Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 8th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I don’t own a computer, I don’t own a cellphone, I don’t own any electronics. I do own a radio." – Max Palevsky


"The telephone and cable companies will object to any path the [FCC] chairman takes. He might as well take the one that best protects consumers and is most legally sound." – Art Brodsky


"ISPs will not be required to block circumvention attempts by their customers or end users." – Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy


"No matter where you go, you can use the Internet for free." – Chinese security researcher


"Realistic scenario: someone uses McAfee or another affected product to secure their desktops. A malware developer abuses this race condition to bypass the system call hooks, allowing the malware to install itself and remove McAfee. In that case, all of the 'protection' offered by the product is basically moot." – H D Moore



































May 8th, 2010




Film Industry Demands Fines from Pirate Bay Pair
Peter Vinthagen Simpson

13 major film companies have filed writ against two of the men behind The Pirate Bay demanding payment of 500,000 kronor fines for continuing to operate the file sharing website despite a court order from October 2009.

Columbia Pictures, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox are among the firms seeking 500,000 kronor each from Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg who they claim remain key figures behind the site.

Neij and Svartholm Warg, together with Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were found guilty of being an accessory to copyright violations and issued with a collective fine of 30 million kronor ($4.17 million) as well as a year in prison.

The Pirate Bay four have appealed the Stockholm District Court decision with the case likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court because of its precedential nature.

The Pirate Bay has in the meantime continued operating and, in a ruling from Stockholm District Court in October, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg were ordered to pay 500,000 kronor fines if they did not close the site.

The film companies have now joined a previous call from music industry giants Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner Music to demand payment of the fines as they are not satisfied with steps taken by The Pirate Bay to shut down their BitTorrent tracker function.
In his appeal of the court's ruling, Svartholm Warg claimed that the fines are redundant if the tracker is down. Peter Sunde has also commented that the change leaves only the file sharers themselves responsible for their actions.

But Monique Wadsted, the lawyer representing the film companies in their application to the court argues that the changes are only cosmetic and that The Pirate Bay website still provides comprehensive links to uploaded torrents.

"This change has no impact on the file sharing service function," she argues in the film companies' petition.

A new survey carried out by the film companies indicates that only seven of the 109 torrent files named in the case had been taken off The Pirate Bay, all of which remained available via other sites.

The companies furthermore argue that Neij and Svartholm Warg's claims to have no further role in the operation of The Pirate Bay are contradicted by several public statements made by the pair, including comments made in conjunction with the aborted sale to Global Gaming Factory.
http://www.thelocal.se/26298/20100426





81.8% Students Would Stop Illegal File-Sharing Post ISP Warning: Survey

MUMBAI: On World Intellectual Property Day, the International Federation Against Copyright Theft – Greater China (IFACT-GC) released the results of a survey which confirms a strong preference for a graduated response program as an effective means to stop illegal file-sharing in Hong Kong.

A graduated response program, which has already been adopted in several jurisdictions, brings internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright holders together to tackle rampant filesharing. Under such a program ISPs will send educational notices to subscribers engaging in illegal sharing informing them of the risk associated with such conduct, including the possible termination of their internet access.

Survey participants considered such a program as an effective means to deter online infringement, with 81.8% respondents saying they would likely stop or may stop after the implementation of such a program.

"Distributing content without the consent of the creators is illegal and that's akin to theft. It is heartening to note that most people would stop if warned once - they know that what they are doing is wrong. We have seen the same results in other countries. For example in New Zealand, more than 70% of survey respondents stated they would stop file-sharing if warned by their ISP. On World Intellectual Property Day, this survey reminds us all yet again of the importance of protecting content on behalf of its creators," said Motion Picture Association president and managing director Asia-Pacific Mike Ellis.

The study, conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project of the Hong Kong Baptist University between October 17 and 19, 2009, was designed to gauge public opinion about the effectiveness of a graduated response program in addressing illegal downloading. One thousand respondents were successfully surveyed.

According to the survey, 57.1% were supportive of the implementation of a graduated response program in Hong Kong. "It is encouraging to learn that the general public is receptive to the implementation of a graduated response system. The findings highlight the fact that the vast majority of Hong Kong people acknowledge the need to step up efforts to combat illegal filesharing," added IFACT-GC executive director and general manager Sam Ho.

"Graduated response is an effective means to address the issue of online piracy and creates a win-win situation for all parties concerned," he said.

The survey also underlined the seriousness of illegal file sharing in Hong Kong as 60% of the respondents admitted they had shared unauthorized content, such as movies, TV programs, music, games and software, on the internet.

Responding to the findings of the survey, veterans of the movie and music industries - Motion Picture Industry Association Limited CEO Brian Chung and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) CEO Ricky Fung called on the government to take bolder actions to safeguard the industries.

"Our box office revenue has been seriously affected by illegal filesharing activities over the past few years. These unauthorized activities are disincentives to investment in the industry and will also lead to a drain of local creative talents," said Chung.

"Online copyright protection is fundamental to fostering a creative economy, but Hong Kong is lagging far behind other advanced jurisdictions in this area of work. We believe that a graduated response program can serve the best interests of users, online service providers and copyright owners. The recent implementation of such programs in France and UK and the findings in this survey support the need for our government to rethink its position and take immediate steps to put graduated response in place in order to make Hong Kong the key regional center for the creative industry," said Fung.
http://www.businessofcinema.com/news.php?newsid=16079





Google Attorney Slams ACTA Copyright Treaty
Declan McCullagh

An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has "metastasized" from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is "something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like," without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.

Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests from civil libertarians and technologists for the text of ACTA, with the White House last year even indicating that disclosure would do "damage to the national security." After pressure from the European Parliament, however, negotiators released the draft text two weeks ago.

The international adoption of ACTA could increase the liability for Internet intermediaries--such, perhaps, as search engines--Keller said. "You don't want to play Russian roulette with very high statutory damages."

One section of ACTA says that Internet providers "disabling access" to pirated material and adopting a policy dealing with unauthorized "transmission of materials protected by copyright" would be immune from lawsuits. If they choose not to do so, they could face legal liability. Fair use rights are not guaranteed

"It looks a lot like cultural imperialism," Keller said at the Legal Frontiers in Digital Media conference. "It's something that really snuck up on a lot of people."

Jamie Love of the Knowledge Ecology International advocacy group, which has criticized the ACTA process, reported last year that Keller had signed a nondisclosure agreement that provided her with access to the early draft text. Other organizations whose representatives signed the confidentiality agreement, according to Love's Freedom of Information Act request, include Verizon, eBay, Public Knowledge, Intel, News Corp., and the Consumer Electronics Association.

Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, who signed the nondisclosure agreement, wrote at the time that it didn't provide much access: "We were allowed to view a draft of one proposed section as we sat in a (government office) with some of its negotiators and counsel. We were not allowed to take any copies of the text with us when we left the meeting about an hour later."

The U.S. Trade Representative said in a statement last month that recent ACTA negotiations in New Zealand were "constructive." The Motion Picture Association of America called ACTA an "important step forward" that deserves to be adopted.

The next ACTA meeting is in Switzerland in June.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20004450-38.html





Another View of Game Piracy
David

We've been hearing a lot about game piracy recently, with big developers inflicting draconian online-only DRM systems on their users, and blaming their declining PC game sales entirely on piracy. I'm not questioning that piracy is common, since even honest, DRM-free, indie developers like 2DBoy[1] report a 90% piracy rate. I am, however, questioning what this means. How much revenue are developers actually losing to piracy?

The common industry assumption is that developers are losing 90% of their revenue. That is, pirates would have bought every single game that they downloaded. From personal experience, I know this is not possible -- most pirates that I've met have downloaded enough software to exceed their entire lifetime income, were they to have paid for it all. A more plausible (but still overly optimistic) guess is that if piracy was stopped the average pirate would behave like an average consumer.

This means that to calculate the worst-case scenario of how much money is lost to piracy, we just need to figure out what percentage of the target market consists of pirates. For example, if 50% of the market is pirates, that means that it's possible that you've lost 50% of your revenue to piracy. So how do we calculate what percentage of the market consists of pirates? Do we just go with 90%?

iPhone piracy

iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones) [2] This immediately struck me as odd -- I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking'. I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct -- only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. [3] World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries -- but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated?

The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales. If you'd like to see an example with math, read the following paragraph. If word problems make your eyes glaze over, then I advise you to skip it.

Let's consider the following scenario. Because game pirates can get apps for free, they download a couple new games every day -- or about 500 games in a year. On the other hand, normal gamers tend to play the same game for a longer time -- buying an average of 5 games per year. If this seems low to you, then consider that you are also reading a post on an indie game developer blog. You are probably more hardcore than the average gamer. Anyway, given these statistics, if the market consists of 10 million gamers, then there are 500 million pirated game copies, and 90 million purchased game copies, From the perspective of every individual game, 80% of its users are using pirated copies. However, only 10% of the market consists of pirates.

PC game piracy

Does this also apply to PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) gamers? Many PC game developers find that about 90% of their users are running pirated copies -- does this mean that piracy is killing PC games? Let's try our alternative explanation, and see if these statistics are possible even if only 20% of worldwide PC gamers are pirates. The average PC gamer worldwide only buys about three games a year, and plays them for a long time [4]. I buy many more than that, and you probably do too, but again, we are not average gamers! On the other hand, game pirates might download a new game every few days, for a total of about 125 games a year. Given these numbers, games would see 90% piracy rates even though only 20% of gamers are pirates.

Are these numbers accurate? The NPD recently conducted an anonymous survey showing that only 4% of PC gamers in the US admit to pirating games [5], a number that is comparable to XBox 360 piracy statistics [6] . However, since piracy is inversely proportionate to per-capita GDP, we can expect piracy rates to increase dramatically in places like Russia, China and India, driving up the world-wide average. Let's say to 20%.

This means that if all pirates would otherwise buy as many games as the average consumer, then game developers would be losing 20% of their revenue to piracy.

But would pirates really buy games?

Anecdotally and from studies by companies like the BSA, it's clear that pirates for the most part have very little income. They are unemployed students, or live in countries with very low per-capita GDP, where the price of a $60 game is more like $1000 (in terms of purchasing power parity and income percentage). When Reflexive games performed a series of experiments with anti-piracy measures, they found that they only made one extra sale for every 1000 pirated copies they blocked [7]. This implies that their 90% piracy statistic caused them to lose less than 1% of their sales.

Why are PC games really losing sales?

While many game developers blame piracy for their decreasing PC game sales, it is clear that this is not the problem -- relatively few gamers are pirates, and those that are would mostly not be able to afford games anyway.

However, it's easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem: that their games are not fun on PC. The games in question are usually designed for consoles, with the desktop port as an afterthought. This means they are not fun to play with a mouse and keyboard, and don't work well on PC hardware. Their field of view is designed to be viewed from a distant couch instead of a nearby monitor, and their gameplay is simplified to compensate for this tunnel vision.

Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers in the world, and it develops exclusively for the PC. Why do they succeed where everyone else fails? They create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard, and with all kinds of desktop hardware. If developers spent more time improving their PC gaming experience, and less time complaining about piracy, we might see more successful PC games.

With the Humble Indie Bundle promotion we've seen that when we treat gamers as real people instead of criminals, they seem to respond in kind. Anyone can get all five DRM-free games for a single penny, and pirate them as much as they want -- we have no way to find out or stop it. However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server? We'll never know for sure, but somehow I doubt it.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Anot...of-game-piracy





File-Sharers are Content Industry's "Largest Customers"
Nate Anderson

Drawing on a major study of Dutch file-sharers, Prof. Nico van Eijk of the University of Amsterdam concludes, "These figures show that there is no sharp divide between file sharers and others in their buying behaviour. On the contrary, when it comes to attending concerts, and expenses on DVDs and games, file sharers are the industry's largest customers... There does not appear to be a clear relationship between the decline in sales and file sharing."

In fact, the study found that file-sharers often buy more content, especially when it comes to films and games.

Van Eijk's conclusions appear in a recent paper for the journal Communications & Strategies, one coauthored with Joost Poort and Paul Rutten. While van Eijk doesn't deny that specific industries (like recorded music) have been in decline, he paints a more complicated picture of the content industries as a whole.

For instance, Sweden has long been regarded as a worldwide piracy hub—it's home to The Pirate Bay, the VPN IPRedator, and it sent a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament. But van Eijk draws on 2009 research showing that "total revenues [in Sweden] from recorded music, live concerts and collecting societies remained roughly stable between 2000 and 2008."

That doesn't help the recording industry, however, unless music labels get a cut of revenues from live music and merchandise. That's exactly what has started to happen via so-called "360 deals" over the last few years, where labels will invest in recording and promotion budgets for bands, but only when they benefit from all parts of the band's revenue stream.

Van Eijk sees this as a necessary business model change in response to file-sharing, but he argues that far more innovation is needed. And he blasts the music industry in particular for acting out of fear. Labels tried to "stem the tide of unlicensed music file sharing with their conservative strategy of abstaining from innovation, promoting legal measures against supposed offences, and digital rights management," he wrote.

"This strategy resulted in the current backlash, providing space for a new entrant establishing a major brand in the online music business: Apple's iTunes. Reinvention of the business model looks like the only way out for the traditional players in the music industry."

If you attend music industry conferences, you never have wait long for someone to say that we have entered an age in which people are unwilling to pay for content; that is, traditional business models are dead.

Van Eijk still sees life left in direct content sales, but he notes that current prices are far out of line with consumer expectations. When file-sharers were surveyed about what a "reasonable" price would be for an album, a movie, and a video game, the answers were surprising. A full 75 percent of file-sharers thought €8 was appropriate for an album—not too far off from current pricing.

But video games are another story. If the gaming industry wants to offer a "reasonable" price to three-quarters of file-swappers, it needs to sell games for €7, a far cry from the €50 or so currently charged for a new video game.

If we look at the median and the top quartile, the same trend holds. Music and film prices are already close to the "reasonable" zone, but video games are not; even the most spendthrift file-sharers believed that only €24 was reasonable for a new game. The upside for the gaming industry is that most people see games as more valuable per unit than music and movies.

In the end, says van Eijk, "File sharing is here to stay and... people who download are at the same time important customers of the entertainment industry... And so the entertainment industry will have to work actively towards innovation on all fronts. New models worth developing, for example, are those that seek to achieve commercial diversification or that match supply and end-user needs more closely. In such a context, criminalizing large parts of the population makes no sense. Enforcement should focus on large scale and/or commercial upload activities."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-customers.ars





Surprise: 'Iron Man 2' Already Available Online Illegally

You can't keep a good movie pirate down
Gregory Ellwood

One of the initial concerns Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures must have had about releasing "Iron Man 2" overseas before stateside was the effect online piracy could have on its box office tally. As expected, numerous illegally filmed versions of the sequel are now available on BitTorrent and peer-to-peer sites on the web. While in years past this would no doubt cause panic for any studio, in 2010 it may not be as much of a worry.

Last year, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was posted on the web weeks before its May debut. 20th Century Fox was immediately concerned about how the picture, which already had negative buzz surrounding it, would be affected by the break. It became a major issue when it was estimated over 1 million downloads of the film occurred. The drama was so intense that freelance columnist Roger Friedman was let go at NewsCorp sister company FoxNews.com because he reviewed the film off the illegal copy. In the long run, however, it didn't matter much as "Wolverine" became one of the biggest hits of the year grossing $373 million worldwide including $179.8 million domestic.

With "Iron Man 2" still expected to generate upwards of $150 million plus this weekend after an impressive $100.2 million debut overseas, it's unclear how concerned Marvel or Paramount are about the film's availability online.

There is no official comment from distributor Paramount Pictures regarding the break at this time.
http://www.hitfix.com/articles/2010-...line-illegally





Fox News, Rupert Murdoch… All Pirates
Ernesto

Fox News, a prominent media outlet owned by copyright evangelist Rupert Murdoch, is blatantly infringing on the rights of an individual photographer. The irony, or hypocrisy, is that Murdoch himself is going after Google, the BBC and many other companies that he believes are infringing on the rights of his news empire.

Copyright is a double edged sword, and those who sharpen one side often get cut by the other. Two weeks ago we reported that the gadget blog Gizmodo was going after bloggers who copied their work without permission, while they were ’stealing’ from photographers themselves.

Now, one of the photographers has written in again, pointing us to a photo gallery of the Icelandic volcano eruption last month that was published on Fox News. Like Gizmodo, Fox News is also exploiting the work of Flickr user Orvatli without permission. This clearly violates his copyrights and Örvar is not pleased, to say the least.

“This was a once in a lifetime photo session for me and these big media companies are ruining the value of my images by publishing them. Each time the image gets published their value decreases,” Örvar told TorrentFreak. “Publishers generally want unique and unpublished images on their media so a rarely or unpublished image has higher value than those everybody has seen,” he added.

As with Gizmodo, Örvar sent an invoice to Fox News to get paid for his work. Although Gizmodo eventually paid half of his standard fee after he kept complaining, Fox News is not responding to his inquiries at all. Fox News is obviously not living up to its “Fair & Balanced” tagline.

Now, we probably wouldn’t have covered this issue if Fox News wasn’t owned by Rupert Murdoch. The multi-media tycoon is a known copyright evangelist who accuses Google and other search engines of copyright infringement for indexing the websites of his newspapers.

Murdoch’s News Corp. outfit also owns the film studio 20th Century Fox, an MPAA member that has launched several lawsuits against against torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. It seems that Murdoch has a double standard when it comes to copyright infringement. Apparently it’s not that bad if he’s the one making money from it.
http://torrentfreak.com/fox-news-rup...irates-100503/





Big Paydays for the Chiefs in the Media
Joseph Plambeck

The media industry may be going through some rough times, with the landscape changing day to day, but at least one aspect is business as usual: big paydays for the people at the top.

Top executives at the country’s largest media companies continued to reel in multimillion-dollar pay packages in 2009, a year of widespread cost-cutting throughout the industry. In several cases, the packages even increased from the year before.

At the top of the list is Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, whose pay package in 2009 totaled almost $43 million, more than twice what he made in 2008, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.

Not far behind was Viacom’s chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, who was paid nearly $34 million, a 22 percent increase over 2008. Sumner M. Redstone, who controls CBS and Viacom, was paid more than $33 million from the two companies combined.

“Anybody who reads the business section knows the margins are being squeezed at media companies, so the fact that there are these huge packages makes no sense,” said James F. Reda, the founder of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm with offices in New York and Atlanta.

At Comcast, the two highest-paid executives, Brian L. Roberts and Stephen B. Burke, were paid $25 million and $31 million. Mr. Roberts’s pay was essentially the same as the year before, while Mr. Burke’s increased about $12 million, much of it because of one-time bonuses related to the company’s purchase of NBC Universal.

For several executives, it was more lucrative to be running a media company in 2009, however wobbly it might be, than a large financial firm, where many boards cut executive pay after the federal financial bailout.

John G. Stumpf, the head of Wells Fargo, was the highest-paid financial executive, earning an $18.8 million package, according to an analysis by Equilar. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, made $41 million in 2008 and less than $1 million in 2009, Equilar said, not including a $9 million payout he received this year that was deemed to be for work done the year before but is not included in Equilar’s calculations.

The bankers’ pay will most likely return to past levels if financial reform passes, Mr. Reda said, as Washington’s spotlight will shift elsewhere and the banks will have less incentive to stay in the public’s good graces.

Mr. Reda said, “What is the government going to do after financial reform? Take away their birthday?”

Despite the hard times at many media companies and the uncertainty of maintaining revenue in the digital future, investors did not shy away last year. The stock of CBS jumped 74 percent in 2009, and Viacom’s stock rose 56 percent.

In the case of many of the media executives, including Mr. Dauman at Viacom, most of the compensation is based on the company’s performance. Mr. Dauman’s base salary in 2009, $2.5 million, was unchanged from the year before.

The media industry did rebound in 2009 after a particularly tough 2008, but for many companies that largely meant cutting expenses, including labor costs. Overall revenue declines remained commonplace, but in many cases profits rose.

At Viacom, revenue in 2009 declined 7 percent compared with the year before but the company’s profit rose to $1.6 billion, a 29 percent increase, not far off from Mr. Dauman’s 22 percent pay raise. CBS returned to profitability in 2009 — $227 million — after a huge write-down in 2008.

“Right now, the executive compensation is not what’s driving people to invest or not invest in these stocks,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG in New York. “Shareholders are more focused on the underlying growth prospects of the companies than executive compensation.”

The pay packages for executives at public companies are made available in corporate filings. Equilar’s calculation includes base salary, discretionary and performance-based cash bonuses, the grant-date value of stock and option awards and other compensation.

Pay increases extended beyond the handful of large media conglomerates to some of the largest newspaper companies as well.

Craig A. Dubow, the head of Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, was paid $4.4 million in 2009, up 17 percent from the year before.

At The New York Times, Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive, was paid $4.9 million in 2009, 26 percent more than the year before, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman, made $4.8 million, a 171 percent increase. Gary B. Pruitt, the chief executive of McClatchy, was paid $2.6 million last year, up 61 percent.

But pay did not increase across the board.

Both Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes at the News Corporation had declines in pay, 40 percent for Mr. Murdoch — to about $18 million — and 21 percent for Mr. Ailes, the head of Fox News, who was paid $14.6 million.

Other top executives’ pay fell, too. Robert A. Iger, head of Disney, was paid $21.6 million in 2009, 58 percent less than the year before, and his counterpart at Time Warner, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, earned $19.4 million, a 10 percent drop.

Several analysts said the shifting marketplace and uncertainty surrounding the media business could actually contribute to the large payouts, making companies even more determined to hold on to people they see as gifted executives.

“When you have an industry going through so much tumult, it puts upward pressure on pay because so many people are moving around,” said Don Delves, the president of the Delves Group, a compensation consulting firm in Chicago. “People are looking around a lot, people are moving around and there’s a concern about losing talent.”

He added that big compensation figures were “one of the difficulties in the whole business model.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/bu...dia/03pay.html





Trailers a Bounty for Theaters, Concern for Studios
Carl DiOrio

Wondering why the coming attractions keep coming and coming these days?

Simple: For the first time, theater operators routinely are being paid to play movie trailers.

The placement of a half dozen or more trailers, often after seven or eight consumer-product commercials, raises the question of whether such "pre-show" presentations poison moviegoers' mood. The conundrum keeps movie producers awake at night, for the same producers would have to nag studio marketing executives if their films failed to open well.

Which leads to the further question: When will the industry as a whole decide enough is enough?

"I admit it bothers even me," a top film distribution executive acknowledged recently. "Then again, I know I want my own trailer to be played. So I don't know the answer, because everybody is going to feel the same way."

Trailer numbers have surged in the past decade from two to four per film to a current five to seven on screens operated by larger circuits, with an additional number of 30-second "teaser" trailers often tossed in as well.

The National Association of Theater Owners doesn't dictate rules to its members on trailer numbers, but NATO president John Fithian said the trade group frowns on anything hurting the theatrical experience.

"We're seeing an increased pressure to play trailers, but there is a limit to what the patron can take in and retain," Fithian said. "Playing trailers does help both distribution and exhibition, so it's important to get it right."

Guidelines and Exceptions

Indeed, research shows that trailers can be enormously helpful to movie campaigns, and the resulting trailer mania can take many forms. For instance, a studio normally attaches one trailer for an upcoming release to film reels of pictures playing in theaters, but Paramount has been asking exhibitors opening "Iron Man 2" on Friday to play three trailers for the studio's movies. That's one more than the standard in recent years of two per "tentpole," or high-profile event movie. But Par on occasion has sought to place as many as four trailers with its biggest releases.

Motion Picture Association of America guidelines on trailers set a maximum length but don't address the number presented by individual studios or in aggregate. The studio group simply stipulates a maximum length of 2-1/2 minutes per trailer, with one NATO-approved "exception" allowed per year so studios can send out the occasional four-minute promo for event movies.

In the meantime, it has become common for theater operators to seek concessions from distributors in film-rental negotiations in exchange for agreeing to play a set number of trailers for a studio on a regular basis.

Certain studios have begun offering substantial compensation to big theater chains for placing one or more extra trailers per showtime. For years, international distributors have included trailer payments in marketing budgets, especially in territories where other media buys are difficult, but pay-for-play trailers is a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S.

In the case of so-called 100 percent deals, studios secure a guarantee that circuits will continuously run at least one trailer on every screen for an entire year. A distribution insider suggested that annual payments of one form or another total as much as $30 million.

In 2002, Sony marketing and distribution chief Jeff Blake paid a reported $100,000 to get wider play for the trailer for the Rob Schneider comedy "The Animal." Yet rumors of even heftier payments continue to circulate.

"Whether or not the exhibitor gets the money in a check or it comes off the film rentals, the studios can just include it in the prints-and-advertising costs," a well-placed industryite explained. "So $50 million in P&A becomes $52 million on a picture, and nobody's ever going to know."

'Entertainment, Not Marketing'

Sony domestic distribution president Rory Bruer wouldn't discuss the subject of exhibitor compensation in any form but was unhesitant to endorse the spread of film trailers.

"The proliferation of trailers is a good thing, and I don't think they play too many at all," Bruer said. "Everybody I know thinks of the playing of trailers as entertainment, not marketing. But it is also the best way to get your message across to an audience."

Those still opposed to paying for trailer placements stress that such materials need to be tied to similarly targeted films. But they appear to be rowing against the marketing tide.

Some smaller exhibitors set limits on the number of trailers played, but larger chains show little inclination for halting the surge anytime soon. (Pacific ArcLight cinemas limit trailers to three per picture and nix ads.)

In fact, theater owners' desire to tap new revenue streams soon may spread to theater lobbies.

Studios are eager to place movie posters and cardboard standees in theaters to promote upcoming releases, and theater operators always have been happy to display the materials. But in the current context, the matter soon may become yet another topic swept up into the parties' film and marketing negotiations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6440OV20100505





Footage Restored to Fritz Lang's ‘Metropolis’
Larry Rohter

For fans and scholars of the silent-film era, the search for a copy of the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has become a sort of holy grail. One of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, “Metropolis” had not been viewed at its full length — roughly two and a half hours — since shortly after its premiere in Berlin in 1927, when it was withdrawn from circulation and about an hour of its footage was amputated and presumed destroyed.

But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country. So an 80-year quest that ranged over three continents seems finally to be over, thanks in large part to the curiosity and perseverance of one man, an Argentine film archivist named Fernando Peña.

The newly found footage, about 25 minutes in length and first exhibited in February at the Berlin Film Festival, is grainy and thus easily distinguished from an earlier, partly restored version, released in 2001, into which it has been inserted. But for the first time, Lang’s vision of a technologically advanced, socially stratified urban dystopia, which has influenced contemporary films like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” seems complete and comprehensible.

“ ‘Metropolis’ is the most iconic silent picture of its day, mainly because of the visual ambition and virtuosity of the film itself,” said Noah Isenberg, editor of “Weimar Cinema,” a book about early German films, and a professor of film and literary studies at the New School. “But until now, we didn’t have the full story. These additions are really essential to understanding the full arc of the narrative.”

Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.

Mr. Peña discovered a full-length copy of “Metropolis” in 2008 in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. He had first heard stories 20 years earlier that a two-and-a-half-hour print had somehow found its way to Argentina and was wandering from one government institution to another, but his efforts to gain access to the film cans had always been frustrated by an indifferent bureaucracy.

Since the 1930s, the full-length version of “Metropolis” had been part of a large private archive assembled by a prominent Argentine film critic, Manuel Peña Rodríguez, who would lend titles to local film clubs. At his death around 1970, the collection was donated to the Argentine version of the National Endowment of the Arts, which handed it off to the Museo del Cine in 1992.

Over the years, Mr. Peña had shared his frustrations at not being given access to the film with Paula Félix-Didier, another film archivist and, during the 1990s, his wife. When she became head of the Museo del Cine in 2008, she said, “I called Fernando and said, ‘Just come, let’s do it.’ So he came, we looked for the cans, and there they were, cataloged and up on a shelf.”

That a copy of the original print of “Metropolis” even existed in Buenos Aires was the result of another piece of serendipity. An Argentine film distributor, Adolfo Wilson, happened to be in Berlin when the film had its premiere, liked what he saw so much that he immediately purchased rights, and returned to Argentina with the reels in his luggage.

“If he had gone two months later, he would have come back with a different version,” Mr. Peña said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires. Initially, the F. W. Murnau Foundation, a German film-preservation group named after the great silent-era director, which holds the rights to Lang’s silent films, did not respond when the Argentines notified it of the discovery. So Mr. Peña made a DVD and while on a business trip to Madrid took it to a prominent film scholar there, Luciano Berriatúa, who watched the film with him, enraptured, and immediately phoned the Germans to tell them, Mr. Peña recalled, “It’s the real thing.”

Restoring the Argentine reels required the latest in digital technology. In the early 1970s, the original 35-millimeter nitrate print was taken to a laboratory in Buenos Aires to be reduced to a 16-millimeter negative. But the lab technicians were careless, Ms. Félix-Didier said, “so they didn’t clean the film, and as a result there are all these artifacts, like dust and hair and scratches, on the 16-millimeter print” from which the Germans had to work. Because of damage to the reels, a couple of scenes have also had to be supplemented with intertitles.

Some of the newly inserted material consists of brief reaction shots, just a few seconds long, which establish or accentuate a character’s mood. But there are also several much longer scenes, including one lasting more than seven minutes, that restore subplots completely eliminated from the Paramount version.

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”

Even as the full-length version of “Metropolis” plays in Germany and the United States, the Argentine archivists continue to examine the Museo del Cine collection in Buenos Aires. Just last month, Ms. Félix-Didier said, a print was found of a Soviet-era silent film long thought to have been lost: Yevgeny Chervyakov’s 1928 “My Son.”

In addition, the Museo del Cine has discovered what the Library of Congress says are the only surviving copies of three American films: a 1916 William S. Hart western called “The Aryan”; a 1928 drama called “The Crimson City,” with Myrna Loy and Anna May Wong; and a melodrama from 1921 called “The Gilded Lily” and starring Mae Murray.

“This is great news,” said Stephen Leggett, program coordinator of the library’s National Film Preservation Board.

Mr. Peña said: “I’m glad I persisted. We still haven’t been through everything, so new discoveries could keep appearing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/mo...etropolis.html





'Floored' Tries a New Distribution Route

Docu goes mobile, online, peer-to-peer on same date
Gordon Cox

In the latest example of an indie film exploring new distribution models, docu "Floored" will get a simultaneous release via mobile phone, online and paid peer-to-peer download.

Movie, about the chaotic Chicago trading floor, will be released in ad-supported episodes over mobile devices through Babelgum beginning May 10, when Lyons, France-based, UbicMedia also will release the full-length pic in paid, hi-def peer-to-peer and legal download.

Also planned are theatrical releases including engagements at Gotham's Quad and suburban Chicago, both starting Friday.

Unusual multi-platform strategy aims to hit the pic's core audience, traders who live all over the world. According to Karol Martesko-Fenster, Babelgum's g.m. and senior VP of film, the pic has a high profile among the international trading community thanks to early screenings in Chicago that drew online attention.

"This is making the movie available for the target audience, the finance community around the world," he said.

Also included in the release strategy are special screenings targeting the finance world as well a June VOD release on iTunes and Amazon through FilmBuff and a planned DVD for July.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...ryId=1009&cs=1





Audiences, and Hollywood, Flock to Smartphones
Brian Stelter

It might be hard to imagine watching “The Office” on a screen no bigger than a business card. But tens of thousands of people — by the most conservative estimate — are already doing just that.

As Hollywood shrinks its films and television shows for the small screens of cellphones, its assumptions about mobile viewing are being upended by surprisingly patient consumers.

“We all thought they’d be watching video clips in the checkout line or between classes,” said Vivi Zigler, the president for digital entertainment at NBC Universal, summing up the industry’s conventional wisdom. But owners of iPhones and other smartphones are actually watching long episodes and sometimes complete films, so a growing number of media companies are vying for people’s mobile attention spans.

Measured against TV ratings and box-office receipts, the mobile video audience is tiny today, but a range of companies, from Hollywood studios to local TV stations, all foresee an increasingly wireless world — and they don’t want to be cut out of the picture.

Some TV shows, like “The Office” on NBC.com, are streamed at no charge now, but there is a gnawing fear among media companies that they may be leaving money on the table by relying solely on revenue from advertising. And there is always the concern — whether it be on the Internet or on phones — that the new platforms could cannibalize the companies’ core businesses.

Accordingly, much of the mobile TV experimentation is happening on the paid side, through packages sold by individual carriers like AT&T and Verizon and through subscription services that will be coming soon.

“The economics around this are exhausting,” Ms. Zigler said.

Joining the wireless equivalent of a land rush, last month some of the biggest local TV station owners in the United States announced a joint venture to transmit their content to viewers on the go. It is most likely years away from operation.

The stations would transmit to phones over the airwaves, much like Flo TV, a unit of Qualcomm, which has invested about $1 billion in mobile video distribution. The service sends channels like ESPN, Fox News and MTV to phones.

“Putting the concepts of mobility and watching video together is a natural, and we’re seeing it really grow right now,” said Flo TV’s president, Bill Stone.

Mr. Stone says the average Flo user watches 30 minutes of video a day. So far, though, few people are ponying up $10 a month or more for the service.

But that is not stopping other media companies from trying to charge for walled gardens of content. Beginning later this year, Bitbop, a product of the News Corporation’s Fox Mobile Group, will stream TV episodes to smartphones for $9.99 a month.

The News Corporation declined an interview request, but Joe Bilman of Fox Mobile, who is described as the chief architect of Bitbop, said in a statement in March that “the marriage of on-demand content and mobility has the power to ignite a fire in the smartphone space.”

Along with all-you-can-watch plans like Bitbop, there are à la carte stores for mobile viewing popping up. Blockbuster, the beleaguered movie rental chain, started selling movies for phones in the last month. The Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker” costs $3.99 for a 24-hour rental period.

But no one can say how big the market is for costly video delivered to phones. Most households already pay monthly cable or satellite TV bills. And those distributors are already starting to circle the mobile arena.

Mr. Stone would not say how many subscribers Flo has, citing relationships with its wireless carrier partners. But he acknowledged that the market was “early,” and would not say when Qualcomm expected Flo to turn profitable.

On top of the paid services, there is perhaps the simplest one of all, which is free and supported by ads. When NBC.com is reached from a smartphone, it typically takes a few seconds for the episode to start playing, but the streaming is surprisingly reliable on a 3G network. Similarly, CBS gives away an iPhone application for TV viewing.

Many media companies are distributing their wares several different ways, since as J. B. Perrette, the president for digital and affiliate distribution for NBC Universal, put it, “we don’t have an answer as to which one is going to win out.”

From services like Flo, networks receive subscriber fees. From their own Web sites, networks may find it easier to customize ads to individual viewers.

While the audience for mobile TV is small at the moment, it is growing rapidly. Roughly 17.6 million people in the United States watched video on their phones in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Nielsen Company, up from 11.2 million 12 months earlier. They watched an average of three hours and 37 minutes of mobile video a month.

By way of comparison, Americans who own television sets watch on average 153 hours of traditional TV a month.

Eric Berger, the senior vice president for digital networks for Sony Pictures Television, said the increase in mobile-viewing minutes correlates to the surge in smartphone sales. Sony has found that mobile visitors to its online video site, Crackle.com, watch movies for an average of 26 minutes. About 20 percent of visitors finish the movies. Mr. Berger said he thinks that people tune in to movies that they have already seen and watch portions of them again.

Many media researchers still maintain that viewers gravitate toward the best available screen, defending TV as the medium to beat. If a parent is watching on the living room TV set, a child may choose to watch something else on his or her phone.

“It’s becoming more mass market than it was, say, two years ago,” Mr. Berger said of mobile TV.

Similarly, Ms. Zigler has found that 60 percent of mobile visitors to NBC.com are coming from home, indicating that some people do not mind watching comedies and dramas on a palm-size screen even when a big-screen TV is nearby. “It’s pretty remarkable,” she said.

But bandwidth constraints are a big concern. Blockbuster’s rentals, for instance, do not yet work on the iPhone, which is sold by Apple, with service by AT&T.

The iPhone is “a little challenging,” said Scott Levine, vice president for digital at Blockbuster, citing the heavy bandwidth demands the phone places on AT&T’s strained network. “We have to think about how to make 3G work with the carriers. Above all, we want it to be a good experience for users.”

Carriers say they are gradually introducing next-generation networks that will be better suited for widespread video viewing. And Kay Johansson, the chief technology officer for MobiTV, said his company and others kept finding ways to squeeze more data through the existing lines.

But in the meantime, ventures that rely on over-the-air spectrum — like Flo and, someday, the one announced by local stations — say they can deliver video to mobile customers much more efficiently. Both factions are confident that people will increasingly want to watch video on the go, whether live over the airwaves or on demand over a wireless carrier’s network.

“The TV at home is just going to be a bigger screen,” Mr. Johansson said.

Jenna Wortham contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/bu.../03mobile.html





Blackberry 'Predicted a Century Ago' by Pioneering Physicist Nikola Tesla

The BlackBerry was first predicted more than a century ago, by Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer, it has been claimed.
Andrew Hough

Tesla, a pioneering Serbian-born physicist, made the prediction about the portable messaging service in the Popular Mechanics magazine in 1909.

Tesla, whose name lives on at Tesla Motors, the electric car manufacturer, saw wireless energy as the only way to make electricity thrive.

He wrote in the magazine that, one day it would be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world.

Tesla, who spent most of his adult life in America before his death in New York in 1943, imagined such a hand-held device would be simple to use and that, one day, everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it.

This, he added, would usher in a new era of technology.

Seth Porges, the magazine’s technology editor, disclosed Tesla’s prediction at a presentation, titled “108 years of futurism”, to industry figures recently in New York.

The "Crackberry" as it has been dubbed for its addictive qualities, is popular with business executives and US President Barack Obama, but has struggled in Britain to widen its appeal to a younger demographic.

The magazine, which has nine international editions that is read by millions, has been trying to imagine how the world will look in future years since it was first published in January 1902.

"Nikola Tesla was able to predict technology which is still in its nascent forms a hundred years later,” Mr Porges said.

"He talked a lot about his other great passion, which was wireless power.

"It has taken a little longer to get off the ground, but work on fascinating wireless conductive transmission is going on right now in research centres at MIT and Intel and other places.”

But some predictions have fallen short of expectations such as personal helicopters, flying cars, airports positioned on the top of giant buildings, and even an oven that also acted as a hairdryer.

In the first half of the 20th century, other magazine writers imagined trains that were transported around the country via hot air balloons, fire fighters that wore sprinkler helmets and homebuyers that chose their homes via mail order.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ola-Tesla.html





Web’s Users Against Its Gatekeepers
Kevin J. O'Brien

With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should be allowed to treat Web users differently, based on the users’ consumption.

Proponents of the current system — called network neutrality — see that principle as a kind of civil rights declaration of the digital age, one that requires the gatekeepers of the global Internet to treat all users equally, regardless of application, source or download limit.

While operators have never been required to maintain neutrality, the industry has created that expectation largely by charging users a flat rate for unlimited Internet access.

But there is a big flaw in the concept, according to the operators: Networks have never been neutral. They have always been actively managed to some extent since their inception in the 1980s to ensure that all customers get a basic “best effort” level of service.

If an operator could not restrain bandwidth hogs, who typically make up 15 percent of customers but who generate 80 percent of the traffic, most Internet users would experience poor service.

“The Internet has never been a neutral environment left to develop freely on a first-come, first-serve basis,” said Stuart Orr, the head of the telecommunications group in Europe, Africa and Latin America for Accenture, a U.S. software services consultant.

The arcane issue of network management, and the free speech and competition issues it raises, has taken on broader political importance as operators have increasingly micromanaged the flow of data, favoring some users over others as they have sought to handle exploding levels of traffic or deliver premium broadband service at guaranteed speeds to heavy users and businesses.

In the United States, users of the BitTorrent file-sharing service, a large generator of broadband traffic, last year challenged a cable operator, Comcast, that had blocked the service by identifying and disabling a common protocol used by BitTorrent users.

The Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast to stop the blocking. Comcast challenged the ruling. On April 6, an appeals court in Washington sided with the operator, saying the F.C.C. could not tell Comcast how to manage its network.

In Brussels, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, Neelie Kroes, plans to hold a public consultation on net neutrality this summer, which could lead to a push for new laws or regulations for operators.

Earlier this year, Ms. Kroes warned mobile operators not to block or hinder Internet voice services like Skype from their networks.

Operators are worried that any rigid legal mandate that forced them to observe net neutrality standards would be unworkable and make the economics of high-speed wireless broadband less attractive, which could limit future investment and improvement to the networks.

“We have no interest as an industry in policing individual surfing habits or acting as the gatekeeper for information,” said Frederic Gastaldo, the head of strategy and innovation at Swisscom. “Historically, our industry has resisted attempts to force operators to act as the personal gatekeepers of information. That would be a very negative marketing approach. However, customers who do excessively use our data network are a big challenge for us.”

Congestion is more problematic for mobile than landline broadband operators because wireless broadband capacity is limited by the ability of individual base stations to process the Web activities of hundreds of users simultaneously. The more users per station, the less performance for each user.

To avoid bottlenecks, operators use techniques like “traffic shaping,” which sorts traffic to ensure basic service for all, or “throttling,” which applies a general brake on large streams of data.

Kabel Deutschland, the largest German cable TV operator, has one million broadband customers. Its coaxial and glass-fiber network is so far able to satisfy all customers without restrictions, said Georg Merdian, director of the company’s infrastructure regulation.

But he said that the number of its broadband customers was doubling each year. “We anticipate we will soon have to use some kind of management techniques,” Mr. Merdian said.

For most mobile operators, traffic management is a fact of life.

Vodafone, one of the largest mobile operators in Europe and a part owner of Verizon Wireless, the No.1 wireless operator in America, routinely alerts its customers when they exceed the download limits of their service packages.Like all other operators, Vodafone uses sophisticated software that can pluck users or applications from the digital clamor.

“We use a form of network management to say, ‘I’m sorry, you are not going to be able to get the same level of service unless you decide to top up,”’ said Richard Feasey, Vodafone’s public policy director in London.

As data traffic levels rise, some executives, like César Alierta, the chairman and chief executive of the Spanish operator Telefónica, and Vittorio Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, have floated the idea of charging not only customers but also Web sites that generate lots of data traffic, like Google, Amazon and Facebook, for faster, guaranteed service.

Web businesses, which depend on fast Internet paid for by individual customers, oppose the idea and have been pushing lawmakers in Brussels and Washington to adopt restrictions preventing operators from making deals with content providers.

Prohibitions like that would make an operator’s business untenable, eventually reducing cable and phone networks to unprofitable, crowded data freeways, said Robert Mourik, the director of Telefónica’s regulatory policy in Europe.

“We have an explosion of traffic, but our revenues have not been growing at the same pace or staying flat,” Mr. Mourik said. “We are not looking at content on the Internet. We are not trying to police the network. What we are looking to do are commercial deals.”

Whether operators can successfully sell preferred Internet access to big Web businesses remains to be seen. Such a move would drastically alter the economics of the Internet, forcing content providers, in effect, to pay a toll, and perhaps a heavy toll, for access.

Naturally, none of the big Web sites are interested in doing that.

In February at an industry convention in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, was asked to comment on statements made by Mr. Colao of Vodafone, who had called for the right to clinch commercial deals with big Web businesses like Google.
Mr. Schmidt, who during a speech that day had stressed Google’s role in helping network operators build their wireless broadband businesses by attracting consumers to the mobile Web, declined to comment, adding that Mr. Colao was a friend.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/te...03neutral.html





FCC Chairman Genachowski Expected to Leave Broadband Services Deregulated
Cecilia Kang

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has indicated he wants to keep broadband services deregulated, according to sources, even as a federal court decision has exposed weaknesses in the agency's ability to be a strong watchdog over the companies that provide access to the Web.

The FCC currently has "ancillary" authority over broadband providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon and must adequately justify actions over those providers. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency had exceeded its authority in 2008 when it applied sanctions against Comcast.

The ruling cast doubt over the FCC's ability to create a "net neutrality" rule that would force Internet service providers to treat all services and applications on the Web equally.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to respond soon to the court ruling. Three sources at the agency said Genachowski has not made a final decision but has indicated in recent discussions that he is leaning toward keeping in place the current regulatory framework for broadband services but making some changes that would still bolster the FCC's chances of overseeing some broadband policies.

The sources said Genachowski thinks "reclassifying" broadband to allow for more regulation would be overly burdensome on carriers and would deter investment. But they said he also thinks the current regulatory framework would lead to constant legal challenges to the FCC's authority every time it attempted to pursue a broadband policy.

"The telephone and cable companies will object to any path the chairman takes," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, a media public interest group. "He might as well take the one that best protects consumers and is most legally sound."

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because a final decision hasn't been made and because of the sensitive nature of the issue. FCC spokeswoman Jen Howard would say only that Genachowski has not made a final decision.

Telecommunications companies would cheer a decision from the FCC to retain the current regulatory structure.

"It should come as no surprise . . . that leading financial analysts and technology commentators have questioned this path," the biggest telecommunications and cable trade groups wrote in a letter to Genachowski last week, warning against further regulation. "Thus it is hard to imagine a regulatory policy more at odds with the commission's goal of encouraging 'private investment and market-driven innovation.' "

Supporters of net neutrality -- companies such as Google and Skype as well as public interest groups -- have called for the agency to shift broadband Internet services more clearly under the agency's authority, saying consumers would be more vulnerable to business decisions that could cut off competition and access to applications on the Web. And they said the agency could strip broadband services of many of the rules that apply to other telecom services.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...203262_pf.html





FCC to Make Move on Net Neutrality
Tony Romm

The FCC will announce on Thursday that it still plans to pursue tough net neutrality rules, opening a new front in an ongoing legal battle that could come to define the commission under Chairman Julius Genachowski.

A senior FCC official said Wednesday that the chairman "will seek to restore the status quo as it existed" before a federal court stripped the commission of the authority to regulate broadband providers and set rules that mandate open Internet.

The goal is to "fulfill the previously stated agenda of extending broadband to all Americans, protecting consumers, ensuring fair competition, and preserving a free and open Internet," the FCC official said.

While details of Thursday's announcement are scant, Genachowski's "third way approach" would seem skirt some of the debate over reclassification -- the rule-making process that could allow the FCC to institute tough net neutrality rules and implement challenged sections of its National Broadband Plan, but would also prompt quick legal challenges from broadband providers and telecommunications companies.

A federal court ruled last month that the FCC only had jurisdiction of Title II, or "telecommunications services," while broadband actually fell under Title I, or "information services." Rather than simply taking broadband and re-designating it as a telecommunications service, the commission would use a procedure called "forbearance" to pick and choose elements of Title II to apply to broadband providers.

Some of the provisions the FCC plans to apply -- which an official did not specify to Hillicon Valley on Wednesday -- would likely allow the agency to continue pursuing the net neutrality rules both Genachowski and President Barack Obama have long touted.

However, broadband and telecommunications companies are still likely to fight the FCC's move, even though its Title II-lite approach imposes far few regulations on them than re-classification. Comcast and Verizon were not immediately available for comment on Wednesday, though Verizon has in the past threatened to challenge any effort to regulate broadband in court. AT&T later declined to remark on the commission's latest move.

Still, the announcement is sure to satisfy net neutrality proponents, who balked at news earlier this week that the FCC might punt the issue to Congress.

"We have said all along that the commission should at a minimum consider a Title II approach and a Title II-lite approach, and this appears to be from the statement what he's going to do," said Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge.

Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, later described the FCC's plans as a coming "clear signal that they are backing away from the cliff."

"This is extremely welcome news," noted Silver, who only a few days ago excoriated Genachowski for jeopardizing his entire commission's central mission. "We reserve judgment, however, on whether the FCC has gone far enough to protect consumers with this new proposal."

Others, though, felt the FCC was about to go too far with its proposed regulations. Bruce Mehlman, co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance, even questioned the logic motivating the FCC's forthcoming decision.

“If the goal is maximizing broadband deployment and adoption under the Broadband Plan, new regulations such as these will not help," said Mehlman, whose group includes members such as AT&T. "This sounds more like a political solution likely to imperil investment than a policy initiative that tackles actual challenges in the marketplace.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...ality-thursday





F.C.C. Proposes Rules on Internet Access
Edward Wyatt

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission outlined a plan on Thursday that would allow the agency to control the transmission component of high-speed Internet, but not rates or content.

In announcing the F.C.C. decision, Julius Genachowski, the commission’s chairman, said the agency would begin a process to reclassify broadband transmission service as a telecommunications service, subjecting the Internet to some of the same oversight as telephone services.

But, he said, the commission would also exempt broadband service from many of the rules affecting telephone service, seeking mainly to guarantee that Internet service providers could not discriminate against certain applications, Internet sites or users.

The approach would specifically forbid the commission from regulating rates charged by telephone and cable companies for Internet service and would not allow the commission to regulate Internet content, services, applications or electronic commerce sites.
The approach, Mr. Genachowski said, maintains the “status quo” and is intended to be “consistent with the longstanding consensus regarding the limited but essential role that the government should play with respect to broadband communications.”

Opponents, including some telecommunications companies that provide broadband Internet service, said the approach would create uncertainty and legal battles that would slow the development of technologies that could benefit consumers.

They also said that in making the legal justification for its decision, the commission seemed to be arguing the opposite of what it had previously asserted in a Supreme Court case on Internet regulation.

The new regulatory framework was made necessary, Mr. Genachowski said, by a federal appeals court decision last month involving Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, that invalidated the approach that the F.C.C. had taken to regulating broadband service.

Under that approach, the commission maintained that it had “ancillary authority” to oversee certain aspects of broadband service even though it did not fall under the strict rules that give the commission the power to regulate telephone service.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in April that the F.C.C.’s classification of broadband service as an “information service” rather than as a “telecommunications service” did not allow it to sanction Comcast for slowing or blocking access by its customers to an application known as BitTorrent, which is used to share large data files including video and audio.

The new approach, which the F.C.C. called a “third way,” would rely on a legal theory that recognizes the computing function and the broadband transmission component of retail Internet access service as separate things subject to different regulation.

The approach is similar to one that the commission has used to regulate aspects of wireless communications service, Mr. Genachowski said. And it relies in part on a 2005 United States Supreme Court decision, National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services. In that case, the court said that Congress gave the F.C.C. the authority to decide how it would regulate Internet service.

But the F.C.C.’s new approach also relies in part on a dissenting opinion in that case, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, which said that the “computing functionality” and the broadband transmission component of Internet access service are two different things, each subject to differing levels of regulation.

Austin C. Schlick, general counsel for the F.C.C., said in a statement that “ the upshot is that the commission is able to tailor the requirements” of its regulatory authority “so that they conform precisely to the policy consensus for broadband transmission services.”

Telecommunications companies said they believed the F.C.C. had overstepped. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, with whom the F.C.C. sided in the Brand X case, called the decision “fraught with legal uncertainty and practical consequences which pose real risks to our ability to provide the high-quality and innovative services that our customers expect.”

Thomas J. Tauke, an executive vice president at Verizon, said the new approach was “legally unsupported” and could only bring “confusion and delay to the important work of continuing to build the nation’s broadband future.”

Part of the uncertainty, opponents said, would result from the possibility that future F.C.C. leaders could decide that they wanted to reverse the decision, just as Mr. Genachowski reversed a previous commission’s ruling.

Consumer advocates praised the decision, at least in part. Public Knowledge, a consumer interest group, said it supported the approach but was dismayed by the commission’s decision that “open access” provisions of the Communications Act — which require companies to share access to the physical lines of connection that enter consumers’ homes — did not apply to broadband access as they did to basic telephone service.

Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst for Consumers Union, said the F.C.C. “appears to have found a way to ensure it has the authority to protect consumers from potential anticompetitive actions by providers of broadband services.”

Comcast, which successfully fought the commission over its regulatory authority, said in a statement that it was prepared “to work constructively” with the F.C.C. on “limited but effective measures” to preserve an open Internet, as long as they did not put the industry under a regulatory cloud.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/te...broadband.html





Net Filter Circumvention: it's Completely Legal
Liz Tay

The Federal Government's $23.8m ISP-level internet filtering initiative will not block encrypted content or web applications and can be circumvented legally, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has admitted.

In an official response to parliamentary questions on notice released yesterday, Senator Conroy said he had attended an hour-long demonstration of filter circumvention on 5 June 2009.

He was shown how to get around the ISP-level filter using free proxy network TOR and Virtual Private Network (VPN) techniques at the Enex TestLab in Victoria.

Although Enex expected "technically competent" users to be able to circumvent the filter, Conroy said monitoring circumvention attempts would not be required by the Government.

"ISPs will not be required to block circumvention attempts by their customers or end users," he said.

While he said it would be "irresponsible" of the Government to publish circumvention techniques, the Government took no measures to prevent other organisations from doing so.

Euthanasia advocacy group Exit International held a "hacking masterclass" for senior citizens last month, and Electronic Frontiers Australia planned to make public as much information about the filter as possible.

When asked if an ISP would be held responsible for knowingly allowing customers to bypass the filter, Conroy reiterated that ISPs would not be required to block circumvention attempts.

He said the same to whether ISPs would be allowed to offer a service or product that enabled circumvention.

"The capacity of filters to detect and provide warnings on circumvention was not tested during the pilot as none of the filtering solutions provided such granular controls including monitoring and alerting, and it is not a requirement of the Government's policy," he said.

Internet Industry Association (IIA) CEO Peter Coroneos was sceptical of the filter's effectiveness.

"While we support many of the Government's efforts in the online security sphere, we aren't convinced that it [the filter] will have anything more than symbolic value," he told iTnews.

While the IIA did not believe that the internet should be "unregulated and unrestricted in all ways", Coroneos said the filter would only give families a false belief that their children could not access unsavoury material.

"It remains our concern that much of the worst of the worst content will escape the filter and people are given a false sense of security," he said.

"The reality is, access to this content remains unaddressed and really could only be addressed by the families themselves."

Last week, Conroy's Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said filter legislation would not be introduced to parliament until "later this year".

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, whose questions on notice prompted Conroy's current response, urged the Government to abandon its net filter plan completely.

"The Government needs to clearly indicate that it's going to scrap the idea completely and work on a new policy in collaboration with all stakeholders," Ludlam said in a statement last Thursday.

"Opposition against the internet filter is widespread because it will do precisely nothing to curb the distribution of illegal material online, while establishing the architecture for greater government censorship in the future."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/173707...ely-legal.aspx





Sirius XM: Broadband Plan Will Hurt Satellite Radio
FMQB

Sirius XM and its subscribers are up in arms over the FCC's plan to expand wireless Internet access across the country. The satcaster claims that the wireless expansion will cut into Sirius XM's ground repeaters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, lawyers for Sirius XM filed comments with the FCC on April 23, saying that an expansion of wireless broadband will "fail to protect satellite radio's nearly 19 million subscribers and 35 million listeners from harmful interference."

Additionally, Howard Stern has been voicing his concerns about wireless expansion interfering with satcaster's transmissions. Stern's fans have begun sending complaints to the FCC about the plan, including insinuating that the Commission specifically aiming to damage the satcaster. The WSJ quotes subscribers' complaints to the FCC that said, "You are going to destroy the satellite radio market? Perhaps that was your intent?" and "I absolutely cannot believe you are about to let wireless carriers destroy Sirius XM after what you've already put this company through."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1792158





When History Is Compiled 140 Characters at a Time
Randall Stross

TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.

Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.

“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”

Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.

Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. “My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. “But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.”

Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. “I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,” she said.

The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.

As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”

Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. “In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,” said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.”

Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account “protected,” so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.

A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.

Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.

But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.

Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, “From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.” Twitter’s privacy policy states: “Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.”

Mr. Macgillivray added, “That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ” He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a “privacy policy” labeled as such.

Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, “There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.”

The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”

BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.

Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on “Show options,” then “Updates,” then a particular place on the timeline.)

A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.

Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the “staggeringly large historical record” of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward “anecdotal history.”

In the end, perhaps quality will emerge from sheer quantity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02digi.html





How Wired.com Tracked the iPhone Finder

In response to Wired.com’s scoop identifying the finder of the lost iPhone prototype, many have asked me how we did it. The process of uncovering digital footprints to identify Brian Hogan was indeed challenging and enlightening, so I thought I’d tell the story here. Heck, it might even teach police officers a thing or two so they don’t have to kick down doors.

(I am limited to what I can share due to a confidentiality agreement with an anonymous source, but I’ll say as much as I can.)

It all started with a Facebook comment. The day Gizmodo published its 4G iPhone bombshell, our former intern Rose Roark saw a suspicious-looking note posted by Hogan on someone’s Facebook wall. She pointed it out to me, and I agreed it was telling. But even so, the comment was vague (a single word) and not enough to draw a conclusion; we didn’t have access to Hogan’s Facebook profile to learn more about him. We created a screenshot of the Facebook wall in case we needed it for future reference.

Wired.com didn’t immediately pursue Hogan, because 1.) We are not police officers and 2.) We don’t work for Apple. But after San Mateo police officers announced they’d identified and interviewed the finder, without revealing his identity, we decided it was time to push the story forward by naming him.

And so the hunt for clues began — a week after Gizmodo broke its story. By then, Hogan had deleted his Facebook profile, and presumably every other social networking profile he owned, in an effort to hide. That made the search difficult, but his attempt to disappear was already a major clue that he was in trouble.

Reviewing the screengrab of the Facebook wall, we saw a few other people — possibly Hogan’s friends — had posted comments in reaction to the Gizmodo story as well. From checking their Facebook profiles, it appeared several of them went to school at Santa Barbara City College. So I had a hunch that Hogan, too, attended the school at some point. I also assumed he had since moved to Redwood City, where the phone was left in the bar Gourmet Haus Staudt.

Wired.com’s Kevin Poulsen searched Hogan’s name using a people-tracking website (Knowx.com) and found one Brian J. Hogan with addresses listed in Redwood City and Santa Barbara. Notably, the Redwood City address was located one mile away from Gourmet Haus Staudt. Wired.com’s Kim Zetter dialed the phone number for the house, but the call went to a voicemail of what sounded like a mother. We assumed this was Hogan’s parents’ home. Wired.com’s Dylan Tweney drove over to the house and knocked on the door, but no one was home. However, neighbors confirmed that Hogan lived there.

I continued to obsess over finding more about Hogan, and late at night on Tuesday I got very lucky with one Google search: “Brian Hogan SBCC.” The first search result revealed a Facebook page for a 2008 China/Vietnam study abroad program with Santa Barbara City College students. Google’s cached result showed a part of a comment posted by Hogan. When I visited the study abroad group’s Facebook page, Hogan’s comment was no longer present, as he had purged his account. But that single Google search result was proof that Hogan attended SBCC. Even more importantly, we now had access to a group of 25 people who studied abroad with Hogan and were likely his friends.

Poulsen proceeded to send Facebook friend requests to everyone in the study abroad group. Meanwhile, Wired.com editor in chief Evan Hansen phoned our anonymous source who claimed to be connected to the iPhone finder. When Hansen asked whether Hogan was the finder, the source declined to confirm or deny.

We were convinced Hogan had to be the guy, but we still didn’t have enough to publish a story. Late Wednesday evening I got lucky again. I found a website hosted by a friend of Hogan, where he linked to a personal travel blog documenting the 2008 China/Vietnam study abroad experience. In that blog, I found one photo where the first name Brian was mentioned in a caption. I was certain that was Hogan.

Shortly after I found the photo, Poulsen received a phone call from Hogan’s attorney, Jeffrey Bornstein. He called because Poulsen was apparently “shaking too many branches” (perhaps by trying to add all of Hogan’s Facebook friends). Bornstein acknowledged that he was representing Hogan and agreed to send us a written statement on Thursday afternoon. The fact Hogan had a lawyer was more or less confirmation that he was involved in finding the iPhone.

Zetter and Poulsen retrieved Bornstein’s statement at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, which stated that Hogan was the finder. They also interviewed the attorney to get as many details about Hogan as they could — everything from his age to his volunteer work at an orphanage. Poulsen sent Bornstein the photo I found, and he confirmed that was indeed Hogan.

And with all that, we finally had enough to break the story with confidence. It was a combination of cyber sleuthing, old-school gumshoe reporting and persistent stalking.

My colleagues at Wired and I feel especially proud about this scoop. I don’t personally have moral qualms about Gizmodo’s M.O. of purchasing the phone, but from reading reactions I sense that many readers and writers feel disheartened about what such an action means for the state of journalism. I don’t think a story like ours could have come at a better time. I hope it sends a message that journalism is still very much alive, even if in the chaotic world of the internet it comes in many different shapes and forms.
http://brianxchen.tumblr.com/post/56...-iphone-finder





Apple Says Sold 1 Million iPads

Apple Inc on Monday said it sold one million iPads in its first 28 days, and users of the tablet computer have already downloaded 12 million apps and 1.5 million digital books.

Apple sold 300,000 iPads, which has a 9.7-inch touchscreen iPad and is essentially a cross between a laptop and a smartphone, on launch day April 3 and a half-million units the first week.

It is intended as a media consumption device, good for video, games, electronic books and magazines and Web browsing.

Apple began the second stage of a two-part rollout of the touchscreen tablet computer on Friday when it started sales of the pricier, high-speed wireless version of the iPad in the United States, following the successful launch of the short-range Wi-Fi tablet earlier this month.

Although the device won't reach international markets until late May, some analysts expect Apple to sell roughly 5 million or so this year.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple closed rise 1.3 percent in pre-market trade at $261.09 on Monday.

(Reporting by Franklin Paul)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64002T20100503





Apple Obsession: The Science of iPad Fanaticism
Rachael Rettner

When Apple released its iPad, people lined up for hours to get their hands on the latest shiny techno-gadget stamped with the Apple logo.

While there likely wasn't reason to worry iPads would go out of style, or worse, become unavailable, and those die-hard consumers didn't urgently need the tablet for an essential task that same day, still the lines persisted — as they often do when Apple comes out with something new.

The seemingly odd behavior makes sense to market researchers and psychologists who weigh in on the reasons for Apple's cult-like following, and why members feel such affection for these products.

The unadulterated loyalty often invovles brand-centric fan groups, which scientists refer to as brand communities. These groups, which have formed around Apple, Harley-Davidson and even Hello Kitty, seem to rise up largely without the aid of sly marketing campaigns and instead by grassroots movements with their own rituals and traditions. Some even say the Apple community has the makings of a cult, with fanaticism that comes close to religious furor.

These groups can form out of necessity, the desire to be part of a community, and a shared sense that members understand something that, well, not everybody else gets.

In addition, Apple fans always have something new to keep their interest, an important component in fueling any fanaticism, researchers say. And, as is the case with fans of any brand, objects can become more than the sum of their parts — they can represent a lifestyle and more.

"I think people have values that they're pursuing, they have core goals in their life, and it's different for different people, but Apple has done a good job of becoming symbolically part of one type of lifestyle, or one type of concept," said Lynn Kahle, a professor of marketing at the University of Oregon who studies consumer psychology. "The brand becomes more than just a set of attributes to get you somewhere, it's a core part of who you are."

I'm a Mac...

A key component of any brand community is what researchers call "consciousness of kind," which really means a sense of "we-ness." Today, this element is driven home in the Mac community by the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ad campaign that the company started running in 2006. But the bond between Mac users stretches back decades.

"I remember speaking to early Mac fans, folks who had adopted the platform back in the 80s, and they would tell me things like: 'At that time, it was clear, IBM people were one way — wore suits and voted for Reagan. Mac people were another way — wore jeans and didn't vote for Reagan,'" said Albert M. Muniz, Jr., a professor of marketing at DePaul University in Chicago, who has studied the Apple brand community.

Brand communities also involve rituals and traditions, or some type of shared culture. Harley riders have their group rides; Apple users have store openings or a new product release. As was evident with the iPad, loyalists chose to camp out despite the fact that, if they simply wanted the product, they could have ordered it online.

Finally, members feel an obligation to each other, and help each other out — like a Harley rider who stops on the side of the road to help another Harley rider, Muniz said.

"There's probably a belief that 'This person is like me, at some level they get it,'" Muniz said. With Apple users, "there might be an assumption that there are shared values on a whole range of things, but certainly on computing," he said.

Why do these groups from?

Strong brand followings don't tend to form at the snap of a marketer's fingers. In fact, it's the other way around.

"To date, the strongest examples of brand community I’ve encountered have been grass roots in nature, meaning, they have formed independent of the marketer," Muniz said.

In other words, there's often no telling what brand will strike a chord with people — these groups tend to have a life of their own. For example, some other companies that have tried to rally a cult following, like Saturn cars, were not as successful, said Russell Belk, a marketing professor at York University in Ontario, Canada.

One reason groups like the Apple community form is purely out of necessity. Macs have always been a minority computer compared with PCs, and if users have a problem with their device, they often find themselves turning to other community members for help, making the bonds between users all the more strong.

Then, there's the feeling that you're part of something special, which ties into the sense of "we-ness." For Apple users, there might be the feeling that, by going with the PC-alternative, they're heading against the mainstream. It's the idea that "We’re the people marching to a different drum, if there are fewer of us, that just proves that we understand something that not everyone else can get," Muniz said.

Scott Thorne, a marketing professor at Southeast Missouri State University, has also seen this type of exclusiveness in many fan communities, some of which use jargon as a way to refer to outsiders. "It's kind of a way to feel superior — 'We know something you don't, we're aware how cool this product is, or how good this singer is, or how cool this technology is, we know something that other people are not aware of,'" Thorne said.

Brand communities might also serve as a substitute for real, location-based communities, which recent research suggests are declining.

"There's less community, and we're social creatures, so I've always suspected that we seek or create or reinforce community where we find it," Muniz said. "So if we can create community around a shared interest or brand, that can become a platform for generating that kind of social contact, generating that kind of cohesion or collectivity."

Fan, fanatic

Within these communities, all members seem to have shared characteristics that denote them as fans.

Thorne and his colleagues have identified four: They have a personal interested in the topic or product; they do things to show that they're fans (like wearing a T-shirt); they feel the need to associate with others that share their interests; and they feel the need to find out more about the object of their fanaticism.

Such fanaticism, defined as excessive devotion or enthusiasm, can have components of addiction or obsession. But research has also shown it doesn't usually cause harm to the consumer or to others.

Not all fanatics are created equal, and Thorne has found there are generally four flavors of fandom:

* Dilettante — Casual involvement. To take a baseball example, if the game is on, you'll watch it, but won't go out of your way to do so.
* Dedicated — If the game is on, you make a point to be home, and you might make your own fantasy baseball league.
* Devoted — You might fly out to see your favorite team play around the county, and have a shrine of memorabilia in your home.
* Dysfunctional — A level that's disruptive to the individual or society. (Think planning one's wedding around baseball season.)

"At all three of [the first] levels, your family and society may view you as eccentric, but you're not viewed as harmful or dangerous," Thorne said.

Generally, if there's nothing new to continue one's interest in a "brand," most fans will go back to the casual level.

However, Apple fans never want for such stimulation.

"That's one of the reasons Apple has such a devoted fandom, is because there's always talk about what's the next product Apple's going to come out with," Thorne said.

Is Apple a cult?

Some market researchers have gone so far as to dub Apple fans a "brand cult," a group with some cult-like attributes.

Here's why: Some fans have retold and romanticized Apple's history, giving a "legend" quality to the company and its founders. In 2005, Belk and his colleges found evidence for several myths within the Apple community, including a "creation myth" involving the creation of one of the first computers in Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs's garage, a"heroic myth" surrounding the founders, and a "satanic component" involving the company's rivals, portraying them almost like the Antichrist.

"I think that if ever there is a brand cult, Apple deserves it, they come close to religious fanaticism on the part of enthusiastic followers," Belk said.

He points to some Apple enthusiasts who went out and bought iPads despite complaining early on that the iPad didn't offer much new, saying it was essentially a big iPod touch.

"That sort of loyalty and devotion would suggest that there's something more than an objective appraisal going on, and it's the same sort of faith and loyalty that we see in religions oftentimes," he said.

However, some feel "cult" is too strong a label to throw around when discussing brand communities, since it conjures thoughts of conflict surrounding other cult groups, such as religious cults. "That's kind of heavy baggage, it's an emotionally charged word," Muniz said.

It's a lifestyle

Whether or not Apple fans are cult-like, there is no doubt that a strong sense of devotion to the brand is there. At the core of the devotion could be "a sense of self." The brand taps into what's truly important to people — it's about more than just the technological bells and whistles, it's a lifestyle, experts say.

"Apple I think has done a good job of having its brandimage connect to the core values and core lifestyle aspects of people," said Kahle, of the University of Oregon.

He points to the famous "1984" Macintosh Super Bowl ad, which alluded to George Orwell's book by the same name. In the ad, people were mindlessly watching a screen, meant to symbolize Big Brother, or conformity. A woman comes in and throws a hammer at the screen, blowing it up.

"The implication is, if you don't want a world like '1984,' you should identify with Apple," Kahle said. "Apple created an image as being a brand that's associated with independence and freedom, that the kind of tyranny of technology that's too complicated for people to use, that's something Apple was against. And Apple would create freedom or independence for you through technology, as opposed to making you a slave to technology."

Apple fans are also expressing a certain mindset.

"I would really consider people who use it [as] open-minded to technology, and liberal and everything," said Florian Brunbauer, an Apple user who designs and sells iPhone and iPad apps, and who stood in line the day the iPad was released. "I think it's a way to express that too."

Appealing product

All that said, Apple fans aren't just crazed over nothing. The company has at times been a technology innovator, said, Kahle, popularizing new concepts, like the idea of a computer mouse. And products often come with a sleek, different design that users find appealing.

Also, many of the products integrate with each other — you download iTunes on your iMac to put music on your iPod, for instance.

"That's the only way to guarantee the best experience I think," Brunbauer said. "Everything you're using comes from the same company, and that really helps. The whole process all works together, and it's very efficient in a way that you cannot achieve at all with Windows."

And since Apple allows third party developers to design applications for its products, such as the iPhone, users with a little programming know-how can jump right in and broaden the product's toolkit beyond what's provided by the company.

And fans find the products to be user-friendly, a plus with any kind of technology.

"You don't really have to learn how to use a Mac," Brunbauer said. "You just start it, and it all makes sense."
http://www.livescience.com/culture/A...sm-100502.html





Regulators Mull Antitrust Look at Apple: Source
Gabriel Madway

Regulators are considering an inquiry into whether Apple Inc violates antitrust law by requiring that its programing tools be used to write applications for the iPad and iPhone, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday.

The news comes amidst a high-profile dustup between Apple and Adobe Systems Inc, which makes the widely used Flash software to provide video and build games.

Although Flash is nearly ubiquitous on the Internet, Apple calls it a balky battery hog and Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs will not allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad, or as a tool to build apps on those devices.

Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones since its debut in 2007, and 1 million iPads since its April 3 debut. The devices' popularity means extra scrutiny about every Apple move related to the smartphone platform.

Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department enforce U.S. antitrust law, and no decision has been made on which may take the probe on Apple, said the source, who spoke privately for business reasons.

The New York Post first reported regulators' interest in Apple's policy. The paper reported that the two agencies were locked in negotiations over which would handle the inquiry, and a decision was expected shortly.

"What they're (Apple) doing is clearly anticompetitive ... They want one superhighway and they're the tollkeeper on that superhighway," said David Balto, a former FTC policy director.

Apple, Adobe and the Justice Department declined to comment. The FTC did not respond to a request for a comment.

Apple has recently come under scrutiny from U.S. regulators for other reasons. Under pressure from the FTC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple's board of directors last year.

Technology War

After months of sniping at one another, the feud between Apple and Adobe broke into the open last week, when Jobs published an open letter where he slammed Flash as unsuitable for mobile devices.

Jobs called Flash "closed and proprietary" because Adobe controls the technology -- charges that have also been levied at Apple over the iPhone platform, which is also used for the iPad.

Apple has prohibited software developers from using Flash

-- and other programing languages -- to build apps for its newest iPhone platform, so these companies must use Apple-approved tools and custom-build their programs, which adds extra cost and work.

Apple said allowing third-party tools would result in "sub-standard" apps. But critics say the company is abusing its position.

"For us and the whole developers community, it really locks us into a single platform," said Michael Chang, chief executive of mobile ad network Greystripe, of Apple's rules.

Chang said a basic iPhone app might cost $75,000 to build on Flash, and a few thousand dollars more to convert it to work on Google Inc's Android mobile platform. But with the new restrictions, a developer must spend another $75,000 to build the app from the ground up for a non-Apple platform.

"For a small or medium-sized company, it becomes a real financial issue, and that's how it becomes anticompetitive," he said.

The iPhone has generated huge interest from app developers, who have created more than 200,000 programs, or apps, for the platform. Developers get 70 percent of the revenue they earn, while Apple takes 30 percent.

One developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Apple's new app development rules were just "incredibly broad. The fact that you can't use any other tools to build your app is just ridiculous."

But he acknowledged that apps built using Apple's tool look and run better than those built with third-party technology.

Simon Buckingham of the app blog Appitalism argued that developers could write for the Apple platform and other platforms easily using a WebKit open source browser standard.

"What they're (Apple critics) trying to do is make a mountain out of a molehill," he said.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway, additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6425JE20100503





Pot, Meet Kettle: a Response to Steve Jobs' Letter on Flash
John Sullivan

Steve Jobs' recent missive on the deficiencies of Adobe's Flash is still reverberating around the Internet. In this guest editorial, John Sullivan of the Free Software Foundation responds, arguing that Apple is presenting users with a false choice between Adobe's proprietary software and Apple's walled garden.

Watching two proprietary software companies deeply opposed to computer user freedom lob accusations back and forth about who is more opposed to freedom has been surreal, to say the least. But what's been crystal clear is that the freedom these companies are arguing about is their own, not that of their users. And what they are calling freedom isn't freedom at all—it is the ability to control those users. Adobe is mad at Apple for not letting Adobe control iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users via Flash, and Apple is mad at Adobe for suggesting that Apple is arbitrarily abusing its control over Application Store users.

Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" is the latest volley in this bout between pot and kettle, and while it makes many dead-on criticisms of Adobe and Flash, it does not change the fundamental character of this disagreement, nor does it solve any concerns about Apple's broader intentions.

What's strangely absent from "Thoughts on Flash" is any explanation for why proprietary technology on the Web is bad, or why free standards are good. Noting this omission helps us understand why, though we agree with his assessment of the problems with Flash and the importance of free Web standards, Jobs is led to a solution that is bizarre and unacceptable.

If he had said anything about why user freedom on the Web is important, his hypocrisy would have been explicit. In a nutshell, he says, "Don't use Adobe's proprietary platform to engage with information on the Web. Use Apple's." He doesn't want users to freely wander and creatively explore the Web or their own computers; he wants them to move from the fenced-off "Freedom Zone" based in San Jose to the one based in Cupertino.

Freedom on the Web has multiple elements. Free standards like HTML5, which govern Web publishing, are critical and have amazing potential, but they are only one element. Standards are not enough on their own, because there is another layer between them and the computer user—the software used to interact with the Web, and the operating system surrounding it. Freedom in terms of Web publishing does no good if the software with which you access the Web filters it before it ever gets to you, or restricts you in other ways in order to grant access to the Web. Proprietary software can be compatible with free standards while simultaneously undercutting the values those free standards seek to achieve. Such "freedom" will always be contingent. In order to have an actual, irrevocably free Web, both the Web publishing standards and the software which accesses them will need to be free.

Although Jobs talks part of the talk when he says, "we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open," his walk goes the opposite direction, advocating both a proprietary video format, H.264, and proprietary software for engaging it—iPhone OS.

The definition of proprietary software is software which restricts users' freedoms to view its source code, run it for any purpose, share it, or modify it. Jobs himself defines proprietary software when he says:

Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

The dreaded fine-print EULA is a primary tool software companies use to implement such restrictions. Looking at the EULAs for Apple and Adobe, we can see that they look pretty much the same, and that "iPhone OS" and "Apple" could be substituted for "Adobe" and "Flash" in Jobs's own quote. His implicit admission of this, that "Apple has many proprietary products too," is a comical understatement.

Adobe's license says:

You may install and use one copy of the Software on your compatible Computer.

This license does not grant you the right to sublicense or distribute the Software.

You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You will not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software except to the extent you may be expressly permitted to reverse engineer or decompile under applicable law.

Apple's own terms of service document covering all applications downloaded from the App Store, says (in Section 10b):

(ii) You shall be authorized to use the Products only for personal, noncommercial use.

(iii) You shall be authorized to use the Products on five Apple-authorized devices at any time, except in the case of Movie Rentals, as described below.

Part of the reason why Flash and iPhone OS are proprietary is that Adobe and Apple agreed to the terms of the H.264 patent license. H.264, despite Jobs's claim, is not a free standard—patents necessary to implement it are held by a group that requires all users to agree to a license with restrictive terms. Those terms have previously even been unavailable for examination online. We are publishing them on fsf.org today in order to comment on their unethical restrictions. The fact that H.264 is a commonly used standard does not make it a free standard—the terms of its use are what matter, and they require all licensed software to include the following notice:

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (I) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (II) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM

You'll find similar language in the license agreements of Final Cut Studio, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, and Windows 7.

Any Web that can be engaged only after agreeing to such terms, whether for software or a standard, is not "free" or "open." It is gated, and its use is restricted. Jobs himself explains the problems with giving up the freedom to use your computer and its software to another, when he says, "[Apple] cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

We agree with that statement, and it's exactly why users should not place themselves at the mercy of Apple or H.264 either. If you buy an iPhone OS computer, there is no recourse if Apple makes a decision you do not like. You'll wait on Apple to approve or not approve the application with features you want to use, you'll never be assured that Apple won't remove the application once it's accepted, and you'll wait on Apple to implement any bug fixes or new features, or to take care of your security—even though it's ostensibly your platform, your computer, and part of your life.
Better conclusions

A free Web needs free software. You cannot have a free Web if your access to the software you use to engage the Web is limited to an arbitrary number of computers, or if you are not allowed to conduct business on the Web using the software, or if you are forbidden from asking someone to develop additional features you need.

Jobs has hit the nail on the head when describing the problems with Adobe, but not until after smashing his own thumb. Every criticism he makes of Adobe's proprietary approach applies equally to Apple, and every benefit attributed to the App Store can be had without it being a mandatory proprietary arrangement. Apple can offer quality control and editorial selection over available free software, and encourage users to exclusively—but voluntarily—use their store. Instead, Apple chooses to enforce legal restrictions, the transgression of which is punishable by criminal law, on users who want to make changes to their own computers, like installing free, non-Apple, software.

Fortunately, the way out of the Adobe vs. Apple cage match is straightforward, and exists already: free software operating systems like GNU/Linux with free software Web browsers, supporting free media formats like Ogg Theora. To make things even better, we can continue urging Google to release their new media format, VP8, under a free license as well.

The language of the GNU General Public License, used by thousands of GNU/Linux developers worldwide as the terms for distributing their software, stands in stark contrast to the proprietary EULAs cited above, and provides a useful tool for building and sharing software to actually engage the free Web:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program—to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

When Jobs defensively points to Apple's involvement in WebKit, he inadvertently makes the case for the superiority of free software over his own proprietary App Store approach. WebKit is indeed free software, and Apple did help make it happen. But the success of WebKit is neither Apple's success alone (in fact, some of its advances have been achieved in spite of some uncooperative behavior by Apple) nor is it a result of their proprietary approach. They are one contributor among others, and those others are able to contribute because the software is freely licensed. WebKit users are not at the mercy of Apple—the source code is available and can be legally modified, so anyone is entitled to make and distribute new features or fixes. WebKit is an example of what the free Web can actually be. But, sadly, Jobs can't stand to let it be that—while the core of Safari is WebKit, it is engulfed in other proprietary code, giving Apple leverage we should reject.

So, the correct decision in the dispute between Apple and Adobe is "none of the above." The past we need to leave behind is not just Flash, it's Apple's proprietary software as well. There is plenty of room for them to join us along with everyone else in the free world—but they must stop pretending that their little cages are the free world.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...r-on-flash.ars





Google’s Andy Rubin on Everything Android
Brad Stone

Andy Rubin, a vice president for engineering at Google, leads one of the search giant’s most important efforts—the development of Android, Google’s open source platform for smartphones and other mobile devices.

Android, of course, is Google’s primary weapon in its escalating battle with Apple over the smartphone market. Android currently runs on 9 percent of smartphones in the United States, according to Comscore.

It is also likely to be the company’s software choice for the emerging worlds of tablet computers and set-top boxes.

In a wide-ranging conversation on Google’s campus last week, Mr. Rubin talked about openness, support for Adobe Flash, Chrome, the upcoming Froyo release, and seemed to compare Apple to North Korea.

He predictably said that the Android platform was taking off because it was open to many manufacturers running many different architectures.

“It’s a numbers game. When you have multiple O.E.M.’s building multiple products in multiple product categories, it’s just a matter of time” before sales of Android phones exceed the sales of proprietary systems like Apple’s and R.I.M.’s, he said.

As to when the number of Android phones sold would exceed the number of BlackBerrys and iPhones sold, Mr. Rubin said, “I don’t know when its might be, but I’m confident it will happen. Open usually wins.”

I also asked him about the Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’s recent comment that “folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.”

“I don’t really have a rationale for that,” he said. “It’s a different style of interacting with the public and the media.”

Mr. Rubin also addressed many other topics — like whether consumers actually care if their mobile phone software is “open” or not. He insisted that they would, comparing closed computing platforms to totalitarian governments that deprived their citizens of choice. “When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea,” he said.

When asked whether Android apps from Google might have an advantage over other companies’ apps in the Android Market, the discussion again seemed to implicitly veer toward Brand X.

“We use the same tools we expect our third-party developers to,” Mr. Rubin said. “We have an SDK we give to developers. and when we write our Gmail app, we use the same SDK. A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t. That’s on policy and on technology. If there’s a secret API to hook into billing system we open up that billing system to third parties. If there’s a secret API to allow application multitasking, we open it up. There are no secret APIs. That is important to highlight for Android sake. Open is open and we live by our own implementations.”

He also promised that full support for Adobe’s Flash standard was coming in the next version of Android, code-named Froyo, for frozen yogurt (previous Android releases were called Cupcake, Donut and Eclair, and are represented outside Building 44 on the Google campus with giant sculptures of the desserts). Sometimes being open “means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying,” he said.

Of the fear that Android could “fork” into various different versions, making it difficult for application developers to create one program for all Android devices, Mr. Rubin compared the platform with every other PC operating system.

These systems naturally evolve, causing newer applications to not be compatible with older devices. “But compatibility for us means more than it does for other people,” Mr. Rubin said. “We have to run on a screen the size of a phone and a 42-inch plasma display — and still be compatible. I think we have the world’s first moment where an app written for phone can run on TV.”

I also asked about how Google was viewing its Android and Chrome operating systems – and which was the company’s preferred software for devices like tablet computers. He said the two platforms represented two different ambitions at Google – improving access to information on mobile phones, in the case of Android, and pushing forward the open Web in the case of the Chrome operating system.

The efforts are not necessarily mutually exclusive, Mr. Rubin said. “I don’t know if there will be Chrome and Android tablets, but if a consumer walks into store and two of those tablets are my company’s choices, I’m all good.”

Mr. Rubin said he owned an iPad; he purchased one for his wife. He said that such tablets should have traction among “a certain demographic that consumes more than produces,” but that they will likely eat into laptop sales, instead of creating an additional market. “I don’t think people want to charge another device,” he said.

At the end of the hourlong chat, I joked with Mr. Rubin that his press relations colleague, who was in the room, wanted to confess that he had left a prototype Android phone at a local bar.

“I’d be happy if that happened and someone wrote about it,” Mr. Rubin said. “With openness comes less secrets.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...thing-android/





Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA
Eugenia Loli-Queru

IconWe've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It's not just a matter of just "picking Theora" to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper! The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs! Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You see, there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn't apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, which costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word "professional" and "video" on the same sentence on their press release for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon's press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with the exact same restriction. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold.

And no, this is not just a Canon problem (which to me sounds like false advertising). Sony and Panasonic, and heck, even the Flip HD, have the exact same licensing restriction. Apparently, MPEG-LA makes it difficult for camera manufacturers, or video editor software houses, to obtain a cheap-enough license that allows their users to use their codec any way they want! This way, MPEG-LA caches in not only from the manufacturers and software providers, but also artists, and even viewers (more on that later). Maximizing their profit, they are!

Recently, MPEG-LA extended their "free internet broadcasting AVC license" until 2015. So until then, users can use a licensed encoder (x264 doesn't count, in their view this makes both the video producer AND every random viewer of that video *liable*), to stream online royalty-free, as long as that video is free to stream. However, what's "free to stream"? According to the interpretation of the U.S. law, if you stream your video with ads (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo), then that's a non-free usage. It's commercial video, even if you, the producer, makes no dime out of it (and that's a definition and interpretation of the US law that even Creative Commons believes so, if I am to judge from their last year's "what's a commercial video" survey). MPEG-LA never made a distinction in their newly renewed license between "free streaming on your own personal ad-free homepage", and "streaming via youtube/vimeo". For all we know, they can still go against Youtube/Vimeo for not paying them [extra] royalties (to what, I assume, they already pay) for EVERY video viewed via their service, or go against the video producer himself.

And then there's the other thing too: Both Youtube and Vimeo use the open source x264 encoder to encode their videos, as far as I know. Youtube's version is a highly modified x264 version (forked, I believe), and Vimeo's is a much more vanilla version (since their company has fewer C/C++ engineers than Youtube). Vimeo is probably in even worse situation because they offer their in-house encoded x264 MP4 videos for free download too, prompting users to download these x264-created videos, and break their license agreement with MPEG-LA for using unlicensed videos with their [licensed] decoder installed on their PC! Since we know for a fact that x264 is breaking the MPEG-LA license agreements (because their devs didn't license it with MPEG-LA), can this make Vimeo, myself the video producer, AND every of these millions of viewers, liable, in the eyes of MPEG-LA?

In my opinion, while the current MPEG-LA execs still seem to have some small common sense, there's nothing protecting us from changing their current somewhat-common-sense execs in 5 or 10 years time, with some bat-shit crazy ones. Their license agreement is so broad, that ALLOWS for crazy lawsuits against 99.999% of the population (most people have watched a Youtube video, you see, even if themselves might not even own a PC).

Think about it.

They have created such broad license agreements, with such a stronghold around the whole chain of production (from shooting to delivering), that they could make liable the whole EU/US population, and beyond. This is major. This is one of these things where the DoJ should get involved. This is one of the situations that can destroy art. I'm a video producer myself (I direct rock music videos for local bands without compensation, and I also shoot Creative Commons nature videos), and I much prefer to never hold a camera in my hands ever again than to pay these leeches a dime. If MPEG-LA enforces all that they CAN enforce via their various EULAs, then fewer and fewer people will want to record anything of note to share with others.

And that's how an artistic culture can ROT. By creating the circumstances where making art, in a way that doesn't get in your way, is illegal. Only big corporations would be able to even grab a camera and shoot. And if only big corporations can shoot video that they can share (for free or for money), then we end up with what Creative Commons' founder, Larry Lessig, keeps saying: a READ-ONLY CULTURE.

Humans are intellectual species. We can't go further, advance our own species, go to the next level, without art. We need every member of the society to be free to express him/herself via any modern means of art that can REACH OTHERS. Art is only effective when it can reach other people. And MPEG-LA makes it not only difficult to do so, but it could bankrupt you.

This is why I said that this a DoJ/governmental issue. It's not only anti-trust, monopolistic and whatever other economical buzzword you want to use, but it's also something very dangerous for our society as a whole.

As I explained above, the problem CAN NOT be fixed by simply exporting your footage using OGV Theora, because by the time you decided you want to charge for your video, or upload it on a free streaming site with ads, or you used a non-licensed *decoder* to edit it, you're already liable. In fact, you've already made your decision which route to take by the moment you pressed that "REC" button on your camera! Theora (and any other Free codec) only helps you in one small part of the licensing minefield that MPEG-LA has setup in the last 20 years. It doesn't protect you in the whole chain of creation-editing-exporting-sharing, which is how MPEG-LA has locked us in for good.

MPEG-LA has insinuated in the past that they own so many patents around mpeg2 and h.264, that is simply not possible to build a video codec that it doesn't infringe on their patents. Guess what. I do believe that this is pretty true. I don't believe that any modern codec is actually patent-free. It's not possible, since their patents seem to be as broad as their licensing agreements. For some algorithms, there is only a single way of doing it right, and that method was probably already patented in the '90s by MPEG-LA. So if one day they decide to go against Theora, BBC's Dirac, or VP8, it's possible that they do have a case. I'm not a lawyer of course, but it is my opinion that they would find a way to do damage in court!

Now, there is only one way out of this whole MPEG-LA mess:

1. Use a camera that does not use any of MPEG-LA's codecs.
2. Use a codec that all, of most of its patents, have expired, patents that *PREDATE* MPEG-LA's.
3. After editing, export back to that codec. Don't use any of the supposedly modern patent-free codecs, because you can still be liable if MPEG-LA sues these codecs and wins.

So, which codec you should use to record your video and share with the world?

The solution is MJPEG.

Let me make one thing clear. MJPEG **sucks** as a codec. It's very old and inefficient. OGV Theora looks like alien technology compared to it. But (all, if not most of) its patents have expired. And JPEG is old enough to predate MPEG-LA. Thankfully, there are still some MJPEG HD cameras in the market, although they are getting fewer and fewer: Nikon's dSLRs, and the previous generation of Panasonic's HD digicams. Other cameras that might be more acceptable to use codec-wise are the Panasonic HVX-200 (DVCPro HD codec, $6000), the SILICON IMAGING SI-2K (using the intermediate format Cineform to record, costs $12,000), and the RED One (using the R3D intermediate format, costs $16,000+). Every other HD camera in the market is unsuitable, if you want to be in the clear 100% (and that's already monopolistic in my view).

Another way to get mpeg-free video is to record via HDMI, directly to the desktop PC (and bypass the SD/CF card). However, this is NOT an 100%-proof way of going around MPEG-LA, because some cameras still use their codecs to do some processing (since HDMI-output is still not "true" RAW).

And this brings to an end my little thought process which started last night and has consumed me ever since. Apple and Microsoft supporting the behemoth called MPEG-LA makes me sick to my stomach. They should both be ashamed of themselves. Instead, they should all be lobbying to get them out of the way completely -- and not via just picking a different codec, but completely invalidating most of their patents. Put lobbying to the government to good use, for once.

FREE OUR CULTURE. We already have Creative Commons, and a Free codec in our disposal. But without FREE CAMERA CODECS, we're going nowhere fast. Because it all starts with the camera. Not how you export at the very end.
http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Wh... y_the_MPEG-LA





NEC Tech Detects Illegal Video Uploads in Seconds, MPAA Swoons
Tim Stevens

NEC tech detects illegal video uploads in seconds, MPAA swoons Surely by now you've come across something on YouTube that was flagged for copyright infringement, a process that's surely powered by massive teams of elves and other mystical creatures who watch each and every video uploaded to the site. NEC is looking to put them all out of work with a system that, with just 60 frames worth of video (about two seconds, typically) can identify copyrighted video with 96 percent accuracy and a false alarm rate of one in 200,000 -- even if it was copied from digital to analog or had captions added. This process is now part of the MPEG-7 Video signature tool, apparently the international standard, and works by creating signatures for copyrighted video that are just 76 bytes per frame. That's small enough for a desktop with a single core, 3GHz processor to churn through 1,000 hours of questionable video in one second, looking for matches all the while. Unless you freelance for the MPAA this isn't software you'll be running, but if you're a fan of the torrents there's a good chance that someone you know very indirectly will be.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/07/n...s-mpaa-swoons/





FCC Allows Blocking of Set-Top Box Outputs
Joelle Tessler

Federal regulators are endorsing Hollywood's efforts to let cable and satellite TV companies turn off output connections on the back of set-top boxes to prevent illegal copying of movies.

The decision by the Federal Communications Commission, announced late Friday, is intended to encourage studios to make movies available for home viewing on demand soon after they hit theaters or even at the same time.

Bob Pisano, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said the FCC's action will give consumers "far greater access to see recent high-definition movies in their homes."

But critics warned that the FCC order could prevent 20 million Americans with older, analog TVs from seeing these new-release movies at all. That's because the order allows the studios to limit delivery of new movies to only those households with newer digital sets.

In addition, critics say the blocking technology could prohibit legal recordings on some video recorders and other devices with analog connections.

"We are unsure when the FCC has ever before given private entities the right to disable consumers' products in their homes," the Consumer Electronics Association said in a statement. "The fact that the motion picture studios want to create a new business model does not mean that functioning products should be disabled by them."

Public Knowledge, a public interest group, said the FCC "has succumbed to the special-interest pleadings of the big media companies."

The FCC prohibits the use of so-called "selectable output control" technology, which encodes video programming with a signal to remotely disable set-top box output connections. The FCC granted a waiver from those rules on Friday at the request of the MPAA.

Allowing movie studios to temporarily prevent recording from TVs could pave the way for movies to be released to homes sooner than they are today. The FCC said the waiver is therefore in the public interest, because the studios are unlikely to offer new movies so soon after their theatrical release without such controls.

Companies such as The Walt Disney Co. have been trying to shorten the time between theatrical and home video releases, partly to benefit from one round of marketing buzz and partly to head off piracy. With DVD sales declining, studios are looking for new ways to deliver their content securely while still making money.

In its decision Friday, the agency stressed that its waiver includes several important conditions, including limits on how long studios can use the blocking technology. The FCC said the technology cannot be used on a particular movie once it is out on DVD or Blu-Ray, or after 90 days from the time it is first used on that movie, whichever comes first.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100507/...vie_recordings





Broadcasting In The Wake Of Comcast
Lee Petro

The aftershocks of Comcast could reach well beyond broadband and net neutrality

While most attention on the aftermath of the Comcast decision has tended to focus on the decision’s impact on net neutrality and the implementation of the National Broadband Plan (NBP), the seismic wave from Comcast and its aftershocks could reach well beyond those obvious targets. Local TV broadcasters, in particular, might want to pay attention to how Comcast might play out in their corner of the regulatory universe.

For example, the NBP contemplates that spectrum currently in use by TV stations might be re-purposed for broadband. To wrest that spectrum away from the television operators who now hold it, the Commission has suggested that it might work some kind of deal in which: (a) the spectrum would be “voluntarily” relinquished by the broadcasters; (b) the re-captured spectrum would then be auctioned off; and (c) the broadcaster would be entitled to a portion of the auction proceeds.

But the FCC’s authority to cut this kind of deal in any event is far from clear. While the Commission is unquestionably authorized to conduct spectrum auctions, that authority does not obviously extend to cutting deals to kick-back auction proceeds to private parties. And any hope that such deals might be seen as “ancillary” to other authority is dimmed by Comcast. That in turn means that the FCC’s ability to secure spectrum commitments from broadcasters is likely diminished. Why, after all, would a broadcaster commit to turning in its spectrum if the FCC is not in a position to guarantee any repayment that might be part of the deal? As a result, the Commission should not expect much enthusiasm from broadcasters unless and until the Commission can demonstrate that it will be able to make good on any payment deals it may try to cut.

Another possible ripple effect of Comcast on the broadcasting terrain: let’s not forget that Comcast, the folks who landed the knock-out punch on the FCC in the eponymous Comcast case, are also the folks who are currently trying to get the FCC to approve a massive merger with NBC Universal. Now that Comcast’s ability to restrict, legally, Internet traffic contrary to the FCC’s preference has been established (thanks to the D.C. Circuit), the FCC (and other governmental authorities) may not be especially gung-ho about giving Comcast even greater control of more media than it already holds. If Comcast’s practice of jiggering with its subscribers’ Internet access is deemed potentially anti-competitive, the Feds might be expected to be reluctant to increase any perceived competitive advantages for Comcast.

Of course, in light of such concerns, the Powers That Be (whether that might be the FCC, DOJ or Congress) might attempt to extract “voluntary” commitments from Comcast and NBC, much as they did in connection with the Sirius/XM merger. Could the Commission then impose conditions that look remarkably like net neutrality requirements – even though the FCC might not have the authority to impose such requirements industry-wide? Conceivably, since the FCC’s clear authority to act on the merger request would arguably provide it the related authority to impose conditions on any grant of that request. Such conditions could have an impact on competition in both the online media and the cable industries, not to mention the broadcast business – in all of which Comcast plays a major role.

On the other hand, even if the Commission were to offer grant of the merger in return for concessions or commitments from Comcast, who’s to say that Comcast would accept the deal? Presumably, Comcast would not do so unless the deal made good business sense.

Another possible impact zone from Comcast: retransmission consent. As has been widely reported, the cable industry has filed a petition for rulemaking seeking overhaul of the current retransmission consent process. Thus far the FCC has appeared to be receptive to the idea. But a large number of fixed broadband service providers are cable companies, and those companies can now restrict internet traffic (thanks to Comcast), giving them a potential competitive advantage. How eager will (or should) the Commission be to give the cable industry a further leg up over competitors in the retrans consent process?

At this point we can only guess about how any or all of this will shake out. But it is important to recognize that the impact of Comcast is not likely to be limited to issues of net neutrality. In any event, television broadcasters should keep a wary eye on their own situation. They may still be looking at a decidedly unattractive future: packed tighter than ever in the broadcast band, stiffed by the FCC on any kick-back payments from spectrum auctions, and losing a steady source of revenue to the network, which just merged with the largest cable company.
http://www.commlawblog.com/2010/05/a...ke-of-comcast/





The Lazy Medium
How people really watch television

Only the content and the curtains have changed

A MIDDLE-AGED couple sits in front of a TV set. He flicks idly through a magazine, she holds a drink. An advertisement for Marks & Spencer, a British retailer, comes on. “These are really good ads,” declares the woman. Her husband glances at the screen. “Oh, I looked at that skirt,” she continues. It is a humdrum domestic scene, one that could have been captured at any point in the past 50 years. But that in itself is surprising.

The husband and wife in the video are playing back a programme that they have captured on a digital video recorder—something they do often. They do not need to watch advertisements. Indeed, they claim never to do so. Whenever an ad comes on during a recorded programme, the husband says in an interview, he zips through it at 30 times the normal speed.

Just outside Brighton, on England’s south coast, Sarah Pearson watches people watch television. She has almost 100,000 hours of video showing utterly banal scenes—people channel-surfing, fighting over the remote control and napping. Her findings are astonishing. There turns out to be an enormous gap between how people say they watch television and how they actually do. This gap contains clues to why television is so successful, and why so many attempts to transform it through technology have failed.

In the past few years viewers have gained much more control over television. Video-cassette recorders have been replaced by DVD players and digital video recorders (DVRs), both of which are easier to use. Cable and satellite firms offer a growing number of videos on demand. TV has gone online and become mobile. As a result, viewers’ expectations have changed dramatically. Katsuaki Suzuki of Fuji Television, Japan’s biggest broadcaster, says nobody feels they need to be at home to catch the 9pm drama any more.

But a change in expectations is not quite the same as a change in behaviour. Although it is easier than ever to watch programmes at a time and on a device of one’s choosing, and people expect to be able to do so, nearly all TV is nonetheless watched live on a television set. Even in British homes with a Sky+ box, which allows for easy recording of programmes, almost 85% of television shows are viewed at the time the broadcasters see fit to air them.

“People want to watch ‘Pop Idol’ when everyone else is watching it,” says Mike Darcey of BSkyB. If that is not possible, they watch it as soon as they can afterwards. Some 60% of all shows recorded on Sky+ boxes are viewed within a day. Often the delay is only a few minutes—just enough to finish the washing up or to make a phone call. For the most part, internet video is used in the same way. Matthias Büchs of RTLNow, a video-streaming website, says online viewing of a programme peaks within a day of that programme airing on TV.
Social animals

It may seem dated, but the image of the family clustered around the living-room set is an accurate depiction of how most people watch television in most countries. In Latin America advertisers have learned to tout grown-up products on children’s channels like Nickelodeon and Discovery Kids, knowing that many parents will be watching with their offspring. Indeed, TV executives believe there is more demand for programmes that the whole family can watch together. Colleen Fahey Rush, head of research at MTV, puts this down to the rise of two-earner households. Because both the father and the mother are absent more often, their company is more valued. “Today’s children actually like spending time with their parents,” she explains. A big thing they like to do together is watch television.

Like all social activities, television-watching demands compromise. People may have strong ideas about what they want to watch, but what they really want to do is watch together. So the great majority of them first see “what is on”—that is, what is being broadcast at that moment. Restricted choice makes it easier to agree on what to watch. If nothing appeals, they move on to the programmes stored in a DVR. On the very rare occasions when they find nothing there, they will look for an on-demand video.

This helps explain one of the oddest and most consistent findings of television research: that people seem unaware of their own behaviour. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form (see chart 4). In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson’s subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.

Efforts to improve the TV-watching experience have often gone wrong because they took people at their word. The past ten years have seen a parade of websites and set-top boxes—Apple TV, Boxee, Joost, Roku—offering a huge range of content and interactive features. All promised to deliver TV the way people (that is, individuals) really want it. Because they failed to take account of the social nature of television, not one has caught on. Efforts to turn TVs into personal e-mail devices and home-shopping outlets have fared no better. “The killer application on television turns out to be television,” says Richard Lindsay-Davies, CEO of the Digital TV Group.

Some technology firms do “get it”, as the bloggers like to say. Yahoo is building internet widgets into the most advanced TV sets that appear as small icons at the bottom of the screen. Click on a weather icon, for example, and a sidebar appears with the latest forecast. The widgets work because they are unobtrusive and do not distract other viewers from watching their programmes.

Other technology outfits are learning to become more like television. YouTube, the original video-sharing website, became famous for water-skiing squirrels and bedroom musings. It still has plenty of those, but since November 2009 it has also had a “TV shows” section that is neatly divided into genres, not unlike a video-on-demand menu from a cable or satellite company. In North America the website has Vevo, a channel offering music videos. Another innovation is youtube.com/disco, which plays one video after another. The aim, says Hunter Walker, its head of content, is to create “more of a TV-like experience”.
All together now

Live television is not just the most popular way of watching video; it also influences the way people watch shows on all devices. The most popular live television programmes tend to be the most heavily recorded and the most watched on computers and mobile devices. In February “EastEnders”, a British soap, accounted for 12 of the 20 most played-back programmes on iPlayer, the BBC’s online video service. Technology slightly favours programmes aimed at men: science fiction and shows about cars are more likely to be recorded or watched on computers. But there is little to suggest that television is growing a long tail of niche interests.

Quite the opposite, in fact. David Poltrack, head of research at CBS, says technology is helping hits to attract even bigger audiences. Now that it is so easy to record TV programmes and to find them online, the big shows scheduled at peak viewing time are freed from direct competition with each other. Faced with a choice between two programmes at 9pm that they want to see, viewers will often watch one show live and play the other one back an hour later. So strong is the competition from recorded shows that it has become hard to break a new show in America at 10pm. Indeed, thanks to technology and the rise of multi-channel TV it is becoming ever harder to get away with repeats or mediocre programmes at any time of day.

In the 1999-2000 season the most popular thing on American broadcast TV was “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, a game show. Every Tuesday evening it pulled in 28.5m viewers. But the rest were not far behind. The 10th most popular show that season attracted 63% of “Millionaire’s” audience, or 18m viewers. Even the 100th most popular show still got 30% of the top figure. By the 2008-09 season the also-rans had tumbled. The top show, “American Idol”, had 25.5m viewers. The 10th most popular programme pulled in 55% of its audience and the 100th most popular show just 20%. Relatively, the hits are becoming bigger.

Humdrum television thrived in a world of scarcity when there was little to watch. As the number of channels multiplies, more households get DVRs and television spreads to computers and mobile phones, there is always something on. “You don’t have to watch the best of a bad choice,” says Mr Carey of News Corporation. And one kind of show is becoming more and more dominant.
http://www.economist.com/specialrepo...ry_id=15980817





‘Fantasticks’ Pays Back for 50 Years
Patrick Healy

The American economy was in recession, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was yo-yo-ing in the 600s when Marjorie and Malcolm Gray found a new investment to offset a battering in the stock market. It was the spring of 1960, and after dropping by a neighbor’s home on Long Island to hear a couple of hopeful musicians play songs from their new Off Broadway musical, “The Fantasticks,” the Grays bought a stake in the show for $330.

The other day, 50 years later, Ms. Gray. now a widow, received her latest dividend from the musical, a $200 check in return for that stake. She has earned about $80,000 so far on the original $330 investment, or an average of $1,600 a year since 1960. And she will continue to receive money until 2020 because of the investment terms for the original production, which ran a record-setting 42 years at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village.

Investors or their heirs will make money from all “Fantasticks” shows — including a current revival Off Broadway and a forthcoming run in London — for 18 years following the final performance of the original show, which took place in 2002. The 18-year period is not unusual (though 10 years is more typical today). What has turned “The Fantasticks” into an extraordinary legacy for the investors, many of whom are now in their 80s and 90s, was the longevity of the 1960 production, the 50th anniversary of which will be celebrated by the surviving investors on Monday.

“We would’ve just been happy to earn our $330 back and get free tickets to a couple of performances,” said Ms. Gray, who is 80. “But the ‘Fantasticks’ money helped put our three children through college and paid for trips to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Israel. It’s certainly been handy to have around for 50 years.”

While these investors will never earn as many dollars as those who made much bigger bets on blockbuster musicals like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Wicked” with much higher ticket prices, “Fantasticks” backers will still most likely enjoy a more sizable profit in percentage terms: accountants for the show estimated their total return at about 24,000 percent since 1960.

Requiring only a two-member band and the barest of sets, the musical is inexpensive to produce, and “The Fantasticks” is one of the most widely produced in the world, with more than 11,000 productions to date in 3,000 cities and town in all 50 states, as well as in 67 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The original investors make money off of each of these productions.

“These investors hit a gusher,” said Charles H. Googe Jr., the chairman of the entertainment department at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who often works on theater contracts but is not involved with “The Fantasticks.”

“A lot of money is being made on ‘Phantom’ and ‘Wicked,’ but it may never reach the profit margin of ‘The Fantasticks’ because they are such big and expensive productions whose costs eat up profits,” Mr. Googe said. “ ‘Wicked’ could run as long as ‘The Fantasticks’ and pay its investors back handsomely, but it’s hard to imagine a rate of return ever again like this. Inexpensive, popular shows like ‘The Fantasticks,’ ‘Stomp’ and ‘Nunsense’ have proved to be unexpectedly good investments.”

Over the 50 years an investor in the S&P 500 who reinvested dividends (and did not pay brokerage or other fees) would have earned 9.8 percent a year before taxes. On a $330 investment, that would amount to almost $35,000. A “Fantasticks” investor who simply cashed every check and put the money in a mattress would now have $80,000, a return of 11.6 percent a year. But if you assume that the money paid out $1,600 a year over 50 years, and that the investor did not spend the cash, but instead invested it in Treasury bills, the safest investment around, that backer would now have about $422,000, a return of 15.4 percent a year.

If $1,600 a year hardly seems like much of a windfall, several of the original investors said in interviews that their “Fantasticks” money went a longer way in, say, 1970, by which time profits from the show were steadily increasing. That year the New York City subway fare was 30 cents; the average ticket price to a Broadway show was $8; the best suit at Brooks Brothers cost about $200; a Harvard undergraduate education cost $4,070; and the median American income was $8,734.

“Money has never been incidental, especially earlier in our careers, but I certainly didn’t expect to have a steady lifetime stream of income from ‘The Fantasticks,’ ” said Donald Farber, 86, who handled legal matters for the 1960 production and helped recruit investors. (He and his wife Anne, 85, invested as well.)

“A lot of times during that first summer of the show, there would only be two or three people sitting in the audience. People kept telling us to close. Annie and I would go to the playhouse and drink five scotches apiece just to deal with our nerves about this show that we fell in love with,” said Mr. Farber, who had never invested in theater before.

The tale of young lovers torn apart by warring families, perhaps most identified with the bittersweet song “Try to Remember,” “The Fantasticks” opened on May 3, 1960, and ran for a record-setting 17,162 performances before closing in 2002. With music by Harvey Schmidt and a book and lyrics by Tom Jones, the show remains the longest-running musical in the world; the New York production of “Phantom” is not quite half its age.

Many of the original investors in the show were not experienced theater hands but rather friends and neighbors of some of the artists and executives involved in the show. (Neither Mr. Farber, the lawyer, nor the show’s accountants could say precisely how many of the show’s 52 original investors are still alive.)

It was a struggle for those “Fantasticks” executives to recruit investors for the no-name show. They held several “backer’s auditions” in New York City and on Long Island (including at the Farbers’ former home in Merrick) to raise money for the show’s $16,500 budget. A typical Off Broadway musical today, by contrast, costs more than $1 million to mount.

Ira Kapp, 86, said he became an investor out of guilt: he attended a late-night run-through rehearsal in 1960 and quickly fell asleep. The next day he told his wife, June, that he felt bad for nodding off and that the least they could do was invest.

“That’s the luckiest investment I ever made in my life,” said Mr. Kapp, who receives three checks of “Fantasticks” money each year. “I’ve made more money overall from stocks, certainly, but no investment return of ours has ever approached ‘The Fantasticks’ percentage-wise.”

Those returns have helped investors pay for first and second homes, medical emergencies and decades of gifts, they said. And the show forged a special bond between some of them and their children and even grandchildren, as the investors take them to the show — which is now in its fourth year of revival Off Broadway — and they listen to the CD soundtrack together.

“My three grandkids love the show, they can hum or sing a few bars of ‘Try to Remember’ like so many people can,” said Muriel Neufeld, 90, who, with her husband, Stanley, went in on a share with three other couples for $82.50 a piece. “I’ve heard that the show has played all over the world, but it’s also a show that will run in its little way through all of the generations in my family.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/th...antastick.html





Antisocial Networking?
Hilary Stout

“HEY, you’re a dork,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”

“Thanks!” said the boy.

“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”

They both laughed.

“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.

“O.K., see you,” said the girl.

It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”

Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)

Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.

To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.

“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”

But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.

“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”

What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”

One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.

Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”

And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.

But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”

Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.

To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.

Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”

Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”

Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.

“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html





Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls
Tamar Lewin

It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.

Formspring.me, a relatively new social networking site, has become a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation.

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

By setting up a free Formspring account and linking it to their Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook accounts, young people invite their hundreds of online friends to ask questions or post comments, without having to identify themselves.

In part, Formspring is just the latest place to hang out and exchange gossip, as teenagers have always done. But because of the anonymity, the banter is unvarnished.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

“I’d never heard of Formspring until yesterday, but when I started asking kids, every seventh and eighth grader I asked said they used it,” said Christine Ruth, a middle school counselor in Linwood, N.J. “In seventh grade, especially, it’s a lot of ‘Everyone knows you’re a slut,’ or ‘You’re ugly.’ It seems like even when it’s inappropriate and vicious, the kids want the attention, so they post it. And who knows what they’re getting that’s so devastating that they don’t post it?”

Users can choose not to accept anonymous questions, but most young people seem to ignore that option. And some Formspring users say it is precisely the negative comments that interest them.

“Nice stuff is not why you get it,” said Ariane Barrie-Stern, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City. “I think it’s interesting to find out what people really think that they don’t have the guts to say to you. If it’s hurtful, you have to remind yourself that it doesn’t really mean anything.”

Ariane, who has more than 100 posts on her site, said she had not been terribly bothered by anything she has read so far, but she acknowledged that after one comment about a certain pair of leggings, she stopped wearing them.

Her father, Larry Stern, who like most other parents interviewed had never heard of Formspring until a reporter’s call, was aghast.

“It’s just shocking that kids have access to all these things on the Internet and we don’t even know about it,” Mr. Stern said. “And it’s disturbing that what goes on there will influence how somebody behaves. How do you block it? How do you monitor it?”

Even teenagers who do not set up Formspring accounts can peruse their friends’ accounts to see if they are mentioned.

Many families on Long Island became aware of Formspring after the March suicide of Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old West Islip soccer player who had received many nasty messages.

Since it began in late November, Formspring has caught on rapidly. More than 28 million people visit the site each month, 14 million of them in the United States, according to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web traffic.

The company, started in Indianapolis by John Wechsler and Ade Olonoh, recently raised $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors and moved to San Francisco.

According to Formspring, more than three million questions have been asked and answered on the site. Mr. Olonoh said in an e-mail message that the company did not know what percentage of users were teenagers.

Formspring is not the first site to allow anonymous comments. Some schools say students have been demoralized by comments on Honesty Box, a Facebook add-on. And Juicy Campus, a college gossip site, caused so much grief that some colleges blocked it, and some state attorneys general began consumer-protection investigations. The site shut down last year.

Formspring is one of many question-and-answer Internet sites that are widely used to find, say, the calorie count of avocados. But Formspring spread like wildfire among young people, who used it to for more intimate topics — or flat-out cyberbullying.

Many schools say they have seen students crushed by criticism of their breasts, their body odor or their behavior at the last party.

“There’s nothing positive on there, absolutely nothing, but the kids don’t seem to be able to stop reading, even if people are saying terrible things about them,” said Maggie Dock, a middle school counselor in Kinnelon, N.J. “I asked one girl, ‘If someone was throwing rocks at you, what would you do?’ She said she’d run, she’d move away. But she won’t stop reading what people say about her.”

In some schools, the Formspring craze may already be burning out.

“We all got Formspring about two months ago, when it began showing in people’s Facebook status,” said a 14-year-old from a New York City private school. “It’s actually gone down a little bit in the past few weeks, at least in my grade, because a lot of people realized it wasn’t a good thing, that people were getting hurt, or posting awful comments.”

Some young Formspring users say they strive for a light touch in answering questions about their relationships (hookups, that is, or “hu” in online parlance). Several said they admired friends’ skills at deflecting the often-asked question about how far they had gone, with answers like, “I’ve been to Morocco.”

One mother in Westchester County, N.Y., discovered Formspring when her daughter came to her, sobbing, after reading putdowns of her breasts and her teeth.

“She was very, very upset,” the woman said. “She’s always been self-conscious, and in a way this just flushed out what people might been thinking all along. She worked very hard on figuring out how to answer. But there’s a kind of obsessiveness to it. She still wants to read everything.”

Unknown to her daughter, the woman has learned her password, and occasionally checks her Facebook and Formspring accounts.

“The comments are all gross and sexual,” the mother said. “And yet, of course, this is coming from her friends. I wish I could just erase it, but all of her friends are online, and so much of their social interaction is online that I don’t think I could just take away her Internet access. But I do think this whole online social media thing is a huge experiment on our children.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06formspring.html





When You’re Only Text Friends
Charlotte Steinway

THERE’S A SILENT epidemic making the rounds at my college. No one talks about it because, quite literally, it goes unspoken.

When I first set foot on campus, I feared every freshman’s pariah nightmare was coming true: Kids who had friend-requested me on Facebook were pretending I didn’t exist when I passed them on the quad. People from my wilderness pre-orientation — people I’d shared sleeping bags with only a couple weeks earlier — would look at me, then immediately look away. A girl I’d given my lecture notes to walked right by as if I were a stranger. But a dozen or so conversations with friends and classmates led me to realize it wasn’t me alone being shunned.

No, I was getting the cold backpacked shoulder largely because everyone was on their iPod or cellphone, or at least pretending to be. The elderly use canes, the youth use phones. What horrified me the most was that by the end of September, I was right there with them, pretending I didn’t recognize the kid whose Facebook page told me he too likes TV on the Radio and Ratatat. And I was clutching my phone with a severity of object attachment I hadn’t felt since the days of the pacifier. In an age where hookups, breakups, and makeups are increasingly initiated via text or online, the social dynamic of face-to-face interactions has changed drastically and in some cases disappeared entirely.

As a sociology major and a member of this be-everywhere-now generation, I find the silence deadening. Also, if it’s this bad on a college campus — where our lives are landscaped to criss-cross each other many times a day— what happens when we graduate and retreat into separate cities, homes, cars, marriages? One friend, a junior who’s on the shy side, told me she relies heavily on her electronic escape hatch. “I’ll walk by someone, I’ll have my iPod in, even if it’s not on, and they’ll think I didn’t say hi because I was distracted. So it gives me an excuse.’’

Another classmate admits she’s turned to “fauxting,’’ fake texting when she realizes that someone she knows is about to actively ignore her. Given an option, there isn’t a college student out there who will choose to invite rejection. “Everyone wants everyone else to say hi but doesn’t want to be the person saying hi,’’ as my housemate put it. We use cellphones to mediate they way others perceive us; if we’re texting or calling a friend, we appear sought after, occupied, in demand.

But the tragic, isolating thing is that we reach for our devices because we don’t want to seem lonely — which is causing us to avoid our peers and actually be lonely.

In 1983, Erving Goffman, a founder of the symbolic interactionist school of sociology, claimed that humans of “acquaintanceship’’ are enlisted to “the right and obligation mutually to . . . acknowledge individual identification on all initial occasions of incidentally produced proximity.’’ In English, this means that every time you happen to be within physical range of someone you know, it is your duty as a social being to acknowledge this person, ideally with a hello followed by their name.

Oh, how we now scoff at the Goff. I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to someone at a party, promising to start saying hi to each other on campus. The next morning, we pass on the way to class — and nothing.

The precedent is set. And I’m sick of it. Um, hello? Start saying it. If you don’t know the name of someone you recognize, use the tools you’ve got (FB) to figure it out. If they reject your greeting, well, then you really have something to text your friend about. I was recently at a party and got to talking to a boy I’d seen around but had never spoken to. The next day, when we passed on the quad and gave each other that “Are you going to say hi?’’ look, I vowed to break the silence.

“Hey Matt, what’s up?’’ I said. Only slightly startled, he replied with “Hey’’ and a smile. A couple hours later he friend-requested me on Facebook.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ed..._text_friends/





Reddit Goes Into “Read-Only” Mode; Digg Quality Crumbles as a Result
JD Rucker

Two sites, Reddit and Digg, went into emergency mode today as Reddit had technical difficulties preventing users from submitting new content to the site.

“reddit is in ‘emergency read-only mode’ right now. you won’t be able to log in. we’re sorry, and are working frantically to fix the problem.”

Other social news sites such as Digg experienced a drop in the quality of content as one of the primary sources for content, Reddit, went into “read-only mode” making it challenging for many top Digg users to find content. The front page of Digg has not yet experienced the fallout as most of the top images today were from yesterday’s Reddit front page, but tomorrow is expected to be a low-Digg-count-day with Redditors unable to supply Digg users with content to submit.

Many Redditors were seen outside today. Some made their monthly trip to the grocery store, barber shops, and liquor stores early, while others simply experienced external weather conditions for the first time in ages.

“I’m glad this happened,” said one top Reddit user. “It gave me a chance visit my girlfriend at her house rather than having her come over to mine. I had no idea she was such a slob!”

No word from Reddit about what caused the outage or when it will be fixed, but updates will be posted as they come available. Stay tuned.
http://socialnewswatch.com/reddit-go...s-as-a-result/





Scientist Gets a Billion Pages on One Chip

Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the University of North Carolina.

Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”

Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch.” That’s pages in terms of books, by the way, so how much is this in terms of bits and bytes?

Speaking to Thinq, Dr Narayan explained that "one terabit can store 250 million pages." According to Dr Narayan, "at 10nm per bit, 1cm square stores one terabit." As such, the billion pages would be made up of four square centimetres of silicon, providing four terabits of storage. That's basically 512GB in just one small chip, and you could squeeze in much more data than that if the dots had a diameter of just 6nm.

The university explains that the nanodots are “made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip.” The nanodots are all positioned uniformly with strict precision, ensuring that they can be read and written to reliably.

In theory, the chips shouldn’t be too expensive to make, and the university says that they can be “manufactured cost-effectively.” However, this is still a really early technology, and developments still need to be made.

“The next step is to develop magnetic packaging that will enable users to take advantage of the chips,” says the university, “using something, such as laser technology, that can effectively interact with the nanodots.”

It doesn't look as though we'll have to wait long for the technology to become widely available, though. We asked Dr Narayan when he could see this method overtaking traditional solid state disk technology, and he replied: "five years or sooner!" Watch this space.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/1...s-on-one-chip/





‘Digital Universe’ Nears A Zettabyte
Rich Miller

The Great Recession hasn’t slowed the breakneck growth of the Digital Universe. In 2010 the volume of digital information created and duplicated in a year will reach 1.2 zettabytes, according to new data from IDC.

What the heck is a zettabyte? It’s equivalent to about 1 million petabytes, 1 trillion terabytes and 1 quadrillion gigabytes. In short, it’s an almost unimaginably large number. The annual Digital Universe report is an effort to visualize the enormous amount of data being generated by our increasingly digital lives.

Here’s an example: By 2020, IDC projects annual data generation will reach 35 zettabytes. That’s enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars.

Storage Implications

All those emails, texts, instant messages, documents, pictures, videos, and social network invitations have to live someplace. Given the storage implications of this data deluge, it’s no surprise that the IDC report is backed by EMC Corp., the largest provider of storage systems.

But the report’s humongous numbers provide food for thought – and not just thinking about buying more storage. The incredible growth of the Digital Universe challenges the IT community to address how it will manage this firehouse of data.

The biggest challenge isn’t how much data we’re creating – it’s all the copies of it we’re making, requiring that the same data to be stored on multiple storage devices. Seventy five percent of all the data in the Digital Universe is a copy, according to IDC.

Case for Deduplication

This factoid makes a compelling argument for the future of deduplication, which saves space on storage devices by eliminating duplicate copies of the same file or data. EMC demonstrated its appetite for this technology when it acquired Data Domain, a leading player in deduplication, after a bruising bidding war with rival NetApp.

The immense volume of information may also create a major staffing challenge. IDC estimates that the number of files to be managed will grow by a factor of 67 between 2009 and 2020, while staffing to manage that data will grow by a factor of 1.4.

IDC foresees automation and management tools as key to tackling this challenge, along with a gradual migration to cloud platforms that offer scalability and favorable economics.

How accurate has the report been? The initial 2007 report predicted that the Digital Universe would reach 988 exabytes this year, indicating that the growth has actually exceeded the projections.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...s-a-zettabyte/





Intel Shows Off First Light Peak Laptop
Barry Collins

Intel has provided the first hands-on demonstration of a laptop running its Light Peak technology, at the company's inaugural European research showcase here in Brussels.

Light Peak is an optical interconnect that can transfer data at 10Gbits/sec in both directions. Intel hopes Light Peak will one day replace the host of other PC interconnects, including USB, DisplayPort and HDMI.

Intel has fitted Light Peak into a regular USB cable, with optical fibres running alongside the electrical cabling. Intel provided a visual demonstration of how data is passed through the cable, by shining a torch into one end of the cable, with two little dots of light visible to the naked eye at the other end.

The demonstration laptop was sending two separate HD video streams to a nearby television screen, without any visible lag. The laptop includes a 12mm square chip that converts the optical light into electrical data that the computer understands. The technology hasn't yet been integrated into the screen, which explains the ugly black box sitting between the two devices.

Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, claimed that the bandwidth afforded by the optical technology is practically unlimited. "Light Peak begins at 10Gbits/sec, simultaneously in both directions," he said. "We expect to increase that speed dramatically. You'll see multiple displays being served by a single Light Peak connection. There's almost no limit to the bandwidth - fibres can carry trillions of bits per second".

Rattner said the technology will find its way into everything from home PCs to server farms. "The potential of that headroom will lead people to rethink the design of their systems," he said. "We've very, very excited about the potential of Light Peak."

An Intel spokesman said Light Peak hardware should start to become available to manufacturers by the end of this year.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/357688/i...ht-peak-laptop





Intel Fires Opening Salvo in x86 vs. ARM Smartphone Wars
Jon Stokes

I have been writing about Moorestown since Intel started talking publicly about it in 2007, so the official unveiling of Intel's first x86-based SoC aimed at the smartphone market marks the end of a long journey. Moorestown's appearance also marks the beginning of another journey, as Intel prepares to face down ARM in its quest to win handset and tablet makers over to the x86 camp. In many ways, this is the biggest and most important Intel product launch since the original Atom introduction.

The unveiling isn't a product announcement, so there are no "speeds and feeds" or prices to reveal. Rather, Intel is showing prototypes, making some specific performance and power claims, and announcing that Moorestown will officially be known as the Atom Z6XX series. Because the reveal was about filling in the blanks and confirming previously known or rumored details, I won't spend a lot of time reproducing the specifics of the announcement—you can get that information from the Intel press release, linked at the end of this post.

In this article, I'll do a brief recap of the basics of Moorestown, and then I'll give my own take on some of the specific claims that Intel has made for its first-ever smartphone platform.

A rough map of Moorestown

The image above shows two of the four main parts of the Moorestown platform. At the heart of Moorestown is the application processor, which is an SoC (system on a chip) that features an in-order, Atom-derived x86 CPU core and a PowerVR SGX GPU from Imagination technologies. This application processor, codenamed "Lincroft" and now officially known as the Intel Atom Processor Z6XX, is a 45nm part made on Intel's low-leakage SoC process. This SoC process trades a bit of performance for a reduction in leakage, making the SoC more efficient.

The Lincroft SoC consists of the following major blocks:

* Atom CPU core: 24K data cache, 32K instruction cache, 512K L2.
* PowerVR SGX-derived GMA 600 core: OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG 1.0,and DirectX 9.L. The clockspeed of this GPU has been doubled vs. what's typical for ARM SoCs that use it.
* Video Encode/Decode.
* Display.
* Memory: DDR2-800 and LPDDR1-400.

The Langwell Platform Controller Hub (PCH) is made on TSMC's 65nm process using IP blocks from a number of sources. This is the part of the Moorestown platform that TSMC customers will be able to customize to fit their own products. The PCH contains the following main blocks:

* System controller
* Image processing: support for 5MP and VGA camera, dedicated image signal processor
* Audio acceleration
* Crypto acceleration: secure boot support
* I/O: USB 2.0, HDMI, misc.
* SSD

Attached to the PCH are two other major chips:

* Briertown mixed signal IC: this contains a number of functions, including a touchscreen controller and an audio interface, and it also plays a key role in the platform's power management by supporting OS-controlled power gating for the SoC and PCH.
* Baseband processor: this is for the actual wireless interface, and it contains DSP hardware as well.

When you include the separate memory chip, which competitors like Apple's A4 have integrated into the SoC package, you're looking at five chips in all for the Moorestown platform. Compare this to Qualcomm's Snapdragon, which integrates most of this functionality, including the baseband processor, into a single package. Moorestown's sprawling five-chip layout will make it less efficient and more expensive than a comparable, more highly integrated ARM solution.

Performance and power: ideal numbers

According to AnandTech (see below), Intel is offering the following battery life figures as typical for a smartphone based on a 1.5GHz Moorestown:

1. Idle: 21-23 milliwatts (Intel claims 25 milliwatts idle for a 1GHz Snapdragon). This is 10 days of standby time with a 1500mAh battery
2. Audio playback: 120 milliwatts; about 2 days
3. 1080p video playback: +1.1W, or 5 hours (compare 10 hours for the iPhone 3GS).
4. Web browsing over WiFi: 1.1W, or ~5 hours.
5. 2G calls: 550 mW (8 to 10 hours talk time)
6. 3G calls: 1.2W (4 to 5 hours talk time).

All of the above look pretty typical for a smartphone, which is great. But they all have something in common, which I'll point out in a moment.

As for performance, this is where Intel really makes some claims for Moorestown. Anand reports that he saw Quake 3 running on Moorestown at 100FPS. He also reports that Moorestown completed the SunSpider benchmark in a scorching two seconds (compare about 10 seconds for a 1GHz Snapdragon). The SPEC scores that Intel gave for Moorestown versus the competition were equally impressive, and you can check these benchmarks out here.

It's kinda still not really a smartphone platform

If you compare Intel's power consumption numbers to its performance numbers, you'll notice that there's zero overlap. Nowhere does Intel reveal how much power Moorestown draws when running Quake 3 at 100FPS, or when executing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in two seconds. That's because the power draw in those situations is certain to be astronomic by smartphone standards. In other words, as long as you're doing a bunch of stuff that either doesn't involve the main SoC at all (e.g., talking, idling), or will let you shut down all but a few specialized blocks (e.g., 1080p video playback, audio playback), you can expect to have something approaching a normal smartphone experience. But when you actually use the main SoC like a real x86 processor... well, Intel is silent on those power numbers, and that's almost certainly because they're ugly.

The reason for Moorestown's decidedly unsmartphone-like range of power/performance points is that Intel relied heavily on power gating and other, very fine-grained dynamic power optimization techniques. This means that under ideal conditions, with most of the complex and power-hungry parts of the platform either shut down or severely throttled, the SoC's low leakage means that Moorestown's power profile will look much like that of a more integrated, simpler ARM platform. But as you start turning on and upclocking the parts of the SoC that can deliver the kinds of performance results that Intel touts in its slides, Moorestown's power usage will spike up out of smartphone territory and into the lower reaches of the netbook stratosphere. In other words, you can't get something for nothing, despite the fact that Intel can make it look like you do by selectively pairing some nothing-based power numbers with some something-based performance numbers.

The level of OS involvement needed to manage this very thorough and carefully implemented level of dynamic power management is substantial, and Anand describes some of the effort that went into making the Intel- and Nokia-run MeeGo OS play the hardware like a giant pipe organ. In this respect, Moorestown is a tiny bit like the late Larrabee project, because Moorestown's substantial software component will be critical to making the platform competitive in its initial incarnation. You won't just fire up Ubuntu—or even Chrome OS or Android or an x86 port of webOS—on your Moorestown-based tablet and expect to get any kind of battery life from it. No, making a Moorestown-based product sip power like a smartphone will take a lot of custom, Intel-led effort, and this will constrain the platform's potential applications a bit.

The ironies of it all

Now that the Moorestown picture is more fully fleshed out, there are a few wonderful ironies here.

The first irony is that Intel, the quintessential hardware maker, has had to invest considerably in the software side of the platform in order to make it competitive with the ARM-based competition's simpler, pure hardware offerings. The second irony is that Moorestown's dependence on a heavily optimized software stack will constrain its realistic OS options, at least initially, to MeeGo, despite the fact that desktop x86 can boot just about anything.

The final bit of irony is rooted in the fact that, unlike ARM, Intel is not licensing out its core design to one and all, so Moorestown is still a single-vendor, single-source platform that's competing with designs like the A9 that are available from multiple vendors and foundries. The result is that, in contrast to the ubiquity of commodity x86 in the desktop space, Moorestown turns out to be something of a boutique mobile platform—you might even call it a bit "closed"—that's pitted against the more "open," commodity alternative of the ARM ecosystem. Intel, the desktop commodity hardware vendor, has suddenly become the niche player in mobile.

The upshot of all of the above is that Moorestown is typical of Intel's initial, awkward steps into a brand-new space: the first product isn't really competitive, but Intel uses it to lay the groundwork, learn lessons, and provide grist for the iterative mill. Then, by the time the second or third product comes to market, the kinks are worked out and the platform can compete. This being the case, Intel's first serious smartphone part will be the 32nm Medfield in 2011. Medfield will combine the application processor and PCH onto a single chip, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it sport in-package memory. In all, Medfield will be a real ARM competitor—and then it'll be game on.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/...phone-wars.ars





Max Palevsky, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 85
William Grimes

Max Palevsky, a pioneer in the computer industry and a founder of the computer-chip giant Intel who used his fortune to back Democratic presidential candidates and to amass an important collection of American Arts and Crafts furniture, died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, said Angela Kaye, his assistant.

Mr. Palevsky became intrigued by computers in the early 1950s when he heard the mathematician John von Neumann lecture at the California Institute of Technology on the potential for computer technology. Trained in symbolic logic and mathematics, Mr. Palevsky was studying and teaching philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, but followed his hunch and left the academy.

After working on logic design for the Bendix Corporation’s first computer, in 1957 he joined the Packard Bell Computer Corporation, a new division of the electronics company Packard Bell.

In 1961, he and 11 colleagues from Packard Bell founded Scientific Data Systems to build small and medium-size business computers, a market niche they believed was being ignored by giants like I.B.M. The formula worked, and in 1969 Xerox bought the company for $1 billion, with Mr. Palevsky taking home a 10 percent share of the sale.

In 1968 he applied some of that money to financing a small start-up company in Santa Clara to make semiconductors. It became Intel, today the world’s largest producer of computer chips.

A staunch liberal, Mr. Palevsky first ventured into electoral politics in the 1960s when he became involved in the journalist Tom Braden’s race for lieutenant governor of California and Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency.

Mr. Palevsky pursued politics with zeal and whopping contributions of money. He bet heavily on Senator George McGovern — who first began running for the presidency in 1972 — donating more than $300,000 to a campaign that barely existed.

His financial support and organizing work for Tom Bradley, a Los Angeles city councilman, propelled Mr. Bradley, in 1973, to the first of his five terms as mayor. During the campaign, Mr. Palevsky recruited Gray Davis as Mr. Bradley’s chief fund-raiser, opening the door to a political career for Mr. Davis that later led to the governorship.

Mr. Palevsky later became disenchanted with the power of money in the American political system and adopted campaign finance reform as his pet issue. Overcoming his lifelong aversion to Republican candidates, he raised money for Senator John McCain of Arizona, an advocate of campaign finance reform, during the 2000 presidential primary. Mr. Palevsky also became a leading supporter of the conservative-backed Proposition 25, a state ballot initiative in 2000 that would limit campaign contributions by individuals and ban contributions by corporations.

Mr. Palevsky donated $1 million to the Proposition 25 campaign, his largest political contribution ever. “I am making this million-dollar contribution in hopes that I will never again legally be allowed to write huge checks to California political candidates,” he told Newsweek.

His support put him in direct conflict with Governor Davis, the state Democratic Party and labor unions, whose combined efforts to rally voter support ended in the measure’s defeat.

Max Palevsky was born on July 24, 1924, in Chicago. His father, a house painter who had immigrated from Russia, struggled during the Depression, and Mr. Palevsky described his childhood as “disastrous.”

During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps doing electronics repair work on airplanes in New Guinea. On returning home, he attended the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and philosophy in 1948. He went on to do graduate work in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and U.C.L.A.

Money allowed him to indulge his interests. He collected Modernist art, but in the early 1970s, while strolling through SoHo in Manhattan, he became fixated on a desk by the Arts and Crafts designer Gustav Stickley. Mr. Palevsky amassed an important collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and Japanese woodcuts, which he donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He also plunged into film production. He helped finance Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” in 1973, and, with the former Paramount executive Peter Bart, produced “Fun With Dick and Jane” in 2005, and, in 1977, “Islands in the Stream.” In 1970 he rescued the foundering Rolling Stone magazine by buying a substantial block of its stock.

Mr. Palevsky married and divorced five times. He is survived by a sister, Helen Futterman of Los Angeles; a daughter, Madeleine Moskowitz of Los Angeles; four sons: Nicholas, of Bangkok, Alexander and Jonathan, both of Los Angeles, and Matthew, of Brooklyn; and four grandchildren.

Despite his groundbreaking work in the computer industry, Mr. Palevsky remained skeptical about the cultural influence of computer technology. In a catalog essay for an Arts and Crafts exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005, he lamented “the hypnotic quality of computer games, the substitution of a Google search for genuine inquiry, the instant messaging that has replaced social discourse.”

He meant it too. “I don’t own a computer,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I don’t own a cellphone, I don’t own any electronics. I do own a radio.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/us/07palevsky.html





Google Sues Tiny Indie Label

Woke up this morning, got the Goliath vs David Blues
Andrew Orlowski

You might call this one asymmetric copyright warfare. Google, the $167bn internet company, is suing a tiny indie label that releases blues records.

Blue Destiny Records, based in Florida, first sued Microsoft, Google and porn hounds' favourite cyberlocker Rapidshare last December. Blue Destiny claimed Rapidshare provided "a distribution centre for unlawful copies of copyrighted works", and that the search engines were benefitting from the infringement. Blue Destiny withdrew its lawsuit in March. But that wasn't enough for Google.

Google has now sued the indie, asking a more friendly Californian court to provide a declaratory judgement whether links to cyberlockers constitute infringement. Victory would ensure a significant area of liability for Google would be removed. But even Reuters is moved to describe Google's response as "hubristic".

As well as drawing attention to the disparity in the resources available to Google and companies who depend on copyright - Google's annual revenue is larger than the entire global record industry - the aggressive litigation also sends out a message to copyright businesses that they should not dare to antagonise the internet giant.

The mood has changed significantly in recent months. While Google may win this court battle, it may be losing the longer, bigger war.

The trade unions have swung behind the creators, in the shape of the TUC-backed Creative Coalition Campaign in the UK, and the AFL-CIO in the US. The release of emails in the Viacom litigation showed Google executives burying their ethical reservations and buying YouTube anyway - so much for "Do no evil".

The shift is encapsulated in one particular tale.

In January, self-styled libertarian Lord Lucas tabled a number of amendments to the Digital Economy Act giving Google exactly what it's asking for in the blues label case. Lucas called the amendment 'Protection of search engines from liability for copyright infringement' and would have forced every publisher (professional or amateur) of any web page to grant search engines a "standing and non-exclusive license".

By March, Lucas had changed his mind. If dodgy cyberlockers were used mostly for infringing purposes, a responsible search engine shouldn't be promoting them.

"I do not see why search engines should not be able to block these things," he asked.

So you can see what's at stake.

Rather than mediating a settlement with aggrieved parties, Google is leaning on the law, which it hopes will provide it with a strictly literal definition of liabilities. This is a very American approach - politics is conducted through the courts - but it's one that antagonises almost everyone else.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05...s_blues_label/





Songwriters Want Piracy Investigated by FBI, Compare it to Bank Robbery
Andre "DVDBack23" Yoskowitz

Songwriters want piracy investigated by FBI, compare it to bank robbery The Songwriters Guild of America has made it clear with a note this weekend, via Ars, that music piracy is worse than bank robbery, and that the FBI should begin prosecuting all file-sharers civilly and criminally.

"There are numerous economic crimes of much lesser magnitude (such as bank robbery) that are routinely and fully investigated, for which law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have significant resources," says the SGA. "By contrast, online copyright piracy dwarfs bank robbery in causing economic losses, yet the FBI has limited criminal investigative interest and no civil mandate whatsoever to pursue this devastating economic harm. This inequity must change."

The Guild goes on to say that the DOJ (Department of Justice) needs to class illegal file-sharing as a "serious" crime. "Unfortunately, this misguided attitude allows domestic and foreign pirates to decimate an industry—intellectual property—where the United States enjoys a true global competitive advantage," they add.

Additionally, the SGA says that the federal government should immediately begin bringing civil copyright lawsuits against offenders. Currently, any lawsuits against illegal file-sharers come from the private sector.

Finally, the SGA gives some hints as to what they would like to see currently done to help combat piracy:

-Technologies to detect, monitor (and filter) traffic or specific files based on analysis of information such as protocols, file types, text description, metadata, file size and other “external” information;

-Content recognition technologies such as digital hashes, watermark detection, and fingerprinting technologies;

-Site blocking, redirection with automated warning systems/quarantine of repeat offending sites;

-Bandwidth shaping and throttling;

-Scanning infrastructure (the ability to subscribe to RSS-style data feeds as sites get new postings of content and links (for linking, streaming, and locker sites)

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/articl...ba nk_robbery





Book Talk: Sex, Drugs and Classic Record Covers
Nick Zieminski

A new book of record covers shows how musicians forged an identity and communicated with fans, using an art form that has sometimes endured longer than the music between the covers.

"The Art of the LP: Classic Album Covers 1955-1995," by Ben Wardle and Johnny Morgan, which will be published in the United States and Britain on Tuesday, groups rock, pop and jazz images by theme: sex, drugs, death, and escape.

The escape theme has cropped up in lyrics and imagery of popular music since the beginnings of rock 'n roll half a century ago.

The imagery on album covers became an important part of the music experience. In the book fans will find Eric Clapton, ABBA, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Tony Bennett and others.

Morgan spoke with Reuters about the images, baby boomers' deep pockets, and why some album covers were more useful than others.

Q: Album art got shrunk for CDs, and now in the iPod age it's reduced to about one inch square. Are we seeing the death of an art form?

A: "I genuinely think we are. You haven't anything to replace it with. For a while I had high hopes for the front pages of websites, but every site now has to have everything on the front page. There was a time when teenagers would carry albums around with them. The covers served to identify these tribes. The whole Baby Boomer generation's world changed after World War Two.

"Music has become incredibly homogeneous. There are no style tribes anymore. You can become a national star much quicker. Look at Lady Gaga. What's interesting is how old-fashioned her references are, whether it's David Bowie or Grace Jones or Madonna. The names she drops are '70s and '80s stars."

Q: Is the loss of this art form something deeply regrettable, or more akin to small losses like people no longer able to handwrite neatly?

A: "It depends on what age you are. I have a 13-year-old daughter and she really doesn't care. She wants the songs and she'll watch the video on YouTube, but actually having the CD is a pain. It gets ripped and put onto the iPod. I've got a great collection of vinyl and tell her, 'This is your inheritance.' She says, 'Great, Dad, why not sell it now?'"

Q: Did musicians decide on album covers, or their label?

A: "There were some, like Pink Floyd, that had absolute control. Others, like Scorpions, claim they had no idea. The covers were landed on them. That's mainly because the covers were so awful and they're covering their backs."

Q: Anyone nostalgic for the '70s and '80s can see Pat Benatar with REO Speedwagon this year, James Taylor with Carole King, or AC/DC, Scorpions and Jeff Beck with Eric Clapton. Are baby boomers increasingly the target audience?

A: "People in their 40s, 50s and 60s now have the money and they have the interest. I'm hoping there are covers here that people don't remember and might get people to search them out. There's a lot of stuff that's a bit more underground. Baby boomers missed a lot the first time around. There's a band called Gang of Four. Tickets for the reunion gigs were impossible to get."

Q: The images in the book have smudges and creases. These sleeves are clearly not just art objects to be held at arm's length. You intentionally avoided pristine images?

A: "Absolutely. And also, of course, they were used to roll joints. You'd put the tobacco and the dope in the crease. You look at prog rock albums, they're all gatefolds -- and that served a function."

Q: The book ends in 1995, when CDs took over. Have there been great covers since then?

A: "There are interesting unknown artists working on CD covers but when you see them blown up they don't look quite right. CD cover artists are working at that size but they don't stand up. But we have a recent trend toward vinyl again."

Q: What's behind that? Is it just a fad?

A: "I think it's probably a fad, because there's a whole retro thing. If look at emerging bands, there's a lot of guitar bands. Look at the equipment they're using. All of it was made before 1980. Part of it is a return to what rock and roll is supposed to sound like, going back to the whole Ramones and Clash thing. That's driving the vinyl (resurgence)."

Q: If these things go in cycles, is a 1980s New Wave revival next?

A: "My prediction is disco. Gaga is really pushing it. Gaga has emerged in a similar economic situation to the way disco emerged."

(Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6422YS20100503





J.D. Salinger Copyright Case to be Reconsidered

A lawsuit blocking publication of a purported "sequel" to J.D. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye" will be reconsidered in federal court, but Salinger's trustees are likely to prevail, an appeals court ruled Friday.

The unauthorized spin-off, "60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye," was barred from publication in the United States after Salinger -- who died in January at age 91 -- last year sued its Swedish author Fredrik Colting, who writes under the name J.D. California.

Colting's book is already available in other countries including Britain, where it is labeled on its cover as a sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye."

In July, a judge in Manhattan federal court blocked the publication of Colting's book.

Friday, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to the federal court to determine whether Salinger's trust will suffer irreparable harm from the publication of Colting's book.

But in its ruling, the appeals court made clear it expected Salinger's trust to prevail.

"Most of the matters relevant to Salinger's likelihood of success on the merits are either undisputed or readily established in his favor," the court ruled.

Salinger, a famous recluse whose 1951 novel is considered one of the great works of American literature, never submitted any deposition in the case. The book is a first-person narrative that relates teen-ager Holden Caulfield's experiences in New York City after being expelled from an elite school.

Colting's book begins with a character called Mr. C leaving a retirement home 60 years later. Both books end near a carousel in Central Park. Colting's lawyers argued the book was literary commentary or parody.

During oral arguments last September, Judge Guido Calabresi suggested Colting's work did not compare favorably to Salinger's. The spin-off is "rather dismal piece of work if I may say," he said.

Salinger's lawyer Marcia Paul said her client had turned down offers from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and director Steven Spielberg for a sequel. "Salinger does not want to authorize a sequel or a derivative," she said.

A lawyer for Colting did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Beyond Colting, the other defendants were Swedish publisher Nicotext, Windupbird Publishing and SCB distributors.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Eric Beech)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63T4N520100430





Shoppers Who Can’t Have Secrets
Natasha Singer

IT’S called behavioral tracking:

•

Cameras that can follow you from the minute you enter a store to the moment you hit the checkout counter, recording every T-shirt you touch, every mannequin you ogle, every time you blow your nose or stop to tie your shoelaces.

•

Web coupons embedded with bar codes that can identify, and alert retailers to, the search terms you used to find them and, in some cases, even your Facebook information and your name.

•

Mobile marketers that can find you near a store clothing rack, and send ads to your cellphone based on your past preferences and behavior.

To be sure, such retail innovations help companies identify their most profitable client segments, better predict the deals shoppers will pursue, fine-tune customer service down to a person and foster brand loyalty. (My colleagues Stephanie Rosenbloom and Stephanie Clifford have written in detail about the tracking prowess of store cameras and Web coupons.)

But these and other surveillance techniques are also reminders that advances in data collection are far outpacing personal data protection.

Enter the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and, yes, how much money they are making from them.

On the way out, consumer advocates say, is that quaint old notion of informed consent, in which a company clearly notifies you of its policies and gives you the choice of whether to opt in (rather than having you opt out once you discover your behavior is being tracked).

“How does notice and choice work when you don’t even interface with the company that has your data?” says Jessica Rich, a deputy director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission.

The commission has brought several dozen complaints against companies about possibly deceptive or unfair data collection and nearly 30 complaints over data security issues. In 2009, the commission proposed new guidelines for Web advertising that is tailored to user behavior.

The problem is, the F.T.C.’s guidelines are merely recommendations. Corporations can choose to follow them — or not. And the online advertising standards don’t apply to off-line techniques like observation in stores.

Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association based in Manhattan, says the advertising industry is not generally collecting personally identifiable data.

His group has worked closely with the F.T.C. on industry self-regulation, he says, and is developing new industry standards to alert consumers as they encounter ads based on their online behavior.

In the meantime, Mr. Zaneis says, consumers can use an industry program if they want to opt out of some behavior-based ads. As for mobile marketing, he says, consumers are always asked if they want to opt in to ads related to their cellphone location.

The larger issue here is not the invasion of any one person’s privacy as much as the explosive growth of a collective industry in behavioral information, says Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy.

“The whole business model is unfettered data collection of all your activities online and off,” Mr. Chester says. For example, he says that when consumers opt into cellphone ads, they may not understand that marketers may link their locations with information from third-party databases. The result, he says, is mobile dossiers about individual consumers.

As contradictory as it might sound, we need new strategies for transparent consumer surveillance.

In a country where we have a comprehensive federal law — the Fair Credit Reporting Act — giving us the right to obtain and correct financial data collected about us, no general federal statute requires behavioral data marketers to show us our files, says Ms. Rich of the F.T.C.

So, is the European model, involving independent government agencies called Data Protection Commissions that are charged with safeguarding people’s personal information, better than ours?

Europe’s privacy commissioners have generally been more forward-looking, examining potential privacy intrusions like biometric tracking, while the F.T.C. is still trying to understand the magnitude and the implications of the Web, says Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington.

“The U.S. system with regard to privacy is not working,” Mr. Rotenberg says.

By early fall, the F.T.C. plans to propose comprehensive new privacy guidelines intended to provide greater tools for transparency and better consumer control of personal information, Ms. Rich says.

In the meantime, what if consumers take a more active interest in who is collecting information about them?

In a recent documentary called “Erasing David,” the London-based filmmaker David Bond attempts to disappear from Britain’s surveillance grid, hiring experts from the security firm Cerberus to track him using all the information they can glean about him while he tries to outrun them. In the course of the film, the detectives even obtain a copy of the birth certificate of his daughter, then 18 months old.

But the real shocker is the information Mr. Bond is able to obtain about himself — by taking advantage of a data protection law in Britain that requires public agencies and private businesses to release a person’s data file upon his or her written request.

In one scene, Mr. Bond receives a phonebook-thick printout from Amazon.com listing everything he ever bought on the site; the addresses of every person to whom he ever sent a gift; and even the products he perused but did not ultimately buy.

He also receives a file from his bank, including a transcript of an irate phone call he once made after the bank lost one of his checks. The transcript noted that he seemed angry and raised his voice.

“It read like a mini-Stasi file,” Mr. Bond said when I called him last week. When recorded messages inform us that we may be taped “for training or quality assurance purposes,” he reminded me, we should remember that our conversation may end up in our dossiers.

INSPIRED by Mr. Bond’s odyssey, I called some companies with whom I do business.

A customer service representative at a bookstore chain where I have a discount card told me that the company maintains a list of the amount each member spends on each transaction so that the store can tell people how much money they saved at the end of the year. But a loyalty cardholder is not permitted to obtain his or her own purchase history.

Then I called an online travel agency and asked if I could get copies of my flight history and phone transcripts. I was regretting a disgruntled call I made to the agency a few months ago after being stranded at an airport in a blizzard. The customer care rep said clients couldn’t obtain their own transcripts unless it was for legal purposes.

Was I being taped this time, too? They always tape, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/bu.../02stream.html





Consumer Groups Say Proposed Privacy Bill Is Flawed
Stephanie Clifford

A LONG-AWAITED draft of a Congressional bill would extend privacy protections both on the Internet and off line, but privacy advocates said the bill did not go far enough in protecting consumers.

The draft legislation was released Tuesday by Representatives Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, and Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida. Mr. Boucher is the chairman of the House subcommittee on communications, technology and the Internet, and Mr. Stearns is the panel’s ranking minority member. The two lawmakers will collect comments on the draft, and hope to have formal legislation introduced within a month or so, Mr. Boucher said in an interview.

•

Consumer groups have been fighting what they see as the prevalence of online tracking, where online advertising is selected for a certain user — perhaps because he once visited a company’s home page, perhaps because he showed an interest in automobiles or baby products, or perhaps because he is a middle-aged man.

As opposition has intensified, companies like Google and Yahoo have adjusted their own privacy policies in response to consumer concern. Industry groups, while arguing that free Internet content depends on this type of sophisticated advertising, have issued their own self-regulatory principles.

This, though, “would be the first law that applies generally to businesses requiring privacy notice, particularly in the offline space,” said Lisa J. Sotto, a partner at Hunton & Williams who heads the law firm’s privacy and information management practice. “This bill represents a sea change.”

Right now, Ms. Sotto said, there is no national legislation governing how companies tell consumers that they are collecting data, but companies do post privacy notices because certain state laws require it.

The proposed bill would expand what information should be considered confidential. It would require companies to post clear and understandable privacy notices when they collected information. Such information could range from health or financial data to any unique identifier, including a customer identification number, a user’s race or sexual orientation, the user’s precise location or any preference profile the user has filled out. It could also include an Internet Protocol address, the numerical address assigned to each computer connecting to the Internet that many companies use now to aim particular messages at users, which the companies argue is not personally identifiable.

Essentially, companies would need to alert consumers whenever any information the companies are collecting can identify a single person or a single computer or device.

“This bill, were it to pass, would get us closer to the more stringent privacy regimes that we see in other countries,” Ms. Sotto said.

Significantly, the bill also requires companies to advise consumers even when they are collecting any of that information off line, which could include data houses and direct marketers.

The online and off-line privacy notices would have to include a description of the information being collected, why the company was collecting that information, how that information might be linked or combined with other data about the individual or computer, and why the company would disclose that information and to what types of other companies, among other requirements.

•

Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy for the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau, said that some of these definitions and requirements were “overly broad.” For instance, including an I.P. address in covered information would be a huge “change to existing laws here in the U.S. and would potentially have widespread implications.”

Mr. Boucher said that “our goal is to enhance electronic commerce — we are not seeking in any way to disable targeted advertising.”

He added, “We are largely tracking the best business practices that exist among the most consumer-oriented companies today.”

In a conference call with reporters, representatives from privacy and consumer groups said the draft included several loopholes that might let companies track consumers too closely.

There was an exemption from the disclosure requirements for what was called “operational” (defined as “a purpose reasonably necessary for the operation” of the company) or “transactional” (defined as “a purpose necessary for effecting, administering or enforcing” a transaction between company and customer). Those exceptions were “troubling,” said Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of these groups.

Privacy advocates said they were disappointed that this approach relied on a privacy policy, which few site visitors actually read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/bu...ia/05adco.html





Ariz. College to Position Sensors to Check Class Attendance

Devices would be installed in underclassmen lecture halls; some say infringes on privacy
David Brazy

Students at Northern Arizona University will have a hard time skipping large classes next fall because of a new attendance monitoring system.

The new system will use sensors to detect students’ university identification cards when they enter classrooms, according to NAU spokesperson Tom Bauer. The data will be recorded and available for professors to examine.

Bauer said the university’s main goal with the sensor system is to increase attendance and student performance.

“People are saying we are using surveillance or Orwellian [tactics] and, boy, I’m like ‘wow,’ I didn’t know taking attendance qualified as surveillance,” Bauer said.

University President John Haeger is encouraging professors to have attendance be a part of students’ grades, but he added it is not mandatory and up to each professor to decide, Bauer said.

Haeger added the sensors, paid for by federal stimulus money, initially would only be installed in large freshmen and sophomore classes with more than 50 students.

NAU Student Body President Kathleen Templin said most students seem to be against the new system. She added students have started Facebook groups and petitions against the sensor system.

NAU sophomore Rachel Brackett created one of the most popular Facebook groups, “NAU Against Proximity Cards,” which has more than 1,400 members.

Brackett said she chooses to go to class, and it is a right she hopes to preserve. She said not being forced to go to class is a part of the college experience.

“I feel as though having students make it their own decision to go to class is part of the process of becoming mature adults,” Brackett said.

Adam Kissel, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said this is the first time he has heard of such a system.

Kissel added if the school is strictly using the system for taking attendance in classrooms there would probably be no harm.

Kissel said with enough sensors, the system could be used to track students’ presence on campus 24 hours a day, which would be a problem for students’ rights.

“One thing that we find here at FIRE is that if the rule is there or the technology is there, the university will probably use it,” Kissel said.

Brackett said she feels the sensor system is an invasion of privacy. She said in theory, with the recorded data, many people in the university would be able to track students’ locations.

“It’s just one more step in the wrong direction…. I am finding out the more I study this particular issue,” Brackett said.

While some say the system is Orwellian, it is similar to an existing University of Wisconsin practice. Some UW classes use electronic clickers to take attendance and have students answer questions during class.

UW professor Dana Geary, who uses the clickers for one of her classes, said the clickers do not seem to affect the number of students who attend class.

Geary added the attendance grades were useful in helping her make decisions in grading for students whose grades were right at a boundary level.
http://badgerherald.com/news/2010/05...ge_to_posi.php





Wi-Fi Key-Cracking Kits Sold in China Mean Free Internet

Kits that crack WEP and guess WPA keys are popular despite hacking laws
Owen Fletcher

Dodgy salesmen in China are making money from long-known weaknesses in a Wi-Fi encryption standard, by selling network key-cracking kits for the average user.

Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China's bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year.

With one of the "network-scrounging cards," or "ceng wang ka" in Chinese, a user with little technical knowledge can easily steal passwords to get online via Wi-Fi networks owned by other people.

The kits are also cheap. A merchant in a Beijing bazaar sold one for 165 yuan ($24), a price that included setup help from a man at the other end of the sprawling, multistory building.

The main piece of the kits, an adapter with a six-inch antenna that plugs into a USB port, comes with a CD-ROM to install its driver and a separate live CD-ROM that boots up an operating system called BackTrack. In BackTrack, the user can run applications that try to obtain keys for two protocols used to secure Wi-Fi networks, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). After a successful attack by the applications, called Spoonwep and Spoonwpa, a user can restart Windows and use the revealed key to access its Wi-Fi network.

To crack a WEP key, the applications exploit weaknesses in the protocol that have been known for years. For WPA, they capture data being transmitted over the wireless network and target it with a brute-force attack to guess the key.

Security researchers said they did not know of similar kits sold anywhere besides China, even though tutorials on how to crack WEP have been online for years.

The kits appear to be illegal in China and it is unclear who is bundling the software with the USB adapters. One of the adapter makers is Wifly-City, a company that operates a Wi-Fi network covering coffee shops and other areas in Taipei, Taiwan. A woman surnamed Ren who answered the phone at the company said it does not supply the software that often appears with its products.

A developer of BackTrack said the operating system is meant for penetration testing, not malicious attacks. "It sounds like BackTrack is being abused in China for illegal purposes. This is done without our knowledge or approval," the developer, who goes by the name Muts, said in an e-mail.

One of the kits took over an hour to crack the WEP key equivalent to the password "sugar" in a test attack on a personal router set up for the purpose using 40-bit encryption.

"Depending on many factors, WEP keys can be extracted in a matter of minutes," Muts said. "I believe the record is around 20 seconds."

The brute-force attacks on WPA encryption are less effective. But while WEP is outdated, many people still use it, especially on home routers, said one security researcher in China. That means an apartment building is bound to have WEP networks for a user to attack.

Since the kits capture data packets to perform their attacks, they may also let a user steal sensitive personal information that a victim sends over a network, the researcher said.

The kits have stayed popular despite Chinese laws against hacking.

"No matter where you go, you can use the Internet for free," the researcher said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...source=nww_rss





Hacker Develops Multi-Platform Rootkit for ATMs

One year after being blocked, researcher Barnaby Jack will finally give a controversial Black Hat talk
Robert McMillan

One year after his Black Hat talk on Automated Teller Machine security vulnerabilities was yanked by his employer, security researcher Barnaby Jack plans to deliver the talk and disclose a new ATM rootkit at the computer security conference.

He plans to give the talk, entitled "Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines," at the Black Hat Las Vegas conference, held July 28 and 29.
Building a Secure and Compliant Windows Desktop: Download now

Jack will demonstrate several ways of attacking ATM machines, including remote, network-based attacks. He will also reveal a "multi-platform ATM rootkit," and will discuss things that the ATM industry can do to protect itself from such attacks, he writes in his description of the talk, posted this week to the Black Hat Web site.

Jack was set to discuss ATM security problems at last year's conference, but his employer, Juniper Networks, made him pull the presentation after getting complaints from an ATM maker that was worried that the information he had discovered could be misused.

The security researcher found a straightforward way of getting around Juniper's objections, however. Last month, he took a new job as director of security research with IOActive.

ATM machines do get compromised, but in a roundabout way. Thieves often hit them by installing card skimmers on them to extract magnetic stripe data from the cards. Then, using a hidden video camera, they steal login numbers. Using all of this information, the crooks can build their own duplicate cards and empty bank accounts.

But Jack's talk looks at a new area: bugs in the software used to run the machines.

He's taken advantage of the extra year provided by Juniper's ban to do more research. "Last year, there was one ATM; this year, I'm doubling down and bringing two new model ATMs from two major vendors," Jack says in his talk description. The security researcher couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Jack doesn't say which ATMs he plans to discuss, but it could be any major vendor, according to Black Hat Director Jeff Moss. "He's got a living room full of a lot of different brands of ATMs, and they all seem to suffer from one or the other problem," he said.

ATMs haven't received a lot of serious scrutiny by security researchers, so Jack's talk will break new ground, Moss said. "Apparently you can make all the money come out," he said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...otkit-for.html





U.S. Treasury Web Sites Hacked, Serving Malware

Hackers targeted known bugs, including flaws in Adobe's Reader, to redirect visitors to a Web site in the Ukraine associated with similar attacks in the past
Robert McMillan

Three Web sites belonging to the U.S. Department of the Treasury have been hacked to attack visitors with malicious software, security vendor AVG says.

AVG researcher Roger Thompson discovered the issue Monday on three Web domains associated with the home page of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. As of late Monday, all three Web sites were still actively serving malicious software and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Web site should be avoided until it's clear that they've been cleaned up, Thompson said in an interview via instant message.

Although the Treasury Department could not be reached for comment, IT staff there appear to be aware of the problem. On Tuesday morning, all three sites had apparently been taken offline and were returning a "page not found" error.
Malware Deep Dive

According to Thompson, hackers had added a small snippet of virtually undetectable iframe HTML code that redirected visitors to a Web site in the Ukraine that then launched a variety of Web-based attacks based on a commercially available attack-kit called the Eleonore Exploit pack.

The Ukrainian Web site was associated with similar attacks in the past. Those attacks targeted a handful of known software bugs, including flaws in Adobe's Reader software.

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing provides information on U.S. currency -- how to identify counterfeit bills for example -- and just two weeks ago had used its Web site to promote the newly redesigned $100 bill.

It's not clear how hackers managed to install their malicious code on the Treasury Department's Web sites.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-...ng-malware-624





Microsoft Kills off Newsgroups

Herds users into forums instead
John Oates

Microsoft is killing off its newsgroups and encouraging users to move to forums instead.

The software giant has over 2,000 public groups covering its various products, as well as 2,200 private groups for the likes of Microsoft resellers. But from June 2010 these will be moved to revamped forums on TechNet, MSDN and Microsoft Answers.

Microsoft said: "Forums offer a better spam management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a healthy discussion space."

Apart from spam Microsoft said it was appealing that "we own the app" and could continue to develop new back-end services. These include support for Questions and Answers flagged by authoritative users, subscription to RSS or notification services and voting for useful posts.

Forums also last longer - newsgroup posts were typically deleted after 90 days.

Although Microsoft admitted there would be some cost-savings from the move it said visitors to newsgroups had fallen by a half over the last fiscal year. It will post notices in the groups it closes in a progressive manner, starting with the least-used groups.

More from Microsoft here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05..._kills_groups/





New Attack Bypasses Virtually all AV Protection

Bait, switch, exploit!
Dan Goodin

Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender.

The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload.

The exploit has to be timed just right so the benign code isn't switched too soon or too late. But for systems running on multicore processors, matousec's "argument-switch" attack is fairly reliable because one thread is often unable to keep track of other simultaneously running threads. As a result, the vast majority of malware protection offered for Windows PCs can be tricked into allowing malicious code that under normal conditions would be blocked.

All that's required is that the AV software use SSDT, or System Service Descriptor Table, hooks to modify parts of the OS kernel.

"We have performed tests with [most of] today's Windows desktop security products," the researchers wrote. "The results can be summarized in one sentence: If a product uses SSDT hooks or other kind of kernel mode hooks on similar level to implement security features it is vulnerable. In other words, 100% of the tested products were found vulnerable."

The researchers listed 34 products that they said were susceptible to the attack, but the list was limited by the amount of time they had for testing. "Otherwise, the list would be endless," they said.

The technique works even when Windows is running under an account with limited privileges.

Still, the exploit has its limitations. It requires a large amount of code to be loaded onto the targeted machine, making it impractical for shellcode-based attacks or attacks that rely on speed and stealth. It can also be carried out only when an attacker already has the ability to run a binary on the targeted PC.

Still, the technique might be combined with an exploit of another piece of software, say, a vulnerable version of Adobe Reader or Oracle's Java Virtual Machine to install malware without arousing the suspicion of the any AV software the victim was using.

"Realistic scenario: someone uses McAfee or another affected product to secure their desktops," H D Moore, CSO and Chief Architect of the Metasploit project, told The Register in an instant message. "A malware developer abuses this race condition to bypass the system call hooks, allowing the malware to install itself and remove McAfee. In that case, all of the 'protection' offered by the product is basically moot."

A user without administrative rights could also use the attack to kill an installed and running AV, even though only admin accounts should be able to do this, Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, said.

Matousec.com's research is here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05...tch_av_bypass/


















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- js.



















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