Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 15th, '06

[JackSpratts]

Dude – where’s my fiber?

$200 Billion Broadband Scandal

This book documents the largest fraud case in American history

The case is simple: Do you have a 45 Mbps, bi-directional service to your home, paying around $40? Do you have 500+ channels and can choose any competitive service? You paid an estimated $2000 for this product even though you did not receive it and it may never be available. Do you want your money back and the companies held accountable?

Background: Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

The Commitment:

• By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
• Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
• Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
• Each State: By 2006, 75% of the state of New Jersey was to be wired, Pennsylvania was to have 50% of households by 2004, California to have 5 million households by 2000, Texas claimed all schools, libraries, hospitals.…Virtually every state had commitments.
• Massive Financial Incentives: In exchange for building these networks, the Bell companies ALL received changes in state laws that gave these them excessive profits, tax savings, and other perks to be used in building these networks.
• This was not DSL, which travels over the old copper wiring and did not require new regulations.
• This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC’s Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
• This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

The Harms and Outcome

• Costs to Customers — We estimate that $206 billion dollars in excess profits and tax deductions were collected — over $2000 per household. (This is the low estimate.)
• Cost to the Country — About $5 trillion dollars to the economy. America lost a decade of technological innovation and economic growth, about $500 billion annually.
• Cost to the Country — America is now 16th in the world in broadband. While Korea and Japan have 40-100 Mbps at cheap prices, America is still at kilobyte speeds.
• The New Digital Divide — The phone companies current plans are to pick and choose where and when they want to deploy fiber services, if at all.
• Competitor Close Out — SBC, BellSouth and Verizon now claim that they can control who uses the networks and at what price, impacting everything from VOIP and municipality roll outs to new services from Ebay and Google.

The Truth: This is a Fraud Case

• Fraud: There is a dark secret — the networks couldn't be built at the time the commitments were made and are still not available. If someone pays thousands of dollars for a service and doesn't get it, isn't that fraud?
• Collusion and Cover-up: TELE-TV and Americast, the Bell companies' fiber optic front groups, spent about $1 billion and were designed to make America believe these deployments were real in order to pass the Telecom Act of 1996 and enter long distance. How did every major phone company in America not know that these fiber-based services couldn't be built and were able to defraud over 40 states?
• The mergers killed fiber optic deployments in over 26 states and harmed competition. With every merger, the phone companies simply dropped all state commitments and harmed every state they merged with. Case in point: Verizon cut deployments to 13 states during the NYNEX-Bell Atlantic merger, not to mention GTE's 28 state deployments. SBC did the same in all 13 of its states, from California to Illinois. Worse, the mergers were based on the companies competing with each other and there is NO evidence they ever did any serious wireline residential competition.
• The Regulators Killed Competition and Broadband. Over the last 4 years, instead of continuing competition as ordered by the Telecom Act of 1996, the FCC has rewritten the laws close down Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that brought America to the Internet, as well as virtually all local competition. AT&T and MCI couldn't compete because they were regulated out of business and thus were sold off.
• Distortion of the Truth by the FCC. Virtually every piece of documentation presented in this work is missing from the FCC's Advanced Network Reports. The FCC defines broadband as 200 kilobytes per second in one direction — 225 times slower than what was promised in 1992.
• Cross-Subsidization — Instead of spending the money on these networks, the Bell companies used the money to enter long distance, rollout wireless and the inferior DSL services. The Bells also lost over $20 billion overseas and paid executives over a billion in stock options during the mergers.
• Bait and Switch — Customers paid for a fiber optic wire and got DSL over the old copper wiring — it's like ordering a Ferrari and getting a bicycle.

20 Year Analysis of Revenues, Profits, Expenditures: This book is based on a 20 year analysis of Bell-supplied data, Census Data and Business Week. Since 1984::

• Revenues are up 128%.
• Employees are down 65%, Construction is down 60%.
• $92.5 billion is missing in network upgrades.
• Profits based on failed fiber plans up 188% as compared to other utilities.

Teletruth has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, (FTC) to investigate the claims presented; the book is the data for our complaint.

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm





How Google Works
David F. Carr

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Others are starting to follow its lead. Here's why.

With his unruly hair dipping across his forehead, Douglas Merrill walks up to the lectern set up in a ballroom of the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, looking like a slightly rumpled university professor about to start a lecture. In fact, he is here on this April morning to talk about his work as director of internal technology for Google to a crowd of chief information officers gathered at a breakfast sponsored by local recruiting firm Phoenix Staffing.

Google, the secretive, extraordinarily successful $6.1 billion global search engine company, is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Yet it selectively discusses its innovative information management infrastructure—which is based on one of the largest distributed computing/grid systems in the world.

Merrill is about to give his audience a rare glimpse into the future according to Google, and explain the workings of the company and the computer systems behind it.

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google—everything from the press it gets for its bring-your-dog-to-work casual workplace, to its stock price, market share, dizzying array of beta product launches and its death-match competition with Microsoft—it must also solve more basic issues like billing, collection, reporting revenue, tracking projects, hiring contractors, recruiting and evaluating employees, and managing videoconferencing systems—in other words, common business problems.

But this does not mean that Google solves these problems in a conventional way, as Merrill is about to explain.

"We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," he says.

Among other things, that means that Google often doesn't deploy standard business applications on standard hardware. Instead, it may use the same text parsing technology that drives its search engine to extract application input from an e-mail, rather than a conventional user interface based on data entry forms. Instead of deploying an application to a conventional server, Merrill may deploy it to a proprietary server-clustering infrastructure that runs across its worldwide data centers.

Google runs on hundreds of thousands of servers—by one estimate, in excess of 450,000—racked up in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centers around the world. It has data centers in Dublin, Ireland; in Virginia; and in California, where it just acquired the million-square-foot headquarters it had been leasing. It recently opened a new center in Atlanta, and is currently building two football-field-sized centers in The Dalles, Ore.

By having its servers and data centers distributed geographically, Google delivers faster performance to its worldwide audience, because the speed of the connection between any two computers on the Internet is partly a factor of the speed of light, as well as delays caused by network switches and routers. And although search is still Google's big moneymaker, those servers are also running a fast-expanding family of other applications like Gmail, Blogger, and now even Web-based word processors and spreadsheets.

That's why there is so much speculation about Google the Microsoft-killer, the latest firm nominated to drive everything to the Web and make the Windows desktop irrelevant. Whether or not you believe that, it's certainly true that Google and Microsoft are banging heads. Microsoft expects to make about a $1.5 billion capital investment in server and data structure infrastructure this year. Google is likely to spend at least as much to maintain its lead, following a $838 million investment in 2005.

And at Google, large-scale systems technology is all-important. In 2005, it indexed 8 billion Web pages. Meanwhile, its market share continues to soar. According to a recent ComScore Networks qSearch survey, Google's market share for search among U.S. Internet users reached 43% in April, compared with 28% for Yahoo and 12.9% for The Microsoft Network (MSN).

And Google's market share is growing; a year ago, it was 36.5%. The same survey indicates that Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4% from the previous month. Google sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo sites (1.9 billion) and MSN-Microsoft (858 million).

This growth is driven by an abundance of scalable technology. As Google noted in its most recent annual report filing with the SEC: "Our business relies on our software and hardware infrastructure, which provides substantial computing resources at low cost. We currently use a combination of off-the-shelf and custom software running on clusters of commodity computers. Our considerable investment in developing this infrastructure has produced several key benefits. It simplifies the storage and processing of large amounts of data, eases the deployment and operation of large-scale global products and services, and automates much of the administration of large-scale clusters of computers."

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. "We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures," he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: "We're really building what we think of internally as supercomputers."

Because Google operates at such an extreme scale, it's a system worth studying, particularly if your organization is pursuing or evaluating the grid computing strategy, in which high-end computing tasks are performed by many low-cost computers working in tandem.

Despite boasting about this infrastructure, Google turned down requests for interviews with its designers, as well as for a follow-up interview with Merrill. Merrill did answer questions during his presentation in Phoenix, however, and the division of the company that sells the Google Search Appliance helped fill in a few blanks.

In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting. As a result, sources for this story included technical presentations available from the University of Washington Web site, as well as other technical conference presentations, and papers published by Google's research arm, Google Labs.
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/...1985040,00.asp





Matsushita to Sell 103-Inch Plasma TVs

Larger than a double-sized mattress, weighs 473 pounds

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., the maker of Panasonic brand electronics, said on Monday it planned to launch the world's largest plasma television by the end of the year.

Measuring 2.4 meters by 1.4 meters (94 by 55 in) and weighing 215 kg (473 lb.), the 103-inch (measured diagonally) panel is bigger than a double-sized mattress and almost as heavy as an upright piano.

The world's largest consumer electronics maker has yet to set the price, but Matsushita's 65-inch plasma TVs, its largest available now, sell for about $7,500 in Japan.

The plasma panel used in the Matsushita TV will be just one-inch larger measured diagonally than a 102-inch model developed by Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. The South Korean company has not launched the model commercially.

Matsushita is the world's largest plasma TV maker competing with smaller rivals such as South Korea's LG Electronics Inc.

As liquid crystal display TVs encroach on the market for 40-inch TVs and above -- which had previously seen as plasma TV's turf -- developing even larger-sized panels is important for plasma TV makers to remain competitive.

Matsushita also said it had started taking orders for the 103-inch panels in the United States for business use, such as studio monitors at broadcasting companies and electronic billboards, and planned to deliver them from this autumn.

Matsushita aims to sell 5,000 units of 103-inch panels a year, with TV demand accounting for little less than 20 percent, which can be calculated into annual sales of some 1,000 103-inch TVs.

The new panels will meet full high-definition specifications, meaning they can produce images at the highest standard of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels of resolution.

Osaka-based Matsushita controlled 21.6 percent of the global plasma TV market in the January-March quarter, followed by LG Electronics with 17.8 percent, according to DisplaySearch.

Shares of Matsushita closed up 1.5 percent at 2,390 yen, outstripping the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC, which gained 1.2 percent.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13798647/





New Soundtrack Service For Videographers

Company also licenses music for use in television shows, commercials
AP

Want a jazz riff to accompany your video of cat tricks? How about an interesting kazoo piece to go with your compilation of biking bloopers?

Pump Audio, a company that licenses the music of independent artists for use in television shows and commercials, will launch Monday a soundtrack-creation service aimed at the growing crop of amateur filmmakers pervading the Internet.

Users of the MyPump Soundtrack service could go online to check out its library of original music and digitally synchronize a tune to their videos — all with the permission of the copyright holders. Users could search the catalog by genre, mood or speed, then edit a song to match their video before dubbing it.

The concept could help budding auteurs head off copyright troubles as they display their work on a worldwide stage at popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Until recently, no one could make much money or get a wide audience for amateur videos, so obtaining copyright permission was less a concern if the videographer was using, say, part of a Rolling Stones song.

But now anyone with a camcorder can easily post their work online. As the delivery of videos over the Internet increases and accompanying revenue from advertising or other sources grows, so do the legal risks, analysts say.

"Content creators are scrambling to find legitimate audio that they can use in their videos to complete the story," said Allen Weiner, a digital media industry analyst for market researcher Gartner Inc. "This begins to solve the problem."

Pump Audio, a 5-year-old company based in Hudson Valley, N.Y., specializes in licensing music only from independent musicians.

Steve Ellis, the company's founder and chief executive, says television outlets such as NBC and MTV Networks, as well as major advertisers, frequently draw from its music catalog of about 65,000 pieces, ranging from classical instrumentals to indie rock bands.

Prices will vary for the consumer-oriented MyPump Soundtrack service, with basic licensing for the one-time use of a song starting at 99 cents.

Pump Audio is also looking to team up with video-sharing Web sites or video-editing providers, so the service could potentially be free for users if accessed through a company partner.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13798676/





Apple's Market Share Falls/Rises, Depending On Who You Ask
Conrad Quilty-Harper

AppleInsider writes about a new Gartner report that states overall Mac market share has decreased in the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year. However these findings conflict with an earlier news article by ZDNet based on earlier research by Gartner which suggested that worldwide Mac market share had actually increased slightly. MacRumors.com puts the numbers together:

U.S. Mac Market Share
1Q 2005: 3.8%
1Q 2006 (ZDNet): 3.5%
1Q 2006 (AI): 3.6%

Worldwide Mac Market Share
1Q 2005: 2.2%
1Q 2006 (ZDNet): 2.3%
1Q 2006 (AI): 2.0%

So depending on which report you believe, Apple could have gained or lost overall marketshare across the world. Both articles state that Apple has lost market share in the U.S. The only thing that's really clear is that Mac sales have obviously been lackluster in the first quarter when compared to the rest of the industry.

That's not entirely surprising considering that only Intel Mac that was available throughout the first quarter was the Intel iMac. The MacBook Pro didn't ship until mid-February, the Intel Mac mini wasn't released until late February and the MacBook was released just under three weeks ago. It's remarkable that the Mac market share has managed to stay as high as it is considering that half the Apple line-up hadn't made the transisition to Intel CPUs for much of the quarter. We've got to ask though, where did that 6.6% U.S. Mac marketshare that was reported last year go?
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/02/apple...ng-on-who-you/





Appeal Is Planned in 'Da Vinci Code' Case
Lawrence Van Gelder

Court officials say two historians who lost a plagiarism case against the British publishers of Dan Brown's best seller "The Da Vinci Code" plan to appeal the verdict, Reuters reported. The officials said the appeal could take place later this year, but no specific date has been set. Random House U.K., which won the copyright case earlier this year at the High Court in London, expressed disappointment at the decision by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," to appeal. "We have the utmost respect for the British legal system and acknowledge Baigent and Leigh's right to appeal the ruling," a Random House spokesman said. "We regret, however, that more time and money is being spent trying to establish a case that was so comprehensively defeated in the High Court."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/books/11davinci.html





We Aren't All Pirates

Anti-piracy proposals before Congress could limit innovation and legal uses of technology.

The Internet and digital technology have been both a blessing and a curse for the entertainment industry, opening new opportunities for selling music and video but also fueling rampant global piracy.

To attack the latter problem, industry lobbyists are pressing Congress to adopt at least five different proposals that would give them more control over their works as they flow through new digital pipelines into living rooms and portable devices. But these measures, like the technologies they would affect, have a hard time distinguishing between illicit actions and legitimate ones.

The bills would pressure device makers and service providers to limit or eliminate features from some products, such as the ability to record individual songs off satellite radio. In essence, tech companies would have to alter what they are selling to safeguard the entertainment industry's wares.

Protecting intellectual property is a legitimate goal for Congress — after all, the Constitution called on Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." The task has grown more urgent with the emergence of an Internet-fueled global information economy. But what the entertainment industry is seeking in this year's proposals isn't merely protection from piracy; it's after increased leverage to protect its business models.

That's why lawmakers must bear in mind the balance needed between copyright holders' interests and the public's, something Congress has not done well lately. In 1998, it gave copyright holders broad power to block legitimate uses of works, even those in the public domain, through the use of electronic locks that impede copying of digital products. And that same year, it prolonged the public domain's starvation diet by extending copyrights an additional 20 years, to 70 years beyond the death of the creator.
The movie and music industries have similar interests, but their agendas this year are distinct. The major studios want to alter digital TV receivers, recorders and home networks to stop shows from being redistributed indiscriminately online — a proposal that has won grudging support from some consumer-electronics and high-tech firms. They also want to redesign computers, set-top boxes and other products to ensure that the limits placed on digital videos are not removed when the data are converted from digital to analog. This approach could deter people from making a permanent copy of a pay-per-view movie, but it also could make it hard for digital movie buyers to create backup copies or transfer videos to portable players.

The music industry, meanwhile, is focusing its fire on satellite and digital radio services that make it easy for listeners to record and save individual songs. Those recorders don't fuel piracy, given that federal law already requires them to include a form of anti-piracy technology. Instead, a more immediate effect of the industry-backed proposals would be to give labels and music publishers more control over listeners' ability to record broadcasts, while helping them collect more money from XM, Sirius and other digital music businesses.

Clearly, the industry-backed proposals would do more than just defend copyrighted works from pirates. They also would impinge on devices that have legitimate uses and steer the development of technology, cutting off some innovation. As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...ent-editorials





U.S. Album Sales Off 4.2 Percent in '06; Downloads Up 77 Percent
Alex Veiga

U.S. album sales were down 4.2 percent in the first half of the year, but sales of music downloaded online soared 77 percent, according to figures released Friday.

Total sales of albums across different formats - CDs, digital albums, cassette and others - stood at 270.6 million between Jan. 2 and July 2, a decline of 4.2 percent compared to 282.6 million in the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The top-selling album so far this year is a soundtrack inspired by the Disney Channel movie "High School Musical," which has sold more than 2.6 million units.

Albums by Rascal Flatts, James Blunt, Mary J. Blige and Carrie Underwood round out the top five sellers.

The decline reflects in part a dearth of big hits compared to the same period in 2005, which saw Mariah Carey and rapper 50 Cent each release multi-platinum sellers.

The more than 23,000 new releases in 2006 accounted for 22 percent of all albums sold through July 2, compared to 39 percent in the same span last year, Nielsen said.

"Considering that you haven't had a 50 Cent to be the Pied Piper during the first half of the year or a Norah Jones the year before that, being behind 4 percent in album sales is really not that bad," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for music tracker Billboard.

The R&B genre accounted for the biggest slice of all albums sold so far this year with 53,806, but also represented the biggest percentage drop - 22.4 percent - in units sold by genre from the same period last year.

The country music genre saw 17.7 percent increase in sales over the first half of 2005, the highest percentage of all.

While the CD remains the dominant album format despite a sales decline in all but one of the last five years, music fans have been increasingly buying digital downloads of single tracks and full albums.

Nearly 281 million digital singles were purchased through July 2, compared to 158.8 million in time frame last year. More than 14 million full-album downloads were purchased in the first six months of this year, more than double the 6.5 million bought in the first half of 2005.

The growth of online music purchases is a mixed blessing for recording companies, however. Such sales often come at the expense of more profitable album sales as music fans opt to cherry pick a few songs online instead of purchasing a whole album that may not be worth the expense.

"Digital distribution is an answer to the consumer who's been throwing up that complaint," Mayfield said. "It's a changing dynamic that the industry still needs to get its arms around."

Despite rampant music piracy, overall sales of albums, singles, music videos and digital music totaled 564 million units, a 23 percent increase over the same six-month period last year.

Overall music purchases are expected to break $1 billion by the end of the year, Nielsen said.

Among the four major recording companies, Universal Music Group led the pack in the first half of 2006 with a market share of 31.66 percent. Sony BMG Music Entertainment was second with 26.25 percent market share, followed by Warner Music Group's 19.30 percent and Britain's EMI Music's 10 percent.

Warner Music's market share reflected a 2.65 percentage increase over the same period last year - the only major recording company to add market share.

Independent record labels accounted for 12.79 percent of market share.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/14990933.htm





Big Music Hope For The Future
p2p news

Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, under federal and state investigation in the US, continue to accuse their own customers of being thieves and criminals, using spurious lawsuits to try to terrify them into kick-starting the as-yet undeveloped corporate online music market.

The labels have had zero luck with their bizarre sue 'em all marketing campaigns, but a trend offering hope for the future is emerging in Britain.

And it harks back to the past.

Once upon a time 45s, those shiny, round vinyl things with big holes in the centre - 45s - were where it was at. They were called singles.

Corporate downloads barely make a blip in the graphs compared to what's happening in the real world of online music where indie sites and the p2p networks rule. However, digital downloads, “will regularly break the one-million- a-week barrier this year as music fans push sales of singles to their highest for six years,” says The Herald.

Yes, singles.

Stacked against the fact that this May, globally, the number of p2p users simultaneously logged on to the p2p networks at any given moment was 9,735,661, as p2p research firm Big Champagne told p2pnet, four million corporate downloads a month doesn't amount to a hill of beans. But it does amount to a start, albeit it a tiny one.

This “digital revolution,” as the Herald is somehow able to call it, and which it says is, “currently rejuvenating the music industry,” will result in 50 million-plus singles being downloaded this year.

But the interesting this is it's, “bolstered by the grey downloader, or the over-50s buyer, many of whom are replacing their vinyl collections,” says the story, going on:

“For the first time many more obscure singles are available since they were originally issued in the 1960s or 1970s as bands and individual artists as well as record companies broaden online back catalogues.

“A total of 16.7 million singles were downloaded or sold in shops in the second quarter of 2006, according to new figures yesterday from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

“It represents a lean back towards the single, sales of which dropped with the onset of internet file-sharing and CD-burning in the 1990s.”

David Belcher, Saga FM DJ and Herald writer, is quoted as saying:

"For the over-50s, the range is always growing. Whereas before you could only replace CDs of your old vinyl and those were essentially what the record companies had sold you already and you were only getting the big selling artists.

"Now you are getting the artists themselves. A lot of them have got the rights back to the material that the labels didn't want to reissue. Among those veteran musicians attracting the attention of the more mature internet users are the Rolling Stones ..."
http://p2pnet.net/story/9314





Cirque du Soleil: A Beatles Love-In From Las Vegas to Eternity
John Rockwell

The gala premiere of "Love," Cirque du Soleil's new Beatles show at the Mirage Hotel, has come and gone, and the extravaganza has now settled into the glitzily refurbished theater in which Siegfried and Roy and their pets disported themselves for 13 years. The Beatles have now joined Celine Dion, the ghost of Frank Sinatra, Rubens from the Hermitage and four other Cirque shows playing along the Strip as yet another competing attraction in the land of slot machines and neon flash.

"Love" tells us many things — about the evolution of the Beatles in the pantheon of cultural icons, about the clashing contentions of the preservationists and the evolutionists among Beatles fans, and perhaps above all, about the continuing transformation of the Cirque du Soleil format.

That format has been successful beyond what must have been the dizziest dreams of the Québécois street performers who founded this once-humble organization in 1984. Right now there are seven touring shows perambulating around the world, including "Corteo," which closed recently on Randalls Island in New York, plus one in Orlando, Fla., and the five here.

The first Las Vegas Cirque show, "Mystère," opened in 1993, to be followed by "O," KÀ "Zumanity," "KÀ" and now "Love." None have ever closed; they come as close to eternality as live show business has yet achieved. Even during the sweltering summer, when the average daytime temperature is well above 100 and overall attendance in Las Vegas drops sharply, the 2,000-seat "Love" theater looked full at the early show on Thursday, and on Friday the similarly scaled "KÀ" theater and the relatively modest 1,260-seat "cabaret" for "Zumanity" seemed nearly full.

"Love" has already been blessed in every conceivable way by the surviving Beatles. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and nearly every extant widow and ex-wife and child and close collaborator (Ravi Shankar!) were on hand for the gala opening on June 30. Apple, the Beatles organization, licensed the songs to the Cirque, and George Martin, the Beatles producer, and his son Giles reknitted and remixed those songs into the aural tapestry on display at the Mirage.

Unsurprisingly, the message of "Love" is that it's all you need. The music pouring forth from the 4,000 speakers — or is it 6,000? or 12,000? Statistics fall from Cirque-land like the confetti of little white apples and red-purple petals that flutter down from the ceiling — sounds great, if crystalline grandiosity counts as great.

I missed the effect of individual words emitted from speakers in my own individual, painfully narrow seat, but I'm sure they were there.

The show has been conceived by the core Cirque creative team. The wonderfully named Guy Laliberté, who founded the troupe and still runs the Cirque operation, is listed as "show concept creator" along with the wonderfully named Dominic Champagne, the director and writer. Mr. Champagne is also responsible for the egregious erotic parody, "Zumanity."

What they have created with "Love" is less a musical or a concert than a 90-minute visually live rock-video fantasy. (All Cirque shows here last 90 minutes on the nose, to fit in two performances a night.) It's visually live because the music is, of course, recorded.

Circus flash is minimized in favor of mimes and dancers and actors and ornate costumes and a dizzying onslaught of props — including, too predictably, two Volkswagen Beetles. Perhaps the paucity of circus excitement accounted for what seemed like a slightly muted response on Thursday. Or perhaps the audience was just blitzed with the scenic barrage.

The circus bits include daredevil in-line skaters zipping up, down and over half-pipelike structures; some trampolinists; and innumerable rope climbers, bungee jumpers and aerialists. They serve mostly to fill the huge vertical space and compete with the giant projections. There is a lot of dancing, or mass posing, since no one dancer has interesting moves or could stand out in the welter of activity. Two choreographers are credited, but three more apparently had a hand in the proceedings. The stage images are always ingenious and sometimes beautiful. But like a rock video, they constrain a listener's own imagination, too often in the service of Cirque clichés.

In the projections, there are Beatles silhouettes and documentary film and, at the end, big portraits of the lads. But this is ultimately a Cirque show more than a Beatles show. Nothing against mimes; I'm sure that in their private lives they love their pets and are perfectly nice, even talkative, people. But their presence in Francophone circuses has become an intrusive mannerism, down to the central mime figure in "Love," who clutches flowers to his various multihued jackets and serves as a, or the, representative of the flower-child, all-you-need-is-love moral that is meant to overcome protest and war and injustice. It's too painfully easy.

For the Beatles and their most obsessive fans, "Love" poses a dilemma. It will undoubtedly be a lucrative source of income for Apple and its owners for years to come, if not for all eternity. The music sounds terrific and will no doubt sound more human on home speakers on the soundtrack due in the fall.

There are those who will always resent any tinkering with the originals, although what is original varies from person to person. When I saw the Beatles live, the girlish squeals drowned out the music. For some, nostalgic pops and clicks on their well-worn LP's are now part of the authenticity. Those who believe that the senior Mr. Martin, with his orchestrations and sonic collages, lent a classical cachet to the primitive musical gropings of the foursome will welcome his chance to reshape this material even more elaborately.

Yet in the world of recordings, what's wrong with a little tinkering, as long as a listener knows what's going on? A Mozart score is open to endless interpretation, and Da Ponte's operatic stage directions are routinely ignored. Yet Mozart survives. The Beatles' original intentions will always be right there in their recordings, and anyone who wishes to stick solely with those is free to do so. Opening up this music to interpretation is just part of the process of their ascending into the cultural pantheon.

But what does "Love" tell us about Cirque du Soleil, which by now is a cultural phenomenon as symptomatic of our time as the Beatles were in theirs? "Mystère" is the only Las Vegas Cirque show I have not seen, but it was the first and, by all reports, the closest to Cirque roots: breathtaking circus acts, dazzling visuals, dorky New Age soundtracks with world-music flavorings.

Since then, concepts have infused the Cirque du Soleil mix as the team quite rightly strives for novelty. "O," the water show, was still a series of spectacular acts, but the set was so amazing that sheer bedazzlement overrode any lingering regrets about absent artistic profundity. By now, Cirque sets for the permanently installed show are built on an order of magnitude and technical sophistication that easily transcends the flashiest Broadway musicals, even "The Phantom of the Opera," now playing here, too, or opera, which for 400 years offered more awesome spectacle to audiences than anything else.

To sustain interest from show to show, however, you need more than just spectacle. "O" had water; "Zumanity" has sex, however silly; "KÀ" has an elaborate fairy tale of lost imperial twins in search of each other and enlightenment; and "Love" has the Beatles.

In the end, though, spectacle trumps concept; this is the era of the arena rock show and mass displays like those of the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. By now, stage directors who work in theater and opera have been lured to direct such events: Robert Lepage did a Peter Gabriel tour and La Fura dels Baus, the Barcelona rock-theatrical Surrealists, staged an Olympics opening spectacle in their home city.

"KÀ" is the best Cirque show because it was conceived and directed by Mr. Lepage. He is French Canadian, too, which must have made things easier with the Cirque team. "KÀ" has the same overblown musical formulas as most other Cirque shows. The story is pretty much an excuse for the visuals.

But the visuals are truly amazing, and like the best of the "cirque moderne" directors, Mr. Lepage uses traditional circus acts to dramatize his story: acrobatics as combat, aerialism as flight and escape. And his vision for spectacle is different enough from that of the Cirque team to enliven a format that threatened to go stale.

For an opera lover, "KÀ" hints at what Mr. Lepage may accomplish with the Metropolitan Opera's new "Ring" starting in 2010. When the Metropolitan Opera House was built 40 years go, it boasted about its stage machinery, though it must look pretty primitive next to a specially constructed Cirque theater, especially the huge rotating, floating platforms of "KÀ." At least at the Met, Mr. Lepage will have a real story and real music. One wonders what he'll do with Wagner, or what he might have done with the Beatles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/10/ar...32c&ei=5087%0A





Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd Co-Founder, Dies
AP

Syd Barrett, the troubled Pink Floyd co-founder who spent his last years in reclusive anonymity, has died, the band said Tuesday. He was 60.

A spokeswoman for the band said Barrett died several days ago, but she did not disclose the cause of death. Barrett had suffered from diabetes for years.

The surviving members of Pink Floyd -- David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright -- said they were ''very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett's death.''

''Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire,'' they said in a statement.

Barrett co-founded Pink Floyd in 1965 with Waters, Mason and Wright, and wrote many of the band's early songs. The group's jazz-infused rock and drug-laced, multimedia ''happenings'' made them darlings of the London psychedelic scene. The 1967 album ''The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'' -- largely written by Barrett, who also played guitar -- was a commercial and critical hit.

But Barrett suffered from mental instability, exacerbated by his use of LSD. His behavior grew increasingly erratic, and he left the group in 1968 -- five years before the release of Pink Floyd's most popular album, ''Dark Side of the Moon'' -- to be replaced by Gilmour.

Barrett released two solo albums -- ''The Madcap Laughs'' and ''Barrett'' -- but soon withdrew from the music business altogether. An album of previously unreleased material, ''Opel,'' was issued in 1988.

He reverted to his real name, Roger Barrett, and spent much of the rest of his life living quietly in his hometown of Cambridge, England. Moving into his mother's suburban house, he passed the time painting and tending the garden. His former bandmates made sure Barrett continued to receive royalties from his work with Pink Floyd.

He was a familiar figure to neighbors, often seen cycling or walking to the corner store, but rarely spoke to the fans and journalists who sought him out over the years.

Despite his brief career, Barrett's fragile, wistful songs influenced many musicians including David Bowie -- who covered the Barrett track ''See Emily Play.''

Bowie said in a statement posted on his Web site that Barrett had been a ''major inspiration.''

''His impact on my thinking was enormous,'' Bowie write. ''A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.''

The other members of Pink Floyd recorded the album ''Wish You Were Here'' as a tribute to their troubled bandmate.

It contained the song ''Shine On You Crazy Diamond'' -- ''Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.'' The band also dwelt on themes of mental illness on the albums ''Dark Side of the Moon'' and ''The Wall.''

The band spokeswoman said a small, private funeral would be held.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...rtner=homepage





Meth Users, Attuned to Detail, Add Another Habit: ID Theft
John Leland

Joe Morales, a prosecutor in Denver, can remember when crack came to his city in the 1980’s. Gangs set up on Colfax Avenue and in the Five Points neighborhood, and street crime — murders and holdups — grew.

When methamphetamine proliferated more recently, the police and prosecutors at first did not associate it with a rise in other crimes. There were break-ins at mailboxes and people stealing documents from garbage, Mr. Morales said, but those were handled by different parts of the Police Department.

But finally they connected the two. Meth users — awake for days at a time and able to fixate on small details — were looking for checks or credit card numbers, then converting the stolen identities to money, drugs or ingredients to make more methamphetamine. For these drug users, Mr. Morales said, identity theft was the perfect support system.

While public concern about identity theft has largely focused on elaborate computer schemes, for law enforcement officials in Denver and other Western areas, meth users have become the everyday face of identity theft. Like crack cocaine in the 1980’s, officials say, the rise of methamphetamine has been accompanied by a specific set of crimes and skills that are shared among users and dealers.

“The knowledge of how to violate the law comes contemporaneously with the meth epidemic,” said Sheriff Paul A. Pastor of Pierce County, Wash., who said the majority of identity theft cases his officers investigated involved methamphetamine.

Tammie Carroll, a mother of four in Denver who was indicted in 2003 in an identity theft ring, described her social circle succinctly.

“Anybody I knew that did meth was also doing fraud, identity theft or stealing mail,” Ms. Carroll said. “We helped each other out, whatever we needed to do that day. They all had their own little role.“

Mr. Morales, director of the Denver district attorney’s economic crime unit, said 60 percent to 70 percent of his office’s identity theft cases involved methamphetamine users or dealers, often in rings of 10 or more.

“Look at the states that have the highest rates of identity theft — Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas and Colorado,’’ Mr. Morales said. “The two things they all have in common are illegal immigration and meth.”

But identity thieves are difficult to generalize about because most crimes are never solved. The prevalence of meth use among identity theft suspects may say more about the state of law enforcement than about the habits of lawbreakers. In other words, meth users may simply be the easiest to catch.

In Denver, Mr. Morales said his office and the local police lacked the resources to pursue more sophisticated identity thieves who crossed jurisdictions or bought and sold identities over the Internet. On the other hand, he said, “it’s easy to get a meth addict to flip’’ and testify against others.

Nonetheless, prosecutors, police officers, drug treatment professionals, former identity thieves and recovering addicts describe a connection between meth use and identity theft that is fluid and complementary, involving the hours that addicts keep, the nature of a methamphetamine high and the social patterns of meth production and use, which differ from those of other illegal drugs.

For example, crack cocaine or heroin dealers usually set up in well-defined urban strips run by armed gangs, which stimulates gun traffic and crimes that are suited to densely populated neighborhoods, including mugging, prostitution, carjacking and robbery. Because cocaine creates a rapid craving for more, addicts commit crimes that pay off instantly, even at high risk.

Methamphetamine, by contrast, can be manufactured in small laboratories that move about suburban or rural areas, where addicts are more likely to steal mail from unlocked boxes. Small manufacturers, in turn, use stolen identities to buy ingredients or pay rent without arousing suspicion. And because the drug has a long high, addicts have patience and energy for crimes that take several steps to pay off.

In a survey of 500 county sheriffs, 27 percent said methamphetamine had contributed to a rise in identity theft in their areas. Even more — 62 percent and 68 percent, respectively — noted that it contributed to increases in domestic abuse or robberies and burglaries.

“I think identity theft is a big deal; there’s a lot of it going on,’’ said Terree Schmidt-Whelan, executive director of the Pierce County Alliance in Washington, which provides court-mandated drug treatment to addicts. “But I don’t think it’s going on to the extent we read about because we’re not seeing it to that extent here.’’

The circumstances of methamphetamine arrests, Dr. Schmidt-Whelan said, can exaggerate the connection with identity theft. “If a sheriff does a bust and there are 10 people in a room, are they all doing it?’’ she asked.

After law enforcement officers in Washington reported that high percentages of their identity theft cases involved methamphetamine, including 100 percent in Spokane County, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, proposed a bill to study the connection.

Richard Rawson, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying methamphetamine since the 1980’s, agrees that meth use is compatible with the kind of concentration needed to be an identity thief.

“Crack users and heroin users are so disorganized and get in these frantic binges, they’re not going to sit still and do anything in an organized way for very long,” Dr. Rawson said. “Meth users, on the other hand, that’s all they have, is time. The drug stimulates the part of the brain that perseverates on things. So you get people perseverating on things, and if you sit down at a computer terminal you can go for hours and hours.”

But Dr. Rawson said he had not seen a connection with identity theft in his research, and had not heard of one until law enforcement officials started bringing it up in conferences in the last year.

“If it is a major event, it’s a relatively new one,” he said. “How widespread it is, I don’t know.”

In Phoenix, which has the nation’s highest rate of identity theft complaints, officials first became aware of the connection when laboratory raids uncovered stolen mail and checks that had been washed with acetone, a chemical used to make methamphetamine.

“We thought for a while that that was the connection,” said Todd C. Lawson, a state prosecutor who specializes in identity theft. “But we learned there was much more to it.”

Often identity theft rings organize like meth labs, where one person has the technical skills and others gather the raw materials. In an identity theft ring, one person might work the computer and the others steal identities or use the fraudulent checks or credit cards to get cash.

In Minnesota, meth laboratories and users developed a barter economy of washed checks, stolen checkbooks, drugs, ingredients and equipment, said Carol Falkowski, a spokeswoman for Hazelden, a drug treatment center in Center City.

In rural parts of Salt Lake County, Utah, meth addicts take their stolen identities onto the Internet because it has more targets than the local area, said Pat Fleming, director of county substance abuse services. “Meth is one of the major things driving identity theft in Utah,” Mr. Fleming said.

Cocaine and heroin bypassed these areas because importers took the drugs directly to Salt Lake City, where addicts commit different crimes to pay for them.

For D., a 22-year-old woman in Missoula, Mont., meth and identity theft just came together.

“It’s always suggested if you’re around people that are high,” she said, agreeing to be identified only by her first initial because she said she was afraid of a past associate. “They know that this is an easy way to get money. That’s the only way we ever found out about it, here anyway.”

With advice from a fellow user, D. and her husband at the time stole a checkbook and wrote $5,600 worth of checks, using the money to buy drugs, gamble at Montana casinos and pay for hotel rooms, where she stayed up all night doing crossword puzzles. She never considered more traditional forms of crime, she said.

“Going and stealing money from people is too risky,” D. said. “With this, I was sitting in my car at a bank, I could drive away if I wanted to. That’s the only way I would have ever considered because I felt it was more safe. Now I think it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”

She was caught, finally, when she misspelled the signature of one of her victims.

For Ms. Carroll, the end came when one of her accomplices took an identity out of Ms. Carroll’s trash and tried to use it. Ms. Carroll discarded identities every few days to avoid detection. When the police arrested her, the accomplice pointed them to Ms. Carroll.

Ms. Carroll said she had not used methamphetamine since Jan. 7, 2003. She has also regained custody of her three children, who were placed in foster care after her arrest; a fourth, an infant at the time, was adopted.

Ms. Carroll said she planned to start college in August.

“I still see people put the little red flags up on their mailboxes when they’re mailing their bills,” she said. “It amazes me. They still put their checks in their own mailboxes, and that was one of the biggest things we did was watch for red flags on mailboxes. You’re sending your electricity bill, you have a check in there, that’s all the information we needed.”

People underestimate the resourcefulness of thieves, she said.

“Five days a week we did it,” Ms. Carroll said. “It was like a job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us...5e4&ei=5087%0A





e-Passports: Ready or Not Here They Come

The State Department expresses confidence in "e-Passports" while technologists fret about their security risks.
Christian Zappone

Imagine being overseas and your identity being available for the taking - your nationality, your name, your passport number. Everything.

That's the fear of privacy and security specialists now that the State Department plans to issue "e-Passports" to American travelers beginning in late August.

They'll have radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and are meant to cut down on human error of immigration officials, speed the processing of visitors and safeguard against counterfeit passports.

Yet critics are concerned that the security benefit of RFID technology, which combines silicon chips with antennas to make data accessible via radio waves, could be vastly outweighed by security threats to the passport holder.

"Basically, you've given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares 'Hey, I'm a foreigner,'" says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. "If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes."

RFID chips are used in security passes many companies issue to employees. They don't have to be touched to a reader-machine, only waved near it. Following initial objections by security and privacy experts, the State Department added several security precautions.

But experts still fear the data could be "skimmed," or read remotely without the bearer's knowledge.

Kidnappers, identity thieves and terrorists could all conceivably commit "contactless" crimes against victims who wouldn't know they've been violated until after the fact.

"The basic problem with RFID is surreptitious access to ID," said Bruce Schneier security technologist, author and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a technology security consultancy. "The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won't be hackable."

The State Department argues the concerns are overstated. "We wouldn't be issuing the passports to ourselves if we didn't think they're secure," said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services Frank Moss, who noted that RFID passports have already been issued to core State Department personnel, including himself. "We're our own test population."
How skimming works

The equipment needed to skim an RFID chip neither has to be large nor expensive. Nokia sells cell phones capable of reading RFID chips. Texas Instruments sells kits to do the same thing.

In May, researchers at the University of Tel Aviv created a skimmer from electronics hobbyist kits costing less than $110. The equipment was small enough to fit into a briefcase or be disguised in any manner of luggage or clothes that could hide the 15-inch copper tube antenna.

The antenna boosts the read-range from a few inches to a few feet. To extend the range of surreptitious access much further, a second piece of equipment is needed to fake the RFID reader into sending a "read" signal, which is then relayed via radio waves to the skimmer's reader near the targeted RFID chip.

In 2005, a researcher at Cambridge extended the range to about 160 feet while successfully accessing a contactless smart card's details.

ID thieves who figure out a way around the security precaution on RFID passports, which includes anti-skimming material in the cover, can use this method in a crowded airport terminal or hotel lobby to conceivably "borrow" someone's ID data and spoof it to another official reader, effectively cloaking themselves in another's persons ID.

Or they could learn a person's nationality, or confirm the identity of someone they were searching for to harm.

"It's a great way for unfriendly elements to set up their own RFID scanning systems and pick Americans right out of a crowd...If you put an RFID scanner in a doorway or maybe a lamp-post," said Sterling, "you can just sit there automatically counting the passing passports."

Even if the skimmed data is encrypted -- as e-Passport information would be -- skilled hackers could potentially save the information and crack it elsewhere.

Researchers at the Dutch security test lab Riscure cracked the encryption on a mocked up RFID passport in two hours using a PC in 2005.

U.S. passports are issued for ten years, which means the RFID chip technology of those passports, along with their vulnerabilities, will be floating around for a decade. Technology would have to "stop cold" Schneier of Counterpane says for improvements in skimming and hacking equipment not to occur.

Moss said the State Department "recognizes that technology will change during the 10 year life cycle of US passports" and that's why it's focusing on more than one technology to protect data.

Sterling, however, compares RFID passports to a "nice yellow armband" -- a big sign on your body announcing your identity. "Would you pay anything for that device?" Sterling asks. "Would you buy it in a travel store because you thought it made you feel safer? Or would you conclude that this technology existed so that you could be treated like a can on a grocery-food shelf?"

Schneier says there are a number of ways to improve the security of RFID passports but the best trick is to not create RFID passports at all. "Someone in the government got it in their head to make it RFID. Yes, its cool technology," said Schneier, "but don't do it because it's cool."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/13/pf/r...orts/index.htm





MSNBC’s Star Carves Anti-Fox Niche
Bill Carter

He is either the leading man of MSNBC or its leading agent provocateur, but Keith Olbermann has no problem embracing either role.

“You can’t spell momentum without Olbermann — or something like that,” he said in a telephone interview, with a typical sprinkle of wry in his voice.

The momentum reference related to MSNBC’s recent aggressive positioning of the program “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” as the centerpiece of this all-news cable network’s latest effort to become more competitive with Fox News Channel and CNN.

MSNBC revamped its prime-time schedule two weeks ago, shelving many of its prime-time hosts in favor of documentary-style programs but retaining “Countdown,” a program the network cites as its great growth story.

That growth, while coming from a base that Fox News would find disastrously puny, is demonstrable, especially among the group that is chiefly sold to news advertisers: people between the ages of 25 and 54. For the last quarter, Mr. Olbermann, who is 47, has seen his ratings in that group grow by more than 30 percent.

The growth has not been unfailingly steady, as competitors at Fox and CNN pointed out. They noted that Mr. Olbermann did better in February and March than he has since. Still, for the year, Mr. Olbermann has managed to climb past CNN into second place in the news channel competition at 8 p.m. among that 25-to-54 group. That qualifies as a feat for MSNBC, though Mr. Olbermann’s show remains little more than a dot in the rearview mirror of Fox News.

Even from that far back, he seems to have been able to honk his horn loud enough to raise hackles at Fox, which, Mr. Olbermann enthusiastically acknowledges, has been his precise intention as well as a useful marketing strategy.

He was especially able to redden the neck of the time period’s king, Bill O’Reilly, starting this winter, when the two men engaged in a widely discussed barb-filled feud.

Mr. Olbermann began frequently naming Mr. O’Reilly as the winner in a segment he calls “The Worst Person in the World,” tweaking cable news’s most popular host for such excesses (according to Mr. Olbermann) as his declaration last year (in jest, Mr. O’Reilly said) that a resolution passed in San Francisco to ban military recruitment in schools was so un-American that he was inviting Al Qaeda to blow up Coit Tower.

The worst-person citations eventually riled Mr. O’Reilly enough that he began a petition drive directed at Mr. Olbermann (though he did not mention him by name; he has apparently never mentioned Mr. Olbermann’s name), suggesting that he be replaced by a long-ago MSNBC host, Phil Donahue. Mr. Donahue’s ratings, Mr. O’Reilly said in February, eclipsed anything MSNBC had achieved since. By the next day, Mr. Olbermann was celebrating the petition and offering to sign it himself. Now he gleefully notes that Mr. O’Reilly (whose name he has no trouble uttering) only helped his cause by taking the bait and responding to the gibes.

“You don’t punch down,” Mr. Olbermann said. “If you’re in my position,” he added, referring to his initially microscopic ratings next to Mr. O’Reilly’s, “you punch upwards.”

Every time Mr. O’Reilly took umbrage at the slams, it seemed to add a bounce to Mr. Olbermann’s ratings — one reason, perhaps, that Mr. O’Reilly’s reactions seem to have tailed off more recently. Nobody at Fox News wants Mr. Olbermann to get any more of a draft from Mr. O’Reilly’s popularity.

Mr. Olbermann thinks he knows one reason behind his gains. He believes that Mr. O’Reilly’s audience, which is still huge, is aging. He noted that Mr. O’Reilly’s total viewer ratings are basically flat, while his numbers in the younger audience group have been dropping — down about 15 percent for the last quarter. “There is no other conclusion to draw than he is not adding younger viewers,” Mr. Olbermann said.

Of course, in terms of numbers of viewers in that younger age group, Mr. O’Reilly is still playing in another league, with about three times as many as Mr. Olbermann. But that does represent a small slice of the total audience for Mr. O’Reilly.

MSNBC’s research claims that the median age for Mr. O’Reilly’s audience is 71, while Mr. Olbermann’s is 59. (Fox and CNN both report that the only figures they get for median age of shows with older audiences is “65 plus,” and that Mr. O’Reilly’s audience falls into that category.)

The age discrepancy has led Mr. Olbermann to dish out even more mockery in his attacks. “It’s slipping away from you,” he said, addressing Mr. O’Reilly on a “Countdown” segment last month. “You don’t know what to do. You can’t even lie well any more. Seriously: I understand. It’s called panic.” He added, “You begin to see the audience dying off, and the creases deepening in your forehead.”

Lately Mr. O’Reilly has resisted giving Mr. Olbermann the satisfaction of more attention. Mr. O’Reilly was on vacation last week, so Fox responded through Irina Briganti, the spokeswoman for the channel. Her comments, matched with Mr. Olbermann’s biting remarks, reflected how corrosive the byplay has become.

“Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he’s worked,” Ms. Briganti said. “From lashing out at co-workers to personally attacking Bill O’Reilly and all things Fox, it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to happen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”

The references to personal demons and implosions touched on Mr. Olbermann’s résumé, which includes an array of positions over the last decade. At times he has been in public disputes with employers. More recently he landed in gossip columns after some nasty e-mail messages he sent were published. In one, he mocked the intelligence of the MSNBC host Rita Cosby; in others, he used vituperative language in responding to e-mail critics.

Mr. Olbermann apologized for the e-mail exchanges, saying he had been stupid and should have known better than to engage in such confrontations. He said he wouldn’t be e-mailing viewers again.

But the e-mail incidents offered an opening for critics like his antagonists at Fox to point to earlier evidence of a volatile nature. Certainly Mr. Olbermann has evoked a lot of strong reactions in his career.

He first came to the nation’s attention at ESPN, where his fast-paced commentary and sharp writing established a pattern: younger audiences liked Mr. Olbermann; traditionalists despised him.

Mr. Olbermann said, “People who didn’t like what I was doing would call and say: ‘Is this guy a jackass or what?’ You can tailor what you’re doing or saying to other people’s expectations, but you’re going to wind up acting.” He freely admitted, “The reaction of the audience has not been paramount with me.”

Still, Mr. Olbermann became a star at ESPN. His “Sports Center” work with his partner Dan Patrick became a trademark of the channel: sports delivered with irreverence and insouciance, like Mr. Olbermann’s home run call, “It’s deep, and I don’t think it’s playable.”

Mr. Olbermann acknowledged that his departure from ESPN in 1997 led to a “nuclear war.” The channel said he had abused the company’s rules; he said the company had a “corporate ‘all we have are the rules’ mentality.” At that point he began his first tenure at MSNBC, in a news show that mainly consisted of covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the Clinton administration.

“I did that for 218 straight days,” Mr. Olbermann said, recalling his rising frustration. From there it was back to sports for, of all organizations, Fox. When that ended after about two-and-a-half years, Mr. Olbermann landed at CNN briefly as an interim host.

Then, in 2003, MSNBC needed a temporary replacement for one of its hosts. “It was a three-day fill-in stint,” Mr. Olbermann said. “Thirty-nine days later I had a four-year contract.”

The “Countdown” show began as a prelude to the invasion of Iraq, but Mr. Olbermann decided it was an ideal format for him. He counted down the news stories of the day, in whatever order he pleased, adding his own spin and style.

Gradually, the show took on more of Mr. Olbermann’s persona, which meant stories were delivered with either mock outrage or ironic amusement. And unquestionably the chief target of the outrage was the Bush administration and its defenders.

Mr. Olbermann said he believed that the turn in public sentiment toward the administration clearly began to bring more viewers to his show. “We saw a certain cultural shift,” he said, adding that it was a “sea change, if that’s not too unfortunate a word, around the time of Hurricane Katrina.”

That a rabid audience can be built for a political discussion show from the left, as it has so effectively been done on talk radio and on some of Fox’s programs from the right, has not been demonstrated before, unless you count the fake news shows on Comedy Central. Mr. Olbermann said the administration had created enough disaffection to keep both his ratings and his outrage up.

“The country gave this president every imaginable benefit of the doubt,” he said, about the period following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “He abused it. You know what Lincoln said: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of time. But it looks like you can’t fool all of the viewers all of the time, endlessly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/ar...on/11keit.html





Nielsen to Offer Data on TV Commercials

Nielsen Media Research to offer data on how many people are tuned in during commercial breaks
Seth Sutel

Television advertisers have long wanted to know how many people actually watch their commercials, but until now ads have been sold based on the average viewership of a whole program.

That could be on the verge of changing, however, now that Nielsen Media Research is preparing to offer data for the first time on how many people are tuned in during the commercial breaks.

Jack Loftus, a spokesman for Nielsen, a unit of the privately held company VNU, says the major networks asked the research company several months ago to provide the new data, and Nielsen plans to begin doing so this fall on a test basis.

However, much negotiation remains to be done among advertisers and the networks over how the data will be used and in what form, Loftus said, adding that the earliest it could be adopted as an arbiter of value would be the advance ad-selling season for the fall 2007 season, called the "upfront."

"Obviously this is going to have a huge impact on next year's upfront," Loftus said, "but we don't know what."

The change came about as networks and advertisers tussled this year over whether to count shows that are played back on digital video recorders, or DVRs, as part of the viewership that advertisers get charged for.

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC network pressed particularly hard for those viewers to be counted, but yielded in the end after advertisers resisted.

The new data showing the viewership of commercials will also include those played back on a DVR device within seven days, something that is likely to favor highly rated shows that are more likely to be viewed on recorded playback such as "American Idol."

Network executives say the inclusion of played back viewership in the commercial ratings should render moot any concerns that advertisers may have over ad-skipping.

But Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, says the next challenge is getting all parties to agree on how to actually use the data. "We understand what Nielsen's trying to do, but there are many specific details that need to be ironed out," Wurtzel said.

Advertisers had resisted paying for viewership that was played back, partly because they're concerned that many people are skipping through the ads, and also because Nielsen's sample included fewer households with DVRs than the national average.

Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes said Nielsen's sample is now about 7 percent made up of homes that have DVRs, versus the national average of about 12 percent. Holmes says Nielsen expects its sample to catch up to the national average of DVR penetration by the end of the year.

Networks have long acknowledged that viewership dips during commercials. David Poltrack, the head of research for the CBS network, says that studies have found commercials consistently rate about 5 percent lower than regular programming.

What networks are eager to show, Poltrack says, is that not everyone actually skips through the ads when shows are being played back on a DVR, say if the remote is out of reach or the viewer is walking around the room or doesn't feel like skipping through the ads.

Poltrack says research suggests that somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of audiences do watch commercials on playback. Nielsen's Holmes said the company wasn't releasing any data on commercial viewership yet.

This could favor big shows like CBS's "CSI," Poltrack says, which go up against other popular shows like "Grey's Anatomy," which CSI viewers couldn't otherwise see since they're scheduled in the same time slot. "We know that a lot of people are going to watch one live and record the other one and watch it later," Poltrack says.

For advertisers, the new data represent a welcome means to measure the effectiveness of their ads, but also more work in figuring out how to agree on ways to value a new audience measure.

Advertisers are increasingly asking for clearer breakdowns of how many people see and act on ads, especially now that Internet advertising can provide great detail on how many people made a purchase after seeing and clicking through an ad online.

"This is a step in the right direction," said Brad Adgate, director of research for Horizon Media Inc., an advertising buying and planning agency. "This is one of the important things that buyers want."

Adgate added, however, that the data won't be a perfect solution _ not every single ad will be rated, just the average ratings for all ads in a given time period will be measured.

Jack Klues, chairman of Publicis Groupe Media, called the step long overdue, noting that advertising is sold in most other countries on the basis of ratings for commercials themselves, not the shows in which they appear. Klues's group oversees the global ad-buying activities of Publicis Groupe SA, a Paris-based advertising conglomerate.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...8IQ1PEO0.shtml





France to Offer Low-Cost PCs to Families
AP

Low-income French families will be equipped with a computer and an Internet connection for 1 euro ($1.27) a day under a new government proposal.

Families who sign up will receive a computer, a high-speed connection, software and a class on how to use the equipment, officials said Tuesday after an inter-ministerial meeting.

The program is expected to start early next year. Later this year, officials will announce which incomes qualify.

About half of French homes have a home computer - a figure that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin wants to boost to 68 percent in three years.

Families in the program will contribute financially for three years, the government said. The program will have both state and private funding, with the state guaranteeing bank loans for families, while Internet providers give sharp discounts for access.

Many details were still being worked out.

The project is in line with the government's "equal opportunity" plan for children from disadvantaged families. Boosting their prospects has been a main concern since riots swept through France late last year in troubled neighborhoods where many immigrants live with their French-born children.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-11-16-14-33





Ding dong, Big Brother calling

Agency Works On Emergency Alert System
Lara Jakes Jordan

We interrupt your cell phone call with this important announcement: The government will soon be sending warnings of national emergencies on wireless phones, Web sites and hand-held computers.

The new digital system will update the emergency alerts planned - but never used - during the Cold War in the event of a nuclear strike. More likely, these 21st-century technologies will carry warnings of natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

The Homeland Security Department, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, expects to have the system working by the end of next year. Though still in its pilot stages, the system is being demonstrated Wednesday at a public television station in suburban Virginia.

The Association of Public Television Stations is partnering with FEMA to transmit the alerts to receiving networks ranging from wireless devices, cable TV channels and satellite radio to traditional broadcast outlets.

"Anything that can receive a text message will receive the alert," Homeland Security Department spokesman Aaron Walker said Tuesday. "We find that the new digital system is more secure, it's faster and it enables us to reach a wide array of citizens and alert them to pending disasters."

In 1951, President Harry Truman created the nation's first alert system, which required radio stations to broadcast only on certain frequencies during emergencies. That evolved into the test on TV and radio stations that solemnly intoned: "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test."

Only the president can order a national emergency alert. The system was initially designed to warn Americans of a nuclear attack, but President Bush last month ordered Homeland Security to extend the alert "for situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster or other hazards to public safety and well-being."

The public TV stations have so far raised $1.1 billion - a third of it from the federal government - to convert antiquated technology at its 176 stations to digital systems that can transmit the alerts, APTS President John Lawson said.

Overall, the new warning system is expected to cost $5.5 million to test and deploy nationally, and $1 million annually to maintain, Walker said.

The government has been testing the system in the Washington area since October 2004, Lawson said, and earlier this year expanded its pilot program to 23 public television stations nationwide. It will be rolled out to the public and emergency responders in stages, beginning in Gulf Coast states that were heavily damaged by hurricanes last year, and later in major cities.

Peter P. Swire, chief privacy counselor during the Clinton administration and law professor at the Ohio State University, questioned whether the alerts might "be like spam or a telemarketing call" to people who don't want to receive the government warnings.

"Before the broadcast happens, people should likely have a choice whether to receive it," Swire said.

Walker said consumers will have a chance to opt out of the alerts.

Some glitches remain as telephone companies and other networks grapple with potentially trying to alert all of their customers at the same time without jamming their systems, Lawson said. But the alerts could be transmitted by text messages, audio recordings, video or graphics, he said, opening the possibility of sending out additional detailed information to specific sectors, like hospitals or emergency responders.

For alerting regular Americans, "we're hoping that your cell phone will go off saying something bad is happening, and you need to get to a TV or radio to find out what's going on," Lawson said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-04-39-53





Agency Recovers From Computer Break-Ins
Ted Bridis

The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned.

Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the widespread intrusions and the resulting investigation.

State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck said late Tuesday that officials continue to investigate the incident but that there was no indication any sensitive U.S. government information was compromised. Still, Beck said, the department changed passwords and modified some internal procedures to provide extra security.

"This case is a textbook example of our ability to detect and defeat threats before they can do any damage," Beck said.

The break-ins and the State Department's emergency response severely limited Internet access at many locations, including some headquarters offices in Washington, these officials said. Internet connections have been restored across nearly all the department since the break-ins were recognized in mid-June.

"The department did detect anomalies in network traffic, and we thought it prudent to ensure our system's integrity," department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said. Asked what information was stolen by the hackers, Cooper said, "Because the investigation is continuing, I don't think we even know."

Tracing the origin of such break-ins is difficult. But employees told AP the hackers appeared to hit computers especially hard at headquarters and inside the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, which coordinates diplomacy in countries including China, the Koreas and Japan. In the tense weeks preceding North Korea's missile tests, that bureau lost its Internet connectivity for several days.

The FBI declined to comment, saying it was "not appropriate for the FBI to discuss the existence of ongoing cases or lend speculation to media reports of alleged incidents."

China's government was considered by experts a chief suspect in computer break-ins at the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies disclosed last summer. But China also is home to a large number of insecure computers and networks that hackers in other countries could use to disguise their locations and launch attacks.

The Pentagon warned earlier this year that China's army is emphasizing hacking as an offensive weapon. It cited Chinese military exercises in 2005 that included hacking "primarily in first strikes against enemy networks."

After the State Department break-ins, many employees were instructed to change their passwords. The department also temporarily disabled a technology known as secure sockets layer, used to transmit encrypted information over the Internet. Hackers can exploit weaknesses in this technology to break into computers, and they can use the same technology to transmit stolen information covertly off a victim's network.

Many diplomats were unable to access their online bank accounts using government computers because most financial institutions require the security technology to be turned on. Cooper said the department has since fixed that problem.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-11-23-22-55





Feds taking back road to Routerville

Insecure By Design
David Sugar

CALEA (Computer Assistance Law Enforcement) is quietly in the background of current news again, because the FBI is pushing congress to mandate that all future routing equipment manufactured will include back doors for law enforcement. Like in CALEA mandates for telephone switching equipment, such back doors require no warrant to activate, and hence can be secretly enabled at will. Some vendors have already eagerly embraced CALEA inspired backdoors to internet routing equipment in anticipation of future intercept mandates, thereby already compromising the integrity and security their current and future customers. This approach of using backdoors on Internet connected systems, even more so than the original CALEA mandates for wiretapping backdoors in telephone switching centers, is a danger to both our infrastructure and our society.

CALEA has required that all telephone switching equipment manufactured since 1994 must include backdoors to enable wiretapping. While the need for lawful legal intercept is estimated to be in the range of 1000 or so wiretaps per year, and past practices have required not only warrants but also physical access to switching centers, these requirements were neither unduly burdensome, nor unduly expensive for the limited number of lawful investigations normally engaged in per year, whether back then or today. What these historic pre-CALEA limitations did assure is that the cost of mass privacy invasion would be far too expensive to ever effectively undertake.

By contrast, CALEA mandated backdoors allows one to activate wiretaps remotely on any scale desired, and to do so entirely in secret. Indeed, the NSA wiretapping scandal is an example of how CALEA can be misused. That the huge volume of information being collected, and the fact that most of the older telephone switching equipment does not normally support true network remote access, had forced the NSA to co-locate facilities in a number of switching centers to collect their data. Applying CALEA backdoors to distributed and even end-user deployed routing equipment that is already Internet connected of course eliminates the need to co-locate facilities, and hence would make it much harder to detect or determine the scope of any future illegal government activities, in regard to misusing Internet wiretapping.

While these mandates may be only originally intended for spying and use within North America, clearly, with proprietary telephone switching systems, such equipment was often also sold overseas. As the Greek prime minister discovered in 2004, when he and 100 other governmental officials were tapped for over a year by someone making use a CALEA mandated backdoor, “source secret by obscurity” backdoors often do not remain secret. Of course this is not the only incident where CALEA backdoors have been used for espionage purposes by others. Such systems are hence inherently insecure by design.

When one deliberately builds in government mandated backdoors that can be opened in secret and without notice, one is opening such systems to undetected access by anyone who can discover and operate them, including those who may be deemed even more undesirable than national governments spying on their own citizens. Even, as noted in the case of the Greek Government, the security of government facilities themselves may be compromised by outside parties. Such information may be used to blackmail individuals, to acquire identity information for theft, or to acquire passwords and information that could be used to compromise the underlying security of key infrastructures and safety systems, like for example power generation systems.

Personally I do not feel any “safer” in a state that requires the infrastructure for enabling or engages in mass surveillance of it's own citizens, or that practices guilt until proven innocent while claiming to do so in the name of my “protection” and safety. Indeed, I find that such a state is in fact a far greater danger to the safety of myself, my children, and the people as a whole, than the potential threats I am supposedly being protected against, whether real or imagined.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1671





End to Win98 Support May Boost Desktop Linux
Munir Kotadia

From today, Microsoft will no longer issue security updates or provide support for Windows 98 and Windows ME, which could lead users to trying alternative operating systems such as Linux.

Eight years after launching Windows 98, Microsoft will finally wash its hands of updating and plugging security gaps in its ageing operating system. The software giant originally planned to pull the plug in January 2004 but decided to extend support because of the increasing threat from Linux.

This time round, Microsoft is hoping that the remaining users of Windows 98 and Windows ME will upgrade to Windows XP, according to Peter Watson, chief security advisor, Microsoft Australia.

"Microsoft works closely with leading retailers to undertake promotions such as upgrade discounts to encourage users to upgrade to Windows XP," Watson told ZDNet Australia. "Just last month, you may have seen the price promotion activity Microsoft conducted with Harvey Norman, one of the largest computer software retailers in the country, to encourage Windows XP upgrades."

Analyst firms estimate that there are still between 50 million and 70 million computers running either Windows 95, 98 or ME.

Hardest hit by the cancellation of support will be home users and schools, according to Michael Silver, research vice president of client platforms at research group Gartner, who agrees that support has been extended to fight off the threat from Linux.

"Consumers and schools will be most affected by this announcement because they will no longer get security fixes," Silver told ZDNet Australia. "I suspect that Microsoft's original extension of the Windows 98 support date a couple of years ago was, in part, to make sure Linux was not brought in to replace these systems."

Silver believes that as far as the overall security landscape goes, millions of unsupported PCs is a "cause for concern". In addition, he said Microsoft may be pressured into creating a fix if there is a serious virus outbreak.

"Microsoft has not fixed every hole in Win9x, but I'm not sure they've been attacked, either. If Microsoft sees a Win9x attack in the wild in the next few months, we would not be surprised if they issued a fix -- wide scale outages are not good for their customers or for Microsoft -- but since there is no automatic update, users may not be able to get the fix in time," said Silver.

Silver still believes that some users may decide to switch to Linux instead of upgrading to XP but he said existing applications that require Windows are likely to stop a mass migration.

"School PCs are likely more at risk. Win9x PCs used regularly on the Internet need up to date security software. Some of these users -- companies, schools and governments -- may switch to Linux or Mac, but application issues often makes that an expensive option," said Silver.

Microsoft's Watson said consumers have the choice to use any version of Windows and dismissed any suggestion that Microsoft has a responsibility to secure older versions of its software.

"This issue is not unique to the IT Industry. For example, there are many people on the road who choose to drive the latest cars with the latest safety features such as ABS brakes and air-bags, but at the same time, there are many others who are happy driving their cars which may not have these features.

"It is not the 'responsibility' of automotive manufacturers to have their customers acquire the latest technology. This is the same issue for makers of mobile phones, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs fridges, radios, and so on," said Watson.

However, Watson said Microsoft would try to "encourage" users of Win9x systems to upgrade to XP.

"Microsoft encourages users to upgrade to Windows XP and provides information which helps educate users on the benefits of upgrading, but it is ultimately the customer's choice," he added.

Gartner's Silver said that although there are still millions of Windows 9x users, compared to alternative operating system vendors, Microsoft's support schedules are still "better than most".

"Most software vendors and hardware vendors are no longer developing Win9x drivers for their new products -- and have not been for some time now. Further, most free Linux distributions are supported for a year, some for two. Microsoft has supported Win98 for 8 years, 98SE for 7 years, and Windows ME for 6 years.

"These do not meet Microsoft's current enterprise standard of 10 years -- they shipped before the 10 year policy -- but they're better than most," added Silver.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...733t-10000002c





Microsoft Releases New OS For Old PCs
James Niccolai

Microsoft Corp. released a new version of its operating system for businesses this week that extends the life of older PCs by effectively turning them into thin-client computers.

Called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, the software is offered only to customers on Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing and maintenance program. It is not a full-featured operating system, but it improves the security and manageability of PCs for customers with systems that are too old for Windows XP and who aren't ready to upgrade their hardware, Microsoft said.

The company first discussed the software last September as one of a series of perks intended to improve the value of Software Assurance, which had been criticized by some customers. Fundamentals for Legacy PCs was originally targeted for release last month.

The operating system can run only a few programs locally, such as security tools, management tools and document viewers, so line-of-business and productivity applications will need to be run remotely on a server.

The trade-off is that the older PCs will be able to run the latest security and management tools, and the end user experience should be similar to that with Windows XP, according to Microsoft, making help desk calls easier to deal with. Customers will also have a fully supported operating system.

Among the other sweeteners offered to Software Assurance customers was exclusive access to a new, enterprise edition of Windows Vista due out in November. The operating system is expected to include a hardware-based encryption system to protect data if a laptop is lost or stolen, among other benefits, according to Microsoft.

It also allows customers to run four versions of the enterprise operating system on one PC using virtualization software. In line with that, Microsoft announced this week that Virtual PC 2007 for Windows Vista PCs and its current Virtual PC 2004 SP product are now available to customers for free.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...e =rss_news10





Microsoft to Release 1980s Games for Xbox
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 may exemplify the high-tech future of video game consoles, but the company is hoping some of its avid players still pine for the good old days of Pac-Man and Frogger.

Microsoft plans Wednesday to offer some additional updated versions of popular 1980s-era games through Xbox Live Arcade, an online service that lets people download free trial games and buy them for $5 to $15.

The company will offer a game every Wednesday for the next five weeks, including some retro games with higher-end graphics and new ways to play together. The first game on offer is the log-hopping, traffic-dodging classic, Frogger.

Greg Canessa, a group manager for Xbox Live Arcade, said the downloadable games service has been surprisingly successful for the company. About 5 million free trial games have been downloaded by Xbox 360 owners, he said, and 21.7 percent of those have been "converted," meaning a person decided to pay for the permanent version.

Many people initially thought the Xbox Live Arcade, with its focus on less complex games, would be a potential draw for children, women or older players who don't fit the young male demographic traditionally associated with Xbox 360 owners. But Canessa said they've found that even the so-called hardcore gamers are interested in the arcade games, and willing to pay for them.

Microsoft currently has 20 arcade games available for sale to people who own an Xbox 360, the second iteration of Microsoft's video game console. Canessa said they hope to have about 50 titles available by the end of the year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-03-26-16





In Atta Kim’s Long-Exposure Photographs, Real Time Is the Most Surreal of All
Holland Cotter

Every day, hundreds of tourists snap photographs of a crowd- and car-jammed Times Square. The average picture takes — what? — 15 seconds to shoot? The same picture of the same place takes the Korean photographer Atta Kim eight hours. And his Times Square ends up with only an eerie trace of a human presence, like a deserted movie set.

Other pictures by Mr. Kim, who is making an outstanding New York solo debut in a show titled “Atta Kim: On-Air” at the International Center of Photography, have required less time. A photograph of a soccer game: two hours. Of a couple having sex: one hour. Still others go way beyond the eight-hour mark. “Monologue of Ice,” with its mysterious lozenge of pollen-yellow light hovering in the dark, is the product of a marathon 25-hour shoot.

And what is that picture of? A block of ice melting. Mr. Kim put the ice in a room and left the lens of his camera open to record the process of physical change as a solid form returned to fluid. Naturally, the transformation was slow. But who would have guessed that it would be so spectacularly photogenic — molten-looking and radiant?

Many of the large-format photographs in Mr. Kim’s show were made over time. His is an art of duration and of simultaneity. When he leaves his lens open for an hour on a couple making love, every movement made in that hour is in the picture, though condensed into an explosive blur. His view of Times Square leaves all the stationary elements — buildings and such — in crisp focus, but reduces traffic to a shimmering haze, a ghost of motion. Other famous New York intersections get the same treatment.

This technique is old. Early-19th-century pioneers of photography experimented with it. So do contemporary artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, in his well-known shots of movie-house interiors taken while full-length films are in progress. What Mr. Kim brings to the tradition are new subjects — live-model Buddhist sculptures, for example — and dramatically extended temporal parameters, to create ever more complex compressions and layerings of time.

He has similarly pushed the boundaries in his extreme elaboration of a second traditional method of image-layering, one associated with double or multiple exposures. In several series of pictures Mr. Kim overlays different, semitransparent pictures of human figures, one on top of another, using digital editing. He piles up anywhere from a dozen to a hundred separate images to create a single composite picture, at once singular and multiple.

But while digitally savvy, Mr. Kim’s work is more distinctive for its ideas than for its technology. Born in South Korea in 1956, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but his interests were, and still are, literature and philosophy. He considers Heidegger’s speculations on time an important early influence, along with the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (which also shaped the work of the American photographer Minor White). Most important of all is Zen Buddhist thinking, although this thread has been fully apparent only in the last few years.

Mr. Kim’s earliest photographs were of patients in a Korean psychiatric hospital whom he shot during long, immersive, interactive sessions in the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s he created a series of cinematic performance-based pictures of nude models lying, as if asleep or dead, in desolate landscapes. The scenes looked like the aftermath of a catastrophe, but the bodies were meant to signify dormant new life.

His first New York appearance was in 2002 in the large group show “Translated Acts: Body and Performance Art From East Asia,” at the Queens Museum of Art. There he showed selections from “The Museum Project” (1995-2002), which remains his best-known body of work. (Excerpts from it are on view at Yossi Milo Gallery, 525 West 25th Street, Chelsea, through Aug. 25.)

That series centered on a single visual motif: one or more figures encased, as if on display, within a museum-style plexiglass vitrine. In the earliest pictures the figures were nude, often crouched in fetal position. Some of the vitrines were actually placed and shot in museums, others in natural settings or on city streets and in public buildings at off hours. The pictures that resulted were effective: quiet, miminalist, mildly surreal. They placed bare bodies where they would not otherwise be found, but also made the bodies as untouchably inorganic as antique sculptures in a gallery or expensive machines in a showroom.

Mr. Kim varied his basic format in several subseries to create what he referred to as his own private museum of cultural and emotional subjects. One series offered a compendium of Korean “types”: families, artists, workers and so on. Another was composed of erotic couples.

More interesting were a group of portraits of maimed and wounded Korean War veterans, and a “Holocaust Series” in which models lay in heaps or hung from racks like slaughtered animals. Then, in a radical shift in tone, came the “Nirvana Series,” shot largely in Buddhist temples or in outdoor settings with nude models, including young priests and nuns, posed as bodhisattvas and tantric deities.

“The Museum Project” was an ambitious venture. Parts of it were strikingly successful, though certain images bordered, intentionally or otherwise, on kitsch. This was especially true of the “Jesus Series” (2002), which had punkish young models chained to plexiglass crosses and wired with intravenous drips. I surmised that AIDS was a possible subject but wondered where Mr. Kim’s unsettled work might be heading.

As “On-Air” demonstrates, it was headed in a direction far less obviously theatrical. In the work in this New York solo show, organized by Christopher Phillips, narrative and overt symbolism are played down. Where “The Museum Project” often graphically illustrated ideas — of preservation and decay, corporality and spirituality — the new pictures subtly embody them.

And although Mr. Kim is careful to assert that he is not a practicing Buddhist, core Buddhist concepts shape the new work. One is the notion that change, or transience, is the only concrete reality, and that time as a quantifiable, linear entity is a mirage. All time and no time are the same. A couple making love for an hour is a cloud of luminosity.

Then there is the Buddhist belief in cosmic interconnection, that all things are linked to, are part of, all other things. In a series titled “Self-Portrait” Mr. Kim layers head shots of 100 Korean men to create one “Korean” face.

In a studio-made re-enactment of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” the figures of 13 different models, each holding the appropriate pose, are combined to form the 13 figures in the scene. Thus, by implication, Jesus is also Judas.

Again, Mr. Kim’s use of such photographic techniques is not in itself novel, but the philosophical shape of his work is. And it is clearest in his most straightforward pictures. His “Portrait of Mao” (2006) series involves no layering or time compression, but consists of a sequence of still shots. In the first we see a lifelike bust of the Chinese leader carved in ice. In the second the bust has grown abstract through melting. In the third it is as smooth, attenuated and abstract as a Brancusi sculpture.

And in a similar series, “Portrait of Atta,” not in the New York show, the artist records his own features carved in ice undergoing a similar transformation. The sequence is a perfect, step-by-step Buddhist image of time passing and an ego disappearing, a process that some of Mr. Kim’s other recent pictures turn into mandalas of layered light.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/ar...gn/12atta.html





Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts
Andrew Pollack

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.

The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain.

A former high school football star in Weymouth, Mass., Mr. Nagle was paralyzed below the shoulders after being stabbed in the neck during a melee at a beach in July 2001. He said he was not involved in starting the brawl and didn’t even know what sparked it. The man who stabbed him is now serving ten years in prison, he said.

There have been some tests of a simpler sensor implant in people, as well as tests of systems using electrodes outside the scalp. And Mr. Nagle has spoken about his experiences before.

But the paper in Nature is the first peer-reviewed publication of an experiment using a more sophisticated implant in a human.

The paper helps “shift the notion of such ‘implantable neuromotor prosthetics’ from science fiction towards reality,’’ Stephen H. Scott of Queen’s University in Canada wrote in a commentary in the journal.

The implant system, known as the BrainGate, is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems of Foxborough, Mass. The company is now testing the system in three other people whose names have not been released — one with a spinal cord injury, one who had a brain-stem stroke and one with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Timothy R. Surgenor, the president of the company, said Cyberkinetics hoped to have an implant approved for use as early as 2008 or 2009. Mr. Donoghue of Brown is a cofounder of the company and its chief scientist. Some of the authors of the research paper work for the company, while others work at Massachusetts General Hospital and other medical or academic institutions.

The sensor measures 4 millimeters — about one sixth of an inch — on a side and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex that is responsible for arm movement, and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.

When the device was to be used, technicians connected the pedestal to a computer with a cable. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.

Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets, as technicians calibrated the machine, a process that took about half an hour each time. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by nearby neurons as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.

Scientists said the study was important because it showed that the neurons in Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex were still active, years after they had any role to play in physically moving his arms.

Cursor control was not very smooth. In a task where the goal was to guide the cursor from the center of the screen to a target on the perimeter, Mr. Nagle hit the target about 73 to 95 percent of the time. When he did, it took an average of 2.5 seconds, though sometimes much longer. The second patient tested with the implant had worse control than Mr. Nagle, the paper said.

By contrast, healthy people moving the cursor by hand can hit the target almost every time and in only one second.

Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, a researcher at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, said the BrainGate performance did not appear to be substantially better than a non-invasive system he is developing using electroencephalography, in which electrodes are placed outside the scalp.

“If you are going to have something implanted into your brain, you’d probably want it to be a lot better,’’ he said.

Dr. Donoghue and other proponents of the implants say they have the potential to be a lot better, because they are much closer to the relevant neurons. The scalp electrodes get signals from millions of neurons all over the brain.

One way to improve implant performance was suggested by another paper in the same edition of Nature. In a study involving monkeys, Krishna V. Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University eavesdropped not on the neurons controlling arm movement but on those expressing the intention to move.

“Instead of sliding the cursor out to the target, we can just predict which target would be hit, and the cursor simply leaps there,’’ said Mr. Shenoy, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and neurosciences.

He said a patient using the system could do the equivalent of typing 15 words a minute, about four times the speed of the other devices.

Other obstacles must be overcome before brain implants become practical. The ability of the electrodes to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons that are not fully understood. Also, ideally, the implant would transmit signals out of the brain wirelessly, doing away with the permanent hole in the head and the accompanying risk of infection.

Mr. Nagle, meanwhile, had his implant removed after a bit more than a year, so he could undergo another operation that allowed him to breathe without a ventilator. He can control a computer with voice commands, so he does not really need the brain implant. But he said he was happy he volunteered for the experiment.

“It gave a lot of people hope,’’ he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/sc...rtner=homepage





Breakup and makeup

Wired Magazine Regains Web Sites

Wired magazine, the publication that helped popularize the Internet during the 1990’s, is poised to recover the online business it lost when the company was divided eight years ago.

Lycos Inc. said Tuesday that it had agreed to sell its Wired News online properties for $25 million to Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine, the print publication that is equal parts technology-culture trend-spotter and glossy product catalog.
Lycos acquired Wired News for a reported $83 million as part of the Wired Digital acquisition that closed in June 1999. The deal came a year after Advance Publications, owner of Condé Nast, paid $75 million to buy Wired from Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, the co-founders, and other investors. The sale followed two failed efforts at an initial public offering.

The current transaction includes the sale of the Wired.com domain name and Wired News assets. Lycos will retain other original Wired online properties including Hotbot, Hotwired and Webmonkey.

While one of the earliest and most insistent promoters of the notion that digital technology and the Web would transform business, Wired magazine’s efforts to live up to its own mantra have been hamstrung by the loss of its online domain.

Upon completion of the deal, the assets of Wired News will be operated as part of CondéNet, the Web division of Condé Nast.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/bu...a/12wired.html





Web Site Comparing Shipping Rates Launches
Brian Bergstein

The inspiration struck Bill Van Wyck while he drove around one day trying to find a good deal on a package he was sending to Australia: What if a Web site could offer side-by-side comparisons of shipping rates, just like travel sites do with airfares?

Van Wyck gathered about $5 million from investors and turned the idea into RedRoller.com, a site that debuted last month.

Enter your address, the weight of a package and its destination, and the site displays a grid with the prices various couriers would charge to send the item, depending on the delivery time. With a few clicks, you can print a shipping label and schedule a pickup, or find the nearest drop-off center.

"Instead of being designed to ship people, it was designed to ship packages," Van Wyck said.

Targeted at small businesses and shipping-intensive consumers such as eBay sellers, RedRoller is free to use. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company expects to make money from advertising and supplemental businesses such as sales of shipping supplies and integration of RedRoller's service with outside sites.

The site connects to FedEx, DHL, the U.S. Postal Service and some regional couriers, but there's a conspicuous absence: UPS, which refused to open its systems to RedRoller.

UPS spokesman Steve Holmes said the company generally lets third parties deal with its customers only when UPS can maintain some control over the process.

Even if UPS were to change course, shipping industry analyst Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting Group Inc. suggests RedRoller will be lucky to survive. Jindel said similar ideas have failed, partly because there are key differences between shipping and the airline industry, with its inscrutable pricing schemes.

"If they are able to make a great success of it," Jindel said, "I will say they are truly geniuses."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-26-31





Zidane's Head-Butt The Rage on The Web
Jocelyn Noveck

The head-butt: It's the new butt of Internet jokes. As swiftly as a speeding shot on goal, riffs on Zinedine Zidane's infamous moment of soccer rage have invaded cyberspace. Though fans across the world are clearly divided on whether the French star deserves condemnation or sympathy for head-butting an Italian opponent in the World Cup final, the Web has been typically merciless.

Some jokes take the form of interactive games.

Wondering, for example, how many Marco Materazzis YOU could knock down with a single butt to the chest? AddictingGames.com gives you the chance: Just a left click of the mouse, and the Zidane figure goes to work against a sea of Italian defenders. The game gives you a red-card score at the end.

On Wednesday afternoon, the most viewed video on YouTube.com, the popular site for user-posted videos, was "A New Way to Solve Problems," from Austria, in which a succession of a dozen or so innocent street encounters culminate in - you guessed it, the head-butt.

Example: a tourist with a map asks a bicyclist for directions. The bicyclist gets off to help, but can't. "You don't know?" the suddenly angry tourist exclaims. THWAK! A header to the chest.

Just under 600,000 people had viewed the video by late Wednesday, and many added comments supportive of Zidane. So did the video's makers: "We are not against Zidane, he is still the best. ok!!"

Also on the site: a video where instead of simply collapsing after the head-butt, Materazzi erupts in flames, too.

Zidane made his first public comments about the head-butt felt 'round the world in an interview Wednesday on French TV. He offered repeated apologies - especially to children who watched it - but not regrets, saying Materazzi had made cruel insults to his mother and sister.

It might be some comfort to Zidane fans that the French star isn't the only one being mocked.

Another video circulating widely the past few days is actually from 2004. In an ad for Britain's Guardian newspaper, a fictitious soccer team - dubbed Italy's, by the various users who've posted it to YouTube - is practicing for the Euro 2004 championships. But what are they practicing? Tumbling to the ground in exaggerated agony, clutching themselves and gesturing for the referee to take notice.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-12-19-34-14





A Visionary Seeking to Connect the World, Wirelessly
Robin Finn

GEEKSTER-HOOD is powerful. And visionary. And necessary. At least it is in the worldview of Marshall Brown, the Internet impresario who is making good on a personal vision this summer by staking New Yorkers — and city visitors prescient enough to pack laptops or other paraphernalia critical to mobile connectivity — to free wireless Web access at 18 locales in 10 city parks. Hard to imagine how we ever dallied in those parks without him and Wi-Fi Salon.

Mr. Brown, sharing his tale of start-up ingenuity while sitting on a bench in the art gallery of the landmark Arsenal in Central Park at East 54th Street, sure can’t. “Probably a million people come to Central Park on a sunny summer day, and if even 1 percent of them come with wireless-capable devices, that’s a thousand people who can be connecting with our service,” he fantasizes, fidgeting with his wedding band as he speaks. If Mr. Brown seems a tad nervous, and he does, perhaps it stems from having switched off both of his cellular phones for politeness’s sake. To a gadget addict of his caliber, being out of the digital loop must be akin to finding himself in public without his clothes on.

A mild-mannered, latter-day Walter Mitty from Sayville on Long Island who says he came up with a conceptualization for an MP3-style music device during a 1991 brainstorming session with his father, an engineer (“Too bad we didn’t act on it,” he says), he lately dreams of the wireless bubble on a grandiose scale. “The first end of Internet expansion was about globalization,” he lectures — yes, he spent five years as a teaching fellow at Harvard — “but this second phase of wireless Internet is going to be about the Internet made local.” His niche: for example, “What we’re going to enable by installing our portals in the parks is for people to get more in touch with where they happen to be.” Cool.

He foresees a universe where “the end point is that all the major cities are covered by the Internet umbrella, there is world-pervasive computerization, and people get all content all the time.” Yikes. And, to paraphrase a Carpenters tune from the last century (sorry), he’s only just begun.

“The challenge is to get from where we are now to that point; it’s as much a cause as a company,” he says of Wi-Fi Salon, the tiny company he formed in 2003 on, not by coincidence, Sept. 11.

HE selected the starting date in deference to the ‘What can a software-centric guy like me possibly do to help?’ epiphany he had had two years earlier as a husband of one year (he took his vows on Sept. 17, 2000, at Windows on the World) with a 3-month-old son. Who says entrepreneurs can’t be sentimental as well as ambitious?

Once Mr. Brown had read and digested “Organizing Genius,” a primer for progressive types who see innovations like eBay as business templates — “Beautiful” and “genius” are his words for eBay — he was on his way.

“When you go from being a lone entrepreneur into this kind of very public space you know your work is going to get reviews — good, bad, or indifferent, well, probably not indifferent,” says Mr. Brown, whose mission elicits the protest “Inappropriate!” from Luddites.

“The toughest thing in the world is to scale beyond yourself,” he says of his effort to help obliterate the digital divide in New York City, a place, he notes, that ought to be the wireless capital of the world but is not even in the running.

Mr. Brown’s attempt to plug into what he calls “neighborhood hot spots” has unfolded in fits, starts and setbacks since the city awarded him the parks contract in October 2004 after Verizon withdrew from the project.

Mr. Brown and the team of consultants who comprise Wi-Fi Salon — “I love technology, but I know this much about myself: I’m not detail-oriented enough to be a coder or an engineer” — are resigned to running “in the red” for the first half of what is essentially a three-year, $90,000 contract. Meaning, Wi-Fi is paying the city for the right to serve as its wireless conduit, with all 18 locations expected to be functional by the end of August. He admits it helps that his wife, Pauline, “is a high-powered corporate executive” at Avon. She supports his wireless dream so long as he doesn’t bring his gadgets along on vacations. Still, the arrangement with the city was in danger of falling apart after Wi-Fi’s initial sponsor reneged; a pact with Nokia, a Finnish manufacturer, salvaged the situation.

This month Wi-Fi Salon activated the first of its wireless “hot spots” in Battery Park, and Mr. Brown says the portal there will offer a historical slide show, a tour of the Dutch gardens, and a video-cam hookup to the Statue of Liberty. In Mr. Brown’s wireless neighborhoods, connectivity is accompanied by educational content.

“People ask me, ‘Why the heck are you doing this? There’s no business model for it,’ and I tell them, ‘That’s exactly why,’ ” he says. “We’re very much at the ‘Gee whiz’ phase of this technology.” But he predicts that by 2007, 100 million WiFi devices will be in use.

He does not apologize for interposing modern technology into classic parks: “I think we should pat everyone down for cellphones before they go into the park,” he jokes. “But we don’t. Technology is the new reality.” Which reminds him: high time to check his e-mail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/nyregion/14lives.html





U.S. Terror Targets: Petting Zoo and Flea Market?
Eric Lipton

It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.

“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”

But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.”

“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says.

In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”

Even people connected to some of those businesses or events are baffled at their inclusion as possible terrorist targets.

“Seems like someone has gone overboard,” said Larry Buss, who helps organize the Apple and Pork Festival in Clinton, Ill. “Their time could be spent better doing other things, like providing security for the country.”

Angela McNabb, manager of the Sweetwater Flea Market, which is 50 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., said: “I don’t know where they get their information. We are talking about a flea market here.”

New York City officials, who have questioned the rationale for the reduction in this year’s antiterrorism grants, were similarly blunt.

“Now we know why the Homeland Security grant formula came out as wacky as it was,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Tuesday. “This report is the smoking gun that thoroughly indicts the system.”

The source of the problems, the audit said, appears to be insufficient definitions or standards for inclusion provided to the states, which submit lists of locations for the database.

New York, for example, lists only 2 percent of the nation’s banking and finance sector assets, which ranks it between North Dakota and Missouri. Washington State lists nearly twice as many national monuments and icons as the District of Columbia.

Montana, one of the least populous states in the nation, turned up with far more assets than big-population states including Massachusetts, North Carolina and New Jersey.

The inspector general questions whether many of the sites listed in whole categories — like the 1,305 casinos, 163 water parks, 159 cruise ships, 244 jails, 3,773 malls, 718 mortuaries and 571 nursing homes — should even be included in the tally.

But the report also notes that the list “may have too few assets in essential areas.” It apparently does not include many major business and finance operations or critical national telecommunications hubs.

The department does not release the list of 77,069 sites, but the report said that as of January it included 17,327 commercial properties like office buildings, malls and shopping centers, 12,019 government facilities, 8,402 public health buildings, 7,889 power plants and 2,963 sites with chemical or hazardous materials.

George W. Foresman, the department’s under secretary for preparedness, said the audit misunderstood the purpose of the database, as it was an inventory or catalog of national assets, not a prioritized list of the most critical sites.The database is just one of many sources consulted in deciding antiterrorism grants.

The inspector general recommends that the department review the list and determine which of the “extremely insignificant” assets that have been included should remain and provide better guidance to states on what to submit in the future.

Mr. Agen, the Homeland Security Department spokesman, said that he agreed that his agency should provide better directions for the states and that it would do so in the future.

One business owner who learned from a reporter that a company named Amish Country Popcorn was on the list was at first puzzled. The businessman, Brian Lehman, said he owned the only operation in the country with that name.

“I am out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Lehman, whose business in Berne, Ind., has five employees and grows and distributes popcorn. “We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care.”

But on second thought, he came up with an explanation: “Maybe because popcorn explodes?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/wa.../12assets.html





Crow Believed to Be Oldest in World Dies
AP

There's no way to prove Tata was the world's oldest crow when he died Sunday at age 59. But an expert on crows says it's possible.

Tata's tale began in 1947 when a thunderstorm blew the fledgling out of his nest in a Long Island cemetery, a mishap that likely led to his long life. Injured and unable to fly, the bird was scooped up by a cemetery caretaker and brought to a local family with a reputation for taking care of animals, Tata's most recent owner, Kristine Flones, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston.

"He was never able to fly, so he became their family pet," said Flones, a wildlife rehabilitator in the Woodstock, N.Y., hamlet of Bearsville, 95 miles north of New York City.

The Manetta family took care of Tata for more than half a century but gave the bird to Flones in 2001 because of their own health problems.

Blinded by cataracts and 54 years old when she got him, Tata was still a wonderful pet, Flones said.

"When you came around him, his energy was very beautiful," she told the newspaper. "It was as if he were exuding or giving off a loving energy."

"It's an incredibly old bird," said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University who has studied crows for more than 20 years. "They don't live that old in the wild."

McGowan said the oldest living crow he has documented in the wild is a bird he banded as a fledgling and has tracked for 15 years. There is an unsubstantiated claim of a 29- or 30-year-old crow in the wild, but he knows of no older crows, tame or otherwise.

While claims of animal longevity are tough to verify, McGowan said, "This one sounded pretty reasonable to me."

In an environment without predators, communicable disease or the likelihood of a fatal accident, a crow could grow as old as Tata, he said.

Flones said Tata was still active and alert in his later years, to the point each spring that he called out from inside the house to crows outside, often loudly and beginning at 5 a.m.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2165981





The Continuing Adventures and Movie Cameos of Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane
Joe Rhodes


Jack Larson and Noel Neill

The flickering attention span of Hollywood, barely able to sustain itself from one big opening weekend to the next, has already moved on. All the prerelease debates about the cultural significance of “Superman Returns,” the first summer blockbuster of the year, about whether Superman might be gay, whether he’s a messiah figure, about what he represents in a post-9/11 world, are being replaced. Now there are conversations about Caribbean pirates and, soon enough, about the new James Bond, the new “Miami Vice,” the metaphysical implications of “Snakes on a Plane” and what there is to be learned from “Clerks II.”

Jack Larson and Noel Neill have been through this before, often enough over the last 50 years not to take it too seriously, infrequently enough to enjoy it when it comes. As the most lasting video incarnations of Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, Superman’s pal and gal, Mr. Larson, now 74, and Ms. Neill, 85, have inevitably been swept up in the buzz surrounding every new version of the Man of Steel. This has been happening since their 1950’s-epitomizing “truth, justice and the American way” television series, “The Adventures of Superman,” went off the air in 1958, its six-year run abruptly halted by the shooting death of its star, George Reeves, eventually ruled a suicide.

“Our George,” as Ms. Neill referred to him. “He will always be Superman to us.”

When that series ended, both Ms. Neill and Mr. Larson retreated from their acting careers for very different reasons, lured back into the spotlight only on those rare occasions when the producers of new “Superman” adaptations — films in the late 1970’s and early 80’s; cartoons; television versions like “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” and “Smallville” in the 90’s — would seek them out. They make cameo appearances in “Superman Returns,” directed by Bryan Singer, Ms. Neill as a wealthy widow whose deathbed scene is the opening act of the film, and Mr. Larson as a bow-tie-wearing bartender serving drinks to Jimmy Olsen (played this time by Sam Huntington) and Clark Kent.

“Bryan Singer has shown great respect for the entire Superman legend, for our television show, for Noel and for me,” Mr. Larson said, occasionally grasping Ms. Neill’s hand as they sat together recently in Patrick’s Roadhouse, a weathered, memorabilia-cluttered diner alongside the traffic-jammed Pacific Coast Highway, where Ms. Neill, who lives nearby, is a regular. “I was enormously moved and gratified by that.”

Mr. Singer offered casting invitations in person to Mr. Larson and Ms. Neill before “Superman Returns” began filming last year in Australia.

Ms. Neill, the daughter of a Minneapolis newspaper editor, was a little-known Paramount contract player on loan to Columbia in 1948 when she first played Lois Lane opposite Kirk Alyn in a 15-episode “Superman” serial and its 1950 sequel, “Atom Man Versus Superman.” Another actress (Phyllis Coates) played Lois in the first year of the television series, with Ms. Neill reclaiming the part in 1953. Ever since, she has been identified with the role, which she has embraced, frequently appearing at comic-book conventions and fan gatherings. In 2003 she was the subject of an authorized biography, “Truth, Justice and the American Way: The Life and Times of Noel Neill, the Original Lois Lane.”

Except for the occasional cameo (a brief scene in the 1978 “Superman” film, a 1991 appearance with Mr. Larson in the syndicated “Superboy” television series), Ms. Neill stopped acting after “The Adventures of Superman” ended.

“I just figured I’d worked enough, I didn’t have any great ambition,” she said, when asked why she’d walked away. “Basically, I’m a beach bum. I was married, we lived near the beach, that was enough for me.”

For Mr. Larson, it was more complicated. With dreams of being a playwright and Broadway actor, he had misgivings about even taking the Jimmy Olsen role. But, only 18, needing the money and convinced that the show would never take off, he signed on for 26 episodes, receiving at most $350 a show. A year later he was living in New York when the episodes began to be broadcast. His worst fears suddenly came true.

“To me, it was a nightmare,” he said. “Everywhere I went, it was, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy! Hey, Jimmy, where’s Superman?’ Suddenly, I couldn’t take the bus or the subway anymore. It absolutely freaked me out.”

Feeling as if he couldn’t be taken seriously in New York, Mr. Larson returned to Los Angeles and, thinking that he had no other options, to “The Adventures of Superman.” “I always loved doing the show, I loved the work,” he said. “I just didn’t love what it did to my career.”

After a particularly humiliating encounter with the producer Mervyn LeRoy in 1961 — “He started castigating the casting director right in front of me, saying, “I can’t have him in my film! He’s Jimmy Olsen!’ ” — Mr. Larson sought advice from his onetime lover, the actor Montgomery Clift. He remembers the meeting at the Bel Air Hotel.

“Monty said, ‘This is going to continue,’ ” Mr. Larson recalled. “ ‘Don’t put yourself in these situations anymore. You need to leave this behind.’ And that’s when I decided to quit acting.”

He focused instead on his writing, becoming an award-winning playwright and librettist, receiving the first Rockefeller Foundation grant ever awarded to a playwright. He collaborated with composers including Virgil Thomson, Irving Fine and Ned Rorem, and his rhymed verse plays were performed all over the world. He was also a producer on films like “The Paper Chase,” “Urban Cowboy” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” often working with his domestic partner, the director James Bridges, with whom he lived for 35 years before Mr. Bridges’s death in 1993.

It wasn’t until the late 1970’s that Mr. Larson became confident and relaxed enough to talk about the part that made him famous, to take pride in the work he had done.

He still doesn’t work the fan-club circuit in the way that Ms. Neill does. He would rather relax in his Brentwood, Calif., house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, than travel to face screaming admirers. He still can’t get over a visit to Cleveland in 1988 for the 50th anniversary of Superman’s comic book debut and “the thousands of people coming at us with pictures to autograph and Sharpie pens.”

“And I had this beautiful white linen suit from Venice, made at the Piazza San Marco,” Mr. Larson said. “The best cleaners in Brentwood couldn’t get the ink stains out of that suit.”

Ms. Neill laughed at his stories and told him he should join her on the road more often, even as she recounted the tale of the fan who came up to her at a convention and said, “Are you Lois Lane?”

“I sure hope so,” she told him. “That’s why I’m here.

“I just wanted you to know that when I was young, I would run home from school, turn on the TV set, crawl underneath and try to look up your dress.”

Mr. Larson said, “See, those are die-hard fans.”

They spent the better part of the afternoon together, he in his gold-and-white striped seersucker jacket, she with her silver hair flowing onto the shoulders of her bright yellow jacket, getting constant refills of sugary iced tea. They’ve been running into each other here before Patrick’s even existed, when the site was just a hamburger joint across from the beach where he used to surf and where she played volleyball and lounged. That was more than 50 years and a dozen Superman versions ago.

“People love the characters, they love the movies, they love seeing us,” Ms. Neill said. “So we must have done something right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/movies/13supe.html
















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