Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 11th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Every musician should read these ten pages. It affects everyone." – Punch Andrews




































September 11th, 2010





European Police in Pirate Raids
BBC

Police have conducted a series of raids across Europe in one of its biggest crackdowns on file-sharing.

Police targeted 48 sites in countries including the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Hungary.

In Sweden, seven premises were raided including PRQ, which is believed to host Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

Co-ordinated by Belgian police, the operation was the culmination of a two-year investigation.

Off-network

Swedish prosecutors said the raids targeted a network called "The Scene" which offered downloads of films before they were available on DVD.

Umea University was among the premises targeted.

So far the raids have resulted in four arrests in Sweden and servers and computers have been seized from all seven Swedish premises, according to the Swedish police.

They said the raids had no links to WikiLeaks.

Belgian police are expected to make a statement later today.

Authorites across the globe have toughened their stances on illegal file-sharing in recent months, with governments including the UK, introducing tough new policies to deter individuals.

Mark Mulligan, an analyst with research firm Forrester, questioned the wisdom of both the raids and increased legislation.

"File-sharing operations are no longer centralised and any server is only ever going to be a cog in the wheel," he said.

"This is just like customs seizing drugs - it doesn't really affect the level of drug trafficking."

"These things are necessary but the simple fact is that the judiciary and legislative bodies move much slower than technology. There are now dozens of different ways to share music off-network," he added.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11227813





Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates
Ben Grubb

The film industry is using pirate tactics to beat the pirates – by employing “cyber hitmen” to launch attacks that take out websites hosting illegal movies.

Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software, a firm in India, told this website that his company, which works for the film industry, was being hired - effectively as hitmen - to launch cyber attacks on sites hosting pirated movies that don't respond to copyright infringement notices sent to them by the film industry.

Kumar said 95 per cent of sites hosting illegal movies co-operated with notices, but a few - mostly sites hosting torrents and used primarily for illegal content - did not.

"Most movies are released on Friday morning at 10am in India," Kumar said in a telephone interview. "The movie is released in the morning [and] by afternoon it's on the internet."

His company trawled the net to find movies uploaded, he said.

"What we do is we see all those links on the net," he said.

"We find the hosting [computer] server and send them a copyright infringement notice because they're not meant to have those links. If they don't remove [the link] we send them a second notice and ask them [again] to remove it."

He said that if the provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server.

In Australia, distrubuted-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are an offence under section 477.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995, according to the Australian Federal Police. As for DoS attacks, which are different, according to Australian law a person is guilty of an offence if the person causes "any unauthorised impairment of electronic communication to or from a computer".

According to news site Daily News & Analysis, Kumar's company sometimes went further in its attacks.

"At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further," the site quoted him as saying.

"Generally speaking 95 per cent of ... providers do remove the content. It's only the torrent sites - 20 to 25 per cent of the torrent sites - that do not have respect for any of the copyright notices," Kumar said.

"How can we put the site down? The only means that we can put the site down is [by launching a] denial-of-service [attack]. Basically we have to flood [the site] with millions and millions of requests and put the site down."

He said commercial sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion were the only sites that responded promptly to infringement notices.

"They are immediately responding to our copyright notices and removing the links and this is saving immense revenue to the producers [of movies]," he said.

Asked whether his company ever warned when it was to launch a DoS attack on a site if it did not remove pirated content, Kumar said that it did not.

"No, we don't do that. We generally ask them to respect the copyright notices under DMCA ruling XYZ."

Kumar even pledged to come to Australia to help out on internet piracy here.

"If you want me to service any Australian companies I would be really pleased to come down and do a presentation and work for the Australian movie [industry] also if they are willing," he said.

Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company's services came from the film industry in India.

"We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses."

As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.

"We are tied up with Fox STAR Studios - Star TV and 20th Century Fox - who are a joint venture company in India."

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, or AFACT, which represents the film industry on piracy in Australia, said it did not condone the activities of Kumar's company.

"The methodology [used by Kumar's company] ... is not something that AFACT has undertaken nor sub-contracted to outside vendors," executive director Neil Gane said.

Asked whether it, on behalf of the Australian film industry, would use Kumar's services, it said: "AFACT have very talented in-house investigators and a successful track record that does not require outside vendors to assist in ongoing criminal investigations."

"AFACT investigates websites that infringe our member companies content and refers such alleged criminal matters to law-enforcement agencies using investigative techniques that are within the law, cost effective and would elicit the necessary level of evidence to support further police inquiries."
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...907-14ypv.html





How an Anti-Piracy Firm Became Banned In Its Own Country
enigmax

A notorious Switzerland-based anti-piracy tracking company has to stop harvesting the IP addresses of citizens using P2P networks. The Swiss High Court ruled that IP addresses constitute personal information and when Logistep collected them without the owner’s knowledge, that amounted to a breach of privacy laws. From its eDonkey Razorback beginnings, via France through to yesterday’s conclusion, here is the full story.

logistepThe road to curtailing the Swiss activities of Logistep has been a long one and although it ended in Switzerland, the complaints began in France.

Back in 2007, Razorback, the non-profit group which previously administered the well known Razorback eDonkey server, alerted data protection authority Préposé fédéral à la protection des données et à la transparence (PFPDT) about the activities of Logistep.

Logistep works in a particularly controversial area of anti-piracy action. It collects the IP addresses of those it believes are sharing its clients’ media on the Internet and that data is then used to identify them through the courts. Once found, they receive cash demands to make lawsuits go away.

The company’s work came to light in France when hundreds of file-sharers received letters accusing them of sharing the game Call of Juarez. For Elizabeth Martin, the lawyer who did Logistep’s work in France, the experience was not a happy one.

As originally reported by Numerama, The Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (French Commission of Freedom and Computings, roughly the equivalent of the Préposé Fédéral in Switzerland) stated that because Martin had failed to declare her activities, her work in this area was illegal.

Furthermore, Martin also became the subject of a disciplinary investigation conducted by her own peers. Condemning her, a lawyer’s disciplinary board declared, “By choosing to reproduce aggressive foreign methods, intended to force payments, the interested party also violated [the code] which specifies that the lawyer cannot unfairly represent a situation or seriousness of threat.”

Martin was ordered by the disciplinary board to suspend her activities as a lawyer for 6 months and she was banned from belonging to lawyers’ professional associations for a period of 10 years. France had not gone well for Logistep and back in Switzerland, things were heating up.

In January 2008 the Swiss data protection authority (Préposé fédéral à la protection des données et à la transparence) published a recommendation that Logistep stop collecting IP addresses in Switzerland. Among other things it argued that it was unacceptable that Logistep collects data without the knowledge of people involved and that the systematic collection and recording of data in order to track violations of copyright does not conform to the purpose of the P2P applications.

Logistep was dismissive of the request (the Préposé can only make recommendations) and vowed to carry on regardless. It did just that. In response the Préposé – with the assistance of the former Razorback administrator mentioned earlier and his lawyer Sébastien Fanti – filed a lawsuit.

In June 2009 the Federal Administrative Court (TAF) came to a decision, one which saw it overrule the Federal Data Protection commissioner’s decision of 2008.

While the Court acknowledged that the monitoring and data harvesting activities conducted by Logistep raised privacy concerns, it decided that those concerns were trumped by the needs of the anti-piracy company. In a nutshell, since there are few other ways to deal with this type of online piracy, the end justified the means. Logistep could continue.

Refusing to accept this decision, the Préposé decided to appeal the ruling. Yesterday that road came to an end and it was bad news for Logistep.

In a ruling by the Federal Court – which is final and cannot be appealed – the activities of Logistep were declared illegal in Switzerland.

From a panel of 5 judges, the vote was 3 to 2 in favor of the Préposé and against Logistep, with a statement that the breaches of privacy carried out by the company were illegal. Even the judges who believed that Logistep acted legally agreed that IP addresses are private data.

According to Numerama, who have followed this case closely, the ruling was public which is unusual in these types of case. This type of arrangement is usually there to make clear a court’s intent to set a precedent.

The ruling means that it is now illegal to collect IP addresses in Switzerland with the aim of later filing a lawsuit, and the ruling reinforces the notion that IP addresses are private data. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Swiss courts will accept IP addresses gathered from outside the country as evidence against suspected file-sharers either.

For Logistep, however, with a flick of a switch or two it will be business almost as usual. They have already announced a relocation of their data harvesting operation to Germany.

For former Razorback admin bile666, the battle goes on. Despite complying with notice and takedown requests, several years ago the Razorback eDonkey server was seized and that lawsuit continues today.

However, in light of this Swiss decision, TorrentFreak is informed that lawyer Sébastien Fanti and bile666 are seriously considering filing lawsuits against the IFPI and other companies that collected Swiss IP addresses so that criminal proceedings can also be initiated against them.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...ountry-100909/





Subpoenas for Internet Users
AP

A federal judge on Friday allowed the holder of a movie copyright to subpoena the names of people accused of illegally downloading and distributing a film over the Internet.

Courts have held that Internet subscribers do not have an expectation of privacy once they convey subscriber information to their Internet service providers, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled.

Collyer denied motions by some computer users to quash subpoenas for subscriber information.

The decision came in the case of a German limited partnership which is suing some Internet users for copyright infringement of the movie "Far Cry," a video game adaptation.

Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs Gmbh & Co KG, a creator and distributor of motion pictures, holds an exclusive license to the copyright of "Far Cry" in which two reporters investigate the deaths of mercenaries on an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

The partnership identified the Internet protocol addresses of computers associated with the alleged infringement. It then subpoenaed the Internet service providers seeking names of individuals associated with those addresses. Notified by their provider, some of the customers challenged the subpoenas.
http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=3163





EU Parliamentarians Criticize Anti-Counterfeiting Deal

An EU commissioner says the talks are 'disappointing'
Jennifer Baker

The proposed multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has hit a stumbling block over the liability of ISPs in allowing customers access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and the inclusion of geographic indicators.

European Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht, gave a statement to the European Parliament on Tuesday and attempted to downplay fears that the agreement could infringe individual civil liberties and result in increased border searches for counterfeit and pirated goods. Personal laptops and MP3 players will not be searched, the commissioner said, adding that only piracy and counterfeiting on a commercial scale are of interest.

However, he said that he would walk away from any deal if it did not include so-called geographic indicators, which aim to protect E.U. products such as champagne or Parma ham. De Gucht described the latest round of negotiations in Washington, D.C., last month as "disappointing".

The international deal seeks to enforce intellectual property rights and combat online piracy and illegal software. But parliamentarians are still very concerned about the secretive nature of the negotiations as U.S. officials have prevented the European Commission from publishing the draft agreement online. Some 377 MEPs have signed a document calling on E.U. negotiators to reveal the full negotiating text to Parliament before any deal is signed. "There is confusion and vagueness about what is targeted," said French MEP Françoise Castex.

MEPs will have to approve any deal and are concerned that the agreement may not uphold E.U. rules on data protection and privacy. There are fears that "big business" will be protected at the expense of consumers. Under the latest draft, governments are still free to legislate on piracy and ISPs at their own discretion, but there are fears that where stricter countries lead, others will follow. Ireland has already instigated a so-called three-strikes rule making ISP Eircom responsible for preventing file sharing and cracking down on individual customers' downloads.

Some parliamentarians also queried the effectiveness of an agreement that does not include China, the source of the vast majority of counterfeit goods coming on to the E.U. market. Last year, China accounted for almost 65 percent of all cases of counterfeit goods seized by E.U. customs.

The 10th round of negotiations will take place in Japan later this month.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...erfeiting.html





ACTA Text Leaks: U.S. Concedes on Secondary Liability, Wants To Go Beyond DMCA on Digital Locks
Michael Geist

Given the history of ACTA leaks, to no one's surprise, the latest version of the draft agreement was leaked last night on KEI's website. The new version - which reflects changes made during an intense week of negotiations last month in Washington - shows a draft agreement that is much closer to becoming reality. Square brackets have been removed from many sections, leaving the core issue of scope of the agreement as the biggest issue to be resolved when the next round of negotiations begins in a few weeks in Japan.

Perhaps the most important story of the latest draft is how the countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement chapter. The Internet enforcement chapter has been among the most contentious since the U.S. first proposed draft language that would have globalized the DMCA and raised the prospect of three strikes and you're out. In the face of opposition, the U.S. has dropped its demands on secondary liability but is still holding out hope of establishing digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by its own courts.

The key takeaways from the Internet chapter, noting that Canada has reserved the right to revisit elements of this chapter at a later date:

1. There is still disagreement on scope - the EU wants it to apply to all intellectual property, while the U.S. would limit to copyright and trademark. This disagreement occurs throughout the ACTA text.

2. Each party is now required to provide the means to address infringement in the digital environment, including unlawful file sharing and streaming. There are no specific requirements and the provision notes that these procedures must preserve principles related to freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy.

3. The secondary liability provisions that focused on ISP liability have been dropped entirely. Instead, the chapter requires countries to promote cooperative efforts with the business community to address infringement and says that countries may provide that authorities have the power to order ISPs to disclose subscriber information. Note that the disclosure power is not a requirement but rather something a country "may" do.

4. The anti-circumvention provisions remain somewhat in play. There is general agreement on a broad provision that largely mirrors the WIPO Internet treaties in calling for "adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures." If the obligation were to end there, the provision would simply ensure that all ACTA countries establish anti-circumvention rules, with all the flexibility that WIPO allows.

However, the U.S. is still pushing for two additional provisions that would define adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies in an effort to limit the flexibility that all countries agreed to with the WIPO Internet treaties in the 1990s. The U.S. approach would mandate protection against circumvention of access controls as well as include several prohibitions against devices that can be used to circumvention, potentially even including marketing circumvention devices. The EU has reserved its position on the entire additional provision, Japan opposes parts of it, and (as mentioned) Canada has reserved on the entire chapter (presumably with this section in mind). Moreover, the U.S. also supports a second provision that makes it clear that circumvention does not even require infringement of copyright. This appears to contradict recent U.S. caselaw and would raise constitutional issues in Canada. The EU has proposed deleting the entire provision.

This chapter is far better than the initial U.S. proposal, but other countries - particularly Canada - should hold out for anti-circumvention rules that mirror the WIPO Internet treaties. The U.S. demands would currently have a significant impact on the debate on C-32, effectively constraining the House of Commons' ability to tinker with portions of the digital lock rules. Moreover, the attempt to de-link circumvention from copyright infringement runs counter to a growing body of U.S. jurisprudence and appears to be a USTR attempt to re-write elements of the DMCA as interpreted by U.S. courts. I'll post more on the rest of the leaked agreement shortly.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5285/125/





Nevada GOP Candidate Faces Copyright Lawsuit

A company has sued Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, claiming she reprinted two Las Vegas Review-Journal articles on her campaign website without permission.

Las Vegas-based Righthaven is seeking unspecified damages in its complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.

The suit alleges Angle neither sought nor received permission to display a Review-Journal article and editorial on her website this summer.

An Angle spokesman says he would not comment until the campaign's lawyers have reviewed the suit.

Righthaven tracks Internet traffic for copyright infringements of Review-Journal stories. It then buys the copyright for a story from the newspaper's owner, Stephens Media LLC, and sues the alleged infringer.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_nevada...yright_lawsuit





Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought
David Kravets

A federal appeals court said Friday that software makers can use shrink-wrap and click-wrap licenses to forbid the transfer or resale of their wares, an apparent gutting of the so-called first-sale doctrine.

The first-sale doctrine is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that allows legitimate owners of copies of copyrighted works to resell those copies. That defense, the court said, is “unavailable to those who are only licensed to use their copies of copyrighted works.” (.pdf)

The 3-0 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal, if it stands, means copyright owners may prohibit the resale of their wares by inserting clauses in their sales agreements.

“The terms of the software license in the case are not very different from the terms of most software licensing. So I think it’s safe to say that most people don’t own their software,” said Greg Beck, the defense attorney in the case who represented an eBay seller sued by Autodesk. “The other ramification, there is no reason a similar license could not be put into the cover of a book. It wouldn’t be difficult for everybody to implement this.”

Beck said he will ask the San Francisco-based appeals court to rehear the case with 11 judges.

The Software & Information Industry Association, whose members include Google, Adobe, McAfee, Oracle and dozens of others, urged the court to rule as it did. The Motion Picture Association of America also sided with Autodesk.

The American Library Association and eBay argued against the outcome. The library association said it feared that the software industry’s licensing practices could be adopted by other copyright owners, including book publishers, record labels and movie studios.

That assertion was not lost on the appeals court, saying Congress is free to modify copyright law “if it deems these or other policy considerations … require a different approach.”

It was believed to be the first appellate ruling directly addressing whether a user agreement could forbid resales of software, though the appellate courts have previously backed companies that have imposed terms on how software may be used. The decision covers the nine western states, including California.

The appeals court reversed a lower court judge that said the first-sale doctrine applied whenever the consumer is entitled to keep the copy of the work, entitling consumers to resell their purchased software at will.

The case concerns Autodesk’s AutoCAD Release 14, which was for sale on eBay. Autodesk, invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, demanded eBay remove the item from the site, and it promptly did in 2007.

Timothy Vernor, the seller, who purchased at least four copies of the software from a company that was required to dispose of the software under a licensing agreement, re-posted the sale and his eBay account was terminated after Autodesk complained. Litigation ensued.

Autodesk, of San Rafael, California, imposed a significant number of transfer restrictions: it stated that the software could not be transferred or leased without Autodesk’s written consent, and the software could not be transferred outside the Western Hemisphere.

The first-sale doctrine of 1909, in its current form, allows the “owner of a particular copy” of a copyrighted work to sell or dispose of his copy without the copyright owner’s authorization. “The first sale doctrine does not apply to a person who possesses a copy of the copyrighted work without owning it, such as a licensee,” the court ruled.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...sale-doctrine/





UK Music Calls for Truce with Technology

The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing.

Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music.

Sharkey, a campaigner against people copying music on the internet and the technology they use, said it had become apparent that technology and creativity were inseparable.

"It's now time for ISPs and tech companies to sit down together and possibly for the first time have a broad adult conversation. Our future is now totally dependent, totally entwined, totally symbiotic," he told an audience of industry, government and media at the Westminster Forum this morning.

Sharkey was on rousing form. The former pop star called dramatically for the mobilization of British music and technology producers: "By 2020. We. Want. To rival. The United States. As the largest. Source of repertoire. And artistry. In. The. World."

"In short," he said, "We want to be number one."

The music industry scored a controversial success in April when the last government passed the Digital Economy Act, which would sanction the removal of people's internet connections if they were suspected of sharing copyrighted music online.

This had helped restore the equilibrium between creativity and technology that had, said Sharkey, been out of kilter. It was but a single "stepping stone" toward the music industry's goal of having people "remunerated for their talent time, effort and ability".

Nevertheless, he said, there should be a "reality check". Internet applications providers should think not about how many users they could get, but how sustainable were their business models.

"The internet has given everybody the opportunity to be a busker," he said. But with a nod to Napster, MySpace, We7, the Ipod, broadband, declared: "You can't democratize genius".

He appealed for "the ultimate solution", which was a music market place.

"It's now imperative that we all look forward and move towards what I hope will be a very bright and successful future, where the British music industry can in 10 years time become not only number one, but in doing so take British technology companies with us. My name's Feargal Sharkey. May God be with you."
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/9/4/uk-m...ce-technology/





Pure Music Boosts MP3s

New program enhances playback of digital audio files, a service curiously lacking in otherwise tech-savvy times.
Kevin Hunt

Why in the name of Justin Bieber does a 99-cent iTunes track still have less than a tenth of the digital resolution of a CD?

You, with the iPod: "Portability!"

Even with digital-television resolution reaching higher and higher, from 480 pixels (p) to 720p to 1080p and now 3-D's eye-bulging Full HD, home audio remains stuck in the iTunes Store Age. Pure Music, a new Mac-only audio software program from Channel D of Trenton, N.J., perhaps anticipates a dawning era of higher-resolution music on full-size, computer-centric sound systems.

Once launched, Pure Music reduces iTunes to a music database and organizational tool. You'll select songs as usual through iTunes, but Pure Music performs all audio functions, enhancing playback of CD-quality files and adjusting on the fly to even higher-resolution files now available for download at sites such as HDtracks.com.

After distilling its 39-page, read-it-or-you're-lost manual, the user will find countless options and combinations. What's the right one? Whichever sounds best.

Crunch time

To see what inspired Pure Music, follow the numbers:

Songs purchased at the iTunes Store are 128 kilobits per second. Higher-quality iTunes Plus songs are 256 kbps.

CDs transferred to a computer at full, uncompressed fidelity are 1,411 kbps, more than 10 times a standard iTunes Store purchase.

If you're transferring CDs to a hard drive, make the files CD quality. Use lossless files (such as Apple Lossless), which take up less space than uncompressed files (like .Wav or AIFF) but do not discard any information from the original as MP3s do.

Next, say goodbye to your computer's low-fi soundcard. Get an external converter like the HRT Music Streamer II ($149 at amazon.com) that bypasses the soundcard and converts digital music files to analog waves detectable by the human ear. Then connect it to your audio system.

How Pure Music works

Pure Music ($129 purchase; free 15-day demo) is an abridged, playback-only version of Pure Vinyl ($229), another Mac-only program used for digitizing vinyl recordings. Engineer Robert Robinson, a former research scientist and project manager at Bell Communications, oversees both projects.

Some observations:

Memory Play/Hybrid Memory Play: Shifts a song from a noisy, spinning hard drive onto a computer's stable, stationary RAM. Your computer should have 4 gigabytes of RAM. The hybrid mode, which stores less of each song, needs only 2 gigabytes.

Pure Music sounded best in Memory Play mode at my in-home audition: relaxed, engaging and less obviously digital.

Hog mode: The purest path for the digital signal, giving Pure Music exclusive use of the converter. To these ears, Memory Play made a bigger difference. Together? Maybe even better.

Upsampling: Like a DVD player that "upconverts" a movie to near-HDTV quality, Pure Music uses upsampling to make a CD-type track sound more like a high-resolution track. In my audition, it added an undesirable stridency. I left it off.

Wireless: Pure Music does not work with Airport Express, Apple's mini-base station with Airtunes that can stream music up to CD quality. Instead, Pure Music can stream high-resolution or upsampled tracks using the NetSend wireless feature.

Bugs: During the early parts of my tests, Pure Music was plagued by delays, freezes and crashes. It stabilized substantially after a version 1.6 update in early August.

The biggest step in improved computer audio sound is still getting an external converter as a bridge to a home audio system. Pure Music, though, gives hope that digital audio some day will catch up to hi-def video.
http://www.courant.com/business/cust...55,full.column





UMG Loses Lawsuit Over Eminem Royalties
FMQB

A federal appeals court in California has ruled in favor of Eminem and his producers in a court battle against Universal Music Group (UMG), with a decision over digital music royalties that could have far-reaching effects in the music industry. The court reversed a lower-court jury decision from 2009, and ruled that Em and his production company are due almost three times as many royalties as they had received for digital sales of songs and ringtones. UMG is expected to appeal the court's decision.

Eminem's former production company, FBT Productions, filed the lawsuit against UMG and Aftermath Records. "This potentially readjusts the economics between the artist and the record company, and that’s been long overdue," FBT’s Joel Martin told the DetroitFree Press. "It puts Eminem in a position he should have been in to begin with, which is to receive a larger portion of the download royalties."

In the suit, FBT claimed that selling songs via iTunes was similar to licensing deals for music and TV and should award a 50 percent royalty rate, while UMG said a standard 18 percent royalty rate should be the norm, a la physical sales.

"In the meantime, it should be noted that this ruling sets no legal precedent as it only concerns the language of one specific recording agreement," Universal spokesman Peter Lofrumento wrote in a statement. However, L.A.-based attorney Gary Stiffelman told the Free Press that he believes if this ruling stands and "downloads are the way of the future, this is going to have massive implications. It changes the playing field.”

Bob Seger's manager Punch Andrews also told the Free Press that the ruling is "staggering" and that "every musician should read these ten pages. [meaning the court decision, which can be found here] It affects everyone."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1943621





Why are Books so Big?
Got Medieval

Seems the Google algorithm ferried a confused soul to my post about the silly study that claimed you could tell how big portion sizes were throughout history by looking at famous pictures contained in a single coffee table book, when all said confused soul wanted to know was, "Why are medieval books so big?"

Ah, my poor wayward Googler, medieval books are no bigger or smaller than modern books, generally speaking. Gutenberg and the other early printers didn't invent a whole new format for books, they just copied what people were already using.

The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size they were? And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were. Remember, paper wasn't the original medium for page-creation. Medieval books were constructed of parchment, which is a fancy word for sheep or goat skin (and primarily sheep skin, because there were a lot more of them around). So take your average sheep:

Skin her and trim off the curvy parts where her legs used to be, and you get one gigantic sheet of parchment, way too big for most bookmaking purposes.

But that's fine, because you can fold it in half and you'll get a huge but manageable pair of leaves (four pages counting front and back), which you can gather with a lot of other similarly sized leaves and make a "folio"-sized book, the sort of giant monstrosity of a book that you have to leave spread out on a table before you in order to read and which, not surprisingly, they don't tend to make too many of these days. It's good size for a fancy atlas, but since we've all got Google Earth, who needs that? Or if you need to make an edition of the complete works of somebody famous, like so:

• Fold that single-folded sheet once more and you'll have an eight-page-per-sheep book they call a quarto (for 4 leaves), which is the fancy dictionary or encyclopedia-sized book.

• Fold it again and you get an octavo, which is about the size of a modern hardback, give or take.

• Fold it one more time and you get a sixteenmo, or around the size of a mass-market paperback book.

• One more fold gets you thirty-twomo, which is about the size of your standard notepad (or just a bit bigger than your smartphone), and at this point you're talking books designed to hide away in your girdle or hang from a chain around your neck. So if you're going that small, why not fold it one last time and you get down to a sixty-fourmo, and impress all the cool kids at the cathedral next week?

So there you go: books are as big as they are because medieval sheep were as big as they were. Next time you're squinting at your mass-market copy of Dan Brown's latest wishing the pages were just a smidge roomier, blame the medievals for not having bigger sheep.
http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010...e-penance.html





The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
John Markoff

Dr. Alan Shatzel’s pager beeped at 9 on a Saturday morning. A man had suffered a stroke, and someone had to decide, quickly, whether to give him an anticlotting drug that could mean the difference between life and death.

Dr. Shatzel, a neurologist, hustled not to the emergency room where the patient lay — 260 miles away, in Bakersfield — but to a darkened room at a hospital here. He took a seat in front of the latest tools of his trade: computer monitors, a keyboard and a joystick that control his assistant on the scene — a robot on wheels.

He guided the roughly five-foot-tall machine, which has a large monitor as its “head,” into the patient’s room in Bakersfield. Dr. Shatzel’s face appeared on screen, and his voice issued from a speaker.

Dr. Shatzel acknowledged the nurse and introduced himself to the patient’s grandson, explaining that he would question the patient to determine whether he was a candidate for the drug. The robot’s stereophonic hearing conveyed the answers. Using the hypersensitive camera on the monitor, Dr. Shatzel zoomed in and out and swung the display left and right, much as if he were turning his head to look around the room.

For years, the military and law enforcement agencies have used specialized robots to disarm bombs and carry out other dangerous missions. This summer, such systems helped seal a BP well a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, with rapidly falling costs, the next frontiers are the office, the hospital and the home.

Mobile robots are now being used in hundreds of hospitals nationwide as the eyes, ears and voices of doctors who cannot be there in person. They are being rolled out in workplaces, allowing employees in disparate locales to communicate more easily and letting managers supervise employees from afar. And they are being tested as caregivers in assisted-living centers.

“Computers are beginning to grow wheels and roll around in the environment,” said Jeanne Dietsch, a veteran roboticist and co-founder of MobileRobots Inc., a robot maker in Amherst, N.H., and a division of Adept Technologies.

Skeptics say these machines do not represent a great improvement over video teleconferencing. But advocates say the experience is substantially better, shifting control of space and time to the remote user.

“Most of the existing videoconferencing technology is designed for meetings,” said Pamela J. Hinds, co-director at the Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford University. “That is not where most work gets done.”

For now, most of the mobile robots, sometimes called telepresence robots, are little more than ventriloquists’ dummies with long, invisible strings. But some models have artificial intelligence that lets them do some things on their own, and they will inevitably grow smarter and more agile. They will not only represent the human users, they will augment them.

“The beauty of mobile telepresence is it challenges the notion of what it means to be somewhere,” said Colin Angle, chief executive of one of the largest robot manufacturers, iRobot.

The robot is what allowed Dr. Shatzel to “be” in the patient’s room far away. From an earlier telephone conversation with the emergency room doctor, the patient’s condition had not been clear. But in speaking directly with the patient, examining his face and control of his hands and glancing with the camera at the cardiac monitor in the room, Dr. Shatzel could assess the stroke, he said, with the same acuity as if he were there. He instructed the staff to administer the drug.

“We had a good outcome,” he said later.

Dr. John Whapham, a Loyola University neurologist who has helped create several regional networks providing telemedicine with robots made by InTouch Health, says that when he began using the robot during his residency, he would carry his laptop in a backpack so he could perform consultations anytime.

“I’ll pull out the laptop, and when I’m on Michigan Avenue here in Chicago, put it on a garbage can or on the seat of a bus stop,” he said. “You’re live, and you can walk around, examine, image, zoom in and out. I do it all the time.”

Expanding the Workplace

“I’m very thin in this new outfit,” Mike Beltzner says, breaking the ice in a room of Silicon Valley computer programmers. In the flesh, he is 2,200 miles away, at home in Toronto with his cat. But at this meeting his face appears on a 15-inch LCD atop a narrow aluminum machine resembling an upright vacuum cleaner. Indeed, as this robot rolls around the room it looks as if it could just as easily be sweeping.

Mr. Beltzner rolls the robot to a large conference table in the Mountain View headquarters of the Mozilla Corporation, maker of Firefox, a popular Web browser. By swiveling his camera eye back and forth, he can see the entire room and chats comfortably with the assembled team.

An hour earlier, Mr. Beltzner, director of Firefox, was logged into a different robot on the other side of the building to attend the weekly all-hands meeting. With a pink lei on one shoulder and a jaunty cap on the other, the robot was surrounded by more than 100 young software engineers, each sitting with a wirelessly connected laptop.

Aside from the occasional greeting, no one seems to notice the disembodied Mr. Beltzner until he is called upon by Mary Colvig, a Mozilla marketing manager. She wants employees to share the chore of leading tours of the office each week.

“What do you want me to do?” Mr. Beltzner asks, his voice piping from twin speakers in the robot’s chest.

“I would like you to give tours,” she responds from the front of the room. “That would be pretty insane.”

When the meeting ends, “Robo-Beltzner” — as one colleague calls him — mingles in the large room, chatting. Then Mr. Beltzner executes a nifty pirouette and moves the robot, made by Willow Garage of Menlo Park, Calif., to a charging station.

Like many other Silicon Valley companies, Mozilla has employees around the world, and in the month since it began testing the system, as many as 10 employees have logged in to run errands, chat and attend meetings.

Mr. Beltzner has now used the Willow Garage robot for more than a month, usually four to six times a week to attend meetings and chat with his co-workers in Mountain View. He finds it to be a distinctly different experience from a video teleconference or a computer chat system.

“With the robot, I find that I’m getting the same kind of interpersonal connection during the meetings and the same kind of nonverbal contact” that he would get if he were in the room, he said. “It’s a lot easier to have harder conversations when I ‘roll the robot,’ ” he added, referring to reviewing an employee’s performance or discussing technical issues.

There are few drawbacks to the robots, the company’s employees agree, although Erica Jostedt, a Mozilla communications manager, notes that the virtual Mr. Beltzner is ruder than his flesh-and-blood Canadian counterpart.

“I came to a meeting with him, and he didn’t even open the door for me!” she said, laughing.

The robot, of course, has no arms.

That has not stopped other programmers from commuting to Silicon Valley robotically.

Each morning for the past year, Chad Evans’s robot has sat with its back to a freeway in a double aisle of cubicles occupied by software designers at Philips Healthcare in Foster City, Calif.

Mr. Evans, a software designer himself, sits more than 2,000 miles away at home in Atlanta. But “Chadbot,” a four-foot-tall prototype built by RoboDynamics of Santa Monica, Calif., allows him to live where he chooses and work West Coast hours.

When he is sitting at his desk in Atlanta, Mr. Evans is visible in a small monitor at the top of the robot, which is usually plugged into a recharging station. His workmates can see at a glance whether he is available for a quick chat by simply peering down the aisle.

When Mr. Evans needs to go to a meeting in Foster City or visit a colleague, he drives the robot to a desk or a meeting room. If someone is willing to help him by pressing the elevator buttons, he can even visit other floors.

“Using Skype would require me to initiate a phone call,” he said. “This gives me more of a passive ability. I’m just sitting here like I would be at my desk if I was in the office. I see people coming and going, and they see me and they think, ‘Oh yeah, there was something I wanted to ask Chad.’ ”

It took a while for his co-workers to get used to Chad as Chadbot. “The first three weeks were the weirdest experience I’ve ever had,” said Karl McGuinness, a software architect whose desk is adjacent to the robot. “You’d hear his voice, and I’d think, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ”

The Boss, or Big Brother?

Tom Serani’s boss had grown frustrated that while Mr. Serani was on the road, his 20 salespeople working the phones back at company headquarters did not have the same zip as when he was in the office.

“The new guys were not doing quite as well,” said the boss, Neal Creighton, a co-founder of RatePoint, a company based in Needham, Mass., that tracks Internet users’ opinions of products and companies.

When RatePoint was approached by Vgo Communications to test a mobile robot, Mr. Creighton jumped at the chance.

From his hotel room, Mr. Serani can roll a robot up to an office cubicle back at headquarters, listen in on a telephone sales pitch and offer advice.

Mr. Serani was initially skeptical. “I immediately saw the potential,” he said. “It was more a question of ‘How do I position this so I don’t have my guys running out of the building calling the local reporters about how insane I am?’ ”

But in practice, he said: “Our sales team responded a lot differently to the robot than they did to the speakerphone. They were looking at it like it was a person, and their behavior patterns were completely different when it was here.”

Still, the possibility that remotely operated robots might be used by some managers as surveillance devices, or as peeping Toms, has made some in the fledgling industry nervous.

“I don’t want this technology to be seen as a means of oppression,” said Trevor Blackwell, founder and chief executive of Anybots, the maker of QB, a $15,000 mobile robot that balances on two wheels like a Segway and will be shipped commercially beginning this fall.

Others argue that the design of a robot determines how it will be perceived in the workplace. “Larger screens for showing the pilot’s video create a greater sense of presence, whereas little to none suggests surveillance,” said Sanford Dickert, a Willow Garage executive.

There are also skeptics about the value of the current generation of mobile robots. “It’s cool, but it’s a little gimmicky,” said Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of the technology news Web site TechCrunch. Although he now lives much of the year in Seattle and manages his Silicon Valley Web site from afar, he said he would consider the robot as a stunt, perhaps for an interview, but not for running his company.

“You can walk around, but you can’t really see what’s going on,” he said.

A Tool for the Elderly

All five of the United States companies that have announced or are already selling mobile robots are adding or experimenting with automation. For example, it will not be unusual for mobile robots in the next year to feature collision avoidance and lane-following technologies like those now offered in luxury automobiles. Already Vgo’s robot automatically parks itself when it is driven within a foot or two of its recharging station.

Such automated robots could help in caring for a rapidly aging population.

Vgo’s executives said they ultimately envisioned their robots being used by family members to pay visits and offer help to elderly parents, allowing them to remain independent longer. At the simplest, the Vgo robots could help workers in assisted-living homes check in on residents and make sure they were taking medicines at the correct time each day.

“We’re not replacing low-cost labor,” said Brad Kayton, Vgo’s chief executive. “We’re acting as a supplement for it.”

Others see the robots as a new means of mobility for the elderly, allowing them to stay in better contact with friends and family and visit museums and theaters, among other possible applications.

As technology advances, designers say, mobile robots will allow the elderly and others to do more than be in two places at one time. The robots will augment their human users, enhancing their senses by offering capabilities like better vision and hearing as well as futuristic skills like face recognition.

Still, no one believes the telepresence robots will be accepted without some resistance.

Lou Mazzucchelli, an expert in video teleconferencing, suggested that workers might make fun of their robot-enhanced managers behind their backs.

Moreover, there may be unpredictable consequences. The robots might become a new target for frustrated colleagues. “All of these products,” he said, “are just begging me to kick them over.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html





A Free Web, for Whom?
Jim Dalgleish

Americans know the Internet as the information superhighway, a thruway shared by the poorest child, the most connected politician and the wealthiest corporation.

Boosters call it a boon to democracy, giving everyone equal access to information and a ready soapbox for ideas. No longer would Americans be reliant on conventional media, controlled by a shrinking number of corporate owners.

But unlike conventional highways, Internet roads have private owners.

And how those owners are to be regulated is an increasingly lively topic in Washington, D.C., and the issue exposes an important contrast between the major party candidates seeking to represent Southwest Michigan in Congress.

The questions are: Can and should the federal government tell telecommunications companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast they must treat all Internet communications as equal?

Or should those companies be free to rule the Internet in accordance with their business needs?

At the front

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton is the ranking Republican on the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet -- a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The St. Joseph resident stands to become committee chairman if he wins re-election Nov. 2 to the 6th District seat and his party gains control of the House. The committee chairman has a giant say in Internet laws.

Upton is no fan of what he dismissed in a June 16 press release as "so-called net neutrality."

Net neutrality is the idea that carriers cannot play favorites with content. Upton said he opposes efforts in the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to mandate net neutrality.

A U.S. Appeals Court in April ruled that Congress didn't grant the FCC the authority to regulate Internet carriers. Upton hailed the decision as a victory for consumers. He said Congress should not give the FCC such authority.

"I hope the FCC and Congress will respect the court's wisdom that government red tape is not the answer and allow the Internet to flourish under a new spirit of investment and competition at a time when we are desperate for economic growth," Upton said in an April 6 news release.

He said in an interview Sunday the telecommunications companies are planning to invest billions of dollars into increasing speeds and expanding choices. He said they will not invest in a government-regulated Internet.

Calls for Congress to mandate net neutrality grew louder after Verizon and Google announced in August they were considering an agreement that would create a two-tired Internet: A high-speed version for those willing to pay the rates, relegating everyone else to slower, inferior technologies.

Net neutrality advocates fear such arrangements will give a communications edge to deep-pocketed corporations and their media and political allies while ill-funded public interest groups are relegated to Internet ghettos.

Or even blocked.

After all, net neutrality advocates note, Verizon in 2007 refused to make its mobile phone network available to an abortion rights organization. Verizon officials said they have the right to block "unsavory or controversial" material.

But Upton said Sunday the Internet is working well without a net neutrality mandate, and it's hard to imagine any telecommunications company blocking or slowing access.

"If (providers) are denying access to certain sites ... folks are going to be upset, and that hasn't happened," Upton said. "It is in the best interest of the providers to not deny access."

Passion for neutral

Upton hasn't been paying attention, his Democratic opponent charges.

Don Cooney, a former Kalamazoo County commissioner, said several Internet service providers have intentionally slowed peer-to-peer communications.

"Still other companies have acted in contrast to these assertions of hands-off behavior and have begun to use deep packet inspection to discriminate against (peer-to-peer, file transfers) and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom 'value added' services, and bundling," the retired Western Michigan University professor said in an e-mail response to an interview request.

He said Congress needs to mandate net neutrality.

The companies "have some rights, but the overriding concern is that people have access to information, and that access is not limited by the ability to pay," he said in a phone interview Monday.

Furthermore, Cooney said, without net neutrality the potential exists for a politically driven media mogul, such as Rupert Murdoch, to gain control of the Internet and run it like a dictator.

He said he doesn't understand how Upton can argue that a net neutrality mandate would stifle innovation.

"It's the free flow of information that stimulates the whole thing," he said.

Cooney, in his written statement, said efforts to block net neutrality expose Upton and his fellow Republicans to charges of hypocrisy.

"Republicans like to talk about being business-friendly, but in past decades, the Internet has created more innovation, more jobs and more economic growth than almost any other industry in history. We cannot allow control of that fantastic resource to be monopolized by a handful of companies."

Bipartisan support

Cooney appears to be swimming against the tide. Upton and news reports note there appears to be a bipartisan consensus against a net neutrality mandate.

The apparent bipartisanship is celebrated in television commercials produced by Broadband for America, an organization backed by Verizon, AT&T and Comcast.

In the ad, conservative Republican Michael Powell, FCC chairman under President George W. Bush, appears with former U.S. Sen. Harold Ford, chairman of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council.

In addition, the three companies' political action committees are among the top 10 contributors to Upton's re-election campaign, chipping in $31,250 total this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Verizon, AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association are three of the four top contributor's to Upton's leadership PAC, the center reported on its website.

Upton said the contributions are not rewards for favors but rather a recognition of their mutual interest in deregulation.
http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/news....ryid=149526743





M2Z's Free, Wireless Nationwide Broadband Plan Killed: Thank the FCC
Kit Eaton

Despite a seemingly stout business plan, and all the financial, social, and educational benefits it would bring, the FCC's just turned down M2Z's application for a coast-to-coast free wireless broadband system.

The FCC did not elaborate on why it turned down a plan from a new company called M2Z which would've created a U.S.-wide, free wireless broadband network. M2Z's trick was going to be to use a spare bit of the radio spectrum, the 2GHz "AWS-3" band, and earn itself cash by embedding ads in its free Net service as well as licensing out part of the spectrum it would then be controlling for other commercial uses. The entire nationwide system could've been up and running inside 10 years, and 5% of M2Z's revenues would've gone straight to the Treasury.

Ignoring all the potential commercial benefits, educational uses, opportunities for new businesses to spring up that utilized the free network, and all sorts of enterprising stuff that isn't even dreamed up yet, the FCC has finally ceased its deliberations, and has completely denied M2Z's application. Early on, the plan ran afoul of puritanical concerns about how it could be used for viewing pornography--but the FCC's intention to filter porn ran into opposition with civil liberties groups.

The FCC is known to have heard complaints about M2Z's plan from existing wireless carriers. Though M2Z's network would've operated at under 1 mbs peak speeds--meaning it was very slow by today's standards, and probably snail-like by tomorrow's--its free pricing may well have tempted many folks away from spending cash with an established ISP. Those carriers are now reported to be pleased with the FCC's decision, though they argue it's in line with the greater National Broadband Plan. Whenever that actually gets off the ground.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1686542/f...-thank-the-fcc





UN Reveals Global Disparity in Broadband Access
Jonathan Fildes

Outsourcing centre in Kenya Africa is now encircled with high-speed internet cables

The global disparity in fixed broadband access and cost has been revealed by UN figures.

The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there.

Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income.

Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account.

"Access to broadband in an affordable manner is our greatest challenge," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), told BBC News.

The statistics were released ahead of the UN 2010 Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York on 19 September.

Remote care

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of targets intended to reduce global poverty and improve living standards by 2015.

Specific goals target education, fighting disease and promoting gender equality.

Access to communications technology is a part of one of the targets.

With five years to go until the deadline to achieve the goals, progress remains uneven. Some countries have achieved many of the goals, while others - mostly in the developing world - may not realise any.

Many development experts question how the goals will be achieved and how they will be paid for. Some even question whether the approach is neccessary or helpful.

But Dr Toure said that he believed technologies such as broadband could be used to "accelerate" progress on the goals and help countries achieve them.
Men sell phone credit (Kiwanja) Mobile phones have proliferated throughout Africa and the world

"Unfortunately many observers will say that we run the risk of not meeting the goals. But I think the focus should be on how we meet the goals," he said.

"I am putting ICT [Information and Communication Technologies] as an opportunity of meeting the goals."

In particular, he said, broadband and connectivity could be used to develop e-health and e-education programmes.

He said broadband would allow people in rural and remote areas to access "state of the art" health facilities and doctors.

"You will also be able to ensure that students around the world will have access to the best universities at their fingertips," he said.

"That can only be done if [connectivity] is accessible and affordable."

Claire Godfrey, senior policy advisor for Oxfam, agreed that technology could help accelerate progress on the MDGs but said "the root causes of poverty must be addressed first", including "access to clean water, adequate food, free healthcare and education".

"Rich countries' governments need to meet their aid commitments, with sustainable, well-targeted and predictable aid and they need to help poorer countries to make health care and education free," she told BBC News.

Cheapest fixed line broadband as proportion of monthly income

Rank Country Price as % of monthly income B'band subscriptions per 100 inhabitants

Source: ITU (Figures for 2009)

1


Macao, China


0.30


23.42

2


Israel


0.33


25.8

3


Hong Kong


0.49


29.34

4


United States


0.5


27.1

5


Singapore


0.58


23.71

Dr Toure said there had always been a debate about where the focus should lie.

"Do you have health as a priority or ICT? Do you have food as a priority or ICT? Do you have education as a priority or ICT?

"My answer to that is that ICT is a tool for all of those, for access at the lowest cost."

The ITU estimates that fixed broadband penetration is below 1% in many of the world's poorest countries, whilst access costs can be more than 100% of monthly average incomes.

By contrast, in the world's most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income.

"We have big disparities," said Dr Toure.

As a result, in many poorer countries cheaper mobile communications have become the dominant way of accessing information.

Innovative projects have been set up to deliver healthcare and other key services such as banking via mobile and text message.

The ITU estimates that there are currently 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world.

However, the number of subscribers can be misleading as some people have more than one phone.

Most expensive fixed line broadband as proportion of monthly income:

Rank Country Price as % of monthly income B'band subscriptions per 100 inhabitants

Source: ITU (Figures for 2009)

1


C. African Rep


3891


No data

2


Ethiopia


2085


No data

3


Malawi


2038


0.02

4


Guinea


1546


No data

5


Niger


967


0.01

Even so, Dr Toure said that he believed there would be "global connectivity by 2012" with everyone in the world able to access mobile communications. But access to broadband, remained key, he said.

"We are no longer talking about the digital divide in terms of telephony. We are trying to avoid a broadband divide."

Mobile broadband was part of the solution he said, but the radio spectrum used for services was ultimately a finite resource.

"Fixed broadband will continue to be meaningful because of the bandwidth capabilities that it gives you," he said.

Dr Toure is trying to encourage all countries to have a framework that enshrines broadband as a public service to which every citizen should have access.

Currently more than 30 countries have agreed.

"Access to broadband - access to information - should be a universal human right," he said.

He says it is then up to profit-making companies to do the rest.

"Governments should put the right regulatory framework in place and leave it to the private sector to invest," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11162656





Lessons of the Summer Box Office
Brooks Barnes

Christopher Nolan proved there is always room at the multiplex, even in swimsuit season, for a smart, original story. Will Ferrell bounced back. Michael Cera fell flat. Animation was the No. 1 genre. Sorry, “Sex and the City” ladies: It’s over.

Hollywood’s summer may have been tepid — movie theater attendance was the lowest in over a decade — but the big-budget, big-risk stretch delivered an unusually robust array of tea leaves for studios to read as they make decisions for the seasons ahead.

First, the numbers. Attendance from the first weekend in May through Labor Day is projected to total about 552 million, the lowest tally since 1997, when 540 million people turned up in the same period, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. Revenue for the period — which typically accounts for 40 percent of the industry’s annual ticket sales — totaled $4.35 billion, a 2 percent increase from last year.

Sharply higher prices for tickets across the board, but especially for 3-D presentations, drove the increase. The worry, as seen in poor results for recent 3-D releases like “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” is that theater chains and studios have overreached on pricing. “We suspect some consumers are choosing 2-D movies solely to reduce the cost of their moviegoing experience,” wrote Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, in an Aug. 23 research note.

So studios are starting to think more carefully about which titles make sense to release in 3-D and which do not. Part of the challenge in a post-“Avatar” Hollywood, however, is that presenting a film in 3-D is one way to build a release into a must-see event — a crucial part of movie marketing in the age of 50-inch flat-screen televisions.

Some studios were burned over the summer by pushing too hard to “eventize” movies. Walt Disney Studios, for instance, trumpeted May 28 in enormous red lettering on virtually every piece of advertising for “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” The goal was to blast the film’s opening date into the minds of consumers, but instead the tactic drove expectations so high that “Prince” was quickly branded a bomb despite selling $330 million in tickets at the global box office.

“You can hype up a movie like crazy, but consumers are smart and can smell a con job,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com. “It has to be substance over style.”

No one would accuse Mr. Nolan of soft-pedaling substance. His “Inception,” backed by Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures, was the breakout blockbuster of the summer, racking up about $660 million in ticket sales. “Everybody looked at us and said, ‘Why are you releasing a movie this smart in the middle of July?’ ” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president for distribution. “Guess what? The summer isn’t just for dopes.”

Stars received a sharply mixed reception, which has been the case lately. It was certainly a good summer for Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in “Inception” as an invader of people’s dreams. Also faring well were Angelina Jolie, who turned an old-fashioned spy caper (“Salt”) into a hit, and Adam Sandler, who powered an ensemble comedy (“Grown Ups”) into the stratosphere.

And Will Ferrell came back from the dead. After suffering the biggest flop of summer 2009 with “Land of the Lost,” Mr. Ferrell returned in August with “The Other Guys” and garnered the second-biggest opening of his career.

Flopping this summer were Nicolas Cage, whose “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” died on arrival, and Mr. Cera, whose quirky “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” won positive reviews but failed to draw a mainstream audience. Mr. Cera badly needed a hit: “Pilgrim” was his fifth big-screen dud in a row. Also disappointing were Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, who fizzled in the action comedy “Knight and Day,” and Zac Efron, whose weepy “Charlie St. Cloud” landed with a thud.

The No. 1 movie of the summer had no stars, at least on screen: “Toy Story 3” topped the North American box office with over $405 million and had a global total of over $1 billion. “Iron Man 2” was second, with $312 million ($622 million total), and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” was third, with $298 million ($655 million total).

It was a quiet summer for specialty films, with no picture managing to cross over to a mainstream audience. “The Kids Are All Right” came the closest with about $19 million. (The threshold for a crossover hit is typically in the vicinity of $30 million.)

The art house market came alive over the weekend, however. With George Clooney starring, “The American,” released by Focus Features on Wednesday, was No. 1 in North America, with about $13 million for a total of $16.1 million.

“Takers” (Sony Pictures Entertainment) was second, with $11.5 million for a new total of $38 million. “Machete,” a grisly revenge thriller from 20th Century Fox, was third, with $11.3 million. “The Last Exorcism” (Lionsgate) was fourth, with $7.6 million for a new total of $32.3 million, while Drew Barrymore’s “Going the Distance” (Warner) disappointed with a fifth-place debut and $6.9 million.

“Going the Distance” continued an uncharacteristically soft summer for Warner. The success of “Inception” was counterbalanced by a disastrous result for “Jonah Hex,” which sold just $10.5 million in tickets and cooled off Megan Fox’s career. The critically reviled “Sex and the City 2” was also a substantial disappointment; ticket sales lagged behind the first installment by 30 percent.

Disney had a similar summer, with mistakes like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “Step Up 3D” dragging down profit from blockbusters like “Toy Story 3” and “Iron Man 2.” Universal Pictures could empathize: “Despicable Me” was a runaway hit, selling over $237 million in tickets, but “Scott Pilgrim,” “Get Him to the Greek” and “Robin Hood” all misfired.

Of the major studios Fox had the worst summer. None of its titles cracked the Top 10, as “The A-Team,” “Marmaduke” and “Knight and Day” all went down in flames.

Paramount Pictures was the most successful by volume; for the summer its releases racked up over $770 million at the domestic box office. But the result is misleading because Paramount owned only two of its wide releases, “The Last Airbender” and “Dinner for Schmucks.” The others — “Shrek Forever After,” for instance — were distributed for a fee.

Sony, on the other hand, owned all of its wide releases and delivered hit after hit, albeit on levels lower than most of its rivals. Sony’s modestly budgeted remake of “The Karate Kid” was one of the summer’s biggest surprises, rocketing to $176 million in North America. Although “Eat Pray Love” was soft, the studio also scored with “Grown Ups,” “Salt” and “The Other Guys.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/movies/06box.html





Do People Want ‘Amateur Hour’ on Their TVs?
Nick Bilton

Last week Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, unveiled a new version of the Apple TV, which is smaller and, at $99, less expensive than the previous model.

Before showing off the new device, Mr. Jobs walked the audience through a list of what he said were requests from customers about what they wanted from an Internet-connected set-top box.

Some of the items on the wish list made complete sense: Lower prices for content, no need to sync with a computer, and a silent, cool and small device. Yet some of the things he mentioned didn’t really ring true.

Although the Apple TV does allow access to YouTube videos, it doesn’t offer viewing of video on many other sites, including Facebook, Vimeo and Blip.tv, all of which feature primarily amateur content.

Mr. Jobs claimed that people want “Hollywood movies and TV shows,” and he added that “they don’t want amateur hour.” While I’m sure that some customers want exclusively professional content on the television in their living room, some of the numbers show consumers behaving in a completely different way.

Take a post I wrote in June of this year when Facebook announced some new statistics around video consumption. According to the company, Facebook’s half a billion users were uploading “20 million videos each month, many of which are shared through mobile phones.” These same users were consuming more than 30 billion videos online each month.

As Josh Wiseman, an engineering manager at Facebook, explained when I discussed these staggering numbers with him, these videos are primarily user-generated, illustrated by the fact that they are uploaded from a mobile phone. In other words, they are the “amateur hour” Mr. Jobs said customers don’t want.

If we look beyond Facebook, research from ComScore found that 135 million Web surfers are consuming 13 billion videos on YouTube each month. Although the report didn’t break down the amateur-vs.-professional split of those videos, vast numbers of YouTube’s videos are not from professional sources.

Another point Mr. Jobs shared was that consumers don’t want to have to use “a computer” to view online video.

Yet a report released by Nielsen found that consumers are watching video on their mobile phones and computers on an increasingly regular basis.

Although the new Apple TV meets many of the requirements on Mr. Jobs’s list, consumers seem to be coming up with their own ideas about how they want to watch video and where they want to watch it.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...-on-their-tvs/





Samsung Opens The Door To 1080p On Smartphones
Daniel Bailey

Following Qualcomm, Samsung is also close to be launching a new smartphone processor with two cores. Based on ARM architecture, the new processor promises five times the graphics performance of current chips and enable 1080p video recording and playback.

The excitement of processor development is switching more and more to smartphones as we are seeing substantial progress several times every year in this product category. Samsung today said that it will be ready to introduce its first dual-core processor for smartphones, tablets and netbooks in the fourth quarter of this year. Codenamed Orion, the chip integrates two variants of the ARM Cortex A9 architecture that run at a clock speed of 1 GHz. If Samsung’s claims hold up, then the application processor should be able to run demanding applications much more efficiently and reduce the overall power consumption when compared to today’s CPUs.

Multicore seems to be the trend to watch in cellphones, with Qualcomm, Nvidia and now Samsung being the main players. We are expecting multicore news also from Intel within a few weeks.

The hardware of the Samsung processor is based on a 45 nm production process and includes 32 KB of data cache, 32 KB of instruction cache as well as 1 MB L2 cache. While we have to wait to see what this processor is capable of, the pure specs are impressive and show that smartphone processors may soon be just as capable as netbook CPU.

Samsung said the processor will enable full HD video playback and recording at 1080p resolution, which is a huge step up from the 720p that is possible in today’s high-end smartphones. Also, we should remember that 1080p was a big challenge for mainstream desktop processors – and was not possible until the introduction of dual-core processors at the end of 2005 and capable discrete graphics cards at about the same time.

Even more stunning, Samsung says the chip will not just play 1080p, but will do that at a full 30 fps. Using a new graphics processor, which the company did not explain any further, the 3D graphics performance will jump by a factor of 5. A GPS unit is now directly integrated into the processor itself, there is a triple-interface controller, which means that Orion can run two screens and output data on a third screen such as a TV via on-chip HDMI 1.3a integration. In related news, Samsung also announced faster embedded NANF flash memory, which is built in 20 nm and stores 16 GB of data on a single chip. Conceivably, smartphones will integrate a dazzling 64 GB of integrated mass storage within 1 year: The new memory will be ready for mass production later this year, Samsung said.

So, how fast is this new processor? There are just estimates out there at this time, but current benchmarks indicate that dual-core smartphone processors could be changing the application landscape as soon as multithreaded software is making its way into these devices. By the way, Qualcomm announced third-generation Snapdragon dual-core processors with 1.2 GHz and 1.5 GHz that are expected to arrive late this year and we know that Motorola is planning on releasing a 2 GHz smartphone that is based on Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra product later this year as well.

Apple’s A4 processor, which is based on an ARM Cortex-A8 design, has been generally described as the most capable chip combination in the smartphone landscape today, but new benchmark results indicate that Apple may be coming under pressure at least as far as the hardware capability is concerned – especially if we are considering Samsung’s promised GPU horsepower.

The Samsung i9000 Galaxy S was just crowned as the fastest smartphone by GLBenchmark, with a performance of 1834 frames, ahead of the iPhone 3GS with 1077 frames and the iPhone 4 with 1039 frames. The performance discrepancy and the 3GS’ high score is due to a difference in screen resolution, which is led by the iPhone 4: The Galaxy S shows 384,000 pixels on its screen, versus 153,600 of the iPhone 3GS and 614,400 of the iPhone 4. The database does not include all current smartphones, including the Droid X. However, just this morning we saw the Samsung Epic 4G being listed with a not-yet-official score of 1907 frames. According to the GLBenchmark, the Galaxy S has an advantage over the iPhone 4 in the traditional GLBenchmark Pro ES 1.1, but is slightly behind in the HD version, 3D rendering quality, texture filtering and CPU floating point performance. It is ahead in integer operations, pixel fill rates, triangle drawings and lighting effects.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/2608/...n-smartphones/





VLC Media Player for the iPad

After several month of porting, we are proud to announce the release of VLC for the iPad! This application stands out for two reasons. First, it will be available for free on the AppStore. But that’s not all. VLC is an OpenSource project. We are currently preparing our patches for submission to the main VLC tree. And obviously, we will release our current working tree when the app will hit the AppStore.

If everything goes well, VLC for the iPad should be available next week. To celebrate this release, we’re organizing a game. To be won: a copy of VLC of the iPad, one week before the official release! All you have to do is to follow @applidium on Twitter. We will randomly pick 5 people out of our followers on Sunday, and we’ll send them their own version of VLC for the iPad!
http://applidium.com/en/news/vlc_med...e_for_the_ipad





From Viral Video to Billboard 100
Jenna Wortham

Viral videos tend to have a short lifespan online. The best ones might attract a few million views on YouTube and get a mention on a late-night talk show before fading into oblivion.

But in one of the stranger twists in recent pop-music history, a musical remake of a local news clip transcended YouTube fame and reached the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August.

It was a rare case of a product of Web culture jumping the species barrier and becoming a pop hit.

The song’s source material could not have been more unlikely: A local TV news report from Huntsville, Ala., about an intruder who climbed into a woman’s bed and tried to assault her.

But with some clever editing and the use of software that can turn speech into singing, the Gregory Brothers, a quartet of musicians living in Brooklyn, transformed an animated and angry rant by the victim’s brother into something genuinely catchy.

The resulting track, “Bed Intruder Song,” has sold more than 91,000 copies on iTunes, and last week it was at No. 39 on the iTunes singles chart. Its video has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube.

And to top it off, the song was No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week of Aug. 20, ranked among singles by Katy Perry and Usher. The chart takes into account sales and radio play as well as online streaming.

“It’s not easy to get on that chart,” said Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts at Billboard. “There are plenty of decent radio songs that don’t reach the sales chart.”

Russ Crupnick, an analyst at NPD, said the song’s success pointed to a shift in how music is shared and discovered. Around 70 million Americans buy a CD each year, he said, which is on par with the number of people who are now listening to and finding new music on YouTube.

“The bar is getting lower for creative artists to break into the mainstream,” Mr. Crupnick said. “In a sense, it’s not surprising that this viral pop music is succeeding as a pop-culture phenomenon.”

The Gregory Brothers’ choice of subject matter has elicited a range of responses, with some critics asking whether they were perpetuating stereotypes or making light of a serious crime.

In both the original news clip and the video remix, the victim’s brother, Antoine Dodson, looks into the camera and angrily tells his sister’s would-be attacker: “You don’t have to come and confess — we’re looking for you.”

But the group says they were drawn by Mr. Dodson’s energy. “The song is memorable and compelling for the same reasons a conventional song is,” said Evan Gregory. “He’s conveying emotion and a strong personality, and that’s what we latch onto in a pop performance.”

In fact, the song is credited to “Antoine Dodson & The Gregory Brothers,” and the group is splitting the profits from the song with him.

For his part, Mr. Dodson said he welcomed the unexpected attention and was hoping he could also ride the wave of Web fame.

“We all have the song as our ring tone,” he said, adding that it had brought “some brightness” to an otherwise dark incident.

“We’d intended to get attention to what happened to my sister — but not this much attention,” Mr. Dodson said with a laugh.

This was not the first viral success for the Gregory Brothers, which consists of three brothers — Michael, Andrew and Evan — and Evan’s wife, Sarah. They are originally from Virginia but they all migrated to New York in the last few years to pursue careers in music.

While they were fooling around with video of the presidential debates in 2008, they started experimenting with Auto-Tune, software that is meant to help fix off-key vocals but can also turn a person’s speech into a song, or create the warbling-robot vocals that have become a pop-radio cliché.

“Mostly we started doing the videos because it amused us,” said Michael Gregory, who at 25 is the youngest of the group.

The Gregorys first caught the Web’s attention by splicing choice bits from news broadcasts and turning them into a satirical compilation for a video series called “Auto-Tune the News.”

The series developed a following among news watchers and has a prominent fan in Rachel Maddow, who has often featured the videos during her show on MSNBC.

“We built credibility by turning it into a series,” said Evan Gregory. “People would know that we weren’t a one-hit thing.”

“We got really addicted to the challenge of making speakers sing,” Sarah Gregory added.

Lately the Gregorys have been trying to take clips that are already viral online and make them more so. In July they released “Double Rainbow Song,” remixing a home video of a double rainbow over Yosemite National Park that featured ecstatic commentary by the videographer, Paul Vasquez. They also split the proceeds from sales of that song with what they refer to as its “unintentional singer.”

The group’s recent work has attracted offers from music and media companies that are impressed with their online success and mastery of viral culture.

“I find them to be enormously talented comedically and musically, but bigger than that — I fell in love with them,” said Kent Alterman, head of original programming and production at Comedy Central, which has asked the group to develop a pilot for a possible show.

“They are so appealing both as performers and as people,” he said. “I think that’s part of what makes their work so instantly a part of the zeitgeist.”

For now the group says its bread and butter comes from iTunes sales and commercial work they have secured as a result of their Web hits. The members of the group are also involved in various folk music projects and solo acts — none of which feature Auto-Tune. But the success of “Bed Intruder” has eclipsed any of their previous work.

“Music professionals are now turning to us saying, ‘How did you edge out our clients?’ ” said Evan Gregory. “We’ve had offers for publishing deals, songwriting opportunities, even asking if we want to put artists into our videos.”

Some of the group’s online traction stems from the way they turn their songs into viral video franchises by posting the chords and lyrics and encouraging others to create their own versions of the songs, said Kenyatta Cheese, one of the creators of a Web video series called “Know Your Meme” that documents online phenomena.

“They made it more participatory, which increases the value of their original work,” Mr. Cheese said. “They embraced the remix culture and understood they have to contribute back in order to make it spread even further.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/bu...ia/06tune.html





John W. Kluge, Founder of Metromedia, Dies at 95
Marilyn Berger

John W. Kluge, who parlayed a small fortune from a Fritos franchise into a multibillion-dollar communications empire that made him one of the richest men in America, died on Tuesday night at a family home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 95.

The John W. Kluge Foundation confirmed his death.

Mr. Kluge was the creator of Metromedia, the nation’s first major independent broadcasting entity, a conglomerate that grew to include seven television stations, 14 radio stations, outdoor advertising, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Ice Capades, radio paging and mobile telephones.

An immigrant from Germany, Mr. Kluge (pronounced KLOOG-ee) came to the United States in 1922 and took his first job at the age of 10 as a payroll clerk for his stepfather in Detroit. He made his first million by the time he was 37.

He made his first billion — it was actually almost two billion — in 1984, when he took Metromedia private in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout and then liquidated the company, more than tripling his take.

He sold the television stations, including WNEW in New York, for more than $2 billion to Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his communications empire.

Mr. Kluge’s sale of 11 radio stations brought close to $290 million. The outdoor advertising business went for $710 million. The Harlem Globetrotters and the Ice Capades, which together cost the company $6 million, brought $30 million.

Critics complained that he had reaped the bonanza after having paid Metromedia’s stockholders too little when he took the company private. But Mr. Kluge maintained that the value of the company shot up afterward, when the Federal Communications Commission increased the number of television stations a company could own from seven to 12 and ruled that only two cellular telephone systems could operate in a given city.

“That changed the price of poker,” he said.

In 1986, Forbes magazine listed Mr. Kluge as the second-richest man in America (after Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores). By this year, after a bankruptcy of the Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale restaurant chains in 2008, Mr. Kluge had dropped to 109th on the Forbes list with a fortune of $6.5 billion.

Mr. Kluge savored the chance to move into new areas of high technology. He had no patience for those he called “self-important corporation types cut out of the same cookie cutter” who tended to stick to what was safe. He often took Wall Street by surprise, but as the financial analyst Allen J. Gottesman said in 1986: “Whatever he does works out real well. You always assume there was a good reason, and you usually find out later that it was a good move.”

Not everything he touched turned to gold. In 1965 he bought Diplomat magazine in Washington and tried to change it from a society sheet into a serious publication of world affairs. “I lost a million dollars before I ever knew I lost it,” he said.

Three years later he negotiated a proposed $300 million merger of Metromedia with Transamerica only to join in calling off the deal “by mutual consent” in a two-paragraph statement months later, saying a merger would “adversely effect” the growth plans of both companies.

But he never lost his zest for developing new businesses or his taste for complex financial deals.

“I love the work because it taxes your mind,” he said in an interview for this obituary, one of the few he ever gave, after he turned 72. “Years ago, I could have taken a few million dollars and joined the country club and gotten into this pattern of complaining about the world and about the tax law.”

He was critical of corporation executives who put themselves in the limelight. There were no public relations officers on his payroll. He liked to do business behind an unmarked door.

“I think a great deal of publicity becomes an obstacle,” he said. “I’d love to be in the woodwork all my life. I enjoy it when I know who the other people are and they don’t know who I am.”

But it was inevitable that people would come to know who he was, first in the business world as the man with the Midas touch and then as a generous contributor to schools and hospitals.

In his later years his name appeared in the society columns as the host for charity parties that he and his third wife, Patricia, gave on their yacht, the Virginian, or as a guest at dinner dances. (He had taught dancing at an Arthur Murray studio when he was in college.) He grew flowers and collected paintings, African sculpture and Indian, Chinese, Greek and Egyptian objets d’art.

But nothing gave him more pleasure than putting a deal together. And the creation of Metromedia, considered a triumph of financial structuring, may have been his greatest pleasure of all.

The most satisfying day in his life, he said, was the day Barney Balaban of Paramount told him, “Young man, you bring me $4 million and you’ll be able to have the Paramount stock in the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company.”

With that $4 million, Mr. Kluge got into the television business as chief executive of Metropolitan, which consisted of two stations — WNEW and, in Washington, WTTG — and two radio stations. He renamed the company Metromedia in 1961 because he intended to expand it beyond broadcasting.

Mr. Kluge held to a simple maxim: make money and minimize taxes. He made it his business to study the tax code. In 1981, for example, he received tax benefits when he bought buses and subway cars from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and leased them back to the authority for a tax savings of $50 million over five years.

He also found a way to enhance the company’s revenue by marrying the profits of broadcasting to the depreciation that came with billboard advertising.

“I sold the banks the idea that the Ford Motor Company that advertises on radio and television would also advertise on billboards,” he recalled. “From a financial orientation, if you took the pretax profits of radio and television and the depreciation of outdoor advertising, you increase the cash flow. I impressed the bank so much that I borrowed $14 million and got our money back in 27 months.”

John Werner Kluge was born Sept. 21, 1914, in Chemnitz, Germany. His father died in World War I. After his mother remarried, John was brought to America by his German-American stepfather to live in Detroit. The stepfather, Oswald Leitert, put him to work as a boy in the family contracting business.

Mr. Kluge said he left home when he was 14 to live in the house of a schoolteacher. “I was driven to have an education.”

He worked hard, and successfully, to lose his foreign accent and to get the grades he needed in high school to win a scholarship to college. He first attended Detroit City College, which was later renamed Wayne State University, and transferred to Columbia University when he was offered a full scholarship and living expenses.

At college he distributed Communist literature. “I was never an official member of the Communist Party, but I was quite liberal,” he said many years later. But what got him in trouble was his card playing. At one point the dean called him in to warn that he was in danger of losing his scholarship.

“I told him, ‘Dean, you will never catch me gambling again,’ ” he later recalled, “and it was then that I realized the dean of Columbia University didn’t understand the English language. I had told him he’d never catch me gambling again.”

Mr. Kluge later channeled his fondness for gambling into high-stakes finance. “I don’t really get comfortable when I haven’t got something at risk,” he said. Even as a billionaire twice over, he borrowed money to leverage his next ventures.

Mr. Kluge graduated from Columbia in 1937 and went to work for a small paper company in Detroit. Within three years he went from shipping clerk to vice president and part owner.

After serving in Army intelligence in World War II, he turned to broadcasting and, with a partner, created the radio station WGAY in Silver Spring, Md., in 1946. “It cost us $90,000,” he recalled. “I went up and down the street on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring to get investors.”

In the 1950s he acquired radio stations in St. Louis, Dallas, Fort Worth, Buffalo, Tulsa, Nashville, Pittsburgh and Orlando, Fla. Meanwhile, he invested in real estate and expanded the New England Fritos corporation, which he had founded in 1947 to distribute Fritos and Cheetos in the Northeast, adding Fleischmann’s yeast, Blue Bonnet margarine and Wrigley’s chewing gum to his distribution network.

In 1951 he formed a food brokerage company, expanding it in 1956 in a partnership with David Finkelstein, and augmented his fortune selling the products of companies like General Foods and Coca-Cola to supermarket chains.

Mr. Kluge served on the boards of numerous companies, including Occidental Petroleum, Orion Pictures, Conair and the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, as well as many charitable groups, including United Cerebral Palsy.

His philanthropy was prodigious. About a half-billion dollars went to Columbia alone, mainly for scholarships for needy and minority students. One gift, of $400 million, was to be given to the university by his estate when he died.

Mr. Kluge also contributed to the restoration of Ellis Island and in 2000 gave $73 million to the Library of Congress, which established the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities.

Mr. Kluge and his third wife, the former Patricia Rose Gay, lived in a Georgian-style house on a 6,000-acre farm near Charlottesville called Albemarle House. He had another home in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Long Island Sound, and an apartment in Manhattan, where he kept much of his modern art collection, including works by Giacometti, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Fernando Botero. He traveled to his houses in his plane and helicopter.

Mr. Kluge became acquainted with the woman who would become his third wife at parties when she was in her mid-20s and he was about 60. “At one party,” he said, “she cooked the dinner and then she did a belly dance on the table and I said to myself, ‘Where have I been all my life?’ ”

A small scandal erupted in 1985 when Mrs. Kluge was chairwoman of a charity ball in Palm Beach, Fla., attended by Charles and Diana, the prince and princess of Wales. The British press disclosed that a nude photograph of Mrs. Kluge had been published a decade before in a British magazine called Knave, which was owned by her first husband. To avoid embarrassment, the Kluges were traveling abroad on the night of the ball.

Their marriage ended in divorce in 1991, and Mrs. Kluge received a big settlement as well as the Virginia estate. He married again, to Maria Tussi Kuttner, who survives him.

Mr. Kluge is also survived by his son, John W. Kluge II; a daughter, Samantha Kluge, from his second marriage, to Yolanda Galardo Zucco; a stepson, Joseph Brad Kluge, whom he adopted; and a grandson. His first wife was Theodora Thomson Townsend.

A convert to Roman Catholicism when he married his third wife, Mr. Kluge said he often went to church. He had planned to be buried in a crypt in a chapel he built on the grounds of Albemarle, but later changed his mind after the house was awarded to his third wife in the divorce.

Mr. Kluge acknowledged that he had been ruled by his ambitions and traced them to the struggles of his boyhood. He recalled a conversation he had with friends in college about their aspirations. “One fellow said he wanted to be a lawyer, another a doctor,” he said. “I said one thing — that the only reason I wanted money was that I was always afraid of being a charity case and of being a ward someplace. That’s what really drove me all my life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/bu...a/09kluge.html





Cellphone Carriers Are Turning to Wi-Fi, Too
Damon Darlin

THE definition of a nerd, it has been said, is someone who has more e-mail addresses than pants.

I have three addresses and three pairs of pants, so I guess I am borderline, using that criterion.

But what does it mean that I have seven phone numbers? There is my home landline, my office landline, my cellphone, a Google Voice phone number and three other Internet-connected phone numbers.

That’s 70 digits to manage — yet I rarely talk on the phone and always try to avoid answering one.

I may well be a nerd, but there is a reason for all those numbers. Like a lot of other people, I’ve been searching for new ways to communicate as the phone system that has served us well for more than 130 years morphs into another, still uncertain form.

Fewer people have landlines. A quarter of American homes use only cellphones. We are talking less and texting more. And as we use more data on cellphones that are really hand-held computers, we must search for alternative networks, usually Wi-Fi, to bypass a strained cellphone network.

All of those phone numbers, then, are the residue of my experiments to find a system to not only stay in touch, but also to find one, or two, reliable ways that people can use to contact me. The multiple numbers parallel the numerous text- and instant-messaging systems I use, like Google Chat, Twitter, Facebook and AIM.

It’s not just consumers who are using the phone system differently. The phone companies are way ahead of us — and couldn’t be happier that consumers are shifting to texting. The economics are clearly in the companies’ favor. The cellphone carriers rival Vitamin Water or Hewlett-Packard and its printer ink cartridges in their ability to extract a high-profit margin from a seemingly mundane product.

Text messages take up very little space — about 140 bytes, as they are being transmitted. That’s really why text messages are kept short. How much are we really paying for them? As much as $1,498 per megabyte. Here’s some of the math:

There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so 7,490 text messages are transmitted in each one. The cellphone companies charge about 20 cents a text message, adding up to that $1,498 a megabyte. (And yes, you are charged that rate whether you write 160 characters or just “LOL.”)

Of course, for a more personal idea of how expensive texting is, ask any parent who has ever been floored by the phone bill of a child without an unlimited texting plan.

But the unlimited plans, generally costing about $20, are only a relative bargain. The average texter sends about 500 text messages a month, according to Nielsen, the media measurement firm. That drops the price of a single text message to 4 cents, or to $300 a megabyte.

Nielsen says the average teenager sends 3,146 messages a month. Even at that volume — an average of about 104 texts a day — the phone company is extracting $47.62 a megabyte.

At the same time, cellphone companies charge roughly 15 cents a megabyte in an unlimited data plan — data in this case meaning Web surfing, streaming music or video or sending e-mail. To explain why there is such a big difference, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, the two largest wireless carriers, say that text messages travel on a voice network and data on a separate data network — and that I am comparing apples and oranges.

But industry analysts say the phone companies are facing problems that will continue to hasten the shift to Internet calling. The revenue from voice calls is falling, and revenue from text messaging will flatten, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley.

That’s not devastating to the carriers because revenue from data is growing fast. It is expected to double over the next four years, partly because carriers are moving away from the unlimited plans and toward tiered pricing, in which those people who use more data will pay more. The cost of transmitting the data, meanwhile, is falling by 50 percent with each new generation of wireless network, Morgan Stanley says.

But the wider use of data is straining the capacity of the networks. So the carriers try to offload traffic from the cell networks. And they are doing exactly what consumers are doing — moving to Wi-Fi.

To shift the burden on its network to the Internet, AT&T is selling microcells to its cellphone customers, which they install inside their homes.

Up on the roofs of large buildings, meanwhile, the carriers are installing wireless routers to offload about 20 percent or more of the peak traffic to Wi-Fi. AT&T says it has more than 20,000 hot spots in the United States. “AT&T is doing it big time,” said Selina Lo, the chief executive of Ruckus, a company that makes the Wi-Fi hardware. Its equipment is much cheaper than the cost of building an additional cell tower. “It’s an easy way to offload traffic,” she said.

If Wi-Fi were widespread, I could use an iPod Touch as an ersatz cellphone. And I wouldn’t need yet another phone number.

But it might be time for some new pants.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/business/12every.html





Israeli Teens Swipe Wristbands to Update Facebook Status

'Like Machine' lets kids share the fun at Coca-Cola Village summer camp
Emma Hall

Coca-Cola is pioneering technology in Israel that allows users to automatically update their Facebook status by swiping a wristband across a reader.

The Coca-Cola Village has been a fixture of the summer scene in Israel for the last five years, inviting 600 to 800 teenagers at a time to stay for three days in a multimedia village where they can enjoy activities including riding horses, massage, rock concerts, stand-up comedy and sports.
Coca-Cola Village

This summer, thanks to the Like Machine, dreamed up by Enon Landenberg, joint CEO of Publicis E-dologic, the inhabitants of the village were able to use their wristbands to register that they "liked" a certain activity.

For example, a guest that likes the pool can place his or her band next to the readable device by the pool, and a Facebook message will automatically appear on his or her wall stating that her or she "liked" the pool at the village.

Photographers carrying portable reader devices were also out and about at the village. They took pictures of guests, which were then uploaded onto the Coca-Cola Village Facebook page, with a tag automatically in place.

The event was so popular this year that, according to E-dologic joint-CEO Doron Tal, 250,000 people claimed to have been there -- even though only 8,000 had the opportunity to experience it in real life. "They felt that they had been there because they could enjoy it through their friends by following their fun on Facebook," Mr. Tal said.

Last week, Diet Coke launched its first "Desert Camp" for young adults in their 20s and 30s. They could also use the Like Machine as they enjoyed luxury tents in the desert, watched rock bands and tasted food from a top Israeli chef.

To win a stay at the Coca-Cola Village, consumers have to register via Facebook in groups of eight and collect 80 bottle tops per group to enter. They also have to pay $50, but this includes all accommodation, food and activities. Ten sessions of three days each took place this year.

Mr. Tal said, "When Enon had the idea for the Like Machine, I thought it was too far-fetched, but we have some very talented and visionary people here. I try not to show off, but we have created a little revolution. Coca-Cola likes us to approach them with innovations."

Recently E-dologic created a site for Coca-Cola that lets users design their own cans, either by using the site's technology or by uploading their own photos or graphics. At the end of the promotion, 1,000 winners had a six-pack of Coke delivered to their doors bearing their own designs. Out of Israel's population of 7 million, 200,000 people entered the competition.

E-dologic works for Procter & Gamble, Nestle and Orange in Israel. Opened in 1999, it claims to be Israel's first digital agency. It was bought by Publicis Groupe in 2001 and has been working with Coca-Cola since 2000.

Mr. Tal said another E-dologic client has already signed up to do "an even bigger project" that uses the Like Machine technology.
http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=145713





Some See a Ploy as Craigslist Blocks Sex Ads
Claire Cain Miller

Craigslist, by shutting off its “adult services” section and slapping a “censored” label in its place, may be engaging in a high-stakes stunt to influence public opinion, some analysts say.

Since blocking access to the ads as the Labor Day weekend began — and suspending a revenue stream that could bring in an estimated $44 million this year — Craigslist has refused to discuss its motivations. But using the word “censored” suggests that the increasingly combative company is trying to draw attention to its fight with state attorneys general over sex ads and to issues of free speech on the Internet.

The law has been on Craigslist’s side. The federal Communications Decency Act protects Web sites against liability for what their users post on the sites. And last year, the efforts of attorneys general were stymied when a federal judge blocked South Carolina’s attorney general from prosecuting Craigslist executives for listings that resulted in prostitution arrests.

“It certainly appears to be a statement about how they feel about being judged in the court of public opinion,” said Thomas R. Burke, a First Amendment lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine who specializes in Internet law and does not work for Craigslist. “It’s certainly the law that they’re not liable for it, but it’s another matter if the attorneys general are saying change your ways.”

Attorneys general and advocacy groups have continued to pressure the company to remove the “adult services” section. A letter from 17 state attorneys general dated Aug. 24 demanded that Craigslist close the section, contending that it helped facilitate prostitution and the trafficking of women and children.

The “adult services” section of Craigslist was still blocked in the United States on Sunday evening. “Sorry, no statement,” Susan MacTavish Best, Craigslist’s spokeswoman, wrote on Sunday in response to an e-mail message.

Analysts said that if the block was a temporary statement of protest, it could backfire because of the avalanche of news coverage that the site had received for taking down the ads.

“I’m very convinced that this is permanent, even if it was not their intention to make it permanent,” said Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the Advanced Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm that follows Craigslist closely. “I think it will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to go back and reopen that section without really running into a buzzsaw of negative publicity and reaction.”

Attorneys general in several states said they had so far been unable to get any information from Craigslist.

“If this announcement is a stunt or a ploy, it will only redouble our determination to pursue this issue with Craigslist, because they would be in a sense be thumbing their nose at the public interest,” Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general who has headed the campaign against Craigslist, said in an interview by phone on Sunday.

Mr. Blumenthal said Craigslist’s outside lawyer had been in touch with his office, but that the lawyer had not clarified whether the shutdown of the section was permanent, or said when Craigslist might make a statement.

Even though courts have said that Craigslist is protected under federal law, Mr. Blumenthal said part of his mission was to rally public support to change federal law.

“Raising public awareness is extraordinarily important, because it increases support for changes in the law that will hold them accountable,” he said. “Their view of the law, which is blanket immunity for every site on the Internet, never has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, and I think there is some serious doubt.”

Richard Cordray, the Ohio attorney general, said in an interview by phone on Sunday: “We’re taking it at face value. I think it’s a step forward, maybe grudging, in response to the efforts of the attorneys general.”

But Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, was more skeptical about Craigslist’s intentions. “Certainly because of the way they did it,” she said, “it leaves an open question as to whether this is truly the end of adult services on Craigslist or if this is just a continuing battle.”

For a site that prides itself on being a neighborly town square, Craigslist has been increasingly pugnacious in response to its critics.

Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive, has written screeds on the company blog explaining and defending Craigslist’s efforts to combat sex crimes, including manually screening sex ads and meeting with advocacy groups.

“Craigslist is committed to being socially responsible, and when it comes to adult services ads, that includes aggressively combating violent crime and human rights violations, including human trafficking and the exploitation of minors,” he wrote last month.

But he also uses the blog to lash out at eBay, an investor and a competitor that also has a sex ads service, and Craigslist critics and reporters who question Craigslist’s actions on sex ads.

Last month, Amber Lyon of CNN reported about sex ads on Craigslist and questioned Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and who is no longer a manager at the company, outside a conference where he spoke about a different topic.

In a blog post addressed to Ms. Lyon, Mr. Buckmaster responded: “There is a class of ‘journalists’ known for gratuitously trashing respected organizations and individuals, ignoring readily available facts in favor of rank sensationalism and self-promotion. They work for tabloid media.”

And he wrote a sarcastic post titled “Advocate Indeed” in response to a television appearance by Malika Saada Saar, executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a nonprofit group that has urged Craigslist to shut the sex ads section.

Though sex ads on Craigslist are the most salacious example of the debate over free speech on the Internet, it is a battle being waged across the Web. Yelp, the review site for local businesses, has been repeatedly sued by small businesses for what its users write. The suits have been dismissed by courts citing the Communications Decency Act or withdrawn by defendants once they learned about Web sites’ immunity, said Vince Sollitto, a Yelp spokesman.

Some Internet law experts say the issue strikes at the heart of free speech. “For the government to intervene in Internet communication, it has to do that very carefully,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University in California. “The ultimate goal, public safety, is really important, but these are venues of free speech communication. They’re not conspirators in crimes.”

The erotic services categories are still accessible on Craigslist sites outside the United States, and the personals section of the site is still active. Craigslist has said that if it takes down the “adult services” section, sex ads will simply migrate to other parts of the site.

Doubts about whether the block on the sex ads section is permanent are fueled by the prospect of Craigslist losing a significant amount of money. The ads, which cost $10 to post and $5 to repost, are expected to bring in $44.4 million this year, about a third of Craigslist’s annual revenue, according to the Advanced Interactive Media Group.

Still, it is difficult to predict the motives of the company, which employs about 30 people and operates in a quirky, opaque and at times petulant manner.

“It would surprise me if they didn’t try to find a workable solution to reintroduce some of that income,” said M. Ryan Calo, a senior research fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “Although, that said, Craigslist is not your typical company in the sense that it doesn’t seem to be exclusively motivated by profit.”

Louise Story contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/te...raigslist.html





How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags
Danah Boyd

For the last 12 years, I've dedicated immense amounts of time, money and energy to end violence against women and children. As a victim of violence myself, I'm deeply committed to destroying any institution or individual leveraging the sex-power matrix that results in child trafficking, nonconsensual prostitution, domestic violence and other abuses. If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve these goals, I'd be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist's "adult services" achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others.

On Friday, under tremendous pressure from US attorneys general and public advocacy groups, Craigslist shut down its "Adult Services" section. There is little doubt that this space has been used by people engaged in all sorts of illicit activities, many of which result in harmful abuses. But the debate that has ensued has centered on the wrong axis, pitting protecting the abused against freedom of speech. What's implied in public discourse is that protecting potential victims requires censorship; thus, anti-censorship advocates are up in arms attacking regulators for trying to curtail First Amendment rights. While I am certainly a proponent of free speech online, I find it utterly depressing that these groups fail to see how this is actually an issue of transparency, not free speech. And how this does more to hurt potential victims than help.

If you've ever met someone who is victimized through trafficking or prostitution, you'll hear a pretty harrowing story about what it means to be invisible and powerless, feeling like no one cares and no one's listening. Human trafficking and most forms of abusive prostitution exist in a black market, with corrupt intermediaries making connections and offering "protection" to those who they abuse for profit. The abused often have no recourse, either because their movements are heavily regulated (as with those trafficked) or because they're violating the law themselves (as with prostitutes).

The Internet has changed the dynamics of prostitution and trafficking, making it easier for prostitutes and traffickers to connect with clients without too many layers of intermediaries. As a result, the Internet has become an intermediary, often without the knowledge of those internet service providers (ISPs) who are the conduits. This is what makes people believe that they should go after ISPs like Craigslist. Faulty logic suggests that if Craigslist is effectively a digital pimp who's profiting off of online traffic, why shouldn't it be prosecuted as such?

The problem with this logic is that it fails to account for three important differences: 1) most ISPs have a fundamental business -- if not moral -- interest in helping protect people; 2) the visibility of illicit activities online makes it much easier to get at, and help, those who are being victimized; and 3) a one-stop-shop is more helpful for law enforcement than for criminals. In short, Craigslist is not a pimp, but a public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen.

1. Internet Services Providers have a fundamental business interest in helping people.

When Internet companies profit off of online traffic, they need their clients to value them and the services they provide. If companies can't be trusted -- especially when money is exchanging hands -- they lose business. This is especially true for companies that support peer-to-peer exchange of money and goods. This is what motivates services like eBay and Amazon to make it very easy for customers to get refunded when ripped off. Craigslist has made its name and business on helping people connect around services, and while there are plenty of people who use its openness to try to abuse others, Craigslist is deeply committed to reducing fraud and abuse. It's not always successful -- no company is. And the more freedom that a company affords, the more room for abuse. But what makes Craigslist especially beloved is that it is run by people who truly want to make the world a better place and who are deeply committed to a healthy civic life.

I have always been in awe of Craig Newmark, Craigslist's founder and now a "customer service rep" with the company. He's made a pretty penny off of Craigslist, so what's he doing with it? Certainly not basking in the Caribbean sun. He's dedicated his life to public service, working with organizations like Sunlight Foundation to increase government accountability and using his resources and networks to help out countless organizations like Donors Choose, Kiva, Consumer Reports and Iraq/Afghani Vets of America. This is the villain behind Craigslist trying to pimp out abused people?

Craigslist is in a tremendous position to actually work with law enforcement, both because it's in their economic interests and because the people behind it genuinely want to do good in this world. This isn't an organization dedicated to profiting off of criminals, hosting servers in corrupt political regimes to evade responsibility. This is an organization with both the incentives and interest to actually help. And they have a long track record of doing so.

2. Visibility makes it easier to help victims.

If you live a privileged life, your exposure to prostitution may be limited to made-for-TV movies and a curious dip into the red-light district of Amsterdam. You are most likely lucky enough to never have known someone who was forced into prostitution, let alone someone who was sold by or stolen from their parents as a child. Perhaps if you live in San Francisco or Las Vegas, you know a high-end escort who has freely chosen her life and works for an agency or lives in a community where she's highly supported. Truly consensual prostitutes do exist, but the vast majority of prostitution is nonconsensual, either through force or desperation. And, no matter how many hip-hop songs try to imply otherwise, the vast majority of pimps are abusive, manipulative, corrupt, addicted bastards. To be fair, I will acknowledge that these scumbags are typically from abusive environments where they too are forced into their profession through circumstances that are unimaginable to most middle class folks. But I still don't believe that this justifies their role in continuing the cycle of abuse.

Along comes the Internet, exposing you to the underbelly of the economy, making visible the sex-power industry that makes you want to vomit. Most people see such cesspools online and imagine them to be the equivalent of a crack house opening up in their gated community. Let's try a different metaphor. Why not think of it instead as a documentary movie happening in real time where you can actually do something about it?

Visibility is one of the trickiest issues in advocacy. Anyone who's worked for a nonprofit knows that getting people to care is really, really hard. Movies are made in the hopes that people will watch them and do something about the issues present. Protests and marathons are held in the hopes of bringing awareness to a topic. But there's nothing like the awareness that can happen when it's in your own backyard. And this is why advocates spend a lot of time trying to bring issues home to people.

Visibility serves many important purposes in advocacy. Not only does it motivate people to act, but it also shines a spotlight on every person involved in the issue at hand. In the case of nonconsensual prostitution and human trafficking, this means that those who are engaged in these activities aren't so deeply underground as to be invisible. They're right there. And while they feel protected by the theoretical power of anonymity and the belief that no one can physically approach and arrest them, they're leaving traces of all sorts that make them far easier to find than most underground criminals.

3. Law enforcement can make online spaces risky for criminals.

Law enforcement is always struggling to gain access to underground networks in order to go after the bastards who abuse people for profit. Underground enforcement is really difficult, and it takes a lot of time to invade a community and build enough trust to get access to information that will hopefully lead to the dens of sin. While it always looks so easy on TV, there's nothing easy or pretty about this kind of work. The Internet has given law enforcement more data than they even know what to do with, more information about more people engaged in more horrific abuses than they've ever been able to obtain through underground work. It's far too easy to mistake more data for more crime and too many aspiring governors use the increase of data to spin the public into a frenzy about the dangers of the Internet. The increased availability of data is not the problem; it's a godsend for getting at the root of the problem and actually helping people.

When law enforcement is ready to go after a criminal network, they systematically set up a sting, trying to get as many people as possible, knowing that whoever they have underground will immediately lose access the moment they act. The Internet changes this dynamic, because it's a whole lot easier to be underground online, to invade networks and build trust, to go after people one at a time, to grab victims as they're being victimized. It's a lot easier to set up stings online, posing as buyers or sellers and luring scumbags into making the wrong move. All without compromising informants.

Working with ISPs to collect data and doing systematic online stings can make an online space more dangerous for criminals than for victims because this process erodes the trust in the intermediary, the online space. Eventually, law enforcement stings will make a space uninhabitable for criminals by making it too risky for them to try to operate there. Censoring a space may hurt the ISP but it does absolutely nothing to hurt the criminals. Making a space uninhabitable by making it risky for criminals to operate there -- and publicizing it -- is far more effective. This, by the way, is the core lesson that Giuliani's crew learned in New York. The problem with this plan is that it requires funding law enforcement.

4. Using the Internet to combat the sex-power industry

It makes me scream when I think of how many resources have been used attempting to censor Craigslist instead of leveraging it as a space for effective law enforcement. During the height of the moral panic over sexual predators on MySpace, I had the fortune of spending a lot of time with a few FBI folks and talking to a whole lot of local law enforcement. I learned a scary reality about criminal activity online. Folks in law enforcement know about a lot more criminal activity than they have the time to pursue. Sure, they focus on the big players, going after the massive collectors of child pornography who are most likely to be sex offenders than spending time on the small-time abusers. But it was the medium-time criminals that gnawed at them. They were desperate for more resources so that they could train more law enforcers, pursue more cases, and help more victims. The Internet had made it a lot easier for them to find criminals, but that didn't make their jobs any easier because they were now aware of how many more victims they were unable to help. Most law enforcement in this area are really there because they want to help people and it kills them when they can't help everyone.

There's a lot more political gain to be had demonizing profitable companies than demanding more money be spent (and thus, more taxes be raised) supporting the work that law enforcement does. Taking something that is visible and making it invisible makes a politician look good, even if it does absolutely nothing to help the victims who are harmed. It creates the illusion of safety, while signaling to pimps, traffickers, and other scumbags that their businesses are perfectly safe as long as they stay invisible. Sure, many of these scumbags have an incentive to be as visible as possible to reach as many possible clients as possible, and so they will move on and invade a new service where they can reach clients. And they'll make that ISP's life hell by putting them in the spotlight. And maybe they'll choose an offshore one that American law enforcement can do nothing about. Censorship online is nothing more than whack-a-mole, pushing the issue elsewhere or more underground.

Censoring Craigslist will do absolutely nothing to help those being victimized, but it will do a lot to help those profiting off of victimization. Censoring Craigslist will also create new jobs for pimps and other corrupt intermediaries, since it'll temporarily make it a whole lot harder for individual scumbags to find clients. This will be particularly devastating for the low-end prostitutes who were using Craigslist to escape violent pimps. Keep in mind that occasionally getting beaten up by a scary john is often a whole lot more desirable for many than the regular physical, psychological, and economic abuse they receive from their pimps. So while it'll make it temporarily harder for clients to get access to abusive services, nothing good will come out of it in the long run.

If you want to end human trafficking, if you want to combat nonconsensual prostitution, if you care about the victims of the sex-power industry, don't cheer Craigslist's censorship. This did nothing to combat the cycle of abuse. What we desperately need are more resources for law enforcement to leverage the visibility of the Internet to go after the scumbags who abuse. What we desperately need are for sites like Craigslist to be encouraged to work with law enforcement and help create channels to actually help victims. What we need are innovative citizens who leverage new opportunities to devise new ways of countering abusive industries. We need to take this moment of visibility and embrace it, leverage it to create change, leverage it to help those who are victimized and lack the infrastructure to get help. What you see online should haunt you. But it should drive you to address the core problem by finding and helping victims, not looking for new ways to blindfold yourself. Please, I beg you, don't close your eyes. We need you.

(My views on this matter do not necessarily represent the views of any institution with which I'm affiliated.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danah-..._b_706789.html





What the Attacks on Craigslist’s Adult Ads are Really About
Jeff Jarvis

Let me start with a disclosure: I hope to think that Craig Newmark is a friend. He can be as hard for me to read as James Joyce or C++. But I know him as a decent and genuine man who believes that he is bringing a service to millions of people, saving them billions of dollars that used to go to overpriced, monopolistic middlemen. He doesn’t do it to get rich (I’ve driven by his office and home and they ain’t palaces), which is precisely what bedevils those old middlemen; I’ve watched them try to break him and prove he’s greedy, too, and I’ve watched them fail. When I last had coffee with Craig in San Francisco (on the craigslist tab, I should disclose), he talked about the number of free ads craigslist has given people in terms of economic philanthropy, which is also what he said to my students at CUNY two years ago.

These days, Craig and the company he founded are being demonized in courts of political and media power as sex peddlers. The service - which Craig is quick to point out, he does not run; he means it when he says he is its customer-service representative - just took down its adult ads in the U.S., replacing the link with the word “censored.”

The argument has been that craigslist ads are used to serve human sex trafficking. Except craigslist has been openly and consistently helping police in their efforts to arrest traffickers. The adult ads were paid and more trackable than free personals on craigslist or ads in many other places online and in print. Now the trade, whatever its scale, is only more distributed. Gawker has a guide to post-craigslist paid sex and craigslist has pointed out that even eBay has sold party favors of another sort.

So why are government and media going after craigslist? The same reason, I think, that media and government in, for example, Germany are demonizing Google (even as the German people give Google its biggest market share anywhere in the world). They’re going after the disruptors, the biggest disruptors in sight.

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year, leaving that money in the pockets of former advertiser-customers. Since Google and the internet have existed, many more billions have left traditional media as Google offered their former ad customers a better deal.

The New York Times today belittles craigslist’s censorship, calling it a “stunt” and “ploy” and labeling as “screeds” craisglist CEO Jim Buckmaster’s defenses of the service-and of free speech-against attorneys general and against ratings-starved CNN ambushing Craig. Nowhere does The Times disclose its own dead dog in this hunt, its loss of billions in classified revenue (in blogs, we’d be expected to, eh?). But the paper does acknowledge that the law is on craigslist’s side even if its enforcers are not and that this is a matter of free speech, which should put The Times and its journalists on craigslist’s side as well.

But they’re not. I’m not suggesting conspiracy; I rarely do. But I do see old power structures huddling together against the cold breath of technologists bringing change. At the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer, I asked Google’s Eric Schmidt whether we were going through a larger restructuring than a mere crisis. He replied that he wished we were but cautioned that, as I wrote then, too much of our resource, people, government help and attention go to the big, old legacy companies rather than supporting innovation (read: disruption). I would have translated that into the idea that instead of bailing out GM and subsidizing and artificially, temporarily propping up house and car prices, government should invest in bringing broadband to every door. I would have hoped that Schmidt might have agreed. Sadly, even he is now listing to the legacy. Google, the big boy, plays with other big boys.

But craigslist is still the weird kid. At the end of its story, The Times quotes someone saying that “Craigslist is not your typical company in the sense that it doesn’t seem to be exclusively motivated by profit.” What a strange, inscrutable child, it is. It’s easier to attack a company that doesn’t act like a company. And it’s easier to attack free speech and liberty when they - and dollars - are spent on nasty sex.

But this is a fight of old establishment power - business, media, and political - against new and disruptive technologists who are writing new rules. This is also a fight over freedom of speech. Last night, I woke up on the couch to see the end of The People vs. Larry Flynt. In this country, we protect bad speech to protect all speech.

Yes, prostitution is illegal. It long has been - the oldest laws cover the oldest profession - but the authorities have been blinking at ads for *cough* escort services in newspapers of many sorts for many years (here are the Village Voice’s adult ads). I’m headed to Berlin and Amsterdam in a few weeks, where prostitution is legal and regulated. Beyond exploitation of children - which every civilized person on earth abhors; as Mike Masnick says, the real enemy, not discussed in all this, is the trafficker - do we really want and need government regulating sex among free-willed adults? But that’s not the issue here. If it were, those attorneys general and CNN and The Times would be going after all those services Gawker lists and some newspapers, still.

No, the issue is disruption.
http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandte...-really-about/





Wikipedia Founder Says Apps, Not Paywalls, Could Save the News
Samuel Axon

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday that paid apps like those found on the iPhone, Android and iPad could help financially troubled news organizations, but he didn’t have anything positive to say about charging for content on the web.

On the other hand, he’s not optimistic about other micropayment plans wherein publications would charge users to access individual articles because at present there is not a centralized and widespread payment system as there is with Apple’s services (iTunes, iBooks and the App StoreApp StoreApp Store) or the Android MarketAndroid MarketAndroid Market.

“If I just click on my iPad, and it’s billed on my normal bill, that micropayment model makes it possible for people to have an impulse purchase,” he said. Apple already has his payment information from the get go, and the creator of each app can use Apple’s billing system for in-app purchases.

That’s one of the reasons Wales believes app stores could be beneficial for the news industry. “The apps model — the iPad app, the Kindle — does provide new and interesting opportunities for newspapers.”

We’ve heard rumors in the past that Google has a unified micropayments system in the works that could do the same for desktop content, but it hasn’t happened yet.

WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is not a commercial enterprise, but Wales’s current venture Wikia is ad-supported.
http://mashable.com/2010/09/04/jimmy-wales-apps-news/





Some Newspapers, Tracking Readers Online, Shift
Jeremy W. Peters

In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.

Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data.

Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.

“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” asked Alan Murray, who oversees online news at The Wall Street Journal. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”

Editors at The Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.

At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.

Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience.

The Post, which provided extensive coverage of the recent elections in Britain online and in its print editions, found that online readers were not particularly interested in the topic. One of the five most viewed items on The Post’s Web site in the last year, in fact, was not a political project at all but a piece on Crocs, the popular foam footwear. Editors attributed that to Yahoo, which linked to the article.

But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. And coverage of the British elections was not scaled back.

Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.

“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”

He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.

At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.

But Mr. Murray explained that the data was not always used as a blunt tool. In the case of a rather dry business development last month involving the Potash Corporation, the Canadian fertilizer maker, Journal editors decided to prominently display articles on the subject despite very low traffic numbers.

“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Mr. Murray said.

The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”

Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.

As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.

At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.

“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.

As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.

At a recent meeting with the top online editors of The Los Angeles Times, a consulting group that helps media companies enhance profits from their Web sites pitched new software that it said could change the industry. The newsroom would be able to know how much money — down to the penny — each of its articles online was making when readers clicked on ads.

“I could see a business case for it,” said Mr. Gallagher, who hastened to add, “I don’t agree with that business case.”

Software developers acknowledge that the questions can be difficult as newspapers try to reinvent their business models. But they say the dialogue is ultimately constructive.

“By having this data and making it available, we’re spurring the conversations to take place,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer for Perfect Market, the company that developed the tracking software for ad clicks. “And it’s especially healthy to have those conversations in the context of experience and not in an abstract way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/bu...a/06track.html





Online Ads, Privacy Remain in FTC Crosshairs
Kenneth Corbin

A senior official at the Federal Trade Commission hinted on Wednesday that the agency is planning to prod online advertisers and Web companies to adopt new education tools and data-collection restrictions in an effort to protect consumer privacy.

"Right now the consumers really don't understand what's going on. So I think that is the real issue that needs to be addressed," Loretta Garrison, a senior attorney at the FTC, said here at the O'Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit. "We think they sort of know they're being tracked, but they don't really understand the wealth of information that's being collected and the many different parties that are involved and the various ways in which [information] is being used."

Garrison acknowledged that the commission is sensitive to the concerns expressed by members of the Internet industry about enacting overly restrictive rules in a marketplace evolving as rapidly as the online advertising sector, particularly when advertising revenue funds the bulk of the free content and services on the Web.

But at the same time, she suggested that a baseline privacy protection should be available to consumers, recalling FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz's comments at a recent Senate hearing when he proposed a "do-not-track mechanism" for online advertising, similar to the popular "do-not-call" registry that restricts the activities of telemarketers.

"There ought to be an element where if they don't want to be tracked they ought to be able to say 'no,'" Garrison said.

Earlier this year, the FTC concluded a series of workshops that convened consumer advocates, industry representatives and other stakeholders to explore various aspects of the online privacy debate. This fall, the commission is planning to release a report outlining a set of recommendations for Internet advertisers and Web companies to provide clearer notice about their data-collection practices and offer meaningful privacy safeguards.

Leibowitz has acknowledged that those guidelines will likely extend the commission's policy of self-regulation in the online-advertising space, given its limited rulemaking authority absent an act of Congress.

House lawmakers have developed a framework for online privacy legislation, though any bill is unlikely to advance in an election-shortened session.

For some of the other members of the privacy debate speaking at the conference today, that's probably a good thing.
Education Could Alleviate Some Consumer Anxiety

High-profile missteps, such as Google's inadvertent collection of Internet transmissions with its Street View cars, or some of Facebook's more controversial policy changes, help keep the privacy debate in the front burner.

But for Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, those are the inevitable byproducts of a fast-moving technology revolution, and hardly a justification for hasty laws or regulations.

"I'm really worried because it's so important when we enter a new technological era to realize that there will be mistakes," O'Reilly said. "It really worries me when we see this rush to criminalize mistakes as we are starting to enter a new world that we don't fully understand."

The FTC's Garrison conceded that the agency's series of workshops had made it clear that "there's no such thing really as anonymity on the Web," particularly in an age when users are willingly sharing information about themselves on social media sites and loose snippets of data from disparate sources can be compiled into highly detailed profiles.

In that light, she said that the well-worn guideposts of the online privacy debate -- opt-in versus opt-out data-collection regimes and the efficacy of privacy policies -- may no longer apply.

Internet companies could drain much of the anxiety from the privacy debate if they could more effectively demonstrate the value proposition of gathering data about their users, argued Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum who formerly served as the chief privacy officer at AOL and DoubleClick.

Polonetsky recalled the outrage many Facebook users expressed when the company launched its news feed, providing automatic updates about members' activities.

Those privacy concerns dissipated as members grew accustomed to the feature (now an essential element of the social network) and Facebook made some modifications to the way it was implemented. Polonetsky made a similar point in an interview with InternetNews.com while still at AOL, describing the knee-jerk reaction privacy-conscious consumers might have had to an instant-messaging client such as AIM that alerts users when their buddies are online and available.

Both cases involve social features that seem almost quaint by the standards of 2010, but in each situation, the privacy concerns were defused when consumers came to recognize the utility of the product. Polonetsky argued that if companies could do a better job of explaining to users the value they receive in exchange for sharing benign bits of information (such as Amazon's personalized shopping recommendations), the perception of a widespread consumer harm could be laid to rest, and policy makers might not feel compelled to press for restrictive laws or regulations.

"You solve an enormous number of these privacy questions when you make data the feature that frankly it is for many of these apps," Polonetsky said. "How do we tell people that it's not about tracking, profiling -- it's about serving you."
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/article.php/3902571





AnchorFree Thrives when Nations Censor Sites
Douglas MacMillan

David Gorodyansky started AnchorFree Inc. in 2005 to offer free, private Web surfing in coffee shops, airports and other places with wireless hot spots.

The chief executive officer never predicted that five years later the Mountain View-based company's biggest growth area would be people seeking ways to skirt government censors in China.

A growing number of China's 420 million Web users are turning to services that connect them to servers outside the country so they can access sites blocked by China's extensive filtering software, known as the Great Firewall, said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The so-called proxy services have become so common among China's educated class and Western expatriates that the fees they charge are sometimes referred to as an "Internet tax," Zuckerman said.

AnchorFree runs a free, ad-supported proxy service called Hotspot Shield. Users download an application from AnchorFree's website that connects them to the Internet via a virtual private network, or VPN, similar to what telecommuters use to log onto an office network.

Most computers connected to the Internet are assigned a unique number, or IP address, to route users quickly to the right destination. AnchorFree's software assigns an anonymous address that can be traced back only to the company and not to the user, Gorodyansky said.

"We send you on a virtual trip outside China," he said.

As China's censorship has become more sophisticated, AnchorFree's popularity has grown. The company saw users of Hotspot Shield rise 159 percent in the past year, to an average of 8.52 million each month during the second quarter, as users in China more than doubled to 1.16 million.

China limited access to several popular U.S. sites, including Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, in summer 2009. Authorities had stepped up censorship in advance of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project, told Bloomberg News at the time.

The Beijing government's censorship drew international attention at the start of this year, when Google Inc. said it would stop filtering its search results in China.

AnchorFree also grew in Iran, Turkey, Georgia and the United Arab Emirates - all known to filter websites - as well as Canada, where people use it to gain access to U.S.-only video site Hulu.

Part of Hotspot Shield's appeal is that it's free. Ads appear to users as a banner inside a frame that surrounds the user's Web browser, and AnchorFree said such ads have made its business profitable. The closely held company, which works with Yahoo China to sell ads, does not disclose revenue.

Hotspot Shield may eventually become a victim of its own success: The more attention paid to a proxy service, the more reason China's censors have to shut it down.

These services aren't explicitly banned in China, though the authorities occasionally block access to them.

"It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game," said Austin Heap, who last year co-founded the nonprofit Censorship Research Center in San Francisco.

AnchorFree's website, from which the Hotspot Shield application can be downloaded, has been blocked in the past by the Chinese government, the company said. When that happens, the company finds alternative ways to distribute the program, such as e-mail.

Users who can't get access to AnchorFree's site to download the program can e-mail the company to get an automatic response with the program attached.

"We anticipate technological conflicts," Gorodyansky said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...BUHI1F8C54.DTL





Vatican: Quran Burning 'Outrageous'
CNN Wire Staff

Burning the Quran would be an "outrageous and grave gesture," the Vatican said Wednesday, joining a chorus of voices pleading with a small Florida church not to burn Islam's holy book on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The Vatican body responsible for dialogue with other religions expressed "great concern" about the plan by Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it would be a "disrespectful, disgraceful act." She was speaking Tuesday night at a State Department dinner in honor of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Her statement came a day after the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, warned that the plan "could cause significant problems" for American troops overseas.

But despite the growing pressure, the pastor of the Florida church, Terry Jones, said Wednesday that "as of this time we have no intention of canceling."

Jones all week has rebuffed pleas to call off the event, saying radical Islamists are the target of his message.

"The general needs to point his finger to radical Islam and tell them to shut up, tell them to stop, tell them that we will not bow our knees to them," Jones said on CNN's "AC360."

"We are burning the book," Jones said. "We are not killing someone. We are not murdering people."

Jones announced Wednesday that the church's website provider has "canceled" Dove World Outreach Center's accounts, though its website, and another URL for a book written by Jones titled "Islam is of the Devil," were still accessible Wednesday evening.

"We feel that it's definitely an indirect attack on our freedom of speech," Jones said, adding that the provider, Rackspace, is "trying to shut us down."

But he said, "This is not going to affect the event going forward."

A spokesman for the provider, Rackspace, said the company decided to cancel the center's sites after investigating a complaint and reviewing both sites.

The center "violated the hate-speech provision of our acceptable-use policy," said Rackspace spokesman Dan Goodgame.

"This is not a constitutional issue. This is a contract issue," said Goodgame, adding that his company had given the center until midnight to find another host and move its content. Goodgame said Rackspace has about 100,000 customers and he did not know how long it had hosted those two specific sites.

On Tuesday, Jones said his flock was taking Petraeus' warning seriously but had not decided to cancel the event.

Jones told CNN that while his congregation still plans to burn Qurans to protest the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the church is "weighing" its intentions.

"We have firmly made up our mind, but at the same time, we are definitely praying about it," Jones said on CNN's "American Morning."

As reaction to the planned event grew Wednesday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin took to social media outlets, using Twitter to call on Jones to "please stand down."

On Facebook, Palin wrote that Jones' planned Quran burning "will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don't feed that fire."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the few public officials who defended Jones' right to go ahead, even as he condemned the idea as "distasteful.

"I don't think he would like if somebody burned a book that in his religion he thinks is holy. ... But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you can't say that we are going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement," Bloomberg said, citing the section of the Constitution that promises freedom of speech.

"If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others no matter how much you disagree with them," Bloomberg said.

The planned action has drawn sharp criticism from Muslims around the world and from U.S. officials.

The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan condemned it as "disrespectful, intolerant and divisive," in a statement on Wednesday.

"We are deeply concerned about all deliberate attempts to offend members of any religious or ethnic group," said Stephen Engelken, the second-ranking diplomat at the embassy.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday issued a statement saying the U.S. government "in no way condones such acts of disrespect against the religion of Islam, and is deeply concerned about deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups."

It emphasized that it strongly condemned "the offensive messages, which are contrary to U.S. government policy and deeply offensive to Muslims especially during the month of Ramadan."

"Americans from all religious and ethnic backgrounds reject the offensive initiative by this small group in Florida. A great number of American voices are protesting the hurtful statements made by this organization," the Afghanistan embassy said.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, issued a joint statement with Lloyd Austin, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, to condemn the act.

"As this holy month of Ramadan comes to a close and Iraqis prepare to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, we join with the citizens of Iraq and of every nation to repudiate religious intolerance and to respect and defend the diversity of faiths of our fellow man," they wrote.

With about 120,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops still battling al Qaeda and its allies in the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, Petraeus warned that burning Qurans "is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems -- not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community."

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman denounced the Quran burning as "contrary to the teachings of tolerant divine religions and totally incompatible with the logic of dialogue among civilizations, religions and cultures."

Suleiman noted that a United Nations conference on religious tolerance two years ago called on people "to renounce hatred and intolerance and terrorism," and "to reflect on the Christian teachings and concepts of humanity that emphasizes the love and respect for the other."

Thousands of Indonesians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sunday to protest the planned Quran burning.

"The burning is not only an insult to the holy Quran, but an insult to Islam and Muslims around the world," said Muhammad Ismail, a spokesman for the hard-line Indonesian Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population.

Jones said his congregation is aware that the action is offensive.

"We realize that this action would indeed offend people, offend the Muslims. I am offended when they burn the flag. I am offended when they burn the Bible. But we feel that the message that we are trying to send is much more important than people being offended."

Jones said Muslims are welcomed in the United States, if they observe the Constitution and don't try to impose Sharia, or Muslim law.

The message, he said, is directed toward the "radical element of Islam."

"Our message is very clear," he said. "It is not to the moderate Muslim. Our message is not a message of hate. Our message is a message of warning to the radical element of Islam, and I think what we see right now around the globe provides exactly what we're talking about," he said.

The center says it was founded in 1986 as a "total concept church for the rich, the poor, the young and the old." Its purpose is to "stand up for righteousness and for the truth of the Bible." It stresses that "Christians must return to the truth and stop hiding."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/08/flo...uran.reaction/





Pentagon Plan: Buying Books to Keep Secrets
Scott Shane

Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute.

The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security.

Disputes between the government and former intelligence officials over whether their books reveal too much have become commonplace. But veterans of the publishing industry and intelligence agencies could not recall another case in which an agency sought to dispose of a book that had already been printed.

Army reviewers suggested various changes and redactions and signed off on the edited book in January, saying they had “no objection on legal or operational security grounds,” and the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, planned for an Aug. 31 release.

But when the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in July and showed it to other spy agencies, reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified information, setting off a scramble by Pentagon officials to stop the book’s distribution.

Release of the book “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security,” Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr., the D.I.A. director, wrote in an Aug. 6 memorandum. He said reviewers at the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and United States Special Operations Command had all found classified information in the manuscript.

The disputed material includes the names of American intelligence officers who served with Colonel Shaffer and his accounts of clandestine operations, including N.S.A. eavesdropping operations, according to two people briefed on the Pentagon’s objections. They asked not to be named because the negotiations are supposed to be confidential.

By the time the D.I.A. objected, however, several dozen copies of the unexpurgated 299-page book had already been sent out to potential reviewers, and some copies found their way to online booksellers. The New York Times was able to buy a copy online late last week.

The dispute arises as the Obama administration is cracking down on disclosures of classified information to the news media, pursuing three such prosecutions to date, the first since 1985. Separately, the military has charged an Army private with giving tens of thousands of classified documents to the organization WikiLeaks.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the case showed that judgments on what is classified “are often arbitrary and highly subjective.” But in this case, he said, it is possible that D.I.A. reviewers were more knowledgeable than their Army counterparts about damage that disclosures might do.

Mr. Aftergood, who generally advocates open government but has been sharply critical of WikiLeaks, said the government’s move to stop distribution of the book would draw greater attention to the copies already in circulation.

“It’s an awkward set of circumstances,” he said. “The government is going to make this book famous.”

Colonel Shaffer, his lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, and lawyers for the publisher are near an agreement with the Pentagon over what will be taken out of a new edition to be published Sept. 24, with the allegedly classified passages blacked out. But the two sides are still discussing whether the Pentagon will buy the first printing, currently in the publisher’s Virginia warehouse, and at what price.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Bob Mehal, said the book had not received a proper “information security review” initially and that officials were working “closely and cooperatively” with the publisher and author to resolve the problem.

In a brief telephone interview this week before Army superiors asked him not to comment further, Colonel Shaffer said he did not think it contained damaging disclosures. “I worked very closely with the Army to make sure there was nothing that would harm national security,” he said.

“Operation Dark Heart” is a breezily written, first-person account of Colonel Shaffer’s five months in Afghanistan in 2003, when he was a civilian D.I.A. officer based at Bagram Air Base near Kabul.

He worked undercover, using the pseudonym “Christopher Stryker,” and was awarded a Bronze Star for his work. Col. Jose R. Olivero of the Army, who recommended Colonel Shaffer for the honor, wrote that he had shown “skill, leadership, tireless efforts and unfailing dedication.”

But after 2003, Colonel Shaffer was involved in a dispute over his claim that an intelligence program he worked for, code named Able Danger, had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat before he became the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general later concluded that the claim was inaccurate.

In 2004, after Colonel Shaffer returned from another brief assignment in Afghanistan, D.I.A. officials charged him with violating several agency rules, including claiming excessive expenses for a trip to Fort Dix, N.J. Despite the D.I.A. accusations, which resulted in the revocation of his security clearance, the Army promoted him to lieutenant colonel from major in 2005. He was effectively fired in 2006 by D.I.A., which said he could not stay on without a clearance, and now works at a Washington research group, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

Even before the Able Danger imbroglio, Colonel Shaffer admits in his book, he was seen by some at D.I.A. as a risk-taking troublemaker. He describes participating in a midday raid on a telephone facility in Kabul to download the names and numbers of all the cellphone users in the country and proposing an intelligence operation to cross into Pakistan and spy on a Taliban headquarters.

In much of the book, he portrays himself as a brash officer who sometimes ran into resistance from timid superiors.

“A lot of folks at D.I.A. felt that Tony Shaffer thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted,” Mr. Shaffer writes about himself. “They never understood that I was doing things that were so secret that only a few knew about them.”

The book includes some details that typically might be excised during a required security review, including the names of C.I.A. and N.S.A. officers in Afghanistan, casual references to “N.S.A.’s voice surveillance system,” and American spying forays into Pakistan.

David Wise, author of many books on intelligence, said the episode recalled the C.I.A.’s response to the planned publication of his 1964 book on the agency, “The Invisible Government.” John A. McCone, then the agency’s director, met with him and his co-author, Thomas B. Ross, to ask for changes, but they were not government employees and refused the request.

The agency studied the possibility of buying the first printing, Mr. Wise said, but the publisher of Random House, Bennett Cerf, told the agency he would be glad to sell all the copies to the agency — and then print more.

“Their clumsy efforts to suppress the book only made it a bestseller,” Mr. Wise said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10books.html





A Strong Password Isn’t the Strongest Security
Randall Stross

MAKE your password strong, with a unique jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. But memorize it — never write it down. And, oh yes, change it every few months.

These instructions are supposed to protect us. But they don’t.

Some computer security experts are advancing the heretical thought that passwords might not need to be “strong,” or changed constantly. They say onerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact, they say, we aren’t paying enough attention to more potent threats.

Here’s one threat to keep you awake at night: Keylogging software, which is deposited on a PC by a virus, records all keystrokes — including the strongest passwords you can concoct — and then sends it surreptitiously to a remote location.

“Keeping a keylogger off your machine is about a trillion times more important than the strength of any one of your passwords,” says Cormac Herley, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research who specializes in security-related topics. He said antivirus software could detect and block many kinds of keyloggers, but “there’s no guarantee that it gets everything.”

After investigating password requirements in a variety of settings, Mr. Herley is critical not of users but of system administrators who aren’t paying enough attention to the inconvenience of making people comply with arcane rules. “It is not users who need to be better educated on the risks of various attacks, but the security community,” he said at a meeting of security professionals, the New Security Paradigms Workshop, at Queen’s College in Oxford, England. “Security advice simply offers a bad cost-benefit tradeoff to users.”

One might guess that heavily trafficked Web sites — especially those that provide access to users’ financial information — would have requirements for strong passwords. But it turns out that password policies of many such sites are among the most relaxed. These sites don’t publicly discuss security breaches, but Mr. Herley said it “isn’t plausible” that these sites would use such policies if their users weren’t adequately protected from attacks by those who do not know the password.

Mr. Herley, working with Dinei Florêncio, also at Microsoft Research, looked at the password policies of 75 Web sites. At the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, held in July in Redmond, Wash., they reported that the sites that allowed relatively weak passwords were busy commercial destinations, including PayPal, Amazon.com and Fidelity Investments. The sites that insisted on very complex passwords were mostly government and university sites. What accounts for the difference? They suggest that “when the voices that advocate for usability are absent or weak, security measures become needlessly restrictive.”

Donald A. Norman, a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design consulting firm in Fremont, Calif., makes a similar case. In “When Security Gets in the Way,” an essay published last year, he noted the password rules of Northwestern University, where he then taught. It was a daunting list of 15 requirements. He said unreasonable rules can end up rendering a system less secure: users end up writing down passwords and storing them in places that can be readily discovered.

“These requirements keep out the good guys without deterring the bad guys,” he said.

Northwestern has reduced its password requirements to eight, but they still constitute a challenging maze. For example, the password can’t have more than four sequential characters from the previous seven passwords, and a new password is required every 120 days.

By contrast, Amazon has only one requirement: that the password be at least six characters. That’s it. And hold on to it as long as you like.

A short password wouldn’t work well if an attacker could try every possible combination in quick succession. But as Mr. Herley and Mr. Florêncio note, commercial sites can block “brute-force attacks” by locking an account after a given number of failed log-in attempts. “If an account is locked for 24 hours after three unsuccessful attempts,” they write, “a six-digit PIN can withstand 100 years of sustained attack.”

Roger A. Safian, a senior data security analyst at Northwestern, says that unlike Amazon, the university is unfortunately vulnerable to brute-force attacks in that it doesn’t lock out accounts after failed log-ins. The reason, he says, is that anyone could use a lockout policy to try logging in to a victim’s account, “knowing that you won’t succeed, but also knowing that the victim won’t be able to use the account, either.” (Such thoughts may occur to a student facing an unwelcome exam, who could block a professor from preparations.)

VERY short passwords, taken directly from the dictionary, would be permitted in a password system that Mr. Herley and Stuart Schechter at Microsoft Research developed with Michael Mitzenmacher at Harvard.

At the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security conference, held last month in Washington, the three suggested that Web sites with tens or hundreds of millions of users, could let users choose any password they liked — as long as only a tiny percentage selected the same one. That would render a list of most often used passwords useless: by limiting a single password to, say, 100 users among 10 million, the odds of an attacker getting lucky on one attempt per account are astronomically long, Mr. Herley explained in a conversation last month.

Mr. Herley said the proposed system hadn’t been tested and that users might become frustrated in trying to select a password that was no longer available. But he said he believed an anything-is-permitted password system would be welcomed by users sick of being told, “Eat your broccoli; a strong password is good for security.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/business/05digi.html





DHS Cybersecurity Watchdogs Miss Hundreds of Vulnerabilities on Their Own Network

The federal agency in charge of protecting other agencies from computer intruders was found riddled with hundreds of high-risk security holes on its own systems, according to the results of an audit released Wednesday.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, monitors the Einstein intrusion-detection sensors on nonmilitary government networks, and helps other civil agencies respond to hack attacks. It also issues alerts on the latest software security holes, so that everyone from the White House to the FAA can react quickly to install workarounds and patches.

But in a case of “physician, heal thyself,” the agency — which forms the operational arm of DHS’s National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD — failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes (.pdf).

“The majority of the high-risk vulnerabilities involved application and operating system and security software patches that had not been deployed on … computer systems located in Virginia,” reads the report from assistant inspector general Frank Deffer.

Einstein, the government’s intrusion-detection system, passed the security scan with flying colors, as did US-CERT’s private portal and public website. But the systems on which US-CERT analysts send e-mail and access data collected from Einstein were filled with the kinds of holes one might find in a large corporate network: unpatched installs of Adobe Acrobat, Sun’s Java and some Microsoft applications.

In addition to the 202 high-risk holes, another 106 medium- and 363 low-risk vulnerabilities were found at US-CERT.

“To ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its cybersecurity information, NCSD needs to focus on deploying timely system-security patches to mitigate risks to its cybersecurity program systems, finalizing system security documentation, and ensuring adherence to departmental security policies and procedures,” the report concludes.

In an appendix to the report, which is dated Aug. 18, the division wrote that it has patched its systems since the audit was conducted.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said in a statement Wednesday that DHS has implemented “a software management tool that will automatically deploy operating-system and application-security patches and updates to mitigate current and future vulnerabilities.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/us-cert/





Cybercriminals Creating 57,000 Fake Web Sites Every Week

In a recent investigation, it was discovered that cybercriminals are creating 57,000 new “fake” websites each week looking to imitate and exploit approximately 375 high-profile brands. eBay and Western Union were the most targeted brands, making up 44 percent of exploited brands discovered. Visa, Amazon, Bank of America and PayPal also heavily targeted by cybercriminals.

Banks comprise the majority of fake websites by far with 65 percent of the total. Online stores and auction sites came in at 27 percent, with eBay taking the spot as the No. 1 most targeted brand on the Web today.

These findings are based on a three-month long study conducted by PandaLabs, Panda Security's anti-malware laboratory.

The 10 most Targeted brands among all fake websites tracked by PandaLabs:

1. eBay – 23.21 percent

2. Western Union – 21.15 percent

3. Visa – 9.51 percent

4. United Services Automobile Association – 6.85 percent

5. HSBC – 5.98 percent

6. Amazon – 2.42 percent

7. Bank of America – 2.29 percent

8. PayPal – 1.77 percent

9. Internal Revenue Service – 1.69 percent

10. Bendigo Bank – 1.38 percent

According to Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, "Although search engines are making an effort to mitigate the situation by changing indexing algorithms, they have so far been unable to offset the avalanche of new websites being created by hackers every day."

Keep in mind these figures are only ones reported from a single research team, you can be sure the real number of sites like this are significantly higher.

According to a recent study announced this week, two-thirds (65 percent) of Internet users globally, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. users have been a victim of cybercrime. The problem isn't going away anytime soon.
http://www.securityweek.com/cybercri...tes-every-week





New Adobe PDF Zero-Day Under Attack
Ryan Naraine

Adobe today sounded an alarm for a new zero-day flaw in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software, warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability in-the-wild.

Details on the vulnerability are not yet public but the sudden warning from Adobe is a sure sign that rigged PDF documents are being used by malicious hackers to take complete control of machines with the latest versions of Adobe Reader/Acrobat installed.
Here’s Adobe’s warning:follow Ryan Naraine on twitter

A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Reader 9.3.4 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, and Adobe Acrobat 9.3.4 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-2883) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild.

Adobe is in the process of evaluating the schedule for an update to resolve this vulnerability.

Ominously, Adobe said it cannot offer any pre-patch advice to help users thwart the attacks.

Unfortunately, there are no mitigations we can offer. However, Adobe is actively sharing information about this vulnerability (and vulnerabilities in general) with partners in the security community to enable them to quickly develop detection and quarantine methods to protect users until a patch is available. As always, Adobe recommends that users follow security best practices by keeping their anti-malware software and definitions up to date.

An Adobe spokeswoman described the attacks as “limited” but warned that that could change with the availability of public exploit code. She said the company was notified of the attacks yesterday (Tuesday September 7, 2010) via information from a private partner company.

Affected software includes:

• Adobe Reader 9.3.4 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX
• Adobe Acrobat 9.3.4 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh

The next batch of Adobe Reader/Acrobat patches is scheduled for October 12, 2010 but it is likely the company will ship an out-of-band update for this issue.

UPDATE: A sample PDF from the attack is publicly available. It targets Windows users, affects Acrobat 8 and 9, exploits multiple versions at once, and bypasses DEP and ASLR.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/n...er-attack/7283





Madison Police Use GPS to Find iPhones
AP

Apparently a Madison thief isn't that familiar with iPhones.

A 19-year-old man is accused of stealing two of the smart phones from a display near the front of an Apple store in Madison Thursday.

When police responded about 9:30 a.m. Thursday, an employee was already tracking the phones, which have GPS technology. The phones appeared as blue dots on a computer screen as they moved on the Beltline, John Nolen Drive, Park Street and Fish Hatchery Road before stopping at a convenience store.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported that an officer then notified that local district, which dispatched an officer who saw the suspect pumping gas. The phones were located inside a van, and the Madison man was arrested.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...nes-645356.php





Jailbreak Hole in iOS 4.1 Will be Hard to Close

All Steve Jobs's horses and all Steve Jobs's men ...
Dan Goodin

Just hours after Apple released iOS 4.1 to great fanfare, hardware hackers found a way to jailbreak devices that run the new operating system. More surprising still, there doesn't appear to be anything Steve Jobs can do to stop them in the near future.

The exploit in the boot ROM of iOS devices was first announced by iPhone Dev-Team member pod2g. It was soon confirmed by other hackers, who said that because the exploit targets such a low-level part of the operating system, Apple won't be able to stop jailbreakers without making significant hardware changes.

That's in stark contrast to previous jailbreak holes, such as the one exploited for weeks on a site called Jailbreakme.com. That hack relied on two software bugs in iOS, allowing Apple engineers to stop the jailbreaking with a simple update. Ironically, an even earlier jailbreak known as the 24kpwn exploit was eliminated by tweaking iPhone 3GS phones to add — you guessed it — the vulnerable boot ROM.

All iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads that have shipped since November contain the same component.

Dev-Team members say there is still work to be done to fine-tune the exploit technique and that would-be jailbreakers are best served by forgoing the update to 4.1 for now. The admonition comes after they called iOS 4.1 a trap designed to prevent future jailbreaking and unlocks.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09...t_1_jailbreak/





Norton Study Reveals People View Internet Copyright File Sharing as Legal
MarkJ

A new Norton Cybercrime Report - The Human Impact - has revealed that Copyright Holders (Rights Holders) face an uphill struggle with convincing people to stop using their broadband ISP connections for "illegal" file sharing (p2p) activity. Nearly half of respondents felt it "legal" to download a single music track, album or movie without paying (17%, 14%, and 15% respectively).

Norton's Marian Merritt said:

"The anonymous online world we live in enables many of us to engage in activities that would be clearly illegal if done in the physical world. So while we’re besieged by online cybercrime, we often engage in forms of online theft, misrepresentation, defacement and simple lying without recognizing our own hypocrisy."

The study continues on to claim that, despite these "shaky ethics and questionable behaviour", only a fifth of adults (22%) say they have online regrets. In addition, across all of the countries involved, a third have used a fake online identity and 45% lie about personal details (age, sex, income, etc.); although this could be to protect personal privacy.

However, people in the UK are relatively squeaky clean, with only 18% using a false online ID or 33% lying about personal details.

Report contributor, Joseph LaBrie PhD, comments:

"We’ve become accustomed to getting so much of what we need off the Internet for free. So it’s difficult to train people to think about paying for something in this otherwise free place. They don’t regard it in the same way as regular commerce. The psychology around the Internet is that if it’s out there, it’s fair game."

Some 7,000 adults in 14 countries around the world participated in Norton's study, which also found that 65% have been a victim of cybercrime.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...-as-legal.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[labourinvein]

I have just discovered (re-discovered actually) all the information about Napsterites on an old hard drive, good job I never sold it huh? even my password, now how's that for insecurity...?

Good to see you are still doing a wonderful job of collating the vital stuff into one place for us all to read, mind you some of it is a little worrying, all the underhand goings on, by "THEM" and US, I am still one of "US" by the way, but on another platform now (soulseek) and of course BLOGGER and FACEBOOK.

Pleased to say HI to anyone that remembers me from way back then, all those NICE folks I used to have cheery banter with in the early part of the 21st C.

I've been looking for my "FlashMac" avatar for ages for another medium, good to see its still active here...

Regards...

Gus.

[JackSpratts]

hi gus, always a pleasure.

how is soulseek these days? since i joined oink and now waffles i don't stop in as often.

- jack.

[labourinvein]

Greetings JS

Soulseek seems to be going very well,the software revisions have improved operation quite a bit. There is still the leech problem of course, and the odd use by users in the east to grab content for counterfeit CD's, proven numerous times by embedded audio keys turning up on the CD wave files, keys that have been purposely embedded in the 320k MP3's.

Many users now work list only, with friends, and previously checked upload providers with worthwhile content, so the leech thing does not happen to them.

I am still running my opennap servers for users of WinMx 2.6 that club is still going, though getting less and less users as years go by, personally I take no active part in any supply or download on that network, I use it just as a means to communicate with friends.

I wonder how many are still here of the old gang, I half expected this to be dead, quite a surprise to log in and find all your input, all very interesting and wide ranging stuff, some good links you provide, in fact I would say I should send you a bill for all the time I spent today, when I should have been doing other more menial tasks (far less interesting tasks too) I was deep in your postings...

I'll fly back occasionally to see what gives if I can remember the password again (had 4 goes getting it right just now, had writ it down wrong!!)

Gus.