Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 13th, '09

[JackSpratts]

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June 13th, 2009




French Court Savages "Three-Strikes" Law, Tosses it Out

France's groundbreaking "three strikes" law that would disconnect repeat Internet file-swappers has been overturned by the country's Constitutional Council. "Innocent until proven guilty" still means something in France.
Nate Anderson

The French Constitutional Council has ripped into the new Création et Internet law which would disconnect repeat online copyright infringers, calling the basic premise unconstitutional. "Innocent until proven guilty" remains a central principle of French law, and it cannot be bypassed simply by creating a new nonjudicial authority.

Better known as the "three strikes" law, Création et Internet set up a High Authority in France that would oversee a graduated response program designed to curb online piracy. Rightsholders would investigate, submit complaints to the High Authority (called HADOPI, after its French acronym), and the Authority would take action. Warnings would be passed to ISPs, who would forward them to customers; after two such warnings, the subscriber could be disconnected and placed on a nationwide "no Internet" blacklist.

The law passed on its second attempt—the first was foiled by a few Socialists who staged a bit of parliamentary theater to vote down the bill. But the Sarkozy government would not be denied, and it got its way a few weeks later.

The law still had to pass muster before the Constitutional Council, however, and this was a potential problem. The graduated response program was nonjudicial, setting up a separate "administrative" authority, but it performed an essentially judicial function (not just warning and monitoring, but sanctioning). And the sanction proceedings had a presupposition of guilt; sure, there was an appeal mechanism, but the burden of proof was on the Internet user to show that she had not been uploading those Stephan Eicher tracks.

In its ruling, this was precisely the issue that the Council zeroed in upon, going all the way back to the French Revolution to stress the wrongheadedness of the HADOPI approach.

"Moreover, whereas under section nine of the Declaration of 1789, every man is presumed innocent until has has been proven guilty, it follows that in principle the legislature does not establish a presumption of guilt in criminal matters," wrote the Council. This basic principle applies "to any sanction in the nature of punishment, even if the legislature has left the decision to an authority that is nonjudicial in nature."

The court also made a strong statement about freedom of speech: "Freedom of expression and communication is so valuable that its exercise is a prerequisite for democracy and one of the guarantees of respect for other rights and freedoms and attacks on the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the aim pursued."

Disconnection would appear to be a disproportionate penalty—a claim often made by MEPs at the European Parliament who have repeatedly voted to make such sanctions illegal unless overseen by a judge.

To call the decision a "bombshell" is to do a grave disservice to bombshells everywhere. The French law has been a showpiece for the recording industry's worldwide graduated response campaign, and it's been one of the toughtest such laws proposed anywhere. The Council's censure appears to mean that disconnections—a penalty that the industry says is essential—must be treated like court cases, not "you're probably guilty" administrative proceedings. That, of course, was precisely what such systems were set up to avoid, since suing individual file-swappers hasn't worked so well and costs unbelievable amounts of time and money.

With MEPs and its own Consitutional Council condemning the law, the Sarkozy government may need to drop its full-throated support for the approach found in Création et Internet—support that has been seen both on the national and European level. It could also mean the resignation of French Culture Minister Christina Albanel, who was responsible for pushing the bill through the National Assembly and who threatened to resign if it didn't pass. She will hold a press conference in Paris this afternoon to discuss the decision.

There was no grieving from open Internet groups like La Quadrature du Net, which posted its response in the form of a picture.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ses-it-out.ars





German Publishers Demand Govt Action On Piracy
Wolfgang Spahr

German music publishers have called upon the federal government to implement a warning system to clamp down on the illegal use of music on the Internet.

At the German Music Publishers Association's (DMV) annual conference in Dresden, DMV president Dagmar Sikorski said urgent action was needed.

"Germany is on course towards becoming a land of paradise for Internet piracy," he said. "France, for example is combating the illicit use of music by taking a series of measures ranging from the issue of warnings through to a ban on Internet access."

The French government is implementing a 'three-strikes' scheme that would see copyright infringers' broadband cut off after two warnings for up to a year. According to surveys, 80% of users stop such activity after receiving the first warning.

Dagmar Sikorski explained that the non-remunerated use of music jeopardized the German music industry and posed a threat to cultural diversity, adding that it was high time for a statutory obligation to be imposed on Internet access providers, forcing them to pull their weight in efforts to prevent Internet piracy.

Sikorski said that the German federal government should heed the words of its own state minister of culture Bernd Neumann, who had stated that illicit copying and unauthorized use of intellectual property were threatening the livelihoods of artists and companies in the creative industry and that this was an intolerable situation. Ahead of the upcoming federal election in September, music publishers fear that improvements to copyright legislation and efforts to combat Internet piracy will be delayed for years.

DMV represents the interests of German music publishers throughout Germany. With roughly 500 members, it covers around 90% of the music publishing sector in Germany. Last year, the music publishers organized in DMV generated revenue of €580 million ($814 million).
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...3e345f757dad9b





Japan Cracks Down On Internet Copyright Violation
Rob Schwartz

Japanese authorities are cracking down on the illegal distribution of music files over the Internet. The operators of a bulletin board system called One Touch have been warned to stop using copyright-protected material.

Five teenagers, who were all site administrators, were brought in for questioning by the police last week, including one 13-year old who was given juvenile probation. In recent months, two adults have been arrested for uploading songs to the site.

JASRAC, the Japanese rights' society, told Billboard.biz it made a compliant on May 18 to the local police in the city of Nagoya, where One Touch is based. After an investigation, police issued warnings to Aichi Information System, the operators of the BBS, and hauled in the five teenagers from the city of Fukuoka.

JASRAC has previously filed complaints about the same site and the police have taken action against two people in the last two months. In April a male university student was fined 600,000 yen ($6,120), and in May a 54-year-old male doctor was fined 500,000 yen ($5,100).

Some English-language services reported that the five teenagers were formerly arrested but JASRAC told Billboard.biz they were only questioned - with one consequently put on juvenile probation - as they were underage.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...1951a92d3fb283





Illegal Downloads and Dodgy Figures
Ben Goldacre

You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material."

That's about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail was worried too: "The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free every year." Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I'd like more details.

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which "seeks to inform by countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts"). The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."

What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value.

In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax.

Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...usic-downloads





Are Downloads Really Killing the Music Industry? Or is it Something Else?
Charles Arthur

The music industry does like to insist that filesharing - aka illegal downloading - is killing the industry: that every one of the millions of music files downloaded each day counts as a "lost" sale, which if only it could somehow have been prevented would put stunning amounts of money into impoverished artists' hands. And, of course, music industry bosses' wallets. But we won't mention that.

Take the story that appeared in this paper last week:

At least 7 million people in Britain use illegal downloads, costing the economy billions of pounds and thousands of jobs, according to a report.

Shared content on one network was worth about £12bn a year according to the research commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property.

David Lammy, minister for intellectual property, said: "Illegal downloading robs our economy of millions of pounds every year and seriously damages business and innovation throughout the UK. "It is something that needs tackling, and we are serious about doing so."

Well, up to a point, minister. Ben Goldacre took apart the rather dodgy calculations behind the claims on Saturday.

But it left me wondering. Why does the music industry persist in saying that every download is a lost sale? If you even think about it, it can't be true. People - even downloaders - only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs?

I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else.

What else, I mused, might they be buying? Hmm... young.. like the entertainment industry... ah, how about computer games and DVDs? Thus began a hunt for the figures for UK sales of games and of DVDs and of music to see if there was any consistent relationship between them. And since this was about filesharing, it seemed sensible to analyse it since 1999 - when Napster started and blew up the CD business model.

(It's surprising how hard it was to find these statistics. You'd think someone like ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers' Association, would have them. Nope: instead initially I had to track them via press releases. The BPI, representing British record labels, said that it didn't have numbers going back before 2004, which seemed a bit 1984-ish to me; it turns out the BPI doesn't like to release those figures because it changed the methodology for recording sales in 2004, effectively reducing the number. At least DVD data are easily obtained from the British Video Association and the UK Film Council. Thank you.)

The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed "a record year". In fact if you look at the graph above, you'll see that games spend has risen dramatically - from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.

If we assume that there's roughly the same amount of discretionary spending available (which, even allowing for the credit bubble, should be roughly true; most of the credit went into houses), then it's clear who the culprit is: the games industry. By 2009, the amount spent in games and music is almost exactly the same as 1999 (though note that the music industry changed its methods from 2004).

Yes, downloaders aren't spending money on the music industry, and in that way they are hurting it. But I'd argue that the true volume of "lost" sales is nowhere near the claims made. Assume that music couldn't be copied (as many games can't). I don't think that the volume of music sales would equate to all those downloads. At best, it would be £600m larger.

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game - and downloading the two tracks. That's real discretion in spending. It's hurting the music industry, sure. But let's not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datab...wnloads-piracy





iiNet Requests AFACT Letters in Copyright Case
Andrew Colley

PERTH-based ISP iiNet has asked a group of copyright holders to hand over a wide range of documents including those revealing any action they have taken against other internet providers to combat online piracy.
iiNet made the request yesterday during the lead phases up to its landmark legal battle against the group which has alleged it breached their intellectual property rights in the NSW Federal Court.

The documents are expected to reveal details of letters of demand sent to other ISPs - both within Australia and in other jurisdictions - and large amounts of anti-piracy policy information retained by the copyright holders.

Lawyers representing the group of copyright holders, which has coordinated its legal action behind the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), said that the request was nothing more than an attempt to gain political mileage.

The group of 34 copyright holders behind AFACT includes Warner Bros. Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Roadshow Films, Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Seven Network Limited.

AFACT barrister Tony Bannon SC told the court: “There may be some political material they want to get out of it… but it doesn’t have any relevance.”

iiNet’s legal representatives argued that the documents would help the ISP to address key legal claims that the company failed to take reasonable steps to stop its customers infringing its copyright.

iiNet’s barrister Richard Cobden SC argued that the documents would allow the company to address the question of what were reasonable and appropriate steps “if customers could simply go to another ISP.”

“This is why we want to hear what they’ve been doing to other ISPs as well as us,” Mr Cobden said.

AFACT is attempting to prove that iiNet engaged in both primary and secondary copyright infringement. The primary infringement claim is based on loosely-defined allegations that the ISP used some form of technical means to store the files to facilitate the sharing activity.

The secondary infringement claim stands on legal principles established in the 2005 Kazaa trial against Sharman Networks. It requires the group to prove that iiNet failed to take “reasonable and appropriate” steps to stop its customers making alleged copyright breaches.

AFACT hired two investigators to become iiNet subscribers and trade files on the company’s network. It then sent notices to the ISPs with lists of internet addresses requesting that the ISP disconnect the users – requests which were not met.

Broadly, they argue that by failing to disconnect customers after it notified them of the breaches iiNet was engaging in secondary infringement.

The ISP also asked the court to withdraw a previous admission it had as to whether any infringement had taken place on its network.

The discovery proceedings will continue next Monday when the court is expected to rule on whether it will grant iiNet’s request.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15318,00.html





Time to Slay Canadian File-Sharing Myths
Michael Geist

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the debut of Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that had a transformative effect on the music and Internet services industries. While many commentators have marked the anniversary by reassessing Napster's impact and speculating on what lies ahead, now is also a suitable time to put to rest two myths about file sharing in Canada.

The two myths that dominate debate are: all file sharing is legal in Canada and, perhaps as a consequence of this, that Canada leads the world in illegal file-sharing activity. Neither claim is true.

The belief that Canada is a veritable Wild West, where it is legal to upload and download to your heart's content has its genesis in the recording industry's failed file-sharing lawsuits in 2004. Following the U.S. example, the Canadian Recording Industry Association filed lawsuits against 29 alleged file sharers at five Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs).

The case was a failure as then-Federal Court judge Konrad von Finckenstein (now chair of the CRTC) denied a request to order the ISPs to disclose the identity of their customers. Von Finckenstein ruled the recording industry's case suffered from evidentiary shortcomings along with questions about privacy and copyright law. The decision garnered international attention and many mistakenly took it to mean all file sharing was legal in Canada.

The reality is Canadian law features a private copying exemption that includes a levy on blank media. The Federal Court and the Copyright Board of Canada have intimated the levy, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars, could apply to personal, non-commercial downloading of sound recordings onto certain blank media. The law therefore opens the door to some legalized music downloading, but it does not cover other content (movies or software) or the uploading of any content.

The second myth, which is endlessly promoted by advocates of legal reforms, is that Canada has the largest file-sharing population on a per-capita basis. For example, the Conference Board of Canada recently used this argument as its lead finding in a series of reports that were recalled due to plagiarism.

The myth originates from a 2004 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that examined 2003 file-sharing data in its 30 member countries. The nearly six-year-old study did not consider whether the activities were legal or illegal, but rather focused exclusively on the number of peer-to-peer users.

Canada stood first in that study, yet, there is ample reason to doubt its validity today. In addition to the fact the OECD made no claims about illegal activity or about file sharing in the more than 150 non-OECD countries, newer studies indicate Canada is declining as a hub of file-sharing activity relative to the rest of the world.

BayTSP, a U.S. firm that identifies and tracks copyright content for movie and music interests, recently issued a report that assessed the number of infringement notices arising out of peer-to-peer and Internet use. According to the report, Canada declined to 10th worldwide (it was seventh last year). The top three countries were Spain, Italy, and France, with each having at least five times the number of infringement claims as Canada.

The decline runs contrary to Canadian file-sharing mythology, but it should not surprise since it mirrors Canada's decline in the global high-speed Internet access rankings. This suggests Canadians may have been early file-sharing adopters due to better access, but other countries have now passed us.

Much has changed since Napster took the world by storm 10 years ago. As we look ahead to the next decade, it is time to ground the debate in fact rather than fiction.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/647038





Sen. Orrin Hatch Calls Pirate Bay Case a Win, Slams Canada Over Copyright Issues

Influential Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) referred to a Swedish court's recent conviction of the operators of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay as "important" and a "victory." He also reiterated Congressional claims that Canada is a leading copyright violator and pointed with pride to the controversial Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which he helped pass more than a decade ago.

Hatch, who has served in the Senate for 32 years, made the remarks while addressing the World Copyright Summit on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. The Utah Senator co-chairs the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC):

For years, countries like China and Russia have been viewed as providing the least hospitable environments for the protection of intellectual property. But this year, it was particularly disappointing to see that Canada, one of America’s closest trading partners, was listed on the Watch List. This is another sobering reminder of how pervasive and how close to our borders copyright piracy has become in the global IP community...

Appallingly, many believe that if they find it on the Internet then it must be free. I have heard some estimates cite no less than 80 percent of all Internet traffic comprises copyright-infringing files on peer-to-peer networks.

That is why the Pirate Bay case is so important. While the decision does not solve the problem of piracy and unauthorized file sharing, it certainly is a legal victory and one that sends a strong message that such behavior will not be tolerated. We can and must do more...

When we passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, one of my goals was to address the problems caused when copyrighted works are disseminated through the Internet and other electronic transmissions without the authority of the copyright owner.

By establishing clear rules of the road, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act served as the catalyst that has allowed electronic commerce to flourish. I believe the DMCA, while not perfect, has nonetheless played a key role in moving our nation’s copyright law into the digital age...

The Copyright Alliance, a lobbying group for IP rights holders (the ESA is a member), applauded Hatch's remarks:

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) once again was charming, informed, thoughtful and inspiring in his speech. Once again he was a passionate supporter of creators and copyright owners, and told the 500 or so international delegates here that he has been, and always would be, their champion...

Hatch, who last won re-election to the Senate in 2006, has been a regular recipient of campaign donations from the IP industry. A quick check of donations by political action committees shows that Hatch received $7,000 from the RIAA (music industry) between 2004-2006 and $12,640 from the MPAA (movie business) between 1998-2006.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/06/...pyright-issues





The Pirates Will Always Win

Charles Dunstone says illegal downloading cannot be stopped

Trying to stop people sharing copyrighted material over the internet is a game of cat and mouse in which the pirates will always win and calls for internet service providers to halt illegal file sharing are "naive", according to the boss of Carphone Warehouse.

Instead, Charles Dunstone said, the solution is education about the benefits of respecting copyright coupled with services that allow consumers "to get content easily and cheaply".

Speaking after the company announced a jump in annual profits and plans to split its TalkTalk broadband business from its retail stores by July of next year, Dunstone said people had become "obsessed" by peer-to-peer file sharing but "there is a myriad of ways that you can share content on the internet".

"If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid."

His comments come before the publication of Lord Carter's final Digital Britain report this month. The communications minister has made protecting the UK's creative industries from the online piracy one of his key aims and he has promised legislation to back up his proposals. Under a government-brokered deal last year some ISPs sent letters to persistent illegal file-sharers warning them that their actions could result in legal action by media companies and that process is expected to be codified by the new legislation.

The music industry has long maintained that internet service providers (ISPs) must work harder to prevent their customers from engaging in online piracy. More recently, the film and television industry has called for ISPs to introduce "speed humps" that would slow down the connections of persistent illegal file-sharers and pop-up warnings on known file-sharing sites. Many in the media industry have taken heart from the recent Pirate Bay trial in Sweden that saw the four founders of the site, which did not host pirated material but made it easier for people to find copyrighted material, given prison sentences and a hefty fine.

But TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.

"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," he said. "It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."

Carphone Warehouse announced annual pretax profits of £133m, up from £4m last year, and set out a timetable for the planned demerger of TalkTalk from its retail business, which it last year spun into a joint venture with US electronics retailer BestBuy. Dunstone hopes to have the demerger completed by March, although that may slip to July if the company is unable to get all the necessary paperwork sorted in time.

Carphone Warehouse's results were in line with analysts' expectations for its TalkTalk operation, which last month acquired rival Tiscali to become the UK's largest player, seeing revenue dip to £1.38bn from £1.4bn but profits rise as it moved more people onto its own network. The retail business, meanwhile, increased revenues to £3.56bn from £3bn but the recession has forced the company to offer better deals to mobile phone customers so profits before financial charges dropped to £188m from £217m.

Dunstone, however, said high street traffic had held up well in recent months. "We all thought after Christmas, having seen what happened in October and November, that it was going to be the end of the world. That has not happened – the consumer has been more resilient than people had imagined. They are demanding very good value, so you have to be very sharp on price and deals, but it has been OK."

The mobile phone market in the UK has polarised since last autumn with customers choosing to take a smartphone, which can play music and access the internet, or cling to their existing phone in order to qualify for a cheap SIM-only deal.

Carphone Warehouse has benefited from being the only independent stockist of the most desirable smartphone – Apple's iPhone – which is available only on the O2 network in the UK. But Dunstone said as the year progresses there will be a number of new "must have" handsets that should persuade SIM-only customers to take a new phone.

"The team are very excited about the product pipeline – they think there are going to be more products coming out that are going to drive people into the marketplace than we have seen in the last six months," he said.

New devices include the N97 from Nokia, out next month, and the Palm Pre, which will be in the UK in time for Christmas.

But he refused to comment on intense speculation that a new version of the iPhone will be unveiled at Apple's worldwide Developers' Conference on Monday, saying: "It is more than my life's worth to ever say anything. They keep us terrified."

TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London with a view to rolling out even faster services. BT has pledged to spend £1.5bn over the next three years putting a super-fast network within the reach of 10m UK households.

"What BT want to be sure of is that there will be enough customers to use it after they have built it," said Dunstone. "So, although we have not talked in any detail about it, I can imagine a situation where we would give some kind of an undertaking as to how many customers we would buy for, so they can be certain when they started digging the roads up that they will be able to get enough users to pay for it.

"If we can get enough people to take it up it will be cheap enough that a lot of people will take it up but the danger is it that it is very, very high priced and very few people take it."

Dunstone reckons super-fast broadband – offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second – will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...esults-pirates





Pirate Bay Nemesis Has Name Changed By Pranksters
enigmax

Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén, one of the Pirate Bay’s arch rivals, had quite a surprise recently when he received an unexpected piece of mail. The letter from the Swedish tax authority informed him that his request for a name change had been accepted and from now on, he would be officially known as ‘Pirate Pontén’.

Anyone brave enough to take on The Pirate Bay with a view to shutting them down automatically makes millions of enemies, some of which become motivated enough to actually do something about it. Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén knows all about getting on the wrong side of pirates and just recently had yet another reminder that he is widely hated on the Internet.

Just recently Pontén received a letter from the Swedish tax authority (Skatteverket) informing him that his request for a change in his personal details had been accepted, which came as quite a surprise since he had made no such request.

From May 29th 2009, said the letter, 43 year-old Henrik Pontén would have his name changed and become known as Pirate Pontén, undoubtedly to the high amusement of millions of file-sharers.

“The pirate movement have previously tried threats and when that doesn’t work, they do this,” Pontén told Aftonbladet.

Labeling the name change as a “silly” act, Pontén remains determined to press on and get his original name back. “This only makes me more convinced that I’m right,” he said. “The pirate movement often speaks about the importance of personal integrity, but the name change violates my integrity.”

Pontén and others like him around the world are continuing to discover that most people in opposition to their plans have access to a keyboard and the Internet and that is all they need to do their tiny part in annoying those that set out to annoy them. One person alone can cause enough damage, multiply this by thousands or millions and the whole situation can become entirely unmanageable.

Pirate Bay users will tell you that they have grown used to Pontén and his activities against them. Equally Pontén says he has grown used to piracy advocates harassing him in return.

“The way I see it, there is a campaign against anyone who disagrees with the piracy movement,” notes Pontén. “They are trying to restrict our freedom of speech. Previously they have tried threats, now they are trying other methods,” he added.

Pontén told Aftonbladet that the Pirate Party should distance themselves from this type of threat and harassment, although why they should be required to do so is not clear. There is absolutely no suggestion that the Pirate Party was involved in changing Pontén’s name but nevertheless, vice chairman Christian Engström felt compelled to comment;

“To poke fun at the opposition is perfectly ok, but this kind of conduct is just bad form. We distance ourselves from threats and trouble-making. It does not benefit the party,” he said.

Interestingly, no identity check is carried out in Sweden for name change applications, the person concerned just receives a letter to inform the change has been carried out.

Ingegerd Widell, head of the registry at Skatteverket, said that Pirate Pontén will get his original name back in due course.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-n...ksters-090607/





Pirate Party Wins and Enters The European Parliament
Ernesto

The Pirate Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels. After months of campaigning against well established parties, the Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament.

When the Swedish Pirate Party was founded in early 2006, the majority of the mainstream press were skeptical, with some simply laughing it away. But they were wrong to dismiss this political movement out of hand. Today, the Pirate Party accomplished what some believed to be the impossible, by securing a seat in the European Parliament.

With 99.9% of the districts counted the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes, beating several established parties. This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at the European Parliament.

When we asked Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge about the outcome, he told TorrentFreak: “We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything”

“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.

The turnout at the elections is 43 percent, a little higher than the at the 2004 elections. This would mean that roughly 200,000 Swedes have voted for the Pirate Party. This is a huge increase compared to the national elections of 2006 where the party got 34,918 votes.

Both national and international press have gathered in Stockholm where the Pirate Party is celebrating its landmark victory.

At least partially, The Pirate Party puts its increased popularity down to harsh copyright laws and the recent conviction of the people behind The Pirate Bay. After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

With their presence in Brussels, the Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use.

“It’s great fun to be a pirate right now”, Christian Engström, Vice Chairman of the Pirate Party told the press when he arrived.

Update: Sweden has 20 seats, but until the Lisbon treaty passes only 18 with voting rights. This means that the Pirate Party will have 2 seats.

Update: In Germany the Pirate Party got approximately 1 percent of the votes, not enough for a seat in the European Parliament. Andreas Popp, lead candidate for the German Pirate Party is pleased and told TorrentFreak: “This was the first time, we ran for the European elections. And although many voters have hardly known us, we got a great result. This shows, that many citizens identify themselves with our goals. I want to thank all people who supported us, we could not have done that without them. We have fulfilled our minimal goal of 0,5%. Now we can start up for real!”
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...iament-090607/





How Pirates Shook European Politics
Ernesto

With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of rum and loads of pirate chants.

Late Sunday night, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt congratulated the Pirate Party on their unprecedented win at the European elections.

The Pirate Party is seen a serious competitor in Swedish politics now, a fact underscored by the Prime Minister who said that his own party will formulate a clear policy regarding net integrity and copyright issues in preparation for the Swedish national elections in September 2010.

A few hours earlier, the party dinner had come to a close with volunteers and members singing “The Broadband Hymn”. They had fittingly gathered at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and as Swedish TV published the exit polls results indicating that the Pirate Party would get around 7% of the votes, wild cheers broke out. Party leader Rick Falkvinge took to the stage.

“Together we have today re-shaped the political map in Europe,” he said. “Right now, Europe is watching what is happening here and politicians everywhere are scrambling to understand our issues. They now know that the party that has information-political perspectives can win many votes.”

And yes, it did. 214,313 of them in Sweden on Sunday. 7.1 percent of the vote and a guarantee of at least one seat in the European Parliament.

The Pirate Party was the most popular party among voters under 30 years of age. Taking into account that Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderate Party is the most popular party among voters over 65 years of age, one can understand why Reinfeldt later in the evening said he will sit down with the Moderate Youth leader Niklas Wykman - a critic of the surveillance legislation and anti-filesharing laws - to discuss Internet issues.

“We’ll share files in Brussels!” a young man shouted as he ran to the bar at election night. Meanwhile, journalists from all over Europe who had flown in to cover the unique occasion tried to get their piece of party leader Rick Falkvinge and vice chairman Christian Engström.

The latter, who will probably take the party’s seat in the EU parliament, held a short speech in which he thanked all the volunteers. The Pirate Party stays true to its net-roots and has no formal organization. Anyone who thinks he or she can contribute is welcome to do so simply by posting on the forum and going out and doing it. No formal decisions on campaigning are taken and the thousands of party ballots have been distributed to voting centers simply by someone living close and wanting to play their part.

“It’s amazing that it worked. I never thought it would,” Engström joked.

A journalist from Swedish radio broke into the celebrations with a question for party founder Rick Falkvinge on how he felt. With champagne in his hand and pride in his eyes, he just smiled: “How does it feel to write history? It feels pretty damn good.”

Today, after a night spent drinking rum and chanting seafarer standards, the pirates woke up finding themselves on the front pages of the Swedish newspapers. Pirates waving Jolly Rogers. Pirates taking celebratory late night dips in fountains. Pirates laughing. Pirates hugging. And there is consensus among the op-eds and political pundits on how it could happen: Enthusiasm paid off.

The two large parties in Sweden, the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party, are heavily criticized because of their lack of engagement in the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the Green Party (which also had a great election with 10.9%) and the Pirate Party positioned themselves on their respective expert issues and built a lot of support from the base.

When the EU parliament meets after summer, there will be at least one pirate in the midst of European parliament. If the Lisbon treaty is voted through, there can be two. It may not seem a lot in order to make a difference, but as a blogger put it: One pirate can hijack a whole ship.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-pirates-...litics-090608/





The 30% solution

Lawyers Plan Class-Action to Reclaim "$100M+" RIAA "Stole"

Lawyers in this year's two highest-profile file-sharing cases have joined forces, and they plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer to claw back the "$100+ million" that the RIAA "stole."
Nate Anderson

The recording industry has spent (and continues to spend) millions of dollars on its litigation campaign against accused file-swappers, but if two lawyers have their way, the RIAA will have to pay all the money back. Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged "$100+ million" it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

Stopping the lawsuits

Ars spoke with Camara on Tuesday as he rode to the airport for the flight to Minneapolis, where he will defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset after only two weeks of preparation. But the time crunch has in no way restricted his vision; Camara says that he is intent on dismantling the entire RIAA litigation campaign by going after its legal underpinnings.

Camara's firm doesn't do easy cases, and even in pro bono cases, "we want to fix a problem for a lot of people, including our client."

That means doing more than getting Thomas-Rasset off without a guilty verdict, and it's why Camara has already gone after the two fundamental pieces of RIAA evidence in these cases.

First up was the evidence from hired investigator MediaSentry, which tracked down IP addresses of file-sharers and provided the only evidence of observed copyright infringement. Camara has argued that MediaSentry was not licensed as a private investigator in Minnesota, that it ran an illegal "pen register," and that its evidence should be barred. Such a move would essentially destroy the RIAA's main evidence of copyright infringement, and it's no surprise that the trade group has pushed back hard.

But Camara goes even further back in the evidence chain. To prove copyright infringement, the RIAA needs evidence of that infringement, of course, but it also needs to prove it owns the copyrights in question. If it can't establish that fact, the case also falls apart.

This sounds like a long shot—surely the record labels did something as basic as register their copyrights?—but Camara tells us that it's not so simple.

"They basically committed a technical screw-up," he says of the RIAA. That's because lawyers provided the court with "true and correct" copies of their copyright registrations (perhaps accurate but not "official), but these are not the "certified copies" required under federal rules of evidence.

The RIAA seemed taken aback by Camara's pretrial complaint and asked the judge in the case to simply take "judicial notice" of the validity of its forms. But, after a telephone conversation on Monday, the judge refused to do that.

He also rejected the RIAA argument that "hey, these forms were good enough for Thomas' first trial, so they're good enough now." The judge pointed out that "the Court's Order granting a new trial in this matter granted an entirely new trial on all issues. The fact that Defendant did not object to Plaintiffs' evidence of registration in the First Trial does not preclude Defendant from putting Plaintiffs to their burden of proof on this issue in the retrial."

The RIAA admitted that "it will be difficult and expensive to now attempt to obtain certified copies from the US Copyright Office in time for trial." Whoops.

Even if the RIAA comes up with the documents, though, Camara still has objections to their contents (or lack thereof). The registrations don't include the actual "specimen," for one thing (in this case the actual sound recording filed with the Copyright Office), so Camara says he has no way to know what was actually filed and whether it truly is identical with what Thomas-Rasset is accused of sharing.

He will also charge that the registrations are simply invalid, since they were all done in the names of the various record labels, not of the artists. But the "work for hire" law under which this was done has been improperly applied in these cases, he says, and the registrations are therefore defective.

Taken together, the two lines of attack on the RIAA's main evidence are an attempt to cripple the recording industry case before it even reaches the question of whether Thomas-Rasset actually "did it." Which is probably just as well, since there is some fairly compelling evidence against her, evidence good enough to secure a guilty verdict the first time around.

Getting the money back

But not even this sort of attack on the RIAA's methods goes far enough for Camara. He tells Ars that he and Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson will file a class-action lawsuit against the industry at some point after the conclusion of the Thomas-Rasset case in an effort to make the labels pay back all monies taken in from settlements with file-sharers.

Or, in Camara's words, he's going to "get the $100 million that they stole." (The RIAA tells Ars that the $100 million figure is inaccurate, and RIAA general counsel Steven Marks indicated in a recent Ars op-ed that the labels had lost money on the campaign.)

The idea behind the suit is that the RIAA has illegally threatened people, using void copyright registrations, and scared them into paying an average of $3,000 or $4,000 apiece to fend off the threat of federal litigation.

Big picture thinking

If all of these arguments weren't enough, the Nesson/Camara tag team have a couple more eyepoppers to make: P2P file-sharing of copyrighted material is fair use, and huge statutory damage awards against noncommercial users are unconstitutional.

Clearly, "thinking small" doesn't interest either man—Nesson has the nickname "Billion Dollar Charlie" for a reason, and it's not surprising to learn that Camara studied with Nesson at Harvard and calls him "the smartest person that I know." Camara, for his part, is a sharp lawyer who was the youngest person ever to enroll in Harvard Law.

As he prepares to fly up to Minnesota today, Camara says, "We're ready for trial." He also says that he plans to win.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...riaa-stole.ars





Jammie Thomas Suffers Pretrial Setback in Copyright Case
Greg Sandoval

A federal judge dealt a serious blow to Jammie Thomas' defense on Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis will allow evidence gathered by MediaSentry, a security firm that once investigated illegal file sharing on behalf of the music industry, to be heard by a jury in Thomas' retrial, scheduled for Monday. Thomas is the first person sued by the recording industry for copyright violations to have her case argued before a jury. She was found guilty in October 2007 of illegally sharing 24 digital-music files. The judge in the case declared a mistrial after acknowledging he erred in giving jury instructions.

Her new attorneys recently accused MediaSentry of violating federal and Minnesota wiretapping statutes and asked the judge to throw out its findings.

The decision is significant for the music industry. Had the judge granted Thomas' motion, "it would have been nearly impossible" for the Recording Industry Association of America to prevail, according to Ben Sheffner, a former entertainment industry attorney and copyright expert.

Davis also won't let Thomas raise a fair-use defense because she waited too long to make the argument.

"This litigation has gone on for years, yet Plaintiffs had no inkling of this defense until the eve of trial," Davis wrote in his decision. "The record in this case, with which this Court is intimately familiar, gave no hint that a fair use defense would be forthcoming. It would be highly prejudicial to Plaintiffs to allow Defendant to assert this new affirmative defense on the eve of retrial."

What all this means is that Thomas' legal team is running out of ways to prove she's innocent. At her first trial, her defense offered little more than her telling the jury she was innocent of illegally sharing music.

That didn't work out so well. One member of the jury called her a liar following the trial.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10262894-93.html





Cellphones May Soon Form Peer-To-Peer Network to Broadcast Disaster Alerts
ANI

Mobile phones of the future would be able to form a peer-to-peer network to sound an alarm in the event of a disaster, and pass on the alert from phone to phone, even if most of a cellphone network is down.

According to a report in New Scientist, this futuristic scenario might soon be a reality, if a new patent application by Telecommunications Company Motorola is anything to go by.

In an emergency, such as a hurricane or terrorist attack, the US government can operate the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which harnesses all TV and radio frequencies, to broadcast warning messages to people in their homes.

“Unfortunately, a large portion of the intended recipients will not have their TV and radio systems turned on when a disaster occurs,” said Motorola engineer Jerome Vogedes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a US patent filed on May 21.

His answer is a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast.

A phone on the edge of a disaster area, where a cellphone service still operates, receives the alert. It contacts the nearest phone using Wi-Fi, establishes a P2P network with it, and sends it the alert.

That cellphone then does likewise until as many mobiles as possible have received the alert.

This way, the warning message gets out with “minimal use of infrastructure”, Vogedes said. (ANI)
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/...100202161.html





Human Ear Inspires Universal Radio Antenna
Eric Bland

TV, radio, GPS, cell phones, wireless Internet, and other electronics all use different radio waves to receive and send information. Now scientists at MIT have created a tiny antenna capable of receiving any radio signal, based on the human ear.

The new universal radio could lead to better reception and a new class of electronics that can pick up any radio frequency.

"The human ear is a very good spectrum analyzer," said Rahul Sarpekhkar, a professor at MIT who co-authored the paper in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. "We copied some of the tricks the ear does, and mapped those onto electronics."

The unique architecture of the human ear allows it to detect a wide range of sounds. A spiral with thousands of tiny hairs, called cilia, of different sizes help the ear to separate out each frequency, from 100 hertz up to 10,000 hertz, and transmit that information to the brain.

To detect electromagnetic waves instead of pressure waves the MIT scientists used circuits, in place of cilia. Starting on the outside edge of the 1.5-mm by 3-mm-chip are tiny squares, each one corresponding to a different size radio wave.

As they spiral into the center, the squares become larger and larger. The outer spiral detects the highest energy, shortest frequency waves, while the center circuits detect less energetic, longer frequency waves.

The universal radio might be inspired by the human ear, but in terms of spectrum range that can be detected, the EM ear outperforms the human by about a million to one. The electromagnetic ear detects this huge range of frequencies using the same amount of energy that a typical cell phone does.

"A simple cell phone takes 300 milli volts to detect one carrier wave," said Sarpekhkar. "We can do all 50 carrier frequencies with 300 milli volts."

Other devices do exist that can examine a range of radio frequencies. They just require much more power to do so. The low power usage of the electromagnetic ear means it would be ideal for portable electronic devices. The MIT team has a patent on their chip but so far doesn't have firm plans to commercialize the technology.

The first use of a universal radio, say the scientists would be to eliminate any noise in the signal. Cell phone breaking up? The chip could switch to a nearby and less cluttered wavelength. Same for snowy TV sets and slow wireless Internet, or inaccurate GPS signals.

In the future, a cell phone equipped with such a chip could easily pick up TV programs, songs on the radio, and virtually all other radio transmissions.

A chip that can receive virtually any radio signal is good. A device that can also transmit on any frequency would be even better. Adding more power to the device can achieve this, and the MIT scientists are still working on it, but for now, creating a universal radio that receive any signal is still impressive.

"It's very interesting just to see that it's possible to do this," said Christopher Shera, a doctor at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

"People have tried to construct electronic cochlea before, but this is the first demonstration that imitates the amplification we think happens in the ear to produce a device that works."
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/0...radio-ear.html





Sirius XM A La Carte Recievers Coming Soon?
FMQB

Sirius XM Radio could offer a la carte satellite radio receivers in the near future, as a recent patent announcement claims that technology for such an option is on the way. Satwaves.com reports that a new patent indicates that no new hardware will be required to allow for a la carte options. Instead, the feature is "achieved at the point of transmission, rather than reception."

According to the patent's abstract, "a subscriber to a first satellite radio service can be provided with an option to receive, over their current receiver unit, supplemental content, such as a particular show or channel, which is otherwise only available within a relevant jurisdiction as part of a subscription package to subscribers of one or more other satellite radio services. Thus, without purchasing a full subscription to another service, the subscriber of the first satellite radio service may arrange to receive supplemental content that is otherwise only available as part of a subscription package, such as a basic or general subscription package, to subscription holders of one or more other services. The invention also provides methods of broadcasting and methods of configuring dedicated and interoperable satellite radio receiver units so that the supplemental content can be received by a subscriber."

As part of their merger agreement, Sirius XM agreed to release a la carte radios sometime down the road and give subscribers multiple options for a la carte programming from both Sirius and XM.

Satwaves speculates that this technology could let subscribers better pick and choose what they want to hear, i.e. Howard Stern fans could get Stern's channels without signing up for as much other content. Satwaves also says that perhaps the recent news of royalty fees being passed along to subscribers could be connected to this technology, "as lower priced consumer options will require it to level the playing field and still maintain a path to profitability."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1357474





Report: Sirius XM To Pass Royalty Fees Along To Subscribers
FMQB

Though Sirius XM is unable to officially raise its rates yet, as a condition of the satellite radio merger, Orbitcast reports that subscribers could see some additionally fees starting this summer. Subscribers will likely see their bill go up approximately $2 a month, as satellite radio music royalty rate increases will be passed along to the consumer.

According to Orbitcast's sources, the increase in costs will take effect on July 29 and according to a leaked document, Sirius XM "can no longer absorb these increased costs" in performance royalties. In 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board instituted increased performance royalty rates for satellite radio, which have gone up every year and will continue to increase into 2012. The rate increased from six percent of gross revenue in '07 and '08 to 6.5 percent this year. It will reach seven percent in 2010, 7.5 percent in 2011 and eight percent in 2012.

As part of the Sirius and XM merger, the FCC allowed the combined satcaster to pass along the royalty fees, effective July 29, 2009, whereas the company was required to absorb the fees itself before this date. According to Orbitcast's information, most subscribers will be charged an extra $1.98/month, while those with multiple radio plans with be charged another 97 cents/month and "Mostly Music" subscribers will pay $1.53/month. However, "Best Of Sirius" and "Best Of XM" subscribers are exempt, as are subscribers who renew a long-term plan before July 29.

A request for official comment by Sirius XM has not been answered at this time.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1353607





Performance Royalty Bill Expected To Be Blocked
FMQB

According to the NAB, a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives now opposes the controversial performance royalty rate. The Local Radio Freedom Act now has 220 House co-sponsors and 12 Senate co-sponsors. At least 218 House members are needed to have a majority and block the scheduling of a vote on the Performance Rights Act.

Adding their support to the Local Radio Freedom Act are Reps. Alcee Hastings (FL), Ron Kind (WI), Allyson Schwartz (PA), Bob Inglis (SC), Edward Royce (CA) and Ben Ray Lujan (NM). Sens. Jeff Bingaman (NM), Kay Hagan (NC), Jon Tester (MT), Christopher Bond (MO), Judd Gregg (NH), Mike Crapo (ID), and Roger Wicker (MS) have added their support to an identical resolution in the Senate.

"Today's milestone stands as a testament to the tireless efforts of NAB staff, our state association partners, and grassroots efforts of stations across America," said NAB Radio Board Chairman Steve Newberry, President/CEO of Kentucky-based Commonwealth Broadcasting. "But this fight on behalf of 235 million weekly listeners is far from over. Our continued success is dependent on radio broadcasters remaining engaged in building additional support in Congress, and in reminding lawmakers of radio's unparalleled promotional value for both record labels and artists."

"We salute Reps. Gene Green and Mike Conaway and the 218 additional House members who recognize that the proposed record label performance tax stands as a dire threat to the future of free and local radio," added Newberry.

Yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers held a town hall meeting in Detroit on Tuesday to hear both sides of the Performance Rights Act. Representatives from both the artists and radio sides of the argument spoke about the controversial issue.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1354013





Police Hold 10 After Claiming to Crack Online Music Fraud

An international fraud in which a gang allegedly made thousands of pounds downloading its own songs from online music stores with stolen credit cards has been cracked by the Metropolitan police and the FBI, the Met claimed yesterday.

The gang are alleged to have made several songs which they gave to an online US company, which then uploaded them to be sold on iTunes and Amazon.

Over five months they bought the songs thousands of times, spending around $750,000 (£468,750) on 1,500 stolen US and UK credit cards, according to the Met. The criminal network then also allegedly reaped the royalties from the tracks, pulling in an estimated $300,000, paid by the two sites, which were unaware of the fraud being committed against them.

Sixty officers from the Met's central e-crime unit today arrested seven men and three women in London, Birmingham, Kent and Wolverhampton.

They are being held at police stations in London and the Midlands on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Scotland Yard said the arrests were the result of a parallel investigation with the FBI that began in February.

"It was established that between September 2008 and January 2009 a UK criminal network provided music via an online US company who uploaded the tracks to Apple iTunes and Amazon.com for sale," it said. "This is a significant case for the e-crime unit, which was set up 12 months ago.

"The unit has been set up to provide a point of expertise and a national and international response to online crime. The nature of online crime means the unit are actively developing cross-border partnerships both with other international crime agencies and businesses."

Detective Chief Inspector Terry Wilson, of the e-crime unit, said: "This has been a complex investigation to establish what we believe to be an international conspiracy to defraud Apple and Amazon. This investigation, with its national and international dimension, exemplifies why we have set up this national response to e-crime.

"It shows the success that can be achieved through our close working relationship with the FBI.

"We are now making it more risky for criminals who seek to exploit the internet and commit e-crime across national borders. We are working hard through partnership with industry and law enforcement to combat e-crime and are committed to pursuing those responsible."

West Midlands police assisted Met detectives during the arrests, in which 60 UK officers took part.

The arrests included three men aged 19, 23, and 41, and one woman, 37, all from Wolverhampton; a woman, 22, from Dartford, Kent; a woman, 36, and two men, 34 and 40, from Birmingham; and two men, 22 and 46, from Peckham, south London.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009...d-online-music





The Business of Selling Used MP3s
Eliot Van Buskirk

Carting a crate of used CDs to your local record store so you can make rent is a rite of passage as ancient as it can be tearful. But what about those MP3s and iTunes songs you're ready to unload? Is there a way to sell those off, too, when you get tired of them or just need some extra scratch?

A new crop of consumer-facing music stores is focused on helping fans resell "used" digital music the way they do CDs. But the big conundrum with digital music is that there's no way to prove sellers legally own the songs on their computers. There's also nothing to stop them from keeping the songs they're hawking. Unlike CDs — physical products you hand over to a record store clerk — digital files can be replicated ad infinitum with negligible expense.

A physical piece of music is simple — sell it to someone, and you no longer have it. The digital marketplace is strikingly different from one where sellers exchange objects for dollars. The common analogy is that the digital file works like a candle: When you light someone else's candle, your own flame isn't extinguished. Figuring out a fair bartering system is one of many issues facing the new retail world of pre-owned digital media. But with traditional revenue streams drying up in the music business, enterprising companies are nonetheless banking on this uncharted industry.

Even though they're much dicier propositions than heading to Amoeba, several options are available for selling digital music to fellow fans. These range from the fully licensed to the probably illegal, and they offer benefits in both store credit and cash.

Bopaboo, a Washington, D.C.–based used digital music store set to launch later this year (possibly with a name change), is attempting to solve the online riddle without upsetting record labels. Its expected public debut comes after a somewhat aborted attempt to launch late last year using a different model, which asked sellers to delete music after they sold it.

Instead, Bopaboo — still in private beta — now allows you to keep the music files after someone else has purchased them, although you can sell each song only once. First, the service's spider figures out what music you have on your computer, and uploads the songs into an account. From there, you can sell your collection to the Bopaboo community at large, at prices determined by a demand-based algorithm, generally lower than what the same music costs on Amazon or iTunes.

The site pays out in credit on a one-to-one ratio. That means if someone buys a song from you for 43 cents, you'll get the same amount in credit to spend on Bopaboo's catalog of new music, which the company expects to be larger than its catalog of "used" songs. You can download purchased MP3s and do with them what you please. In order for other costumers to buy from your pre-owned collection, however, they'll have to pay in dollars, which go to Bopaboo and the label and/or artist who owns the rights to the recording.

"We're providing consumers with the first marketplace where they can receive some monetary benefits for their previous [digital music] purchases," Bopaboo founder Alex Meshkin says.

He sees a vacuum in the digital music marketplace that's ignored by eBay, which dominates the market for used vinyl and CDs. "There's been a lot of talk about treating consumers like retailers. But at the end of the day, unless consumers receive more flexibility in reselling their digital media, you're not going to be able to effectively leverage them through a new distribution channel."

However, many remain unconvinced that the model will work — especially because it requires such strong industry support. Without some sort of proof of purchase from Amazon or iTunes, Bopaboo's formula could falter. "It's hard to imagine that the major labels would sign a deal with a company, [even] to get resale revenue from any type of digital music file, without some sort of verification of where it came from first," says Susan Kevorkian of the technology market intelligence firm IDC.

Record labels don't want people who have downloaded music illegally to be able to turn around and sell their holdings. And the establishment's buy-in is crucial, because it controls so much of the music people want to hear. In order for Bopaboo to launch with all four majors (EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group), it will need each to agree to allow primary sales (where users redeem credits) as well as secondary sales (where users sell music to each other). In return, the labels would get a large chunk of the revenue generated by both types of transactions.

Meshkin believes the major labels are supportive of Bopaboo's plan, even though it will earn them less money per song than iTunes does, and the music will not be restricted by digital rights management (DRM) technology.

The labels might be willing to bet that Bopaboo users, by collating individual stores and promoting them via Facebook and other avenues, will be able to add to sales in ways that corporate stores like iTunes cannot. Bopaboo also hopes the major labels will see its service as a way to enter the secondary music market with an alternative to free, unlicensed P2P sites.

But unless lots of labels — and users — sign up, the service will be hamstrung to the point of near-uselessness.

The short history of enabling consumers to sell digital music is marred by one disastrous example: a pyramid scheme–like operation called Burnlounge. Starting in 2004, that group raised the hackles of the online community by encouraging franchisees to use annoying marketing tactics like street teams to sell new music from a centralized catalog. Bopaboo's system differs in that it pays out in music, not money, while courting users interested in displaying their painstakingly curated collections rather than picking what they want to sell from a central list.

People's Music Store, which lets anyone become a Web retailer, has also been making waves by helping fans sell music. Unlike Bopaboo, it doesn't price tracks based on demand, and lets you sell music even if you don't own it. In addition, the site gives you only 10 percent of the purchase price to spend on new music. The selection of music you can put in a U.S.-based People's Music Store is fairly limited, although respected indie labels Warp, Ninja Tune, Rough Trade, Beggars Banquet, 4AD, and kranky are included, as well as such luminary artists as Boards of Canada, Fischerspooner, Grizzly Bear, Jarvis Cocker, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. People's Music Store has one big advantage over Bopaboo in that it has already launched.

What if you just want to leverage your encyclopedic MP3 collection into some cold, hard cash? Services exist where you can upload gigabytes of music (or seamier video content), and get paid when people access the files. Hong Kong–based MegaUpload, for instance, offers $1,500 for each million downloads your files generate throughout its network — even if you don't own any of the rights to the music you uploaded. You won't get rich this way, and of course the whole system is unscrupulous in that it doesn't compensate artists or labels. It instead requires the copyright holders to police the network to get their recordings removed.

Hawking digital music online is more complicated than it was to haul a pile of discs down to Streetlight. But in an industry where CD sales are tanking as their digital counterparts fail to make up the gap, selling used MP3s might not be as crazy a business plan as it sounds.
http://sfweekly.com/2009-06-10/music...ing-used-mp3s/





Perils of DRM: What Happens to Your Digital Content if the Provider Goes out of Business?

HDGiants' bankruptcy raises questions about DRM-protected downloads; even Walmart customers feel the pain
Julie Jacobson

If you purchase music or movies online, what happens if the vendor goes out of business? Will you have trouble accessing your content?

The question came up recently after HDGiants -- provider of high-quality audio and video downloads -- filed for Chapter 11. (The company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy this summer.)

A customer contacted CE Pro to say he couldn't access his purchased content:

I have been trying to access media rights to my music library and cannot link to the MusicGiants server. I am using Windows Media Player like most. If you move your songs from one computer to another (not synchronizing) the music file is moved but must confirm the rights to it. When you try to play a file that has been "moved" or "copied" the computer automatically connects to the Internet and verifies your rights to play and/or copy the file.

I did find that the media rights are carried with the file when you burn a CD and use that to rip to the new computer. But then it counts as one of the limited times you are allowed to burn that file. If you sync the file, it also carries the media rights with it, but the sync is only one way. You can't rip from a sync device, clear or overwrite.

This experience "would be odd," according to HDGiants founder Scott Bahneman. "Our servers are up and running and the licensing servers are in place. Once people purchase our content they own it. They have control of it. It's not like they're accessing it from us."

The HDGiants user now reports, "Suddenly the server is available. After constantly getting the 'unavailable' message, I just tried it and it worked!"

Perhaps this incident was just a fluke, but it still raises serious questions about downloaded content wrapped in digital rights management (DRM).

The Problem with DRM

Last year, when Walmart went to a DRM-free model, the company shut down its licensing servers, leaving customers unable to work with the protected content they purchased.

Walmart told its customers, "We strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer." (Walmart later reversed this move.)

Still, at least users had that option.

Proprietary solutions like Vudu could keep content locked up forever. If Vudu goes away (which is not unfathomable), you may be at the mercy of the company's hardware. Eventually the hard drive will fail.

That's the price you pay for Vudu's super-duper video quality. Hey, they had to give the studios something.

If you read the fine print, you'll notice that you don't even own the content you purchase from Vudu (and Vudu certainly isn't the only one).

No right, title or interest in the Content is transferred to you. All Content is licensed, not sold, transferred or assigned to you, for personal, non-commercial use only on VUDU Equipment. You may not edit, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, download, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, translate, create derivative works from, transfer, alter, adapt, sell, rent, lease or sublicense any Content, or facilitate any of the foregoing. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you may not (i) show any Content to any public audience or view it in public location; (ii) duplicate, reproduce, transfer record, or create copies of Content or any portion thereof (including without limitation by "burning," P2P file-sharing, posting, uploading or downloading) onto any physical medium, memory or device, including without limitation, CDs, DVDs, VCDs, portable media devices, computers or other hardware or any other medium now owned or hereinafter devised.


Bahneman from HDGiants suggests the days of proprietary boxes like Vudu's are numbered.

"Do people really want another proprietary box?" he asks.

Success, he says, will come from "open-source, high-quality downloads that can be played across different platforms."

HDGiants is accessible via PC or Mac, and is supported by several media servers in the custom channel.

Back to Discs?

Is anything really safe if it has DRM attached to it?

"It's a big issue for all DRM content," says Peter Cholnoky, CEO of ReQuest, a manufacturer of media server products.

Vendors like ReQuest and Kaleidescape let users rip copy-protected DVDs directly to their hard drive. "We both require the original DVD and use only non-DRM music," he says. "That way the user is never locked when a service goes down."

And the obvious downside to that? The studios don't much care for it. The courts have yet to rule on the legalities of DVD archiving.

Even so, as long as downloaded content is packed with DRM restrictions, owning an old-fashioned disc may be the safest – if not the most convenient -- investment.
http://www.cepro.com/article/what_ha...t_of_business/





Kenny Rankin, Melder of Jazz and Pop, Dies at 69
Peter Keepnews

Kenny Rankin, a singer, songwriter and guitarist whose easygoing style straddled the worlds of pop, jazz and folk, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 69 and lived in Los Angeles.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, his family said.

Singing in a soft, lilting voice and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Mr. Rankin was often categorized as an introspective singer-songwriter in the James Taylor mold. But he drew inspiration from a wide range of sources: the Brazilian singer João Gilberto was an acknowledged influence, as were Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. And though he wrote a number of memorable songs — his “Peaceful” was a Top 20 hit for Helen Reddy in 1973, and other songs of his were recorded by the likes of Peggy Lee and Mel Tormé — he was best known as an interpreter of other people’s.

Mr. Rankin’s albums tended to include a handful of original compositions but consisted mostly of his own distinctly laid-back, gently swinging spin on the Beatles, Bob Dylan and others. In recent years he devoted increasing attention to Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and other songwriters of an earlier era.

Mr. Rankin was particularly partial to the Beatles. He recorded a number of their songs, including “Blackbird,” “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” When John Lennon and Paul McCartney were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987, Mr. McCartney asked Mr. Rankin to represent them at the induction ceremony.

Mr. Rankin’s association with Mr. Dylan was more personal. He was one of the guitarists on “Bringing It All Back Home,” the 1965 album that signaled Mr. Dylan’s transition from acoustic to electric music. One highlight of Mr. Rankin’s first album, “Mind-Dusters,” released in 1967, was his impressionistic version of Mr. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

By the time Mr. Rankin recorded that album, he had acquired a high-profile fan in Johnny Carson, who would go on to present him on “The Tonight Show” more than 20 times. Carson also contributed liner notes to “Mind-Dusters.”

Born in Manhattan on Feb. 10, 1940, Mr. Rankin never formally studied music but began his recording career as a teenager with some singles for Decca. Over the years he recorded for Mercury, Atlantic and several other labels. He had recently signed with Sly Dog Records and was preparing to record a new album when he became ill a few weeks ago.

Mr. Rankin was divorced from Yvonne Rodriguez-Calderone. He is survived by a son, Chris; two daughters, Gena Rankin-Ray and Chandra Rankin; and a granddaughter.

If the music industry and music critics often had trouble characterizing Mr. Rankin’s music, he himself did not.

“Above all, I’m a jazz singer who likes to mess with the melody,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1997. “I sing the songs that touch me in the heart, the songs I would like to sing to someone in front of a roaring fire on a feather couch draped in flowers.”

“But don’t get me wrong,” he added. “We don’t live in a fantasy world, though we all have one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/ar.../09rankin.html





Family Upset Over Photos of Carradine's Body

The family of late actor David Carradine is "profoundly disturbed" by photos published in Thailand that are said to be of Carradine's naked body hanging in his Bangkok hotel room, according to family attorney Mark Geragos.

Geragos said a statement from the actor's brother, Keith Carradine, shows that the family will take legal action against people or media outlets that publish the photos "for invasion of privacy and causing severe emotional distress."

The Thai-language newspaper Thai Rath published photos that show the body of Carradine, who died on June 3 in Bangkok where he was filming a new movie called "Stretch."

Mystery has surrounded his death following initial reports that he had committed suicide -- claims his family has denied repeatedly.

On Saturday, Geragos said Carradine's family had asked the FBI to look into the death.

The family has hired a forensics pathologist to examine the actor's body when it is returned to the United States.

Thai newspapers said the body left Bangkok on Saturday, which Geragos confirmed at the time. The body is expected to arrive in Los Angeles as early as Sunday.

A maid found Carradine hanging in the closet of his hotel suite at Bangkok's plush Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel.

With coroners awaiting results of toxicology tests, Thai media pointed to suicide or accidental autoerotic asphyxiation as possible causes of death.

Thai officials have said it could take several weeks before the results of an autopsy performed in Bangkok are released.

Carradine starred in the mid-1970s U.S. television show "Kung Fu" and the more recent "Kill Bill" movies,

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5534TM20090608





Mogul Ascends With Old Hollywood Clout
Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes

In 1992, Ariel Zev Emanuel, a young operative with the struggling InterTalent agency, had a problem with the rent on a $639-a-month walk-up in the city’s modest Fairfax district. The landlord took him to court seeking eviction, and won.

Today, Mr. Emanuel has a $10 million home in the Brentwood neighborhood; a pipeline to the White House through his brother Rahm, its chief of staff; and a sprawling new talent agency of his own design, called William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

As Hollywood stories go, that is a good start. But it needs a third act.

Long known as a hardball player of considerable skill, Mr. Emanuel, 48, has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in a Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of colorful moguls from an older generation, including Michael Ovitz and David Geffen.

As the co-chief executive and principal architect of William Morris Endeavor, formed in late April by the merger of Mr. Emanuel’s Endeavor with the venerable William Morris Agency, Mr. Emanuel has finally stepped into their shoes — assuming he can hold his venture together. He spent much of the last week in mixers meant to help hundreds of wary colleagues from the newly joined agencies get comfortable with one another.

Hollywood, meanwhile, is still struggling to get comfortable with Mr. Emanuel and his aspirations — and to figure out exactly what makes him tick.

“It’s about respect,” offered J. C. Spink, a young producer who, with his business partner Chris Bender, has been a protégé of Mr. Emanuel’s. “With nine out of 10 people, if not more, they tend to be in this business for respect.”

Others queried in the last week mentioned power, money, an itch to surpass the Creative Artists Agency, and, most intriguing, a surge of ambition that came with the return of Mr. Emanuel’s brother Rahm, a former Clinton adviser, to the White House with President Obama. “Ari wants an empire,” said one associate, who insisted on anonymity to protect his relationship.

If empire is indeed being born here, it is being shaped by a restless achiever who hungers for the bold stroke — as when Mr. Emanuel and three colleagues in 1995 started Endeavor with a nighttime raid on their own office files at International Creative Management — even when that leaves a mess to be cleaned up afterward. In the case of their I.C.M. caper, James A. Wiatt, then president of the agency, caught and fired the four before they could quit.

Even hardened observers of Hollywood’s coarse ways were stunned when Mr. Emanuel and his colleagues dumped dozens of Morris agents and parted ways with Mr. Wiatt, who had since become the Morris chairman, less than a month after the merger was approved. Mr. Wiatt, 62, had expected to continue as chairman for perhaps a year, but has decided to leave in the coming months.

(Mr. Wiatt declined to comment and Rahm Emanuel did not respond to queries for this article.)

Even as Mr. Wiatt opted out, Mr. Emanuel’s temper flared in negotiations with NBC over the drama “Medium,” which was created by one of his clients, Glenn Gordon Caron. The spat, which broke out when the network balked at financial terms, concluded with “Medium” moving to CBS and Mr. Emanuel threatening Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, with personal ruin, according to three people with knowledge of the incident. Mr. Graboff declined to comment; an Emanuel colleague insisted the threats were not personal.

“Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of Ari Emanuel, especially now that his brother is running the White House,” said one television executive, who asked for anonymity to preserve harmony with him.

Mr. Emanuel is now pushing toward a next step that will involve an alliance with a still-to-be-formed investment firm. The goal is to put financial firepower behind the agency, new capital that could, for instance, allow partners or clients of William Morris Endeavor to finance media start-ups or its own productions.

To that end, Joseph Ravitch, an investment banker formerly at Goldman Sachs, and Jeffrey A. Sine, from UBS Warburg, have been working quietly for months to assemble a firm and a fund that would involve William Morris Endeavor and Mr. Emanuel. Prior to the merger, Goldman considered organizing a purchase of Endeavor. But a deteriorating economy, coupled with a growing sense that William Morris was vulnerable, led instead to talks — with Mr. Ravitch advising Endeavor — that resulted in the current merger.

(Neither Mr. Ravitch nor Mr. Sine returned calls for this article; Mr. Emanuel declined to be interviewed.)

But people who have been briefed on the financial enterprise said Mr. Ravitch expects to have it up and running this year, giving William Morris Endeavor access to perhaps the most sought-after commodity in show business: Fresh capital.

Too, Mr. Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, a fellow co-chief of William Morris Endeavor, have been spending time, on the golf course and off, with Theodore J. Forstmann. A friend of both, the private investor controls IMG, a powerhouse sports and media agency that produces lucrative events like fashion shows and golf tournament programming.

Despite widespread speculation about an alliance or merger between the new agency and IMG, no formal ties are likely in the near future, according to people who are involved with each agency and spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships.

If past is prologue, Mr. Emanuel’s approach to growth will be anything but conventional.

Two years ago, in a speech at a gala for the Lab School of Washington and Baltimore, which presented him an award for outstanding achievers with learning disabilities, Mr. Emanuel described his idiosyncratic business style as being rooted in a struggle with dyslexia.

Captured in a video now posted on YouTube, a nervous Mr. Emanuel said that dyslexics, if they overcome their disability at all, do so by inventing a path of their own. The effort “actually provides them with insight to find inventive solutions to life and in business that others when they’re in those situations probably never find,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Emanuel boasted in the video that he now reads scripts for clients like Larry David and Martin Scorsese. More, even Mr. Scorsese would be at home in a state-of-the-art screening room in Mr. Emanuel’s house, purchased four years ago for $9.85 million, as a 10-year-old Endeavor was coming into its own. (As for that Fairfax district eviction, Mr. Emanuel, who had irked the landlord by trying to use his security deposit for his last month’s rent, moved out before any sheriff showed up.)

Mr. Emanuel’s dominance within Endeavor — universally acknowledged, though he had no formal title and shared control with three other members of a permanent governing group — was built around a client list that is unusually scattershot.

It includes those with long-time connections, like the writers John Altschuler and David Krinsky, a team who had started many years before at InterTalent and later helped produce the animated “King of the Hill,” and the actor-filmmaker Peter Berg, who was Mr. Emanuel’s roommate at Macalester College in Minnesota. They are matched by a roster of movie stars as eclectic as Mark Wahlberg, Michael Douglas and Sacha Baron Cohen. Then come writer-producers like Greg Daniels (“The Office”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”), and a grab-bag of performers and media types whose common threat might simply be that they are interesting to know.

In this last category, Mr. Emanuel has represented the documentary filmmakers Michael Moore and Errol Morris, “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and interviewer Charlie Rose.

A year ago, Mr. Rose, on his television show, moderated a freewheeling session with the brothers Rahm, Ari and Ezekiel Emanuel, a renowned bioethicist who described his brothers as being driven by an ethos: “What are you doing today to make the world better?”

In Ari’s case, that has meant driving a hybrid Prius and electric Tesla, keeping the roof of his home lined with solar panels and serving as a director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund.

But Mr. Emanuel has also undertaken less high-minded ventures. For instance, he became one of the biggest shareholder in, and a consultant to, Tablemax Holdings — a small Las Vegas-based company that makes electronic gambling tables (“Caribbean Stud Poker”) for Indian casinos and other gambling operations.

“I do actually believe it’s going to come through,” said Gavin Polone, a Hollywood producer who was recruited as a fellow investor by Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Polone joined the agent in guaranteeing millions of dollars in bank loans for the company, which has been struggling in the tough economic climate.

Another foray involves Live Nation, the concert company whose proposed merger with Ticketmaster is under review by federal antitrust regulators. Mr. Emanuel is on the Live Nation board, but directors of the combined companies have not yet been named.

Mr. Emanuel’s position will be complicated by the merger of Endeavor, which had no significant music business, with William Morris, a music powerhouse whose performer clients will find their fortunes affected by deals with the new concert company.

But Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation, said he did not see a potential conflict of interest in Mr. Emanuel’s evolving roles. “We hope he would find time to continue to be a member,” he said.

Mr. Rose, a friend who describes himself as “the fourth Emanuel brother,” acknowledged that something about Mr. Emanuel’s status has changed in recent weeks.

“It seems to have kicked to another level,” Mr. Rose said. “A convergence of things has enabled him to be seen at a more commanding height.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/bu...10emanuel.html





'Up' Maintains No. 1 Box-Office Altitude With $44.2M; 'Hangover' Crawls in 2nd With $43.3M
David Germain

Two live-action comedies were unable to bring down the animated adventure "Up." Disney and Pixar Animation's "Up" reeled in $44.2 million to remain on top of the box office for the second weekend in a row, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Warner Bros. bachelor-bash comedy "The Hangover" came in a close second with a $43.3 million debut. Will Ferrell's action comedy for Universal, "Land of the Lost," had to settle for a distant third with a $19.5 million opening.

"Up" was the first movie of Hollywood's busy summer season to take the No. 1 spot for two straight weekends. But overall revenues fell for the second weekend in a row, putting the brakes on what has been shaping up as a record revenue year for the movie business.

The top 12 movies took in $164 million, down 6 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Kung Fu Panda" opened on top with $60.2 million, according to box-office figures compiled by Hollywood.com.

For the year, Hollywood has taken in $4.3 billion, up 12.5 percent from 2008 revenues. But studios have been unable to maintain the red-hot pace of the year's first four months.

"Definitely, things have slowed," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. "But there are some potential saviors on the horizon."

Three big sequels — "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," ''Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" — open within three weeks of one another starting June 24.

With $137.3 million in the bank after just 10 days, "Up" is streaking toward the $200 million mark achieved by such previous Pixar hits as "WALL-E," ''Ratatouille," ''Cars" and "Toy Story 2."

Revenues for most big movies typically drop 50 percent or more in the second weekend, but the audience for "Up" was down only 35 percent from its opening. That puts it in line with "Finding Nemo," the top-grossing Disney-Pixar animated tale, said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney.

"Up" likely will finish in the top three among Pixar flicks, Viane said. Leading the Pixar slate now are "Finding Nemo" with $339.7 million, "The Incredibles" with $261.4 million and "Monsters, Inc." with $255.8 million.

"The Hangover" features Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis as pals on a wild Las Vegas bachelor party, during which they misplace the groom (Justin Bartha) and run into all manner of misadventures.

Warner Bros. had expected "The Hangover" to finish at No. 3 behind "Up" and "Land of the Lost." But the movie found a broad audience split almost evenly between men and women and those over and under 25, said Dan Fellman, Warner head of distribution.

"Sunday's always good for a hangover," Fellman said.

"The Hangover" was directed by Todd Phillips, whose 2003 comedy "Old School" featured a breakout role for Ferrell.

Yet Ferrell had one of his weaker openings with "Land of the Lost," inspired by the 1970s children's TV show about adventurers hurled back to an age of dinosaurs. Ferrell's new twist generally was trashed by critics as a crude update.

Sony's "Angels & Demons" took in $6.5 million domestically and $22.3 million overseas to hit $409 million overall, the first 2009 release to cross the $400 million mark worldwide.

In narrower release, Fox Searchlight's romantic comedy "My Life in Ruins" had a so-so debut of $3.2 million, coming in at No. 9. The movie stars Nia Vardalos ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding") as a discontented tour guide in Greece who unexpectedly finds love.

Focus Features' road-trip romp "Away We Go" had a strong opening in limited release, pulling in $143,260 in four theaters for a healthy average of $35,815 a cinema.

That compares to an average of $11,588 in 3,818 theaters for "Up," $13,238 in 3,269 cinemas for "The Hangover," $5,545 in 3,521 locations for "Land of the Lost" and $2,771 in 1,164 theaters for "My Life in Ruins."

"Away We Go," starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as a couple searching out the best place in North America to raise a family, was directed by Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"). The film expands to more theaters Friday.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Up," $44.2 million.

2. "The Hangover," $43.3 million.

3. "Land of the Lost," $19.5 million.

4. "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," $14.7 million.

5. "Star Trek," $8.4 million.

6. "Terminator Salvation," $8.2 million.

7. "Drag Me to Hell," $7.3 million.

8. "Angels & Demons," $6.5 million.

9. "My Life in Ruins," $3.2 million.

10. "Dance Flick," $2 million.

___

On the Net:

http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice

___

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.; Rogue Pictures is owned by Relativity Media LLC; Overture Films is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.
http://www.courant.com/news/nationwo...,7189912.story





Weekend Switcheroo: ‘The Hangover’ Beat ‘Up’ for Box Office Top Spot
Brooks Barnes

Now “The Hangover” has given Pixar a headache.

Warner Brothers executives — along with those at Legendary Pictures, which co-produced and co-financed the film — are doing cartwheels over final box office figures that show their R-rated comedy was the No. 1 movie over the weekend after all, beating Pixar’s “Up” by a whisker. The initial box-office figures that come out on Sunday are based on actual ticket sales for Friday and Saturday and the studio’s best guess of Sunday’s grosses. Sometimes, when actual Sunday ticket sales figures arrive on Monday, the end result can be quite different, which is what happened this week.

Warner said Monday morning that “The Hangover,” about a Las Vegas bachelor party gone wrong, sold $45 million in tickets at North American theaters over the weekend — as opposed to the projected $43.3 million.

“Up,” meanwhile, posted a final number of about $44.1 million, according to Walt Disney Pictures, which distributed the movie for its corporate cousin. Disney had projected “Up” would finish with $44.2 million in sales.

A Warner Brothers spokeswoman said a press release from the studio was forthcoming and, in a boisterous e-mail, offered interviews with Todd Phillips, who directed “The Hangover”; Sue Kroll, president of worldwide marketing; Jeff Robinov, president of Warner’s pictures group; and Dan Fellman, president of distribution.

Think they’re excited?

Unfortunately for Universal’s big-budget “Land of the Lost” — the first big bomb of the summer — final results showed that even its meager early estimate was too lofty. The picture sold closer to $18.7 million in tickets, compared with a projected $19.5 million.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...r-bo-top-spot/





Eat, Drink, Think, Change
Kim Severson

MOVIES about food used to make you want to eat.

The decade that spanned the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was particularly fruitful. It took heroic resolve to walk out of the Japanese spaghetti western “Tampopo” and not head directly to a ramen bar.

Cooks spent entire months trying to recreate “Babette’s Feast” and dreamed of rolling out pasta with Stanley Tucci in “Big Night.”

By the time Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” came out in 1994, moviegoers had come to expect food films filled with glistening dumplings, magical dessert and technically perfect kitchen scenes.

But that was then, before Wal-Mart started selling organic food and Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Before E. coli was a constant in the food supply, before politicians tried to tax soda and before anyone gave much thought to the living conditions of chickens.

Into this world comes “Food, Inc.,” a documentary on the state of the nation’s food system that opens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday.

“Food, Inc.” is part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces. It’s eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all.

“All we have are these little canisters of film, and we’re launching them at a fortress,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a filmmaker and farmer who is finishing a documentary on the young agrarian movement called “The Greenhorns.”

In 2004 Morgan Spurlock took a mini-Michael Moore approach with “Super Size Me,” a documentary that showed what happens when a man eats nothing but fast food for a month. (His waistline ends up looking a little more like Mr. Moore’s, and his sex life takes a dive.)

There has even been a feature film. In 2006 the nonfiction book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser became a narrative (starring Greg Kinnear) about the restaurant industry, obesity and meat-packing labor exploitation.

Mr. Schlosser is a producer of, and a character in, “Food, Inc.,” in which the director Robert Kenner takes a sprawling look at the perils of Big Food. The film is being promoted as an exposé of “the highly mechanized underbelly” of the seemingly benign food people eat every day.

“Food, Inc.” begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000,” Michael Pollan says as the film opens. Mr. Pollan, an author and occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is the spiritual guide for the film and serves as its narrator. “A lot of it is hard to watch,” he conceded, “but I think people are ready to take a good, unflinching look at how their food is produced.”

Mr. Kenner, who has previously tackled subjects like war and endangered species in a series of television documentaries, didn’t know much about food when he embarked on “Food, Inc.” about six years ago. But after warnings from lawyers, stonewalling from food companies and months on the ground in farm fields, grocery stores and Congressional offices, he became a hard-core campaigner for better food.

“It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ” Mr. Kenner said.

Much of the film takes direct aim at the usual suspects — big meat packing companies, Monsanto, the federal Agriculture Department. But Mr. Kenner also offers a sympathetic study of people whose lives have been hurt both from producing food on such a mass scale and eating the results.

“I think what’s important here was connecting all these little pieces,” he said. “Individually they didn’t seem so insidious.”

In a section that shows how modern, mass-produced chickens have been bred to grow to market size in half the time, a woman under contract with Perdue speaks out about the physical toll such rapid growth takes on the chickens and the stifling conditions in which they live.

She also explains the financial stranglehold large chicken companies have on growers. She ends up losing her contract because she refuses to enclose her chicken houses completely.

Viewers who haven’t thought much about how all that food in the grocery store got to be there will likely find it hard to toss a few packages of pork chops and some Froot Loops in the cart and call it a day. Some viewers will undoubtedly look away during the meat cutting and processing scenes. For parents the eye-averting moment will come during repeated slow-motion scenes of a 2-year-old’s last vacation. His mother, now a food-safety advocate, explains in a tearful voice-over the gruesome details of his death after he ate hamburger tainted with E. coli.

For people steeped in food politics the most revealing scenes are the least graphic. Monsanto goes after an elderly man whose life has been devoted to the practice of cleaning seeds so farmers can replant crops. The chemical company, which has patented herbicide-resistant soybeans and corn, says he is helping farmers plant Monsanto seeds illegally.

The man is forced in a deposition to expose longtime friends and clients who are suspected of using the seeds illegally. He eventually gives up the legal fight when he runs out of money. Monsanto recently posted a Web page (monsanto.com/foodinc) devoted to countering the film’s version of events.

Mr. Kenner also visits a poor family with a diabetic father. During their trip to a grocery store it’s easy to see why they pass on broccoli in favor of fast-food hamburgers, which fill bellies longer and cheaper.

“Food, Inc.” has the endorsement of all kinds of people in what some call “the good food movement.” Alice Waters is a champion, and so is Martha Stewart. She has been arranging screenings for her staff and tweeting about the film: “See the film then tell me organic is too expensive for you and your family. It is so upsetting that good food is hard to find.”

A screening that Mr. Pollan described as uncomfortable was even arranged for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

Much of the buzz has been ginned up by an impressive full-court media campaign, which is spinning the movie as hard as a food company promoting a new product.

To coincide with the opening the lids of millions of containers of Stonyfield Farm yogurt have been turned into “Food, Inc.” ads, thanks in large part to the company’s chairman, Gary Hirshberg. One segment of the film is dedicated to his efforts to produce organic food on a mass scale.

The documentary even has its own companion book, which is more than 300 pages long and filled with essays about global warming, hunger and pesticides along with tips on how to talk to a farmer and improve school lunch.

Because “Food, Inc.” was produced by Participant Media (among others), the company that backed “An Inconvenient Truth,” comparisons are inevitable. But there’s a big difference. After watching Al Gore explain the horrors of climate change, moviegoers can turn off a few lights, think about a Prius and call it a day. People who leave “Food, Inc.” still have to eat.

And the filmmakers know that. At the end of the film a series of suggestions run across the screen. Plant a garden. Cook a meal for the family. Contact Congress.

“I want people to feel like they can do something,” said Naomi Starkman, a Northern California media consultant and aspiring farmer who helped create the messages. “You make a choice three times a day on what you want to eat. That is power.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07seve.html





3D Vision Seen Paying Off for Entertainment Firms
David Brett

Digital 3D looks set to be a key revenue earner for businesses from cinema chains to software developers as companies bank on the fast-improving format ushering in a new age of entertainment.

The medium is already fuelling an increase in cinema receipts worldwide and, should it take off, analysts see the potential for substantial revenue growth going into 2010.

Companies such as Cineworld (CINE.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), BSkyB (BSY.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Pace (PIC.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and DDD Group (DDDL.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) are likely to benefit as Hollywood studios and punters alike plough their money into 3D products.

"Movies released in 3D generate two to three times the revenue of the same titles in 2D -- and in some cases, as much as six times," said Kimberly Maki, executive director of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

Industry figures show the 3D remake of the 80s slasher B-movie 'My Bloody Valentine' was responsible for 71 percent of its total box office. A new record for 3D, the 3D screens outperformed 2D screens six to one in the film's opening week.

Reboot

The journey for 3D began over 100 years ago when the technique was first pioneered, while the first projected 3D movies were shown at the Astor Theater in New York City in 1915. Technological advances and nausea-inducing red and blue glasses saw short-lived 3D booms in the 1950s and 1980s.

With the digital age and new-generation specs for the 21st century, the medium is now getting what looks likely to be a longer-lasting reboot.

Around 30 3D theatrical releases are planned globally in 2009 and 13 in the UK, including Avatar, the most expensive 3D film to date - a $200 million sci-fi epic by James Cameron, the director of box-office smash Titanic.

This year has already seen two major releases; Dreamworks' animated 'Monsters vs Aliens', and 'My Bloody Valentine', which cost $15 million to make but raked in more than $50 million at the box office worldwide.

Cineworld (CINE.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is the only one of the three major U.K. cinema chains that has heavily backed the format, installing 144 3D projectors in its cinemas to account for 60 percent of the market.

"(3D) should provide it with a further opportunity to increase revenue in 2009," said Greg Feehley, analyst at Altium, which has Cineworld on a PE ratio of 9.1 times. "The shares are not expensive and have a significant yield," he added,

The group recently reported a 19.1 percent rise in box office takings this year, helped by 3D, which also generates higher admission fees.

Home Entertainment

Evidence of a change in attitude toward 3D from commercial gimmick to immersive, story-telling tool, came in May when Disney/Pixar's 'Up' became the first animated 3D film ever to open the Cannes film festival.

The knock-on effect for the home entertainment industry could be huge, as current blockbusters, classics such as George Lucas's Star Wars saga and video games are released for use within the home.

"3D in the home represents an important secondary revenue stream for studios," said Maki.

Industry giants Apple (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Sony (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and BSkyB have already thrown their weight behind the technology.

Apple has bought a 3D backlog and screen patent, while Sony and BSkyB have current hardware -- respectively Playstation 3/Blu-Ray and the Sky plus Hi-Def (HD) Box -- that can support the format.

"We have the technology and ability to create a wide range of top quality 3D entertainment for home audiences," said Gerry O'Sullivan, director of strategic product development at BSkyB.

The firm slashed the retail price of the HD Box by two thirds in late January, since when the installation backlog has reached up to three months.

BSkyB's share price rocketed 30 percent on the back of the price cut, and Numis analysts say the stock is still undervalued on a PE ratio of 17.7 times 2009 estimates. That compares to struggling ITV (ITV.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) on 13.8 times.

Pace (PIC.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which makes BSkyB's set-top boxes, has seen its share price almost quadruple in value since the announcement.

Investec UK Smaller Companies Fund manager Philip Rodrigs said Pace was benefiting from strong demand for high-definition television and the digital switchover

Industry analysts expect 3D to have a similar impact.

Martin Lister of Edison Investments, estimates DDD Group, a developer of 3D technology for TVs, mobile phones and personal computers, could multiply revenues sixfold by 2010 and sees significant upside potential for the share price if the 3D consumer market takes off in 2010.

Richard Jones, Cineworld's chief financial officer, agrees. "The only way you'll be able to avoid 3D is if you live down a well," he said.

(editing by John Stonestreet)
http://www.reuters.com/article/small...55732320090608





Monsters Inc to Get a Sequel: So Where’s Pixar Heading?
Simon Brew

Monsters Inc 2 is on the way, meaning Pixar now has three sequels on its announced slate. Is this a sign of the times, we wonder?

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. For the past few years, Pixar has come up with a collection of interesting and distinctive films, that stand apart in the market. Whether it's Ratatouille, Wall-E or this year's Up, I know the very least I get from Pixar is something more than a templated family flick. In fact, you generally get something far more daring and risk-taking.

However, for the next few years, it's seems that the focus at Pixar is going to be on sequels. This is understandable from a business perspective, certainly, given the fact that box office revenues for Pixar movies haven't ever since reached Finding Nemo-esque levels. But it still puts an iota of worry in the back of my mind.

Thus far, Pixar has made just one sequel, Toy Story 2, and it's fair to say that it walloped it out of the proverbial park. Not without good reason do some refer to it as The Godfather Part II of animated movies, and the sizeable gap between it and next summer's Toy Story 3 is encouraging, too. You can hardly say they're banging these things out every couple of years.

But then after that is Cars 2, a film whose purpose looks like propping up the massive merchandise machine that the slightly underwhelming first movie ignited (the merchandising on Cars currently accounts for over $5bn in revenues, scarily). Again, it's an understandable business move, but it never struck me as a film crying out for any kind of follow up.

And now? Work has started on a sequel to 2001's Monsters, Inc, another film that's proven to be a continual success for Pixar. There's no release date as of yet, but it's a fair assumption to expect it in 2012, which would make Pixar's next three big summer movies sequels. Okay, when Pixar do a sequel I'm still expecting it to be special, but I love them in Wall-E and Up territory, personally, when they're trying new things.

There are still fresh projects being worked upon, and this post is hardly doom and gloom news. In 2011, we're getting two Pixar films (DreamWorks Animation, incidentally, is ramping up its output to up to three films a year), for instance, with it releasing at Christmas The Bear And The Bow, directed by Brenda Bow (who has the excellent The Prince Of Egypt to her name). Summer 2012 then sees the feature length directorial debut of Gary Rydstrom with Newt. Rydstrom helmed the excellent short Lifted, with a pedigree in Oscar-winning sound design.

Pixar has set such high standards for itself, that I and many others hold it in higher esteem than its peers. It's a shame, therefore, that the next non-sequel release we'll get from it is over two years away. I do appreciate that Pixar, arguably above all film companies, has the right to be given some slack, and personally, I'll gladly give it. And here's hoping that its sequel slate gives Toy Story 2 a real run for its money. It just seems more a sign of the times, I guess, that it currently has three confirmed sequels, and two original projects on its announced slate right now. And that never seemed like the Pixar way of doing things.

We'll wait and see how it all pans out. Pete Docter, who helmed the original Monsters Inc, as well as this summer's Up, will be directing again, and that's clearly encouraging. And it will, to be fair, be good to see Sully and Mike back on the big screen. Despite everything I've written above, Pixar'll still sell me a ticket every time...
http://denofgeek.com/movies/264007/m...r_heading.html





SAG Members, Finally, Approve Contract
Richard Verrier

Hollywood's largest actors union strongly endorsed a new film and TV contract, closing the chapter on a year-long dispute with the major studios.

The vote, which was expected to be close, drew a stronger show of support from the membership of the Screen Actors Guild, with 78% supporting the deal, and 22% opposing it.

The approval comes nearly a year after the guild's current contract expired and is largely similar to a deal the studios offered the union last fall. SAG's bargaining clout was hurt by the weak economy and a series of strategic missteps by the union's former chief negotiator, who was ousted in a boardroom revolt in January.

Although the contract was expected to be ratified, the vote puts to rest lingering fears in Hollywood that the entertainment industry would face another strike following last year's walkout by writers.

It could also help spur at least some independent film production that has been held up because of the dispute. The uncertainty had caused some insurance companies to stop issuing completion bonds -- ensuring that a film will be done on time and within budget -- that independent filmmakers depend on.

The contract was patterned after similar agreements negotiated last year by three other talent unions. It includes an immediate pay increase of 3% and for the first time gives actors residual pay for shows that streamed for free on websites like Hulu.

But SAG's members were sharply at odds over the terms. Stars lined up on either side of dueling campaigns. A group of A-list actors led by Tom Hanks and George Clooney backed the contract as the best that could be had in a difficult economic climate.

Another group that included former SAG President Ed Asner, Ed Harris and Martin Sheen blasted the agreement, saying it shortchanges actors for work that is distributed on the Internet.

Underscoring the divisions, the contract was supported by a majority of the board and the union's executive director, but opposed by the union's president, Alan Rosenberg, who vigorously campaigned against the contract.

Rosenberg was an ardent backer of former SAG executive director Doug Allen, who was ousted after a group of dissident actors won control of the board in elections last fall. They replaced him with veteran negotiator John McGuire and David White, the union's former general counsel.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ente...-contract.html





Stars Urged to Deliver Uplifting Entertainment
James Hibberd

A group of Hollywood creatives are taking a cue from bestselling "Power of Now" author Eckhart Tolle and forming an organization that promotes uplifting messages in entertainment.

The organization is called GATE -- the Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment -- and its invitation-only inaugural meeting on the Fox lot last Thursday attracted such celebrities as Adrian Grenier, Jackson Browne, Virginia Madsen, Garry Shandling and Billy Zane.

"Clearly, these are times of unprecedented transformation, both individually and globally," said founder John Raatz of the PR firm the Visioneering Group. "Everywhere you look, people are questioning values, identity and meaning. We're intending for GATE to support entertainment and media professionals who realize media's power to effect positive change, and want to contribute to this transformation through their work."

The concept was partly inspired by the works of Tolle, whose Zen teachings have encouraged millions to "live in the present moment." Tolle's books received global recognition after the author appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

At the GATE event, Tolle cited instances of inspiring themes in movies. He noted, for example, that war movies such as "All Quiet on the Western Front" showing "the insanity of war" can be transformational, as well as movies depicting spiritual growth of the main character (such as "The Last Samurai").

Tolle recalled the modern classic "Groundhog Day," where Bill Murray's jaded character is trapped in a small town, reliving the same day over and over, until he finally stops resisting the present moment, makes the most of the time he has and accepts everybody around him.

Though Tolle was the event's headliner, many also turned out to see Jim Carrey, whose film last year "Yes Man" embraced a message of spiritual acceptance.

"We live on a planet where we are all really crammed together and yet we do really well," Carrey said. "But when we watch the news and we watch entertainment it's all about conflict. And you imagine that the world is an explosive, horrifying place. It's really non-representative of the way the world is and what the world wants."

(Editing by Dean Goodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...55904N20090610





China to Require Site-Blocking Software on PCs
Lucy Hornby and Kelvin Soh

The Chinese government has required that personal computer makers bundle a software that filters Internet content from July 1, according to a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology document seen by Reuters.

The free "Green Dam-Youth Escort" software, developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co, can effectively filter "unhealthy words and images," the document said.

The requirement is "in order to consolidate the achievements of the online campaign against pornography, combine punishment and prevention, protect the healthy growth of young people, and promote the Internet's healthy and orderly development," it said.

China already has a system to block websites deemed objectionable. Internet police monitor sites, blogs and other online venues for pornographic or politically sensitive content.

"Summer vacation is coming up, and many Chinese parents worry about what their children will see on the Internet. That's the purpose of the software," Jinhui founder Bryan Zhang said.

"Even if you wanted to use it for, say, political content, you couldn't, because it's image distinction software that tracks pornographic images," Zhang told Reuters.

PC makers must report the number of computer units sold and software packages installed to the ministry on a monthly basis in 2009, and yearly starting in February 2010, the circular says.

"Using the software is not compulsory. You can shut it down or take it out if you want to. With a password, you can turn it off at any time," Zhang said.

"It's an optional tool to prevent access to pornography, just like anti-pornography software in the United States."

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on Monday.

Concern

Homegrown brands like Lenovo and Founder dominate China's market, though global names such as HP, Dell and Acer have significant market share.

It is one of the world's fastest-growing PC markets, with research firm Gartner forecasting total PC shipments will climb by about 3 percent this year to more than 42 million units.

Acer said it was not aware of the new requirement, while rival Taiwanese maker Asustek said it was but had not yet been officially informed by the Chinese government.

"Along with the rest of the industry ... we are studying it and working with relevant government and other parties to seek clarifications," said Dell spokeswoman Faith Brewitt.

Jinhui last year won a tender to supply filtering software to the ministry, according to government procurement information. The software was developed with the help of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co.

Since then, the ministry has subsidized the company to make the software available for free downloads, said Zhang. It previously sold for 368 yuan ($54) a package.

The software will remain free for a year, and after that consumers will have to pay to continue using it, Zhang said.

It has already been bundled in over 50 million locally made PCs offered rural dwellers as part of China's economic stimulus package, according to a promotional website (www.lssw365.net).

It said the software is being used by 2,279 schools across China and had been downloaded 3.27 million times by end-March.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing said it was concerned.

"We would view any attempt to restrict the free flow of information with great concern and as incompatible with China's aspirations to build a modern, information-based economy and society," an embassy spokesman said.

The software has a "black list" of sites with pornographic or violent content it blocks, said a customer service representative affiliated with a website offering the software for downloading.

The software also has a "white list" of permitted websites. Users can add or delete websites from the white list.

The software can be un-installed, the representative said.

Savvy Internet users can access sites outside China through virtual private networks or proxy servers. Netizens in China repost content or use oblique language to stay ahead of censors.

Pornography is easily accessed on the Chinese Internet.

(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley and Beijing newsroom)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5570DF20090608





Political Cues in China Web Filter

Web-filtering software that the Chinese government will require on all new personal computers includes data files containing political keywords and Web addresses, suggesting it could block more than just pornography, say people who have studied the program.

A notice sent to PC makers last month said they must include the software with all new PCs shipped in China as of July 1. Chinese officials and the main developer of the software have said the purpose of the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, is to enable parents to prevent their children from viewing online pornography.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124474567529507107.html





China Internet Filter Challenged in Rights Uproar

A Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing to reconsider a government demand that all new personal computers carry Internet filtering software, adding to uproar over a plan critics say is ineffective and intrusive.

Li Fangping, a Beijing human rights advocate who often embraces controversial causes, has asked the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to allow hearings on the "lawfulness and reasonableness" of the demand, which takes effect from July 1 and was publicized only this week.

"This administrative action lacks a legal basis," Li wrote in a submission to the ministry that was sent to reporters by email on Thursday.

"Designating that the same software must be installed in all computers affects citizens' rights to choose."

Li's demand, and denunciations of the plan from Chinese rights groups, have expanded a public battle over the "Green Dam" filtering software, despite a state media effort to promote the software as a welcome way to prevent children being exposed to pornography.

Many citizens worry such software and other measures are being imposed to deter discussion of sensitive political topics, especially in this year of controversial anniversaries, Li told Reuters.

"Above all, we're concerned about freedom of speech and the right to know," he said. "We know that citizens have been prosecuted because of their private emails, and we're worried about more such cases."

Chinese human rights and gay advocacy groups have demanded the software plan be immediately quashed.

A statement from five groups sent by email said the software threatened to cripple access to many of the gay community websites that have flourished in recent years.

The software works by judging whether website pages may show large amounts of exposed flesh.

Wan Yanhai, a leader of the Beijing-based Aizhixing organization, which works on AIDS and gay rights, said he was preparing a mass petition to mobilize opposition to the software.

"We need to demand not just the lifting of this software decree, but also an end to restrictions on gay publications," Wan told Reuters. "This is about opposing censorship."

Chinese state media have promoted the compulsory installation plan as an effective way to staunch the flow of pornography, which is banned in China but widely available.

"If you have children or are expecting a child you could understand the concerns of the parents over unhealthy online content," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters on Tuesday.

State television news said the software can be shut off and erased if users choose, and does not collect personal information.

China is one of the world's fastest-growing PC markets, and has hundreds of millions of Internet users. Research firm Gartner forecasts total PC shipments will climb by about 3 percent this year to more than 42 million units.

Li, the rights lawyer, said the ruling Communist Party is especially wary of dissent and controversy this year, the 20th anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests ended by a bloody crackdown.

"How the government responds in the end will depend on the response from Chinese Internet-users," he said. "If it's strong, they'll back down, and may let the plan quietly die."

(Editing by Sugita Katyal.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061102026.html





Supreme Court Refuses Case of Man With Porn On Computer

The Supreme Court won't stop Pennsylvania officials from prosecuting a man whose computer was found to contain child pornography while it was at Circuit City being upgraded.

Kenneth Sodomsky wants the high court to suppress the videos found on his computer, which he had taken into a Circuit City in Wyomissing, Penn., to get a DVD burner installed into it. While the computer was in the store, a worker looked through some of the files and found movie files with "questionable" names referring to boys of various ages. The worker then found a video of a hand reaching toward a penis and called the police.

Police seized the computer, obtained a warrant and found child pornography. Sodomsky moved to suppress the discovery, saying the Circuit City employees had no right to search his computer and show any of its contents to police.

A trial judge agreed, but a state appellate court overturned that decision, saying Sodomsky ran the risk of his illegal files being found and viewed by taking the computer out of his house and to the store.

Circuit City Stores closed the last of its stores in March.

The case is Sodomsky v. Pennsylvania, 08-1274.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Texas Lawmakers Crack Down On Fake Profiles
Wendy Davis

In a move aimed at cracking down on cyerbullying, Texas lawmakers passed a new bill that makes it a crime to impersonate people online.

The new "online harassment" statute makes it a felony to create phony profiles on social networking sites with the intent to "harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten" others. The statute defines commercial social networking sites broadly, saying they include any sites that allow people to register to communicate with others or create Web pages or profiles. (Email programs and message boards are excluded from the definition.)

The law was sent to the Texas governor for signature last week.

The move comes at a time when fake profiles are increasingly in the news, thanks largely to the relatively new phenomenon of phony Twitter accounts. Last week, it was widely reported that one such account had already led to a lawsuit. In that case, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa alleged that the parody account infringed his trademark.

The Texas law conceivably addresses those types of profiles on Twitter, although it's not clear that courts would find that parody creators do so with an intent to "harm" or "intimidate."

It's also not certain that the law would hold up in court. Internet law expert Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, says the Texas law appears problematic for at least two reasons: it singles out social networking sites and bans speech that might be permissible. "The whole social networking exceptionalism is ridiculous," he says. "There's no way to distinguish social networking sites from other sites."

And, he adds, the attempt to ban fake profiles might be unconstitutional because it could end up also criminalizing legitimate speech. "There's so much potential speech that's covered by this, it makes me nervous," he says.

Last year, a Texas appellate court invalidated another harassment law that made it a crime to send repeated emails "in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another." In that case, the court ruled that the law potentially criminalized speech that was allowed under the First Amendment.

Texas isn't alone in trying to crack down on Internet harassment. Policymakers throughout the country have proposed new laws addressing cyberbullying on social networking sites in wake of the Megan Meier suicide, and at least one politician, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), has introduced a federal measure.

The Texas law, however, doesn't seem to address the Megan Meier situation because no one was impersonated in that case. There, 40-something Missouri resident Lori Drew allegedly helped hatch a plan to create a fake MySpace profile of a fictional boy, "Josh," who sent messages to 13-year-old Megan. She killed herself after receiving a final message from Josh -- a statement that the world would be a better place without her. (That email didn't come from Drew, but a 20-year-old who used to babysit for Drew's daughter.)

But the Texas statute could potentially cover some other fake-profile incidents, such as a well-publicized case involving Yahoo. In that instance, the ex-boyfriend of Oregon resident Cynthia Barnes created a fake profile of her that included nude photos as well as her name, address and phone number.
http://www.mediapost.com/publication...art_aid=107518





East Lancashire Youngsters See Film On Terrorism Danger
Sally Henfield

PRIMARY school pupils are to be shown a film about the dangers of terrorists as part of an organised safety day.

More than 2,000 10 and 11-year-olds will see a short film, which urges them to tell the police, their parents or a teacher if they hear anyone expressing extremist views.

The film has been made by school liaison officers and Eastern Division’s new Preventing Violent Extremism team, based at Blackburn.

It uses cartoon animals to get across safety messages.

A lion explains that terrorists can look like anyone, while a cat tells pupils that should get help if they are being bullied and a toad tells them how to cross the road.

The terrorism message is also illustrated with a re-telling of the story of Guy Fawkes, saying that his strong views began forming when he was at school in York. It has been designed to deliver the message of fighting terrorism in accessible way for children.

The film is being shown as part of Lancashire Police’s Streetwise campaign.

Pupils will also be taught how to rescue someone from water, identify risk of fire in the home, the risks of stranger danger and using the internet as learning how to stay safe whilst out and about.

The event, is now in its 16th year but it is the first year that terrorism has been on the agenda.

A spokesman for Lancashire Police said: “Children attending the event will be offered an interactive presentation delivered by police officers who are based in schools. It tells children who they can speak to if they are worried about anything.

“Officers also introduce the issues surrounding terrorism at a very basic level, which forms part of the wider presentation encouraging children to report any concerns around safety to their parents, teachers, or local police.”
http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk...rism_dan ger/





London Police Accused of Waterboarding
Sarah Lyall

Six officers from the Metropolitan Police department have been suspended or placed on restricted duty after being accused of mistreating suspects during a drug-related raid last November, the police said on Wednesday.

The police would not give details about what the officers, from Enfield, in north London, are alleged to have done. But several British newspapers reported that the charges include dunking the suspects’ heads in buckets of water, a practice that would be similar to a torture technique known as waterboarding. The United States government has come under intense criticism for its use of waterboarding in anti-terror investigations.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Service said he could not comment on the reports.

The allegations were brought to the attention of the police by an unidentified employee of the department. They are being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which looks at police misconduct, and could result in criminal charges.
The police called the allegations “serious” and said they raised “real concern.”

In a statement, the police said that “The Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards received information from a Metropolitan Police Service employee which raised concerns about the conduct of a small number of officers” during an operation in November.

The police also said that the commander of the Enfield force had been moved to a new job in Scotland Yard and would be working on strategy and policy issues.

The complaints commission said that the allegations came to light as part of an internal investigation by the police into corruption in Enfield’s crime squad following the November operation. Among the charges, The Evening Standard reported, were that the officers fabricated evidence and stole items like Ipods and television sets from the suspects.

Five people were arrested and charged with smuggling and possessing drugs after the operation. But the charges against them were dropped earlier this year when prosecutors said “it would not be in the public interest” to proceed.

It is an awkward time for the London police. Scotland Yard’s reputation has already been damaged by allegations of police brutality stemming from police behavior at protests during the Group of 20 meetings in April. One man, a 47-year-old newspaper vendor who was trying to get home during the protests, collapsed and died after being struck and shoved to the ground by a police officer.

Since April, 276 people have made formal complaints to the commission about police behavior during the protests, mostly involving allegations of excessive force. The commission has launched full investigations into five of those complaints, including one that alleged that the police — whose initial claims to have had no contact with the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, were contradicted by video footage taken at the time — lied and tried to cover up the incident.

The commission said that it had referred 131 of the complaints to the police and instructed them to report back if, for instance, the complaints involved injuries or allegations against identifiable officers. So far, it said, 52 of those cases were being investigated by the police under the commission’s supervision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/wo.../11london.html





Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan
Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger

A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama’s assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons.

Much of the new military command’s work is expected to be carried out by the National Security Agency, whose role in intercepting the domestic end of international calls and e-mail messages after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, under secret orders issued by the Bush administration, has already generated intense controversy.

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets.

The cybersecurity effort, Mr. Obama said at the White House last month, “will not — I repeat, will not — include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.”

But foreign adversaries often mount their attacks through computer network hubs inside the United States, and military officials and outside experts say that threat confronts the Pentagon and the administration with difficult questions.

Military officials say there may be a need to intercept and examine some e-mail messages sent from other countries to guard against computer viruses or potential terrorist action. Advocates say the process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons.

“The government is in a quandary,” said Maren Leed, a defense expert at the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies who was a Pentagon special assistant on cyberoperations from 2005 to 2008.

Ms. Leed said a broad debate was needed “about what constitutes an intrusion that violates privacy and, at the other extreme, what is an intrusion that may be acceptable in the face of an act of war.”

In a recent speech, Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a chief architect of the new cyberstrategy, acknowledged that a major unresolved issue was how the military — which would include the National Security Agency, where much of the cyberwar expertise resides — could legally set up an early warning system.

Unlike a missile attack, which would show up on the Pentagon’s screens long before reaching American territory, a cyberattack may be visible only after it has been launched in the United States.

“How do you understand sovereignty in the cyberdomain?” General Cartwright asked. “It doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic boundaries.”

For example, the daily attacks on the Pentagon’s own computer systems, or probes sent from Russia, China and Eastern Europe seeking chinks in the computer systems of corporations and financial institutions, are rarely seen before their effect is felt inside the United States.

Some administration officials have begun to discuss whether laws or regulations must be changed to allow law enforcement, the military or intelligence agencies greater access to networks or Internet providers when significant evidence of a national security threat was found.

Ms. Leed said that while the Defense Department and related intelligence agencies were the only organizations that had the ability to protect against such cyberattacks, “they are not the best suited, from a civil liberties perspective, to take on that responsibility.”

Under plans being completed at the Pentagon, the new cybercommand will be run by a four-star general, much the way Gen. David H. Petraeus runs the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from Central Command in Tampa, Fla. But the expectation is that whoever is in charge of the new command will also direct the National Security Agency, an effort to solve the turf war between the spy agency and the military over who is in charge of conducting offensive operations.

While the N.S.A.’s job is chiefly one of detection and monitoring, the agency also possesses what Michael D. McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, called “the critical skill set” to respond quickly to cyberattacks. Yet the Defense Department views cyberspace as its domain as well, a new battleground after land, sea, air and space.

The complications are not limited to privacy concerns. The Pentagon is increasingly worried about the diplomatic ramifications of being forced to use the computer networks of many other nations while carrying out digital missions — the computer equivalent of the Vietnam War’s spilling over the Cambodian border in the 1960s. To battle Russian hackers, for example, it might be necessary to act through the virtual cyberterritory of Britain or Germany or any country where the attack was routed.

General Cartwright said military planners were trying to write rules of engagement for scenarios in which a cyberattack was launched from a neutral country that might have no idea what was going on. But, with time of the essence, it may not be possible, the scenarios show, to ask other nations to act against an attack that is flowing through their computers in milliseconds.

“If I pass through your country, do I have to talk to the ambassador?” General Cartwright said. “It is very difficult. Those are the questions that are now really starting to emerge vis-à-vis cyber.”

Frida Berrigan, a longtime peace activist who is a senior program associate at the New America Foundation’s arms and security initiative, expressed concerns about whether the Obama administration would be able to balance its promise to respect privacy in cyberspace even as it appeared to be militarizing cybersecurity.

“Obama was very deliberate in saying that the U.S. military and the U.S. government would not be looking at our e-mail and not tracking what we do online,” Ms. Berrigan said. “This is not to say there is not a cyberthreat out there or that cyberterrorism is not a significant concern. We should be vigilant and creative. But once again we see the Pentagon being put at the heart of it and at front lines of offering a solution.”

Ms. Berrigan said that just as the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had proved that “there is no front line anymore, and no demilitarized zone anymore, then if the Pentagon and the military services see cyberspace as a battlefield domain, then the lines protecting privacy and our civil liberties get blurred very, very quickly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us...s/13cyber.html





Bob Hope’s Spirit, But No Cheesecake
Alessandra Stanley

The first comedy show entirely taped, edited and broadcast in a war zone didn’t look like your average U.S.O. tour. Except when it did. In Baghdad this past week the host of “The Colbert Report” was so imbued with the spirit of Bob Hope that he actually twirled a golf club — a Hope trademark — as he told jokes to troops in a former palace of Saddam Hussein. Stephen Colbert, the host, described Iraq as “so nice, we invaded it twice.” Even a taped sketch on Tuesday, in which Mr. Colbert debated himself on the issue of gay soldiers, wasn’t much of a departure from Hope’s old stand-up routines in places like Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay.

“Miniskirts are bigger than ever, even some of the fellas are wearing them,” Hope told troops in Da Nang in 1967. A beat. “Don’t laugh,” he added. “If you’d have thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.”

Mr. Colbert’s four-day “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando,” sponsored by the U.S.O., was unexpectedly charming. His interviews with generals and even an Iraqi deputy prime minister were pleasant, not barbed, and his stand-up routines proved as easygoing and good-natured as many a Bob Hope performance. Mr. Colbert sometimes let his comic persona as an monomaniacal chicken hawk to the right of Bill O’Reilly slip a little, but mostly he stayed in character, and even that matched up with Hope’s self-caricature as someone egotistical and cowardly.

The difference wasn’t in the humor, or even the technology; it was in the intended audience. Hope’s U.S.O. tours were star-studded morale boosters for isolated troops who felt out of touch and forgotten. Mr. Colbert seemed eager to energize viewers who are out of touch with overseas news and have all but forgotten that 130,000 troops remain in Iraq.

“I thought the whole Iraq thing was over,” Mr. Colbert told the troops on Monday night in Baghdad. “I haven’t seen any news stories about it in months.”

When Hope went on the road, and his trips to military bases spanned World War II and Operation Desert Storm, his audiences were young, overwhelmingly male and cut off from home. Even in Vietnam servicemen relied on letters and the occasional scratchy phone call. Hope’s lighthearted cracks about the military, war and women were tailored to amuse and comfort the men on the ground.

Mr. Colbert’s skits and stunts — a mock stint in basic training, a haircut administered by Gen. Ray Odierno (ordered, jokingly, by President Obama via a pretaped message) — were designed to hold the attention of easily distracted audiences back home.

Today’s troops are hardly starved for entertainment; they have laptops, video cameras, satellite phones and every iteration of the Internet, including Skype, Facebook and Gchats. They stay tuned to television, even Comedy Central. Mr. Colbert’s show is broadcast at 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. Central European time on the American Forces Network. He worked in references to “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” and even the bickering stars of “Jon & Kate Plus 8.”

Hope, ever mindful of the mood of men deprived of female company, always brought some cheesecake with him: Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable during World War II; Jayne Mansfield in Korea; Joey Heatherton, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch in Vietnam.

There were no torch songs or Golddiggers in white go-go boots on “The Colbert Report.” The closest thing to Ms. Welch was Tom Hanks, who played himself in a taped sketch about U.S.O. care packages. Today’s military is coed and in no mood to joke about it. Mr. Colbert asked Sgt. Robin Balcom, how, since women are not supposed to be in front-line positions, she won a combat badge. Sergeant Balcom, a military police officer, bristled at the word won, as opposed to earn. “I didn’t really win,” she said. “I was awarded.” Mr. Colbert quickly apologized.

There’s another difference. When NBC broadcast Hope’s Vietnam Christmas specials in the early 1970s (he performed on Christmas Day, but the fully produced shows were not televised until January), they drew 60 percent of the viewing audience. No conflict has ever been as instantly and closely covered as the Iraq War, but access spurs complacency. In the fractured universe of cable and the Internet, the entertaining of troops doesn’t get a lot of attention. World Wrestling Entertainment produces the annual tribute to the troops; Kellie Pickler, a former “American Idol” contestant who went to Iraq on last year’s U.S.O. holiday tour, made a video diary of her tour that was shown on GAC, the Great American Country cable network.

Mr. Colbert’s audience on Comedy Central isn’t very large (a little over a million on a good day), but he has cachet with young and would-be hip viewers who get most of their news from iPhone applications, blogs and comedy shows.

And that’s one reason Mr. Obama and former presidents humored Comedy Central by taping tongue-in-cheek messages to the troops: they seized the opportunity to participate in a government-sanctioned tribute alongside a comedian popular with people who despise conventional politics and government-sanctioned entertainment.

Normally celebrities go to combat zones with the U.S.O. In this case Mr. Colbert took the U.S.O. on a trip with Comedy Central.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/ar...n/12watch.html





Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
Douglas Quenqua

“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”

Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”

The post generated no comments.

Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.

Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”

Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy — what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few — gasp — actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy.

“Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.

Ms. Sun’s posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from “The Simpsons” — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the “best online diary” award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions — wrong ones — about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.

“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”

Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.

“I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart and another with a company that made dog-proof cellphone chargers. Mr. Goodman posted a video of his dog failing to destroy one.

“I guess the charger wasn’t very popular,” he said. “I think I made about $20” from readers clicking on the ads. He last updated the site in November.

Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.

Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.

As for Ms. Sun of Cromulent.org, she has made peace with being public. She has a new blog, SaladDays.org, where she keeps her posts short and jaunty, not personally revealing; mostly, she offers up health and diet tips, with the occasional quote from Simone de Beauvoir.

What is she after this time around? In person, she was noncommittal, but that night she sent a follow-up e-mail message.

“To be honest, I would love a book deal to come out of my blog,” she wrote. “Or I would love for Salad Days to give me a means to be financially independent to continue pursuing and sharing what I love with the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html





Get the Tech Scuttlebutt! (It Might Even Be True.)
Damon Darlin

AT 2:56 in the morning on May 5, a headline flashed on Gawker, the New York gossip site that also carries a smattering of Silicon Valley buzz. It was tentative in its phrasing: “Could Apple Buy Twitter?”

But the post boldly claimed that “a source who’s plugged into the Valley’s deal scene and has been recruited by Apple for a senior position” was saying negotiations were well under way.

Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.

Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade. In October, for instance, Silicon Alley Insider discussed a rumor that first appeared in a “citizen journalism” section of the CNN Web site that Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, had had a heart attack. He hadn’t.

The truth-be-damned approach recalls an earlier era of newspapering that was memorialized in the movie classic “Citizen Kane.” The main character, modeled on the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, is told that a writer sent to Cuba to report a war can find no war. “You provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war,” Kane replies.

W. Joseph Campbell, who chronicled the newspaper wars at the turn of the last century in a book titled “Yellow Journalism,” says, “It was far more freewheeling than they are today.” More than a dozen major dailies fought for an audience in New York City, but gradually papers embraced credibility to survive. “It may have meant some of the newspapers lost a lot of their pizazz,” he notes. (Mr. Campbell, who is an associate professor at the School of Communication at American University, also researched the origins of the “Citizen Kane” quotation and concluded that it was unlikely that Mr. Hearst uttered a similar phrase.)

But seeking credibility may be a less-important strategy for the blogs at this stage. Mr. Arrington, a lawyer, is quick to point out that he has no journalism training. He is at ease, even high-minded, in explaining the decisions to print unverified rumors.

Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story.

He did agonize a bit before publishing the post about Twitter and Apple. In fact, he waited five hours. But in the end, he decided, “it was interesting and it didn’t hurt anyone to write about it.”

TechCrunch, with about five million monthly visitors, dominates rival blogs, which Mr. Arrington disparages. (And they do the same to his.) But he doesn’t think of sites like Gawker or All Things Digital as competitors. He has his eyes set on The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. (And he disparages both.)

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Brian Lam built Gizmodo into the pre-eminent gadget site with a similar philosophy. “The only way to compete with a news organization with more resources is to fit between the cracks,” he says. Sometimes the method appears to pay off, though it never really establishes an organization’s claim to credibility. As editor of Gizmodo, which is owned by Gawker, he decided to run with an item last December, attributed to an unnamed source, that Mr. Jobs would not make his usual appearance at the MacWorld show because he was seriously ill. It was thin reporting at odds with the company’s explanation, he acknowledges. “We were scared to death actually,” he said. “We knew it was a risk.”

He was lectured privately by Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s veteran tech-product reviewer, about ethics, and several bloggers gave him a hard time. A CNBC reporter took to the air to say Gizmodo got it wrong.

A few days later, Mr. Lam could claim vindication when Apple announced that Mr. Jobs was taking a leave of absence because of his health. To this day, it is unclear how much his health figured in Apple’s decision to withdraw from the MacWorld show. Nevertheless, Nick Denton, Mr. Lam’s boss and the founder of the Gawker blog network, crowed, “This is why access is overrated.”

Mr. Lam says it taught him a lesson. “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists?” he asks. “You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/bu...ia/07ping.html





Feds Look Further into Google Book Deal: Reports
Steven E.F. Brown

The U.S. Department of Justice has increased its scrutiny of giant Google Inc.’s $125 million settlement with book publishers, according to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Reports say the DOJ sent civil investigative demands — the civil equivalent of a subpoena — to two publishers involved in the deal, asking for details.

Last year Google worked out the settlement, hoping to get on with its ambitious project to digitize millions of books and make them publicly available in whole or in part, depending on their copyright. The project, and the settlement, irritated some publishers and authors, though publishers can opt out (like Harvard University’s library did in October). The $125 million settlement goes into a fund to pay authors and publishers for use of their works.

Critics of the deal say Google will be making money off of books it puts into its service, and want the deal squelched on antitrust grounds.

The quandary shows — like Apple Inc. and music companies found in their digital rights management struggles — that copyright and creative royalty laws have lagged behind both technological progress and changes in people’s attitudes.

Many young people in their 20s today grew up freely downloading and sharing music, pictures, movies, television shows and other creative products. Businesses like Napster and Limewire catered to their hunger for music, and people would upload entire seasons of popular TV shows when the were released on DVD, letting other people with enough patience and a good Internet connection download them for free.

Apple struggled with so-called DRM software, but didn’t succeed in completely sorting out the issue.

Google, in Mountain View, makes most of its money from online search and advertising, but it has many lofty ambitions for projects for the public good, including this book scanning deal.

Though the deal has been criticized by some, Google has made many out-of-print books available through its efforts. Many of them would still be moldering away in libraries or storerooms somewhere if they hadn’t been scanned and put online for anyone to read.

Although Google has professed many altruistic intentions, nevertheless it is a for-profit business, and some libraries, like U.C. Berkeley, have also joined in the HathiTrust, a nonprofit digital book archive. Libraries, one university spokesman said, think in centuries, while private businesses come and go.

Google has also put paintings from Madrid’s Prado Museum online and opened up archives of Life magazine photos.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranci...8/daily25.html





Connecticut District Tosses Algebra Textbooks and Goes Online
Winnie Hu

Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time.

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a program in India, called HeyMath!, to jazz up the algorithms and problem sets with animation and sounds.

“In America, we run through chapters like a speeding train,” said John Dodig, the principal of the 1,728-student Staples High School here. “Schools in Singapore and India spend more time on each topic, and their kids do better. We’re boiling down math to the essentials.”

That means Westport students focus only on linear functions in Algebra I, taught in seventh, eighth or ninth grade depending on student ability, and leave quadratics and exponents to Algebra II, eliminating the overlap and repetition typical of most textbooks and curriculum guidelines. Westport has also scaled back exercises like long formal proofs in geometry, revising lessons and homework assignments to teach students to defend their answers to math problems as a matter of routine rather than repeatedly writing them out.

Westport’s curriculum overhaul joins other recent critiques of mile-wide, inch-deep instruction in the long-running math wars within American education. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics called for a tighter focus on basic math skills. Two years later, a federal panel appointed by President George W. Bush urged that pre-kindergarten to eighth-grade math curriculums be streamlined after finding that math achievement for American students was at “a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide.

Westport school officials say their less-is-more approach has already resulted in less review in math classes, higher standardized test scores and more students taking advanced math classes. The percentage of the district’s 10th graders receiving top scores on state exams rose to 86 percent last year from 78 percent in 2006. Advanced Placement calculus and statistics classes enrolled 231 students this year, from 170 in 2006, and a record 44 students will be able to take multivariable calculus this fall, up from four in 2006.

But while Westport’s new approach has attracted interest in the math education world, the vast majority of schools in Connecticut and elsewhere continue to race through dozens of math topics in each grade because of concerns that cutting back could hurt student performance on state assessments and SATs.

Hank Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said that most schools choose among prepackaged math curriculums, which have to be expansive enough to meet wide-ranging standards for every state, and that he had not heard of another district trying to write its own.

“I give them kudos for trying it,” he said. “But I’m worried that not many districts will have the amount of support needed to pull off a new curriculum and sustain it.”

Patti Smith, a vice president at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a major national supplier of math textbooks to schools, said she did not believe Westport’s curriculum could maintain the same level of quality and consistency as a published math curriculum. Her company spends two years developing a curriculum using hundreds of math specialists and field-testing in schools.

“With all that is expected of teachers and students today, building a mathematics curriculum that has the depth to meet the needs of all classrooms is a very hard thing to do,” she said, pointing out that for a school district’s teachers, any time they spend “building content is time they are not working with kids.” (The math textbooks Westport is phasing out are by McDougal Littell, now part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

But textbooks are not immune to the streamlining trend: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has written an Algebra I textbook for Florida schools that is about 200 pages shorter than the 1,000-page national version.

Here in Westport, the math curriculum has been compiled from original lessons and assignments as well as material adapted from Web sites, books, training sessions and conferences. Math teachers say their curriculum seeks to balance traditional teacher-directed instruction with student-exploration exercises, and in some cases diverges from Connecticut standards, which, for instance, call for quadratic equations to be taught in Algebra I.

“They’ve sidestepped the math wars because they have a rational curriculum, well-taught, and they get great results, so how can you argue with that?” said Steven Leinwand, principal research analyst at the American Institutes for Research, who helped Westport develop its math curriculum.

Frank Corbo, the head of Staples’ math department, said the district spent about $70,000 to develop the new math curriculum — half to pay two dozen teachers to work on it over the summer, and the other half to pay HeyMath!, whose Web server in Singapore gives students 24-hour, 7-day-a-week access to class lessons, tutorials and homework assignments. He said that the district will soon save at least $25,000 a year on textbooks.

In interviews, several Westport teachers and parents said the slower pace has helped their children focus more deeply on difficult concepts, and students say the shift online has made math easier to understand with cool graphics, animation and real-world context like global warming. “Math for a lot of kids is not fun,” said Lee Saveliff, co-president of the Parent-Teacher Association at Staples. “For kids who are computer literate, this helps them get a connection to the material.”

But the transition has not been without glitches. Some of the new word problems featured children with unpronounceable names like Trygve. Students have forgotten their passwords to log into the math program, and some online lessons had too few practice problems, sending students back to their textbooks.

In precalculus class the other day, Sarah White taught a dozen juniors and seniors about sine and cosine curves by inviting them to “play around with graphs” in a HeyMath! lesson. As a student touched an on-screen graph, the curves jumped and slid — an exercise that used to take 10 minutes or more on graphing calculators. “Kids would punch in wrong numbers and use the wrong mode,” Ms. White said.

Jahari Dodd, 17, a junior who earns B’s in math, said the online lessons were a welcome change from the dense pages of numbers and equations in his precalculus textbook. “I’m much more of a visual learner,” he said. “If I can’t see it or have some kind of image with it, it’s much harder to grasp.”

Kirk Massie, 15, a sophomore, said that he prepared for his midterm in Algebra II by replaying class lessons at home. “You don’t have to ask questions, you just rewind,” he said. “If you forget or it’s late at night, or you don’t have time to talk to the teacher, it’s right there and it takes a minute to log on.”

But he added that was not yet ready to close his math textbook for good. “It’s just weird not having something on paper that I can just look at,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/education/08math.html





Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity
Steve Lohr

In today’s recession-racked economy, penny-pinching is a national pastime. But people are still opening their wallets for smartphones.

Sales of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other smartphone models are rising smartly and are projected to increase 25 percent this year, according to Gartner, a research business. Widely anticipated new models like the Palm Pre, which went on sale nationwide on Saturday, will help fuel that growth. Meanwhile, total cellphone sales are expected to fall.

The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather the downturn. And as is so often true when it comes to adoption of new technology, the smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”

The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.

Smartphones are not cheap, particularly in tough economic times. The phones, even with routine discounts from wireless carriers, usually cost $100 to $300, while the data and calling service plans are typically $80 to $100 a month.

But recent smartphone converts are often people who count pennies, including many from the growing ranks of job seekers. Helene Rude of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., was laid off from her job as a business development manager at I.B.M. this year, when her unit, among others, was the target of cuts. When she left, Ms. Rude had to turn in her company notebook computer with its constant wireless connection.

So she got an iPhone instead, allowing her to be online no matter where she was, without having to lug a computer around. “I absolutely got it for the job search,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s really an expectation, but if another job candidate returns an e-mail message eight hours later, and you get back immediately with a message that says ‘Sent from my iPhone,’ I think it has to be a check box in your favor.”

That is certainly the sort of message the wireless industry would like to reinforce. “Smartphones are seen as essential to be productive in a mobile society,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer at AT&T’s wireless division.

James L. Balsillie, co-chief executive of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, said the company’s introduction of less business-oriented phones, with the general spread of mobile communication, explained the snowballing growth in BlackBerry users. They now number 25 million, nearly double the total a year ago and a tenfold increase in the last four years.

The smartphone wave, industry analysts say, should continue to build. The room for gains is ample because, though rising, smartphone sales will still account for only a quarter of total cellphone shipments in the United States this year. And along with the Palm Pre, a host of new smartphone handset and software offerings are coming this year, from Apple, R.I.M., Nokia, Microsoft, Google and others.

The industry’s goal is to win over more rank-and-file converts like Joseph Sexton of San Jose, Calif., who calls himself “not a gadget person.” Mr. Sexton, 45, decided to leave his job as a manager of a community health organization to travel and then look for other work, shortly before the financial crisis hit last fall.

He soon found himself looking for work in a tough market, and got a smartphone as a digital assistant in his search. Now he is hooked. “It allows me to be on top of things, and always connected, no matter where I am,” he said.

Mr. Sexton searches the Web, takes notes and sends e-mail with his iPhone. When he has trouble sleeping, he reaches for his smartphone to read news or check e-mail. In fact, Mr. Sexton said, he finds himself reading more online these days and buying fewer magazines.

“Basically, I’m walking around with a minicomputer in my pocket,” he said. “And it’s a part of me now, an appendage.”

Such a digital connection can have its downside. The perils of obsessive smartphone use have been well documented, including distracted driving and the stress of multitasking. CrackBerry, a term coined years ago, is telling.

The smartphone, said Mr. Meyer, a cognitive psychologist, can be seen as a digital “Skinner box,” a reference to the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in which rats were conditioned to press a lever repeatedly to get food pellets.

With the smartphone, he said, the stimuli are information feeds. “It can be powerfully reinforcing behavior,” he said. “But the key is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It’s about balance and managing things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/te...y/10phone.html





Data Center Overload
Tom Vanderbilt

It began with an Xbox game.

On a recent rainy evening in Brooklyn, I was at a friend’s house playing (a bit sheepishly, given my incipient middle age) Call of Duty: World at War. Scrolling through the game’s menus, I noticed a screen for Xbox Live, which allows you to play against remote users via broadband. The number of Call of Duty players online at that moment? More than 66,000.

Walking home, I ruminated on the number. Sixty-six thousand is the population of a small city — Muncie, Ind., for one. Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

We have an almost inimical incuriosity when it comes to infrastructure. It tends to feature in our thoughts only when it’s not working. The Google search results that are returned in 0.15 seconds were once a stirring novelty but soon became just another assumption in our lives, like the air we breathe. Yet whose day would proceed smoothly without the computing infrastructure that increasingly makes it possible to navigate the world and our relationships within it?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users. To appreciate the scope of this phenomenon, and its crushing demands on storage capacity, let me sketch just the iceberg’s tip of one average individual digital presence: my own. I have photos on Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, so they reside in a Yahoo data center, probably the one in Wenatchee, Wash.); the Wikipedia entry about me dwells on a database in Tampa, Fla.; the video on YouTube of a talk I delivered at Google’s headquarters might dwell in any one of Google’s data centers, from The Dalles in Oregon to Lenoir, N.C.; my LinkedIn profile most likely sits in an Equinix-run data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and my blog lives at Modwest’s headquarters in Missoula, Mont. If one of these sites happened to be down, I might have Twittered a complaint, my tweet paying a virtual visit to (most likely) NTT America’s data center in Sterling, Va. And in each of these cases, there would be at least one mirror data center somewhere else — the built-environment equivalent of an external hard drive, backing things up.

Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud. Trying to chart the cloud’s geography can be daunting, a task that is further complicated by security concerns. “It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ ” says Rich Miller, whose Web site, Data Center Knowledge, tracks the industry. “The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”

Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society — even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) — the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon. Call it the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year — often built on, say, a former bean field — that lie behind your Internet queries.

INSIDE THE CLOUD

Microsoft’s data center in Tukwila, Wash., sits amid a nondescript sprawl of beige boxlike buildings. As I pulled up to it in a Prius with Michael Manos, who was then Microsoft’s general manager of data-center services, he observed that while “most people wouldn’t be able to tell this wasn’t just a giant warehouse,” an experienced eye could discern revelatory details. “You would notice the plethora of cameras,” he said. “You could follow the power lines.” He gestured to a series of fluted silver pipes along one wall. “Those are chimney stacks, which probably tells you there’s generators behind each of those stacks.” The generators, like the huge banks of U.P.S. (uninterruptible power supply) batteries, ward against surges and power failures to ensure that the data center always runs smoothly.

After submitting to biometric hand scans in the lobby and passing through a sensor-laden multidoor man trap, Manos and I entered a bright, white room filled with librarylike rows of hulking, black racks of servers — the dedicated hardware that drives the Internet. The Tukwila data center happens to be one of the global homes of Microsoft’s Xbox Live: within those humming machines exists my imagined city of ether. Like most data centers, Tukwila comprises a sprawling array of servers, load balancers, routers, fire walls, tape-backup libraries and database machines, all resting on a raised floor of removable white tiles, beneath which run neatly arrayed bundles of power cabling. To help keep servers cool, Tukwila, like most data centers, has a system of what are known as hot and cold aisles: cold air that seeps from perforated tiles in front is sucked through the servers by fans, expelled into the space between the backs of the racks and then ventilated from above. The collective din suggests what it must be like to stick your head in a Dyson Airblade hand dryer.

Tukwila is less a building than a machine for computing. “You look at a typical building,” Manos explained, “and the mechanical and electrical infrastructure is probably below 10 percent of the upfront costs. Whereas here it’s 82 percent of the costs.” Little thought is given to exterior appearances; even the word “architecture” in the context of a data center can be confusing: it could refer to the building, the network or the software running on the servers. Chris Crosby, a senior vice president with Digital Realty Trust, the country’s largest provider of data-center space, compares his company’s product to a car, an assembly-line creation complete with model numbers: “The model number tells you how much power is available inside the facility.” He also talks about the “industrialization of the data center,” in contrast to the so-called whiteboard model of server design, by which each new building might be drawn up from scratch. The data center, he says, is “our railroad; it doesn’t matter what kind of train you put on it.”

At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”

Tukwila is one of Microsoft’s smaller data centers (they number “more than 10 and fewer than 100,” Manos told me with deliberate vagueness). In 2006, the company, lured by cheap hydropower, tax incentives and a good fiber-optic network, built a 500,000-plus-square-foot data center in Quincy, Wash., a small town three hours from Tukwila known for its bean and spearmint fields. This summer, Microsoft will open a 700,000-plus-square-foot data center — one of the world’s largest — in Chicago. “We are about three to four times larger than when I joined the company” — in 2004 — “just in terms of data-center footprint,” Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, told me when I met with her at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash.

Yet when it comes to a large company like Microsoft, it can be difficult to find out what any given data center is used for. The company, for reasons ranging from security to competitive advantage, won’t provide too much in the way of details, apart from noting that Quincy could hold 6.75 trillion photos. “We support over 200 online properties with very large scale,” Chrapaty offered. “And so when you think about Hotmail supporting 375 million users, or search supporting three billion queries a month, or Messenger supporting hundreds of millions of users, you can easily assume that those properties are very large properties for our company.”

Thanks to the efforts of amateur Internet Kremlinologists, there are occasional glimpses behind the silicon curtain. One blogger managed to copy a frame from a 2008 video of a Microsoft executive’s PowerPoint presentation showing that the company had nearly 150,000 servers (a number that presumably would now be much higher, given an estimated monthly server growth of 10,000) and that nearly 80,000 of those were used by its search application, now called Bing. When I discussed the figures with her, Chrapaty would only aver, crisply, that “in an average data center, it’s not uncommon for search to take up a big portion of a facility.”

THE RISE OF THE MEGA-DATA CENTER

Data centers were not always unmarked, unassuming and highly restricted places. In the 1960s, in fact, huge I.B.M. mainframe computers commanded pride of place in corporate headquarters. “It was called the glasshouse,” says Kenneth Brill, founder of the Uptime Institute, a data-center research and consulting group. “It was located near the executive suite. Here you’d spent $15 to 30 million on this thing — the executives wanted to show it off.”

Over the past few decades, Brill notes, there has been an oscillation between using centralized I.T. resources and using more dispersed computing power — a battle between mainframes and desktop computers. The latest iteration is what’s called the thin client: the use of centralized servers rather than the software and operating systems of desktops to perform the bulk of computing needs. But thinness in the office has come with increased thickness elsewhere: more servers in ever-larger data centers.

In his book “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr draws an analogy between the rise of mega-data centers and the Industrial Revolution. Just as nascent industries, once powered by water wheels, were by the 20th century able to “run their machines with electric current generated in distant power plants,” advances in technology and transmission speeds are permitting computing to function like a utility, a distant but ever-accessible cloud of services.

This has sweeping implications for business and society. Instead of buying software and hiring I.T. employees, companies can outsource things like customer relationship management, or C.R.M., the database software that companies use to track client interactions, to an Internet company like salesforce.com, which sells subscriptions, or seats, to its services. “Customers who have two seats on salesforce.com, like a mom-and-pop flower shop, have access to the same application as a customer that has 65,000 seats, like Starbucks or Dell,” Adam Gross, vice president of platform marketing with salesforce.com, told me at the company’s offices in San Francisco. By contrast, just a few years ago, he went on, “if you were to attack a really large problem, like delivering a C.R.M. application to 50,000 companies, or serving every single song ever, it really sort of felt outside your domain unless you were one of the largest companies in the world. There are these architectures now available for anybody to really attack these massive-scale kinds of problems.”

And while most companies still maintain their own data centers, the promise is that instead of making costly investments in redundant I.T. hardware, more and more companies will tap into the utility-computing grid, piggybacking on the infrastructures of others. Already, Amazon Web Services makes available, for a fee, the company’s enormous computing power to outside customers. The division already uses more bandwidth than Amazon’s extensive retailing operations, while its Simple Storage Service holds some 52 billion virtual objects. “We used to think that owning factories was an important piece of a business’s value,” says Bryan Doerr, the chief technology officer of Savvis, which provides I.T. infrastructure and what the company calls “virtualized utility services” for companies like Hallmark. “Then we realized that owning what the factory produces is more important.”

THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE BY TIME

For companies like Google, Yahoo and, increasingly, Microsoft, the data center is the factory. What these companies produce are services. It was the increasing “viability of a service-based model,” as Ray Ozzie, now the chief software architect at Microsoft, put it in 2005 — portended primarily by Google and its own large-scale network of data centers — that set Microsoft on its huge data-center rollout: if people no longer needed desktop software, they would no longer need Microsoft. This realization brought new prominence to the humble infrastructure layer of the data center, an aspect of the business that at Microsoft, as at most tech companies, typically escaped notice — unless it wasn’t working. Data centers have now become, as Debra Chrapaty of Microsoft puts it, a “true differentiator.”

Indeed, the number of servers in the United States nearly quintupled from 1997 to 2007. (Kenneth Brill of the Uptime Institute notes that the mega-data centers of Google and its ilk account for only an estimated 5 percent of the total market.) The expansion of Internet-driven business models, along with the data retention and compliance requirements of a variety of tighter accounting standards and other financial regulations, has fueled a tremendous appetite for data-center space. For a striking example of how our everyday clicks and uploads help drive and shape this real world real estate, consider Facebook.

Facebook’s numbers are staggering. More than 200 million users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos, making Facebook the world’s largest photo-sharing service. This expansion has required a corresponding infrastructure push, with an energetic search for financing. “We literally spend all our time figuring how to keep up with the growth,” Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations, told me in a company conference room in Palo Alto, Calif. “We basically buy space and power.” Facebook, he says, is too large to rent space in a managed “co-location facility,” yet not large enough to build its own data centers. “Five years ago, Facebook was a couple of servers under Mark’s desk in his dorm room,” Heiliger explained, referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. “Then it moved to two sorts of hosting facilities; then it graduated to this next category, taking a data center from an R.E.I.T.” — real estate investment trust — “in the Bay Area and then basically continued to expand that. We now have a fleet of data centers.”

A big challenge for Facebook, or any Internet site with millions of users, is “scalability” — ensuring that the infrastructure will keep working as new applications or users are added (often in incredibly spiky fashion, as when Oprah Winfrey joined and immediately garnered some 170,000 friends). Another issue is determining where Facebook’s data centers are located, where its users are located and the distance between them — what is called latency. Though the average user might not appreciate it, a visit to Facebook may involve dozens of round trips between a browser and any number of the site’s servers. In 2007, Facebook opened a third data center in Virginia to expand its capacity and serve its increasing number of users in Europe and elsewhere. “If you’re in the middle of the country, the differences are pretty minor whether you go to California or Virginia,” Heiliger said. But extend your communications to, say, India, and delay begins to compound. Bits, limited by the laws of physics, can travel no faster than the speed of light. To hurry things up, Facebook can try to reduce the number of round trips, or to “push the data as close to a user as possible” (by creating new data centers), or to rely on content-data networks that store commonly retrieved data in Internet points of presence (POPs) around the world.

While an anxious Facebook user serially refreshing to see if a friend has replied to an invitation might seem the very picture of the digital age’s hunger for instantaneity, to witness a true imperative for speed, you must visit NJ2, a data center located in Weehawken, N.J., just through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan. There, in an unmarked beige complex with smoked windows, hum the trading engines of several large financial exchanges including, until recently, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (it was absorbed last year by Nasdaq).

NJ2, owned by Digital Realty Trust, is managed by Savvis, which provides “proximity hosting” — enabling financial companies to be close to the market. At first I took this to mean proximity to Wall Street, but I soon learned that it meant proximity of the financial firms’ machines to the machines of the trading exchanges in NJ2. This is desirable because of the rise of electronic exchanges, in which machine-powered models are, essentially, competing against other machine-powered models. And the temporal window for such trading, which is projected this year by Celent to account for some 46 percent of all U.S. trading volume, is growing increasingly small.

“It used to be that things were done in seconds, then milliseconds,” Varghese Thomas, Savvis’s vice president of financial markets, told me. Intervening steps — going through a consolidated ticker vendor like Thomson Reuters — added 150 to 500 milliseconds to the time it takes for information to be exchanged. “These firms said, ‘I can eliminate that latency much further by connecting to the exchanges directly,’ ” Thomas explained. Firms initially linked from their own centers, but that added precious fractions of milliseconds. So they moved into the data center itself. “If you’re in the facility, you’re eliminating that wire.” The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles — and three milliseconds — from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)

At NJ2, a room hosting one of the exchanges (I agreed not to say which, for security reasons), housed, in typical data-center fashion, rows of loudly humming black boxes, whose activity was literally inscrutable. This seemed strangely appropriate; after all, as Thomas pointed out, the data center hosts a number of “dark pools,” or trading regimens that allow the anonymous buying and selling of small amounts of securities at a time, so as not, as Thomas puts it, “to create ripples in the market.”

It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” — as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”

THE COST OF THE CLOUD

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.

Much of this is due simply to growth in the number of servers and the Internet itself. A Google search is not without environmental consequence — 0.2 grams of CO2 per search, the company claims — but based on E.P.A. assumptions, an average car trip to the library consumes some 4,500 times the energy of a Google search while a page of newsprint uses some 350 times more energy. Data centers, however, are loaded with inefficiencies, including loss of power as it is distributed through the system. It has historically taken nearly as much wattage to cool the servers as it does to run them. Many servers are simply “comatose.” “Ten to 30 percent of servers are just sitting there doing nothing,” Koomey says. “Somebody in some department had a server doing this unique thing for a while and then stopped using it.” Because of the complexity of the network architecture — in which the role of any one server might not be clear or may have simply been forgotten — turning off a server can create more problems (e.g., service outages) than simply leaving it on.

As servers become more powerful, more kilowatts are needed to run and cool them; square footage in data centers is eaten up not by servers but by power. As data centers grow to unprecedented scales — Google recently reported that one of its data centers holds more than 45,000 servers (only a handful of companies have that many total servers) — attention has shifted to making servers less energy intensive. One approach is to improve the flow of air in the data center, through computational fluid-dynamics modeling. “Each of these servers could take input air at about 80 degrees,” John Sontag, director of the technology transfer office at Hewlett-Packard, told me as we walked through the company’s research lab in Palo Alto. “The reason why you run it at 57 is you’re not actually sure you can deliver cold air” everywhere it is needed. Chandrakant Patel, director of the Sustainable I.T. Ecosystem Lab at H.P., argues there has been “gross overprovisioning” of cooling in data centers. “Why should all the air-conditioners run full time in the data center?” he asks. “They should be turned down based on the need.”

Power looms larger than space in the data center’s future — the data-center group Afcom predicts that in the next five years, more than 90 percent of companies’ data centers will be interrupted at least once because of power constrictions. As James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services observed recently at a Google-hosted data-center-efficiency summit, there is no Moore’s Law for power — while servers become progressively more powerful (and cheaper to deploy) and software boosts server productivity, the cost of energy (as well as water, needed for cooling) stays constant or rises. Uptime’s Brill notes that while it once took 30 to 50 years for electricity costs to match the cost of the server itself, the electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas.

The huge power draws have spurred innovation in the form factor of the data center itself. For its Chicago center, Microsoft is outfitting half the building with shipping containers packed with servers. “Imagine a data center that’s about 30 megawatts, with standard industry average density numbers you can probably fit 25,000 to 30,000 servers in a facility like that,” says Microsoft’s Chrapaty. “You can do 10 times that in a container-based facility, because the containers offer power density numbers that are very hard to realize in a standard rack-mount environment.”

The containers — which are pre-equipped with racks of servers and thus are essentially what is known in the trade as plug-and-play — are shipped by truck direct from the original equipment manufacturer and attached to a central spine. “You can literally walk into that building on the first floor and you’d be hard pressed to tell that building apart from a truck-logistics depot,” says Manos, who has since left Microsoft to join Digital Realty Trust. “Once the containers get on site, we plug in power, water, network connectivity, and the boxes inside wake up, figure out which property group they belong to and start imaging themselves. There’s very little need for people.”

“Our perspective long term is: It’s not a building, it’s a piece of equipment,” says Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s director of data-center research, “and the enclosure is not there to protect human occupancy; it’s there to protect the equipment.”

From here, it is easy to imagine gradually doing away with the building itself, and its cooling requirements, which is, in part, what Microsoft is doing next, with its Gen 4 data center in Dublin. One section of the facility consists of a series of containers, essentially parked and stacked amid other modular equipment — with no roof or walls. It will use outside air for cooling. On our drive to Tukwila, Manos gestured to an electrical substation, a collection of transformers grouped behind a chain-link fence. “We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/ma...4search-t.html





Microsoft Sets Record with Monster Windows, IE, Office Update

Patches 31 vulnerabilities, including bug used in Pwn2Own hacking contest to break IE8
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft today issued 10 security updates that patched a record 31 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Excel, Word, Windows Search and other programs, including 18 bugs marked "critical."

Of the 10 bulletins, six patched some part of Windows, while three patched an Office application or component, and one fixed a flaw in IE. Eighteen of the 31 bugs were ranked critical, Microsoft's most serious ranking in its four-step score, while 11 were tagged as "important," the next-lowest label, and two were judged "moderate."

The total bug count was the most patched by Microsoft in a single month since the company began regularly-scheduled updates in 2003. The previous record of 26 vulnerabilities patched occurred in both August 2008 and August 2006.

"This is a very broad bunch," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at security company Qualys, "compared to last month, which was really all about PowerPoint. You've got to work everywhere, servers and workstations, and even Macs if you have them. It's not getting any better, the number of vulnerabilities [Microsoft discloses] continues to grow."

Security experts were all over the map when it came to naming which fixes to deploy first.

"IE's, by far, takes the cake," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. "It's a client-side bug, there are eight CVEs and there's no doubt that it will be exploited."

As Storms said, MS09-019 patches eight separate vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. One of the patches finally plugs the hole that a researcher used in March 2009 to hack IE and walk off with a $5,000 prize at the "Pwn2Own" challenge.

"If you're running IE8 on Windows XP, or are concerned about intranet-based attacks, I would highly recommend putting this update on your high priority 'to do' list," said Terri Forslof, the manager of security response at 3Com's TippingPoint, the Pwn2Own sponsor, in an e-mail today.

Although users running IE8 on Vista or even Windows 7 are somewhat protected by that operating system from the exploit used to cash in at Pwn2Own, Windows XP users have been at risk for months, Forslof added.

The IE update also caught the eye of Kandek's colleague, Amol Sarwate, the manager of Qualys' vulnerability research lab. "What's interesting is that IE8 only has a single vulnerability," said Sarwate, talking about the Pwn2Own bug. "But IE7 has seven. That's one good reason to go to IE8."

Eric Schultze, chief technical officer at Shavlik Technologies, added two other updates to Storms' IE patch as his fix-first recommendation. "I'd equally patch the IIS, IE and Active Directory vulnerabilities," he said.

The Internet Information Server (IIS) flaw affects some systems that have enabled WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), a set of extensions to HTTP used to share documents over the Web. Schultze put the spotlight on MS09-020 because Microsoft had publicly acknowledged the bug last month in a security advisory.

MS09-018 got his attention because Microsoft pegged the Active Directory flaw as critical, and it could be exploited remotely by simply sending a server a malicious data packet. "Someone could use this to take over Active Directory, and if they do, they'd own all [an organization's] passwords," Schultze said.

Three of the security updates, MS09-021, MS09-024 and MS09-027, addressed one or more issues each in Microsoft's popular Office suite.

None of the researchers contacted today put the Office patches near the top of their to-do list. Storms explained why: "Office in general is usually not without bulletins," he said. "This month it's Excel, Works Converter and Word. It's going to continue happening," he said, referring to the file format parsing bugs that continue to plague Office. "It's easy to write fuzzers for file format parsing problems, and while Microsoft's fuzzers may be more sophisticated, there are more hackers out there than Microsoft has employees."

Kandek and Sarwate nominated MS09-022, a three-patch update for the Windows print spooler. "It affects all Windows operating systems, anyone can activate this, and most people have remote printing enabled on their PC," said Kandek. "An additional aspect is that this is often out of the control of the IT administrator, since it's easy for users to turn on remote printing."

Microsoft wasn't able to wrap up work on a patch for a known vulnerability in DirectX, specifically in the QuickTime format parser within DirectShow. The no-show was no surprise, since the company had announced it wouldn't issue a fix today in its monthly advance notification last week.

"I'd expect to see that next month, though," said Storms.

The company, however, did release security updates for the Mac editions of PowerPoint; last month, Microsoft took the unusual step of issuing fixes for the Windows versions, but not for the Mac. At the time, it explained the decision as wanting to protect most users immediately rather than wait to protect everyone later. One researcher, however, blasted Microsoft for breaking its own rules for "responsible disclosure."

Other bulletins that Microsoft released today patched problems in Windows Search (MS09-023), Windows' kernel (MS09-025) and Windows' remote procedure call (RPC) function (MS09-026).

"Ten is a large number, but at least two in the past year were larger," said Schultze, talking about the number of security updates released today. And three are on the server side, where a hacker can remotely attack without any user interaction. Those are the ones that are frequently leveraged in worms."

June's updates can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9134156





Opera Says Microsoft EU Browser Offer "Not Enough"
Tarmo Virki

Norwegian browser maker Opera ASA said on Friday Microsoft's plan to ship Windows operating system in Europe without its Internet Explorer web browser was not enough to restore competition.

On Thursday the world's top software maker Microsoft, countering pressure from European regulators, said it plans to ship the newest version of Windows in Europe without its Internet Explorer web browser.

"I don't think what Microsoft announced is going to restore competition," Opera's Chief Technology Officer Hakon Wium Lie told Reuters.

"I don't think its going to be enough, I don't think it will get them off the hook," he said.

Microsoft's abrupt reversal comes shortly before the European Commission is due to rule on antitrust charges brought against Microsoft in January, claiming that Microsoft abuses its dominant position by bundling its Internet Explorer browser, shielding it from head-to-head competition with rival products.

Until now, Microsoft has claimed that the browser was an integral part of the operating system and should not be pulled out, but it now plans to do that for a European version of Windows 7, due to be rolled out later this year.

Opera said that if Microsoft's plan would be the final outcome it would have no impact on Internet Explorer's dominant role.

"Then we would be very disappointed. That means Microsoft's dominant position will continue," Wium Lie said, adding operating systems should be sold with several browsers -- giving consumers the choice -- not with no browsers at all.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; editing by Mike Nesbit)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55B1F220090612





8 Browser Innovations Started by Opera
Matt

Even though Opera is the most popular mobile browser in the world, in the desktop market Opera is the most under-rated browser despite having created many innovative features. Which were later copied by other browsers.

Its hard to understand why Opera has only ~2.2% browser market share while IE6 still boasts a whopping ~14.5% market share. Maybe the Opera developers were so busy developing solid browser features that they forgot that they need to do some promotions in order for people to use it. In contrast IE developers were so busy shoving their crap browser down people’s throat they forgot to make a half decent browser. Whatever is the case, the internet is a better place today thanks to some of the innovations that started from the Opera camp.

1) Speed Dial: First introduced by opera in 2007, copied by Chrome since the beginning, added to Safari 4 since beta and can be added to Firefox in the form of an extension.

2) Tabbed Browsing: There are some disagreements about who introduced tabbed browsing. The first version of Opera in 1994 (named MultiTorg Opera) introduced MDI tab where each tabs could be resized, tiled, cascaded and moved. But Netcaptor in 1997 was the first browser that offered the current form of simple fixed tabs that we are used in browsers (but at the bottom). Tabs on top of the browser (unlike Netcaptor) was also introduced by Opera in 2000.

[ Tabs in general applications was first introduced by IBM and adobe holds some sort of patent for tab functions, but thats a different story ]

3) Sessions: The ability to save browser session was introduced with Opera 2 in 1996. If you close your opera browser or it crashed you can go back to your last auto saved session including history of that session. This feature has been since copied in one form or another by other browser but none of them are as extensive as Opera session, where you can save a whole session of browser history in to text file and transfer in to a different computer and resume from there.

4) Pop-up Blocking: Imagine a web experience without pop-up blocker. What we take for granted today was first introduced by Opera 5 in 2000. Firefox picked it up soon and IE joined in the party in 2004.

5) Full page Zoom: A better alternative to larger text, zooming increases the size of the page without distorting the layout by only increasing the text size. Introduced by opera in 1996, and now all major browsers have this feature.

6) BitTorrent: Opera was the first to have torrent support built-in to the browser since 2006. It uses its download manager to download a torrent file like a regular download.

7) Delete Private Data: The ability to remove personal information from your browser was first introduced by Opera in 2000. We had to manually delete personal info BO (before Opera).

8) Mouse gestures: Using mouse gestures to perform repetitive tasks like scrolling tabs, closing tabs, back and forward button using gestures was meant as an alternative to keyboard shortcuts for maximum productivity. This feature was introduced by opera in 2001 and now Firefox supports this functions with the help of an extension.

Conclusion: This is not a complete list and Opera was not the only browser that had unique ideas and innovations that changed the way people use browser. But no other browsers had so many innovative ideas that has been copied with great success by almost every other browsers. Yet, Opera’s market share is still around 2% while other browsers are benefitting from its ideas.

The Opera team will have to take some blame for not doing enough to promote their browser in desktop market (they are big in mobile browser market), also for the longest time Opera has this stigma attached to it because it used to be a commercial trialware browser and later ad-sponsored. But since 2000 they moved away from trialware and from 2005 they removed ad-sponsorship. Will they ever be a major player in the browser market share, now that the competition is greater than ever? Difficult to predict, but hopefully we will continue to benefit from great ideas delivered by the Opera team.
http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/06/...rted-by-opera/





BT Wants BBC to Pay-Up for iPlayer

BT is tired of the BBC and other video sites getting a "free ride" on its networks.

Last week a row erupted between BT and the BBC, after it emerged that BT was choking iPlayer streams on some of its broadband packages, which the broadcaster said was hurting viewers' ability to watch television online.

John Petter, managing director of BT Retail's consumer business, has now accused the BBC of getting a "free ride".

"We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect," he told the Financial Times, adding it wasn't only the BBC that was the burden, but any sites offering streaming video.

A spokesperson for BT could not confirm the financial cost of the iPlayer and other video to the ISP, but said it was clearly significant.

"Obviously we're a big business," he told our sister-site IT PRO. "We're raising this issue publicly, so you can take it as read we're not talking small amounts of money."

The BBC and BT are currently in talks, he noted, but BT is looking to raise the pressure on the BBC and other video hosting sites in those negotiations. "We'd like to have real-world discussions with content holders with where we could go from here," he said.

He noted that BT and the BBC are partners in Project Canvas, an IPTV plan. "It's a good example of how ISPs and content owners can sit down and agree on a cost," he said.

But the BBC - and other content providers - are unsurprisingly against the idea of picking up the tab, and noted the iPlayer makes up only a small portion of online traffic.

The BBC's technology editor Rory Cellan Jones said that he "could not remember BT ever making such an forthright call for cash," and suggested it was an issue of net neutrality.

"So far the whole issue of net neutrality - the idea that the internet should not discriminate between different types of traffic - has not made much of an impact in Britain," he wrote in his blog.

"Now Britain's biggest internet service provider is making it clear that, in a cut-throat broadband market, something is going to have to give - and net neutrality may have to be chucked overboard."

He noted that "both sides are manoeuvring in advance of the Carter report" - the so-called Digital Britain report due next week.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/255805/b...r-iplayer.html





Bad Text Messaging, E-Mailing Manners Can be Costly
Ellen Wulfhorst

A political coup in New York's statehouse can be traced back to an incident in which a top lawmaker so enraged a wealthy backer by peering at e-mails on his BlackBerry that his patron engineered his ouster.

One of the newer forms of poor office etiquette -- paying more attention to a hand-held device than to a conversation or business meeting -- happens so frequently that businesses are complaining it upsets workplaces, wastes time and costs money.

"It happens all the time, and it's definitely getting worse," said Jane Wesman, a public relations executive and author of "Dive Right In -- The Sharks Won't Bite."

"It's become an addiction," she said.

A third of more than 5,000 respondents said they often check their e-mails during meetings, according to a March poll by Yahoo! HotJobs, an online jobs board.

Such habits have their price, said Tom Musbach, senior managing editor of Yahoo! HotJobs.

"Things like BlackBerries fragment our attention span, and that can lead to lost productivity and wasted dollars because people aren't focused on their work, absolutely," he said.

Reprimanded For Bad Manners

In other Yahoo! HotJobs research, nearly a fifth of respondents said they had been reprimanded for showing bad manners with a wireless device. Yet even those who rail against such behavior admit to their own weakness.

"I catch myself driving in the car with my husband. He's talking to me and I'm downloading my e-mails," said Wesman. "You can't help yourself. There's this need to know what's going on."

But the constant pursuit of an e-mail fix may be costly. Research shows such multi-tasking can take more time and result in more errors than does focusing on a single task at a time.

"We know that if you have a person attending to different things at the same time, they're not going to retain as much information as they would if they attended to that one thing," said Nathan Bowling, an expert in workplace psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

"If you're attending to multiple things at the same time, you often times don't learn anything," he said.

Then there's the risk of making someone really mad.

In the New York state political coup, billionaire businessman Tom Golisano said he grew angry after meeting this spring with state Democratic majority leader Malcolm Smith, who paid more attention to his BlackBerry than to issues at hand.

"I thought that was very rude," Golisano told statehouse reporters. Golisano is known for hefty campaign contributions and for funding his own unsuccessful bids for governor.

Irked by Smith's behavior, Golisano reportedly approached other legislators, who this week voted out the Democratic leadership and voted in the Republicans.

"One should not play with one's BlackBerry (or anything else) when billionaires who have helped elect you have traveled to your office to talk to you," Henry Stern, former head of New York City's parks department, wrote on a Yonkers Tribune blog.

Counter-Productive Work Behavior

People who text message when they should be doing something else are engaging in what Bowling called counter-productive work behavior, which also includes harassment, showing up late or playing endlessly on the Internet.

"Technology allows us to do counter-productive things that we weren't able to do 10, 20 or even five years ago," he said.

Business etiquette coach Barbara Pachter said there is a "learning curve" to new technology such as BlackBerries.

"We're still at that point where we're being rude," she said, adding that people's behavior is likely to improve in the next year or two. "We're just not there yet."
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...55A6XZ20090612





NowTorrents Domain Hijacked by Hacker
Ernesto

With more than million searches each day NowTorrents is one of the larger torrent search engines on the Internet. The site has grown steadily during recent months, and everything was looking great until a few hours ago, when the owner lost its domain. The domain was hijacked and parked on an account at the popular registrar GoDaddy.

With a few million visitors a month most of the larger torrent sites make lucrative targets for scammers and hackers wanting to cash in on these traffic magnets.

In November 2008, someone used a forged CA driver’s license to take over Torrentz.com, and put some of his own ads on the site. Luckily, the hijack took less than a day to bring to an end and things were back to normal before most users even noticed that something was wrong. But Torrentz is not the only torrent site to interest hackers.

NowTorrents, a torrent meta-search engine that recently acquired a spot among the 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet, is facing a similar problem. This morning, the admin of the site noticed that he was no longer in control of the domain name as it was transferred to a new registrar, GoDaddy.

Coincidentally, the admin also had two of his email accounts hacked, which could very well be the cause of the domain troubles. He told TorrentFreak that he is doing all he can to resolve the issues. Google has reinstated one of his email accounts after some emails back and forth.

GoDaddy, where the domain was transferred after it was hijacked, is currently looking into the case. It can usually take up to a week before the domain gets transferred back to the rightful owner, the admin said. However, by putting in some calls to a supervisor at GoDaddy he hoped to speed up this process a little.

How the ‘hacker’ gained access to the domains remains a mystery for now. The email password was secure and not really guessable, and all signs currently point to a keylogger. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has happened to an admin of a torrent site.

Nevertheless, the admin of NowTorrents is confident that he will soon regain access to his site. Meanwhile its users will have to be patient and look for alternatives until the site comes back.

Update: the site is coming back slowly, waiting for the DNS to propagate.
http://torrentfreak.com/nowtorrents-...hacker-090609/




Napster: Ten Years of Change
Darren Waters

In June 1999 a US teenager wrote a computer program that turned the music industry on its head, and created shockwaves that are still being felt by the global entertainment business a decade later.

His name is Shawn Fanning and the program was Napster.

As a 19-year-old undergraduate in Boston, Fanning's program let friends connect and share music on their computers. Initially, it seemed innocuous but Napster unleashed a social, technical and commercial revolution.

By letting friends swap MP3 tracks, perfect digital copies of music, Napster made the casual copying and exchanging of music among friends into a global, automated and simple process that threatened the music industry, whose business model was in no way geared, or even prepared, for the digital online age.

"It feels like such a long time ago," Fanning says. "It seemed like the world was much simpler back then; the net was a lot simpler; a large majority of people I was close to were not interested in the internet."

Music explosion

Napster allowed connected users to share the MP3 contents of their hard drives, using peer-to-peer technology to move the files from one machine to another.

The program was the first mainstream peer-to-peer technology and a giant wake up call for the music industry, particularly record labels, who had not come to terms with the impact the net would have on their business models.

In a few months, Napster exploded beyond the university campus and was being used by 85 million people around the world, with a billion searches for music every day.

For the music industry, Napster represented the gravest possible threat to music and to the business model that had served it so well for almost 50 years.

Within months of the service launching, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster.

At the time, the RIAA said: "Napster knowingly and wilfully set out to build a business based on copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale."

Napster became public enemy number one for the industry and for Fanning, who had gone from being a lone developer coding in his spare time at university to trying to start a business using the technology, the experience was at times "overwhelming".

Fanning says the original intention was never to make money from his creation.

"In terms of the inspiration behind why I started building it - I had a number of friends really into digital music and they would find sites to download music but these sites would go up and down all the time.

"I realised there was a better way to connect people and their music together and a way to build it so it was accessible to those who were not tech savvy."

Legal lessons

Fanning says he was never aware during the development process that Napster would shake the foundations of the global music industry.

"It was a problem I was trying solve."

And he says he never anticipated the legal action that would see himself, and the company he had started, in the dock facing multi-billion dollar fines.

He says: "My point of view was we were just linking people to content and trying to find a similar service to any web-based search engine.

"I was very surprised that when the lawsuit came down that they weren't willing to work with us in the same capacity as other search services."

Fanning says Napster was very keen "to be legal" but the offer fell on deaf ears.

"Early on I knew it was going to be a long fight; the industry wasn't going to cave in or work with us. They were really adamant they wanted their legal precedent."

After two years of legal fighting Napster was finally shut down.

"I always looked at Napster as a technical success and product success. The business side and legal side were failures, but the other two were widely successful," he says.

"My primary interest was in building a better product and one that would work and be reliable. I always felt a deep sense of satisfaction with what I had achieved."

Ten years on and in many respects the Napster effect is still being felt. While the music industry can point to a plethora of legal services and emerging business models, there is a widespread feeling that the relationship between consumers and music is broken in the manner many in the industry understand it.

Game change

Illegal file-sharing remains rampant, despite a host of other legal actions against websites and computer programs, as well as lawsuits against thousands of individuals charged with facilitating file-sharing.

CD sales are falling, while legal services have yet to make up for the lost revenue.

"I was very much a fan of the rewards to consumers in a digital age, where you could share music and explore new music. That's what I felt the industry needed to get their head around and evolve their businesses models," says Fanning.

The perhaps unanswerable question is what would have happened to the music industry if Napster had not emerged: would we now have Rhapsody, Spotify, iTunes or Last FM?

As soon as the legal action against Napster finished, Fanning dived into his second venture - Snocap. "It was an effort to create a registry where anyone who owned a piece of content can claim ownership of it and the goal was to be able to allow free sharing of all the unregistered works, all the interesting live recordings and independent artists that want their stuff to flow freely."

Snocap failed, says Fanning, because the timing was wrong and he was unable to build consensus in the industry.

"I eventually burnt out on music and discovered the gaming industry. I found immediately that where music firms are traditionally fearful of new technology and things that could disrupt their model, games are built around new technology and success is driven by innovation."

Fanning is now general manager of a company called Rupture and the eponymous product is designed to connect gamers across different platforms and titles to create a more cohesive social experience.

Instead of having one "handle" on Xbox Live and one set of friends, perhaps a different one on PlayStation Network and World of Warcraft, Rupture pulls these threads together by being platform and title agnostic.

Rupture has now been bought by Electronic Arts, and has been soft launched.

"Building Napster, I was the only developer, there was no product team, and I did most of the design work in notepad. Working in a larger team and trying to deliver more complex solutions, it's a constant learning experience

"When I look back I really don't regret anything. Being a software developer, it really is about a journey, because the process of building a product is really satisfying. Often the achievement is not that important."

For two years at the height of Napster's fame, or notoriety, Fanning became a household name, and an icon for those in the digital age.

"I never sought, or craved the attention that came with Napster; it was the side-effect. I feel as long as I continue to work at solving problems, I'll be satisfied."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8089221.stm

















Until next week,

- js.



















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