Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 25th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































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"I wouldn’t have taken the case." – Rune Lavin



































April 25th, 2009




Pirate Bay Judge Accused of Bias, Calls for a Retrial
enigmax

One of the biggest cases in file-sharing history ended last week with The Pirate Bay Four sentenced to huge fines and jail time. Today it is revealed that far from being impartial, the judge in the case is a member of pro-copyright groups - along with Henrik Pontén, Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky. There are loud calls for a retrial.

It’s been almost a week since the verdicts of one year in prison and heavy financial damages were passed against the four accused in the Pirate Bay trial. The sentence seemed surprisingly tough to many analysts, with the court chosing to judge on intent only, dismissing all technical evidence.

But did The Pirate Bay Four receive a fair trial? Today, an event on Swedish national radio SR threw everything into doubt - and it’s barely believable, like something straight out of Hollywood.

The copyright industry likes to have the outcome of processes clear before engaging them so it’s perhaps unsurprising that SR today revealed that the judge Tomas Norström is in league with it on many fronts. The judge has several engagements - together with the prosecution lawyers for the movie and music industries.

Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) - The judge Tomas Norström is a member of this discussion forum that holds seminars, debates and releases the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review. Other members of this outfit? Henrik Pontén (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), Monique Wadsted (movie industry lawyer) and Peter Danowsky (IFPI) - the latter is also a member of the board of the association.

Swedish Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (SFIR) - The judge Tomas Norström sits on the board of this association that works for stronger copyright laws. Last year they held the Nordic Championships in Intellectual Property Rights Process Strategies.

.SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) - Tomas Norström works for the foundation that oversees the .se name domain and advises on domain name disputes. His colleague at the foundation? Monique Wadsted. Wadsted says she’s never met Norström although they have worked together.

Commenting on the revelations, Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde brokep said, “Spectrial Cliffhanger in S01 with the verdict - S02 started with the judge being biased. Reality beats fiction yet again!”

There are several renowned lawyers and judicial commentators that are attacking Tomas Norström’s decision to take the case, in spite of having a clear conflict of interest.

“I wouldn’t have taken the case,” says former judicial ombudsman Rune Lavin.

Former Director of Public Prosecution Sven-Erik Alhem said, “You cannot hide controversial facts. The attention this gets only leads to unnecessary questioning of bias in Swedish courts. Of course the judge should have informed people of the situation prior to the process and thereby allowed the involved parties to decide if it was suitable or not.”

Lawyer Leif Silbersky made a comment all Pirate Bay supporters want to hear, “If the lawyers [for the defense] act on this immediately, this could mean a re-trial.”

Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin says he has already put in a request for a re-trial. “In my appeal, I will claim the court was biased and that the appeal court should cancel the verdict and re-submit the case to the district court,” he said.

And the judge himself? “Every time I accept a case I make an assessment on whether I am part of it or not. But I have not felt that I am biased because of those commitments,” he said.

During the trial it was the judge, Tomas Norström, that was responsible for ensuring that the trial was fair and that the lay judges did not act in their own interests.

Previously one of the original lay judges in the case had to step down when his involvement in a music rights group became known;

“Three lay judges were appointed,” said Judge Norström one week before the trial. “On a question from me to the lay judges on whether they had any involvement in copyright associations or similar, or if they are or have been artists one of them answered Yes.”

That lay judge was removed. It’s anyone’s guess why the judge didn’t think the same should apply to him.

Whether or not Tomas Norström allowed his personal interests to get in the way of a fair verdict is open for debate, but there can’t be an intelligent human being reading this news that doesn’t feel that it would’ve been better for everyone if he simply backed away from this case and let someone else take over. He has compromised the entire case and verdict.

Rick Falkvinge of Sweden’s Pirate Party said the revelations were indicative of “corruption on a completely unforgivable level.”
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-l...etrial-090423/

http://www.thelocal.se/19028/20090423/





Pirate Bay Says Appeal is Filed
Greg Sandoval

Days after four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case were found guilty of violating copyright law, the Web site implored fans to stay calm, not to send donations, and to stay united.

In a blog posted to Thepiratebay.org, the controversial BitTorrent tracker said the "verdict has already been appealed by us and will be taken to the next level of court."

Administrators of the court in Sweden did not immediately respond to requests to confirm the filing of the appeal. On Friday, the court convicted Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström of charges related to copyright infringement and sentenced each to a year in jail and fined the group the equivalent of $3.6 million.

The news stirred outrage and disbelief among fans, while those at big entertainment companies rejoiced. Based in Sweden, the Pirate Bay has been accused of encouraging and aiding massive illegal file sharing by media and entertainment companies. The site's founders say they do not host any illegal content and are just a search engine. They have always argued there is little difference between the Pirate Bay and Google.

In the blog post, the Pirate Bay remained defiant.

"The site will live on," the group said in the post. "We are more determined than ever that what we do is right. Millions of users are a good proof of that."

Addressing efforts of some fans to raise money to help the defendants pay the fines, the Pirate Bay asked that such efforts cease. "We do not want (the money) since we will not pay any fines."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10223683-93.html





Swedes Demonstrate Against Pirate Bay Verdict
Ernesto

More than thousand people have gathered in the streets of the Swedish capital Stockholm today, to protest against yesterday’s Pirate Bay verdict. The demonstration was organized by the Swedish Pirate Party that is campaigning for the European Parliament elections in June.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each of them was ordered to pay the entertainment industry $905,000 in damages. The defendants have all anounced that they will appeal, which means that the case is likely to drag on for years.

Many Swedes were outraged by the harsh sentence that was given and today the Swedish Pirate Party organized a demonstration to support the defendants. The demonstration took place in in Stockholm, and there were similar protests in other Swedish cities.

“Politicians have declared war on our entire generation,” Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge told the crowd, adding. “Our politicians are digital illiterates. We need politicians who can’t be hen-pecked by a foreign power.”

“The Pirate Bay is a completely legitimate service that transmits information between people. After this ruling, no one can feel secure when linking to a YouTube clip on its website,” Daniel Nyström from the Pirate Party said in his speech while the crowd yelled “Free TPB, free TPB!”

The verdict has brought many new members for the Pirate Party, and they hope to get a seat at the European Parliament later this year. Over the past day over 6000 members applied, raising the member count from less than 15,000 up to more than 20,000 making them one of the largest political parties in Sweden.

Tomorrow the Pirate Party has planned another demonstration in the city center of Goteborg, hoping to equal the success of today.
http://torrentfreak.com/swedes-demon...erdict-090418/





BitTorrent Trackers Close En Masse After Pirate Bay Verdict
Ernesto

Several private BitTorrent trackers including Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds and Wolfbits, have closed down after the Pirate Bay verdict came in last Friday. Other trackers are set to follow this example in what could be the greatest voluntary tracker collapse ever.

Operating a BitTorrent tracker from Sweden is not as fun as it used to be, last Friday ruined all that. What was once considered a safe haven for BitTorrent sites, is now a Bermuda Triangle for some previously very active BitTorrent trackers. The harsh verdict against the four individuals involved with the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet led to worries among those who operate similar sites in Sweden and elsewhere.

In the days following the verdict, several large and small BitTorrent trackers have decided to close down and more are expected to follow suit in the days to come. One of the sites that has closed its doors is NordicBits, which displays a message citing the verdict as one of the reasons for the closure.

We have to shut down the site now due all circumstances. We don’t have time to do anything to the code, we don’t have interest in it, we don’t have any more money and the biggest reason is The Pirate Bay info.

Rumors say that at least a dozen trackers will discontinue operations in the days to come including Swebits, who have already shut down their tracker but not the site itself. SeedIT, a relatively small community is another tracker that’s decided to shut - they posted their latest torrent a few hours ago, titled:

“RiP.SeedIT.We.Have.always.been.the.best.of.the.best.Love.lo ve.love.XXX-RIP”
Several of the trackers that are now offline were operated by Swedes, who are worried that they might be facing legal troubles as well. In addition, there are many other BitTorrent trackers hosted in Sweden run by non-Swedes - time will tell how they respond.

The Pirate Bay continues business as usual as the defendants appeal their case, but in the meantime the Swedish anti-piracy lobby will use the verdict to their advantage. Uncertain times.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-t...erdict-090420/





BT Blocks Off Pirate Bay

BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay, as part of a "self-regulation" scheme.
Barry Collins

BT Mobile Broadband users who attempt to access the notorious BitTorrent tracker site are met with a "content blocked" message.

The warning page states the page has been blocked in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code".

"This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have 'over 18' status," the warning states. It goes on to list a series of categories that are blocked, including adult/sexually explicit content, "criminal skills" and hacking.

It's not stated which category The Pirate Bay breaches, although the site does host links to porn movies.

BT's warning message advises customers to contact customer services if they want the block on the site to be lifted. The message also invites users to seek further information on the self-regulation scheme on the Internet Watch Foundation's website, although an IWF spokesman denies any involvement with the mobile filtering scheme.

All mobile networks

The self-regulations scheme includes all five of the major mobile networks. (BT's service is based on the Vodafone network).

The Code says that members agree to block even legal "adult" content on mobile connections, in case phones or laptops fall into the hands of minors.

"The Code covers new types of content, including visual content, online gambling, mobile gaming, chat rooms and internet access," the code of practice states.

However, it then goes on to state that "the Code does not cover peer-to-peer communications but it does give assurances to customers that the mobile operators are taking action to combat illegal, bulk and nuisance communications."

Pirate Bay's founders last week lost their landmark case against several leading record companies and now face a huge fine and up to a year in jail, pending an appeal.

BT was also unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/251609/b...irate-bay.html





Norway Makes it Easier to Go After File-Sharers
enigmax

The recently implemented IPRED legislation in Sweden makes it easier for copyright holders to identify and go after alleged illegal file-sharers. Up until now the same hasn’t been easy in Norway, but all that is set to change as the country’s telecoms regulator says that file-sharers identities can be given to copyright holders.

Norwegian file-sharers transferring illicit content on the Internet are about to find out that their identities aren’t as secure as they were previously. To date, the identities of these file-sharers has been kept secret as privacy rules have largely stopped copyright holders discovering real-life names behind IP addresses.

All that is set to change as Norway’s Post and Telecommunications Regulator has just decided that if a court feels there is good enough reason, it can force ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of illicit file-sharers to copyright holders. This means that they can now be pursued through the courts, or more likely, through “pay up or else” type threats.

The decision to allow courts to force ISPs to hand over file-sharers’ details relates to one particular case brought by Simonsen, a company that is licensed to investigate illegal file-sharing on the web. It’s believed that the decision will be applied to future requests of the same nature.

Post and Telecommunications Regulator director Willy Jensen said it was time to make online a “legitimate and structured place,” not of anarchy. “Cultural life on the web is important, so we can’t allow a situation where artists copyrights are broken,” he said.

Simonsen law firm works with notorious movie industry lawyer Espen Tondel, who previously sent a letter to ISPs ordering them, among other things, to disconnect alleged file-sharers. The ISPs refused to compromise their customers, but with this new decision it looks like they may be forced to do just that in future.

Interestingly, the decision of the telecoms regulator opposes the views of the Norwegian Minister of Education who believes that the music industry should embrace the Internet instead of fighting it. “All previous technology advances have led to fears that the older format would die. But TV did not kill radio, the Web did not kill the book, and the download is not going to kill music.” the Minister said earlier.
http://torrentfreak.com/norway-makes...harers-090419/





Taiwan File-Sharing Website Indicted for Copyright Infringement

The Pan-Chiao District Prosecutors office has indicted the company operating local file-sharing website Foxy and one person, suspected of being the owner and operator of the site, of violations of Taiwan’s Copyright Law.

Prosecutors estimated that Foxy's operation caused approximately $5.2 million in losses to rights holders.

The indictments follow raids by Taiwan's Intellectual Property Rights Police in 2007 and 2008 against both Foxy and a publishing company believed to be related to Foxy. The Foxy software resides in users computers and, similar to Winny software in Japan, can cause problems with information being inadvertently shared by users.

Such was the concern over this system that Taiwan's Government has prohibited the installation of Foxy software on Government computers. Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has also banned the use of the software on the academic network, TANet, used by students across the country.

"These indictments against Foxy are proof of the value Taiwan places on intellectual property rights and the great effort the country will go to ensure they are protected. We look forward to more indictments as these will serve to deter such operators as well as send a clear message across that illegal file sharing will not be tolerated in Taiwan," "said Motion Picture Association (MPA) president and managing director, Asia-Pacific, Mike Ellis.

Taiwan's Foundation Against Copyright Theft (TFACT) represents the MPA in Taiwan. TFACT executive director Spencer Yang said, "We thank the authorities for their efforts in taking down this website and sending a strong signal to those who use it as a tool for piracy. For sure, content owners and creators in Taiwan are greatly encouraged by the fact that action is being taken against those who try to steal their work."

In Taiwan, Internet piracy remains a key concern for rights holders. In 2008, TFACT coordinated with local enforcement authorities to take action in regard to more than 423 online piracy cases.
http://www.businessofcinema.com/news.php?newsid=12812





Hollywood's Victory Over The Pirate Bay Will Be Short-Lived
Daniel Ionescu

From Sweden to London to Hollywood, protectors of copyrights are celebrating the conviction of the four men behind the world's most popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay. The four convicted men behind The Pirate Bay -- Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom -- say they can't and won't pay the $3.6 million in damages and promised the site will continue running. So much for Hollywood's sweet victory and happy ending.

Hollywood may have won a battle, but the war against piracy is far from over. Unauthorized file-sharing will continue (and likely intensify), if not through The Pirate Bay, then through dozens of other near-identical swashbuckling Web sites.

Of course, The Pirate Bay's case is nothing new. Eight years ago Napster was shut down after getting sued. It tried a few legal business models, but never managed to even get close to the popularity it had when it was operating illegally. The shutdown of Napster turned its creator, Shawn Fanning, and Napster into a into heroes and martyrs, inspiring others to develop new ways to pirate music.The Pirate Bay site itself is still up and running while the case is appealed.

What Hollywood needs to remember is that sites like The Pirate Bay are like weeds. When you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. In this case, The Pirate Bay already moved most of its servers to the Netherlands, a change that could keep the site running even if The Pirate Bay loses its appeal.

The bad news for copyright-holders is there is obviously a market demand for this type of content distribution model. And while the entertainment industry seeks compensation via lawsuits, other similar services (which I do not endorse) such as Mininova, Demonoid and Torrentbox to name a few, will continue to thrive. That is, of course, until they get sued into oblivion as well. And then there are always new technologies on the horizon. Hollywood might want to start looking at a budding new peer-to-peer tool called OneSwarm that aims to let file-swappers preserve their privacy by cloaking their IP address.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16336...t_lived.h tml





Plan to Fight Illegal Downloads Faces Opposition
Kevin J. O'Brien

The governing party of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, scrambling to save a national law that would cut off Internet service to those who make repeated illegal downloads, is threatening to block a European Union telecommunications bill that would undermine the legal foundation of the French plan.

The E.U. bill would create a new telecommunication regulator in Europe, enable regulators to separate dominant phone companies from their networks, and increase coordination of broadcast frequencies within Europe.

But the measure prohibits the exact proposal that France is considering — allowing a government agency to cut off the Internet service of E.U. citizens. The French National Assembly, which unexpectedly rejected the proposal this month, is scheduled to revisit the plan next week.

Representatives of Mr. Sarkozy have spent the past week lobbying Brussels to eliminate the clause, which is part of legislation that has been two years in the making.

“What the conservatives are doing now is holding the entire European telecoms package hostage because of the French,” said Raphaël Delarue, a legislative assistant to Guy Bono, the French member of the European Parliament who proposed the ban on administrative sanctions for Internet piracy last year.

Mr. Bono’s amendment was approved overwhelmingly by Parliament in September. It would require E.U. governments to obtain court orders before disconnecting Internet service.

The committee in Brussels debating the telecommunications package, the Industry, Technology and Research committee, is expected to vote on the package Tuesday.

The committee’s chairwoman, Catherine Trautmann, a former French minister of culture, last week offered European telecommunications ministers a compromise that would reduce Mr. Bono’s ban to a “recital,” a form of legislative preamble that would guide the ban’s transcription into law.

Recitals are considered by some to have less effect than if the ban were inserted as an article in the body of legislation. But E.U. ministers last week indicated that they would reject Ms. Trautmann’s compromise and wanted the controversial language removed from the bill, according to a lawmaker.

Negotiators for the ministers are also scheduled to meet Tuesday.

“This has the potential to hold up the entire telecoms package,” said Miloslav Ransdorf, a Czech lawmaker and vice chairman of the committee. “We’ve agreed to everything in the package except for this and the French are the reason.”

The French proposal has pitted music and film companies fighting widespread piracy against broadband operators, software makers and free speech advocates, who object to government intrusion into the Internet.

Under the French plan, citizens accused of making illegal downloads three times in 12 months would have their Internet service severed by a new administrative agency. Individuals who had their service cut off would have to resort to the French court system to challenge the move.

In Brussels, France is finding support from Italy, Sweden and Britain, all of which oppose E.U. restrictions on domestic copyright law, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.

Whatever the outcome, Mr. Bono, the French member of the European Parliament, plans to reintroduce his ban on the sanctions when the full Parliament votes on the telecommunications package in early May, his assistant, Mr. Delarue, said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/te...net/21net.html





ISPs Refuse to Shut Down Pirate Bay

Internet service providers refuse to cooperate with an entertainment industry group's demand to shut down The Pirate Bay.

Following yesterday's conviction of the four men connected with the popular file sharing site, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is demanding that Pirate Bay website be shut down.

But Internet service providers (ISPs) refuse to cooperate, reports the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.

Neither has the judgement slowed down file sharing. Several minutes after the Stockholm District Court delivered the verdict, almost ten billion files were being downloaded.

The ISPs maintain that the ruling doesn't apply to them.

"In part, this is not a legally binding decision, but above all, this is a judgement against Pirate Bay and nothing that effects any service provider. We will not take any action (to block) the contents if we are not compelled to do so," Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at Telia Sonera, told Svenska Dagbladet.

Bredbandsbolaget and Com Hem had the same reply. Jon Karlung, managing director of Bahnhofs, said the judgement does not change anything.

"We will not censor sites for our customers; that is not our job. I am against anything that contradicts the principle of a free and open Internet."
http://www.thelocal.se/18940/20090418/





ISP Speeds Up Customers’ BitTorrent Downloads
Ernesto

There are many ways for ISPs to manage the increased load BitTorrent traffic places on their network. Some choose to interrupt BitTorrent transfers like Comcast did, but there are more ‘consumer friendly’ alternatives too. An Israeli Internet provider is adding local web-seeds to speed up torrent transfers and reduce the amount of international traffic.

Over the past few years Internet service providers have been increasingly complaining about the massive load BitTorrent transfers place on their networks. They claim that this load can reduce the performance experienced by other subscribers, but the huge amount of data transferred outside their own network is also very costly.

To solve these issues, some ISPs have started to slow down all BitTorrent traffic, Comcast-style. Others choose to limit BitTorrent speeds at certain times of the day, and there are other examples where customers simply cannot download files with a .torrent extension at all.

Luckily there are options available which can help manage BitTorrent traffic and please customers, all at the same time. The Israeli ISP Bezeq has taken this more consumer-friendly route. This ISP actually makes BitTorrent downloads faster by caching popular torrent downloads on their own network. By doing so the load on the network decreases and since there are less connections to peers outside the network Bezeq is also saving on costly bandwidth.

It works as follows. When a Bezeq customer downloads a .torrent file the ISP will intercept it and add (!) a new tracker to it. The additional tracker is only accessible for Bezeq customers and it connects to a high speed web-seed hosted on Bezeq network. As a result the files will be downloaded much faster. A Bezeq customer told us that almost all ‘popular’ torrents he downloaded connect to local seeds.

Interestingly, the tracker Bezeq uses is hosted by a Usenet provider in The Netherlands, while the actual seeds (caches) are on the ISPs network. The Usenet provider confirmed to TorrentFreak that the ISP is indeed listed as a client, but they were not aware of its torrent caching practices or that they were hosting a BitTorrent tracker.

On the surface this seems to be a win-win situation for both the ISP and its customers. Bezeq saves on resources and expensive bandwidth while the customer enjoys higher download speeds. There are of course privacy concerns, since the .torrent files are intercepted and edited without permission, but the biggest opposition to such a system will most likely come from the entertainment industry.

Various anti-piracy lobby groups, including the MPAA and RIAA are already pushing for more cooperation from ISPs in tracking down copyright infringers. The relationship between the entities is an uneasy one already, and that’s before an ISP decided it would become a BitTorrent seeder. Although Bezeq does not control which files are cached on their servers, the likes of the MPAA and RIAA will likely see it as aiding in copyright infringement.

Caching BitTorrent traffic and attempts to keep it within the local network as much as possible are not new, but aside from occasional tests these technologies are never implemented by ISPs. Bezeq did not respond to our inquiries so we can’t confirm that they have implemented it for all their customers. For those who are lucky enough, enjoy the ride.
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-speeds-u...nloads-090418/





Queen Elizabeth II Rules World's Worst Copyright Regime?

A pair of consumer groups have surveyed 16 copyright regimes around the world. The worst one they found was the United Kingdom, a "blessed plot" which makes it illegal to rip CDs, doesn't protect parody and satire, and puts a copyright on government documents.
Nate Anderson

Who has the worst "worst, by far" copyright laws in the world? According to a pair of consumer groups, the winner is—wait for it—the UK.

Yes, the country that brought us copyright, modern parliamentary democracy, chocolate Hobnobs, and both Shakespeare and Simon Cowell was rated the absolute worst of sixteen countries surveyed when it came to copyright. The abysmal rating came from the Open Rights Group and Consumer Focus, which dinged the UK for its lack of a broad "fair use" right and the continued existence of rules that prohibit (among other things) legally ripping a CD to one's computer or iPod.

Countries surveyed included China, Australia, Argentina, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Korea, and the US, but the UK's consumer unfriendliness (read the country-specific report) can be seen in the fact that it has no copyright exemption for parody or satire. It also assigns the copyright in most government documents to the Crown, unlike the US government, which places its material in the public domain.

Many of these items were identified as problems by the hugely important Gowers Review back in 2006, but have still not been acted upon. Andrew Gowers, a newspaper editor, recommended that the UK's "fair dealing" laws get a major upgrade and that private ripping of legally purchased CDs be made legal; neither has yet happened.

To some rightsholders, of course, the "bad news" actually looks like "good news," since it gives them even more power to control their material. Consumers widely ignore rules such as the ban on CD ripping, and people aren't prosecuted for doing so, but this sort of copyright overreach simply damages public respect for law and copyrights so long as it remains on the books.

From the consumer point of view, things may get worse, quickly. The European Parliament, pushed by record labels and rock stars like Bono and Sir Cliff Richard, is considering an extension on musical copyrights to 95 years per song.

The Gowers Review said that the current 50-year copyright was plenty of time, but the UK government is pushing for an extension to 70 years. It won't go along with the full 95-year term, however, and has been holding up the legislation in Europe on the grounds that it goes too far. The European Parliament could hold a full vote on the plan next week.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ght-regime.ars





Biz Welcomes EU Term Vote
Andre Paine

U.K. industry bodies the BPI, AIM and Musicians' Union have joined with labels' and performers' licensing organization PPL in welcoming a European Parliament vote in favor of extending the term for copyright on sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years.

MEPs in Strasbourg today (April 23) backed Irish MEP Brian Crowley's report for the committee on legal affairs, with 377 votes in favor, 178 against and 37 abstentions, although EU governments will ultimately have to approve the change in the law in the European Council.

"Today's supporting vote in the European Parliament recognises fairness and the benefit copyright term extension will bring to artists, producers, performers and music companies," said the joint statement from the BPI, AIM, the Musicians' Union and PPL. "We welcome the vote and urge the EU member states in the Council to follow Parliament's lead and support the proposal."

The U.K. government has backed the 70 years proposal, after originally coming out against the European Commission's plan for a 95-year term.

"We are pleased to see that the Parliament supports the view that performers should receive protection during their lifetime, and that this is achieved with the 70 year term," said a spokesperson for the U.K. governement's Intellectual Property Office.

However, a vote of the European Council went against the directive on April 14, the second time it had stalled. There have been issues surrounding the session fund measure, for which record companies would set aside part of the additional revenues for performers, and the clean slate proposal to prevent the use of previous contractual agreements by labels to deduct money from the additional royalties.

Crowley said the compromise reached by the Parliament on 70 years would facilitate an agreement with national governments.

The dedicated fund for session musicians was backed by the Parliament and MEPs amended a provision relating to this fund to give collecting societies the right to administer the annual supplementary remuneration.

MEPs also looked at the clean slate measure and amended the original text to prevent the use of previous contractual agreements to deduct money from the additional royalties, to ensure that performers receive the full benefits of copyright extension. And on the so-called 'use-it-or-lose-it' clause, the Parliament stated that if producers do not make a recording available to the public after 50 years, performers could ask to terminate the contract they signed to transfer their rights to the label. The rights will expire in a year if the recording is not made available.

The Parliament also wants the European Commission to launch an impact assessment of the situation by January 2010, with a view to deciding whether a similar copyright extension would benefit the audiovisual sector. And after three years of the legislation taking effect, it wants an assessment of its application to the digital market.

"As a musician, I am grateful to all the MEPs who have today voted to give us a fair copyright term," said musician Phil Pickett of Culture Club and Sailor in a statement. "It cannot be right that we lose our recordings, while others continue to profit from them. Now we look to the ministers from the various member states to show their support for musicians and for our European cultural heritage."

The copyright extension will apply to new recordings as well as existing recordings that are not yet out of copyright.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...f93b96ad6cab3d





Fair Use, Turnitin, And... Why Google Never Should Have Caved On Book Scanning

Last year, we wrote about a district court decision that noted iParadigm's popular Turnitin plagiarism checker service wasn't violating copyright by adding every student's paper to its database, noting that this was fair use. Wired points out that an appeals court has upheld this ruling and links to Thomas O'Toole's quick summary of why this is fair use:

The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative "in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work," citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff's work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court's fair use finding.

While O'Toole rushes through these points, they're actually pretty important, since they're quite often misunderstood by people (even copyright lawyers) who claim that commercial use isn't fair use, or that using an entire work can't be fair use or can't be transformative. In this case, the court lays out why none of that is true. When the original decision came out, I suggested that all of these points could be helpful to Google in defending its book scanning efforts, since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points. It's scanning was a commercial use, but transformative (it was for indexing/searching books, not reading them), it was making use of the entire work, but again, in a transformative way.

Unfortunately, as we all know, Google caved in that lawsuit and settled -- though, now we're watching as many are challenging whether the settlement terms are legal or reasonable. I still think Google should have stuck with the pure fair use defense, showing that its use was transformative and different - similar to just indexing websites for linking purposes. Not only is it unfortunate that Google gave this up, because it's one less strong precedent over fair use, but it's now opened up the ridiculous claims by a bunch of other industries (newspapers, recording) demanding that Google "settle" with them as well, and hand over cash. Google's decision to back down was a big mistake, not just in terms of screwing over others trying to scan books (what most of the current complaints are about), but in denying a strong fair use precedent and making Google look like an easy place for struggling industries to demand cash.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...07284556.shtml





Bono Favors Performance Rights Act
FMQB

U2's Bono is the latest artist to speak out in favor of the Performance Rights Act, which would call for radio stations to pay roylaties to artists for playing their music. Bono joins other supporters such as Smashing Pumpkins founder Billy Corgan, will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, Herbie Hancock and Emmylou Harris, who have all joined the musicFIRST Coalition on Capitol Hill to lobby in favor of the Performance Rights Act.

Bono released a statement on the matter via musicFIRST, which is an advocacy group for artist rights. "While we have many friends at radio, and appreciate the many things that radio has done for our band over the years, we believe it’s only fair that when radio makes money by playing a recording artist's music and selling advertising, the recording artist should be compensated just as songwriters are already," said Bono. "This is a principle accepted by radio broadcasters in virtually every country in the world. The music business is in a state of freefall at the moment, and while, thankfully, this no longer really affects us - there are many young recording artists out there who can no longer earn a living from the sale of their music, or from touring or selling merchandise... yet they remain a vital part of radio playlists throughout the USA. They should not be denied their fair share. In this time of so much positive change coming from Washington, we hope this bill will be embraced and become the law."

In response to Bono's statement, NAB EVP Dennis Wharton commented, "The irony is that it will be the less-established performers who will be hurt most by a performance tax. If radio stations are forced to pay to play music, program directors will be less likely to take a chance playing unknown artists and will instead stick with established musicians like Bono. New artists and niche formats will suffer, and Bono and Britney Spears will become wealthier."

The House Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings on the legislation, and numerous broadcasters have testified that radio is facing an extremely difficult time in this economy as it is, and enacting a performance royalty would be devastating to the industry.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1283609





Reflections On the Less-Cool Effects of Filesharing
surpeis

This snub is an attempt to point the finger at something I feel has been widely ignored in the ever-lasting debate surrounding (illegal) filesharing, now again brought in the spotlight by the Pirate Bay trial. I should state that I am slightly biased, as I have been running my own indie label for some years, spanning about 30 releases. It's now history, but it was not filesharing that got the best of us, just for the record.

I try as far as humanly possible to view the debate from all angles, and before entering the music biz myself, I was a strong believer in Internet as the driving force to develop new markets. Since then life has taught me a lot, and as said I will try to share one of my major concerns in this (hopefully) short snub.

My observation is based on a lot of trying and failing, as well as being a moderate user of filesharing myself — mainly to check out stuff I read about but cannot get my hands on in the local store back here in Norway.

My concern is about this argument, which has been seen in most any debate about this subject for the last 10 years, usually formulated roughly as below:

"Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."

I beg to differ.

One thing that has become more and more obvious to me is that the power of the market more than ever is still safely held by the biggest corporations in the music biz. I will try to explain why.

If we use TPB as an example, they have about 10M visitors per day, which gives us a good base for pulling out stats. If you look at their Top100 list at any given time, you will find exactly 0.00% artists that are not (major) label signed. This might not be very surprising, as TPB naturally would reflect the music market in general.

But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.

This puts a heavy responsibility on the pirates, one that I don't think they are aware of nor able to handle. The day we find the top crop of the aforementioned artists that are actually free to share on the top 100 list, we have a winner. Until then the only thing that we will see "die" is the small indies that cannot benefit from heavy marketing. Thus, more market power is given to the major labels, and all of us reading this will be dead and buried long before they stop making a reasonable income from selling oldies and goldies, radio play, publishing, etc.

The actual 'mystery' is why the major labels don't see this themselves, and continues to take services like TPB to court. They are, and I'm pretty sure about this, the actual winners in the ongoing war. The price paid is extending the status quo when it comes to growing new markets.

So, ladies and gentlenerds: Are we really driving forth the music scene of the future? Or are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy while the suppliers of correctives (indies, free music) are effectively kept out of the loop? What could possibly be done (technically or socially) to provoke changes to this and hit the major labels where it actually hurts?
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/ar...9/04/19/181246





Lawmakers to Re-Examine Internet-Sharing Software

A House committee is reopening its investigation of Internet services that let computer users distribute music and movies online amid reports the same software was exploited to gain unauthorized access to government and private data.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent letters Monday to the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and The Lime Group, which runs LimeWire, a popular file-sharing service. The letters, signed by chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., and ranking Republican Darrell E. Issa of California, sought information about any such breaches and what the Obama administration and company are doing to protect against them.

Internet file-sharing links computers across the Internet and allows users to access files stored on any other computer within the network. In the past, these networks have been popular among people who distribute popular music, movies and commercial software without paying legally required copyright fees.

The House committee held hearings in 2007. The problem of pirated music has since declined due to rising popularity of legal services such as iTunes, concerns over the threat of personal lawsuits by the entertainment industry and efforts by colleges to limit illicit data traffic on their computer networks. LimeWire is the largest remaining such network popular among computer users.

Witnesses at the earlier hearings "easily obtained bank records, health records, military files, tax returns, corporate documents, and other highly sensitive private files via the LimeWire network," Towns and Issa wrote to Mark Gorton, chairman of The Lime Group.

They recalled that Gorton told lawmakers he would make significant changes in the software to prevent inadvertent disclosures of personal or confidential information over the Internet service.

"However, it appears that nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P (peer-to-peer) providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem," Towns and Issa wrote.

They cited press reports this year and last year of computer users making available the blueprints and avionics for Marine One, the president's helicopter; more than 150,000 tax returns; 25,800 student loan applications; 626,000 credit reports and tens of thousands of medical files with names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients with AIDS, cancer and mental illnesses.

Asked about the renewed investigation, LimeWire spokeswoman Linda Lipman responded, "We at LimeWire understand that Internet safety is paramount, and we strive to offer peer-to-peer's most secure technology." She said the company had worked with other P2P providers and regulators to develop and implement protections, including changes in default settings; file-sharing controls; shared folder configurations; and sensitive-file-type restrictions.

"Our newest version, LimeWire 5.0, by default, does not share sensitive file types such as spreadsheets or documents," Lipman said. "In fact, the software does not share any file or directory without explicit permission from the user."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042102229.html





Movie Studios Tout Job Creation to Lawmakers
Alex Dobuzinskis

Hollywood's major film and television studios on Tuesday began a new push to educate U.S. lawmakers about the entertainment industry by touting job creation in the recession and media's global trade surplus.

The lobbying effort by the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the key film and TV studios in governmental affairs, comes after the U.S. Senate in February stripped $246 million in tax breaks for entertainment companies from President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus package.

In a study released on Tuesday, the MPAA said the entertainment industry employs 2.5 million U.S. workers and production is increasingly moving to states outside California and New York.

The movement away from the epicenters of film and TV is due in many cases to tax incentives that lure producers.

The MPAA said the industry contributes $41.1 billion in wages to U.S. workers, with an average salary of $74,700 for employees with projects in production, which is higher than the national average.

"All this together indicates that this is an important part of the American economy, and we can be a big, important, positive factor to economic renewal," Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, told Reuters.

On Tuesday, the MPAA is hosting a full-day symposium for lawmakers in Washington to highlight the importance of movie and TV production and encourage the federal government's involvement in trade issues such as fighting copyright piracy.

Vice President Joe Biden will be among those speaking.

The jobs data is important, the MPAA believes, because in February when film and TV tax incentives were stripped from the federal bill, some lawmakers pointed to the movies' robust box office and argued Hollywood has no need for tax breaks.

"I think it was unfair, and it didn't get much debate at all," Glickman said. "One of the reasons we want to help educate lawmakers is to let people know that Hollywood is more than just weekend box office," he said.

The MPAA's employment figures include 285,000 Americans in the core business of producing, marketing and distributing content. Another 478,000 work in related businesses, including at theaters, TV stations and video stores.

The industry helps provide 1.7 million indirect jobs at companies that do business with film and TV companies, such as clothing retailers, caterers and lumber suppliers.

The MPAA report, which is based on statistics from 2007, notes the industry employs workers in all 50 states. The top state is still California, where the major movie studios are based and where the industry generates $16.3 billion in wages. New York is second with $7.4 billion.

But the report said production has increasingly shifted to other states, including Texas where the industry generates $1.7 billion in wages, and Florida with $1.5 billion.

In many states, governments provide tax breaks to lure film companies.

The MPAA report said that, unlike other industries, film and TV production generates a trade surplus for the United States to the tune of $13.6 billion.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Eric Walsh)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...53K2CA20090421





Movie Makers Appeal to the Crowd, for Money
Eric Pfanner

The credits at the end of a movie generally roll for a few minutes. If “Dardentor” gets made, they could take as long as a half-hour.

That is because tens of thousands of people will have been responsible for bankrolling the movie, the project of three British teenagers who are championing a novel approach to film financing. On the Web site buyacredit.com, people can purchase the right to have their name added to the list of credits, for a minimum of one pound.

Adrian Bliss, Benjamin Robbins and Toby Stubbs say they have already raised upward of £100,000, or about $149,000, from more than 10,000 donors, on their way to a goal of £1 million. That is what they say they need to make the film, an adaptation of a little-known novel by Jules Verne, “Clovis Dardentor.”

“We knew we had to do something really special to get the money, otherwise it wouldn’t come about,” said Mr. Bliss, who is 18, like Mr. Robbins. Mr. Stubbs is 17.

At a time when music companies, newspapers and other media owners lament the fact that hardly anyone will pay anything for their products on the Internet, it might seem strange that thousands of people are willing to hand over a pound or more to three young men who look like they ought to be auditioning for roles in an after-school special, not sitting in the director’s chair.

But Mr. Bliss, Mr. Robbins and Mr. Stubbs, who have been making videos for friends, charities and their school near London, are only the latest of a number of would-be filmmakers to tap the power of so-called crowdfunding.

Franny Armstrong, a documentary director, raised £450,000 for “The Age of Stupid,” a recently released film on global warming, through gifts from hundreds of donors.

Casey Walker, a Canadian director, has been raising money for a romantic comedy called “Free for All ... but You,” selling individual frames from the film for $10 each, via the Internet.

The idea isn’t limited to movies.

Four years ago a British student, Alex Tew, set up a Web page to raise money for his university education, selling off pieces of a digital mural on the site for $1 each. He ended up raising more than $1 million.

More recently, the Cologne soccer club in Germany has been selling chunks of a Web portrait of Lukas Podolski, a star striker, to help finance the cost of acquiring him from another team, Bayern Munich.

Though the novelty of crowdfunding may be wearing off, the prospect of three rosy-cheeked teenagers making a feature film seems to have captured the imagination of many Britons.

Mr. Bliss, Mr. Robbins and Mr. Stubbs stumbled on “Clovis Dardentor” last summer and decided that it would make a good movie.

The book, published in 1897, tells the story of two cousins who are set to enlist in the French Army in Algeria. On their voyage across the Mediterranean, they meet a wealthy industrialist, Clovis Dardentor.

As they connive to get him to take them under his wing to avoid the dangers of the battlefield, a series of plot twists occurs.

Last summer Mr. Bliss, Mr. Robbins and Mr. Stubbs started blogging about their idea and created social networking pages for it.

After they set up their Web site, local newspapers published articles. In recent weeks, interest has spread to British national papers, and Mr. Bliss said inquiries and donations had come from as far afield as China, South Africa and the United States.

Mr. Bliss said he envisioned the film having the feel of an Indiana Jones adventure, with a bit of the British comedy of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” thrown in. The three are already working on a second draft of the screenplay, with a theater and radio scriptwriter, Lizzie Hopley.

Mr. Bliss said he and his two friends intended to produce and direct the film, a degree of control that many an auteur would relish.

“When it’s not made under a production company, there’s a certain amount of integrity,” he said. “It hasn’t been twisted by fat-cat businessmen who want to make money out of it.”

Mr. Bliss may be wary about commercial influences, but not so wary as to spot another potential advantage of crowd-sourcing: “The people who buy the credits will also most likely buy tickets to the film.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/te...t-media20.html





Fan Fever Is Rising for Debut of ‘Avatar’
Michael Cieply

In an old airplane hangar near the beach here, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may:

(a) Change filmmaking forever

(b) Alter your brain

(c) Cure cancer

For certain expectant movie fans, the answer might as well be all of the above.

Eight months before its scheduled release on Dec. 18, Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar,” a science-fiction thriller filmed with his own specially devised 3-D technology, is stirring up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture.

That might foretell a hit on the order of Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic,” with $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales.

Or it might just be a giant headache for 20th Century Fox, which is backing “Avatar” and will have to spend much of the year managing expectations for a film whose technological wizardry is presumed by more than a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of “The Jazz Singer,” the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.

To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron or Fox.

But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie — in their dreams. “The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3-D still,” wrote one “planetshane,” whose particular dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.

“It was the best movie I had ever seen,” the post continued.

Only a few weeks ago, Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he was shown just 15 minutes of the film. Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual “memory creation.”

Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Mr. Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience.

“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes.

“You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,” said Mr. Quittner, who remained eager for another dose.

Executives and producers of the film declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement Fox said: “Jim Cameron is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.”

In a brief interview reported by The Associated Press in December, Mr. Cameron said he was worried that “Avatar” could not live up to the expectations that were building around it. “Whatever they think it’s going to be, it’s probably not,” he said at the time about those who were speculating about the movie on the Internet and elsewhere.

Yet Mr. Cameron has done his share to feed the hype with his repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema (yes, it still requires glasses) would have the power to penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.

Some fans believe that Mr. Cameron and his colleagues have finally crossed the “uncanny valley.” That is a supposed point at which a viewer’s responsiveness to a simulated human takes a sudden drop into revulsion as the image comes close to reality but strikes the watcher as being zombielike, or not quite right.

Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world.

“Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating,” Dr. Mendez said. He added that he had used virtual-reality therapy in working with soldiers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles — and found himself jarred by his experience with a “virtual Iraq” simulation.

“It was with me for days and days,” Dr. Mendez said.

At ShoWest, a convention of movie exhibitors, a few weeks ago, Mr. Cameron in a short promotional video compared watching “Avatar” to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” (It was a neat complement to those who have been viewing the movie in their sleep.)

But, sooner rather than later, an increasingly restless group of the fans would like to sample the real thing. And that presents a conundrum for Fox, which will be hard pressed to release a conventional, 2-D trailer online — one of the most powerful ways to promote a movie these days — without undercutting the promise of a transcendental 3-D experience.

“I can’t believe they would spend 12 years developing the technology and telling us in words how great this is, then show us in 2-D,” said T. F. Powell, who runs AvatarMovieZone.com, an unofficial fan site devoted to the film. Mr. Powell recently spoke by telephone from Kansas.

Some fans are already teasing their peers about expecting too much.

“You would think this movie cures cancer,” taunted a skeptical Danny Danger in his “movie preview extravaganza” on a MySpace blog in January.

Typically, studios have given a peek at some of their biggest science-fiction and fantasy movies during the giant Comic-Con convention, an annual summer gathering of the fans in San Diego. But that also poses problems for “Avatar,” in that Comic-Con’s convention hall setting has not been equipped to showcase films in 3-D.

“I can’t imagine we will not have something, but nothing has been confirmed,” said David Glanzer, the convention’s director of marketing and public relations, speaking of the prospects for an “Avatar” moment at Comic-Con.

As for the movie’s release in December, Mr. Glanzer said, “Maybe they should have nurses in the lobby.”

It was a joking reference to a ploy once used by the producer William Castle. He posted fake nurses in the lobby of theaters that showed his own neuron-challenging horror film “Macabre,” while insuring every member of the audience for $1,000 against “death by fright.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html





'17 Again' Opens at No. 1 With $24.1 Million
David Germain

Weekend gross: $24,065,000
Total gross: $24,065,000

Zac Efron has taken the box-office crown from his Disney teammate Miley Cyrus.

Efron's comedy " 17 Again," in which he plays the youthful version of a middle-aged man magically transformed to high school age, debuted as the top weekend movie with $24.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The No. 1 opening for the Warner Bros. movie solidifies the big-screen potential for Efron, who rose to fame with Disney's "High School Musical" series.

"There's no question that Zac's a star," said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. "He's such a hardworking, talented individual. He certainly has given his all to promote this movie."

Universal had the No. 2 movie with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck's Washington thriller "State of Play," which pulled in $14.1 million. Crowe plays a reporter investigating a series of deaths linked to an old college friend (Affleck) who's now a rising star in Congress.

Cyrus' "Hannah Montana: The Movie" slipped from first place to fourth with $12.7 million. That lifted the domestic total for Cyrus' movie spinoff of her Disney Channel show to $56.1 million after 10 days in theaters.

"Hannah Montana" finished just behind DreamWorks Animation's "Monsters vs. Aliens," which took in $12.9 million to raise its domestic haul to $162.7 million. Estimates for "Hannah Montana" and "Monsters vs. Aliens" were close enough that the movies could switch rankings when final numbers are reported Monday.

Jason Statham had a so-so opening for his action sequel "Crank: High Voltage," which came in at No. 6 with $6.5 million, $4 million less than the first weekend for the 2006 original.

The Lionsgate sequel features Statham in a race to recover his heart, which has been stolen by organ thieves and replaced with a mechanical one.

Hollywood maintained a record box-office pace with just one weekend to go before the busy summer season arrives May 1 with " X-Men Origins: Wolverine," Hugh Jackman's spinoff of the blockbuster "X-Men" franchise.

Overall revenues were at $112 million, up nearly 20 percent from the same weekend last year, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

For the year, Media By Numbers is tracking receipts at $2.92 billion, 17.3 percent ahead of 2008's and well above the box-office pace of 2007, when Hollywood took in a record $9.7 billion. Accounting for higher ticket prices, movie attendance this year is up 15.6 percent compared to last year's.

The movie business is poised to top $10 billion at the box office for the first time in 2009, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers.

"It's going to be a record year, because we've never had a start to a year this strong," Dergarabedian said. "Unless the world goes off its axis and spins into the sun, I don't see how we're not going to have a $10 billion year."

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "17 Again," $24.1 million.

2. "State of Play," $14.1 million.

3. "Monsters vs. Aliens," $12.9 million.

4. "Hannah Montana: The Movie," $12.7 million.

5. "Fast & Furious," $12.3 million.

6. "Crank: High Voltage," $6.5 million.

7. "Observe and Report," $4.1 million.

8. "Knowing," $3.5 million.

9. "I Love You, Man," $3.4 million.

10. " The Haunting in Connecticut," $3.2 million.

http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,6320563.story





My Mythical Online Rental Service for Movies

Why Hollywood is so slow to catch up on offering all of its movies and shows online.
Farhad Manjoo

I've been watching most of my movies and a lot of my TV shows through Netflix for at least three years now. But lately my red envelopes have been piling up; I've gone weeks without watching anything on DVD. That's because the superfast Internet connection that my apartment building recently tapped into gives me immediate access to just about every recent movie or TV show I'd care to watch. I can download an hourlong show in less than 10 minutes; a movie takes about 15. I can watch these on my computer or—with a DVD player that accepts USB thumb drives—on my TV.

I would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for this wonderful service—if someone would take my money. In reality, I pay nothing because no company sells such a plan. Instead I've been getting my programming from the friendly BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Pirates aren't popular these days, but let's give them this—they know how to put together a killer on-demand entertainment system.

I sometimes feel bad about my plundering ways. Like many scofflaws, though, I blame the system. I wouldn't have to steal if Hollywood would only give me a decent online movie-streaming service. In my dreams, here's what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.) Don't gum it up with restrictions, like a requirement that I watch a certain movie within a specified time after choosing it. The only reasonable limit might be to force me to stream the movies so that I won't be able to save the flicks to my computer. Beyond that, charge me a monthly fee and let me watch whatever I want, whenever I want, as often as I want.

Sound like a lot to ask for? In fact, it's pretty much the same system that Netflix has been offering with DVDs for years. I'm only calling for someone to give me all the splendors of Netflix, but through the Web. Netflix proves that even if you give people unlimited subscriptions, they'll still watch only a handful per month. My guess is that the same sensibility governs online rentals. Sure, a few uninspired people will sit around streaming movies every spare moment, but most of us have too much to do to abuse an unlimited subscription, even when we cut out the postal service as the middle man.

But it is reasonable to charge more for the convenience. Netflix's current three-at-a-time DVD plan goes for $17 a month. Theoretically, you can get up to about 22 movies a month through the plan, which means you're paying at least 75 cents or so per movie; most people, of course, get far fewer, and thus pay a lot more per movie. (You can see how much you've been paying by analyzing your Netflix rental history.) I'd be willing to pay twice as much for the convenience of getting everything without having to wait for the mailman. About $35 to $40 strikes me as reasonable; I bet that at that price, millions of people will sign up.

The current offerings are nowhere close to this dream service. Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming plan offers a smattering of popular new releases and a slightly wider selection of films from the '80s and '90s. Watch Instantly often feels like Settle-For Instantly, since many of the titles are of the airline-movie variety. Apple's iTunes rental plan, meanwhile, sits at the other end of the spectrum: It offers a wide selection of new releases that go for $3 or $4 each, but it's crippled by a surfeit of restrictions. After you press play, you've got just 24 hours to watch the full film, and new releases tend to disappear off the virtual shelf after a few months as they enter a new circle of Hollywood's contractual purgatory.

So why won't anyone in Hollywood build my service? The reason isn't stupidity. When I called people in the industry this week, I found that many in the movie business understand that online distribution is the future of media. But everything in Hollywood is governed by a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of companies—studios, distributors, cable channels, telecom companies, and others. The best way to understand it is to trace what you might call the life cycle of a Hollywood movie, as Starz network spokesman Eric Becker put it to me. We all understand the first couple of steps in this life cycle—first a movie hits theaters and then, a few months later, it comes out on DVD. Around the same time, it also comes out on pay-per-view, available on demand on cable systems, hotel rooms, airplanes, and other devices. Apple's rental store operates under these pay-per-view rules, most of which put a 24-hour limit on movies. The restriction might have made sense back in the days when most people were getting on-demand movies in hotel rooms and the studios didn't want the next night's guest piggybacking on rentals. It doesn't make much sense when you're getting the movie on your MacBook. But many of the contracts were written years ago, and they don't reflect the current technology.

A movie will stay in the pay-per-view market for just a few months; after that, it goes to the premium channels, which get a 15- to 18-month exclusive window in which to show the film. That's why you can't get older titles through Apple's rental plan—once a movie goes to HBO, Apple loses the right to rent it. (Apple has a much wider range of titles available for sale at $15 each; for-sale movies fall under completely different contracts with studios.) Between them, Starz and HBO have contracts to broadcast about 80 percent of major-studio movies made in America today. Their rights extend for seven years or more. After a movie is broadcast on Starz, it makes a tour of ad-supported networks (like USA, TNT, or one of the big-three broadcast networks) and then goes back to Starz for a second run. Only after that—about a decade after the movie came out in theaters—does it enter its "library" phase, the period when companies like Netflix are allowed to license it for streaming. For most Hollywood releases, then, Netflix essentially gets last dibs on a movie, which explains why many of its films are so stale.

Couldn't the studios just sign new deals that would give them the right to build an online service? Well, maybe—but their current deals are worth billions, and a new plan would mean sacrificing certain profits for an uncertain future. Understandably, many are unwilling to take that leap.

This is not to say there hasn't been any progress. Last year Netflix signed a deal with Starz that allows it to get access to relatively new releases from Disney, Sony, and their subsidiaries. As a result, subscribers have lately been seeing some bigger movies on Watch Instantly—Superbad, Ratatouille, No Country for Old Men, and others. But this deal has its problems, too: As Becker explained, these movies will stay in Watch Instantly for only about 18 months; after that, they'll go to ad-supported TV networks, and Netflix will lose the right to stream them.

Does all this sound confusing? It should, because it is. And working through these contracts in order to build the perfect streaming service will take time. Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder, told the Hollywood Reporter last month that it'll be 10 years before we see a streaming service that offers any movie at any time.

For the studios, that's terrible. Just like in the music business, eventually the entire home-video market is sure to move online, and many consumers will abandon pirate sites in favor of easy-to-use legal services. The music industry lost a lot of money when it dithered over this transition, and now the movie business seems to be making the same mistake. It could be raking in a lot of cash by selling us easy online rentals. Until it works out a plan to do so, there's always BitTorrent.
http://www.slate.com/id/2216328/





The Cost of Downloading All Those Videos
Saul Hansell

In an article in today’s New York Times, I wrote about the controversy over the now-abandoned plan by Time Warner Cable to impose additional fees on customers who upload and download more than a set quota.

AT&T continues to test a similar plan, and many cable and phone company executives still argue that usage is growing so fast, mainly driven by video that they need to start charging heavy users to cover the additional cost of the bandwidth they consume.

Hard numbers are not that easy to come by, but I’ve found a few. I see no evidence that the pace of spending to expand network capacity has increased at all. Indeed there are a lot of areas where new technology is radically cutting the cost of Internet bandwidth.

For those that want to understand more about what drives these costs, here is some of the hard data I’ve found. (As always, Bits readers are a knowledgeable bunch, so if you are in the network business, please share your own experience in the comments.)

I’ve mainly been looking at the costs that will increase as the bandwidth used by customers goes up. So I haven’t looked at overhead, marketing, customer service and so on. All of the discussion of cost is complex because much of the infrastructure at these providers is shared between video, phone and Internet service.

Still, there seem to be two major buckets of expense to consider: the cost of local networks that connect to people’s homes and the cost of the bandwidth that link those networks to the Internet. The local costs are larger, but falling faster with new technology.

Local Network Costs

Think of a broadband Internet provider like a river of bandwidth that divides into smaller and smaller tributaries as it flows from a regional hub through neighborhood facilities until it trickles a stream of connectivity into each home. Each connection in this network, and each node where connections are split into smaller streams, has a set capacity.

Most of the network for any Internet provider is high-capacity fiber optic cable. But the last link, running from a neighborhood office or a small device hung on a phone pole—runs over cable TV or phone wires. In a cable system, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that is shared among all the customers in a node, often about 500 homes.

That capacity, in current technology, provides about 38 megabits per second to share. That means if four homes are all downloading very long files at 10 Mbps, a fifth customer going online, will start to slow down everyone’s connections.

If that node often becomes congested, the cable company divides it into two separate groups of roughly half as many homes. This process of “splitting nodes” happens on a regular basis. (While the details are not the same, phone companies that use D.S.L. technology also have to spend money when usage in a given neighborhood increases beyond a certain capacity.)

In a presentation to investors in 2007, Comcast boasted about how its network is designed to make such node splits efficient. The cost depends on the configuration of the equipment at the node to be split. In some cases, little more than minor adjustments are needed, and the cost is $2,500. If the company needs to add a new Cable Modem Termination System, the device that connects cable wires to the Internet, it will pay $6,000 if the device is in one of its existing facilities. And if Comcast needs install a new C.M.T.S. on a pole, stringing a new fiber optic cable to it, the cost is $20,000.

According to Comcast’s presentation, the average cost of all these upgrades comes to $6.85 for each home served in the neighborhood. I checked with Tony Werner, the chief technical officer of Comcast. He said the costs quoted are still roughly accurate, but the average may be increasing somewhat as more of the company’s upgrades involve new equipment and sometimes new fiber.

The other way that cable companies are increasing capacity is by using new technology known as Docsis 3. This is a standard that allows companies to use more video channels for Internet service. The current standard uses one video channel. The first generation of Docsis 3 service combines four 38-Mbps channels into a pool of roughly 152 Mbps that can be divided among customers. Cable companies can decide whether to use that capacity to offer higher speeds to customers or to increase the number of customers who can be served at slower speeds, avoiding the need to split nodes.

The Comcast presentation said that the effect of this is that Docsis 3 will reduce the cost of the C.M.T.S. hardware, which had been about $20 per home passed, by 70 percent, for customers at current speeds. And it will allow 100-Mbps service at a lower hardware cost than the company had been paying for its then current 6-Mbps service.

There is one other hidden cost of Docsis 3 that should be noted: When a cable company converts 3 more channels from video to Internet service, it can’t make money from those channels by offering a video package or pay-per-view movies.

But most cable systems are in the process of converting to an all-digital format from the current approach that mixes analog signals (which can be watched without a set-top box on an older “cable-ready” television) with digital signals. This is mainly being driven by the need for extra capacity to handle high definition programs. A company can send 10 standard-definition channels or 2 high-definition channels in the space of one analog channel. All that means is that there is not a shortage of channels for use by Internet data, at least for a while.

Bandwidth Costs

It’s even harder to get hard numbers for the cost of connecting a local network to the Internet. As you might expect, the costs vary enormously depending on the geography involved.

I spent a fair bit of time working through the options with George King, the president of Global Capacity, a firm that helps companies negotiate and buy Internet connections, and Julie Dillenbeck, the firm’s vice president of marketing.

A medium-sized Internet provider might pay about $10,000 per month for a one gigabit per second connection to the Internet. If the system didn’t own its own network in the metropolitan area, it may need to spend another $2,000 to $15,000 per month for a connection between a local system and the central office of whatever company was providing their Internet bandwidth. Assuming that bandwidth is divided among nodes of 500 homes sharing 38 Mbps, that means the cost of bandwidth ranges from 76 cents to $1.92 per month.

Mr. King added that the cost for a very large Internet provider that owns a backbone network would likely be less.

In general, this cost is linear. That means if everyone started using a lot of Internet video, and a cable system split all their 500 home nodes in half, the cost of the Internet bandwidth would double. That cost, however, has been declining steadily, perhaps 5 percent to 10 percent a year, Ms. Dillenbeck said.

That tracks with what I’ve heard from Mr. Werner of Comcast and other cable industry experts I’ve talked to, who say that the bandwidth costs are rising somewhat but they are a relatively small portion of the overall expense of providing Internet service.
All these costs, by the way, apply whether or not anyone on the system is actually surfing or downloading anything. I asked Mr. King to help me figure out what a cable company pays per gigabyte used by its customers because Time Warner wanted to charge customers $1 for every gigabyte they used over a certain monthly allotment.

He told me that telecommunications providers will not sell bandwidth by the gigabyte to businesses, even though many customers want to buy it that way. For example, some movie studios that send large files to DVD manufacturing plants, don’t want to pay for connections they only use from time to time.

“The network providers almost always say ‘No,’” Mr. King said. “As long as the bandwidth is open for business, it will cost you the same whether there is data running or not.”

In other words, the cable and phone companies want to charge consumers per gigabyte even though they refuse to sell it to business customers on the same basis.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...ose-videos/?em





Free TV Broadcasting Comes to Mobile Gadgets
Saul Hansell

There’s a nifty new wireless video technology on the horizon, and its best feature is its price: free.

A group of broadcasters and electronics companies has developed a standard called Mobile DTV that will let cellphones and other portable gadgets receive video using a part of the new digital spectrum given to broadcast stations, ostensibly to support their high definition signals.

The group announced Monday that it will start testing the service in late summer in Washington, D.C. Five local TV stations will broadcast their regular programming over the new system, including local affiliates of CBS, NBC, PBS and Ion.

So far, 70 stations in 28 markets have said they will be broadcasting in the format by the end of this year. The technology’s backers say that the equipment to broadcast using the format will cost each station about $250,000.

Right now there are no devices that can receive these signals, but Samsung and LG are two main backers, so there will be phones and other gizmos soon. Dell also announced it will make a laptop that can receive the broadcast signals. Another market will be backseat viewers for cars.

There are other companies working on mobile television services, such as MobiTV and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO . But these are subscription services, and I wonder how many people will want to pay $10 or more a month for another package of video channels.

In the future, the Mobile DTV technology could also be used for subscription video services, but for now it is meant for free simulcasts of the existing broadcast stations. The technology allows each station to broadcast up to 8 simultaneous program streams.

We’ll have to see the devices that can use this and the quality of the experience. But this certainly looks like a nifty use for the new digital broadcast spectrum, perhaps a better use than viewing at home in a country where 90 percent of households have cable or satellite service.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...le-gadgets/?hp





AT&T Plans to Double its 3G Network Capacity
Alana Semuels

It's a common complaint among iPhone users: The device is great, but the much-heralded 3G network, provided by AT&T, needs work. Now, it seems AT&T may be listening.

AT&T is testing increased download speeds on its 3G network, according to spokesman Geoff Mordock. The news first emerged in an interview with Scott McElroy, AT&T Mobility vice president of technology realization, in Telephony Online. The tests, if implemented, would bring the theoretical maximum speed to 7.2 megabits per second -- double the current maximum speed.

AT&T is also increasing network capacity by adding new cell sites and nearly doubling the total network capacity in most markets via an additional spectrum at 850 MHz, according to Mordock. That frequency makes it easier to get coverage inside buildings. Network capacity determines how much information can be sent over the network, including calls and data connections.

AT&T has come under fire lately for its sluggish 3G speeds. It was sued in March for promising faster 3G speeds than were available, the latest in a long line of quibbles over 3G speed. The plaintiff in the March lawsuit said he could connect to the 3G network only periodically.

The news about the increased speeds comes at a strategically beneficial time to AT&T: last week, reports emerged that the wireless company was trying to extend its exclusive relationship with Apple until 2011.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...port-says.html





As Costs Fall, Companies Push to Raise Internet Price
Saul Hansell

Internet service providers want to end the all-you-can-eat plans and get their customers paying à la carte.

But they are having a hard time closing the buffet line.

Faced with rising consumer protest and calls from members of Congress for new regulations, Time Warner Cable backed down last week from a plan to impose new fees on heavy users of its Road Runner Internet service.

The debate over the price of Internet use is far from over. Critics say cable and phone companies are already charging far more than Internet providers in other countries. Some also wonder whether the new price plans are meant to prevent online video sites from cutting into the lucrative revenue from cable TV service.

Cable executives say the issue is not competition but cost. People who watch or download a lot of movies and TV shows use hundreds of times more Internet capacity than those who simply read e-mail and browse the Web. It is only fair, they argue, that heavy users should pay more.

“When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?” Landel C. Hobbs, the chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable, asked recently in a blog post defending the company’s now abandoned plan.

Still, critics say the image of Internet providers as restaurants about to go broke serving an endless line of gluttons simply does not match the financial or technological realities of the industry.

They point out that providers’ profit margins are stable, and that investment in network equipment is generally falling.

These plans to charge for above-average Internet use “are unjustifiable for almost everywhere in the country except for rural America,” Richard F. Doherty, the research director of the Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm that studies cable technology.
Cable or telephone networks have little in common with a restaurant, the critics say, because there is no electronic equivalent of food to buy. If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company’s costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.

That is because their networks are constantly being expanded to handle ever-greater peak periods. It is the modern equivalent of how the old AT&T was said to have built the long-distance network to handle the number of calls expected on Mother’s Day.

“All of our economics are based on engineering for the peak hour,” said Tony Werner, the chief technical officer of Comcast. “Just because someone consumes more data doesn’t mean they drive more cost.”

Yet even as the providers continually upgrade their networks, the cost of the equipment needed to do so is shrinking steadily, reflecting the well-worn economics of computing.

Indeed, the equipment needed to add capacity to any household costs a fraction of one month’s Internet service bill. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, has told investors that doubling the Internet capacity of a neighborhood costs an average of $6.85 a home.

The cost of providing Internet service is about to fall even more, as cable companies install new technology, called Docsis 3, that will both increase their capacity and allow them to offer much faster download speeds.

So far, however, companies in the United States have chosen to use Docsis 3 as an opportunity to offer far more expensive Internet plans. Comcast has introduced a new 50-megabit-per-second service at $139 a month, compared with its existing service that costs about $45 a month for 8 megabits per second. Time Warner just announced it will charge $99 for 50 megabits per second.

By contrast, JCom, the largest cable company in Japan, sells service as fast as 160 megabits per second for $60 a month, only $5 a month more than its slower service.

Why so cheap? JCom faces more competition from other Internet providers than companies in the United States do.

Cable systems in the United States use the same technology and have roughly the same costs. Comcast told investors that the hardware to provide 50-megabits-per-second service costs less than it had been paying for the equipment for 6 megabits per second.

Questions about the speed, availability and affordability of Internet service in the United States will be central to the study Congress has required from the Federal Communications Commission next year. And cable and phone executives are worried that the commission may call for more regulation of Internet service, which currently is free from any government price controls.

Time Warner Cable abandoned its plan to expand a test of what it called “usage-based pricing” in four cities after Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, announced his opposition to the idea in a meeting with Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20isp.html





1 Million Google Android Phones Sold By T-Mobile
Samantha Rose Hunt

T-Mobile’s Google Android smartphone has reached an incredibly important milestone, reaching one million in US sales in the six months since the phone launched. The smartphone now accounts for almost two thirds of all of the 3G devices available on the T-Mobile network.

T-Mobile is the US’s fourth largest wireless network operator and has over 32.1 million customers. The company started selling the G1 Smartphone on October 22, 2008.

It is being reported by mobile advertising specialist AdMob that the Android OS now accounts for 6% for the entire smartphone market in the United States. Though the popularity is increasing, Android still has a while to go until it beats out Windows Mobile, which holds an 11% market share, the Blackberry OS at 22% and the iPhone, which takes the cake with 50% of the smartphone market in the U.S.

During a conference call last week Eric Schmidt, Google CEO stated that he felt the Android had a chance for great success this year. Schmidt claimed that the open source strategy was gaining ground and hinted that the company would deliver future announcements.

“There are announcements happening between now and the end of the year that are quite significant from operators and new hardware partners in the Android space, which I won't preannounce except to say that they really do fulfill much of the vision that we laid out more than a year ago,” stated Schmidt during the call. “On the netbook side, there are a number of people who have actually taken Android and ported it over to netbook or netbook-similar devices.”
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/cont...42164-145.html





Adobe in Push to Spread Web Video to TV Sets
Brad Stone

The denizens of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have, by and large, vastly different value systems, role models, even tastes in cars, food and clothing.

But they increasingly agree on one thing: a standard for online video called Adobe Flash.

Flash was once known primarily as the technology behind those niggling Web ads in the 1990s that gyrated and flickered on the screen. Today, it is a ubiquitous but behind-the-scenes Web format used to display Facebook applications, interactive ads and, most notably, the video on sites like YouTube and Hulu.com.

Now Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, wants to extend Flash’s reach even further. On Monday, Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.

For consumers, what sounds like a bit of inconsequential Internet plumbing actually means that a long overhyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.

For Hollywood studios and other content creators, a single format for Web video is even more enticing. It means they can create their entertainment once in Flash — as the animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir,” from Sony Pictures Classics, was made — and distribute it cheaply throughout the expanding ecosystem of digital devices.

“Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it,” said Bud Albers, the chief technology officer of the Disney Interactive Media Group, who will join Adobe executives at the convention to voice Disney’s support for the Flash format. “This gets us where we want to go.”

Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., is among the oldest Internet powers but perhaps one of the least visible to users. Founded in 1983, the company first developed a common language for laser printers called PostScript and later built or bought popular desktop publishing tools like Illustrator and Photoshop.

In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia, the originator of Flash, and expanded from making software to create and share digital documents, like Adobe Acrobat and the PDF file format, to dominating the budding market of tools to create online graphics and video. Last year the company reported net income of $871.8 million on revenue of $3.6 billion.

According to Adobe, Flash is now on 98 percent of all computers, and about 80 percent of Web videos are viewed using it.

Adobe says Flash was installed on 40 percent of cellphones shipped last year, and it recently announced efforts to increase that penetration by abolishing the licensing fees it was charging handset makers, much as it offers the Flash player free to consumers and video sites like YouTube.

Adobe makes money on Flash by selling software to help companies create and deliver Flash content to the Web.

Some major players in the phone market do not support Flash. Most notably, Apple, maker of the iPhone, says Flash uses too much processing and battery power. Mr. Narayen says handset makers will ultimately not be able to resist, since it will make viewing the Web on a phone no different from surfing on a PC.

“Anyone who wishes to deliver Web browsing on smartphone devices, supporting Flash will be an integral part of the experience,” he said.

Despite its problems wooing Apple, Adobe considers the television screen the last great frontier for Flash. To support the new effort to bring Flash to the TV, it has signed partners including Intel, Comcast, Netflix and Broadcom, the company that makes many of the components that go into cable and satellite set-top boxes. (The New York Times Company has also agreed to support this initiative to bring Flash to the TV set.)

While television makers like Sony and Samsung are not involved yet, analysts say integrating Flash — or at least some kind of Internet video — into the living room television is inevitable.

“It’s hard to differentiate TVs these days. They’ve gotten about as big and thin as you can get them,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Interpret LLC. “This idea of being able to standardize on Flash-based content across devices and platforms will be something TV vendors can get excited about because it will distinguish their products.”

One company standing in Adobe’s way is Microsoft. Its rival to Flash, called Silverlight, is used by Netflix and the BBC, among others, and was used by CBS to stream the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament and by NBC last year to stream the Olympics.

Microsoft says the second version of Silverlight has been installed on 300 million PCs since it became available six months ago. It also claims that Silverlight better supports live, high-definition video in what is called 1080p resolution, which is paramount to bringing Internet content to large HDTVs.

“I can’t imagine what could be more important on a television than high video quality,” said Brad Becker, director of rich client platforms at Microsoft — and a former Adobe executive. Adobe executives say the new Flash for televisions will support such high-definition video.

Some analysts are not counting out Microsoft just yet. They say the company has a significant presence in the living room with devices like the Xbox 360 game consoles that can stream movies to a TV. Microsoft, with annual revenue that is 17 times that of Adobe’s, also has the resources to finance an escalating competition.

“There hasn’t been a true competitor to Adobe for quite some time and Microsoft could potentially start bridging the gap between the PC and the TV even more effectively,” said Josh Martin, an analyst at the Yankee Group. “Maybe they could start putting out some of the fire that Adobe has long held.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/te...y/20adobe.html





Aussie Inventor Wins Over Microsoft

AN Australian inventor is set to share in a damages payout of more than $500 million after a US court ruled that Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, infringed a patented technology used to deter software piracy.

Uniloc founder Ric Richardson, who divides his time between Sydney and California, alleged Microsoft made billions of dollars by using his technology in its Windows XP and Office programs.

The payout, the fifth-largest patent jury award in US history, could increase three-fold because jurors ruled the infringement was intentional.

The $US388 million ($537 million) payout equals about eight days' profit for Microsoft.

Singapore-based Uniloc first sued Microsoft in 2003, alleging it copied software designed by Mr Richardson, who conceived the patented technology while he was working as a sound equipment programmer for bands.

Microsoft's Windows software is used in about 95 per cent of the world's personal computers.

Microsoft said it was "very disappointed in the jury verdict", delivered last week, and that it planned to appeal.

"We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported," Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster said. "We will ask the court to overturn the verdict."

The patent, which Mr Richardson obtained in the 1990s, covers a software registration system aimed at preventing "casual copying", whereby a user installs a programmer on more computers than permitted, according to court documents.

Uniloc argued Mr Richardson showed his program to Microsoft in 1993 on the proviso that the computer giant would not try to break the code or duplicate it.

Uniloc claimed that in 1997 or 1998, Microsoft breached this agreement and began using similar software in its pilot programs.

Microsoft denied any breach, arguing it had developed a different system after deciding Uniloc's software was of no use.

Mr Richardson also designed the "shade saver" cords used to keep sunglasses attached to the wearers.

Mr Richardson had yet to make a statement but used his Twitter site to air his reaction to the ruling: "Dear friends (sic) ... and family ... it's official. We won the case with Microsoft ... and a $388 million verdict."

Mr Richardson used profits from the shade saver invention to fund his Uniloc venture.

While he remains one of the largest shareholders, Mr Richardson has stepped down as a director of Uniloc, according to documents lodged with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission lodged in January this year.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013040,00.html





Bitter Feuding Mars Jane's Addiction Reunion

War has broken out among the original members of Jane's Addiction, who are gearing up for their first tour in almost 18 years.

Singer Perry Farrell told Reuters that a mediation attempt by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, with whom Jane's Addiction will tour next month, was unsuccessful.

But despite the temper tantrums, Farrell is determined to keep Jane's Addiction together. He, guitarist Dave Navarro and drummer Steven Perkins have toured on and off over the years. Bassist Eric Avery is back in the lineup after declining to play with the band after it first broke up in 1991. His return appears to have changed the delicate chemistry.

"I'm not going to tell you it's been all smooches and hugs. But it shouldn't be because that would be a bore," Farrell said on the sidelines of the Coachella music festival, where he was scheduled to perform on Sunday.

"If my band didn't have issues, if they didn't throw tantrums, I would think I was with a bunch of suckers. As long as they can handle it, I can handle it. After all we're just delivering music that people love, so how bad can it be? It could be worse. We could be drafted."

"I just talked to Eric man-to-man. We're different people, that's okay. He serves a different purpose, he's got a different frequency he operates on. I'm overjoyed that we're working together. I don't care that we butt heads as long as when we hit the stage we blast on people."

Reznor, who is also producing Jane's new songs, tried in vain to help the group work out its differences.

"He did his best to be both producer and psychologist," Farrell said. "He was very respectful, trying to get out of the way and not overproduce. I wish honestly he would've produced a little more, but he was a little gun shy after seeing us explode on each other in the studio. He became the referee for a day and after that day I think he was done."

Farrell said not many groups from the early days of alternative rock are still playing together, and he estimated Jane's Addiction had a "small, five-year window left."

"Any time you get a chance to put the original members of a group together, (you should do it). Look at Pink Floyd. I consider Roger Waters to be the greatest live rock act for a festival today. He has a great guitar player, but it's not David Gilmour. You need the original members if you can have them. I love The Who, love Led Zeppelin, but nobody's the same when they're not original members, the people that wrote and recorded those songs and set their vibrations down into those tracks. That's why it's important to try to keep your crew together."

Although Reznor failed to reconcile Avery and Farrell, Jane's Addiction, known for hits such as "Been Caught Stealing" and "Jane Says," will follow his lead and release music for free on the Internet. Farrell said Jane's would give out singles for free on its Web site as soon as they were ready. The first one will be called "Embrace the Darkness."

"I see 100,000 people in the United Kingdom singing along to this song," he said. "We don't have a record label to have to worry about putting together something that they can charge $19.99 for. I think we should put the songs out and keep writing and be creative. It's great that we have these classic songs, but it couldn't hurt us to put in more new songs (in our shows) that people know and got online for free."

Farrell, who also organizes the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, said the recession has been hurting the touring business but not ticket sales for Jane's Addiction or Lollapalooza.

"At Lollapalooza, we're selling more tickets than ever," he said. "People need an even bigger excuse to escape more than ever and there is no better escape than going to a festival and just tripping and taking in music."

Jane's Addiction's co-headlining tour with Nine Inch Nails will kick off in Florida on May 8, and run through June 12 in North Carolina. The band will also be among the headliners at Lollapalooza, which runs August 7-9; the full lineup will be announced on Tuesday.

(Editing by Dean Goodman)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/...addiction.html





Economic Blogger Who Angered Seoul Is Acquitted
Choe Sang-Hun

A South Korean online economic commentator who criticized and angered the government but commanded a huge following was freed from jail Monday after a court acquitted him of charges of maliciously spreading false information on the Internet.

The arrest of Park Dae-sung in January and his ensuing trial on charges of spreading false data in public with a harmful intent — a crime punishable by as much as five years in prison — prompted debate about how much freedom of expression should be tolerated in cyberspace in this extensively wired country.

Mr. Park, an unemployed 31-year-old, gained an almost prophet-like status among many South Koreans after he correctly predicted the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, the crash of the South Korean currency — the won — and the effects of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis on South Korea.

In some of the hundreds of online commentaries he posted under his pen name, Minerva, Mr. Park also unleashed scathing attacks on the government’s response to the global financial crisis. Some of his postings contained factual errors. The government accused him of undermining the financial markets.

In acquitting Mr. Park, Yoo Young-hyeon, a judge at the Seoul Central District Court, ruled Monday that there was no proof that Mr. Park had “had the intention to undermine public interest.”

It was also difficult to believe that Mr. Park knew that some of his statements were false at the time when he wrote them, Mr. Yoo said.

In July and December, Mr. Park wrote that the government had banned financial firms and major corporations from buying U.S. dollars in a dire effort to arrest the fall of the Korean won — a statement the court Monday said had been false but not criminal.

Prosecutors had demanded an 18-month sentence for Mr. Park, accusing him of “blatantly stoking fears among the people” in an economic crisis. Quoting from his writing, they accused the often-satirical blogger of advising people to hoard daily necessities in anticipation of runaway inflation and to “send children to orphanages.”

“South Korea may be the only country in the world where a man is tried because he criticized the government’s foreign currency policies,” Mr. Park said in a statement before the judge on April 14.

Prosecutors had a week to appeal the verdict.

Political parties have intensely monitored and squabbled over Mr. Park’s case. President Lee Myung-bak’s governing Grand National Party has sought to regulate the country’s often unruly online forums, prompting opposition parties to accuse the government of trying to silence its critics. The main opposition Democratic Party on Monday called Mr. Park’s trial “an international embarrassment.”

The government has denied wanting to suppress online freedom of expression, but it has long voiced concern about the influence of Internet rumors. Officials blamed online demagogues in part for huge protests last summer against U.S. beef imports that paralyzed the government for weeks.

Before his identity was exposed, Mr. Park, as Minerva, had cultivated an aura of mystery, describing himself at times as an old farmer and at others as a former Wall Street financial expert. After he was arrested, many were surprised to learn that he was an unemployed graduate of a two-year community college who spent much of his time at home scouring the Web and reading mail-order books on finance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/bu...21blogger.html





Make Room, Cynics; MTV Wants to Do Some Good
Tim Arango

Four buddies set off across the country in an R.V., video camera in tow, to knock items off their “100 things to do before I die” list: kiss the Stanley Cup, get a tattoo, grow a mustache.

With plenty of high jinks and adolescent humor, “The Buried Life” seems like the perfect MTV reality show, except for one unexpected twist. At each stop the group helps deserving locals with their own wishes. In Idaho, for example, they took eight children with brain cancer on a shopping spree at Toys “R” Us.

Meet MTV for the era of Obama. After years of celebrating wealth, celebrity and the vapid excesses of youth, MTV is trying to gloss its escapist entertainment with a veneer of positive social messages.

Last fall, after the financial crisis erupted but before the presidential election, MTV executives gathered in New York for meetings to discuss the direction of the network and whether programs like “The Hills,” which chronicles the lives of the young and rich in Los Angeles, and “My Super Sweet 16,” a weekly visit to over-the-top coming-out parties, had trapped MTV in a decadent age that was passing.

The talk wasn’t just academic. While MTV may still be a cultural touchstone for America’s youth, its ratings are down considerably from earlier this decade.

Executives looked at in-house research and the work of William Strauss, a generational expert who gave a presentation to MTV executives last fall, and saw that the country’s young were deeply engaged in the election and becoming more civic-minded.

One point of discussion at the meetings was whether shows about rich young girls were still relevant.

“It was very clear we were at one of those transformational moments, when this new generation of millennials were demanding a new MTV,” said Stephen Friedman, MTV’s general manager, using the term for those born between 1980 and 2000.

In the era that was passing, Mr. Friedman said, “the humor was more cynical, the idea of community seemed earnest and not cool. It’s the opposite now.”

As a result, a new reality program, “T.I.’s Road to Redemption,” shows a troubled rapper helping keep children on the straight and narrow. Nick Lachey, the former boy band star who was married to Jessica Simpson, his co-star on the MTV program “Newlyweds,” is producing “Taking the Stage,” a reality show about a performing arts school in Cincinnati. A finishing school show, “From G’s to Gents,” tries to transform homeboys into gentlemen — or at least get them to cover their tattoos — with the help of Fonzworth Bentley, who was Sean Combs’s valet.

Other networks, like CBS, Fox and NBC, have adjusted their programming to reflect the more austere times, with some escapist programs like “Desperate Housewives” introducing plots about the downturn. But MTV, which caters to 14- to 26-year-olds, often fickle in their tastes, has to be more astute at taking the cultural temperature.

“There’s a lot of different factors for MTV than a network would face if it were focused on the broader 18-to-49 demographic,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media-buying company. “I think as a programmer at MTV you always have to be one step ahead of the curve.”

Even with the changes, MTV’s lineup still has plenty of wealth, celebrity and sophomoric humor. “My Super Sweet 16,” about rich families throwing their daughters’ 16th birthday parties, and “MTV Cribs,” which celebrates the outlandish homes of the young and wealthy, remain on the air.

“It’s not like you flip a light switch from one type of programming to another,” said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks. “The notion of escapism will still live next to inspiration.”

Some of MTV’s many critics, who over the years have raised questions about the quality of the shows and their effects on children, are cautiously optimistic.

“MTV is an enormously important medium in terms of kid culture,” said James Steyer, the chief of Common Sense Media, a group that promotes family-oriented entertainment and has been critical of MTV for sexually explicit programming. “We want to encourage the good, and we’ll call out the bad when we see it.”

More broadly, MTV’s overhaul comes in the context of programming changes across Viacom, the network’s parent company, which has a new deal with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make shows more supportive of education. And the company recently started a Programming Council, which meets periodically to consider programming messages and includes executives across Viacom — MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and BET.

Historically, MTV has had to reinvent itself from time to time, Mr. Toffler said. In the late 1990s, he said, “grunge gave way to the pop phenomenon of Britney and ’N Sync. To go from grunge to the bling was a big shift.”

The latest cultural shift hasn’t been kind. This season, 19 percent fewer households are tuning in on average during prime time than in the 2002-3 season, according to Nielsen Media Research. About 1 million individual viewers, on average, tuned in for prime time in 2002-3, compared with 775,000 this season. MTV executives say a better measure is overall total day ratings, and by this measure MTV is down about 13 percent since 2002-2003. It is still the top-rated cable network among 12-to-24-year-olds.

“When you give way from one generation to the next, from Gen X to the millennials, you are going to see some blip in the ratings,” Mr. Toffler said.

Michael Hirschorn, whose company, Ish Entertainment, produced “T.I.’s Road to Redemption,” said: “It felt like a compelling narrative and a way to see a celebrity in a new and surprising way. You normally see a guy like him swaggering through music videos.”

MTV executives pointed to several recent bright spots — a 2 percent increase in ratings, a growing audience for “Taking the Stage” — that they attribute to the new focus. Still, hits like “The Hills” aren’t disappearing. Even “The Real World” which began in 1992 and helped usher in the reality-TV era, is being further tweaked to focus less on roommate fights and drunken hook-ups and more on aspirations.

“It’s less about the hot tubs and the drama and more about pursuing their careers,” Mr. Friedman said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/bu...dia/19mtv.html





Don Henley Battles Republicans Over YouTube Video
Greg Sandoval

YouTube has become the battleground in a copyright fight between singer Don Henley and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in California.

Henley, one of the founders of rock group The Eagles, has filed a lawsuit accusing Senate candidate Charles DeVore of violating his copyright. DeVore allegedly used two of Henley's hit songs "The Boys of Summer" and "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" in two YouTube campaign videos without authorization.

"Don Henley and Mike Campbell (Henley's producer) brought this action to protect their song, 'The Boys of Summer,' which was taken and used without their permission," Henley's spokesman told CNN. "The infringers have vowed to continue exploiting this and other copyrighted works, as it suits them, to further their own ambitions and agenda. It was necessary to file a lawsuit to stop them."

DeVore, who used Henley's music to attack opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer, maintains he is authorized to use the music as part of his First Amendment right to political free speech.

"We're responding with a counter-claim, asserting our First Amendment right to political free speech," DeVore said on his site. "While the legal issues play out, it's time to up the ante on Mr. Henley's liberal goon tactics. By popular request, I have penned the words to our new parody song."

Leading up to the lawsuit, YouTube had removed DeVore's videos at Henley's request. DeVore then challenged Henley's claims and the videos went back up. YouTube informed Henley that it would only again remove the clips if he filed a lawsuit.

This isn't the first time a Republican has been accused of violating copyright for using music without authorization. Singer Jackson Browne filed suit against former Republican presidential nominee John McCain for allegedly using the song "Running on Empty" to attack Barack Obama in a campaign video.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10222772-93.html





Cable Wars Are Killing Objectivity
David Carr

Apparently there is an ingredient in tea that causes hysteria when given to cable news anchors. How else to explain the coverage of the tax day tea parties on Wednesday, which was the day when we procrastinators finally mailed the check to the feds?

The movement — if that’s what it is — was spawned by a rant on Feb. 19 from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during a live report by the CNBC reporter — if that’s what he is — Rick Santelli, suggesting that it was time to organize a “tea party” to protest government spending on failed mortgages.

The cable news networks took it from there. Fox News, after running more than 100 promos about its coverage of the event, which did a pretty effective job of marketing them at the same time, had wall-to-wall coverage on the anointed day and dispatched four of its leading hosts around the country to perform a kind of hybrid task, covering events that they also seemed to be leading.

And in the increasingly politicized environment between the covered and coverers, Susan Roesgen of CNN, covering a tax protest in Chicago, could not have been more contemptuous of the people she was interviewing, shaking her finger at them and shouting them down. In a move that I’m sure freaked out her bosses, she suggested that the protests were “antigovernment, anti-CNN.”

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC frantically belittled the rhetoric and motives of those involved in the tea party events, even as she spent oodles of air time on the rallies.

Cable news stations have been criticized for “event-izing” all manner of minor news occurrences — President Obama’s first news conference comes to mind. But the Tax Day Tea Party was all but conceived, executed and deconstructed in the hothouse of cable news wars.

It used to be that cable networks would dispatch reporters to the same event and then head back to the studio where shouters from various sides would have it out. Now, in a kind of Hearstian twist, the news media are supplying both the pictures and the war.

“Bring your kids and experience history,” Glenn Beck advised on Fox News as he invited people to join him at the Alamo for a tax day protest, because, he said, “our kids are being sold into slavery.”

It was a kind of al fresco Howard Beale moment, an opportunity to gather in a group and shout about very real rage — these are scary times for all working people — that is nonetheless inchoate and unnameable. The burden being placed on the American economy and future generations is a significant issue — according to fivethirtyeight.com, more than 300,000 people attended rallies in 346 cities — but the event that gave voice to those concerns was far from spontaneous.

The numbers that drove the fervor are not the kind that appear on a 1040 form. Last Wednesday night from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., Fox News had an average of almost 3.4 million viewers, up more than a million compared with its average in March. MSNBC got a bump as well, with 250,000 more viewers, while CNN was only slightly up.

In a sense, we seem to be returning to the days of the party press, where news outlets reflected viewpoints of specific wings of political thought. So perhaps the invocation of an event that took place in 1773 is not that far off the mark.

Even if the historic message of no taxation absent representation doesn’t really scan because the current president won election decisively in a free and open election, the Tea Act that drew the scorn of colonials was, at bottom, a bailout of the East India Company, which was close to bankruptcy after huge misadventures in India. With bankers thumbing rolls of federal billions, the homage to the original Boston Tea Party was not quite a non sequitur.

“The original tea party was something of a media event,” said Robert J. Allison, professor and chair of the history department at Suffolk University and author of “The Boston Tea Party.” “The papers at the time were very politicized and did a lot of campaigning during the run-up to the event.”

He added: “When you think about it, they could have done worse than a bag of tea in terms of symbols. As a historian, I am charmed and fascinated that something that provoked the original revolution still has such resonance.”

The tea references are not the problem. When a media company sets itself as the party of opposition, it can have unforeseen consequences. The theatrics make it hard to tell where talk of secession — the governor of Texas made a veiled threat — states’ rights and stringing up public officials transforms from hyperbole to reality.

The president was likened to Hitler on various posters at rallies, and a sign in Lafayette Park read, “Stand Idle While Some Kenyan Destroys America? I Don’t Think So.”

The Fox Business reporter Cody Willard got in the spirit of things covering a Boston rally by suggesting that conservatives and liberals were “both fascists who are taking my money and building up corporate America with my welfare.”

You have to worry whether something that was intended to goose ratings and kick up debate could metastasize when it meets some of the baser urges of the fringe, among people who don’t come out to rallies but are sitting in a basement steeped in their own misanthropy.

“Together, they will draw a line in the sand, here, where it was originally drawn, live, at the Alamo,” Mr. Beck said as Ted Nugent served up tasty guitar fills. Then Mr. Beck inveighed against Washington, the media, Democrats, Republicans, politicians — you know, everyone who was not standing there at the Alamo.

It had all the earmarks of a stump speech, replete with soaring applause lines and calls to action. But let’s remember: the only thing Mr. Beck and the rest are running for is first place in the demo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/bu...ia/20carr.html





A Cyber-Attack on an American City
Bruce Perens

Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.

That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.

In technical terms, the area was partitioned from the surrounding internet. What was the attackers goal? Nothing has been revealed. Robbery? With wires cut, silent alarms were useless. Manipulation of the stock market? Companies, brokerages, and investors in the very wealthy community were cut off. Mayhem, murder, terrorism? But nothing like that seems to have happened. Some theorize unhappy communications workers, given the apparent knowledge of the community's infrastructure necessary for this attack. Or did the attackers simply want to teach us a lesson?

Although they are silent on the topic, I hope those responsible for emergency services, be they in business or government, are learning the lessons of Morgan Hill. The first lesson is what stayed up: stand-alone radio systems and not much else. Cell phones failed. Cellular towers can not, in general, connect phone calls on their own, even if both phones are near the same tower. They communicate with a central switching computer to operate, and when that system doesn't respond, they're useless. But police and fire authorities still had internal communications via two-way radio.

Realizing that they'd need more two-way radio, authorities dispatched police to wake up the emergency coordinator of the regional ham radio club, and escort him to the community hospital with his equipment. Area hams dispatched ambulances and doctors, arranged for essential supplies, and relayed emergency communications out of the area to those with working telephones.

That the hospital's local network failed is evidence of over-dependence on centralized services. The development of the internet's communications protocols was sponsored by the U.S. Army, and the scientists involved planned for a system robust enough to be used by the military in wartime. But it still takes local engineering skill to implement robust networking services. Most companies stop when something works, not considering whether or how it will work in an emergency.

Institutional networks, even those of emergency services providers, are rarely tested for operation while disconnected from the outside world. Many such networks depend on outside services to match host names to network addresses, and thus stop operating the moment they are disconnected from the internet. Even when the internal network stays up, email is often hosted on some outside service, and thus becomes unavailable. Programs that depend on an internet connection for license verification will fail, and this feature is often found in server software. Commercial VoIP telephone systems will stay up for internal use if properly engineered to be independent of outside resources, but consumer VoIP equipment will fail.

This should lead managers of critical services to reconsider their dependence on software-as-a-service rather than local servers. Having your email live at Google means you don't have to manage it, but you can count on it being unavailable if your facility loses its internet connection. The same is true for any web service. And that's not acceptable if you work at a hospital or other emergency services provider, and really shouldn't be accepted at any company that expects to provide services during an infrastructure failure. Email from others in your office should continue to operate.

What to do? Local infrastructure is the key. The services that you depend on, all critical web applications and email, should be based at your site. They need to be able to operate without access to databases elsewhere, and to resynchronize with the rest of your operation when the network comes back up. This takes professional IT engineering to implement, and will cost more to manage, but won't leave you sitting on your hands in an emergency.

Communications will be a problem during any emergency. Two-way radios have, to a great extent, been replaced by cellular "walkie-talkie" services that can not be relied upon to work during an infrastructure failure. Real two-way radios, stand-alone pager systems, and radio repeaters that enable regional communications are still available to the governments and businesses that endure the expense of planning, acquiring, maintaining, and testing them. Corporate disaster planners should look into such facilities. Municipalities, regardless of their size, should not consider abandoning such resources in favor of the less-robust cellular services.

Satellite telephones can be expected to keep operating, although they too depend on a land infrastructure. They are expensive, and they frequently fail in emergency situations simply because their users, administrative officials rather than technical staff, fail to keep them charged and have no back-up power resource once they are discharged.

A big plus for Morgan Hill was that emergency services had an well-practiced partnership with the local hams. Since you can never budget for all of the communications technicians you'll need in an emergency, using these volunteers is a must for any civil authority. They come with their own equipment, they run their own emergency drills and thus are ready to serve, and they are tinkerers able to improvise the communications system needed to meet a particular emergency.

Which brings us to the issue of testing. No disaster system can be expected to work without regular testing, not only of the physical infrastructure provided for an emergency but of the people who are expected to use it, in its disaster mode. But such testing takes much time and work, and tends to trigger any lurking infrastructure problems, creating outages of its own. It's much better to work such things out as a result of testing than to meet them during a real disaster.

We should also consider whether it might be necessary to harden some of the local infrastructure of our communities. The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice. It might not have helped in Morgan Hill, as the attackers apparently even disabled an unused cable that could have been used to recover from the broken connections.

Surprisingly, manholes don't usually have locks. They rely on the weight of the cover and general revulsion to keep people out. They are more likely to provide alarms for flooding than intrusion. Utility poles are similarly accessible. Much of our infrastructure isn't protected by anything so tough as a manhole cover. Underground cables are easily accessible in surface posts and "tombstones", boxes often located in residential neighborhoods. These can be wrecked with a screwdriver.

Most buried cable cuts are caused by operating a back-hoe without first using one of the "call before digging" services to mark out the location of all of the buried utilities. What's done accidentally can also be done deliberately, and the same services that help diggers avoid utilities might point them out to an attacker.

The most surprising news from Morgan Hill is that they survived reasonably unscathed. That they did so is a result of emergency planning in place for California's four seasons: fire, floods, earthquakes, and riots. Most communities don't practice disaster plans as intensively.

Will there be another Morgan Hill? Definitely. And the next time it might happen to a denser community that won't be so astonishingly able to sustain the trouble using its two-way radios and hams. The next time, it might be connected with some other event, be it crime or terrorism. Company and government officers take notice: the only way you'll fare well is if you start planning now.
http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/





FBI Used Spyware to Catch Cable-Cutting Extortionist

CIPAV spyware helped nab unemployed engineer angry over outsourcing
Gregg Keizer

The FBI used spyware to catch a Massachusetts man who tried to extort money from Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. by cutting 18 cables carrying voice and data in 2005, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Wired.com revealed yesterday.

Although the man's name was redacted in the documents provided to the Web site, their description of the case matches that of Danny M. Kelly, an unemployed engineer who at the time lived in Chelmsford, Mass. According to federal court records, Kelly was accused of cutting a total of 18 above-ground communications cables between November 2004 and February 2005 as part of a plot to extort money from Verizon and Comcast.

"Kelly sent a series of anonymous letters to Comcast and Verizon, in which he took responsibility for the cable cuts and threatened to continue and increase this activity if the companies did not establish multiple bank accounts for him and make monthly deposits into these accounts," the original complaint read.

According to the complaint, Kelly demanded $10,000 monthly from each company, and he told the firms to post the bank account information on a private Web page that he demanded they create.

"Both Comcast and Verizon did create the requested private Web pages in an effort to communicate with the extortionist and to gather information that might identify him," the complaint said. "When Kelly accessed the Web pages, he did so via an anonymizing Web site through which he sought to hide the Internet Protocol address of the computer he was using and therefore hide his identity."

The documents obtained by Wired.com said that the FBI obtained a warrant to use a program called Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV) to identify Kelly's computer as the one that accessed the extortion Web sites.

Details about CIPAV first surfaced in July 2007 in court records related to a case involving a rash of bomb threats e-mailed to a high school in Lacey, Wash. In a filing to the court, an FBI Special Agent said that after getting a warrant, the agency planted CIPAV on a 15-year-old's computer via a link posted to his MySpace page.

According to the agent in the affidavit, CIPAV would "cause any computer -- wherever located -- to send network-level messages containing the activating computer's IP address and/or MAC address, other environmental variables, and certain registry-type information to a computer controlled by the FBI."

However, the warrant application did not spell out whether the CIPAV captured keystrokes or injected other code into the compromised system, as do commonplace Trojan horse downloaders. "The exact nature of [the CIPAV's] commands, processes, capabilities and their configuration is classified as a law-enforcement-sensitive investigative technique," said the 2007 document.

In Kelly's case, the FBI was granted a warrant to use CIPAV on Feb. 10, 2005, said Wired.com. Later that year, Kelly pleaded guilty to extortion, was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay Verizon $378,000 for the damage he did.

According to the complaint filed against Kelly, he believed that "companies like Comcast and Verizon were indirectly responsible for his unemployment and dire financial situation because they worked with companies that favored foreign engineers over their counterparts and because they had indirectly stolen his intellectual property."

As part of his sentence in late 2005, Kelly was also ordered to enter a mental health program.

The court documents related to Kelly's case did not detail how the FBI managed to get CIPAV on his computer, but security researchers commenting on the Washington school bomb threat case speculated that the agency may have used an exploit -- one already in circulation or one of its own -- to plant the spyware.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ource =NLT_AM





FBI Workers Accused of Spying on Dressing Room

Workers Charged with Conspiracy and Committing Criminal Invasion of Privacy
Vicki Smith

Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event at a West Virginia mall.

The FBI employees have been charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy. They were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on temporary changing rooms and zoomed in for at least 90 minutes on girls dressing for the Cinderella Project fashion show, Marion County Prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.

Gary Sutton Jr., 40, of New Milton and Charles Hommema of Buckhannon have been charged with the misdemeanors and face fines and up to a year in jail on each charge if convicted. Sutton has been released on bond, Wilson said, and Hommema is to be arraigned later this week. Wilson did not know Hommema's age.

The workers were described in a complaint as "police officers," but prosecutors did not say whether the men were agents or describe what kind of work they did.

The Cinderella Project at the Middletown Mall in the north-central West Virginia town of Fairmont drew hundreds of girls from 10 high schools in five counties. Organizer Cynthia Woodyard said volunteers, donors and participants are angry.

"I can't even begin to put words around what I consider an unspeakable act, the misuse of surveillance by a branch of our government in a place we felt so secure," she said. "Never in a million years would we have thought something like this would happen. We're in shock."

Hospice Care Corp. was sponsoring the event, offering prom dresses, shoes and accessories to girls who could not otherwise afford them. Dresses sold for as little as $5.

Woodyard, director of marketing for Hospice Care, said this year's event was the biggest in the decade the organization has been holding it, with more than 800 dresses on display.

The prosecutor would not say how authorities found out about the accusations.

It was not immediately clear if the accused men had attorneys. Messages left at phone listings for Gary Sutton were not immediately returned; there was no listing for Hommema.

The FBI issued a brief statement, but refused to answer questions. The statement said the Office of Inspector General was investigating.

"The FBI is committed to the timely and full resolution of this matter, but must remain sensitive to the privacy concerns of any potential victims and their families," the statement said.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1





A Lawyer, Some Teens and a Fight Over 'Sexting'

Revealing Images Sent Via Cellphones Prompt District Attorney to Offer Seminars but Threaten Felony Charges
Dionne Searcey

The group of anxious parents crowded around District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. as he sat behind a table in a courtroom here and presented them with an ultimatum.

Photos of their semi-nude or scantily clad teenage daughters were stacked before him. Mr. Skumanick said the images had been discovered on cellphones confiscated at the local high school. They could either enlist their kids in an education program or have the teens face felony charges of child pornography. "We could have just arrested them but we didn't," said Mr. Skumanick in an interview.

The practice of teens taking naked photos of themselves and sending them to friends via cellphones, called "sexting," has alarmed parents, school officials and prosecutors nationwide, who fear the photos could end up on the Internet or in the hands of sexual predators. In a handful of cases, authorities have resorted to what one parent here called "the nuclear weapon of sex charges" -- child pornography.

But some legal experts say that here in Wyoming County, Pa., Mr. Skumanick has expanded the definition of sexting to such an extent he could be setting a dangerous precedent. He has threatened to charge kids who appeared in photos, but who didn't send them, as well as at least one girl who was photographed wearing a bathing suit. One of the accused is 11 years old.

"The whole tawdry episode seems to call for a little parental guidance and a pop-gun approach, not a Howitzer approach with a felony prosecution," said Louis Natali, a law professor at Temple University.

The sexting case in Tunkhannock is being closely tracked by juvenile-justice authorities. Many prosecutors say pornography laws should be used to protect children from adults, not from other children. In some cases, teens could end up listed on sex registries if convicted of child pornography. Others say that if charges are made, they should be limited to kids who actually distribute the photos.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of parents sued Mr. Skumanick in federal court in Scranton, Pa., alleging he violated the freedom-of-expression rights of three teenage girls. The ACLU also says that Mr. Skumanick is interfering with their parents' rights to raise them as they see fit.

Others say Mr. Skumanick is giving the teens an opportunity to avoid charges, which he could have filed immediately. Mr. Skumanick says he plans to appeal and says he didn't have to offer the education courses as a way out. "We thought we were being progressive."

Some see Mr. Skumanick's alternative of offering classes as appealing. "You don't want to tag them with a scarlet letter for the rest of their life," says Shannon Edmonds, a staff attorney at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, about charging teens with sex crimes.

Sexting came into the spotlight in this rural town, population 1,900, in October. A female student in the Tunkhannock High School cafeteria saw a boy scrolling through his cellphone and spotted a nude photo of herself, according to Mr. Skumanick. When the girl became upset, the school took the phone and called the police who, in turn, handed it to the district attorney's office.

Mr. Skumanick, 47, has been district attorney for the past 20 years here in his boyhood home. He says he was troubled by the photo, and what worried him most was an incident in Ohio where the mother of a teenager blamed sexting for her daughter's suicide last year. The girl, Jessica Logan, had sent nude photos of herself to her boyfriend and later hanged herself after being harassed by schoolmates when the boy allegedly sent the images to his friends.

As Mr. Skumanick contemplated what to do, the school turned up several other phones with nude or semi-nude photos of students. One showed an image of a 17-year-old girl in a towel wrapped just below her breasts. The girl, who asked not to be identified, said she sent the photo to her boyfriend about a year ago to make him jealous when she heard he was interested in another girl. "It was just stupid," she said in an interview.

Another confiscated phone had photos of a 17-year-old girl that she described in an interview as "semi-nude pictures, underwear and stuff like that." The girl, who took the photos herself, was debating whether to send them to her boyfriend when a teacher took the phone.

Mr. Skumanick thought he had enough evidence to charge them as juveniles on pornography violations -- not just for sending the photos, but for appearing in them, too.

With the help of school officials, Mr. Skumanick convened a series of assemblies, from fifth-graders to seniors. For the youngest students, he asked them to conjure how they would feel if their grandparents saw a photo of them that is "not nice." He warned the older students that sexting could damage their college or job prospects and could result in felony charges.

At one of the assemblies, a student interrupted and accused Mr. Skumanick of trying to ruin the teens' lives. "This isn't a debate," Mr. Skumanick told the senior boy, who was escorted out of the auditorium.

Mr. Skumanick also worked with area youth officials to offer the teens a class in lieu of charges. Patrick Rushton, education manager at the Wyoming County Victims Resource Center, culled course outlines for both boys and girls from educational Web sites on sexual harassment and violence. His curriculum included material on "what it means to be a girl in today's society" and a poem, "Phenomenal Women," by Maya Angelou.

On Feb. 5, with the course outline mostly in order, Mr. Skumanick sent a letter to parents of the students involved, saying their children had been "identified in a police investigation involving the possession and/or dissemination of child pornography." The letter summoned the parents to a Feb. 12 meeting at the Wyoming County Courthouse.

MaryJo Miller was dumbstruck when she opened her letter, which targeted her daughter, Marissa. Mr. Skumanick later told her he had a photo of Marissa that showed her from the waist up wearing a bra.

Marissa and her mother say the photo was snapped at a slumber party more than two years ago when Marissa was 12. Neither Marissa nor her mother knows how it got circulated but they don't see the photo as explicit. "It was like an old grandma bra. Nothing skimpy," says Marissa.

Marissa and her parents joined a group of about 50 others at the courthouse. Before showing the photos, Mr. Skumanick explained his offer to the crowd, answering one father's question affirmatively, that -- yes -- a girl in a bathing suit could be subjected to criminal charges because she was posed "provocatively."

Mr. Skumanick told them he could have simply charged the kids. Instead, he gave them two weeks to decide: take the class or face charges.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

Mr. Skumanick dismisses the criticism, saying that no one could see photos of teens who weren't their own children.

In the end, parents enrolled 14 teens in the course. But the parents of three other girls, including Marissa Miller, recruited the ACLU's help to sue Mr. Skumanick. At a hearing March 26, a federal judge indicated he thought the girls may be successful in their suit and temporarily blocked Mr. Skumanick from filing charges, pending a June hearing.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026115528336397.html





Global Economic Crisis Hits German Sex Industry
Erik Kirschbaum

It did not take long for the world financial crisis to affect the world's oldest profession in Germany.

In one of the few countries where prostitution is legal, and unusually transparent, the industry has responded with an economic stimulus package of its own: modern marketing tools, rebates and gimmicks to boost falling demand.

Some brothels have cut prices or added free promotions while others have introduced all-inclusive flat-rate fees. Free shuttle buses, discounts for seniors and taxi drivers, as well as "day passes" are among marketing strategies designed to keep business going.

"Times are tough for us too," said Karin Ahrens, who manages the "Yes, Sir" brothel in Hanover. She told Reuters revenue had dropped by 30 percent at her establishment while turnover had fallen by as much as 50 percent at other clubs.

"We're definitely feeling the crisis. Clients are being tight with their money. They're afraid. You can't charge for the extras any more and there is pressure to cut prices. Everyone wants a deal. Special promotions are essential these days."

Germany has about 400,000 professional prostitutes. Official figures do not distinguish between the sexes and the number of male prostitutes is not known, but they account for a small fraction of the total and are treated the same under the law.

In 2002, new legislation allowed prostitutes to advertise and to enter into formal labor contracts. It opened the way for them to obtain health insurance, previously refused if they listed their true profession.

Annual revenues are about 14 billion euros ($18 billion), according to an estimate by the Verdi services union. Taxes on prostitution are an important source of income for some cities.

Prostitution is also legal and regulated in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Greece, Turkey and in some parts of Australia, and the U.S. state of Nevada.

In other countries, such as Luxembourg, Latvia, Denmark, Belgium and Finland, it is legal but brothels and pimping are not.

"Creative Solutions"

Berlin's "Pussy Club" has attracted media attention with its headline-grabbing "flat rate" -- a 70-euro admission charge for unlimited food, drink and sex between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

"You've got to come up with creative solutions these days," said club manager Stefan, who requested his surname not be published. "We're feeling the economic crisis, too, even though business has fortunately been more or less okay for us so far.

"Our offer might sound like it's too good to be true, but it's real. You can eat as much as you want, drink as much as you want and have as much sex as you want."

Stefan, who runs other establishments in Heidelberg and Wuppertal besides the Berlin club, said the flat rate had helped keep the 30 women working in each location fully employed.

Other novel ideas used by brothels and prostitutes include loyalty cards, group sex parties and rebates for golf players. Hamburg's "GeizHaus" is especially proud of its discount 38.50 euro price. The city has Germany's most famous red-light district, the Reeperbahn, in the notorious St. Pauli district.

Anke Christiansen, manager of the "GeizHaus," said the effects of the economic crisis were clear. "The regular customers who used to come by two or three times a week are only coming by once or twice a week now."

A "GeizHaus" client, who gave his name as Pascal, said: "Naturally we're all feeling the effects of the crisis." He added that he could no longer afford his usual two or three visits a week.

Guenter Krull, manager of the "FKK Villa" in Hanover, concurred. "The girls are complaining, too, because business is bad and I worry that it's all going to get even worse.

Contingency Plans

Ecki Krumeich, manager of upmarket Artemis Club in Berlin, said he resisted pressure to cut prices, although senior citizens and taxi drivers get a 50-percent discount on the 80-euro admission fee on Sundays and Mondays.

"Naturally, we're keeping an eye on the overall economic situation and making contingency plans," said Krumeich, who said his "wellness club" is one of the largest in Europe with about 70 prostitutes.

"Our philosophy is: we provide an important service and even in a recession there are some things people won't do without. Other downmarket places might cut prices but we decided we won't do that. In fact, we raised prices by 10 euros in January."

Stephanie Klee, a prostitute in Berlin and former leader of the German association of sex workers, said even if a few luxury brothels were weathering the storm because of their wealthy regular clientele, many were struggling.

"Just about everyone's turning to advertising in one form or another," she said. "If the consumer electronics shop and the optician come out with rebates and special promotions, why shouldn't we try the same thing?"

While she and her colleagues might have had five or six clients per day a year ago that had fallen to one or even none.

Klee worries, however, that the crisis has led to "price dumping" in some cities -- fees have fallen as low as 30 euros in some parts of Berlin and elsewhere, she said.

"You'll find a lot of customers trying to negotiate prices down now," said Klee. "A 30-year-old came up to me and said 'I lost my job so will you give me a discount?'."

She and others said they were alarmed that amateur prostitutes -- mostly women with low-paid careers -- were increasingly turning to prostitution to make ends meet.

"More and more women are moonlighting on the weekends," said Ahrens. "They're not able to get by with their main job and are in pretty dire straights. For some it works out okay but it's tough for some others and they often don't stay very long.

(Additional reporting by Bettina Borgfeld; editing by Andrew Dobbie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...53K00G20090421





Major German Online Companies Agree to Block Child Porn Websites

German internet providers have grudgingly agreed to block websites containing child pornography. Critics say their deal with the government won't make much of a difference.

Five of Germany's eight major internet service providers - Deutsche Telekom's T-Online, Vodafone's Arcor, Kabel Deutschland, Telefonica's O2 and Alice's Hansenet - signed the legally binding agreement with the government and the Federal Crime Office on Friday, agreeing to install software to block consumer access to child pornography sites. The five companies together cover around 75 percent of the German market.

In future, due to the software blocks installed by the internet service providers, consumers attempting to click on blacklisted websites are to be automatically redirected to a red stop sign. The Federal Crime Office has compiled the blacklist of 1,000 sites, which it updates daily.

The online companies have six months to reprogram thousands of servers and install the page blockers. The government expects that, once these are in place, up to 450,000 attempts to access child pornography sites will be blocked daily.

German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen proposed the law obliging ISPs to block child porn sites. It is modeled on similar action taken years ago in Scandinavia, Britain and Italy.

"If these countries can overcome any legal and technical issues and successfully fight child porn online, we can do the same in Germany," von der Leyen said when she first presented the new measures. "We don't want to tolerate the rape of children, even babies, being widely available in Germany," she added.

The law is also intended to make it harder for criminals to profit from distributing banned pedophile material.

Not all on board, yet

Notably absent in the agreement are 1&1, Freenet and other internet providers who service the remaining 25 percent of the German market. They say they do not want to take the risk of breaching the telecommunications secrecy law by blocking child pornography sites. They also argue that they only provide the technical capacity to distribute information and are not responsible for content that flows through their networks.

Limiting access to information is a sensitive subject in Germany because of its Nazi past and East German Communist rule, but von der Leyen said protecting children was the priority.

"The vulnerability and dignity of children is more important than mass communication," the family minister said.

The German cabinet is expected to announce changes to the telecommunications law by summer that would force the remaining internet providers to block child porn sites.

No reason to believe child porn consumption is going down

The notion that pedophiles are shadowy figures who consume child pornography at midnight is long since defunct. In an embarrassing admission a few weeks, a Social Democrat lawmaker, Joerg Tauss, admitted that he possessed child porn. He denied that he was a pedophile or doing anything wrong, saying he had collected the material for research. As a lawmaker, he ought to know that laws also govern the "research" of child pornography websites.

There's no reliable information on the extent of child pornography, but the German government says access to video and other images of child pornography on the internet more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. There has also been an increase in the amount of violence against small children they show.

The size of those child porn rings that are exposed is, however, some indication of the scope of the problem. On Thursday, German police announced they had smashed a global ring of around 9,000 suspected pedophiles in 92 countries. Pornographic images of children were transmitted from more than 1,000 connections in Germany to 8,000 IP addresses in countries including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Austria and Switzerland. The footage included "images of the most serious sexual abuse, even of toddlers,” police said in a statement.

Child porn users bypass "obvious" areas

Critics say the new law is practically useless, because companies abroad can easily bypass the software block. According to German computer magazine CT, a 27-second online video is already circulating showing how the block can be circumvented. Only the "naive internet user" might possibly be stopped from accessing prohibited material, the magazine wrote.

"Most child pornography material is available through private forums, like exchange sites, newsgroups, chat rooms, free areas of Usenet and e-mail distribution lists," says Udo Vetter, a lawyer who often represents people charged with possession of child pornography.

In an interview with CT, Vetter said "many simply receive the videos on DVD via the mail," adding that he doubted a major child pornography industry even exists. Vetter estimated that 98 percent of such images have been around for years and that the quality of most new material that surfaces seems to have been made by private individuals in a domestic setting.

Others criticize the government deal with the ISPs as being too short-sighted.

"Blocking internet pages containing child pornography is only one step towards preventing the abuse of children and only reaches "the lower echelons" of pedophiles, says legal expert Axel Stahl, head of the association of federal judges and prosecutors in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Stahl warned against excessively high expectations, saying that foreign companies that produce child pornography will surely find ways to bypass the new technical limitations.

Scarcity can actually increase demand

"The new rules mean gaining access to child pornography will become more difficult, but it won't stop material from being published," says Otto Vollmers, who represents FSM, a German industry organization that advocates voluntary self-control of the internet. "Making access technically more difficult can actually arouse greater interest."

However, similar measures in other countries suggest that blocks so work.

"Between 15,000 and 50,000 access attempts are blocked in Norway and Sweden every day," said Friedemann Schindler of the German youth protection initiative jugendschutz.de. "This is undermining demand and is breaking the commercial cycle."
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4185666,00.html





Dissent Made Safer

How anonymity technology could save free speech on the Internet.
David Talbot

"Sokwanele" means "enough is enough" in a certain Bantu dialect. It is also the name of a Zimbabwean pro-democracy website whose bloggers last year published accounts of atrocities by Robert Mugabe's regime and posted Election Day updates describing voter intimidation and apparent ballot stuffing. You can visit Sokwanele's "terror album" and see photographs: of a hospitalized 70-year-old woman who'd been beaten and thrown on her cooking fire (she later died, the site says); of firebombed homes; of people with deep wounds carved into their backs. You can find detailed, frequently updated maps describing regional violence and other incidents. You will be confronted with gruesome news, starkly captioned: "Joshua Bakacheza's Body Found."

Because this horrific content is so readily available, it is easy to overlook the courage it took to produce it. The anonymous photographers and polling-station bloggers who uploaded the Sokwanele material remain very much in danger. In a place like Zimbabwe, where saying the wrong thing can get you killed or thrown in prison on treason charges, you take precautions: you're careful about whom you talk to; you're discreet when you enter a clinic to take pictures. And when you get to the point of putting your information on the Internet, you need protection from the possibility that your computer's digital address will be traced back to you. Maybe, at that point, you use Tor.

Tor is an open-source Internet anonymity system--one of several systems that encrypt data or hide the accompanying Internet address, and route the data to its final destination through intermediate computers called proxies. This combination of routing and encryption can mask a computer's actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies. At a time when global Internet access and social-networking technologies are surging, such tools are increasingly important to bloggers and other Web users living under repressive regimes. Without them, people in these countries might be unable to speak or read freely online (see "Beating Surveillance and Censorship").
Video

Unlike most anonymity and circumvention technologies, Tor uses multiple proxies and encryption steps, providing extra security that is especially prized in areas where the risks are greatest. Paradoxically, that means it's impossible to confirm whether it's being used by the Zimbabwean bloggers. "Anyone who really needs Tor to speak anonymously isn't going to tell you they use Tor to speak anonymously," says Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of Global Voices, an online platform and advocacy organization for bloggers around the world. "You can't tell if it's happening, and anyone who is actively evading something isn't going to talk about it." That said, the Sokwanele journalists "are extremely sophisticated and use a variety of encryption techniques to protect their identity," he says.

Anonymity aside, Internet users in dozens of countries--whether or not they are activist bloggers--often need to evade censorship by governments that block individual sites and even pages containing keywords relating to forbidden subjects. In 2006, the OpenNet Initiative--a research project based at Harvard and the Universities of Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge that examines Internet censorship and surveillance--discovered some form of filtering in 25 of 46 nations tested, including China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Vietnam.

In a new and still-evolving study, OpenNet found that more than 36 countries are filtering one or more kinds of speech to varying degrees: political content, religious sites, pornography, even (in some Islamic nations) gambling sites. "Definitely, there is a growing norm around Internet content filtering," says Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto political scientist who cofounded OpenNet. "It is a practice growing in scope, scale, and sophistication worldwide."

Tor can solve both problems; the same proxies that provide anonymous cover for people posting content also become portals for banned websites. When it officially launched five years ago, the Tor network consisted of 30 proxies on two continents; now it has 1,500 on five continents, and hundreds of thousands of active users. And its developers are trying to expand its reach, both abroad and in the United States, because digital barriers and privacy threats affect even the free world. In the United States, for example, libraries and employers often block content, and people's Web habits can be--and are--recorded for marketing purposes by Internet service providers (ISPs) and by the sites themselves. "The Internet is being carved up and filtered and surveilled," says Deibert. "The environment is being degraded. So it's up to citizens to build technologies to [counter these trends]. And that is where I see tools like Tor coming into play. It preserves the Internet as a forum for free information."

Neutral Nodes
The product of a small nonprofit organization with eight paid developers and a few dozen volunteer security professionals around the world, Tor takes advantage of the fact that Internet traffic consists of two-part packets. The first part contains data--pieces of a Web page you are viewing, or of the photo file or e-mail you are sending. The other consists of the Internet protocol (IP) address of the sending and receiving computer (plus other data, such as the size of the file). Tor uses the latter portion--the addressing information--to build a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network (see "Dodging Spies, Data Miners, and Censors" next page). The requisite relays (which collectively serve as proxies) are operated on a volunteer basis at universities such as Boston University and a few corporations, and by computer-security professionals and free-speech advocates around the world. (Many Tor users also use existing technologies, such as HTTPS--a protocol for encrypting and decrypting a user's page requests and the pages that are returned--to protect the content they are sending and receiving.)

Tor, like the Internet itself, emerged from military research--in this case at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, which built a prototype in the mid-1990s. The military interest was clear: without a way to make Internet traffic anonymous, an agent's cover could be compromised the minute he or she visited .mil domains using the Internet connection of, say, a hotel. Even if the data were encrypted, anyone watching traffic over the hotel network could quickly figure out that the guest might be associated with the U.S. military. And the problem is hardly limited to hotel networks; IP addresses can be linked to physical locations by a variety of means (ISPs correlate such data with phone numbers, data miners can piece together clues from Internet traffic, and someone outside your house can confirm that you are the source of specific kinds of Internet traffic by "sniffing" data traveling over Wi-Fi). As a Tor presentation puts it, chillingly, what might an insurgent group pay to get a list of Baghdad IP addresses that get e-mail from a .gov or .mil account?

The navy project never emerged from the lab, but it attracted the interest of Roger Dingledine, a cryptographer concerned about a different aspect of Internet privacy: the way ISPs and websites amass databases on people's browsing and search history. In 2000, at a conference where he was presenting his MIT master's thesis on anonymous distributed data storage, he met a Naval Research Lab mathematician, Paul Syverson. The two men saw that tools for protecting military agents and tools for protecting Web surfers' privacy could be one and the same, and together they revived the project with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the navy.

The first public version of Tor, which came out in 2003, was available for anyone who cared to install it. But it worked only on open-source operating systems, and using it required at least some technical knowledge. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital civil-liberties organization, funded development of a version for Windows, and soon a wider variety of users emerged. "Originally one of my big reasons for working on Tor was to provide tools for people in the West--Americans and Europeans--to let them keep their information safe from corporations and other large organizations that generally aren't very good at keeping it to themselves," says Dingledine, now 32, who is Tor's project leader. But now, he says, some police agencies use Tor to make sure that an investigation of an online scam won't be compromised by tipping the scammer off to regular site visits from a police department's computers. And some companies, he says, use it to help them prevent competitors from figuring out, say, who is scouring their online product sheets.

It quickly became clear that this diversity was crucial to the technology's success. "It's not just safety in numbers; there is safety in variety," Dingledine says. "Even if there were 100,000 FBI agents using Tor, you would know what it's for: 'You are using the FBI's anonymity system.' Even from the very beginning, part of the fun and the challenge was to take all of these different groups out there who care about what Tor provides, and put them all into the same network." To help promote wider use, its developers made Tor far easier to install. And in 2006, they developed a new feature, the Torbutton, which allows Tor users to easily turn Tor on and off while they browse with the Firefox Web browser (turning it off speeds up Internet access but removes the protections).

Global spread
Syria is an all-purpose Internet repressor. It hunts down some bloggers; a Syrian named Tariq Biasi, for example, was recently sentenced to three years in prison for "dwindling the national feeling"; he allegedly posted a comment critical of the state's security service online. Beyond going after online critics, Syria also blocks many websites--including Facebook, YouTube, and Skype--from all Web users in the nation. I spoke about Syrian censorship with another blogger, Anas Qtiesh; he sat in an Internet café in Damascus as I messaged him from my living room. Qtiesh isn't worried that he'll be tracked down, because he tends to blog about pan-Arab politics, not about criticisms of the regime. But he wants access to more of the Internet than the government permits, so the Firefox browser on his laptop sports the Torbutton. Click the button, and presto--the same Internet that everyone in America sees. To access blocked sites, his computer negotiates a series of proxies, eventually connecting to an IP address somewhere else in the world. This intermediary fetches the blocked material. "Tor brings back the Internet," he wrote.

Qtiesh has plenty of company: Tor was always of interest abroad, but word of mouth and the introduction of the easy-to-use Torbutton have helped accelerate its global spread. Zuckerman has been actively promoting Tor through his Global Voices network. So have other advocates of online free speech in Asia, China, and Africa. And these efforts have been working. Wendy Seltzer, who teaches Internet law at American University and founded Chilling Effects, a project to combat legal threats against Internet users, saw that firsthand when she traveled to Guangzhou, China, for a blogger conference last year. China is generally acknowledged as the most sophisticated Internet filterer in the world; it employs a variety of techniques, including blocking IP addresses, domain names (the text name of a website, such as www.google.com), and even Web pages containing certain keywords (Falun Gong, for example). According to one report, Chinese security forces have arrested several hundred Internet users and bloggers in the past 10 years. Seltzer says that many bloggers she met in Guangzhou were using Tor. And when she went to an Internet café there, she reports, the computers were automatically configured to run the software.

In China, Tor is one weapon in a large arsenal. But in Mauritania, Tor appears to have single-handedly overwhelmed state censorship. Nasser Weddady is a Mauritanian-born son of a diplomat, now living in the Boston area. He is a civil-rights activist who seeks to call attention to the slavery still practiced in his native country, where black Muslims work in servitude for Arab and Moorish farms and households, far from the international spotlight. In 2005, in response to Internet filtering in Mauritania, he translated a guide to using Tor into Arabic and arranged for its distribution to owners of cybercafés. The effect was stunning: the government stopped filtering. Officials "didn't know we were using Tor," says Weddady. "I'm not sure they know what Tor is. But they noticed that our communications were not disrupted, so the filtering was useless."

Such successes can be short-lived, of course, and Weddady predicts that the regime will regroup and resume filtering. "The Middle East in general is a civil-rights desert; it has some of the most sophisticated filtering operations in the world," he says. "Plenty of people I personally know are using Tor in that region." Users know that to any snooper, the messages they post appear to originate from a Tor relay somewhere else in the world, so cybercafé owners can't rat them out even if they want to. "Tor doesn't say, 'Just trust us not to give out your information'--it says, 'We have a design where nobody is in a position to give up your information, because no one person has it,'" says Seltzer, who volunteers on Tor's board. "I do believe Tor is the best solution for people who are trying to get access to blocked matter, or are trying to speak anonymously."

Bridging Tor's Gaps
Neither Tor nor any other tool is a perfect solution to Internet spying and censorship. As an open-source project, Tor publishes everything about its workings, including the addresses of its relays. That doesn't betray the actual source and destination of users' information, but it does mean that a government could obtain this list of addresses and block them. (So far, nobody has taken this step, though Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates did find a way to block Tor for a few months in 2008.) Second, using Tor can make Internet access painfully slow; online activities can take more than 10 times longer when using Tor, according to a study by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It turns out the speed of light isn't so fast after all," Dingledine deadpans. And this problem is getting worse; in the past year, the number of users has increased faster than Tor's developers can add relays.

But the biggest limitation is simply that all these tools still reach only a narrow slice of the world's Internet users. Yes, if you're a business traveler in China and have technical savvy and bandwidth--or you hire someone to set you up--you can circumvent government filters. (It's generally understood that state security forces will rarely move to shut down circumvention tools unless they're publicly embarrassed by being outsmarted online.) But a recently released Berkman report by Zuckerman, faculty codirector John Palfrey, and researcher Hal Roberts has concluded--on the basis of data supplied in 2007 by makers of circumvention software--that only a few million people use the major circumvention tools worldwide. It's true that usage has grown since then--and this estimate doesn't count everybody who has figured out a way to use proxies. Still, China alone has 300 million Internet users, and the researchers believe that most of them aren't equipped to fight censorship. Meanwhile, the list of nations that censor is only growing. Two years ago, Turkey piled on, with particular zeal for stamping out criticism of the nation's founding father, Kemal Atatürk.

Tor is preparing for the fight against relay blocking by creating a system of "bridge nodes"--a constantly changing list of IP addresses through which people can reach the main network of relays. A user can simply send an e-mail asking for a bridge address. Of course, an Iranian censor could also request and block such addresses, but the idea is to defeat such efforts by generating ever more bridges, donated by a wide range of Internet users. And Jonathan Zittrain, a Berkman cofounder and Harvard Law School professor, envisions going even further. "The next big moment that the Tor people haven't implemented--something in the background, something that would be huge--would be if your use of Tor, by default, makes you a Tor node yourself," he says. "At that point, it totally scales. The more people use it, the more people can use it."

As part of a three-year effort to improve the software and expand its use, Tor's staff and volunteers will step up appeals for Tor users to let their computers serve as bridges to individual users elsewhere. But taking the next step--becoming a relay, or node, potentially available to any Tor traffic--would massively increase the traffic flowing through a user's computer. If users became nodes by default, it could defeat the purpose of using Tor to remain low key: once a user wandered into a cybercafé to blog anonymously, that terminal would soon stand out as a hub of Internet traffic. What's more, such a system "sets off an arms race with all the network providers and network administrators," says Andrew Lewman, Tor's executive director. "It increases traffic, and we become something they might block, because that's their job." Tor would ultimately like to find safe ways to enlist distributed help, but for now, developers are pursuing intermediate goals, such as limiting bulk data transfers and improving the flow among existing Tor relays.

One criticism leveled against Tor is that it can be used not only for good purposes but for bad--protecting distributors of child pornography, for example. Dingledine's response is that Tor's protections help law enforcement catch criminals, too, while criminals may find it more effective to use neighbors' or public Wi-Fi links, or hacked computers, to mask their identities.

Another concern is that circumvention tools--especially those that only use a single proxy, which holds information about who is talking to whom--can create privacy and security worries of their own. Earlier this year, Hal Roberts discovered that certain tools used widely in China--DynaWeb Freegate, GPass, and FirePhoenix--appeared to be offering to sell users' browsing histories. While there's no evidence that any individual's privacy was compromised, the point was made: in many cases, using anonymity or circumvention systems still means trusting an organization with your information--and trusting that its privacy policies can and will be honored. (With Tor, it's a bit different; since no single relay ever holds the information about the complete route, you must trust the integrity of algorithms that obscure connections between origins and destinations.) "I don't doubt the dedication of the people hosting these tools, but what I'm concerned about is whether they will protect your data," Roberts says. "The biggest takeaway is: they have that data."

Dingledine thinks events will push people to seek the protections that Tor and other tools provide. In 2006, for example, AOL gave away millions of users' search terms for research purposes. Although the searchers were identified only by random numbers, bloggers and reporters were quickly able to identify individual users from clues based on the search terms. (Since Tor uses a different router pathway for each user each time, it's impossible to amass such aggregate data about even an anonymously identified Tor user.) Dingledine reasons that each time a national censor blocks news sites and YouTube, or an ISP or website loses or sells or gives away user data, people will seek solutions. "The approach we've taken so far is to let the bad guys teach people about it," he says. "Let the AOLs and the China firewalls screw up. Let everybody read about why they want privacy on the Internet." More and more people might just decide that enough is enough.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22427/?a=f





Police Eye 'Grab Your Phone and Shop a Criminal' Tech

Boys in BlueTube
Nick Heath

In the future, witnesses to crimes may simply be able to report wrongdoing by uploading videos taken from their mobile phones.

According to Ian Readhead, director of information for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), the technology to allow such reporting is already being looked at by the force.

"In future it is not bizarre to think that people will not just contact the police to say there is a robbery happening but will say 'Can I send you through the video?'," he said at the recent launch of the Unisys Security Index.

"It is not unreasonable to think that the service will change its capabilities to receive this sort of information from the public.

"That is the sort of tech developments that the service is looking at and considering how we would make those investments," he told silicon.com.

According to Acpo, police now routinely check YouTube to gather evidence during criminal investigations.

"Certain criminal activity can now be posted on YouTube far quicker than we would find it ourselves," Readhead said.

"We have staff search YouTube for evidence of incidents. That could be inappropriate activity by police officers or criminal activity.

"It is just another way of detecting evidence of crimes."

There have already been UK motorists convicted of dangerous driving after posting footage of themselves breaking the speed limit on YouTube.

Readhead added that police forces are also experimenting with image recognition technology that gives officers the ability to scour through hours of video captured on CCTV systems and quickly pick out suspect objects or vehicles.

"For example, say we were looking for a white transit van on the M1 between 6am and 3pm. If we had to view all the video to find that van it would take us hours to find," he said.

"If we know that the van is white and its other distinguishing features then there is tech that will search through the footage of every van of this type."

Readhead said the use of image recognition technologies by police is still in its early stages but predicted their use will increase among forces.
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/...9423609,00.htm





Cash in Hand, Technology Giants Go Shopping
Ashlee Vance

Most consumers do not want to get a PC by purchasing microprocessors, hard drives and operating system software from different suppliers and assembling them all into a working computer. They prefer to buy a complete, customized machine from one supplier.

Corporate customers increasingly want the same thing: a one-stop shop for hardware, software and services. And the largest technology companies are deploying their huge cash hoards to make acquisitions to bolster their ability to be that single provider.

That trend drove Oracle, a leader in business software, to announce Monday that it was spending $7.4 billion to buy an ailing Sun Microsystems and get into the computer hardware business. Oracle beat out rival I.B.M., which considered buying Sun to enhance its own software offerings but ended serious acquisition talks about two weeks ago.

“Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system — applications to disk — where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves,” Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, said Monday.

The drive to consolidate has made life difficult for independent companies like Sun, and the fall of such an industry stalwart highlights the mounting pressure on smaller firms in the computer, storage and software industries to find buyers. Even larger companies like EMC and Dell could be vulnerable, industry observers say.

“I believe that we are in the fifth inning of a nine-inning consolidation game,” said William T. Coleman III, a former Sun executive and co-founder of BEA Systems, who is now chief of the software start-up Cassatt. “It’s not over by any stretch of the imagination, and there are drastic things that still have to happen.”

Five years ago, Oracle bought PeopleSoft for more than $10 billion, igniting a furious rush to scoop up other business software makers. Oracle alone has since bought more than 40 other companies, spending close to $15 billion for BEA and Siebel Systems alone.

Many of the companies purchased by Oracle had carved out a niche for themselves during the Internet build-out, providing unique functions that assisted a rapid infrastructure expansion. In the years after the dot-com bust, however, customers grew weary of visits from hordes of software salesmen peddling isolated wares. A simpler model evolved, in which a handful of companies like Oracle, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard bought dozens of smaller players and then competed to sell most of the software needed to run a modern business.

“The core just keeps getting denser and denser,” said Randall N. Spratt, the chief information officer at McKesson, one of the nation’s largest health care companies. “We welcome large-scale players at the core.”

While software companies led the last round of consolidation, the hardware industry now appears poised for its own reshaping. “I think we’re at an inflection point,” said Patricia C. Sueltz, a former I.B.M. and Sun executive, who runs the start-up LogLogic.

For example, Rackable Systems, a smaller server computer maker, announced plans this month to buy Silicon Graphics for $25 million. Like Sun, Silicon Graphics started in 1982, and had been one of the fastest-growing businesses in America during its heyday, selling billions of dollars of computers a year.

As the computer business has matured, companies that handcraft products for top performance face a harsh reality: Standard equipment can now handle most business tasks, and what matters most to customers now is large scale — and the low prices that come with it.

Over the last decade, H.P. has driven much of the consolidation through a series of large acquisitions. It bought Compaq Computer in 2001, which affected both the PC and server markets as other companies fought to expand and match H.P.’s reach. For example, the Chinese computer maker Lenovo bought I.B.M.’s PC business, and Acer, based in Taiwan, acquired Gateway, which had already acquired eMachines.

Last year, H.P. purchased Electronic Data Systems, one of the largest technology services companies, in a bid to counter I.B.M.’s immense services organization. The E.D.S. purchase also threatened the businesses of Sun and Cisco Systems, which have sold large amounts of equipment to E.D.S.’s customers.

Most recently, the largest technology companies have decided to encroach on each other’s turf. For example, H.P. has increased its investment in networking technology, hoping to pull business away from Cisco, and Cisco has countered by building its own server products. Oracle’s purchase of Sun is an even more drastic lurch into its rivals’ territory, as Oracle will find itself in the unfamiliar position of selling hardware, while also picking up Sun’s prized software assets, like its Solaris operating system, Java programming language and open-source MySQL database.

Lurking behind all of these moves is the rise of virtualization software, which makes it possible to shuffle software around a data center rather than keeping it locked onto specific physical systems. The technology has eroded the boundaries between server, storage and networking hardware, forcing the large players to have a hand in all of these businesses. Both Oracle and Sun have made their own virtualization technology in a bid to catch up with the market leader VMware.

The recent uptick in the stock market may be enough for companies that had been sitting on the sideline to act. Bullish analysts postulate that valuations of vulnerable tech companies will not go much lower.

With $34 billion on hand, Cisco has more funds at its disposal than any other technology company and has been mentioned as a suitor for storage makers like EMC and NetApp. H.P., too, has come up as a potential buyer for NetApp. And Dell has pledged to spend some of its billions on server, storage and services companies. “I think people have been a little more fearful, but there’s still a ton of cash out there,” said Peter Falvey, the co-founder of Revolution Partners, an investment bank centered on technology companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/te...21compute.html





Lost in Space

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.
Kris Hollington

Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed.

The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of flats. Grabbing their assorted pipes, along with a large toolbox, the two brothers ran up the stairs to the rooftop. Moments later, the city’s silence was rudely broken once more as they set to work: a concerto of hammering, clattering, sawing and shouting.

Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!”

One of the young men shouted back “Sorry sir; the Soviets have launched a satellite and we’re trying to intercept it!”

The brothers finished setting up, grabbed their head-sets, twiddled the knobs on their portable receivers, hit the record button and listened…

“Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous?”
The brothers looked nervously at one another. They only fully understood the Russian later when their sister translated for them, but the desperation in the woman’s voice was clear.

“Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!”

The signal went dead.

From Outer Space

There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.

It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.

The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effect ively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.

The brothers’ passion for radio began in 1949, when Achille Judica-Cordiglia was 16 and Gian was just 10. For them, radio was the Internet of its day, a wonderful invention which fuelled their dreams of explor ation; they adored cinema too, and filmed everything they did.

More than 50 years ago, on 4 October 1957, an event took place that transformed their lives forever. The brothers were sitting at a table in the large attic bedroom where they should have been doing their homework but, as usual, were tinkering with old radio parts. Suddenly, the programme they were listening to was interrupted – the Soviets had just launched Sputnik I (left), the first satellite to orbit the Earth.

“They gave the frequency it was transmitting its beeps on,” recalled Achille, “so we thought: shall we try?”

They didn’t know it, but Turin was perfectly situated to track the Soviet satellites; northern Italy was the only area in Western Europe on Russia’s orbital path.

The brothers had their recording within a few minutes. Elated, they decided that they would track and record anything that went up into space. The brothers ended up constructing an 8m (26ft) collaps ible dish which they sneakily perched on the rooftop of the highest block of flats in Turin’s city centre. To try and keep it secret they built it in such a way that it could be erected and dismantled extremely quickly.

After the success of Sputnik, Russian Prem ier Nikita Khrushchev boasted: “The US doesn’t have an intercontinental missile; otherwise, it would have easily launched a satellite of its own.” Russia had demonstrated that it had the power to fire its nuclear weapons to anywhere in the US. Space was about to become the major battleground of the Cold War, and the Judica-Cordiglia brothers dreamed of being part of it.

The brothers went on to record the first living creat ure in space the following month, when Laika the dog travelled aboard Sputnik 2, and then, in February 1958, the beeps from Explorer 1, America’s first satellite. Younger sister Maria Teresa recalled “being in their room was like being in the workshop of Dædalus, it was brimming with ideas… it was one big adventure.”

Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.

“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.

The story was picked up by a Swiss-Italian radio station, and the brothers became the station’s space experts. By now, the Judica-Cordiglias were more than ready to capture the first human sounds from space. They came sooner than expected.

At 10.55pm on 2 February 1961, the brothers were scanning Russian frequencies as usual when Achille picked up a transmission from an orbiting capsule. They recorded the wheezing, struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut. The brothers contacted Professor Achille Dogliotti, Italy’s leading cardiologist and recorded his judgement. “I could quite clearly distinguish the clear sounds of forced, panting human breath,” said Dogliotti.

Two days later, the Soviet press agency announced that Russia had sent a seven-and-a-half-tonne spaceship the size of a single-decker bus into space on 2 February, which had burned up during re-entry. No further information was forthcoming.

Had the brothers captured the dying breaths of a cosmonaut?

Airbrushed From History

James Oberg worked in NASA’s mission control for almost 20 years before becoming a space historian specialising in the Russian space programme. According to him, “the sounds the Judica-Cordiglias heard could be interpreted to mean a lost cosmonaut; in those days nobody could tell. In those days so much was secret and much of the Soviet space programme was wrapped in disinformation, and bred by ignorance.”

Large parts of the early Soviet Space programme remain unknown to this day; information was destroyed; most of those involved have died or vanished. Some historians have recently solved some of the mysteries surrounding the early cosmonauts. Oberg himself discovered that a famous photo of the ‘Sochi Six’, a group of Russia’s original top cosmonaut candidates, had been doctored, erasing one of the six men.

Oberg discovered that the rosebush was Grigoriy Nelyubov, expelled from the programme in 1961 after a drunken brawl with some soldiers. Some time later, drunk and depressed, Nelyubov stepped in front of a train and was killed. Other airbrushings include Anatoliy Kartashov, who experienced skin bleeding during a centrifuge run, and Valentin Varlamov who vanished after injuring his neck in a diving accident. Vladimir Shatalov, the Commander of Cosmonaut Training from 1971 to 1987, admitted that “six or eight” trainees had died in the 1960s, but wouldn’t say how. The Russian cosmonaut, it seems, had to be perfect or not exist at all. By 1971, nine cosmonauts had vanished from the official photographs which were re-released in honour of the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight.

So, did any cosmonauts actually die in space? Russian journalist and 1965 cosmonaut candidate Yaroslav Golovanov claimed that on 10 November 1960, a cosmonaut called Byelokonyev died on board a spaceship in orbit. Mikhail Rudenko, a retired senior space engineer, claimed a few years ago that three early victims were test pilots who were simply blasted straight up into space between 1957 and 1959.

Sadly, there is no evidence to back these claims. But the Soviets were experts at making people and evid ence disapp ear, so it is all too easy to believe that more deaths might have occ urred in those desperate early days of the space race. Risks were taken at the insistence of Khrushchev, who needed results for political leverage. Tests were not completed and safety checks were ignored. On 23 October 1960, a rocket exploded at Baikonur vaporising 165 technicians, an event that was hushed up by the Soviet authorities for over 30 years.

One fatality that we do know about from those early days was that of Valentin Bondarenko. At 24, he was the youngest cosmonaut. He met his terrible end on 23 March 1961, while in a pressure chamber as part of a 10-day isolation exercise. Bondarenko dropped an alcohol-soaked cotton swab on a hot plate, which – in the oxygen-rich environment – started a fire that ignited his suit. It was 20 minutes before the pressurised door could be opened. Bondarenko was pulled out barely alive, crying “It was my fault”, and died eight hours later, comforted by his best friend, Yuri Gagarin. News of the accident was hushed up until 1986.

Two weeks after Bondarenko’s death, on 11 April 1961, an Italian journalist working for the International Press Agency in Moscow received a tip-off that something “of immense importance” was about to happen. He called the Cordiglia brothers.

“We leapt out of bed,” said Achille, “dashed over to our receivers and began listening. Suddenly, in what was a magical moment, the hiss faded and this Russian voice emerged from very far away for a few seconds.” At that stage, no one in the West – not even the President of the United States – knew that the Russians had launched a rocket.

Russian translators were few and far between but the brothers had this covered – their younger sister was fluent in Russian. The first sentence they heard was: “The flight is proceeding normally. I feel well. The flight is normal. I am withstanding well the state of weightlessness.”

As the brothers listened, the cosmonaut experimented with zero gravity. They lost the signal as the cosmonaut prepared for re-entry while whistling a communist hymn. It was only then that President John F Kennedy was awoken at 2am to be given the news that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space.
Five weeks later, on 19 May 1961, the brothers picked up what is now their most infamous recording, which they claim is of a woman cosmonaut whose ship burned up on re-entry. Then, a few days after this, they picked up a tantalising few seconds of another trans mission: “Conditions growing worse, why don’t you answer?” Both recordings are clear and accurately translated.

Torre Bert

The brothers got permission to take over a disused German bunker on the outskirts of Turin at a place called Torre Bert. Reclaiming all the scrap metal and old pipes they could find, they enlisted the help of a dozen student volunteers and constructed a series of antennæ, eventually creating a super-dish with a diameter of 15m (50ft) and weighing one and a half tonnes.

The brothers stuck a sign on the bunker wall: Torre Bert Space Centre. Inside, using discarded WWII American army equipment, they created an exact replica of Cape Canaveral, including an enormous map of the world behind a Perspex sheet along with an LED display that marked satellites’ progress. Kitchen clocks provided the time in London, Moscow, Cape Kennedy and Turin. Volunteers wore white coats. While the US spent 15 million dollars on one listening post, Torre Bert had cost the brothers nothing; and, as they soon discovered, it worked just as well.

With the opening of Torre Bert, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers became local superstars. “Those days were frenetic and exciting,” recalled Gian’s wife Laura, “because when word got out that there was a space mission it was packed with girlfriends, friends, students; even professors started coming.”

The brothers found partners to create their own amateur space-tracking network, dubbed ‘Zeus’. When they got word of an imminent launch, they notified 16 stations across the world. Gian’s fiancée coordinated the operation.

The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.

“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.

They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.

“It seemed so simple but no one else had thought of it. Somehow, we’d managed to crack America’s top secret!” Achille said.

On 20 February1962, while John Glenn lay flat on his back inside the instrument-packed capsule Friendship 7, a buzzing Torre Bert was packed full of students, professors, children, friends, family, hangers-on and one or two shady characters (of which, more later).

For several long minutes, static streamed into Torre Bert, when suddenly Achille hissed “SSSSSSHH!” And then it came through: the voice of the first American in space: “Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous! I can see the booster doing turnarounds just a couple of hundred yards behind. Cape is go and I am go.”

They listened as Glenn gobbled malt tablets, squeezed a tube of apple sauce into his mouth and told ground control he felt fine.

“I have had no ill effects at all from zero G. It’s very pleasant, as a matter of fact. Visual acuity is still excellent. No astigmatic effects. No nausea or discomfort whatsoever.”

Then Friendship 7 shuddered. Glenn’s body was squeezed by G-force. A fiery glow enveloped the ship as he began re-entry.

Cape Canaveral lost radio contact. So did the Judica-Cordiglias. For Cape Canaveral, the silence lasted for seven minutes. Then came Glenn’s exultant voice. “Boy!” he cried. “That was a real fireball!”
Inside Torre Bert, it was a scene of jubilation. “Nobody could believe we’d done it. What a feeling!” said Achille.

As every computer hacker knows, finding out secrets can be dangerous – but the risk is what makes the game so thrilling. That risk was about to catch up with the Cordiglias.

The Guardian Angel

A few days later, the Judica-Cordiglias’ doorbell rang. Standing there like a character straight from a spy movie was a serious-looking, swarthy man in a long coat with a heavy Russian accent. He said he was a journalist. The brothers gave him an interview.

Shortly after the Russian ‘reporter’ left, the doorbell rang again. This time it was a short Italian man with a neat beard in a smart suit. He pulled a photo out of his pocket. It was of the Russian ‘reporter’. “This man is not just a journalist; he works for the KGB, so beware. I work for SIFA [the Italian Secret Service], counter intelli gence,” he said. “Know that we are looking after you. But be careful,” he warned them. “We can’t be every where.” And he left.

The brothers later became firm friends with this man they called their “guardian angel”.

I was told by a retired journalist that the same KGB agent eventually became a Russian ambassador to a European country. Armed with a name, I tracked him down in the Czech Republic. He agreed to meet me in the art-deco basement bar of Prague’s extraordinarily ornate Municipal House. Sitting amongst the tourist hubbub, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, he told me a tale from 50 years ago, a time when Eastern Europe was a very different place:

“Of course we were interested in the Judica-Cordiglia brothers; they were hacking into our commun ications. Imagine that today; a pair of amateur kids taking apart the Russian space programme like it was a toy.

“I heard the Gagarin recording, transcribed it and verified it was genuine. Our cosmonauts were warned to be careful what they said while in space after this and we had the brothers followed.”

I next tracked down the brothers’ “guardian angel”, who insisted that his name and location be kept secret. “When the Judica-Cordiglia brothers were approached by the Soviets,” he told me, “we immediately decided to make contact with them. Our goal was to protect them but also to obtain information about Soviet spacecraft. At first they didn’t trust me, but soon we became friends.”

The brothers didn’t realise how much danger they faced. The retired KGB agent had told me: “They had to be dealt with – an accident perhaps – but then that TV programme happened and they were famous. That saved their lives. I was glad; they were good kids.”

The Fair Of Dreams

The telephone call that may well have saved their lives came from Mike Bongiorno, Italy’s most popular TV presenter who told them: “I want you to come on my quiz show Fiera dei Sogni [The Fair of Dreams], and if you win I’ll make your dreams come true.”

For the Judica-Cordiglias, their dream was to visit NASA, something they thought was way beyond their reach, but now they had a chance. The only catch was that they had to win Italy’s most popular and toughest TV quiz, the Italian equivalent of Mastermind.

Contestants had to answer quest ions on their specialist subject within a certain time frame; incredibly, the brothers answered every single quest ion correctly, and in record time.

They arrived in the US on 26 February 1964. They filmed everything. First stop was the huge white building that was NASA headquarters in Washington. Waiting for them on the top floor was John Haussman from Tracking and Data Acquisition. He wasn’t looking forward to babysitting two space-mad Italians.
They bounded into the room carry ing their tape recorder. “After we introduced ourselves we played the tape and started filming,” Achille remembered. “When he heard the sound of Glenn’s voice calling “Mercury Control” Haussman leapt out of his seat.”

“How did you get this?” Haussman demanded, “It’s not possible!” He phoned a colleague. “You’ve gotta come and hear this.”

James Morrison, NASA’s Space Programmes Technical Director arrived minutes later. “I’ll be darned!” he exclaimed. “How did you do this?!” Turning to Haussman, he said, “We should be more careful; if they intercepted it so can the Russians.”

A few minutes later the room was packed and the two boys found themselves discussing orbits with America’s top scientists – their dreams really had come true.

The next part of their story has remained secret to this day.

Many sceptics have argued that it was impossible for the brothers to have listened into so many Russian space missions. It may be, as some have claimed, that the brothers sometimes felt under press ure to produce results and were tempted to satisfy the insatiable popular demand for space stories by fabricating sensational new recordings. It’s unlikely, for example, that the soft beating sounds they once recorded were really a cosmonaut’s heartbeat as they claimed; heartbeats were broadcast from the capsules, but as electrical signals which sounded like static.

But it’s also true that the Russians always made every effort to keep their disasters secret. In April 1967, Vladimir Komarov died when Soyuz 1 crashed on re-entry due to a design fault. His ship was a prototype of the one Russia hoped to send to the Moon, but had been plagued with major design problems from the start. Not wishing to reveal their mistake, the Russians said that Komarov’s parachute had simply failed on re-entry. Some accounts suggest that the Bochum tracking station, part of the Zeus network, overheard Komarov cursing the ship’s designers while he was still in orbit.

Experts now accept that the brothers did record some Russian and American space missions, but that their interpretations weren’t always accurate.

NASA knew exactly what they had accomplished back in 1964 and wanted all their information. But the brothers wanted something in exchange: “We were missing two frequencies used by the Soviets and we wanted to know if NASA had them. The problem was that NASA didn’t really trust us!”

Eventually, they decided on a straightforward swap. In total silence they began passing pieces of paper back and forth. Achille recalled: “When I finished writing the first frequency, Haussman said to me with a half smile: ‘Correct.’”

“Now,” Gian said, “it’s our turn.” The man handed them a piece of paper. “I was disappointed because we already had that one.”

NASA didn’t have the next two frequencies that the Judica-Cordiglias gave them. NASA Director Harry J Goett told them: “You guys have done a remarkable job.”

“Then, when NASA gave us the third and fourth frequencies, they were totally new!” said Gian. “We shook hands and then practically ran from the building.” The brothers bear-hugged and danced in the street out of sheer joy at what they had accomplished.

Once they arrived back in Turin, they found Torre Bert besieged by fans, enthus iasts – and spies from both sides who had started hanging around. Every now and again, their “guardian angel” appeared to tell the brothers just who these sinister characters were. Documents went missing, including some blurry pictures of the Moon trans mitted from the Soviet Lunik 4 probe. “But we’d already sent copies to the papers,” said Gian, “so it didn’t matter.”

Despite threats from the KGB, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers continued. They captured the final mission of the Vostok spacecraft by the female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and the first-ever spacewalk, taken by Aleksei Leonov in March 1965. Afterwards, when Leonov tried to climb back into the airlock, he found that his spacesuit had inflated so much that he didn’t fit. He managed by opening a valve in his suit to let some pressure bleed off – a risky procedure. This information was withheld by the Russians, but the Judica-Cordiglias passed it on to NASA, believing it might save an astronaut’s life.

A few weeks later, on 7 April 1965 General Nikolai Kamanin, Russ ia’s head of cosmonaut training, claimed that it was impossible that the brothers could have tracked any of their rockets. In an article published in The Daily Red Star, he called them “The Gangsters of Space!”

According to Achille: “This denial only supported all the work we had done. We had succeeded with little equipment in undermining the Soviet Union.”

By 20 July 1969, 12 extraordinary years had passed since Sputnik’s first beep. During that final emotional night at Torre Bert, it was all systems go as the Judica-Cordiglias reported the Moon landing live to millions of radio listeners. But it was the end of an era. The pictures were broadcast live on television. The mystery had gone; it was the beginning of the end for radio.

It wasn’t the end of the brothers, though. They went on to set up Europe’s first cable TV network. Achille trained to become a ‘space doctor’ and is now a leading cardiologist, while Gian helps police to tap the mobile phones of Italy’s criminals.

The Judica-Cordiglia brothers remain adamant that they recorded lost cosmonauts. Standing in front of their unique library of recordings, Gian told me: “Fifty years ago, it wasn’t possible to build a simple computer that weighed less than a ton, yet we were firing men and women into outer space who were prepared to die the loneliest of deaths. They were true heroes. And, thanks to radio, we know about their sacrifices.” He patted a shelf full of recordings. “We must never forget them.”
http://www.forteantimes.com/features..._in_space.html





The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown
Marcelo Soares

FT233

On the night of March 8, cruising 22,000 miles above the Earth, U.S. Navy communications satellite FLTSAT-8 suddenly erupted with illicit activity. Jubilant voices and anthems crowded the channel on a junkyard's worth of homemade gear from across vast and silent stretches of the Amazon: Ronaldo, a Brazilian soccer idol, had just scored his first goal with the Corinthians.

It was a party that won't soon be forgotten. Ten days later, Brazilian Federal Police swooped in on 39 suspects in six states in the largest crackdown to date on a growing problem here: illegal hijacking of U.S. military satellite transponders.

"This had been happening for more than five years," says Celso Campos, of the Brazilian Federal Police. "Since the communication channel was open, not encrypted, lots of people used it to talk to each other."

The practice is so entrenched, and the knowledge and tools so widely available, few believe the campaign to stamp it out will be quick or easy.

Much of this country's geography is remote, and beyond the reach of cellphone coverage, making American satellites an ideal, if illegal, communications option. The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy's Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM. They've been at it ever since.

Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations.

Today, the satellites, which pirates called "Bolinha" or "little ball," are a national phenomenon.

"It's impossible not to find equipment like this when we catch an organized crime gang," says a police officer involved in last month's action.

The crackdown, called "Operation Satellite," was Brazil's first large-scale enforcement against the problem. Police followed coordinates provided by the U.S. Department of Defense and confirmed by Anatel, Brazil's FCC. Among those charged were university professors, electricians, truckers and farmers, the police say. The suspects face up to four years and jail, but are more likely to be fined if convicted.

First lofted into orbit in the 1970s, the FLTSATCOM bird was at the time a major advance in military communications. Their 23 channels were used by every branch of the U.S. armed forces and the White House for encrypted data and voice, typically from portable ground units that could be quickly unpacked and put to use on the battlefield.

As the original FLTSAT constellation of four satellites fell out of service, the Navy launched a more advanced UFO satellite (for Ultra High Frequency Follow-On) to replace them. Today, there are two FLTSAT and eight UFO birds in geosynchronous orbit. Navy contractors are working on a next-generation system called Mobile User Objective System beginning in September 2009.

Until then, the military is still using aging FLTSAT and UFO satellites — and so are a lot of Brazilians. While the technology on the transponders still dates from the 1970s, radio sets back on Earth have only improved and plummeted in cost — opening a cheap, efficient and illegal backdoor.

To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM's 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.

"I saw it more than once in truck repair shops," says amateur radio operator Adinei Brochi (PY2ADN) "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil."

Brochi, who assembled his first radio set from spare parts at 12, has been tracking the Brazilian satellite hacking problem for years.

Brochi says the Pentagon's concerns are obvious.

"If a soldier is shot in an ambush, the first thing he will think of doing will be to send a help request over the radio," observes Brochi. "What if he's trying to call for help and two truckers are discussing soccer? In an emergency, that soldier won't be able to remember quickly how to change the radio programming to look for a frequency that's not saturated."

When real criminals use these frequencies, it's easy to tell they're hiding something, but it's nearly impossible to know what it is. In one intercepted conversation posted to YouTube, a man alerts a friend that he should watch out, because things are getting "crispy" and "strong winds" are on their way.

Sometimes loggers refer to the approach of authorities by saying, "Santa Claus is coming," says Brochi.

When the user's location is stable, the signal can be triangulated. That's how the Defense Department got the coordinates to feed Brazilian authorities in March's raids.

While Brazil may be the world capital of FLTSATCOM hijacking, there have been cases in other countries — even in the United States. In February of last year, FCC investigators used a mobile direction-finding vehicle to trace rogue transmissions to a Brazilian immigrant in New Jersey. When the investigators inspected his radio gear, they found a transceiver programmed to a FLTSAT frequency, connected to an antenna in the back of his house. Joaquim Barbosa was hit with a $20,000 fine.

A technician with Anatel, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the chief problem with ending the satellite abuse in this country is that U.S. and Brazilian authorities simply waited too long to start. Thousands of users are believed to have the know-how to use the system. After a bust, the airwaves always go quiet for a while, but the hijackers always return.

One week after the "Operation Satellite," Brochi met with Wired.com at a gathering of amateur radio enthusiasts in a bucolic square in Campinas, about 60 miles north of Sao Paulo. Brochi switches on his UHF receiver and scans through the satellite frequencies.

It's relatively quiet now on the satellite underground, except for the static-like sound of encrypted military traffic. But eventually, a lone creaky voice cuts through. It's a man in Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia, a day's drive north into the upper Amazon basin. He's making small talk with a friend in Portuguese. The satellite pirates are creeping back on the air.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...09/04/fleetcom





Researchers Find Massive Botnet On Nearly 2 Million Infected Consumer, Business, Government PCs

More than 70 government-owned domains hit, and nearly half of the overall infections are in the U.S.
Kelly Jackson Higgins

Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the U.S.

The botnet, which appears to be larger than the infamous Storm botnet was in its heyday, has infected machines from some 77 government-owned domains -- 51 of which are U.S. government ones, according to Ophir Shalltin, marketing director of Finjan, which recently found the botnet. Shalltin says the botnet is controlled by six individuals and is hosted in Ukraine.

Aside from its massive size and scope, what is also striking about the botnet is what its malware can do to an infected machine. The malware lets an attacker read the victim's email, communicate via HTTP in the botnet, inject code into other processes, visit Websites without the user knowing, and register as a background service on the infected machine, for instance. The bots communicate with their command and control systems via HTTP.

Botnet expert Joe Stewart says it appears to be similar to other downloader-type botnets. "It looks a lot like other downloader bots out there," says Stewart, director of malware research for SecureWorks. "It has a system for installing other malware and getting paid for it. The first stage is to get the bot piece onto the machine, and then they get paid to install other malware."

Finjan says victims are infected when visiting legitimate Websites containing a Trojan that the company says is detected by only four of 39 anti-malware tools, according to a VirusTotal report run by Finjan researchers.

"We don't have our hands on the actual [stolen] data, but we can tell a lot of what they [may be] doing with it by the malware," Shalltin says. "They can use it for spam, [stealing data], and almost almost anything."

Around 45 percent of the bots are in the U.S., and the machines are Windows XP. Nearly 80 percent run Internet Explorer; 15 percent, Firefox; 3 percent, Opera; and 1 percent Safari. Finjan says the bots were found in banks and large corporations, as well as consumer machines.

Shalltin says it appears that the botnet operators may be buying and selling bots or portions of their botnet based on a communique Finjan discovered on an underground black-hat hacker forum in Russia.
http://www.darkreading.com/security/...leID=217000166





International Hackers, Many from China, are Attacking NYPD Computers
Alison Gendar and Bill Hutchinson

A network of mystery hackers, most based in China, have been making 70,000 attempts a day to break into the NYPD's computer system, the city's top cop revealed Wednesday.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the perpetrators have yet to succeed, but their relentless activities have prompted the force to raise its guard against high-tech crime.

"It's a threat that we must continue to pay close attention to every day," Kelly said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kelly said the threat is similar to a shocking cyber espionage plot recently uncovered at the Pentagon.

China-based hackers successfully cracked the Pentagon's computers and gleaned design features of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet program being developed by Lockheed Martin, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

"Perhaps it is because of the NYPD's reach into the international arena that we are being targeted for computer hacking in much the way the Pentagon has been with its plans for the Joint Strike Fighter," Kelly said.

In a CBS "60 Minutes" to air Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates contends the U.S. is "under cyber-attack virtually all the time, every day."

"We're going to more than quadruple the number of experts that we have in this area. We're devoting a lot more money to it," Gates said.

Sources said Internet Protocol addresses of computers attempting to breach the NYPD's files have been tracked to China, the Netherlands and the Ukraine.

Kelly said the unauthorized scanning of NYPD computers is happening "at the rate of 70,000 attempts a day."

Sources said it appears the hackers have devised a automated system in which computers around the world make up to 5,000 attempts a day at pinpointing unsecured portals into the NYPD's files.

Kelly said he suspects his department is being targeted by foreign hackers because it's beefed up operations in the international arena since the 9/11 attacks.

"We are constantly studying events worldwide and assessing their implications for New York," said Kelly, adding that the NYPD now has officers stationed in Abu Dhabi, Jordan, Great Britain, France, Spain, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

He said all attempts to infiltrate the NYPD's computer files have been thwarted by "a robust protective system that we constructed over the last seven years."

The commissioner also said senior police brass have also sat for lectures by foreign affairs and terrorism experts from around the world.

"You might say that the NYPD has aspired to become a Council on Foreign Relations with guns," Kelly quipped.

Kelly's startling revelations came on the heels of a Canadian report exposing an China-based electronic spy network that have invaded at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

Dubbed "GhostNet," the cadre of hackers have targeted embassies, foreign ministries and the Dalai Lama's offices in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The 10-month Toronto University study suggested that the GhostNet is linked to Chinese government espionage agencies.

The researchers said the hackers are so skilled they can remotely plant audio and video surveillance bugs into computers they invade.

Chinese government officials have denied involvement in computer espionage.

"Some people outside of China are bent on fabricating lies of so-called Chinese computer spies," China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said last month.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009...mput ers.html





'Snooping Dragon'? Chinese Hackers Crack Computers in 103 Countries, Including Dalai Lama's
AP

A cyber spy network based mainly in China hacked into classified documents from government and private organizations in 103 countries, including the computers of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles, Canadian researchers said Saturday.

The work of the Information Warfare Monitor initially focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, and eventually led to a much wider network of compromised machines, the Internet-based research group said.

"We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama," investigator Greg Walton said.

The research group said that while it's analysis points to China as the main source of the network, it has not conclusively been able to detect the identity or motivation of the hackers.

Calls to China's Foreign Ministry and Industry and Information Ministry rang unanswered Sunday. The Chinese Embassy in Toronto did not immediately return calls for comment Saturday.

Students For a Free Tibet activist Bhutila Karpoche said her organization's computers have been hacked into numerous times over the past four or five years, and particularly in the past year. She said she often gets e-mails that contain viruses that crash the group's computers.

The IWM is composed of researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. The group's initial findings led to a 10-month investigation summarized in the report to be released online Sunday.

The researchers detected a cyber espionage network involving over 1,295 compromised computers from the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan. They also discovered hacked systems in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.

Once the hackers infiltrated the systems, they gained control using malware — software they install on the compromised computers — and sent and received data from them, the researchers said.

Two researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans are also releasing their own report Sunday.

In an online abstract for "The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement," Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson write that while malware attacks are not new, these attacks should be noted for their ability to collect "actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed."

They say prevention against such attacks will be difficult since traditional defense against social malware in government agencies involves expensive and intrusive measures that range from mandatory access controls to tedious operational security procedures.

The Dalai Lama fled over the Himalaya mountains into exile 50 years ago when China quashed an uprising in Tibet, placing it under its direct rule for the first time. The spiritual leader and the Tibetan government in exile are based in Dharmsala, India.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_w..._crack_co.html





Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says
Sharon LaFraniere

“Ma,” a Chinese character for horse, is the 13th most common family name in China, shared by nearly 17 million people. That can cause no end of confusion when Mas get together, especially if those Mas also share the same given name, as many Chinese do.

Ma Cheng’s book-loving grandfather came up with an elegant solution to this common problem. Twenty-six years ago, when his granddaughter was born, he combed through his library of Chinese dictionaries and lighted upon a character pronounced “cheng.” Cheng, which means galloping steeds, looks just like the character for horse, except that it is condensed and written three times in a row.

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much.

That is also why the government wants her to change it.

For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.

The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.

Moreover, the situation is about to get worse or, in the government’s view, better. Since at least 2003, China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children.

One newspaper reported last week that the list would be issued later this year and would curb the use of obscure names. A government linguistics official told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.

Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.

By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.

The number of Chinese family names in use has tended to shrink as China’s population has grown, a winnowing of surnames that has occurred in many cultures over time.

At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million, followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. To refer to an unidentified person — the equivalent of “just anybody” in English — one Chinese saying can be loosely translated this way: “some Zhang, some Li.”

The potential for mix-ups is vast. There are nearly enough Chinese named Zhang Wei to populate the city of Pittsburgh. Nicknames are liberally bestowed in classrooms and workplaces to tell people apart. Confronting three students named Liu Fang, for example, one middle-school teacher nicknamed them Big, Little and Middle.

Wang Daliang, a linguistics scholar with the China Youth University for Political Science, said picking rare characters for given names only compounded the problem and inconvenienced everyone. “Using obscure names to avoid duplication of names or to be unique is not good,” he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

“Now a lot of people are perplexed by their names,” he said. “The computer cannot even recognize them and people cannot read them. This has become an obstacle in communication.”

But Professor Zhou Youyong, dean of Southeast University’s law school, said the government should tread carefully in issuing any new regulation. “The right to name children is a basic right of citizens,” he said.

Miss Ma said that while her given name was unusual, bank employees, passport control clerks and ticket agents had always managed to deal with it, usually by writing it by hand. But when she tried to renew her identity card last August, she said, Beijing public security officials turned her down flat.

“Your name is so troublesome and problematic,” she recalled an official telling her. “Just change it.”

Miss Ma argues that the government’s technology should adapt, not her.

“There were no such regulations when I was born, so I should be entitled to keep my name for my whole life,” she said. If she changes her name to get an identity card, she noted, it will be wrong on all of her other documents, like her passport and university diploma.

Besides, she said, “I can’t think of another, better name.”

Using the time-honored Chinese method of backdoor connections, Miss Ma was able to get a temporary card in January. She must renew it every three months but considers that a small sacrifice for keeping her name.

Zhao C., a 23-year-old college student, gave up the fight for his. His father, a lawyer, chose the letter C from the English alphabet, saying it was simple, memorable and stood for China.

When he could not get a new identity card in 2006, Zhao C. sued. But security officials convinced him that it would cost millions of dollars to alter the database, his father said, so he dropped the suit in February.

His case might suggest that resistance against China’s powerful bureaucracy was futile. Still, the government’s plan to limit the use of characters has not gone all that smoothly.

The new rules were originally supposed to be issued by 2005. Now, 70 revisions later, they have yet to be put in place.

An official this week batted away questions, saying publicity might delay the rules even longer.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/wo...a/21china.html





Penguin Signs China E-Book Deal as Sales Rise in U.S.
Kate Holton

Penguin Group has become the first international publisher to sign an English electronic book distribution deal in China after seeing significant growth in the United States, the head of the group said on Tuesday.

John Makinson, chairman and chief executive of the Pearson Group unit, told reporters that its e-book sales for the first three months of the year in the U.S., the leading market for e-book readers, were about seven times the level of the previous year.

He said they were "running up to around 1 percent of sales" in the U.S. and would be more than 1 percent by the end of the year.

"The underlying growth in e-book sales is very significant in the U.S. and we expect over time that in the international markets that we are here to talk about (Britain, China, India, South Africa and Australia) it will be very significant there too," Makinson said.

Sales of electronic readers, including Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, have been growing fast over the last year in the U.S. as the gadgets, small and light enough to be carried in a handbag, can eliminate the need to carry around the more bulky books and newspapers.

Technology blogs have also speculated that Apple could announce a new device called an iTablet.

Makinson said that Penguin expected e-books to sell well in new markets once the devices were available there.

He said the group had just signed an agreement with Beijing-based Founder Apabi Group, which will make it the first international publisher to distribute English e-books in China.

Under the agreement, it will make available its full-range of e-books from the United Kingdom and all of its Dorling Kindersley imprint, currently more than 2,000 titles.

Penguin said its best-selling titles would be available in English to download in May.

Makinson said e-books were protected by anti-piracy software, which limited file sharing, and the group had not seen much piracy.

However, he said Penguin was keeping a close eye on Web sites that held books online for any breaches of international copyright terms.

(Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by Karen Foster)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53K2HX20090421





With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?
Joanne Kaufman

SARA NELSON, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, was at a dinner party recently when Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign consultant, arrived carrying a Kindle.

“And I just said, ‘Can I see it?’ ” said Ms. Nelson, also the author of “So Many Books, So Little Time.” “In this honeymoon period of Kindle — when a lot of people don’t have them — you can look to see what someone is reading, in the guise of looking at the hardware.” (For the record, Mr. Rollins’s Kindle was crammed with the day’s newspapers.)

Ms. Nelson owns a Kindle and a Sony Reader. And for her, the ownership of an electronic book reader, while not necessarily a badge of literary honor, at least telegraphs a commitment to books.

“It’s really expensive,” she said of the Kindle 2, which Amazon sells for $359. “If you’re going to pay that, you’re giving a statement to the world that you like to read — and you’re probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.”

But to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects.

“There’s a little box on Amazon that reads ‘Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on Kindle,’ ” she said. “I hope no one tells the publisher.”

The publishing world is all caught up in weighty questions about the Kindle and other such devices: Will they help or hurt book sales and authors’ advances? Cannibalize the industry? Galvanize it?

Please, they’re overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism? If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle — that’s how many it holds — does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve actually read a couple of them.)

The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.

“I always notice how many books there are on the bookshelves, and what the books are,” said Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary and published a book about it. “It’s the faux-intellectual version of sniffing through someone’s medicine cabinet.”

It’s a safe bet that the Kindle is unlikely to attract people who seldom pick up a book or, on the other end of the spectrum, people who prowl antiquarian book fairs for first editions. But for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, “He’s Just Not That Into You”?

“Do you lose all kinds of wonderful things about seeing the physical book?” said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio show “Studio 360.” “Absolutely. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world. At least people still pay 10 bucks for the book.” (Most books for Kindle are $9.99 on Amazon.com.)

Mr. Andersen is proud to live in a two-Kindle household. “Giving people a new, other way to read books is fine and good,” he declared.

TO some book lovers and editors, there are myriad reasons to deplore the Kindle. Publishers will no longer get the bump that comes when travelers see someone reading, say, the latest James Patterson and say to themselves: “I’ve been meaning to get that. I think I’ll buy a copy at Hudson News before I hop on the train.”

And as books migrate from paper, it means the death of the pickup line, “Oh, I see you’re reading the latest (insert highbrow author’s name here).”

Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show “Bookworm,” uses the term “literary desire” to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. “When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,” he said.

David Rosenthal, the executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, recalls the advent of Vintage paperbacks, a line of literary fiction that “could fit precisely into the pocket of your Levi’s with the title slowing, and it was an advertisement for what kind of intellectual you were.”

He uses a Sony Reader for manuscripts “because it’s easier than schlepping them home,” but doesn’t read books for pleasure on the device. “It’s certainly convenient, but I still haven’t gotten around to reading a finished published book on it,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “For me, it feels awkward to have a metal tablet as opposed to a book.”

Ellen Feldman, who writes literary fiction, worries about what will happen to the ineffable kinship among book lovers if the Kindle becomes ubiquitous. She was having lunch in an Upper East Side restaurant when she saw the man at the next table reading “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

“I started speculating about him,” said Ms. Feldman, whose novels include “Scottsboro” and “The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank.” “I had all these fantasies going — I was trying to think if there was a college nearby and if maybe he was a professor.”

Nicholson Baker, who writes fiction and nonfiction books, feels much the same way, even though he defines himself by the contents of his (physical) library. Years ago, he walked into a temporary job with a copy of “Ulysses.” “I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading ‘Ulysses.’ ”

These days, he said, he is “thrilled if people read my books. It doesn’t matter how they read them.”

Given the sorry financial state of the book business, most authors may be willing to set aside any prejudices. Chris Cleave, a novelist who writes a column for The Guardian, put it bluntly. “I love my readers and I want them to read my stuff,” he said. “I’d write it out longhand for them if necessary.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/fa...indle.html?hpw





When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper
Noam Cohen

IT’S not exactly Quentin Tarantino directing Ibsen, or Jeff Gordon racing go-carts, but the idea that Randall Munroe, creator of the online comic strip xkcd — wildly popular among techies the world over for its witty use of programming code in its gags — would for the first time publish a book is still something of a head scratcher.

Not a book for Kindle, I should add. A print book — you know, dead trees, ink, no text search, nonadjustable font size. The plan is for an initial press run of 10,000 copies sometime around June. And judging by the enthusiasm of the strip’s fans, who frequently act out the concepts in the strip in real life, those copies should sell quickly.

So, are we seeing an all-too-rare example of the triumph of print books over digital content? Does even an online legend like the 24-year-old Mr. Munroe crave the respectability of print? (Mr. Munroe once before climbed the respectability ladder when in October he competed against the illustrator Farley Katz of The New Yorker in a “cartoon-off.” No winner was declared.)

In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience.

The print xkcd book is not being published through a traditional company but rather by breadpig — which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of the social-news Web site reddit. The site has sold high-concept merchandise like refrigerator magnets or T-shirts, but never a book. (Its profits go to the charity Room to Read.)

•

“We never made any projection — 10,000 seems like a good run,” Mr. Ohanian said, adding that this lack of research “is laughable from the perspective of anyone who knows the book industry. It’s what makes sense.”

The book — with the working title “xkcd,” though Mr. Ohanian says it may carry a subtitle like “a book of romance, sarcasm, math and language” — will not initially be sold in bookstores, and probably never in the big chains. Instead, it will be sold through the xkcd Web site.

“It doesn’t need to be in bookstores,” Mr. Munroe said. “I don’t have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble — it is almost insignificant.”

Mr. Munroe said he had been contacted by large publishers, particularly those that specialize in comics and graphic novels. “The traditional model is they send us a royalty, and they handle getting it sold,” he said. “We figure that most of our audience is people who know us from the Internet — normal publishers weren’t as interested.”

Naturally, without an established publisher and with a devoted fan base online, the book will not be promoted through traditional publicity. Rather, the plan is to rely on word-of-keyboard.

Such online recommendations, Mr. Ohanian said, were how he discovered xkcd. “The first time xkcd showed up on reddit — it was just good,” he said. “The Internet really facilitates good stuff being read.”

Will there be review copies sent to newspapers and magazines? Good question, Mr. Ohanian said. There’s no reason why not, he quickly concluded.

While Mr. Munroe conceded a nostalgic love of books, remembering how he devoured books of a favorite comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, he said he is now a committed Kindle 2 user, preferring it to print. Still, he said: “I have this urge. You want to print them out and put them up on places. There is something good about collecting them together.”

Publishing a book is an extension of the selling of items like T-shirts and posters, which pays the bills, he said, to a “free culture” mind-set about the cartoons themselves. “We have been encouraging people to share things, saying that it is a good business decision,” he said. “Instead of trying to convince people, why not make a bunch of money?”

The book will have 150 to 200 of strips out of more than 500 so far published online and is expected to sell for $19. The selection was made by a fan who is also doing the layout for breadpig. “I took a few off and added a few others,” he said.

The book will include a foreward from Mr. Munroe as well as red-ink commentary from him on the most popular strips. One trick in transferring the material from online to print has been how to recreate the “title text” that comments on the strip when your cursor hovers over it.

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“It’s not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn’t laugh, you’ll laugh at this,” he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.

Does that mean that the book won’t carry a traditional copyright and instead take its lead from the online comic strip itself, which Mr. Munroe licenses under Creative Commons, allowing noncommercial re-use as long as credit is given?

“To anyone who wants to photocopy, bind, and give a copy of the book to their loved one — more power to them,” he said. “He/She will likely be disappointed that you’re so cheap, though.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/bu...ia/20link.html





A Novel Idea: The Machine That Can Print Off Any Book For You In Minutes
Daniel Bates

It promises to bring the world of literature to the ordinary book-buyer at the touch of a button.

In the time it takes to brew a cappuccino, this machine can print off any book that is not in stock from a vast computer database.

The innovation, launched by book chain Blackwell yesterday, removes the need to order a hard-to-find novel, or the wait to buy one that has sold out.

Even out-of-print works can be printed off in minutes.

The Espresso Book Machine will also benefit aspiring novelists who can walk in to a shop with a CD of their work and have their book professionally printed in minutes.

The cost of buying a book will be generally the same as if it were in stock.

Currently there are 400,000 books ready to be be downloaded. Blackwell hopes that by summer, one million will be available.

It has bought one of the machines for its store on Charing Cross Road in Central London, but if it is a success then more could appear at shops across the country.

The machine, which resembles an industrial photocopier and printer, prints 105 pages a minute, or one book every five minutes or so.

Blackwell's aim is that the customer will be able to browse a catalogue in a kiosk next to the machine then press 'Make Book' and watch as their novel is created.

First the cover is run off, then the pages are printed and collated.

The pages are then clamped and glue applied to the spine. In the final stage, the pages are stuck to the cover before being trimmed to size from A4. The completed book then pops out of a slot in the side of the machine.

Blackwell believes the EBM will allow it to exact revenge on the supermarkets and online retailers.

Tesco, for example, offers aggressive discounting while Amazon has teamed up with second-hand shops and independent sellers to provide an enormous variety of books at knock-down prices.

Five years ago, only 7 per cent of books were bought online. By last year, that was 14 per cent.

In December, the value of books sold on the high street was down 12.7 per cent year on year.

Andrew Hutchings, of Blackwell, said: 'Companies such as Amazon have been offering a very competitive service but you still have one or two days to wait from ordering the book until it arrives.

'With the Espresso Book Machine you can order it and have it in your hand within a few minutes. Having books printed on-demand also reduces the carbon footprint and cuts down on the number that are pulped or sent back.'

Out-of-copyright books will be sold at 10p a page, meaning a 300-page book would be £30, although Mr Hutchings hopes the cost will come down.

All other books will cost the same as if they were bought off the shelf.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...k-minutes.html





Reporter Wins Pulitzer Months After Being Laid Off
Terry Tang

More than three months after he was laid off in a round of massive staff cuts, former East Valley Tribune reporter Paul Giblin learned Monday that he had helped his old newspaper snag a Pulitzer Prize.

Giblin and Tribune reporter Ryan Gabrielson earned the award in the local reporting category for their coverage of the Maricopa County sheriff's immigration enforcement operations.

While he is relishing the honor, Giblin admitted he wondered what it would have been like to find out he won from within the Tribune's Mesa, Ariz., newsroom.

"It is kind of sad," he said. "I wish I was still at the Tribune. I'd have a party with them right now."

Giblin visited the Tribune later Monday to celebrate with Gabrielson.

He said he holds all his former co-workers in high regard.

"The people down there at the Trib are great people. It wasn't quite as painful for them as it was for me when I got laid off," Giblin said. "But I know it was painful for them. I don't harbor any ill feelings."

Giblin learned the news while covering a U.S. Senate committee hearing in Phoenix on border violence. After his cell phone rang several times and he got "the evil eye" from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Giblin finally answered a call.

"It completely caught me by surprise. I've been in the business for 24 years. ... Whoever thinks about something like this? Certainly not me," Giblin said.

In 2007, Giblin and Gabrielson began examining Sheriff Joe Arpaio's efforts to focus on illegal immigration, its cost to taxpayers and to public safety. With the help of an editor, the two exposed slow response times to emergencies and reduced law enforcement as the sheriff dedicated more of his agency's resources to seeking out and arresting illegal immigrants.
The Tribune, owned by Freedom Communications Inc., distributes about 100,000 issues in Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler and Queen Creek.

The suburban Phoenix paper, which plans to eliminate its Saturday print edition on May 16, changed to a free four-day-a-week model in January and laid off about 140 workers, including Giblin.

Giblin and three other reporters laid off from the Tribune started The Arizona Guardian, a news Web site that focuses on politics and the Arizona Legislature.

"When I left, it didn't make me feel any worse as a journalist," Giblin said. "I was laid off in really good company. I still think I'm capable of doing good journalism."
http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_12186452





A Magazine With a Puzzle Buried Inside
Dave Itzkoff

A few nights ago Steven Bevacqua, a postproduction supervisor for the television series “Life,” was flipping through the May issue of Wired magazine when he thought he started seeing secret messages. Yes, he’d just come home from a long day at work, but then again, the issue was guest-edited by J. J. Abrams, a creator of enigmatic television shows like “Lost” and “Fringe.”

So, as Mr. Bevacqua wrote on his blog, he spent the next several days following the hidden clues he believed he’d found, using Morse code, alternative computer keyboard layouts and even electrician’s wiring codes to solve the covert brainteasers. Finally he was directed to a hidden Web site, from which he sent an e-mail message to a secret account. A short while later he learned that he was the first Wired reader to solve an extensive hidden puzzle embedded throughout the magazine.

It all happened a little faster than the editors of Wired expected, but this was the intent of their new issue, created in collaboration with Mr. Abrams: to immerse their audience in a series of riddles — some announced, others not — that were buried just deep enough for the readers who wanted to dig them up.

In doing so, the editors of Wired said, the project might help them solve another problem: how to keep consumers interested in the tangible artifact of a printed magazine — particularly one about digital culture — in an Internet era.

“We like to say it’s our jobs to add value to the Internet,” said Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired. “The great thing about this issue is that none of the puzzles work online.”

It’s not uncommon for magazines to resort to guest editors to help corral celebrity contributors for their pages and generate publicity. (See Bono’s recent tour of duty at Vanity Fair or Roseanne Barr’s infamous stint at The New Yorker.) Likewise, Wired, owned by Condé Nast Publications, has previously allowed the architect Rem Koolhaas, the director James Cameron and the video game designer Will Wright to each take a turn in the editor’s chair.

For its latest issue, Wired wanted Mr. Abrams’s contributions and sensibility on every page, and devoted the entire magazine to the topic of mystery as a catalyst for imagination (inspired by a lecture given by Mr. Abrams at the 2007 TED conference, an annual symposium on technology, entertainment and design): there are articles about a perplexing American landmark called the Georgia Guidestones, how stage magic affects our brain chemistry and how scientists use an online game called Foldit to help determine the structure of proteins.

Naturally, there are callouts to some of Mr. Abrams’s popular entertainment properties, including a six-page comic strip that ties into his new “Star Trek” movie. But there is also, Mr. Abrams wrote in an e-mail message, “something else going on that, if you care to explore it, is crazy cool.”

Distributed across the issue are several puzzles that are not all labeled as such. (For example, you might ask why are there so many typographical errors in the text of Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” that appears on the screen of the Amazon Kindle on Page 46.) And all of these riddles are linked in a larger alternate-reality game, a genre that mixes online and real-world clues.

The project is also meant to illustrate the vitality of the Wired print magazine (whose total paid circulation has held steady over the last year at around 700,000). “Blog posts can effectively summarize a story and give you the takeaway idea,” said Thomas Goetz, the deputy editor of Wired. But print publications, he said, are still better suited to conveying “the nuance and effort of understanding the complexity of an idea and why it matters — what the riddles and wrinkles are within an idea.”

There is still the matter of Mr. Bevacqua, who solved the issue’s master puzzle but had not (by Monday afternoon) solved all the interlocking puzzles that led up to it. (Wired’s editors said he would receive a prize from Mr. Abrams.)

Despite Mr. Bevacqua’s victory, there are still sections of the magazine that remain tantalizingly unaccounted for, like a two-page spread bearing an array of numbers and a lottery ticket that will be familiar to dedicated viewers of “Lost.” Asked via e-mail if these pages were connected to “Lost,” Damon Lindelof, an executive producer of the show, wrote, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Mr. Goetz said that there might be additional prizes for subsequent readers who solve the issue’s master puzzle and perhaps even for those who crack any codes that the editors did not mean to put in there. “We’re always looking to reward the ingenuity of our readers,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/ar...on/21wire.html





Future Cell Phone to Take on Music Editing



Design firm Pilotfish unveiled on Monday plans to make an advanced music phone, hoping to tap untested demand for music editing on the go.

Pilotfish said its concept -- which will reach the market a few years from now at the earliest -- will enable good quality recording of three separate sound tracks and allow editing of the music by physically twisting and bending the phone.

The company, which has also designed scooters and blood pressure monitors, will initially target music enthusiasts and amateur musicians, but also sees wider appeal for the phone.

Analysts said the phone looked attractive but were skeptical about the potential demand in a market dominated by phone manufacturers like Nokia and Apple.

"In a fast moving market niche specifications and applications can rapidly become standard features. We've seen that with cameras, positioning and a host of other features," said Geoff Blaber from CCS Insight.

The phone's main touch-screen, which is similar to today's folder phones, consists of three 'sticks' that can be removed and separately clipped onto a musical instrument or a person to capture live sound.

"The technology should be available in 2-3 years," said Stefanel Barutcieff, senior industrial designer at Germany-based Pilotfish.

Pilotfish says broadening the features of music phones would benefit content creators, who could offer sound libraries or musical games for download. Operators, it says, would gain from increased traffic, and device manufacturers sell new models.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Rupert Winchester)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53J2V220090420





Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System

Anybody who hasn't been living under a rock knows about YouTube. It's a video site built entirely around user-submitted content. Anybody can film anything, upload it to the site, and anybody on the Internet can watch it if they so choose. Sounds great in theory, but over time it's succumbed to a very basic problem: The users can't be trusted.

Copyrighted material -- TV shows, music videos, concerts, even entire feature films -- have popped up on YouTube in huge quantities. Obviously, the copyright owners and content providers don't like this, especially when such free distribution cuts into their bottom line. Back in the day, a copyright holder would have to stumble across an infringing video, contact YouTube, and ask them to take it down manually. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the content providers couldn't keep that up forever, especially as more and more new users kept pouring in.

Enter Fingerprinting

YouTube narrowly avoided legal trouble by promising the big media companies that they'd develop a system that could detect and automatically remove any copyrighted material that was uploaded to the site. But in reality, they didn't actually develop the audio fingerprinting system; they licensed it from a company called Audible Magic.

Audible Magic originally wrote software for CD duplication companies. When you handed a master disc off to a duplication house, they'd check it with an Audible Magic system first. The goal was to positively identify every song on the disc, as well as the copyright/licensing status, before the company ran off 10,000 copies of your potentially pirated disc.

YouTube jumped at this technology and worked to integrate it into their site. It scanned over all the uploads and generated a "fingerprint" for each video. It would then compare each fingerprint to a database containing practically every copyrighted work that the media companies wanted to keep off the site. If any videos matched, it was assumed that the user has posted copyrighted material without permission and the infringing video was removed.

Some labels got the right idea, though. Instead of demanding that any infringing content be taken down, some chose to promote their material or insert links to pay music sites where you could purchase the songs that were being played. That was an amazing idea: It permitted the users to basically do whatever they wanted copyright-wise, while still driving traffic and potential sales to legitimate music retailers.

Heating Up

That worked well enough for a time, but the media companies weren't satiated yet. A slew of legal threats, negotiations, and all-around chicanery ensued. After all, YouTube was making money by running ads alongside videos which often contained material from these companies, and they all wanted a piece.

Unfortunately, nothing seemed to please Warner Music Group, who left the talks without reaching an agreement. They then demanded that YouTube remove every single piece of WMG-owned media on the site. Videos disappeared all over the place.

This Is Where I Came In

I don't consider myself to be much more than a casual YouTube user. I'll upload maybe one or two things a year, but nothing amazing or anything I put any real effort into.

For example, one of my videos depicts three members of my high school's marching band dressed in pajamas at an overly girly sleepover. The song used in the background was "I Know What Boys Like" by The Waitresses. I thought it was hilarious when I was 17, but I had all but forgotten about it five years later.

I was caught by surprise one day when I received an automated email from YouTube informing me that my video had a music rights issue and it was removed from the site. I didn't really care.

Then a car commercial parody I made (arguably one of my better videos) was taken down because I used an unlicensed song. That pissed me off. I couldn't easily go back and re-edit the video to remove the song, as the source media had long since been archived in a shoebox somewhere. And I couldn't simply re-upload the video, as it got identified and taken down every time. I needed to find a way to outsmart the fingerprinter. I was angry and I had a lot of free time. Not a good combination.

I racked my brain trying to think of every possible audio manipulation that might get by the fingerprinter. I came up with an almost-scientific method for testing each modification, and I got to work.

Methodology

The song chosen for all the tests is "I Know What Boys Like," a 1982 song by the one-hit wonder group The Waitresses. This song was chosen for several reasons:

It was the first song I ever saw that was identified and removed by YouTube's fingerprinting system.
It has a very distinctive sound that I thought would be easily identifiable. It's also really repetitive, which probably makes it an easy target for an automated system to detect.

It's one of the few songs I actually have readily available in an uncompressed format. The majority of my music collection is stored with lossy data compression, which might have impacted the results.

In general, it's just a terrible song. I wanted to highlight the fact that somewhere out there, somebody thinks this 27-year-old heap is still valuable enough to be barred from YouTube.

The song originally came from a 1990 CD pressing of "The Best of the Waitresses," which I came across during my freshman year of college. I was so surprised to see a copy of this album, I begged the owner to allow me to make a copy for posterity (and also for hilarity). I used Nero Burning ROM to make a bit-perfect copy of the full album onto a CD-R. I then listened to my copy, laughed at the majority of it, then stored it in a CD binder.

Fast-forward to the present day, when I decided to run these tests. I ripped my copy of the album with Exact Audio Copy in "secure" mode. The result was a 16-bit stereo, 44,100 Hz PCM wave file. This was used as the master file for all the tests.

For each test, a duplicate copy of the master file was manipulated. Practically every change to the audio was made in Adobe Audition 3 on Windows. The modified duplicates were saved as 44,100/16 stereo waves and moved over to a Mac.

Each file was loaded into an empty Final Cut Pro sequence. The video settings, although theoretically irrelevant, were always set to 24 FPS, progressive, NTSC 720x480 @ 4:3, with 44.1/16 stereo downmix audio. The audio files were matched with a default Text generator which described the test being performed. The resulting video files were saved in DV NTSC QuickTime format.

From there, the files were moved into Apple Compressor where they were batch converted into a format YouTube would accept. I chose the "H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 320x240 (QVGA)" setting, which encodes reasonably fast with excellent quality. The final output files were M4V containers with H.264 video and AAC stereo audio.

Finally, the video files were uploaded to my YouTube test account. I chose the name retnirpregnif, which is the word "fingerprinter" backwards. The title of each uploaded video was always set to a description of that particular test. In all but one test, the description was set to 'The song is "I Know What Boys Like" by The Waitresses.' I chose that description to see if the presence or absence of a copyrighted song name in any of the metadata fields influenced the detection. The tags, category, and any other fields were left blank, and possibly auto-filled by the uploader.

I considered a test passed if the status line on my account's "Uploaded Videos" page read "Live!" and the thumbnail had been generated. (Also, if the video actually played, that's a big plus.) If a video had a status of "Matched third party content" or I received an email about a particular video, I considered that test failed.

Please note that these tests are only meant to test the AUDIO aspect of YouTube's fingerprinting system. They probably have a similar feature in place to scan for content in the image data, but I make no effort to test that in this document. The video fingerprinter might be susceptible to tweaks like those I describe below, or it might be an entirely different can of worms. I'll leave it to somebody else to figure that one out.

The Tests

No Description

For the first test, I uploaded a completely unmodified copy of the entire song, but with a description field that read "No Description." The purpose of this test was to determine if YouTube could still identify the material if none of the user-submitted metadata gave any indication that it was there.

Reverse

The entire song was reversed. The purpose of this test was to determine how discriminating the fingerprinter was. If the test passed, it would reveal the systems inability to identify a song which is playing backwards.

Pitch Alteration

The entire song was modified with Audition's "Stretch" plugin. In all tests, the Precision was set to High, Constant Vowels was off, Preserve speech Characteristics was on, Formant Shift was 0, and Solo Instrument or Voice was on. (Admittedly, it should've been off, but that would've taken friggin' forever to process.)

For these tests, the Stretching Mode was Pitch Shift. The Ratio was changed from test to test to create varying amounts of pitch change.

These tests created an output file with exactly the same length and speed as the source, but with the pitch increased or decreased. These tests were designed to determine if the fingerprinter looks at the "notes" the song is made of.

Time Alteration

The entire song was modified with Audition's "Stretch" plugin. In all tests, the Precision was set to High, Constant Vowels was off, Preserve speech Characteristics was on, Formant Shift was 0, and Solo Instrument or Voice was on.

For these tests, the Stretching Mode was Time Stretch. The Ratio was changed from test to test to create varying amounts of tempo change.

These tests created an output file with exactly the same notes as the source, but with the speed (tempo) increased or decreased. These tests were designed to determine if the fingerprinter looks at the "beats" and rhythm of the song.

Resampling

The entire song was modified with Audition's "Stretch" plugin. In all tests, the Precision was set to High, and Constant Vowels was off.

For these tests, the Stretching Mode was Resample. The Ratio was changed from test to test to create varying amounts of tempo change.

These tests created an output file with both altered pitch and altered speed relative to the original. Quite simply, the song was played back at a faster or slower rate than the original -- similar to a tape being played at the wrong speed. And now I suddenly feel old.

Noise

The entire song was mixed with varying levels of background noise. In the first round of tests, the song was mixed with varying levels of pure white noise created with Audition's Noise generator (Color=White, Style=Independent Channels, Intensity=40).

For the second round of tests, the entire song was played on a set of M-Audio BX5a studio monitor speakers (chosen because of their flat frequency response ≥100 Hz, and because they were the only ones I really had available), and recorded into a Canon ZR200 camcorder onto a MiniDV tape. The tape was captured into Final Cut Pro, the resulting 48,000 Hz 16-bit audio was split off to a wave file, and then it was converted back into 44,100 Hz in Audition. The camera was placed at different distances and different angles relative to the stereo field's central axis. No effort was made to keep the room quiet during the trials, and as a result things like heaters, refrigerators, TV flyback transformers, and running water can be heard throughout.

Amplification/Attenuation/DC Bias

The entire song had its volume adjusted by varying amounts from test to test. For amplification tests, the song was allowed to clip hard at 0 dB, creating a great deal of distortion on the louder trials.

In later tests, the amplification was unchanged, but a positive DC bias was added to the signal, resulting in a great deal of distortion and the type of audio I'm afraid to play on good speakers.

These tests were designed to see if there was any absolute volume below which the fingerprinter couldn't detect the song. Likewise, it tested to see if any amount of digital clipping and distortion could disrupt the detection process.

Time Chunks

The song was trimmed to (n * 3) seconds long, where n is a value that changes from test to test. The kept segment of audio comes from near (but not exactly) the center of the song. From 0 seconds to n seconds, the audio is muted. Likewise, from (n * 2) seconds to the end of the song, the audio is also muted. The resulting n seconds at the center of the song are allowed to play. If the song is shorter than (n * 3) seconds, the muted sections are shortened so the entire output file is the same length as the source.

In later tests, the muted and unmuted portions were aligned to the head and tail ends of the song, for reasons that will be explained later.

The goal of these tests was to determine how much of the song needed to be present to trigger a positive detection, and if the position of that section had any effect on the detection.

Stereo Imagery

The entire song was subjected to a series of filters that modify the audio based on the similarities and differences between the two audio channels.

For two of the tests, the vocals were removed or isolated using Audition's Center Channel Extractor plugin (Extract Audio From=0° phase / 0% pan / 0ms delay, Frequency Range=140-20,000Hz, Volume Boost Mode=off, Crossover=100%, Phase Discrimination=4.5°, Amplitude Discrimination=6dB, Amplitude Bandwidth=9dB, Spectral Decay Rate=0%, FFT Size=32,768, Overlays=12, Window Width=100%).

In the third test, both channels' waves were inverted. The phase relationship between left and right were preserved.

In the fourth test, only the right channel's wave was inverted. The left remained untouched. The resulting audio file is completely out-of-phase.

In the fifth test, the two channels were first averaged together, effectively making the file mono. It still had two channels, but they contained identical waveforms. The right channel was then taken out-of-phase in the same manner as the fourth test. The resulting audio file is completely out-of-phase, and when both channels are summed together, they will destroy one another and average out to zero, or total silence.

These tests are designed to see how well the fingerprinter copes with audio with unexpected phase alterations. Also, the later tests attempt to reveal if the fingerprinter considers the files in stereo, or if it first converts them into mono for analysis.

The Results

No Description

Video Modification Performed Result
FxRVPFT5BKM Description field left empty FAIL
Reverse

Video Modification Performed Result
dYQn6CW4-VI Song was reversed PASS
Pitch Alteration

Video Modification Performed Result
7AXCbscz5Ys Pitch was lowered 25% PASS
sE27S6bDocw Pitch was lowered 10% PASS
6EBUGz_k5ww Pitch was lowered 7% PASS
9m5Z2p2P7YE Pitch was lowered 6% PASS
U9FlSevqiA0 Pitch was lowered 5% FAIL
xMlx7rdpP0I Pitch was raised 5% FAIL
rtL0DyACoz0 Pitch was raised 6% PASS
7b_Zy2M9iWU Pitch was raised 7% PASS
mkm0fIuDOOA Pitch was raised 10% PASS
RudFV8HlfAI Pitch was raised 25% PASS
Time Alteration

Video Modification Performed Result
vIJhocJdCJg Time was expanded 25% PASS
WgYeFcSl-bs Time was expanded 10% PASS
Z8IUZCceVXc Time was expanded 7% PASS
yo8Kg0Ws6zk Time was expanded 6% PASS
mfNYWnZ9P9M Time was expanded 5% FAIL
e2eg7JsVk2o Time was compressed 5% FAIL
1KLRmCJgcwQ Time was compressed 6% PASS
HhgN2Y7ICgU Time was compressed 7% PASS
SDw7JvrfvIg Time was compressed 10% PASS
S0C-0RxVe2Y Time was compressed 25% PASS
Resampling

Video Modification Performed Result
HuM_gTA-Id8 Song was slowed down 25% PASS
T5StunpZUeo Song was slowed down 5% PASS
6iFBNPpteog Song was slowed down 4% PASS
lMxy9ZUXXT0 Song was slowed down 3% FAIL
LSTj5LhWIwY Song was sped up 3% FAIL
Lzt4wIWWTz8 Song was sped up 4% FAIL
S-Q7uJ3ErTw Song was sped up 5% PASS
_v82g7p2Qio Song was sped up 25% PASS
Noise

Video Modification Performed Result
nHAdiiFsSwI 0% white noise, 100% song FAIL
V-sOEWQyKyI 25% white noise, 75% song FAIL
R1tRH0vBaT4 40% white noise, 60% song FAIL
-XF2DYIku18 43% white noise, 57% song FAIL
yuHWKDmItLQ 44% white noise, 56% song FAIL
TCOq67P2-f0 45% white noise, 55% song PASS
5jQqMd07yQk 50% white noise, 50% song PASS
2wAHwKBIqPY 75% white noise, 25% song PASS
w4fXEoJ1Tyw 100% white noise, 0% song PASS
YnB82m8AA4U Camera 5' away, 0° off-axis FAIL
DBEicY5e2xI Camera 12' away, approx. 45° off-axis PASS
y7duUWMSIUM Camera 31' away, 90° off-axis FAIL
LiR0we4xugk Camera in next room PASS
Amplification/Attenuation/DC Bias

Video Modification Performed Result
dOzESZj75OM Volume was reduced 48 dB FAIL
TAZCzTj2ICc Volume was reduced 24 dB FAIL
PnOcheExAoA Volume was reduced 18 dB FAIL
FjbBPv-jwfo Volume was reduced 12 dB FAIL
7Zrp4FLEtV8 Volume was reduced 6 dB FAIL
0cA3Ngsp2Tc Volume was increased 6 dB FAIL
b06I160C1RE Volume was increased 12 dB FAIL
l3ee8Mcemf4 Volume was increased 18 dB FAIL
HnsPvUIs5Jc Volume was increased 24 dB FAIL
M6eoLBjRaHE Volume was increased 48 dB FAIL
uE3Tl5uEWI4 50% positive DC bias was added FAIL
IQaDdBqTd2A 100% positive DC bias was added FAIL
Time Chunks

Video Modification Performed Result
jHr3rSVAKMM 5 second chunk, from center of song PASS
WLathwwq3BQ 10 second chunk, from center of song PASS
9hPyB0zVZs8 15 second chunk, from center of song PASS
NzYoOzdHe5c 30 second chunk, from center of song PASS
s7gMeI2CGnw 45 second chunk, from center of song PASS
FjcspXseW7Q 60 second chunk, from center of song PASS
wcBA2ttDszg 90 second chunk, from center of song PASS
uOPmak49TZg 120 second chunk, from center of song PASS
n5peCQjsdQo 165 second chunk, from end of song PASS
oJ11oWG8tRI 30 second chunk, from start of song FAIL
z-vROygcHbY 15 second chunk, from start of song PASS
o3-HnuDI5Oo 15 second chunk, from 0:15 to 0:30 PASS
Stereo Imagery

Video Modification Performed Result
zzoR1h1oKzU Vocals were isolated FAIL
ONOTGscMQSU Vocals were removed PASS
HAd4ejov7sE Both channels were inverted FAIL
sr9mCB4uTF0 Song was knocked out-of-phase PASS
iGYzDV-8eEg Song converted to mono, then knocked out-of-phase PASS
What I Learned

... About the Content ID System

It's everywhere: It scans every single newly-uploaded video, no matter if it has a title/description that seems suspicious. It generally finds them mere minutes after the upload completes. And videos uploaded before the system was installed aren't immune either. It looks like it's going through every single video that has ever been uploaded to the site, looking for copyright problems. It sounds ludicrous, but remember that YouTube is backed by Google, and Google has plenty of hardware to throw around. I have no doubt that they'll eventually trudge through every single video, if they haven't already finished. I wonder how much CPU time (and electricity) they squandered on this?

It's surprisingly resilient: I really thought it would fail some of the amplification tests. Especially the +/-48 dB tests. One was so inaudibly quiet, and the other was so distorted it was completely unlistenable. It found all of them. Likewise, it could detect the sound amidst constant background noise, until the noise level passed the 45% mark. With that much noise, it overpowers the song you're trying to hide. Likewise, it catches all subtle changes in pitch and tempo, requiring changes of up to 5% before it consistently fails to identify material.

It's rather finicky: I can't explain why it was able to detect the camcorder-recorded audio at 5' and 31', but not at 12'. Similarly, the vocal removal/isolation tests should've had similar results. But then again, the effectiveness of the Stereo Imagery tests depends entirely on how the song itself was engineered -- Just because it turned out one way for this song, that doesn't mean it will react the same way to the other songs with that same modification.

It's downright dumb: Wrap your heads around this. When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.

It seems to hear in mono: When I uploaded the files with out-of-phase audio, the tests consistently passed. When the first out-of-phase test is played back in mono, the resulting audio sounds exactly like the Vocal Remove test (which also passed). When the mono-converted/out-of-phase test is played back in mono, both the channels cancel each other out and the result is (theoretically) silence. This is what the fingerprinter hears, and what it bases its conclusions on.

... About YouTube

Apparently they don't really care about repeat infringers: I uploaded a total of 82 test videos to them, and received 35 Content ID emails. There are people out there who live in constant fear of a Content ID match, thinking that one single slip-up will get their account pulled and every single one of their videos deleted. Not so. There was a point (when I was uploading "infringing" material en masse) when I received an impressive fifteen Content ID emails in the course of an hour. Nothing happened to the account. Now, if this article becomes popular, then they might pull my test account manually... But as of the release of this article, it hasn't happened yet.

At some point between 11/22/2008 and 1/19/2009, they changed the way they handle Content ID matches: Initially, when a video was found to be infringing a copyright, they'd immediately block access to it. You'd get an email that says "We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue" and if you didn't click the link in the email and either mute your own video or use AudioSwap on it, nobody would ever see that video again. But now things have changed... They automatically mute your videos now instead of blocking them outright. You still have the option to AudioSwap it, but the emails claim that "No action is required on your part." They conveniently leave out the fact that they silenced the audio. And for what it's worth, AudioSwap is fucking useless. Somebody needed to say it.

It's very evident why they choose to mute the entire audio track of a positively ID'd video instead of just the part with the problem audio: The fingerprinter can only reliably say "yes, [one particular song] is in here, somewhere," but it doesn't know exactly where in the video the infringing content starts or for how long it plays. It's far easier to just nuke the entire audio track than try to figure out precisely how to cut into it.

... About the Community

They really enjoy recordings of pure white noise: I can't explain why people are turning to YouTube to hear this, and why it seems like my test account is the hip place to hear a flat power spectrum. But hey, three comments (almost one and a half of them intelligent) can't be wrong.

Conclusion

It is quite possible to thwart the YouTube Content ID system, but some methods mangle the song too much to be used in anything useful.

In general, the majority of these workarounds are simply kludges which create noticeable (and often irreversible) changes in the sound of the audio. It's likely that some of these workarounds will never be totally fixed, as the amount of computational complexity required to address some of the time/pitch changes would likely create a tremendous strain on a system that's probably already working as hard as it can.

Reversed audio consistently gets through the fingerprinter, but that's not very useful to human listeners. Any pitch or time alterations will also work, provided you apply a 6% or greater change to the parameter you're adjusting.

Pure noise generators will not thwart the fingerprinter until the amount of noise overpowers the original song. Real-world noise is somewhat hit-and-miss, but the amount of effort required to introduce such noise makes the process less than worthwhile.

Stereo Imagery seems to work well, especially those modifications that make the audio play out-of-phase. Unfortunately, such audio is extremely uncomfortable to listen to in stereo mode, and it suffers from phase cancellation in mono mode, resulting in either missing vocals or total silence.

The most subtle approach is to use a resampling function, which simply increases or decreases the speed of playback. For these modifications, a speed increase of 5% or greater will work, as well as a speed reduction of 4% or greater.

A 5% Speed Increase? Are You Nuts?

You might think so. But let's take a step back and think about what it truly means.

We base our Western ideas about music around the fact that the A note above middle C is defined as 440 Hz. Now, if we increase the speed of the song by 5%, all the pitches will shift up 5% as well. That same note becomes 462 Hz. (For reference, the A# above A440 is 466.164 Hz.) In the end, 462 Hz translates to roughly 84 cents above the A. Not quite an A#, but kinda close.

Whether or not you can hear that depends on your level of familiarity with the song. If it's your favorite song, and you've committed every single note of it to memory, then yes, you'll probably be able to tell that it seems slightly higher. But if it's a song you're not very familiar with, or one you haven't heard in years, you might not be able to tell without referring to the original.

To give you a bit more perspective, consider the fact that people have been doing it for years. American films are shot at 24 frames per second. And American television runs at 30 frames per second (yes, I'm oversimplifying the hell out of this). To play film on our TVs, we simply play every 4th film frame twice and they sync up perfectly (again, gross oversimplification).

But in Europe, and the other PAL territories, the TVs run at 25 frames per second. It's a lot harder to fit 24 film frames into 25 television frames without making an unacceptable "judder" every second. So how do they do it, then? Quite simply, they speed the 24 FPS film (and the audio) up to 25 FPS. This translates into a 4.16667% increase in speed and pitch. And I've never heard any Europeans complain about it. (Actually I have, but they do so in a whiny way that just makes me ignore them.)

More Forbidden Uploads

The following are 5 songs that I uploaded, knowing full well that the fingerprinter would catch them. (I've personally witnessed videos with these songs either muted or removed entirely.) The left column contains videos with unaltered audio tracks, all of which were detected. The videos in the right column were all resampled up by 5%.

Song Unmodified Resampled Up 5%
Bob James - Angela pjWenBsdj8o (FAIL) VZTkq1Vpnyk (PASS)
Led Zeppelin - The Lemon Song u21PJ34J_hg (FAIL) QM4YiIjNZLI (PASS)
Atreyu - Falling Down edYOcRPqdIk (FAIL) jj_eK6v5Vpw (PASS)
James Taylor - Mexico MxTlNQKqmFM (FAIL) E1tzzyV8UmU (PASS)
Yes - Tempus Fugit WXvNbs7hmI4 (FAIL) -t6S_BbybeA (PASS)
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~parallax/





U.N. Launches Library Of World's Knowledge
Edward Cody

A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind's accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet's leading libraries.

The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs' first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. "There are many one-of-a-kind documents," Billington said in an interview.

The World Digital Library, which officially will be inaugurated Tuesday at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.

"There is no limit," Billington said. "Everybody is welcome."

The main target is children, he added, building on the success among young people of the U.S. National Digital Library Program, which has been in operation at the Library of Congress since the mid-1990s. That program, at its American Memory site, has made available 15 million U.S. historical records, including recorded interviews with former slaves, the first moving pictures and the Declaration of Independence. Billington predicted that children around the world, like their U.S. counterparts, will turn naturally to the Internet for answers to questions, provided they have access to computers and high-speed connections. "This is designed to use the newest technology to reach the youngest people," he said.

The site was developed by a team at the Library of Congress in Washington with technical assistance from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. The digital library's main server is also in Washington, but officials said plans are underway for regional servers around the world.

Development costs of more than $10 million were financed by private donors, including Google, Microsoft, the Qatar Foundation, King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. By comparison, the American Memory project cost about $60 million, suggesting that more funds will have to be raised as the World Digital Library expands.

In addition to UNESCO and the Library of Congress, 26 other libraries and institutions in 19 countries have contributed to the project. Their offerings include rubbings of oracle bones from the National Library of China, delicate drawings of court life from the National Diet Library of Japan and a 13th-century "Devil's Bible" from the National Library of Sweden. Each is accompanied by a brief explanation of its content and significance. The documents have been scanned onto the site directly, in their original languages, but the explanations appear in all seven of the site's official languages.

"All of this is dependable, authoritative commentary," Billington said.

Users can sort through the information in several ways. They can ask what was going on anywhere in the world in, say, science or literature during the 4th century B.C., for instance. They can look up the history of a certain topic over the centuries in China alone, or in China and North America. By cross-referencing, a user can see how one area of the world compared with another at any given time.

Billington acknowledged that national sensitivities could generate problems as the store of documents expands to include episodes in more recent history that some governments may want to hide or distort. But deliberate omissions may prove difficult to maintain, he said, because the site is open to contributions from all sides.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042001324.html





Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.
Erick Schonfeld

As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

I know a little bit about this because in January I was invited to a meeting at the A.P.’s headquarters with about two dozen other publishers, most of them from the print world, to discuss the formation of the consortium. TechCrunch has not joined at this time. Ironically, neither has the A.P., which has apparently decided to go its own way and fight the encroachments of the Web more aggressively (although, to my knowledge, it still uses Attributor’s technology). But at that meeting, which was organized by Attributor, a couple slides were shown that really brought home the point to everyone in the room. One showed a series of bar graphs estimating how much ad revenues splogs were making simply from the feeds of everyone in the room. (Note that this was just for sites taking extensive copies of articles, not simply quoting). The numbers ranged from $13 million (assuming a $.25 effective CPM) to $51 million (assuming a $1.00 eCPM).

Then they put up a slide with a pie chart showing which ad networks were serving ads on all of the abusive sites. It turns out a full 94 percent of the sites in question were serving ads from three ad networks: DoubleClick (45 percent), Google AdSense (24 percent), and Yahoo (24 percent).

Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved. There is certainly precedent for this type of approach. Look at YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. Except this proposal would take money that would otherwise be distributed to the splog sites themselves, and give a portion of it to the publisher as an automatic syndication fee without the consent of the site owner.

How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. (Attributor runs a free version of its service called FairShare to give publishers a sense of how much of their stuff is being copied without attribution). It is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices, but many issues still need to be worked out.

I’ve seen some of the data for TechCrunch, and there is no doubt that Attributor catches a lot of abuse, not fair use. But some of the sites that fall within Attributors net might still fall within fair use. For instance, I can imagine, a short post two or three paragraphs long being copied in its entirety and being surrounded by commentary. (Although, a minimum 125-word-count limit and exclusion of content clearly in quotes is meant to address such a scenario). Also, I am not sure that demanding payment is the way to go. For the most part, a link and attribution is good enough for us. But if the Fair Syndication consortium gets the ad networks on board and they take a conservative approach to asserting copyright, we might take another look. What do you think, should we join?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/21...ium-thinks-so/





Copyright Lobby Targets "Pirate Bay for Textbooks"
Petteri "dRD" Pyyny

Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls "Pirate Bay for textbooks".

Bookabooka doesn't host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional "snailmail" (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn't handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.

Despite these "small" differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.

TTVK demands that the service must be shut down by Friday this week or they'll sue the company. Bookabooka's founders have already stated that they wont respond to the threats, but instead will keep the service running.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/17696.cfm





Software That Copies DVDs to Players Is on Trial
Brad Stone

RealNetworks says it wants to help increase DVD sales by allowing people to copy their movie discs. Hollywood studios say that idea will only hurt their already struggling business. The two sides square off in a federal court here on Friday to determine who prevails.

The case is ostensibly about RealDVD, a $30 software program that allows users to save digital copies of Hollywood DVDs to their computers — a capability the movie industry strenuously objects to, worrying that it will stimulate piracy and undermine the budding market for digital downloads.

But the outcome of the trial, set against the backdrop of plummeting DVD sales, could also have more far-reaching effects on the future capabilities of the DVD player — a device connected to millions of television sets.

Before it started making RealDVD software for computers, Real was also developing DVD-saving software that it hoped to license to manufacturers of DVD players, according to the company’s executives and legal filings in the case.

That software, which the company refers to by its internal name, Facet, would allow companies like Sony, Samsung and Toshiba to sell DVD players capable of making digital copies of all discs, even movie DVDs that have anticopying software, called C.S.S.

The owners of those devices could save copies of their DVDs to watch later — much as people use digital video recorders like TiVo to save live television programs.

Real has built a prototype of a Facet device that runs on the Linux operating system, which is used in many digital set-top boxes. The device can hold about 70 movies, which take up to 20 minutes to copy.

RealNetworks executives have said they were inspired by Kaleidescape, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that makes high-end DVD players (the price is more than $10,000) that can save hundreds of movies on a hard drive. Kaleidescape was challenged by the DVD Copy Control Association, which administers the C.S.S. encryption, but won.

The Facet-powered DVD players would sell for $300 or less, said Jeff Albertson, manager of the Facet project at RealNetworks, and Real aims to collect a royalty on each device sold.

RealNetworks says that one consumer electronics company has already licensed the platform, and others are closely watching the outcome of the case. Devices could hit the market this fall if Real wins the case, the company said.

Hollywood, of course, hopes that does not happen. The major studios, acting under the umbrella of the Motion Picture Association of America, won a temporary injunction in October that required Real Networks to stop selling the RealDVD software.

Hollywood fears that people will use products like RealDVD and Facet-powered DVD players to “rent, rip and return”; that is, make copies of movies they get from Netflix, Blockbuster or the public library and then watch them again and again, without ever buying the disc.

The studios also worry that the technology will undermine the market for digital downloads and streaming services like iTunes and Hulu.com. It could also hurt new revenue opportunities, like the sale of bonus DVDs that contain a special copy of the film for viewing on laptops and other devices.

The motion picture association’s lawyers plan to claim that RealNetworks has breached its license to use C.S.S. encryption and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing the anticopying locks on Hollywood DVDs.

“Our objective is to get the illegal choices out of the marketplace and instead focus constructively with the technology community on bringing in more innovative and flexible legal options for consumers to enjoy movies,” said Greg Goeckner, executive vice president and general counsel of the association.

Bill Way, the vice president and general counsel of RealNetworks, said the company was only trying to make DVDs cool again.

“The movie industry wants people to buy DVDs and so do we,” he said. “They have a real problem with piracy, and we are not that problem. I don’t think our product will make the problem one iota bigger. I think it gives people an opportunity to make digital copies of their movies in a legal way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/technology/24dvd.html





Study: Pirates Biggest Music Buyers. Labels: Yeah, Right

Those who download "free" music from P2P networks are more likely to spend money on legit downloads than those who are squeaky clean, according to a new report out of Norway. The music labels, however, aren't quite buying that data.
Jacqui Cheng

Those who download illegal copies of music over P2P networks are the biggest consumers of legal music options, according to a new study by the BI Norwegian School of Management. Researchers examined the music downloading habits of more than 1,900 Internet users over the age of 15, and found that illegal music connoisseurs are significantly more likely to purchase music than the average, non-P2P-loving user.

Unsurprisingly, BI found that those between 15 and 20 are more likely to buy music via paid download than on a physical CD, though most still purchased at least one CD in the last six months. However, when it comes to P2P, it seems that those who wave the pirate flag are the most click-happy on services like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. BI said that those who said they download illegal music for "free" bought ten times as much legal music as those who never download music illegally. "The most surprising is that the proportion of paid download is so high," the Google-translated Audun Molde from the Norwegian School of Management told Aftenposten.

Record label EMI doesn't quite buy into BI's stats, though. EMI's Bjørn Rogstad told Aftenposten that the results make it seem like free downloads stimulate pay downloads, but there's no way to know for sure. "There is one thing we are not going away, and it is the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines. It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music," Rogstad said.

Rogstad's dismissal of the findings don't take into account that the online music model has dramatically changed how consumers buy music. Instead of selling a huge volume of full albums—the physical media model—the record labels are now selling a huge volume of individual, cherry-picked tracks. It's no secret that the old album format is in dire straits thanks to online music, which is a large part of why overall music revenue is going down.

BI's report corroborates data that the Canadian branch of the RIAA, the Canadian Record Industry Association, released in 2006. At that time, the organization acknowledged that P2P users do indeed buy more music than the industry wants to admit, and that P2P isn't the primary reason why other people aren't buying music. 73 percent of of respondents to the CRIA's survey said that they bought music after they downloaded it illegally, while the primary reason from the non-P2P camp for not buying music was attributed to plain old apathy.
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/20...rage-folks.ars





Sorting Out the Pirate Bay Verdict
Mats Lewan

In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay trial, many Swedish law experts say they consider Friday's high-profile guilty verdict severe but fair. Very few had predicted the verdict before it was handed out.

Complicating the case in many observers' eyes was the fact that no copyright-protected files were stored or distributed on the Pirate Bay Web site. But reading the 107-page sentence from Stockholm's Tingsratt district court offers a clearer picture of the grounds on which the court found all four defendants guilty of having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via Piratebay.org.

The reasoning makes clear that the principal crime was committed by individual file sharers. This was established via technical evidence that came from content on servers confiscated by the police, as well as by testimony from witnesses who actually downloaded files using torrents on the Web site.

The four defendants--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were accused of having assisted in this crime, and according to Swedish law, it's not necessary to know who committed the infraction in such a case, only that it was committed.

During the trial, prosecutor Håkan Roswall also pointed out that very little is needed to be sentenced for assistance. He referred, as precedent, to a case several decades ago when a person was sentenced for assisting in a case of mayhem, only for having held the culprit's coat.

In its verdict, the Stockholm court states that "responsibility for assistance can strike someone who has only insignificantly assisted in the principal crime," then goes on to show how the defendants participated to a sufficient extent to be considered guilty.

First, the court establishes--through the defendants' statements and e-mail correspondence, and through letters from copyright owners published on the Web site--that the defendants all knew about copyright-protected files being shared by Pirate Bay users.

Second, the court demonstrates that through the Piratebay.org site, they offered both a search function for torrents (small files pointing to the desired file), means for easily uploading and downloading the torrents, and a tracker--the server that keeps file sharers linked while they swap.

But two further criteria have to be met to be held responsible for assisting: holding a position of responsibility and having intent.

Relying on the defendants' statements, e-mail correspondence, and accounting records, the court shows that they have collective responsibility--all having been in the position to act, and all having known about the others' actions. This is also why all four received the same verdict, though they clearly held different roles. Warg and Neij are the co-founders of The Pirate Bay. Sunde is a programmer and a spokesman there, and Lundstr öm offered technical services to the site in 2005.

Intent to swap

The court then finds that the four men had intent, as they knew about torrents pointing to copyright-protected files, and still allegedly did not act to cancel them from the Web site.

For the same reason, the court finally dismisses the defendants' last objection: a European law that doesn't hold e-merchants and service providers responsible for hosting clients' illegal material if they don't know about it.

Eventually, having shown the defendants guilty of assisting in copyright infringement, the court finds that one year of prison is fair, given the extent of the file sharing, and that The Pirate Bay's activities were "managed as a commercial project" and "managed in organized forms."

Though the verdict probably will be appealed twice, all the way up to the Swedish Supreme Court, Swedish legal experts don't expect it to be altered in any major way.

"I would be surprised if the verdict were overthrown in higher courts," said lawyer Kristoffer Nordman of the Swedish law firm Vinge, according to Swedish business weekly Affarsvarlden.

Lawyer Agne Lindberg of the law firm Delphi & Co. agreed, but told the paper the sanctions might be adjusted. Neither lawyer was directly connected with the Pirate Bay case.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10224201-93.html





TPB FTW

So the first verdict finally came, almost 3 years after the raid. You might have heard about it in the news...

You, our beloved users, know that this little speedbump on the information super highway is nothing more than just, a little bump. Todays verdict has already been appealed by us and will be taken to the next level of court (and that will take another 2 or 3 years!)

The site will live on! We are more determined than ever that what we do is right. Millions of users are a good proof of that.

We have seen that some people that we dont know have started collecting donations for us, so we can pay those silly fines. We firmly ask you NOT to do this. Do not gather or send any money. We do not want them since we will not pay any fines!

If you really want to help out, here is a list:
* Seed those torrents a little bit more than you usually do!
* Buy a t-shirt and show the world where your sympathy is.
* If you live in Europe, vote in the election for the EU parliament in June.
* Continue to build the internets! Start more bittorrent sites, blog more, start your own lobby group, create, remix, mash up and continue to grow more heads on this amazing hydra that we know as the internets!
* Do not be afraid of using the network. Invite your friends to this and other file sharing systems. Calm people down if they're upset. We need to stay united.

And say it loud say it proud! We are all The Pirate Bay!
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/151





Oh boo hoo

Apple Dumps 'Baby Shaker' App After Complaints
Ryan Kim

Apple has apparently rethought its decision to allow an iPhone application that allows you to shake a baby to death to quiet its crying.

"Baby Shaker," a simple app from Sikalosoft, was first released Monday for 99 cents. It shows pictures of babies with the sound of them crying and a stop watch. To stop the crying, you shake the iPhone hard and then little Xs appear on the eyes of the baby, who will presumably never cry again.

Apple apparently pulled the app sometime Wednesday afternoon after blogs and sites such as TechCrunch and Cnet caught on to the story. It's hard to believe that this got through the iPhone app certification process in the first place.

Patrick Donohue, founder of the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation, which fights pediatric brain injuries, took Apple to task in a letter, saying, "As the father of a 3-year-old who was shaken by her baby nurse when she was only 5 days old, breaking three ribs, both collarbones and causing a severe brain injury, words cannot describe my reaction."

Apple has had a pretty strict policy on screening apps for content, which has not always been popular with developers. Apple has approved apps like "Beer Goggles" and a raft of farting apps. But the company has also denied apps that dealt with sexual themes, drug use or violence, even in apps designed as games.

While you can debate some of Apple's previous choices, allowing this one looks hard to defend. I doubt Apple will be looking to ease up on its restrictions on apps anytime soon. With the bad publicity from "Baby Shaker," Apple will have more incentive to be even more conservative - not less - going forward.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...BUT1177G2N.DTL





Crazy man

One in Ten Computer Gamers Are 'Pathologically Addicted'

Many children become irritable when they stop gaming
Mike Harvey

Nearly one in 10 American children who play computer games are pathologically addicted, according to new research.

Some young gamers show at least six symptoms of gambling addiction, such as lying to family and friends about how much they play games, using the games to escape their problems and becoming restless or irritable when they stop playing. They may also skip homework to play games or spend too much time playing and do poorly in school, the study shows.

Douglas Gentile, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University, where the study was carried out, said in his report: "The present study was designed to demonstrate whether pathological gaming is an issue that merits further attention. With almost one out of 10 youth gamers demonstrating real-world problems because of their gaming, we can conclude that it does."

The findings are based on a national sample of 1,178 boys and girls aged 8 to 18. Almost 90 per cent of the children who completed the online questionnaire said that they played computer games.

Boys spent an average 16.4 hours a week playing games and girls 9.2 hours. "Addicted" gamers played 24 hours a week, twice as much as casual gamers.

Of the gamers, 8.5 per cent exhibited "pathological patterns of play" gauged by the presence of at least six out of 11 clinical symptoms as defined by the American Psychiatric Association that indicate damage to family, social, school, or psychological functioning. The most common symptom was children skipping household chores to play games.

A quarter of gamers said that they played to escape problems, and nearly as many admitted to playing when they were supposed to be devoting time to homework. A fifth of gamers said that they had botched schoolwork or done poorly in exams because they had spent time playing instead of focusing on their education.

The report found that poor school performance and a pathological addition to video games were strongly linked, but Dr Gentile warned that the research had not investigated which came first.

"It is certainly possible that pathological gaming causes poor school performance, and so forth, but it is equally likely that children who have trouble at school seek to play games to experience feelings of mastery, or that attention problems cause both poor school performance and an attraction to games," he wrote in the findings, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"While the medical community currently does not recognise video game addiction as a mental disorder, hopefully this study will be one of many that allow us to have an educated conversation on the positive and negative effects of video games," he said.

Only about half the homes represented in the survey had rules about computer games. Forty-four per cent of respondents said that they were subject to rules about when they were allowed to play, 46 per cent reported having rules about how long they were allowed to play, and 56 per cent said they had rules about the kind of games they were allowed to play.

A large percentage of the children – 22 per cent of 8 to 11-year-olds, 41 per cent of 12 to 14-year-olds, and 56 cent of 15 to 18-year-olds – owned violent, adult-rated games. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have obtained adult-rated games; 7 per cent of boys admitted that they had bought such a game with their own money without their parents’ knowledge.

Dr David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, which works to minimise the harmful effects of media on the health and development of children and families, said that the findings were a wake-up call for families.

"This study gives everyone a better idea of the scope of the problem," he said. "While video games can be fun and entertaining, some kids are getting into trouble. I continue to hear from families who are concerned about their child's gaming habits. Not only do we need to focus on identifying the problem, but we need to find ways to help families prevent and treat it."
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle6139935.ece


















Until next week,

- js.



















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