including one group of diners that paid nothing over several visits. She pointed out that by not paying they were stealing from her. They ended up contributing.

Deciding what to pay can give some diners indigestion. So Birky suggests they consider three things: How much did you eat? How much would you pay for that elsewhere? And what is fair to your own budget?

Once you're satisfied with the prices, the brie, cranberry and chicken pizza will taste even better.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/printo...572805,00.html





Liberating & Restricting C-SPAN's Floor Footage
bigmammoth writes

"C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions."

"If C-SPAN succeeds, reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all already 'liberated' committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of 'dignity and decorum' and will be denying C-SPANS request."
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.../12/27/0333256





Cellphones for the Music Fan
Roy Furchgott

AT a tree-trimming party at his Chicago co-op apartment, Eric Spanitz supplied seasonal music, a mix of Bing Crosby and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which issued from a certain well-known compact portable electronic device — a mobile phone.

About a year ago Mr. Spanitz, a professor of management at Lake Forest University in Illinois and a business consultant, finally decided to buy a phone and a music player, but he didn’t want to carry two devices. Instead he bought a Sony- Ericsson W800i Walkman phone that combines both.

“I use it more often than I expected,” he said of the music function, with which he listens to tunes on plane trips and in his hotel room, and even uses his selection of 60s rock, jazz, classical and German electronica to serve as a D.J. at impromptu gatherings. “The constant reaction is, ‘Where are you hiding the speakers? That sound can’t come from the phone,’ ” he said.

Speculation that Apple Computer will announce a combination iPod and phone at the Macworld convention in San Francisco next month has fueled interest among people who, like Mr. Spanitz, don’t want to carry multiple devices — even though most phones already have multimedia players that handle music.

The problem seems to be that few multimedia phones, if any, are as easy to use as an iPod. Of course, most people pick phones primarily for the phone features or service plan, but for those who put high importance on music, there is a subset of media phones designed with the music fan in mind. A few can give an iPod a run for the money.

At the top of the list is the Motorola iTunes phone from Cingular ($200 after $50 rebate with a two-year contract). The handset is a modified Motorola RAZR, called the V3i, with a music note button that takes you right to your songs. The V3i uses the same menu system as the iPod. The phone lacks the iPod click wheel, so an up/down/left/right button substitutes.

The phone screen displays not only the basic song information, but also a picture of the CD cover — if you have downloaded the image into your iTunes file. Plugged into a computer with iTunes software, the V3i practically sets itself up. With a few button clicks it randomly fills with songs. Like an iPod, the phone can recharge from its U.S.B. connection or from a wall socket and works equally well with Mac or PC.

The sound quality is Pod-worthy, but the V3i does have its limitations. For one, it can hold only 100 songs (6.9 hours of music, its maker says.), and the memory cannot be expanded, as is true for most music phones. Because Cingular does not sell music over its network (just ring tones), you can’t buy songs and have them instantly transmitted into your phone.

Another Cingular music phone, the Sony-Ericsson Walkman W810i (the newer version of Mr. Spanitz’s phone is $99 after a $100 rebate with a two-year contract), offers a memory slot to store a heap of music, but uses only Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick cards, which are frequently more expensive than generic memory.

A “candy bar”-style phone, it has an adapter for other brands of headsets, although the Sony in-ear headphones that are included are decent — crisp sounding, if lacking in bass. Setting the built-in equalizer to “bass” helps.

Loading songs should be easy but proved initially glitchy in a reporter’s test. Plugging the phone into a U.S.B. port sets it up as a drive; then you can drag and drop songs. The W810i should recognize music and store it properly, but it didn’t work in the test. When music was dropped directly into the folder labeled MP3 on the card and the phone restarted, it worked perfectly.

The Sony does pump out a lot of sound through its three tiny speakers. While it is loud enough for small gatherings like Mr. Spanitz’s, fidelity is the quality of a 1960s transistor radio.

The Walkman phone offers 50 streaming radio stations through MobiRadio for $8.99 a month. Channels range from rap to classical, but the tinny sound quality and signal drop-outs will disappoint hi-fi fans. The built-in FM tuner (found under the Entertainment tab, not Music) sounds far better at no extra charge.

From Verizon Wireless, the LG VX8500 Chocolate phone ($99 after $50 rebate with a two-year contract) has plenty of cool factor, but how much you like it depends on your regard for the buttonless, touch-sensitive control pad. The red backlight glow will attract admiring glances, but it takes practice to develop the right touch to operate the pad.

The slider phone has a hot button to take you right to your music, and loading songs, while not flawless, worked with some persistence. Sound quality was a bit thin but acceptable.

The display while music is playing shows the album cover in a larger size than others, a nice graphic touch.

Browsing Verizon’s V-Cast music store on the Chocolate displays only three artists at a time, making shopping laborious. If you already know what you want, it’s easier. Downloads direct to the phone from the V-Cast store are $1.99 and you get two copies, one to the phone and a higher-quality copy for your computer. You can also use your computer to buy a single copy from the V-Cast store for 99 cents, which can be loaded onto the phone’s SD card by U.S.B.

Sprint’s most tune-oriented phone is the Fusic ($30 after a $50 rebate with a two-year contract, through Dec. 31). But Sprint tries to appeal to the music fan not so much with the phone as with its service, producing exclusive live music and phonecast TV shows for its customers.

Many of the special features and much of the exclusive content, however, are geared toward selling music through Sprint. Shopping screens are neatly laid out showing an artist’s most popular downloads as well as a comprehensive list of tunes. The downloads are remarkably fast, but the cost of that convenience is a steep $2.50 per song — plus the minutes spent downloading. As with Verizon, you get two copies of the song, one direct to the phone and one for your computer, but you can’t save money by buying direct through your computer.

While you can download on an economy plan, the per-kilobyte charge makes it expensive. Frequent downloaders may save over all using the more expensive Power Vision plan, which includes some data downloads. Other add-ons also add to the price, like 20 channels of Sirius radio, which cost $6.95 a month plus tax.

In a test of the Fusic, loading songs through the U.S.B. connection was stymied by a card-reader problem that the company said was being addressed, but was easily accomplished by putting the micro SD card in a reader and dragging unprotected MP3 files to the card’s MP3 folder.

Sound quality was better with MP3s than with the streaming radio, but was greatly improved in both cases by other brands of earbuds.

One novel feature of the Fusic is its FM transmitter, which lets you send the music from your phone to an FM radio receiver.

Then you can use the phone not only like a D.J., as Mr. Spanitz does; you can go him one better at your next party and be an in-house dance club D.J. over your radio.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/te.../28basics.html





Chatterbox

use oink's pink palace
hansblix

it's not public and has almost everything you need.

i rarely have to search elsewhere for a torrent.


[reply]
by tim507

that place scares me,..

http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Torren..._Thoughtpolice





Music Denied -- Shoppers Overwhelm iTunes

•Apple's iTunes struggles to handle post holiday crush
•Users get error messages, long slowdowns, denied access
•Analyst: 'Traffic was so great it blew up the site'

Swarms of online shoppers armed with new iPods and iTunes gift cards apparently overwhelmed Apple's iTunes music store over the holiday, prompting error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads of a single song.

Frazzled users began posting urgent help messages Monday and Tuesday on Apple's technical forum for iTunes, complaining they were either not allowed into the store or were told the system couldn't process their request to download songs and videos.

It was not immediately clear how many people were affected by the slowdowns, and Apple Computer Inc. would not immediately comment Wednesday on what caused the slowdown and whether it had been fixed.

Analysts said the problems likely were the result of too many people with holiday iPods and iTunes gift cards trying to access the site at once.

Traffic indeed was heavy over the holiday, with more than four times as many people visiting the iTunes Web site on Christmas than at the same time last year, online market researcher Hitwise said Wednesday.

Some financial analysts said the interruption could be viewed as a sign that sales dramatically exceeded the Cupertino-based company's own forecasts.

"It's actually created more positive buzz among analysts -- traffic was so great it blew up the site," said Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. "If anything it could be a positive -- demand was better than they were expecting."

Apple commands about 75 percent of the market for downloaded music, but could lose as much as 5 percent of that market share in 2007 because of increased competition from rival services, according to Piper Jaffray.

Dan Frakes, a senior editor at Macworld magazine and playlistmag.com, a Web site focused on digital music, said he and some colleagues were unable to access the iTunes store or received error messages when they tried to download songs early this week.

However, others breezed through the process hassle-free, and Frakes successfully downloaded songs again on Wednesday. He said the problem likely was not as widespread as the frustrated discussion group chatter might indicate.

"The store itself was working, there was just too much traffic," he said. "It's a good bet that most people were able to get through."

Analysts said they didn't anticipate a rash of iPod returns because of the delays.

"What you're seeing is the tremendous success of the iPod," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director with JupiterResearch. "No doubt it was a very, very popular gift, and no matter how well you plan on the server side of the equation, there are always times when you get caught short."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne....ap/index.html





Steve Jobs' Best Year Ever
Leander Kahney

What a blockbuster year Steve Jobs had.

Not only did he manage Apple's seamless switch to Intel, he probably made the company the most money in its 30-year history. (I say probably, because the only dark spot -- a stock options backdating scandal -- may yet prompt a restatement of earnings.)

Financial scandal or no, Apple's comeback is a solid validation of Jobs' business chops. Jobs is too much of a liberal iconoclast to be taken seriously by the corporate world, but 2006 showed he's up there with the greats.

Here are the highlights:

January
At Macworld, Jobs releases the first Macs with Intel chips: the iMac and 15-inch MacBook Pro (Apple's top-selling machines, not coincidentally). They're six months ahead of schedule. Apple shares soar to a record high.

February
New Mac minis -- but no TV/DVR features as rumor sites had predicted. Jobs is not yet ready to take on the living room.

March
Apple celebrates its 30th birthday -- with a press release. Jobs doesn't like to look back.

April
Hell freezes over: Jobs announces Boot Camp, which allows his new Intel Macs to boot into Windows.

May
The Beatles lose their lawsuit over the Apple name for music sales. Jobs reportedly uses the defeat to negotiate an exclusive deal to sell the Beatles' catalog online.

The 13-inch MacBook is released, completing the laptop line's move to Intel.

Apple and Nike collaborate on the Nike+iPod -- a wireless iPod pedometer and matching sneakers.

June
The stock option scandal grows. A terse statement says an internal probe has uncovered "irregularities," including a grant to Jobs. But Apple says Jobs didn't benefit financially and is working with the SEC. Dozens of other companies are conducting their own backdating investigations.

July
The iPod craze is far from over. Customers snap up 8.1 million iPods in the July quarter, boosting profits by a hefty 50 percent. New Intel Macs sales aren't too shabby, either: 1.3 million Macs are sold, up 12 percent.

August
Jobs gives a weird tag-team keynote at Apple's annual developers conference, prompting speculation about his health following a cancer scare last year. He gives a preview of Leopard, the next major revision of Mac OS X. There are bells and whistles, but the biggest rumored change -- a major UI overhaul to compete with Microsoft's Vista -- is left out.

September
For perhaps the first time ever, Jobs gives a public sneak peek at an unannounced Apple product: the iTV -- a wireless router for beaming video from a computer to a TV. He also unveils iTunes' first feature-length movies. The movie shelf is initially bare, but more are expected next year.

October
The stock options scandal claims a victim. Fred Anderson, Apple's long-time chief financial officer, falls on his sword and resigns from Apple's board. A statement says Jobs knew of irregularities but not their import. It's a strategic mea culpa that's allowed him to skate -- so far.

November
IPhone mania grips the nation. There's nary a week when the iPhone isn't a major story. The speculation is fueled by patent filings and a lot of wishful thinking.

Apple's stock reaches a new high at $93.

December
The iPhone becomes a slam dunk, even if Apple has never officially admitted it's working on it. Wall Street starts issuing iPhone investor advisories.

But as Jobs himself says: "Looking forward, 2007 is likely to be one of the most exciting new product years in Apple's history."
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72344-0.html





Apple Computer Shares Go on Roller-Coaster Ride After Reports of Forged Documents Probe
AP

Apple Computer Inc.'s stock option troubles underwent extreme twists following reports of a federal probe into the possible forgery of documents to bolster executives' profits and that CEO Steve Jobs received 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without proper board approval.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the British newspaper Financial Times reported late Wednesday that federal investigators were looking into evidence of the falsification of records that purported Jobs' options were approved by a full board.

In October, Apple said its own internal probe had found no misconduct by any current officers and largely exonerated Jobs of any wrongdoing. But financial analysts, along with Wall Street, have shrugged off the story, seeing little impact as long as Jobs, Apple's iconic and charismatic executive, remained unscathed.

The media reports Wednesday revealed new details of the situation.

Earlier in the day, a legal publication that detailed the possible forgery also reported that Jobs has hired his own attorneys outside of the company's legal team to represent him in the investigation.

That report sent shares of the iPod and Macintosh computer maker on a roller-coaster ride in trading Wednesday, falling almost 5 percent before rebounding to close at $81.52, up a penny, on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1027015





Apple Says Options Probe Clears Execs
May Wong

Apple Computer Inc. restated past earnings Friday and acknowledged the backdating of thousands of stock option grants. But the company cleared current management and Chief Executive Steve Jobs of misconduct, saying it has "complete confidence" in the executive team.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing its probe of stock-options practices, Apple said Jobs was aware of the selection of some favorable grant dates but did not benefit financially from them.

Its options mishandling will result in an additional noncash charge of $84 million, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said. In its full-year financial report filed with the SEC, which was delayed due to the options probe, Apple said earnings for fiscal years 2006, 2005 and 2004 will be lowered by $4 million, $7 million, and $10 million respectively.

Apple shares rose about 4 percent to $84.12 in early trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market after the news.

The three-month probe identified a number of instances in which option grant dates were intentionally selected in order to obtain favorable exercise prices, the company said.

"The special committee, its independent counsel and forensic accountants have performed an exhaustive investigation of Apple's stock option granting practices," former Vice President Al Gore, chair of the special committee, and Jerome York, chair of Apple's Audit and Finance Committee, said in a joint statement. "The board of directors is confident that the company has corrected the problems that led to the restatement, and it has complete confidence in Steve Jobs and the senior management team."

The maker of the iPod music player and Macintosh computers is one of the most prominent among some 200 companies that have come under scrutiny for backdating stock options. It's a widespread practice, especially in Silicon Valley, that involves pegging stock options to favorable grant dates in the past to boost the recipients' award.

The manipulation itself isn't necessarily illegal, but securities laws require companies to properly disclose the practice in its accounting and settle any charges that may result.

Dozens of companies have been forced to restate their earnings, erasing some of their earlier recorded profits, after their stock option shenanigans came to light.

Apple initiated its own stock options probe in June and delayed its quarterly report for the period ending July 1 and its annual report for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 as a result.

Apple said its investigation reviewed 42,077 stock option grants made on 259 dates between October 1996 and January 2003. Of those, 6,428 grants on 42 dates did not have the proper measurement dates, Apple said.

Of two option grants awarded to Jobs, one was improperly dated Oct. 19, 2001, with an exercise price of $18.03, instead of the correct date on Dec. 18, when Apple shares were trading at $21.01. That stock-option grant was for 7.5 million shares. Jobs later surrendered those options without exercising them and realized no financial benefit.

The special board meeting that was pegged to the Oct. 19 grant never occurred, the company said. "There was no evidence, however, that any current member of management was aware of this irregularity," Apple stated.

Though the probe exonerated current management, it did raise "serious concerns" with the stock-options accounting actions of two former officers.

Apple did not identify those officers. Speculation and media reports citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, however, have pointed to former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson and former general counsel Nancy Heinen.

Anderson retired as Apple's CFO in 2004 yet remained a board member until he resigned in October after the internal inquiry. Heinen left Apple for unknown reasons in May, before Apple initiated its stock options probe.

Apple said it has provided the results of its internal review and independent investigation to the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California and has responded to their "informal requests" for documents and additional information.

The details of the findings Friday appeared to ease investor concerns that the options scandal would threaten Jobs. Shares of Apple went on a roller-coaster ride earlier in the week following media reports that federal investigators were looking into the falsification of documents and that Jobs had received an award of stock options in 2001 without proper board approval.

The nationwide stock options scandal has already led to criminal indictments and resignations of several executives.

But none is considered as well known or tied to their company's success and identity as Jobs. Wall Street analysts have largely shrugged off the impact of the scandal on Apple as long as the company's iconic co-founder and CEO was to remain unscathed.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8MAIF6G0.htm





Apple Report Fails to End Stock-Option Controvesy

CEO Jobs is cleared, but questions remain about his role in backdating grants.
Martin Zimmerman

Apple Computer Inc. on Friday cleared Chief Executive Steve Jobs of wrongdoing regarding its improper handling of stock options, but new details from an internal investigation only fueled controversy.

The company revealed that Jobs "was aware or recommended" the selection of favorable dates for stock options awarded to other executives, although he didn't personally profit or "appreciate the accounting implications" of the practice, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Previously, the Cupertino, Calif.-based technology giant said only that Jobs had been aware of the backdating but didn't personally benefit from it.

Apple also disclosed that a special board meeting in which directors were said to have approved an improperly dated option grant to Jobs never took place.

The disclosures could mean that questions regarding the backdating of options at Apple and Jobs' role in it won't go away any time soon, despite the company's effort to put the matter to rest, an industry expert said.

"The company is desperately trying to make us believe that just because [Jobs] wasn't self-dealing directly and because they've come clean and done a thorough investigation, that this is OK," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, a Hawthorne-based financial research firm.

"The problem is that it might not be. We don't know how the SEC or other authorities are going to react to these disclosures."

In the filing, Apple held to its previous claim that the three-month probe by a special board committee had found no wrongdoing by Jobs or other members of its current management.

"The board of directors is confident that the company has corrected the problems that led to the restatement, and it has complete confidence in Steve Jobs and the senior management team," former Vice President Al Gore, chairman of the committee, and Jerome York, chairman of Apple's audit and finance committee, said in a joint statement.

The current scandal over option backdating has ensnared more than 180 U.S. companies and claimed the jobs of several high-level executives, including Bruce Karatz, then head of Los Angeles home builder KB Home.

Investors have fretted that the issue could potentially unseat Jobs, who is credited with reviving Apple's fortunes with such popular products as the iPod music player.

But Wall Street appeared reassured by the board's strong support for Jobs and the news that correcting the option backdating would require it to reduce its previously reported earnings by $84 million — a relatively small amount for a company that earned almost $2 billion in its fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Apple's stock, which had dropped almost 12% in the last month as concerns about the option issue grew, jumped almost 5% on Friday. Several stock analysts and portfolio managers expressed hope that the company would now be able to put questions behind it.

Options are rights to buy stock at a set price within a certain time period. The price of stock to be bought using an option is generally the stock's market price on the day the option is granted by the company's board.

In their current probes of option practices, regulators are focusing on so-called backdating, whereby option grant dates are changed by weeks or months to coincide with the stock's lowest price in a particular period. Doing so could give the executives instant paper gains on their options. It could also cause a company's financial results to understate compensation costs and overstate earnings.

Backdating isn't necessarily illegal, but failing to disclose the practice in a timely manner is.

In its most detailed account yet of its option practices, Apple said its internal investigation uncovered dating irregularities with 6,428 option awards to various Apple employees on 42 dates between October 1996 and January 2003.

Of two option grants made to Jobs during that period, the company's probe found that an award of options to buy 7.5 million shares was dated Oct. 19, 2001, when the exercise price was $18.30 a share, instead of the correct date of Dec. 18, 2001, when the price was $21.01. The difference could have meant an extra $20 million for Jobs.

That grant, along with one awarded in January 2000 for 10 million shares, was canceled in 2003, when Jobs was given 5 million shares of restricted stock, the company said.

The filing also reported that approval of the 2001 grant to Jobs "was improperly recorded as occurring at a special board meeting on October 19, 2001. Such a special board meeting did not occur."

The filing did not elaborate on the meeting that didn't take place, and an Apple spokesman declined to provide additional details. "Apple's most recent filing creates more questions than it answers," said Christopher Bebel, a former federal prosecutor and SEC counsel. "And many of the assertions serve as a launching pad for 20 Questions.

"It seems clear that the board is trying to whitewash these problems. But in reality, it's wishful thinking. This problem is growing larger with each denial, because the denials are so suspect."

The company's insistence that Jobs was unaware of the accounting ramifications of the backdated option grants given to fellow Apple employees also raised eyebrows.

Apple "has a lot of explaining to do," said former federal prosecutor Jan Handzlik. "This is not a matter of esoteric accounting principles applied to very imaginative and aggressive transactions. This is pretty straightforward."

In its SEC filing, Apple again sought to place responsibility for its option backdating on two departed executives. The company hasn't identified the two, but they are understood to be former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson, who resigned from the board four days before Apple announced the results of the internal probe Oct. 4, and former General Counsel Nancy Heinen, who left the company in the spring.

Anderson was not a member of Apple's compensation committee at the time of the 2001 grant to Jobs and "had no knowledge of any impropriety relating to this option grant," Anderson's attorney, Jerome Roth, said in a statement.

Heinen couldn't be reached for comment. She has denied any wrongdoing in the matter.

The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which is conducting a broad probe of option backdating, and the SEC declined to comment on Apple's filing.

At least 11 shareholder lawsuits have been filed against Apple alleging improper option dating. The suits have been consolidated into a single case in federal court in San Jose.

In conducting its inquiry, Apple said, the panel analyzed 42,077 option grants made on 259 dates, examining more than 1 million paper and electronic documents and interviewing more than 40 current and former employees, board members and advisors.

Apple's shares closed Friday at $84.84, up $3.97.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...home-headlines





JS Item of Interest

Bid Request
Tembel

I am designing an information sharing site and I need a set of professional Icons for the following actions:

1. Counter - showing the number of times a certain item has been viewed,
2. Rank - ranking a site/comment/whatever,
3. Comments - Comments by users about an article (=Discussion Forum)
4. File Sharing - Share Documents / Programs / Music / Video,
5. Related Information - Link to related information on the web,
6. Online Store - Buy a related product.

For each one of these I need all size Icons (16x16,32x32,64x64,128x128,256x256) + Disabled, Enabled, Hot.

Icon format must be supported by flash v6 and above. I also require the source (Photoshop - if that's what you're using, or whatever).

Please don't bid if you can't post high quality samples of your work for me to review.

Looking forward for your bids.

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder...questId=594173





Another Day, Another Vista Activation Crack

It was just a week ago that Microsoft's Jim Allchin was talking about Windows Vista security and how the operating system would fend off attacks from malicious code and hackers. Allchin made no mention, however, of the recent successful attempts at cracking Windows Vista's activation scheme.

Earlier this month, pirates found a way to spoof Microsoft's Key Management Service (KMS) server using a VMware image. The software hack allowed pirates to run copies of Windows Vista Business and Enterprise for up to 180 days.

The folks over at Engadget have come across another exploit that allows users to permanently activate Windows Vista using crack files and some registry trickery. The TimeStop Vista cracks only works on 32-bit versions of Windows Vista, so those looking to crack 64-bit versions of the operating system may be out of luck.

The crack effectively stops the countdown times to mandatory Vista activation and freezes the countdown timer at 43,200 minutes (30 days). The countdown timer will not reduce any lower than 30 days.

The makers of the crack note at the bottom of their "instruction manual" that "This article is for educational and informational purpose only." Microsoft likely isn't taking too kindly to this latest activation breach and likely already has a team working to patch up the exploit.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to shut down this latest exploit, it does leave us wondering just how secure this new operating system if it can be poked at and prodded this early after release.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5470





Flaws Are Detected in Microsoft’s Vista
John Markoff

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month.

On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. And over the weekend a Silicon Valley computer security firm said it had notified Microsoft that it had also found that flaw, as well as five other vulnerabilities, including one serious error in the software code underlying the company’s new Internet Explorer 7 browser.

The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site. That would make it possible for an attacker to inject rogue software into the Vista-based computer, according to executives at Determina, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that sells software intended to protect against operating system and other vulnerabilities.

Determina is part of a small industry of companies that routinely pore over the technical details of software applications and operating systems looking for flaws. When flaws in Microsoft products are found they are reported to the software maker, which then produces fixes called patches. Microsoft has built technology into its recent operating systems that makes it possible for the company to fix its software automatically via the Internet.

Despite Microsoft assertions about the improved reliability of Vista, many in the industry are taking a wait-and-see approach. Microsoft’s previous operating system, Windows XP, required two “service packs” issued over a number of years to substantially improve security, and new flaws are still routinely discovered by outside researchers.

On Friday, a Microsoft executive posted a comment on a company security information Web site stating the company was “closely monitoring” the vulnerability described by the Russian Web site. It permits the privileges of a standard user account in Vista and other versions of Windows to be increased, permitting control of all of the operations of the computer. In Unix and modern Windows systems, users are restricted in the functions they can perform, and complete power is restricted to certain administrative accounts.

“Currently we have not observed any public exploitation or attack activity regarding this issue,” wrote Mike Reavey, operations manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center. “While I know this is a vulnerability that impacts Windows Vista, I still have every confidence that Windows Vista is our most secure platform to date.”

On Saturday, Nicole Miller, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said the company was also investigating the reported browser flaw and that it was not aware of any attacks attempting to use the vulnerability.

Microsoft has spent millions branding the Vista operating system as the most secure product it has produced, and it is counting on Vista to help turn the tide against a wave of software attacks now plaguing Windows-based computers.

Vista is critical to Microsoft’s reputation. Despite an almost four-and-half-year campaign on the part of the company, and the best efforts of the computer security industry, the threat from harmful computer software continues to grow. Criminal attacks now range from programs that steal information from home and corporate PCs to growing armies of slave computers that are wreaking havoc on the commercial Internet.

Although Vista, which will be available on consumer PCs early next year, has been extensively tested, it is only now being exposed to the challenges of the open Internet.

“I don’t think people should become complacent,” said Nand Mulchandani, a vice president at Determina. “When vendors say a program has been completely rewritten, it doesn’t mean that it’s more secure from the get-go. My expectation is we will see a whole rash of Vista bugs show up in six months or a year.”

The Determina executives said that by itself, the browser flaw that was reported to Microsoft could permit damage like the theft of password information and the attack of other computers.

However, one of the principal security advances of Internet Explorer 7 is a software “sandbox” that is intended to limit damage even if a malicious program is able to subvert the operation of the browser. That should limit the ability of any attacker to reach other parts of the Vista operating system, or to overwrite files.

However, when coupled with the ability of the first flaw that permits the change in account privileges, it might then be possible to circumvent the sandbox controls, said Alexander Sotirov, a Determina security researcher. In that case it would make it possible to alter files and potentially permanently infect a target computer. This kind of attack has yet to be proved, he acknowledged.

The Determina researchers said they had notified Microsoft of four other flaws they had discovered, including a bug that would make it possible for an attacker to repeatedly disable a Microsoft Exchange mail server simply by sending the program an infected e-mail message.

Last week, the chief technology officer of Trend Micro, a computer security firm in Tokyo, told several computer news Web sites that he had discovered an offer on an underground computer discussion forum to sell information about a security flaw in Windows Vista for $50,000. Over the weekend a spokesman for Trend Micro said that the company had not obtained the information, and as a result could not confirm the authenticity of the offer.

Many computer security companies say that there is a lively underground market for information that would permit attackers to break in to systems via the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/te...rtner=homepage





Vista Security Spec 'Longest Suicide Note in History'
Andrew Thomas

NZ boffin's claim

VISTA'S CONTENT PROTECTION specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history, claims a new and detailed report from the University of Auckland in New Zealand (see last weeks WiR, - Jack).

"Peter Gutmann's report describes the pernicious DRM built into Vista and required by MS for approval of hardware and drivers," said INQ reader Brad Steffler, MD, who brought the report to our attention. "As a physician who uses PCs for image review before I perform surgery, this situation is intolerable. It is also intolerable for me as a medical school professor as I will have to switch to a MAC or a Linux PC. These draconian dicta just might kill the PC as we know it."

But this isn't just a typical anti-Microsoft rant. Gutmann's report runs to 6,000 words and contains hardly any FSF-style juvenile invective.

"Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost," says Gutmann on his homepage.

"These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry."

He also claims that Vista's content protection will 'have to violate the laws of physics if it is to work'.

I'm not going to comment on the details of the report and its implications but merely suggest that you read it for yourselves and come to your own conclusions. I'd also venture to suggest that Microsoft might want to comment on Gutmann's work.

L'INQ
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36570





Microsoft Hands out Ferrari’s to Bloggers
Long Zheng

Microsoft together with AMD gave out some really nice Christmas presents to a bunch of bloggers this year. Brandon LeBlanc got one, Scott Beale got one, Barb Bowman got one, Mauricio Freitas got one, Mitch Denny got one, Zen.Heavengames got one, plus many other bloggers who did not even write about it (shame on them). They seem to have covered everyone from A-list to Z-list, a first in the industry with such a valuable gift, kudos for thinking about the little guys.

Update: Some people got Ferrari 1000s, others got 5000s. The following specs are from the 5000.

The machine looks just as good as it specs. As part of Acer’s Ferrari designer computing range, the carbon-fiber case is styled with a slick threaded finish with genuine Ferrari badging and color strips. Just like the racing counterpart, this machine has grunt. It sports an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera. Full specifications available at the Acer website.

Assuming it doesn’t use Sony batteries, this laptop blows everything out of the water. It retails for a hot $2,299. But if you write about Microsoft, they might even give you one for free. Is it ethical? Probably not. Is it worth something to hard-working sweat and tears bloggers? Hell yeah.

I don’t see the Free Software Foundation handing out any Ferrari’s.

Update: Robert Scoble also picked up the story, comparing this to PayPerPost. Although I think PayPerPost is about profiting, whilst this is about rewarding. Even though the outcome might be the same.

Update 2: Dan Warne from APCMag has a different perspective on this issue, he thinks this is highly inappropriate and immoral. Could this act of generosity turn upside-down into a PR disaster?

Update 3: Just something for everyone to keep in mind. Remember bloggers are given a choice which includes giving the machine back when they’re done with it. Keeping the unit is a decision made solely by the bloggers receiving the computers.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/200...-free-ferrari/





Wall St. Bonuses: So Much Money, Too Few Ferraris
Jenny Anderson

It’s a brisk Wednesday morning in the windy caverns of Wall Street and Sarah Clark’s toes are cold.

Dressed in a purple flight attendant outfit, Ms. Clark, a 26-year-old model, is trying to entice recent bonus recipients at Goldman Sachs into using a charter plane service, handing out $1,000 discount coupons to people in front of the investment bank’s Broad Street headquarters.

“Where am I going?” asks one man, heading toward the Goldman building. “It’s your own private jet,” says Ms. Clark with a smile. “You can go wherever you like.”

For Wall Street’s elite, the sky may well be the limit.

In recent weeks, immense riches have been rained upon the top bankers and traders. After a year of record profits, investment houses like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley are awarding bonuses as high as $60 million. And a select group of hedge fund managers and private equity executives may be taking home even more.

That is serious money. And the serious luxury goods markets are feeling the impact.

Miller Motorcars, in Greenwich, Conn., is fielding more requests for the $250,000 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano than it can possibly fill. One real estate broker laments a dearth of listings for two clients trying to spend $20 million on Manhattan properties. Financiers already comfortably settled in multimillion-dollar apartments and town houses are buying $5 million apartments for their children. Vacation homes, usually bought and sold in the spring, are now hot this winter, including ones in private resorts like the Yellowstone Club in Montana near Yellowstone National Park.

“Last year, everybody bought Ducatis,” said one investment banker, referring to the Italian motorcycle. “This year it’s vacations. I’m on my way to St. Barts,” he said, en route to the airport. Like most bankers, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified, because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter by his company.

The 2006 bonus gold rush has re-energized some luxury markets. The Manhattan real estate market, for example, had softened; sales of apartments fell 17 percent in the third quarter this year compared with a year ago, according to the Corcoran Group.

Then came bonus day. Last week, Michele Kleier, president of Gumley Haft Kleier, received a call from a hedge fund manager in his late 30s. He had spent $6 million on an apartment two years ago and, with his bonus, wanted to upgrade. His new price range? “Not more than $20 million.”

Ed Petrie, a broker at Sotheby’s in East Hampton, N.Y., is now fielding two bids for $8 million to $10 million properties in exclusive Georgica Pond — properties that have been on the market since the spring. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. “The fall was relatively slow and then suddenly, with news on bonuses, there has been quite a bit of activity,” he said.

Many brokers noticed not just the bonus effect, but the bonus-anticipation effect. Buyers who sat on the sidelines in 2006, waiting for real estate prices to come down, saw news of outsized bonuses and started signing deals to pre-empt any price increase driven by new Wall Street payouts.

“Part of our recent increase in sales activity has been buyers not in financial services trying to beat the bonus rush,” said James Lansill, senior managing director at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group.

Once the bonus rush started, Mr. Lansill witnessed a trend he had never seen in his 14 years in the business: people who had signed contracts for apartments under construction 5 to 6 months ago were doubling the size of the properties they were purchasing.

In the last three weeks, the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing group sold the last four apartments in the Richard Meier apartments at 165 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. The last one to go: a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with 2,350 square feet that sold for just under $7 million.

Patricia Warburg Cliff, senior vice president and director for European sales at the Corcoran Group, said that until recently, 2006 had been characterized by calmer, more informed buyers. “Now there’s a feeling, ‘I need to sign because I don’t want it snatched away,’ ” she said.

Adding to the spending spree is a rash of young hedge fund analysts, first big bonus checks in hand, scooping up the $2 million to $3 million starter apartments (most popular features: glass walls, marble bathrooms and kitchens — likely to go unused — with top-flight appliances).

“We love hedge funds, they are our favorite people” Ms. Kleier said. “They don’t feel like the money is real and they don’t mind spending it — they don’t mind going up by $500,000 or $1 million increments.”

Hedge fund analysts are not the only ones celebrating bonus season. Private equity firms like the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts helped fuel a record deal-making year.

Private equity’s deal-making has trickled down to Wall Street in two ways. For one, the banks served as advisers on the deals and financed them, raking in enormous fees. (Kohlberg Kravis is said to pay more than $700 million a year in fees to the Street.)

But bankers also see a pay effect: top executives insist they must pay up because of the danger that their best dealmakers could leave for higher-paying private equity firms or other hedge funds considered more flexible and fun.

Those young, single hedge fund managers are bringing holiday cheer to car dealerships as well. This year, drama surrounds the very limited production of the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, a car with 612 horsepower that can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 3.6 seconds. “It is the most sought-after car ever made,” said Richard Koppelman, president of Miller Motorcars. With a waiting list of 50, Mr. Koppelman expects to get only one.

Who will be the lucky customer? “It’s very difficult,” he said. “We try to take care of our best clients.”

Private planes, or shares of them, are also on the rise, with demand for charter planes at one company up 40 percent to 50 percent among financial services executives. “There is a noticeable difference this year compared to the past, especially in the financial sector,” said Jeffrey Menaged, founder and head of Chief Executive Air, the company that hired Ms. Clark for the day. A typical price for a charter flight is $30,000.

Sales of “jet cards,” a sort of debit card for private flying, increase during bonus season, Mr. Menaged said, as executives lock in last year’s gains with guaranteed comfort for the new year.

Exotic destinations are also being pitched to the Wall Street ultrarich. Unlimited Speed started Victory Lane in November, a 3,000-acre development in Georgia for motor racing aficionados. Along with a 4.5 mile racetrack, the development also has a 1,600-acre nature preserve, equestrian facilities, a golf course and spa. It already has 27 reservations, a quarter of them coming from Wall Street, said Andrew Goggin, president of Unlimited Speed.

Not everyone on Wall Street is getting multimillion-dollar bonuses. The average managing director — who stands at the top of Wall Street’s hierarchical food chain, but far from rock-star status — will be getting $1 million to $3 million, which will likely be stashed in savings as memories of the 2001 bear market remain fresh.

“I’m putting it in the bank because I know next year I could be out of a job,” said one managing director at a leading bank.

For hedge fund traders and managers, markets were rough in the spring and summer, and some did not make gains until stocks rallied this fall.

“It was a terrible year,” said one young hedge fund professional. “I am going to the movies with my bonus. By myself."

At cocktail parties, comparisons to 1999 abound. That year marked the height of the technology boom and the eve of a painful crash. “It feels a little bit like the top,” said another banker.

The morning Goldman Sachs announced record fourth-quarter and 2006 earnings, Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive, implored his employees — many whom would directly benefit from the bountiful earnings — to avoid excess.

“As stewards of the firm’s reputation, I ask each of you to remember that our actions — inside and outside of the office — reflect on Goldman Sachs. Even a perception of arrogance hurts all of us,” he said in a voice mail sent to the entire firm.

Back handing out vouchers in front of Goldman, Ms. Clark wondered why there weren’t more people coming to work during the early hours.

Then, at 7:30 a.m., a black Mercedes pulled up, depositing Mr. Blankfein in front of Ms. Clark. The night before, he had been awarded a $53.4 million bonus.

She offered him a voucher. “How are you?” he said, smiling quickly but refusing the voucher.

“I guess he didn’t want it,” she lamented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/bu...rtner=homepage





US Music Publishers Sue AllofMP3 for $1.65 Trillion USD
Scott M. Fulton

In a move curious only due to its relatively late timing, the major record production labels in the US have filed suit in federal court against Russian online music distributor AllofMP3.com, seeking $150,000 USD for each single violation of copyright infringement for tracks the site posted without authorization.

The lawsuit, brought by Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group - the "big four" - along with Arista Records and Capitol Records, estimates at least 11 million individual intellectual property violations. Thus the publishers are collectively seeking damages equaling the gross national product of many countries.

Their action comes five months after music publishers in Britain sued AllofMP3 in High Court there, and two months after a court in Denmark ordered ISPs in that country to block customer access to AllofMP3.

Last month, special delegates from the US Government met with their Russian counterparts to discuss measures that country must take in order to meet compliance standards for entry into the World Trade Organization. An agreement between the two nations last month specifically mentioned AllofMP3.com as one site that the Russian government must make an effort to keep under control.

In a statement last September before the US Chamber of Commerce, US trade representative Susan Schwab pointed to AllofMP3 as one of a mere handful of principal obstacles Russia must clear if it is to formally join the global economy.

"So far, the Russian authorities have allowed this site to operate with impunity," said Schwab. "We have made clear to Russia that improved protection for intellectual property is critical to its joining the WTO and we have specifically raised our concerns with allofmp3.com, the drafting of a new section of the Civil Code, and other key issues. We are very supportive of our industries' concerns in Russia and we are working to achieve better IPR protection and enforcement there."

For its part, Russia has pledged to pass laws by June of next year that would render AllofMP3's activities officially illegal.

Unlike P2P proprietors, which have defended themselves by saying they're only responsible for the networks their technology facilitates, and not the traffic that passes over them, AllofMP3.com charges subscription fees and/or a la carte costs per album (as opposed to per song), and hosts allegedly unauthorized tracks through its conventional, centralized server. In recent days, however, customers worldwide have found it difficult to pay, with Visa and MasterCard having disqualified AllofMP3 from payment service. The site's director general, Vadim Mamotin, has blasted the credit card services for their disqualification action, calling them "arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory," and adding they "lack the authority to adjudicate the legality of Allofmp3's activities."

While the site has been taken offline for days at a time throughout this year, its parent company, Mediaservices, appears to be enjoying the publicity and is spoiling for a good fight. In recent statements, it has claimed its service abides by current Russian law. It claims to pay royalties to ROMS, the copyright holder service sanctioned by the Russian Parliament, and to FAIR (Rights holders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively). Under Russian law, as long as a distributor of music pays 15% of its collection fees to ROMS, it's a legal service.

Yet the Recording Industry Association of America has stated it doesn't recognize ROMS as a legitimate royalties collector, nor do its affiliated labels actually receive allotments from either party. No agreement with record labels outside of Russia has apparently been negotiated with these agencies. Until that time, the Russian government itself could be the direct recipient of AllofMP3's purported royalties.

So the problem that US regulators, diplomats, and US-based music publishers now face is whether any rulings or threats they make - even if the publishers win their case here - will have any bearing upon lawmakers' decisions in Russia, where isolationism has recently one again reared its ugly head. Since 2003, the IFPI - which represents the recording industry worldwide - has been drawing attention to repeated postponements by the Russian Parliament and Russian courts to take any action toward hardening software piracy laws and enforcement.

That spotlight may have unintentionally created a kind of virtual petrie dish for unauthorized distributors such as AllofMP3 to have a base of support from individuals who see the site's very existence as a kind of crusade against organized music. With Russian senior officials acting of late as if they've been missing the Cold War, the kind of "line in the sand" that US officials have been drawing on this issue may not be taken as an invitation of friendship.
http://www.betanews.com/article/US_M...USD/1166739613





AllofMP3: RIAA Lawsuit is "Unjustified"
Nate Anderson

After being sued in US federal court last week by the RIAA, AllofMP3 has made clear that it has no intention of buckling under the mounting international pressure. In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the company said, "This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3.com does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3.com operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3.com plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws."

The statement still doesn't answer the important question of whether AllofMP3 and its parent company Mediaservices have decided to commit their resources to a full-scale US court battle. Such a move could run to millions of dollars, but failure to appear could lead to a default judgment against them, as Spamhaus recently learned.

Should AllofMP3 show up in court, the case is unlikely to turn on the issue of the service's legality in Russia. Though the AllofMP3 statement made it sound like that was the key issue, it was not raised by the RIAA court filing. The trade group appears to have abandoned its efforts to use the Russian legal system to shut down AllofMP3, instead opting for pressure in the form of trade agreements and federal lawsuits back in the US, where it has more leverage.

The RIAA actually claims that the service is illegal in the US and that AllofMP3 has made a deliberate attempt to target its service at the American market, not the Russian one. The situation is analagous to that of offshore or British-based gambling sites that actually make most of their money from US punters. Though the services are legal in their own localities, the operators have routinely faced arrest if they set foot in the US, and the government has tried to restrict their revenues from leaving the US.

For now, AllofMP3 execs might want to stay out of New York.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061228-8515.html





Music and the People Unfit To Share It

For several years, record companies have received a lot of negative passion from the file sharing community, but to follow up my post from a week ago, I’d like to give some of that love to the artists. As a musician, especially one without a record label, I would think your main objective would be to have as many people as possible hear your band, but this isn’t always the case. For example purposes I am going to use the Alex Kadet Band, a group of students I attended high school with.

As I’ve always thought Alex was a talented individual, I decided to see if he had a MySpace account, and to my delight, he does. So I listened to some of the songs, which in my opinion, weren’t too excruciating. But once I went to download one of these songs so I could possibly play a role in sharing this music or god for bid include some on my iPod’s playlist, I could not.

A band whose reach is limited to what MySpace provides, should be encouraging people to share their music rather than prohibiting them from doing so. Consequently, the Alex Kadet Band, and others like them, will not succeed in the information age.
http://kleduc.wordpress.com/2006/12/...t-to-share-it/





Downloading a New Economy at the Pirate Bay
Kent Scott

Although they’re probably not as good looking as Johnny Depp and their names don’t carry the same historical weight as Blackbeard, the people at peer to peer file sharing networks such as the Pirate Bay might be in the vanguard of a much stronger threat to international trade than the Barbary Pirates were even on their best day. The crisis of copyright and intellectual property protection in the face of digital technology is a relatively new issue and one which people and political parties are sometimes reluctant to address. The minutia of international copyright laws is daunting, the technology isn’t something that everyone understands or uses yet, the problem pits consumers, artists and art marketers against each other and it’s basically just not a sexy issue. However, at the heart of this nerdy misunderstood issue some people see a poison pill that might symbolize the end of the market economy as we know it.

Copyright laws have a long and complex history, but I like to imagine that these laws are a lot like baseball’s infield fly rule: an inelegant but seemingly necessary intrusion that attempts to smooth over a flaw in the game. Defenders in baseball try to catch the ball that’s hit by the offense. However in certain situations (an infield fly ball), it actually makes more sense for the defender to drop the ball. It seems stupid to most fans that a defender would be rewarded for dropping the ball, so there came into the game a rule stating that even in situations where it makes sense to drop the ball a defender should catch it. Not everyone likes the rule, but it does a fairly good job of covering up this strange quirk in the game.

Intellectual property is to the market economy much as an infield fly is to baseball. Just to refresh half remembered high school economics, our markets teeter-totter on the see-saw of scarcity. When a product is scarce its prices rise and producers are tempted into making more, until they reach the point where the product becomes abundant, fewer people buy it and prices fall again. Abundance is seen as a problem by market economists and it can lead to strange behavior. For example, as the European Union was forming Sweden was forced to artificially raise its unemployment level. It was feared that an abundance of jobs would lead to increased salaries from companies needing to keep workers and decision makers saw that as a bad thing. A labor market demands low wages and for that it’s necessary to have a scarcity of jobs and a certain amount of unemployment. More recently and closer to home, agricultural co-ops in Aichi prefecture and other places around Japan have been destroying cabbages, daikon and other winter crops made abundant by warm temperatures this fall. Having such a good crop has led to low prices which farmers are trying to artificially raise by burning tons and tons of edible food, increasing scarcity. The food market demands high food prices through product scarcity and a certain amount of hunger and starvation.

Intellectual property brings out this market strangeness in spades because it’s even more abundant than daikon in Japan this year. In fact, it’s infinitely abundant. While only one person can eat a particular daikon everyone in the world can listen to the same song (someone’s intellectual property) and there would still be an infinite amount of that song left over for other people to hear. It actually stretches grammatical credulity to talk about intellectual property in terms of scarcity. So why doesn’t the infinite abundance of intellectual property make it worthless? That’s where copyright comes in. Copyrights create an artificial scarcity by declaring that only the copyright holder is able to distribute the intellectual property. Naturally the holders demand compensation for distribution and that creates value in the property. This commodification of the infinite is under serious threat however.

Peer to peer file sharing networks like The Pirate Bay have made it very easy to freely distribute copyrighted digital property such as music, movies, books and software. There’s no doubt that it’s illegal to do so, but some controversy over whether or not it’s immoral. Copyright holders are fighting an uphill battle to convince people that sharing is bad, and copyright infringers can’t make adequate excuses for denying content creators the ability to profit from their work. Regardless of the ethics, file sharing has made the markets poor ability to deal with abundance very clear to anyone observing.

For now the increasing un-workability of copyright laws doesn’t seem to be much of a threat to capitalism as the problems are mostly confined to the entertainment industry. The decisions being made now about how to deal with the abundance of digitized information will be used as precedents in future problems that arise from a lack of scarcity in a given industry. There are many areas where a future lack of scarcity might be a problem. Many researchers believe that economic fear of abundance has been holding back alternative energy and agriculture technology, digital property has recently become popular and will probably become much more so, while more fancifully robotics and molecular manipulation at the nano level could mean abundance of labor and just about everything else.

Rather than try to convert anyone to a position or opinion, I would like point everyone to a very wide open and interesting debate that’s occurring at places like Re-Public and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Economies and markets are being theorized and built on foundations much different that the hoarding of scarce property. A digital commons, peer production and property and other alternative value systems are proposed and debated daily while slowly action moves forward. Opinions are still flexible, positions aren’t carved in stone yet. It’s a debate that can still be shaped by anyone with an interest and some good ideas.
http://dajwebnews.blogspot.com/2006/...irate-bay.html





The Ethics of File Sharing (2)
Peter

File sharing is considered by many to be an ethical grey area. It clearly isn’t theft, as theft involves depriving someone of property (although the record companies are doing their best to redefine the word it would seem). The only argument against file sharing that needs to really be taken seriously (in regards to its ethical, not legal, status) is whether causing the record companies to lose sales, hence reducing their profits, is ethically wrong.

In other places I have argued that how an action impacts society should guide our ethical judgments about it. Thus we regard theft as wrong because if we as a society condoned theft then ownership would be meaningless. And without ownership people aren’t motivated to create the infrastructure and developments that give us the high quality of life we enjoy now. File sharing too can be analyzed in this fashion, we simply have to ask whether a society in which file sharing was allowed would be better or worse than one without it.

It should be obvious that, by these standards, protecting someone’s sales is, in general, not an ethical obligation. In fact allowing someone’s actions to reduce the profits of another is the foundation of capitalism. If you own the only source of diamonds then you can like a monopoly, selling a small amount of your product at high prices. You will make a lot of money, but your business won’t operate at the level that is optimal for society. But if I open a diamond mine then we will be in competition. Your sales will be reduced as a result, and your profits even more so (since you can no longer price your product as if you were a monopoly), but in the end there is a net benefit to society (this is a well established fact).

So what we really need to consider is if file sharing, as an individual case, is good or bad for society, since we have seen that in at least some cases causing a company to lose sales, and reduce its profits, is good for society. It is not clear to me that if file sharing was accepted that the record companies would go under, after all some people would still want to buy CDs and other band merchandise. Someone might even set up a CD rental business like Netflix, which would give people the convenience of having the physical CD, but at a fraction of the cost*. But let us consider the “worst” case, in which the record companies do go under. Is this a bad or a good thing?

Certainly for the people who lose their jobs it would be a bad thing, but I would expect that most of them wouldn’t have too many problems finding new ones; unemployment simply isn’t that high, and most of the people working for the record labels are well educated. Besides that the only possible harm to society that I think might result would be a reduction in new music being produced. Certainly the record labels portray themselves as being integral to the production of music (by funding it), and I will assume that music, like artistic endeavors in general, has value to society.

Certainly a world without Mozart or Bach would be a poor world to live in. But wait, Mozart and Bach made their music without the support (or even existence) of any kind of record company! Like the painters and sculptors of their time, they were supported by wealthy patrons. I suppose that in this modern era it might be possible that such a system wouldn’t work, but our modern painters and sculptors seem to get along just fine (ok, well most of them have to supplement their income with other jobs, but they still are able to produce great art). So if the record companies collapsed I suspect that music would simply go back to being made in this way. That means that there would certainly be far fewer musicians than there are today, but quantity doesn’t always mean quality. Maybe we would only have one pop band. In fact I think that such a system might even encourage higher quality music, since the musicians would have to fight harder to get patrons.

Thus I conclude that file sharing can’t be considered ethically wrong. In fact the collapse of the music industry (if that is really the consequence of file sharing) might even be a good thing, turning art back into art instead of a commodity. Of course file sharing is still against the law, at least in some places, and so for legal reasons I can’t encourage you to engage in such behavior. And you might have an ethical obligation to follow the law, even if the law doesn’t have an ethical basis (a discussion which I won’t enter into here).

* If you are inspired by this to start such a service it is only fair to give me some stock.
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/20...ile-sharing-2/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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