Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 15th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista." – Randall C. Kennedy





























I’ll Give You a Red X

Warning: Your Computer Is Infected!

The yellow box popping up relentlessly from your toolbar insists it must be clicked so Microsoft can install a program that will remove the infection and protect you from further harm. The lifeline is thrown but you pause, poised between panic and doubt, wondering if it’s legit...hey, it's from Microsoft, right? RIGHT? Actually no, it’s the infamous “Red X” exploit and once you click you're really in trouble. So don’t. Because if you do some seriously bad stuff is installed.

Perhaps worse, for those who smell a rat and don't click, the web is filled with the most god awful advice and insanely complicated instructions on how to remove this pissy little trojan, screaming about "179 registry entries!" like it’s some mutant Baskin-Robbins product. So many pages of Hijack This logs, downloads, registry edits, restarts, new programs, more edits, more programs etc. you’d need a PHD in engineering to save your files and avoid the dreaded reformat. Whoa.

There’s a Better Way

Take a breath, relax, and download the genuine malicious software removal tool from MS. Launch and run overnight. When you wake up it'll all be gone like a bad dream. You’ll see. It even does the restarts.

Doesn’t get any easier.















Enjoy,

Jack














November 15th, 2008




Internet Attacks Grow More Potent
John Markoff

Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks. Known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks, such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

A survey of 70 of the largest Internet operators in North America, South America, Europe and Asia found that malicious attacks were rising sharply and that the individual attacks were growing more powerful and sophisticated, according to the Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. This report is produced annually by Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks.

The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be overwhelmed by the most powerful attackers.

The Arbor Networks researchers said a 40-gigabit attack took place this year when two rival criminal cybergangs began quarreling over control of an online Ponzi scheme. “This was, initially, criminal-on-criminal crime though obviously the greatest damage was inflicted on the infrastructure used by the criminals,” the network operator wrote in a note on the attack.

The attack employed a method called reflective amplification, which allowed a relatively small number of attack computers to generate a huge stream of data toward a victim. The technique has been in use since 2006.

“We’re definitely seeing more targeted attacks toward e-commerce sites,” said Danny McPherson, chief security officer for Arbor Networks. “Most enterprises are connected to the Internet with a one-gigabit connection or less. Even a two-gigabit D.D.O.S. attack will take them offline.”

Large network operators that run the backbone of the Internet have tried to avoid the problem by building excess capacity into their networks, said Edward G. Amoroso, the chief security officer of AT&T. He likened the approach to a large shock absorber, but said he still worried about the growing scale of the attacks.

“We have a big shock absorber,” he said. “It works, but it’s not going to work if there’s some Pearl Harbor event.”

Over all, the operators reported they were growing more able to respond to D.D.O.S. attacks because of improved collaboration among service providers.

According to the Arbor Networks report, the network operators said the largest botnets — which in some cases encompass millions of “zombie” computers — continue to “outpace containment efforts and infrastructure investment.”

Despite a drastic increase in the number of attacks, the percentage referred to law enforcement authorities declined. The report said 58 percent of the Internet service providers had referred no instances to law enforcement in the last 12 months. When asked why there were so few referrals, 29 percent said law enforcement had limited capabilities, 26 percent said they expected their customers to report illegal activities and 17 percent said there was “little or no utility” in reporting attacks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/te...10attacks.html





China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu.

Just a week ago, reports came in that China had started to ban 10 video hosting sites, allegedly because of “regulations violations”. Other sites, including China’s largest eDonkey indexing site, VeryCD, received warnings. A few days later, however, VeryCD users found that their favorite eDonkey site was redirected to the Chinese search engine - Baidu.com.

It soon became apparent that VeryCD was not the only P2P website to be hijacked. A host of BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were also affected. People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China’s Google.

The domain hijacks continued for more than two days straight, but were lifted yesterday. According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn’t seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe. Also, DNS issues can’t explain why all the P2P sites were suddenly redirected to another website.

Mininova co-founder Niek, whose domain was also redirected to Baidu told TorrentFreak: “We had the questionable honor of joining Wikipedia and YouTube on the list of websites that (at some point) were censored in China. Fortunately the people in charge made the right decision, and realized that blocking a search engine like Mininova wasn’t such a good idea.”

“I’m happy to see that the block is removed now, though it would be nice to talk to the people who made this decision so we can understand their motives,” Niek added. The true reason behind the hijack attempt will probably never come to light. Most importantly, the ‘problems’ are resolved now, and all BitTorrent sites are accessible again.
http://torrentfreak.com/china-hijack...-sites-081108/





Lines Drawn in Battle Over Sweden’s File Sharing Bill
David Landes

Debate in Sweden is growing ever hotter over a proposed law that will make it easier for law enforcement to track down those suspected of illegally downloading copyrighted material from the internet.

On Thursday, several high profile members of the Swedish entertainment industry came out in support of the new measure, while public opposition to the law, based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), continued to mount.

The proposal would make it possible for copyright holders to get a court order requesting the release of information about certain IP addresses if there is probable cause that someone has broken copyright laws.

The copyright holders could then directly contact those suspected of illegal file sharing and request that they stop. If the downloading continues, then information gleaned from internet service providers could be used as the basis for lawsuits demanding compensation for copyright violations.

Political discussions are also ongoing, and neither enterprise minister Maud Olofsson nor justice minister Beatrice Ask, who is formally responsible for implementing the measure, can say exactly when the proposal will move forward.

According to the original timetable, the measure is to be introduced sometime in November and to take effect on April 1st, 2009, but the governing parties have yet to reach an agreement on the bill’s final wording.

“We’re working on improvements, but we don’t do that in public,” said Jan Andersson, a Riksdag member from the Centre Party, to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

Andersson sits in the Riksdag’s committee of industry and trade, which is preparing the legislation.

In an article in Dagens Nyheter (DN) signed by a long list of celebrities, including musician Per Gessle, actor Mikael Persbrandt, and film director Colin Nutley, the group states that Sweden’s music industry has lost around 60 percent of its revenues since the start of the decade.

“It’s that group of notorious uploaders of copyrighted material which the new legislation is designed to stop,” they write.

“Unfortunately, that’s not true,” responded Moderate Party parliamentarian Karl Sigfrid, who is trying to change the proposal which was recently sent to the Council on Legislation (Lagrådet).

“The proposal isn’t aimed at the large-scale file sharers, but at everyone,” he said.

Pirate Party vice-chair Christian Engström started a Facebook group opposed to the measure which now has more than 22,000 members.

“We have examples from other countries where this has amounted to the legalization of wide-spread blackmail,” he told SvD.

“Record companies get the name of someone suspected of file sharing and send out a letter demanding 20,000 kronor ($2,500) or some other made up sum with the threat that if you don’t pay, we’ll be taking you to court.”

The youth organizations of all the centre-right political parties are highly critical of the law.

“Throw IPRED in the waste bin,” writes the head of the Centre Party’s youth organization (CUF), Magnus Andersson, on his blog.

He continues, saying that “this is a shitty law” which hunts down file sharers and he criticizes Swedish celebrities for writing a very “low level” argument in their DN article.

The centre-right youth organizations have decided to act in concert in hopes that the government will take their concerns into consideration.

“The idea is that we can write something up together and make things clear to our mother parties. We’re filing an article as we speak,” said Frida Johansson-Metso, head of the Liberal Party’s youth organization, LUF, to SvD.
http://www.thelocal.se/15688/





P2P Policy to Require RIAA Proof
Hanna Mahuta

Duke will now require agencies like the Recording Industry Association of America to provide evidence of copyright infringement before forwarding pre-litigation notices to students, the Office of Student Affairs said Tuesday.

The University has stepped up its support for students with the new policy, scheduled to go into effect before the end of the semester. In the past, the University did not provide student information to the RIAA without a subpoena, but forwarded all pre-litigation notices to students without evaluating the validity of the infringement claims.

Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta said that under the new policy, the University will not forward a pre-litigation notice from the RIAA unless there is evidence that a third-party download was facilitated by the Duke student in question.

"What we're saying is that in order for us to pass on a settlement letter to a student, we're going to start requiring evidence that someone actually downloaded from that student," Moneta said. "If the RIAA can't prove that actual illegal behavior occurred, then we're not going to comply."

Individuals cited for copyright infringement by the RIAA are known only by an IP address that has been flagged for uploading one or more illegal files. The RIAA polices peer-to-peer networks and collects evidence of infringement against certain IP addresses, forwarding infringement letters to universities that then follow up with the individuals.

In the past year, the RIAA has sent more than 1,000 infringement notices to Duke students, including more than 40 pre-litigation notices, 21 settlement offers and eight subpoenas. Over the past three months, the RIAA has filed three civil lawsuits against Duke students for sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks like Limewire and Kazaa.

Shawn, a junior whose name has been changed to protect his identity, settled with the RIAA for $3,000 but said the playing field would have been more level if he had had access to a lawyer when he received a pre-litigation notice from the University.

"Nothing is going to be solved until Duke gets a student lawyer to contest this in a joint case," he said. "When you get the e-mail from the RIAA, you have no idea what to do, or who to go to. Most kids can't afford a lawyer, but if one lawyer is at Duke to file a joint case they could probably get [the RIAA] to drop it."

Without a University policy requiring the RIAA to supply evidence of alleged illegal activity, students may have been at risk for erroneous claims of infringement. Many experts have disputed the soundness of the RIAA's methods of detecting copyright infringement, said Owen Astrachan, professor of the practice of computer science and co-director of undergraduate studies for the department. The RIAA's current policing software can generate false positives that wrongly implicate users for illegal downloads, he explained.

But for one student who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the new P2P policy is as frustrating than having to pay thousands of dollars in fines in the first place.

"So basically what they're saying now is that before this they didn't have proof? They allowed for 'not good proof' to be shown beforehand, or just not shown at all?" he said. "So now Duke is requiring evidence-so what? It's still not going to change anything."
http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/m...-3544424.shtml





U.S. Congress to Push for Net Neutrality Legislation
Grant Gross

The U.S. Congress will push for net neutrality legislation next year, even though the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has acted against broadband providers that it found to block or slow Web content, an adviser to a senior U.S. senator said Thursday.

While the FCC has addressed what it saw as net neutrality violations on a case-by-case basis in recent years, a law passed by Congress would provide customers, investors, Web-based companies and broadband providers with certainty about the rules of the road, said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel for Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat and cosponsor of a bill introduced in 2007 that would have created a net neutrality law.

"We definitely think legislation is necessary," said Wellings, speaking at a University of Nebraska College of Law forum on telecom law in Washington, D.C.

Net neutrality merger conditions placed by the FCC upon AT&T in its December 2006 acquisition of rival BellSouth were "proof to us that the world doesn't end if you choose not to discriminate" against Internet content, Wellings added. Congress may also look at ways to spur broadband competition by going back to rules that require broadband providers to share their networks with competitors, and it may allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate broadband providers for unfair business practices, she added.

AT&T would prefer that the FCC continue to act on a case-by-case basis on net neutrality issues, said James Cicconi, the telecom's senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs. After a heated debate for a couple of years, there's been a consensus forming around net neutrality, with many broadband providers now acknowledging that customers want an open Internet and many net neutrality advocates acknowledging that network providers need to manage their networks for the good of customers, he said.

"There's a lot of people who now believe that companies like AT&T are not plotting to overthrow the open Internet concept," Cicconi said.

It's against AT&T's economic interest to block or slow Internet content, because customers demand an open Internet, he added. "Our core asset is our network," he said. "We get paid for carrying bits."

But new legislation could raise questions among investors in broadband providers, he added.

"There is definitely a need on the part of investors to not hobble the network operators," added Rebecca Arbogast, a principal with Stifel Nicolaus, a brokerage and investment firm.

While the FCC doesn't have hard rules against broadband providers blocking or slowing Internet content, "as a practical matter," it has made clear that such activities won't be allowed, she said. In the most recent case, the FCC ruled in August that cable modem provider Comcast was wrong in slowing some peer-to-peer and other traffic in the name of network management.

But Comcast has appealed that order, saying that the FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality rules. There is the potential for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rule against the FCC, either by saying the FCC must create a rule against net neutrality instead of enforcing broad principles, or by saying the FCC has no authority to enforce net neutrality under existing law, panelists said.

Arbogast and Cicconi also rejected Wellings' suggestion that the U.S. government consider rules forcing broadband providers to sell access to competitors on a wholesale basis. That concept, tried in the late '90s and early this decade, largely didn't work, Arbogast said.

But broadband providers are trying to have it "both ways," by rejecting a net neutrality law and rejecting efforts to spur competition such as mandated line-sharing, said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, a group advocating for net neutrality rules. More competition could lessen the need for net neutrality rules, he said.

Arbogast agreed. "If we had five or six [broadband] competitors, my guess is we wouldn't be having this conversation," she said.

Wellings expressed hope that President-elect Barack Obama will push for net neutrality -- he was a cosponsor of the 2007 Dorgan bill -- and will push for ways to expand broadband to rural and other underserved areas of the country. "The iPhone is still not available in North Dakota, and it's a sad thing," she said.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...gislation.html





Irish Minister to Meet Phone Industry on 'Cyber-Bullying'
Elaine Edwards

Mobile phone operators have been asked to put their “considerable resources” into tackling the abuse of children through so-called cyber-bullying.

Minister for Children Barry Andrews will meet industry representatives tomorrow to urge them to take steps to reduce the problem.

He said the latest data available to him suggested that 55 per cent of children between five and nine years old and about 90 per cent of 10-14 year-old children in Ireland now have a mobile phone.

“By EU standards, this is a very high level of penetration,” he said.

Mr Andrews said research by the children’s charity Barnardos indicated that 82 per cent of parents are concerned about cyber-bullying and that 39 per cent of children had experienced or witnessed such incidents.

“Mobile phones are a great comfort for children and parents in providing assurance about children’s whereabouts, but can easily be turned in to a powerful tool for bullying,” he said.

Earlier this week, the Irish Cellular Industry Association made a presentation on this matter to the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources on the issue.

Mr Andrews said while some protective steps have been taken by operators on multimedia messaging and web-based telecommunications, there had been little progress on voice and text messages.

“Spokespersons from the sector addressing the Oireachtas committee on Wednesday made clear that the operators have not found a viable solution to combat voice and text bullying,” he said.

He urged the industry to work with the committee to ensure its “considerable resources” were employed to come up with concrete solutions to what he said could only be described as “psychological abuse”.

“Mobile telephony now enables bullies to target their victims in a very personal fashion at all hours of the day and night. I will be requesting operators to step forward to put in place robust protections that will reduce the likelihood of targeted bullying.”

Fine Gael justice spokesman Charlie Flanagan said today social networking sites such as Facebook and Youtube are increasing the chances of cyber bullying.

He said the issue was posing a real risk to children and causing angst and trauma in many families.

Mr Flanagan called on the Government to adopt international best practice to become more proactive in combating the problem.

The new Office of Internet Safety (OIS) in the Department of Justice currently monitors the self-regulation of service providers within the industry. It is due to publish an information guide on cyber bullying next month.

“The booklet is intended to increase awareness of all aspects of cyber bullying in the new media world,” said Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...breaking77.htm





Argentine Judge: Google, Yahoo Must Censor Searches
Stephanie Condon

If an Argentine sports fan tried searching Yahoo Argentina for one of his country's most beloved athletes--soccer star Diego Maradona--these days, he'd be out of luck.

Both Yahoo and Google are locked in a legal battle with dozens of fashion models and other public figures like Maradona over whether the Internet companies should have to censor search results relating to those persons' names.

The result so far: since last year, Internet users have been left with abbreviated search results from Yahoo Argentina and Google Argentina, as a result of temporary restraining orders handed down by Argentine judges.

The restraining orders against Google and Yahoo mean the search companies must censor search results from their Argentine sites for information about the plaintiffs, such as their names. The court orders do not apply to the U.S. sites Google.com and Yahoo.com.

The move effectively holds the search companies responsible for content on other Web sites, a legal maneuver that would not be possible in the United States or the European Union, according to a Google representative. In the United States, federal law generally says that search engines are not responsible for the content of pages they index.

Google first received an injunction to block references to the individuals on its Argentina search engine in mid-2007, after refusing to do so voluntarily, said Alberto Arebalos, Google's director of Latin America global communications and public affairs. A group of about 70 fashion models, represented by the same lawyer, initially asked the Internet company to block all search results with their names with the intent of blocking pornographic sites that used the models' pictures. Google responded that it would only block specific problematic links, provided it could notify users, Arebalos said.

The matter was taken to court, and judges in Argentina have so far sided with the models. Other public figures--including Maradona and Judge María Servini de Cubría--have in recent months sought out the same lawyer to successfully block search results about them on Google and Yahoo as well.

The move amounts to a class action suit against the Internet companies, although there's technically no such thing as a class action suit in Argentina. The lawyer representing all the plaintiffs, Martin Leguizamon Peña, has sought damages between 100,000 and 400,000 pesos for his clients (about $30,000 to more than $121,000).

Both Google and Yahoo have unsuccessfully appealed the restraining orders and are now complying with them while the underlying lawsuits filed by Peña's clients are pending.

Peña probably "thought we'd make a deal out of court, but we don't want to do that because it's not a good deal," Arebalos said. "We will fight because we think this is a good fight."

Multiple restraining orders have been filed for some individuals. In some cases, the restraining orders require the search engines to censor results for certain keywords or URLs. In other instances, however, they call for broad restrictions such as censorship of "scandalous material."

Such broad restraining orders compelled Yahoo to remove all search results for certain plaintiffs such as Maradona, the soccer star. A search for "Diego Maradona" on Yahoo Argentina brings up only news results and a notification that--translated from the Spanish--reads, "On the occasion of a court order sought by private parties, we have been forced to temporarily remove some or all of the search results relating to it."

The notice was implemented early this week, according to Yahoo representative Tracy Schmaler, after it was engineered into the search results.

Arebalos said Google is appealing the court orders because it amounts to "censorship if we block all references to a person, because a lot of those can be lawful."

"Our position always has been we are not going to be the censor of the Internet," Arebalos said. "If you go to a newsstand and tell the owner he's responsible for reading every paper and finding the articles that could impact somebody, that doesn't make any sense. We are the newsstand."

While laws in the U.S. and E.U. make it clear that whoever posts content to the Internet is responsible for it, Arebalos said, no such laws exist in Argentina.

Google is working with Argentine government officials and the congress, Arebalos said, to fill the "legal vacuum" that allows for Internet companies to be held responsible for content. Other Latin American countries, such as Chile and Colombia, have made progress on that front, he said.

Arebalos said he did not know of any other cases in which a search engine had been asked by an individual to censor search results with his or her name. Searches have been limited in some other countries, however. German law, for instance, has forbidden searches for neo-Nazi material, and in France, auction sites have been barred from allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. In the U.S., copyright holders have forced Google to remove search results.

Google and Yahoo recently joined forces with other companies and human rights groups to create the Global Network Initiative, a framework for communications technology companies to follow in response to laws in various countries that may interfere with an Internet user's privacy or freedom of expression. The guidelines are intended for these types of situations, Schmaler said, and encourage principles such as transparency when complying with local law.

CNET's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10094597-38.html





Net Censorship Plan Backlash
Asher Moses

As opposition grows against the Government's controversial plan to censor the internet, the head of one of Australia's largest ISPs has labelled the Communications Minister the worst we've had in the past 15 years.

Separately, in Senate question time today, Greens senator Scott Ludlam accused the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, of misleading the public by falsely claiming his mandatory censorship plan was similar to that already in place in Sweden, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

Despite significant opposition from internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators and online rights activists, the Government is pressing ahead with its election promise of protecting people from unwanted material, this week calling for expressions of interests from ISPs keen to participate in live trials of the proposed internet filtering system.

Michael Malone, managing director iiNet, said he would sign up to be involved in the "ridiculous" trials, which are scheduled to commence by December 24 this year.

Optus and Telstra both said they were reviewing the Government's documentation and would then decide whether to take part.

But Malone's main purpose was to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it is" - specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds.

"They're not listening to the experts, they're not listening to the industry, they're not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help," he said.

"Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicising it."

Malone concluded: "This is the worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed."

The Government intends to introduce mandatory filtering of all "illegal material" and a second optional filter to block content deemed inappropriate for children, such as pornography.

Internet providers and the Government's own lab tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

Many ISPs already offer customers the option of switching on content filtering and the previous government provided free software filters for anyone to download from NetAlert.gov.au.

Much of the opposition to Senator Conroy's plan revolves around the fact that, unlike his earlier promises, he now wants to make the filtering mandatory for all Australians - spurred on by support from vocal minorities such as the Australian Family Association and the Australian Christian Lobby.

Senator Nick Xenophon and Family First Senator Steve Fielding, both of whom the Government needs to pass legislation, have already said they want the mandatory filters broadened to include the blocking of hard-core pornography and online gambling sites.

Grilled by a Senate Estimates committee in October, Senator Conroy said Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand had all implemented similar filtering systems. However, in all cases, participation by ISPs was optional and the filtering was limited in scope to predominantly child pornography.

"It is happening in two other countries - China and Saudi Arabia, that's who he's lined himself up with," said Malone.

In Senate question time today, Senator Ludlam asked the minister to explain those claims, but Senator Conroy dodged the question.

"We are aware of technical concerns with filtering technology, and that is why we are conducting a pilot, to put these claims to the test," he said.

Senator Ludlam then asked Senator Conroy to retract the claims, as well as to explain what he meant by "unwanted content" and to "acknowledge the legitimate concerns by commentators and many members of the public that such a system will degrade internet performance, prove costly and inefficient, and do very little to achieve the Government's policy objectives".

Senator Conroy said he could not answer all of those questions in the time provided and would be "happy to come back and provide the Senator with further information".
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...318639085.html





SKorea Cracks Down on Malicious Internet Use
AFP

South Korean police have rounded up more than 2,000 people for spreading malicious rumours on the Internet during a month-long crackdown sparked by an actress's suicide, officials said Monday.

The National Police Agency said 11 people have been formally arrested and detained for serious legal breaches and that prosecutors would be asked to charge another 2,019 with various offences.

Actress Choi Jin-Sil hanged herself last month. She was said to have been upset by Internet rumours that she lent a huge sum to actor Ahn Jae-Hwan, who had earlier killed himself because of debt pressures.

"After the top entertainer's suicide, there was a social consensus that those who spread false rumours online be sternly punished," Oh Se-Chan, a chief investigator at the agency's cyber-terror prevention centre, told AFP.

"The crackdown will continue in order to secure a cleaner and sounder environment on the Internet."

Some 59 percent of the 2,030 people were accused of libel or breaching laws on contempt, 23 percent of blackmail and 18 percent of cyber-stalking, the agency said.

In one case, a man rejected for a bank loan posted defamatory comments about the bank manager, the JoongAng Daily reported. Another man was detained after he posted in his blog that his ex-girlfriend had had a number of abortions.

Choi's death followed the suicide last year of two South Korean celebrities who came under cyber-attack on their own websites.

In response, the government in Seoul passed a law to curb the country's notorious cyber-bullying by preventing Internet users from hiding behind fake IDs when they post entries at major portals and news websites.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...Axm1hI1tgDw8qQ





Warner Bros. to Pull Out of DVDs in South Korea
Geoffrey A. Fowler and Sungha Park

Warner Bros. is getting out of the business of distributing DVDs in South Korea because of Internet piracy, marking the last major withdrawal by Hollywood in one of the world's most wired countries.

In coming weeks, Warner Bros. will shut its DVD operations in South Korea and sell licensing rights to a local company, which will take over the distribution of its movies, a Warner Bros. spokeswoman said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122643080489917991.html





MGM to Post Full Films on YouTube
Brad Stone and Brooks Barnes

YouTube is by far the world’s biggest stage for online video. But in some ways Hulu is stealing the show.

With critical plaudits and advertising dollars flowing to Hulu, the popular online hub for television shows and feature films, YouTube finds itself in the unanticipated position of playing catch-up.

On Monday, YouTube will move forward a little, announcing an agreement to show some full-length television shows and films from MGM, the financially troubled 84-year-old film studio.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program to YouTube, along with full-length action films like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven” and clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.” These will be free to watch, with ads running alongside the video.

The initial lineup may not be all that compelling, but for YouTube, which is owned by Google, the relationship with MGM is a crucial step in an essential reinvention. YouTube had its debut in 2005 and quickly became famous for the democratic sharing of bite-size video clips. Users love the site — 81 million people visited in September alone, according to Nielsen.

But Hollywood executives have complained over the way clips of their movies and shows pop up on the site without their permission. And advertisers have found that user-created videos of pet pratfalls and oddball skits are largely incompatible with commercials for cars and other products. Revenue at YouTube has disappointed Google investors since the company bought the start-up in 2006.

Now YouTube is trying harder to make friends with Hollywood — and emulate the appeal of Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox. Along with its MGM relationship, YouTube has recently forged ties with the independent studio Lionsgate and with CBS, which this month started posting to YouTube full-length episodes of older shows like “Star Trek” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”

“We believe in comprehensiveness, and we want to have deals with everybody,” said Jordan Hoffner, the director of content partnerships for YouTube. “We want to be able to give users the most content possible.”

In the last few months, YouTube has swept its virtual floors and painted its stage as it prepares to offer more professional videos. This month, it introduced a “theater view” button that expands the viewing screen and darkens the rest of the Web page for optimum viewing — a feature similar to one introduced by Hulu.

YouTube has also developed a system called VideoID. It allows media companies to spot unauthorized clips of their material on the site, and then either remove the clips or leave them up and sell ads on them. As part of its deal, MGM will begin scouring YouTube for studio clips, from properties like the James Bond and Rocky franchises, and pulling many of them from the site.

But MGM will also work with YouTube to choose which clips can remain online, supported by advertising.

“YouTube is essentially saying to media companies, ‘We are sorry for our past copyright stance; we weren’t thinking big enough. Let’s see how we can make some money together,’ ” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Mr. McQuivey thinks the strategy can work. “They have hundreds of millions of views,” he said, “and it will be very hard for studios to pass that up.”

For now, the studios appear to be dipping their toes in cautiously. Many Hollywood executives complain that YouTube’s online presentation is too cluttered.

They also say they are more comfortable with the cleaner, better organized Hulu, which does not have amateur-created videos and which sprang from their own ranks. Hulu had 6.3 million visitors in September, according to Nielsen, and has more than 100 sponsors trying out creative forms of advertising, like interactive games.

Jim Packer, MGM’s co-president, said his studio was starting slowly on YouTube, with action films intended to promote the studio’s video-on-demand channel, Impact, on Comcast. He said other MGM material would move to YouTube soon, including films like “Moonstruck” that appeal to women. But he did not see putting a significant part of the studio’s catalog on the site anytime soon.

“We will have some long-form videos up on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s the platform to have 30 or 40 movies up at once,” Mr. Packer said. “I feel much more comfortable doing that on a site like Hulu.”

Lionsgate has also tiptoed onto YouTube, putting up clips from certain films and TV shows and directing viewers to sites where they can buy the DVD or pay for a full-length download.

“We didn’t have huge expectations for this year,” Curt Marvis, Lionsgate’s president of digital media, said of the studio’s presence on YouTube. “We are still discussing, as I think YouTube is with every studio, how we can further take advantage of this audience.”

Mr. Hoffner, the YouTube executive, hinted that more digital deals were in the pipeline. Potential candidates, according to Hollywood and high-tech executives, include Time Warner and Sony, a part owner of MGM.

A Sony spokeswoman said the studio was already putting abridged versions of older shows, called minisodes, on YouTube, and that no larger deal was imminent — at least in the next few weeks. Time Warner is conducting some technical trials of YouTube’s clip identification system.

The ice between YouTube and Hollywood clearly has yet to thaw. During its first few years, YouTube stood behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and told media companies it was not legally required to remove unauthorized material from its site unless specifically asked to do so by the owner.

The stance provoked a $100 billion lawsuit from Viacom, which is still pending, and animosity from media executives who say they still believe YouTube could be more aggressive in taking down pirated clips.

“A lot of studios have taken the position that they won’t embrace YouTube until everything is perfect and the copyright protection is ironclad,” Mr. Marvis of Lionsgate said.

But YouTube may face an even greater challenge in the effort to transform itself. Ken August, vice chairman of Deloitte & Touche and the head of its media and entertainment practice, said the largest studios were in a state of inertia — willing to experiment with online distribution but mostly aiming to protect their traditional way of doing business.

They are also waiting to see what will happen with Viacom’s lawsuit, Mr. August said.

“There needs to be a major realignment inside some of these companies for profound digital deals to happen,” he said.

Brad Stone reported from San Francisco, and Brooks Barnes from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/bu...dia/10mgm.html





After Banning YouTube, Military Launches TroopTube
Jessica Mintz

The U.S. military, with help from Seattle startup Delve Networks, has launched a video-sharing Web site for troops, their families and supporters, a year and a half after restricting access to YouTube and other video sites.

TroopTube, as the new site is called, lets people register as members of one of the branches of the armed forces, family, civilian Defense Department employees or supporters. Members can upload personal videos from anywhere with an Internet connection, but a Pentagon employee screens each for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.

Part of Delve's work was to build speedy tools for approving and sorting incoming videos. Its technology also crunches video files into several sizes and automatically plays the one that best suits viewers' Internet connection speeds.

But the startup's real forte is making sure searches on the site turn up the best video results. Delve's system turns a video's sound into a text transcript. It pares unimportant words like "this" and "that," then compares what's left against a massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages.

The result: Even if speech recognition software trips on the one word someone is searching for, there's a good chance Delve can still deliver relevant results.

In May 2007, the Defense Department banned employees and soldiers from accessing sites including YouTube and MySpace, citing security and bandwidth issues. Delve Chief Executive Alex Castro called TroopTube a "retention tool" aimed at a generation of soldiers who bring laptops to the front lines.

"A lot of people are excited in the company to be doing something for the people who make sacrifices," said Castro, his eyes tearing. "We're proud of this."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111101741.html





Bush Spy Revelations Anticipated When Obama Is Sworn In
Ryan Singel

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won't just get a new president; they might finally learn the full extent of George W. Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping.

Since the New York Times first revealed in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on citizen's overseas phone calls and e-mails, few additional details about the massive "Terrorist Surveillance Program" have emerged. That's because the Bush Administration has stonewalled, misled and denied documents to Congress, and subpoenaed the phone records of the investigative reporters.

Now privacy advocates are hopeful that a President Obama will be more forthcoming with information. But for the quickest and most honest account of Bush's illegal policies, they say don't look to the incoming president. Watch instead for the hidden army of would-be whistle-blowers who've been waiting for Inauguration Day to open the spigot on the truth.

"I'd bet there are a lot of career employees in the intelligence agencies who'll be glad to see Obama take the oath so they can finally speak out against all this illegal spying and get back to their real mission," says Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's Washington D.C. legislative director.

New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh already has a slew of sources waiting to spill the Bush administration's darkest secrets, he said in an interview last month. "You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on January 20. [They say,] 'You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.'"

So far, virtually everything we know about the NSA's warrantless surveillance has come from whistle-blowers. Telecom executives told USA Today that they had turned over billions of phone records to the government. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein provided wiring diagrams detailing an internet-spying room in a San Francisco switching facility. And one Justice Department attorney had his house raided and his children's computers seized as part of the FBI's probe into who leaked the warrantless spying to the New York Times. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales even suggested the reporters could be prosecuted under antiquated treason statutes.

If new whistle-blowers do emerge, Fredrickson hopes the additional information will spur Congress to form a new Church Committee -- the 1970s bipartisan committee that investigated and condemned the government's secret spying on peace activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other political figures.

But even if the anticipated flood of leaks doesn't materialize, advocates are hopeful that Obama and the Democratic Congress will eventually get around to airing out the White House closet anyway. "Obama has pledged a lot more openness," says Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was the first to file a federal lawsuit over the illegal eavesdropping.

One encouraging sign for civil liberties groups is that the Center for American Progress's president John Podesta is one of the top three heading Obama's transition team, which will staff and set priorities for the new administration. The center was a tough and influential critic of the Bush administration's warrantless spying.

Among the unanswered questions:

• Were there quid pro quo promises made to the phone companies and internet carriers who cooperated with the secret spying? For example, were co-conspirators promised lucrative government contracts?

• Did the program appropriate the CALEA wiretapping infrastructure? Under CALEA, Congress forced telecoms to build surveillance capabilities into the phone and internet network, but promised it would only be used with court orders.

• What did the first version of the surveillance program sweep into its net? In March 2004, a squadron of top officials at the Justice Department, including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI head Robert Mueller, threatened to resign over the illegality of the program. The program was subsequently scaled back, but nobody knows what the NSA was doing that was bad enough to horrify Ashcroft.

• What was the legal rationale for the surveillance?FISA explicitly made warrantless domestic eavesdropping illegal, but the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a series of memos justifying the spying anyway. The ACLU is fighting the Bush administration for access to the documents, as well as secret memos justifying torture.

"It's difficult to see how Sen. Obama could call his administration transparent if his administration continues to suppress non-sensitive information that should have been released a long time ago," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer.

The other looming question is whether, as president, Obama will continue the warrantless spying himself. Obama voted with the majority in Congress to legalize the Bush spying program in July, but the constitutionality of the measure is yet untested. An Obama administration is less likely than Bush to devise convoluted legal end-runs around the Constitution, according to Marc Rotenberg, the head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Keep in mind that Obama is a constitutional scholar and has a deep understanding of checks and balance," says Rotenberg. "It's hard to imagine that an Obama administration would support ... warrantless wiretapping."

With the financial markets and the economy in deep trouble, it's unlikely that Obama will quickly turn to the issue of warrantless wiretapping. But the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T over the surveillance could force the new administration to pick a side quickly. In December, a federal judge in San Francisco will hold a hearing on whether the retroactive immunity granted to AT&T and other telecoms as part of the FISA Amendments Act is Constitutional. Obama voted for the act in order to legalize the spying program, but tried unsuccessfully to strip out the immunity provision.

EFF's Opsahl hopes that if EFF prevails in December, an Obama administration might let the decision stand, clearing the way for EFF's lawsuit to proceed.

"If we are victorious in our constitutional challenge, I would hope the Obama administration would accept that loss and move on without an appeal," says Opsahl. "But we will have to see."
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/.../obama_wiretap





Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books
Eric Pfanner

Long after other media joined the digital revolution, book publishers clung to the reassuringly low-tech tools of printing press, paper and ink.

But now the world of books is starting to go digital, too.

Last week, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Google sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print.

“Almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet,” wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London, on his blog.

The settlement remains subject to court approval, and the bookshop would operate only in the United States for now. But the agreement is only one of many initiatives under which books are making what may be the biggest technological leap since Gutenberg invented moveable type.

This month, a group of European national libraries and archives plans to open Europeana, an online database of two million books and other cultural and historical items, including films, paintings, newspapers and sound recordings. Letters from Mozart to his friends, from the Austrian National Library in Vienna are there, along with early printings of his work, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Meanwhile, publishers are moving ahead with a flurry of digital initiatives, sometimes in a race against Internet start-ups.

“The book business model is under siege, just as the music industry earlier came under siege,” said Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a Silicon Valley company that helps people publish their own books, using the Internet. “The book publishing business has had a front-row seat to see what happened to the music industry.”

Until recently, while the music business was decimated by digital piracy, book sales rose, aided by the ability to browse and buy from online stores like Amazon.

But in the first nine months of this year, book sales in the United States fell 1.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Among the few bright spots were sales of so-called e-books, read on devices like Amazon’s Kindle, on personal computers or on mobile phones. Wholesale sales of e-books were up 55 percent from a year earlier.

Questions remain over the best way to deliver digital books. In the United States, a surge in sales followed the introduction of the Kindle last year and upgrades in rival devices like the Sony Reader, which allow users to download books wirelessly or from an Internet-connected computer.

But in Europe, where such devices are only slowly becoming available, sales of e-books remain in their infancy. The price of these gadgets — the Kindle, for example, costs $359 — may put off readers.

In Japan, the mobile phone has been the most popular way to read e-books, according to the Digital Content Association of Japan. Sales of digital versions of manga comic books are leading the way. Penguin said it also had high hopes for selling e-books to mobile phone users in India.

About half a million people in more than 50 countries have downloaded Stanza, an application that lets them read e-books on the iPhone, said Michael Smith, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum in Toronto.

“The adoption is happening,” he said. “It’s not theory. It’s happening.”

A survey published in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair last month showed that 40 percent of book publishing professionals thought digital sales would surpass sales of paper-and-ink books by 2018.

Now, though, revenue from e-books and other digital sources remains tiny — less than 1 percent of the worldwide sales of Penguin Group, for example, according to Genevieve Shore, digital director for Penguin in London.

But the Google deal with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild could be a catalyst. Under the proposed settlement, Google would share online sales revenue with publishers and authors.

“We’re very excited about it,” Ms. Shore said. “What it means is that a very important player in our online lives, we’re not in conflict with anymore.”

Publishers are exploring other new ways to sell books in digital form. She said Penguin was considering subscription plans, where readers would pay a monthly fee for online access to best sellers. Another possibility would be free or reduced-price online versions of books, supported by advertising — an approach adopted by newspapers on the Internet.

“We will have some interesting new business models on the market in 2009,” she said.

Free electronic versions of some books have been available for years. Project Gutenberg, a volunteer archival effort, makes more than 25,000 books available for download. Feedbooks, a start-up company in Paris, is formatting many of them for use on mobile devices.

There are limits to what readers can find on Feedbooks. George Orwell’s “1984,” for example, is available; the latest best sellers are not. That is because Project Gutenberg focuses on books whose copyrights have expired.

The Google settlement largely concerned works that were still under copyright but no longer in print. Digitizing these books could allow publishers to offer readers vast numbers of additional volumes — the so-called long tail of the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/bu.../10kindle.html





Amazon UK Pulls Scientology Exposé for 'Legal Reasons'

Silences former member of church's 'secret army'
Cade Metz

Amazon UK has barred the sale of a new Scientology exposé penned by a former member of the church's "elite paramilitary group."

The British incarnation of the world's most popular etailer is no longer offering The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology, a 318-page tome from John Duignan, who spent 22 years inside the top secret organization.

In a recent post (http://forums.whyweprotest.net/15-me...reasons-31435/) to an anti-Scientology discussion forum, an Anonymous Brit says that after pre-ordering the book, he received an email from Amazon announcing it had been "removed from sale for legal reasons".

Amazon UK has yet to respond to out request for comment. But the book - published on October 7 - is no longer listed on the site. A Google search reveals it was available for sale as recently as October 23.

For the moment, The Complex is still available from UK booksellers WH Smith and Waterstones. And it's available on Amazon's US incarnation - though it's listed as "out of stock". We're also awaiting a response from Amazon US.

The US listing describes the book like this:

For the first time ever, a former high-ranking member of the Church of Scientology is lifting the lid on life inside the world s fastest growing cult. The Complex reveals the true story behind the religion that has ensnared a Who's Who list of celebrities such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and convinced thousands of ordinary people to join up.

Duignan describes how two years ago he staged a dramatic escape from the elite paramilitary group at the core of the Church, the Sea Organisation, and how he narrowly evaded pursuit by Scientologists from the Office of Special Affairs. He looks back on the 22 years he served in the Church's secret army and describes the hours of sleep deprivation, brain-washing and intense auditing or religious counselling he endured, as he was moulded into a soldier of Scientology.

He talks about the money-making-machine at the heart of the Church, the Scientology goal to Clear the Planet and Get Ethics In, the training programmes, the Rehabilitation Project Force and the punishments meted out to anyone who transgresses, including children. We follow his journey through the Church and the painful investigation that leads to his eventual realisation that there is something very wrong at Scientology's core.

The Complex was published by the Dublin, Ireland-based Merlin Publishing. Famously, Andrew Morton's unauthorized biography of American film star Tom Cruise - which also served as a Scientology exposé - was published in the US, but not in the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, thanks to stricter libel laws. ®
Update

Amazon US says "we're awaiting arrival of the inventory into our fulfillment networks. As soon as we get the books in our fulfillment centers, we'll start shipping them out to customers."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...tology_expose/





"Mama Africa" - Singer and Activist Miriam Makeba – Dies

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who wooed the world with her sultry voice but was banned from her own country for 30 years under apartheid, died after a concert in Italy. She was 76.

In her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world - jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon - and sang for world leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

She was also the first African woman to win a Grammy award.

The Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno, near the southern city of Naples, said Makeba died of a heart attack early Monday.

Town Mayor Francesco Nuzzo said Makeba collapsed late Sunday at the end of a concert against organized crime, which has been blamed for the local massacre in September of six immigrants from Ghana.

Makeba had not looked well as she visited an immigrant aid center in Castel Volturno early Sunday afternoon, the mayor said.

The death of ``Mama Africa,'' as she was known, plunged South Africa into shock and mourning.

``One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,'' Foreign Affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said in a statement.

``Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.''

Makeba wrote in her 1987 memoirs that friends and relatives who first encouraged her to perform compared her voice to that of a nightingale. With her distinctive style combining jazz with folk with South African township rhythms, she was often called ``The Empress of African Song.''

She first started singing in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan neighborhood of Johannesburg that was a cultural hotspot in the 1950s before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government.

She then teamed up with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela - later her first husband - and her rise to international prominence started when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentary ``Come Back, Africa'' in 1959.

When she tried to fly home for her mother's funeral the following year, she discovered her passport had been revoked. It was 30 years before she was allowed to return.

In 1963, Makeba appeared before the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. The South African government responded by banning her records, including hits like ``Pata Pata,'' ``The Click Song'' (``Qongqothwane'' in Xhosa), and ``Malaika.''

Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording in 1966 together with Belafonte for ``An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba.'' The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

Thanks to her close relationship with Belafonte, she received star status in the United States and performed for President Kennedy at his birthday party in 1962. But she fell briefly out of favor when she married black power activist Stokely Carmichael and moved to Guinea in the late 1960s.

Besides working with Simone and Gillespie, she also appeared with Paul Simon at his ``Graceland'' concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

After three decades abroad, Makeba was invited back to South Africa by Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon, shortly after his release from prison in 1990 as white racist rule crumbled.

``It was like a revival,'' she said about going home. ``My music having been banned for so long, that people still felt the same way about me was too much for me. I just went home and I cried.''

She insisted that her songs were not deliberately political.

``I'm not a political singer,'' she insisted in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper earlier this year. ``I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us - especially the things that hurt us.''

Makeba announced her retirement three years ago, but despite a series of farewell concerts she never stopped performing. When she turned 75 last year, she said she would sing for as long as possible.

Makeba is survived by her grandchildren, Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Monique Lee, and her great-grandchildren Lindelani, Ayanda and Kwame.

Acclaimed South African filmmaker Anant Singh, who worked with Makeba on the hit anti-apartheid film ``Sarafina,'' was in awe of the singer.

``We acknowledge the huge role she played in bringing global awareness to African music during the time she lived abroad and she will always be remembered as the mother of African music,'' he told the South African Press Association.

Tributes poured in on morning radio talk shows, with many callers in tears as they recalled her humor and her unrelenting spirit.

``She had been part of my life for a long time. It is a great loss,'' singer P.J. Powers told radio station 702. ``She had a huge soul.''
http://www.wcbs880.com/-Mama-Africa-...a-Dies/3288553





Mitch Mitchell Dies at 62; Drummer for Jimi Hendrix
Ben Sisario

Mitch Mitchell, the jazzy and versatile British drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, died on Wednesday in a hotel in Portland, Ore. He was 62 and had recently finished a national tribute tour, Experience Hendrix.

The cause was unknown, said Bob Merlis, publicist for the tour.

Mr. Mitchell was one of two Englishmen in the Experience, the group that catapulted Hendrix to fame in the late 1960s. Along with the bassist Noel Redding, who died in 2003, Mr. Mitchell was recruited in a rush in the fall of 1966, after the journeyman Hendrix had been discovered in a New York club and whisked to London by Chas Chandler of the Animals.

Hendrix’s guitar pyrotechnics caused an immediate sensation among the British rock elite — the audience at one early gig included John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Brian Jones — and a backup band was needed for a last-minute French tour. Mr. Redding was hired first, followed a few days later by Mr. Mitchell, who was barely out of his teens but already an established session player with the Pretty Things and Georgie Fame.

Mr. Mitchell did not expect much from the job. “I’ll give it a crack,” he later remembered telling Mr. Chandler, who became one of Hendrix’s managers. “I’ll have a go for two weeks.”

But led by Hendrix’s explosive and rhapsodic style, the group revolutionized rock music and became an archetypal power trio. Its style was built around Hendrix’s improvisations, with Mr. Redding’s steady bass lines acting as an anchor and Mr. Mitchell — who was influenced by jazz players like Elvin Jones — playing a lighter, looser counterpoint to the guitar.

The group also developed a signature look that embodied the dandyish flamboyance of the British psychedelic era. The members sought out bell-bottoms and vintage clothes in British shops and teased out their hair. “For Noel, the curly Afro came naturally,” wrote Charles R. Cross in his 2005 Hendrix biography, “Room Full of Mirrors.” “Mitch had to get a permanent to achieve the same result.”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience released three albums: “Are You Experienced” (1967), “Axis: Bold as Love” (1967) and “Electric Ladyland” (1968). Mr. Mitchell continued to play with Hendrix until his death in 1970, and later played in the band Ramatam.

Born John Mitchell in London, he worked as a child actor, appearing in the BBC television show “Jennings at School.”

Survivors include his mother; wife, Dee; a daughter; and two grandchildren.

After Hendrix died Mr. Mitchell worked with the producer Eddie Kramer in completing the albums “The Cry of Love” and “Rainbow Bridge,” and he long worked with Experience Hendrix, the company founded by Hendrix’s father, in promulgating the Hendrix legend. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/ar...c/13mitch.html





(Politely) Kill Explorer.exe

How to quit Explorer, the executable, without shutting down or logging off:

That is one way, yes. A much cleaner way that very few people are aware of is this:

Go to Start > Shutdown. When the dialog appears, hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press Cancel. Explorer will cleanly unload all of it’s resources and shutdown. To start it back up, open Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is one way) and go to File > New Task and run ‘explorer’.

This method was designed for people writing plugins and handlers for Explorer who needed to be able to unload it all and start fresh without rebooting or uncleanly killing Explorer’s process. Can be nice to know.
http://kapustein.com/blog/?p=364





MP3 Player Headphones May Hinder Pacemakers
Will Dunham

Headphones used with MP3 digital music players like the iPod may interfere with heart pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

The MP3 players themselves posed no threat to pacemakers and defibrillators, used to normalize heart rhythm. But strong little magnets inside the headphones can foul up the devices if placed within 1.2 inches of them, the researchers told an American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans.

Dr. William Maisel of the Medical Device Safety Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston led a team that tested eight models of MP3 player headphones, including clip-on and earbud types, in 60 defibrillator and pacemaker patients.

They placed the headphones on the patients' chests, directly over the devices. The headphones interfered with the heart devices in about a quarter of the patients -- 14 of the 60 -- and interference was twice as likely in those with a defibrillator than with a pacemaker.

Another study presented at the meeting showed that cellular phones equipped with wireless technology known as Bluetooth are unlikely to interfere with pacemakers.

A pacemaker sends electrical impulses to the heart to speed up or slow cardiac rhythm. The magnet, however, could make it deliver a signal no matter what the heart rate is, possibly leading to palpitations or arrhythmia, the researchers said.

An implantable cardioverter defibrillator signals the heart to normalize its rhythm if it gets too fast or slow. A magnet could de-activate it, making it ignore an abnormal heart rhythm instead of delivering an electrical shock to normalize it.

The devices usually go back to working the right way after the headphones are removed, the researchers said.

"The main message here is: it's fine for patients to use their headphones normally, meaning they can listen to music and keep the headphones in their ears. But what they should not do is put the headphones near their device," Maisel said in a telephone interview.

So that means people with pacemakers or defibrillators should not place the headphones in a shirt pocket or coat pocket near the chest when they are not being used, drape them over their chest or have others who are wearing headphones rest their head on the patient's chest, Maisel said.

Most of the headphones had magnetic field strengths more than 20 times higher than the threshold for interfering with pacemakers or defibrillators, he said. They were made by Sony Corp, Philips Electronics and others.

MP3 players like Apple Inc's iPod are popular consumer electronic devices. In January, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration researcher said the iPod is unlikely to interfere with pacemakers because it does not produce enough of an electromagnetic field to interfere with the devices.

Brian Markwalter of the Consumer Electronics Association industry group urged consumers to inform themselves about proper use of products with magnets, and encouraged people with pacemakers to understand how headphones can be used safely.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...4A81SS20081110





ID Card Costs Rise - But is the Security Weakening?

Critics attack 'flash and go' cards
Nick Heath

Opponents of ID cards have renewed their attacks on the scheme, claiming security is being watered down even as the cost of the cards rises.

Cards will only be checked against biometric details on the National Identity Register (NIR) in a "minority of cases" according to Home Office documents, prompting accusations it has been relegated to a "flash and go" card.

The Home Office consultation documents said: "Most transactions involving the identity cards are likely to be visual checks of the card, or a local check of the information held on the card (e.g. using a scanner).

"In only a minority of cases - requiring the highest standard of identity assurance - will it be necessary to check identity against information on the NIR."

Ian Angell, a professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) and one of the authors of a report into the scheme, said this undermines the government's claim the ID card system will offer a rock-solid way of verifying a person's identity by locking an ID to biometric details on a secure database.

And Phil Booth national co-ordinator for ID cards pressure group NO2ID said: "It makes the whole system a nonsense, the government is saying that ultimately the whole national identity scheme will come down to a 'flash and go' system.

"A system that is presumed secure which is in fact insecure, then that is worse than having no system at all."

LSE's Angell said: "If they do not check the database then fraud will go up as criminals will quickly figure this out and be able to make a copy of the card and change the photo.

"These shortcuts are going to turn it into a hugely expensive failure."

But an Identity and Passport Service spokesman denied the system would be vulnerable to fraud: "The majority of instances where people use their identity cards will be day to day situations where the cards offer a convenient method of proving identity such as a young person proving their age to buy alcohol," he said.

"Whenever the highest level of identity assurance is vital to prevent fraudulent and criminal activity - such as high end financial transactions or at our borders - checks will always be made against the national identity register.

"The card itself will be protected against forgery by a number of security features. The Identity and Passport Service has issued more than 12 million ePassports to date and nobody has successfully cloned the chip," the spokesman said.

It has also been revealed the National Identity Register Number (Nirno) will now not appear on the card or its embedded chip. Director of Privacy International Simon Davies welcomed the removal of the Nirno, following concerns it could be cross referenced across multiple transactions - such as proof of age purchases or opening a bank account - to track a person's everyday activities.

"For five years we expressed concern about publishing the Nirno, it is amazing that it has taken all this time and £150m pounds for the government to decide to take this initiative," Davies said.

Yesterday the government began touting for high street businesses and other companies to install the equipment to take the 10 fingerprints, facial and signature scan that will be stored in the NIR. It named the Post Office as an example of possible contenders and said local authorities are also being considered as enrolment centres.

Critics say it will inflate the £30 it will cost for a card as the public also have to pay to have their fingerprints taken, with the Home Office estimating the scanners will generate between £120m and £280m per year for business.

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: "We already know that ID cards will do nothing to improve our security but may make it worse. Now we see that the already substantial cost to the tax payer is going to increase. This is particularly outrageous given the current economic crisis."

A cost projection for the scheme for British nationals also showed the cost of the scheme over the next 10 years has increased by £45m to £4.785bn from estimates in May 2008, with a warning that the costs were likely to change as contract negotiations were finalised.

In consultation, businesses expressed fears about the risks of leaving the enrolment to companies, saying they want to see it "delivered by accountable public servants, and particularly not by companies owned and controlled outside the UK".

These worries about whether government and the private sector could be trusted to handle and transfer scans of people's fingerprints, faces and signatures were echoed by the public, particularly in light of the recent spate of data breaches.

Home Office consultation documents revealed: "One of the key concerns raised regarding the market delivering biometric enrolment services is the security and integrity of the application process.

"This is also our key concern and we will not deliver these services through the market unless we think that security and integrity principles can be upheld.

"Where application and enrolment services are provided by an open market, we will set integrity and security standards which will be enforced consistently across the network of market providers."

Small businesses were also anxious about the cost of introducing the scheme and equipment to check identity on the cards, stressing the "need for particular support" from the government and citing difficulties with the introduction of Chip and PIN equipment.

A national identity scheme commissioner will also be appointed to work alongside the information commissioner to ensure data for the scheme is being properly stored, secured and collected by government and the private sector.

The government says it will continue talking to business about the commercial benefits of taking part in the enrolment and "improved identity assurance".
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/...9338405,00.htm





Chinese Hackers Get Access to Some White House Emails
Siobhan Gorman

Chinese hackers gained extensive access to unclassified White House emails when they broke into White House computer systems on multiple occasions last year, according to current and former government officials familiar with the matter.

The break-ins were discovered last year, said several private-sector experts familiar with the breach. They said they learned about it in the summer of 2007. A June 2007 cyber break-in at the Pentagon was also attributed to the Chinese military, but it's not clear whether these incidents were linked.

"Emails that were going to the highest levels of the White House were ending up with the central authorities in China," said O. Sami Saydjari, president of the Cyber Defense Agency, a consulting firm.

The White House break-in, reported by the Financial Times, is a rare example of a publicly disclosed computer-security breach at the White House. Cybersecurity specialists cautioned, however, that such events happen frequently.

"The more that you see, the more numb you become to it," said one U.S. official familiar with the White House breach, who added that the mounting volume of attacks are of great concern.

"This is the kind of development that has been driving the government cyber initiative," said Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a think tank that advises governments and companies. In January, President Bush rolled out the first phase of a major cybersecurity program, which aims to reinforce the government's defenses. A second phase is planned to address private-sector vulnerabilities.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment on the breach.

Over the summer, foreign hackers broke into the computer systems of the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns and stole large volumes of campaign information, according to current and former government officials.

Mr. Saydjari, who worked on cybersecurity for more than a decade at the National Security Agency, said the reported breach was worrisome because it showed that cyberattacks could be used to alter a presidential election. For example, hackers could theoretically manipulate information on a campaign Web site to incite a scandal. Newsweek reported the breach earlier this week.

Cybersecurity experts say attacks are frequent enough that people, including government officials, should assume email sent over regular Internet systems is probably being read by someone. The White House and other government bodies also have secure email systems that weren't breached by last year's Chinese attack, but those systems are more cumbersome for users.

A recent report from the computer-security firm Symantec Corp. found a 468% rise in types of attacks using nefarious software code in 2007 compared with the previous year. Symantec's detectors found 5.2 million cyberattacks in the last 90 days.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122609644394409609.html





Hacking Arrests Doubled in Japan in 2007
Martyn Williams

Arrests associated with unauthorized access to computers more than doubled in Japan in 2007 compared to the previous year, according to figures released by Japan's Ministry of Justice.

During 2007 a total of 1,442 arrests were made, up 703 arrests a year earlier, reported the ministry in its annual White Paper on Crime. The figure is 10 times the number of arrests made in 2003 for violations of the same law.

The country also saw a rise, although a much more modest one, in the number of crimes involving computers. There were a total of 3,918 arrests for such crimes, up 9 percent on the year.

Within this category arrests relating to violations of the copyright law jumped 11 percent to 165, while arrests for distribution of obscene literature climbed 6 percent to 203. There was a drop in child pornography-related arrests from 251 to 192, but arrest for child prostitutes soliciting or solicited online rose from 463 to 551.

The figures come against a backdrop of increasing broadband and cell phone penetration in Japan but generally lower crime.

At the end of 2007 there were 28.3 million broadband connections and 100.5 million cell phone subscriptions. Those figures are up respectively 10 percent and 6 percent on the beginning of the year.

Overall reported cases dropped 7 percent compared to last year. It was the fifth year in a row that the number of cases dropped. They stood at 2.7 million in 2007 against the record high of 3.7 million hit in 2002.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...n_in_2007.html





Russian Link in $4500 Online Theft
Karen Dearne

FORENSIC investigators have traced evidence of a theft of $4500 from a Sydney woman's online bank account to a Russian server holding many more sensitive details captured by a Trojan horse hidden on her computer.

Two unauthorised deductions - each for $1485 - were made from e-banking customer Sandra Bridekirk's account

Sandra Bridekirk's brush with cybercrime began when she noticed two unauthorised deductions - each for $1485 - from her account with a major bank on two days last week.

When she rang the bank, she was told a third payment was programmed to occur that day. "The scary thing was that the transactions had been done with my personal access number and my password, and even my husband doesn't know those," she said.

"It was set up to keep taking money out - the sum is apparently just under our daily limit - every day until it was all gone."

Ms Bridekirk was told the payments had been made to an interstate bank account. The third transaction was stopped, but $3000 has been frozen until her bank and police finish their investigations. A further shock awaited Ms Bridekirk when an examination of her computer revealed all of her web credentials had been stolen - including all her user names and passwords, and her email address lists.

Andreas Baumhof, chief technical officer of online transaction security firm TrustDefender, discovered that Ms Bridekirk's computerchine had been infected by a drive-by download on September 2.

"This means the Trojan was silently installed on her computer without her knowing when she went to a compromised website."

Mr Baumhof found it was Trojan.Spy.Banker.EGJ, which injects extra HTML (web markup language) into internet banking web pages in order to capture passwords and credit-card details.

"All log-in forms on her machine have been collected and sent to Russia," he said.

"This means all her details were compromised."

Mr Baumhof found that the Trojan was active on the PC until September 10.

"She always had antivirus running and it did protect her a few times by detecting a virus before it was executed," he said. "But there's often a lag between an infection and when the sample becomes known to antivirus vendors so they can update their software to deal with it."

AusCERT analysis and assessments manager Kathryn Kerr said a similar Trojan, known as Sinowal, Torpig or Mebroot, had become prolific in the past 12 months, mainly because its many variants could not be detected soon enough by antivirus vendors.

"The HTML injection feature is very worrying, as once your computer is infected the Trojan just sits there waiting, with a target list of sites it's looking for," Ms Kerr said.

"The next time you connect to your online banking site, the Trojan detects that a request has been made to a particular bank.

"It then allows the connection to go ahead, but it intercepts the web page in your browser, and injects web code so that it appears to be part of the legitimate website.

"But it's not. Effectively, you've got two channels occurring simultaneously - one with the legitimate bank site and one with the attacker, which will often prompt you for additional information that then gets sent off to some remote location."

Symantec security expert Robert Pregnell said internet users should check that their antivirus software included a firewall and intrusion prevention capabilities.

"If you bought your software even two years ago, you need to check that it has these protections," he said.

"An intrusion prevention system will detect a change in the connections that have been established with a bank, and they will give you a highly visible warning."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013040,00.html





Ex-Computer Network Administrator Faces 12 Years in Prison for String of Tech Crimes

A former San Jose computer network administrator faces up to 12 years in state prison for using his high-tech skills to commit a wave of burglaries, hacking incidents and identity thefts against local companies and even his neighbors.

Andrew Madrid, 34, pleaded guilty Friday to 14 counts of second degree burglary, four counts of computer hacking, three counts of identity theft and two counts of possession of methamphetamine for sale, according to Santa Clara County prosecutors.

Madrid, who was out on bail for drug and theft charges when he was arrested, is due to be sentenced by Judge Douglas Southard on Jan. 22. He has been in custody since March.

Prosecutors said he posed as a security guard and IT employee to gain access to several local companies and steal computer equipment.

Using his knowledge from years of working as a network administrator for a Sunnyvale high-tech firm, Madrid was able to pull off sophisticated crimes, including two cases where he hacked into corporate computers, stole data and used spyware to obtain security passwords.

Other times, he tapped into the unprotected wireless networks of his San Jose neighbors. In another of his schemes, he placed phony bar codes on expensive computer equipment so he could buy them at much cheaper prices.

Madrid was arrested after investigations by the local high-tech crimes task force, the Sunnyvale Department of Safety and the Los Gatos, Santa Clara and San Jose police departments.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Study Shows How Spammers Cash In
BBC

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.

The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year.

It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.

Slim pickings

The spam study was carried out in early 2008 by computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD).

For their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.

At its height Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control.

The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study.

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

They created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail.

The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.
The research team created a legitimate looking pharmacy site.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.

The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers.

The researchers concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7719281.stm





Child Pornography Sting Nets 17 Arrests in La.
Melinda DeSlatte

Seventeen people in Louisiana were arrested this week in an Internet child pornography sting operation that police said involved sexual abuse of children as young as 3 years old.

Gov. Bobby Jindal and law enforcement officials who worked in the multi-jurisdictional operation announced the arrests Friday. The men were arrested in seven different parishes in the Alexandria, Lake Charles and Lafayette areas, and Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said he expects more arrests to be made.

Police said among the items seized were more than 30 computers, DVDs and other digital media devices that contained photos and videos of sexual abuse of children. "These are 4- and 5-year old girls and boys in pictures. This isn't just simple pornography out there. This goes way beyond that. It's some of the sickest things I've seen in my 28 years. I literally did not sleep that night," said Col. Mike Edmonson, the head of Louisiana State Police.

Edmonson said the child pornography didn't include images that could be accidentally stumbled upon when searching the Internet. He said those arrested had to be looking specifically for the videos and pictures on very specific Web sites. "This isn't pornography that's easy to get off the Internet," he said.

The men arrested live in Grant, Rapides, Natchitoches, Calcasieu, Acadia, St. Martin and Lafayette parishes. All were booked on state charges, though U.S. Attorney David Dugas said his office will consider filing federal charges as well. Fifteen men were booked on charges of possessing child pornography, while two others were booked on drug charges.

Four children, ages 11 to 17, who lived at one of the men's homes were taken into state custody, said Department of Social Services Interim Secretary Kristy Nichols. At least two of those children had been molested, Edmonson said.

The sting operation involved more than a dozen law enforcement agencies and assistance from federal officials. At a news conference announcing the arrests, Jindal urged parents to monitor their children's Internet usage. "The Internet is now the newest frontier for those sick individuals who want to prey on the innocence of our children," Jindal said.

Caldwell said child pornography sites average 3,000 hits per month from Louisiana residents, according to investigators tracking the sites.
http://www.ksla.com/Global/story.asp?S=9319130&nav=0RY5





Banks Urged to Expose Child Porn Money Trails
Nick Mathiason

European banks are under pressure to crack down on the owners of child pornography websites, following a legal breakthrough that has enabled international enforcement agencies to identify those who profit from them.

A meeting in Brussels next month will see child protection agencies and lawyers attempt to persuade the European Banking Federation and law enforcement agencies to form a financial coalition to combat what is a $2bn industry.

The meeting comes after 100 lawyers from Allen & Overy spent the past year developing a framework to circumvent data protection regulations, bank secrecy codes, criminal legislation and contract law across the EU. Until now, it has been virtually impossible for investigators to follow money trails leading to the successful prosecution of the financiers of child porn sites.

The lawyers, led by Allen & Overy managing partner Wim Dejonghe, all worked for free on the project. Dejonghe said lawyers were now attempting to create similar frameworks in Asia.

Delphine Moralis, deputy secretary-general of Missing Children Europe, said: 'This is a first big step. We now need banks and law enforcement agencies to make it work.'

In 2007, reports of child abuse images processed by the Internet Watch Foundation hotline in the UK increased by 16.4 per cent compared with 2006. Victims are increasingly becoming younger and abuse more violent. The commercial sexual exploitation of children is a fast-growing and profitable business.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...n-money-trials





Brazil Congress Approves Tougher Child-Porn Law
AP

Brazilian lawmakers have approved a measure toughening prison terms for people convicted on Internet child-pornography charges.

The law would increase from four to eight years the sentences for those found guilty of producing, publishing or receiving sexual images of minors online.

The penalty was previously two to six years.

Teachers and victims' relatives sentenced under the law would automatically have their prison terms increased by one-third.

Legislators in Congress passed the bill unanimously Tuesday. It has already been approved by the Senate, and now goes to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for his signature.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...ornography.php





From Tiny Sect, a Weighty Issue for the Justices
Adam Liptak

Across the street from City Hall here sits a small park with about a dozen donated buildings and objects — a wishing well, a millstone from the city’s first flour mill and an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.

In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.

The city declined, a lawsuit followed and a federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment required the city to display the Summum monument. The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case, which could produce the most important free speech decision of the term.

The justices will consider whether a public park open to some donations must accept others as well. In cases involving speeches and leaflets, the courts have generally said that public parks are public forums where the government cannot discriminate among speakers on the basis of what they propose to say. The question of how donated objects should be treated is, however, an open one.

Inside the pyramid, sitting on a comfortable white couch near a mummified Doberman named Butch, Ron Temu, a Summum counselor, said the two monuments would complement each other.

“They’ve put a basically Judeo-Christian religious text in the park, which we think is great, because people should be exposed to it,” Mr. Temu said. “But our principles should be exposed as well.”

Su Menu, the church’s president, agreed. “If you look at them side by side,” Ms. Menu said of the two monuments, “they really are saying similar things.”

The Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

The Third Aphorism: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

Michael W. Daniels, the mayor here, is not the vibrating sort.

Sitting with the city attorney in a conference room in City Hall, Mr. Daniels deftly drew several fine lines in explaining why the city could treat the two monuments differently.

Only donations concerning the city’s history are eligible for display in the park as a matter of longstanding policy, he said, and only when donated by groups with a long association with the city. The Fraternal Order of Eagles, a national civic organization, donated the Ten Commandments monument in 1971.

The donations, Mr. Daniels went on, are transformed when the city accepts them. “Monuments on government property become government speech,” he said.

Under the First Amendment, the government can generally say what it likes without giving equal time to opposing views; it has much less latitude to choose among private speakers.

Asked what the government is saying when it displays the Ten Commandments, Mr. Daniels talked about law and history. He did not mention religion.

Pressed a little, he retreated.

“The fact that we own the monument doesn’t mean that what is on the monument is something we are espousing, promoting, establishing, embracing,” Mr. Daniels said. “We’re looking at, Does it fit with the heritage of the people of this area?”

Brian M. Barnard, a lawyer for the Summum church, said the city’s distinctions were cooked up after the fact as a way to reject his client’s monument. The local chapter of the Eagles, Mr. Barnard added, had only been in town two years when it donated the Ten Commandments monument.

“We have a city that will allow one organization to put up its religious ideals and principles,” Mr. Barnard said. “When the next group comes along, they won’t allow it to put up its religious ideals and principles.”

Last year, the federal appeals court in Denver sided with the Summum church and ordered Pleasant Grove City to erect its monument.

Although the case appears to present questions under the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion, the appeals court said the case was properly analyzed under the amendment’s free-speech protections. That distinguishes it from most cases concerning the display of nativity scenes and the like on government property.

The city, supported by more than 20 cities and states, along with the federal government, has told the Supreme Court that the upshot of affirming the appeals court decision would be to clutter public parks across the nation with offensive nonsense.

A town accepting a Sept. 11 memorial would also have to display a donated tribute to Al Qaeda, the briefs said. “Accepting a Statue of Liberty,” the city’s brief said, should not “compel a government to accept a Statue of Tyranny.”

The brief for the Summum church said the relevant dispute was much narrower. “The government,” it said, “may not take sides in a theological debate.”

Governments seeking to avoid accepting donations they do not want have several options, the Summum brief contended. They can choose to display nothing. They can speak in their own voice by creating or commissioning their own monuments. And they can adopt the messages conveyed by donated monuments as their own, but only if they do so expressly and unequivocally.

The Ten Commandments monument here stands in Pioneer Park, which pays tribute to the city’s frontier heritage, one that is mostly Mormon. The two sides differ about how best to honor that heritage.

Mayor Daniels said the monument broadly reflected local history. Mr. Barnard, the Summum lawyer, said the Ten Commandments did not play a central role in the Mormon faith. “If they wanted to quote from the Book of Mormon,” he said, “that would, at least, relate to the pioneers.”

“Mormons came to Utah because of religious persecution,” Mr. Barnard added. “The pioneer heritage in Utah has to be escape from persecution.”

The Summum church was founded in 1975, and it contains elements of Egyptian faiths and Gnostic Christianity. “Summum,” derived from the Latin, refers to the sum of all creation.

Followers of Summum believe that Moses received two sets of tablets on Mount Sinai and that the Ten Commandments were on the second set. The aphorisms were on the first one.

“When Moses came down from the mountain the first time, he brought the principles of creation,” Mr. Temu said. “But he saw the people weren’t ready for them, so he threw them on the ground and destroyed them.”

Summum’s founder, Corky Ra, says he learned the aphorisms during a series of telepathic encounters with divine beings he called Summa Individuals.

Mr. Barnard has represented the Summum church for many years. “They’re odd,” he said of his clients, with an affectionate smile. “They’re strange. They’re different.”

Bernie Aua, the church’s vice president, said the court case should not turn on how his religion was viewed.

“We have this thing called the Constitution,” Mr. Aua said. “The fact is, it’s a public park. And public parks are public.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/wa...11sect.html?hp





Defiant, BitTorrent and NZB Sites Fight Back Against ‘Intimidation’
enigmax

Last week TorrentFreak reported that South Africa’s answer to the RIAA had taken down the country’s largest torrent site and an affiliated Usenet NZB site. According to the lawyer representing the sites for free, the recording industry had no standing to make a complaint. Furthermore, the actions of the sites’ host were unconstitutional. Both sites, BitFarm and NewsHost, are coming back online.

Following legal threats from the Recording Industry of South Africa (RiSA), last week we reported that the country’s biggest torrent site, BitFarm, and its sister site NewsHost (which deals with UseNet NZBs), were both closed. In many similar cases around the world, the threats would’ve been enough to permanently close the sites, but fortunately lawyer Reinhardt Buys, an expert in IP law, noticed their predicament and stepped up to represent them for free.

In order to get the sites closed, RiSA sent copyright complaint letters to ISPA (the South African ISP association) demanding that BitFarm and Newshost should “be taken down with all access to the domain name blocked”, claiming the sites breach Section 27 (1) (b) of the Copyright Act 98/1978. However, according to the site’s lawyer there are several problems, not least that the sites do not host any infringing content.

In fresh correspondence with ISPA, Reinhardt Buys refutes the allegations made against BitFarm and NewsHost. He states that not only did RiSA fail to comply with the Electronic Communications and Transaction Act 25 of 2002 due to the manner in which it presented the takedown requests, but ISPA acted unconstitutionally in dealing with the takedown requests from RiSA. The relevant section from the South African Constitution is highlighted below:

Everyone has the right to have any dispute that can be resolved by the application of law decided in a fair public hearing before a court or, where appropriate, another independent and impartial tribunal or forum.

According to the correspondence, Buys states that it is uncertain if ISPA even considers the legality of takedown requests before initiating the disconnection of a site, and notes that their current takedown procedures seem to be “directed only at the protection of ISPs from possible liability for third party content, regardless of the evident harm done to online free expression, fairness and equality”.

Interestingly, Buys points to a 2004 submission by ISPA itself, on the ‘Proposed Guidelines for Recognition of Industry Representative Bodies’.

ISPA believe that is it critically important for freedom of speech that a service provider be given an option to take stance on content that is of unclear legal status. Clearly, a service provider should not host content that a court of law or some other authority has ruled to be illegal. But in a case where the legal status of content is unclear (perhaps, for example, if an unproven accusation of hate speech had been made against a particular web page), an ISP should not automatically be required to remove the content. Such a requirement would have a chilling effect on free speech.

However, all of this might be considered moot, since it appears that the complainant, RiSA, had no locus standi or ‘legal standing’ to request the takedown of the sites:

In terms of section 24 of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978, only the copyright owner may institute proceedings related to copyright infringement. The Complainant is not a copyright owner and merely a unit within an organisation that claims to represent the South African recording industry

To this end, Buys has advised the administrator of BitFarm and NewsHost to re-enable both sites and to re-engage in their previous activities, while considering claiming for losses, damages and legal costs from both ISPA and RiSA via civil litigation. In the face of further harassment or intimidation from RiSA, the sites may seek a protective interdict from the courts. Buys has also called on ISPA to implement takedown procedures “which are free of constitutional concerns”.

The full legal response can be found here (pdf).
http://torrentfreak.com/defiant-bitt...dation-081110/





BitTorrent Sacks Half Its Staff
Brad Stone

As an open-source technology protocol, the file-sharing system BitTorrent is going strong, representing about half the world’s Internet traffic by some measures. But the San Francisco company, BitTorrent, is showing signs of serious trouble while it tries to commercialize the technology.

Today BitTorrent informed about half its employees, or 18 people, that they were being let go, according to a person familiar with events inside the company. That is in addition to a 20 percent staff reduction in August. In addition, a co-founder, Ashwin Navin, said yesterday that he was leaving the company, although he informed the board of directors of his exit in March.

A person with knowledge of BitTorrent’s plans also said the company would soon close its BitTorrent Entertainment Network, once conceived — and covered in the press — as a rival to iTunes. The company, with its remaining 20 employees, will focus on BitTorrent DNA, a content delivery network that helps media and video game companies distribute their products cheaply over the Internet.

Update: The chief executive, Doug Walker, a Silicon Valley veteran, has also been replaced, according to a company news release.

A spokeswoman for BitTorrent had no comment.

BitTorrent is backed by Accel Venture Partners and DCM, formerly Doll Capital Management.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/1...alf-its-staff/





CondéNet Cuts: Wired.com Lays of 25% of Staff

CondéNet, the online arm of publisher Condé Nast has today laid off staff across the board, with Wired.com taking a big hit.

According to reports, 25% of Wired.com’s San Francisco staff have been laid off, with the majority of layoffs coming from tech roles. 10% of the editorial staff have been cut.

According to Valleywag, also gone is Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for CondéNet and a man responsible for the acquisitions of Reddit and Ars Technica.

Peter Kafka at AllThingsD has an official statement from the company:

Visibility for 2009 is very limited and we are adjusting all costs to prepare for slower revenue growth. The adjustments are across the board and include staff restructuring and some reduction. Despite the current environment, CondéNet will end the year slightly up over 2007. These moves will put the company in a stronger position to handle a challenging year ahead and for the business to benefit when the economy and the ad market start to rebound.

The cuts don’t come as any surprise, with Condé Nast announcing a 5% cut across the board (online and offline) November 1.

Update: more from CNet

In an interview with CNET News, Evan Hansen, Wired.com’s editor in chief, said the company downsized to prepare for the economic downturn.

“Revenues are expected to be up year over year but not as much as we expected,” Hansen said. “We’re concerned about 2009 because visibility is murky. We’re taking steps to make sure we’re in good position.”

Hansen declined to discuss who was let go, but sources familiar with the situation said none of the publication’s staff writers was cut. This is only the latest reduction of editorial staffing for Wired.com’s publisher, Conde Nast.

http://www.inquisitr.com/7974/conden...f-25-of-staff/





EMI To Outline Restructure Plans
FMQB

At a presentation to staffers today, the head of EMI's recorded music division, Elio Leoni-Sceti, will reveal plans to re-structure the business. EMI Music will reportedly be split into three distinct global business units: new music, catalog and music services. Leoni-Sceti will tell employees that EMI Music "is still in the very early stages of its renaissance and the road ahead will not be smooth or easy," according to the Financial Times. Just yesterday, EMI Music announced that it appointed Ernesto Schmitt as President of its catalog business, reporting to Leoni-Sceti. He will join EMI next month.

EMI Music actually saw an increase in first-half earnings, as the company made £59 million in the six months ending September 30, compared with a loss of £14 million last year. Leoni-Sceti, who is embarking on a three-week global tour to unveil the new organizational plans, said profit had been achieved through cost reductions, a fall in CD returns and a more profitable roster of artists. On the down side, EMI Music’s first-half global recorded music sales fell by 3 percent and 12 percent in the U.S. However, neither EMI Music nor EMI Music Publishing would report losses in the current year.

"EMI is absolutely not bankrupt, far from it," Leoni-Sceti said, according to FT. "EMI has never been in such a financially sound situation. Terra Firma [Guy Hands’ private equity group] is a solid financial owner and is committed to this company... and committed to putting in more equity if it is required."

Meanwhile, the company looks forward to launching the online music service EMI.com in December, and they will have holiday season releases from Tom Jones, Sarah Brightman and Coldplay.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=973693





Economy Takes its Toll on Hollywood
Michael Stroud

Conventional wisdom dictates that Hollywood could always shrug off economic downturns because worried consumers spend more on entertainment when times are tough.

Not this time. Everywhere one looks, the entertainment business is in a world of hurt. The downturn is slamming the balance sheets and stocks of major media companies. Banks and hedge funds are cutting or eliminating movie financing, putting projects at studios and independents in peril. TV networks, reeling from an advertising decline, are slashing costs and trimming staffs.

"Every single source of capital has suffered a seismic shock that we haven't seen in our lifetimes," said Nigel Sinclair, co-principal of film producer Spitfire Pictures. "That's going to lead to a broad squeeze throughout the studio system."

The industry's woes are reflected in recent financial announcements.

NBC Universal is cutting $500 million from its budget in 2009 and likely trimming staff.

Viacom's third-quarter earnings dropped 37% as its cable networks saw an ad revenue dip in the U.S., and chairman Sumner Redstone and his holding firm National Amusements are under pressure from nervous creditors amid a global credit crunch and declining stock prices.

Disney's recently announced quarterly earnings dropped 13% from last year, citing a sudden and significant decline in TV ad and theme parks trends.

"Studios are taking a much harder look at the bottom line," said analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Media Valuation Partners in Beverly Hills. "When they contract, they contract across the board, and that includes production."

For movies, the days of easy money are officially over.

Late last month, Societe Generale, a key movie financing player, abruptly exited the business, following the example of Deutsche Bank. Hedge funds like the Merrill Lynch-backed Melrose I fund that backs 24 films in Paramount's slate are either under water or seeking to extricate themselves from the film business.

After first merging several Paramount Vantage departments into the studio proper, the specialty label laid off 60 of its employees. The departure of DreamWorks from the Paramount fold last month shed another $50 million in overhead, and the annual feature slate was concurrently trimmed to 20 per year.

The new DreamWorks is to a large extent immune from the current credit freeze since it bypassed Wall Street to sew up $550 million from Indian company Reliance Big Entertainment. DreamWorks has delayed its pitch for the remainder of its hoped-for $650 million or so through JPMorgan until the new year as a result of poor market conditions.

Independent filmmakers, whose survival is tenuous in the best of times, have the most to lose in the tough environment. Filmmakers who seek funding for new movies in the coming months are in for a nasty shock, some producers and bankers say.

"Production will drop significantly," said D. Jeffrey Andrick, managing director of Citibank unit Continental Entertainment Capital. "Some of the players who are here now, won't be. And those who are here will be making fewer movies."

Investors or distributors who do come to terms are often forcing filmmakers to bear much more of the cost themselves. And even when backers commit, "the question is whether people who are pre-buying now will still be there in a year," said Cassian Elwes, senior vp and co-head of independent film at WMA.

Complicating matters is uncertainty about the availability of "soft money" -- tax credits from local governments that producers use to cover as much as 30% of their costs.

Many states are calling special sessions to cut their budgets, forcing studios to redo their risk analyses and production budget forecasts.

New York offers among the most generous tax incentives, prompting production companies to line up for soft money through 2010, one studio executive said. But now the exec is worried that the state might not honor its commitments, putting several of the studio's TV shows in limbo.

"No one could have predicted six months ago that we'd be in a financial crisis that could potentially make a state insolvent," the exec said. "Those are the kinds of models I have to run now for senior management."

Many digital-cinema insiders are concerned that the credit crisis will impact the industry's transition. In the U.S., both Digital Cinema Implementation Partners -- representing roughly 14,000 screens -- and Access Integrated Technologies' Phase 2 plan -- for up to 10,000 screens --need to secure financing in order to move forward.

For TV companies, the recession comes on the heels of the WGA strike, which led to a lot of belt-tightening last winter. Many restrictions implemented during the strike -- such as limiting print subscriptions and travel, restricting or freezing new hires -- were never lifted after the work stoppage ended in the spring, making recession-related spending cuts a little less painful on the TV side.

ABC Studios was the most aggressive during the strike. It terminated nearly 30 overall deals, the most of any studio. Now it is the only studio so far to impose budget cuts on its shows, a 2% production cost trim on all series. That is on top of the much-gossiped-about spending cuts on wardrobe on the studio-produced hit "Desperate Housewives."

Sister network ABC has trimmed the orders on three series -- "Castle," "The Unusuals" and "Samantha Who?" -- and opted not to go with "Single With Parents," one of the series previously picked up for midseason.

At News Corp.'s TV divisions, recently implemented measures include a hiring freeze, eliminating overtime and restricting the use of temps and consultants, reducing T&E expenses across the board.

In a memo from Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton and co-chairman Amy Pascal, the company outlines its cost-cutting measures, which include less plane travel and hotel downgrades, the restriction of corporate jet travel to top talent only, fewer print subscriptions, no internal meetings outside the company offices and cutting airport parking costs.

Talk of layoffs in Hollywood has subsided as such measures are never popular. By talking up their cost-saving measures, management teams are apparently hoping to avoid major across-the-board layoffs.

Still, with budgets for 2009 being finalized, pink slips could still be in the offing by the holidays and likely on the rise over the next year.

"Without a doubt," Sanford Bernstein analyst Michael Nathanson replied when asked whether layoffs are likely between now and early in the new year. "There will undoubtedly be layoffs," echoed Hal Vogel, president of Vogel Capital Management. "How many, I don't know."

Media industry layoffs this year already are twice as high as last year, reaching 23,417 as of the end of October, according to data from global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That also means that 2008 has already seen the highest number of media job cuts since the 43,420 recorded in 2001.

For all the gloom, there are bright spots in the entertainment business. Unlike most businesses, Hollywood has a locked-in market for its products, ensuring steady supply-and-demand for its movies and TV shows. As some bankers and investors exit the scene, producers are tapping new sources, including India and China, for funding.

"If it's the right film, people will want to make it and finance it," Elwes said. "It's the marginal films that will have a hard time."

Video game sales remain strong, rising 8% in the third quarter, suggesting studios that tie their movies to games -- think "Quantum of Solace" -- will profit handsomely.

The Internet is another wild card. One banker suggests that filmmakers, denied funding, will take their ideas directly to the Web, where production is far cheaper -- helping jump-start the still largely unmonetized market for online video.

Producer Michael Ohoven ("Capote") says the hard times could end up creating a better entertainment business as companies merge, weak players disappear and Hollywood makes fewer, better movies and TV shows.

"There's no need to cry and whine," he said. "Things could be a lot worse. We could be in the auto business."

Georg Szalai contributed from New York; Nellie Andreeva, Jay A. Fernandez and Carolyn Giardina contributed from Los Angeles
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...e456c2049d490a





Videogame Makers Predict Jingle Bells at Registers
Franklin Paul

Videogame sales are expected to be strong this year and in 2009, despite the economic troubles that have hurt some retail stores that sell the games, industry executives said on Thursday.

Speaking at the BMO Capital Markets interactive entertainment conference in New York, they said their optimism is fueled by solid sales of advanced game consoles made by Nintendo Co Ltd, Sony Corp and Microsoft Corp.

"I think it's going to hold up a lot better than other industries," said Mindy Mount, chief financial officer of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division. "We remain cautiously optimistic."

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, said its Wii console continues to sell out, while sales of the pocket-sized DS game machine have risen almost 20 percent year on year. For that reason, Nintendo has no plans to cut the price of the $250 Wii, he said.

Microsoft in September cut the entry level price for its Xbox 360 to $200, and Sony last year lowered U.S. prices of the PlayStation 3, which comes with an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a Blu-ray video disc player, to about $400.

"If I look at this from an industry perspective I think cautiously optimistic is quite appropriate," Fils-Aime told Reuters in an interview. "If I look at it from a Nintendo perspective, I would say very optimistic.

The outlook for videogames is rosy in contrast to many other industries that are suffering from the global financial meltdown and rising unemployment, which has prompted shoppers to curb spending.

This week, Best Buy Co Inc, the No. 1 U.S. electronics chain, slashed its profit forecast and Circuit City Stores Inc filed for bankruptcy.

Yves Guillemot, CEO of France's Ubisoft Entertainment SA -- maker of the hit "Splinter Cell" franchise -- said video games are selling well at low-cost retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc and game-seller GameStop Corp.

"In general, there's a lot of competition (from other publishers), but we see that software is selling well, just due to the fact there are a lot of machine owners who need software," Guillemot said.

He said he still expects 2008 North American and European video game industry software sales to grow by more than 20 percent, and added that 2009 "will also be a great year."

Ubisoft's shares jumped 9.55 percent to 38.07 euros in Paris.

Attracting New Gamers

BMO analyst Edward Williams estimated that there are 50 percent more video game consoles installed now than a year ago, and that will spur robust sales as their owners shop for games during the holiday season.

But the challenge for future growth is to draw in consumers unfamiliar with video game systems, who may already be too concerned about their wallets to buy into games.

"The question is the person who is a little more marginal, the person who is new to gaming and is not as interested in video gaming," he said. "That's where I think there is greater potential for risk."

The slump in consumer spending will hurt some game makers, particularly those lacking major hits, analysts have said.

For example, THQ Inc posted a dismal third-quarter earnings report last week and cut jobs, canceled some games and said it plans to retool.

Strauss Zelnick, executive chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software Inc, maker of the blockbuster "Grand Theft Auto" series, said overall holiday shopping "doesn't look very promising" for those who do not have huge hits on the shelves.

"I'm concerned that it's going to be a pretty rough holiday season," he said. "Everyone's going to be shopping less. First you are going to see less foot traffic and then less inventory on the shelves."

Peter Moore, president of Electronic Arts Inc's EA Sports unit, which makes the popular title "Madden NFL," also voiced "cautious optimism."

"We are entering uncharted water from an economic standpoint," he said. "We are holding our breath and hoping the consumer comes out to play."

On Nasdaq, EA rose 7.08 percent to close at $22.22, while Take-Two fell 1.02 percent to $10.69.

(Reporting by Franklin Paul; editing by Andre Grenon, Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...4AC70C20081114





Liberal Pranksters Hand Out Times Spoof
Sewell Chan


A fake copy of The Times was being handed out to commuters at subway stations in the city this morning.

Sorry, folks, the paper isn’t free. And the Iraq war isn’t over, at least not yet.

In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city, including Grand Central Terminal, Washington and Union Squares, the 14th and 23rd Street stations along Eighth Avenue, and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, among others.

The spurious 14-page papers — with a headline “IRAQ WAR ENDS” — surprised commuters, many of whom took the free copies thinking they were legitimate.

The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics.

The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition.

(A headline in the fake business section declares: “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.” Uh, sure.)

The Associated Press reported that copies of the spoof paper were also handed out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, and that the pranksters — who included a film promoter, three unnamed Times employees and Steven Lambert, an art professor — financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promises.

According to The A.P., software and Internet support were provided by the Yes Men, who were the subject of a 2004 documentary film.

On Wednesday, the Yes Men issued a statement about the prank, stating, in part:

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Catherine J. Mathis, a Times spokeswoman, said: “This is obviously a fake issue of The Times. We are in the process of finding out more about it.”

Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a co-author of “The Trust,” a history of the family that controls The Times, said in a telephone interview that the paper should be flattered by the spoof.

“I would say if you’ve got one, hold on to it,” Mr. Jones, a former Times reporter, said of the fake issue. “It will probably be a collector’s item. I’m just glad someone thinks The New York Times print edition is worthy of an elaborate hoax. A Web spoof would have been infinitely easier. But creating a print newspaper and handing it out at subway stations? That takes a lot of effort.”

He added, “I consider this a gigantic compliment to The Times.”

There is a history of spoofs and parodies of The Times. Probably the best-known is one unveiled two months into the 1978 newspaper strike. A whole cast of characters took part in that parody, including the journalist Carl Bernstein, the author Christopher Cerf, the humorist Tony Hendra and the Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

And for April Fool’s Day in 1999, the British business executive Richard Branson printed 100,000 copies of a parody titled “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The New York Times.” A 27-year-old Princeton alumnus named Matthew Polly, operating a “guerrilla press” known as Hard Eight Publishing, edited that 32-page spoof of the newspaper.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...oof-the-times/





A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence
Richard Pérez-Peña

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.

(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. ...)

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.

Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a bit of news media attention.

When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.

Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”

Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.

The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.

It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media. The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had nothing to do with this.”

Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on YouTube.

In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.

Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.

In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.

Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.

Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”

But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out.”

And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding that the news media could learn something from him.

“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an interview.

And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?

Long pause. “Yeah, that’s a tough one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/ar...on/13hoax.html





Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama
Stephanie Clifford

At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed.

Of course, Mr. Silver had a head start: he had forecast that Senator Obama would beat Senator John McCain back in March.

In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Mr. Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge. A baseball statistician who began analyzing political polls only last year, he introduced his site, FiveThirtyEight.com, in March, where he used his own formula to predict federal and state results and run Election Day possibilities based on a host of factors.

Other sites combine polls, notably RealClearPolitics and Pollster, but FiveThirtyEight, which drew almost five million page views on Election Day, has become one of the breakout online stars of the year. Mr. Silver recognized that people wanted to play politics like they played fantasy baseball, and pick apart poll numbers for themselves instead of waiting for an evening news anchor to interpret polls for them.

FiveThirtyEight is “among the very first things I look at when I get up in the morning,” said Allan McCutcheon, who holds the Clifton chair in survey science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “He helped make sense of some of the things that didn’t seem sensible.”

Mr. Silver has also become an in-demand analyst, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, “The Colbert Report” and Fox News.

“From a marketing standpoint, I’d rather hedge a little bit more,” he said, “but we’re the ones who are bold enough and are stupid enough to say what the polls translate to.”

He spent election night in a small studio inside the Newseum in Washington, as an on-air analyst for “Dan Rather Reports” on HDNet. During the campaign, Mr. Silver had learned a thing or two about television polish: he smoothed his hair, ironed his jacket, applied Visine drops and dabbed on concealer before a “hit,” as he had learned to call it.

This was his second television booking of the day, and a producer from “The Tonight Show” had called earlier. A makeup artist brushed on powder and a producer yelled into a cellphone as Mr. Silver sat sideways at his computer, his elbows splaying from his keyboard at angles that would alarm an ergonomist, squinting at Excel spreadsheets.

Mr. Silver has believed in numbers the way authors believe in words, as capable of expression and provocation, since he was young.

He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

“When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...’ ”

By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own.

He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000, and was working for (and bored by) the accounting firm KPMG when he began messing around with baseball statistics. He tried to predict players’ performance based on their similarity to players from the past, like Bill James, a pioneer in baseball statistics, had done. But unlike Mr. James, Mr. Silver adjusted for body type, including factors like height and weight, discovering, for example, that taller pitchers age better.

He built a predictive system called Pecota around that, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus, a statistical organization, in 2002, staying on as a writer and consultant for the company. For the 2007 season, he correctly predicted the White Sox would lose 90 games. And for the season that just concluded, he predicted the longtime basement-dwelling Tampa Bay Rays would be a top team.

“I think everybody in our field is pleased and proud to see Mr. Silver’s work in political analysis taken seriously, and I’m sure that analysis is shaped to some extent by the ways of thinking that have been developed in our field,” said Mr. James in an e-mail message. “It’s a vicarious pride, much as one takes in the performance of the old school’s football team.”

Late last year, Mr. Silver, an Obama supporter, became frustrated with how primary poll results were being reported, and how sloppy polls and rigorous polls were given the same attention.

“What you heard on television was, Hillary was inevitable, she’s up 20 points,” he said. “She’s up 20 points because people had heard of her. They hadn’t heard of Obama.”

Mr. Silver posted his speculations on the liberal Web site DailyKos.com, and earned attention when he projected Senator Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was within about a dozen of the actual vote estimates.

He began feeding a database with every poll available, from the University of Akron to Zogby International, state demographics and election results from 1952 forward. He weighted all the polls on historical accuracy, and adjusted them for whether they tended to favor Democrats or Republicans and other factors, then built a model that simulated elections.

He began to see patterns, like leads in polls over the summer should be discounted, or a shift in opinion in North Carolina usually moves with one in Virginia.

In March, he introduced FiveThirtyEight.com, and it quickly became a go-to site for readers whose interest in raw numbers had grown after the close (and miscalled) elections in 2000 and 2004. As his reputation grew online — there’s a Facebook group called “There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend” — the mainstream media he disparaged for sloppy reporting came calling.

Political predictions are “big this year because of Nate Silver,” said Sam Wang, who runs the rival site Princeton Election Consortium. “He loves discussing the details of the data, and his commentary is quite good. He’s made this hobby mainstream.”

Between his live TV appearances on election night, Mr. Silver updated his model and determined around 8 p.m., after New Hampshire went to Senator Obama, that Senator McCain had no way of winning. By the end of the night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly.

The show ended at 1 a.m., and minutes later producers outside Mr. Silver’s studio were celebrating and popping Champagne corks. A crew member started to dismantle the desk where Mr. Silver was still examining data.

“You don’t have to go home, but we’ve gotta take your desk away,” the crew member said.

“O.K., just let me post this,” Mr. Silver said, narrowing his eyes at the screen.

One thing Mr. Silver cannot predict: what happens now. He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration — if anyone cares.

“That’s the paradox,” he said. “You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don’t care about bills being passed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/bu...silver.html?em





The YouTube Presidency
Jose Antonio Vargas

The White House has gone YouTube.

Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Yesterday, transition co-chairman Valerie Jarrett recorded a two-minute video that summarized the goings-on in the past week. "President-elect Obama adopted the most sweeping and strict ethics rules that have ever been in place in the course of a transition," said a bespectacled Jarrett, looking directly at the camera in a video that's yet to be posted.

President Bush, too, has updated WhiteHouse.gov, which offers RSS feeds, podcasts and videos of press briefings. The site's Ask the White House page has featured regular online chats dating back to 2003, and President Bush hosted one in January after a Middle Eastern trip.

But online political observers say President-elect Obama's innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House--the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats" between 1933 and 1944,

"The Obama team has written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns. Not only have they achieved impressive mass -- uploading over 1800 videos that have been viewed over 110 million times total -- but they've also used video to cultivate a sense of community amongst supporters," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. "Obama told us in a YouTube interview last year that he plans to have 'fireside chats' on video, and we expect his administration will launch a White House YouTube channel very soon after taking office."

Added Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for government transparency: "We're living, after all, in the Internet era. This is an individualized version of the 'fireside chats.' It's not delivered between 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. but whenever anyone wants to see it. I don't know if it necessarily creates transparency -- it's still a controlled, one-way message. But it creates the aura of a much more accessible presidency."

So what's next from the Obama White House?

A behind-the-scenes online video exclusive of the State of the Union Address? A text message reminding us to turn in our taxes? Who knows...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the...residency.html





Cosby Mulls Over Whether Show Equals Obama Election
Lynn Elber

When Bill Cosby entered the polling booth in his neighborhood last week, he carried with him photographs of his late parents and Jimmy, the kid brother who died in childhood.

"I pulled out the pictures, pulled the curtain shut. And I said, 'You guys are gonna vote.' And they did, on one piece of paper," Cosby said.

He couldn't resist delivering a punch line for fellow voters in Shelburne Falls, Mass. -- "I yelled out, 'How do you spell plumber?'" -- even as he exulted in casting his ballot for the first African-American president.

There's an argument circulating that "The Cosby Show" laid the groundwork for President-elect Barack Obama by presenting an appealing black family, the Huxtables, to young TV viewers who grew up equipped to thwart stereotypes and barriers.

Writer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez called her theory "the Huxtable effect," a counter to the so-called Bradley effect (named for failed black California gubernatorial hopeful Tom Bradley) of possible hidden racism among white voters.

Ask Cosby, 71, his view of the part his 1984-92 NBC sitcom played as political groundbreaker, and the man who looms large as both a comedian and blunt commentator on black America first offers a measured appraisal.

"I was amazed when the young woman's theory came through," said Cosby. It sounds plausible, he mused, recalling the show's immense popularity and the many times that fans said Cliff Huxtable reminded them of their dad -- their white dad.

But he chafes at what he calls the "Karl Rovian" interpretation, referring to the Republican strategist's Election Night comment on Fox News that viewers embraced the Huxtables as "America's family" and not a black one.

"The reason why he's in the White House is Cosby? No, no, no," Cosby said.

He suggests looking beyond the influence of a TV family to that of a real one: the household in which the future president was raised.

He cites Obama's account of being woken early to do his homework and his mother's refusal to brook any complaints. Cosby bows as well to Michelle Obama and her father, who refused special treatment despite multiple sclerosis.

"This is what Michelle and Barack are made of, the things they see" in their parents, he said.

It was Cosby's firm belief in parental responsibility -- and aggravation over '80s programs -- that shaped the creation of "The Cosby Show," out this week in a boxed DVD set of the complete series.

"I was not happy with what we used to call family TV in those days. ... They had all these shows where you just dropped to one knee and fired, then a car blew up or a plant blew up -- all this dopamine-raising violence," he said.

At a time when the sitcom genre appeared near death, the few family comedies that aired were especially dismaying.

"The situation comedies were failing because they had children seemingly who had taken over the house. In a sense, TV comedy writers and producers had decided they would no longer have a family where grown people were making corrections and kids were going through ... 'Leave It to Beaver' type things," he said.

The idea for a show where "the parents weren't losing to the kids" was rejected by other networks before NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff bought a revamped version of it, with the original blue-collar family now morphed into affluent professionals.

"The Cosby Show" starred the comedian as a mellow physician who, with his lawyer-wife Clair (Phylicia Rashad), kept a loving, firm hand on their five children.

Tartikoff knew that Cosby, a recording, movie and TV star (with shows including the 1960s "I Spy," in which he was the first black star of a drama series), was funny and likable.

"And Tartikoff also said, 'What I like about this show is dignity. The family has dignity,'" Cosby recalled. "And what's odd about it is it was just natural for me. Because what I wanted, the only thing I wanted, was to stop these children on TV from running the house."

Wasn't he also intent on shattering racial stereotypes?

"Look, I'm already black," Cosby said, so pressing the race issue "gets to be stupid after all."

But, he adds, "What I did have in mind was that the images that you see on television are not the behaviors of Americans who are black. Racism is so stupid, but it is and it does exist. Period."

The show was a hit from the start, and from the start it encountered criticism that it failed to portray the difficult lives of many blacks and ignored middle-class issues like assimilation. Defenders said it showed what African-Americans could, and had, achieved.

Its many fans had no reservations about embracing the story of a modern family with bedrock traditions, always infused with Cosby's droll humor and indelibly puckish grin. "The Cosby Show" was the nation's top-rated prime-time program for five years.

And then there's the tantalizing suggestion that the echoes of a sitcom long in reruns changed presidential history -- an idea that Cosby can't resist playing with.

"I'm just waiting to see what Bart Simpson's people are going to do at the next election," he said.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_10966338





Deep Secrets of ‘The Daily Show’
Jennifer 8. Lee and Sewell Chan

You’d think that hundreds of people would have better things to do on a Friday night than go to a panel discussion at a museum. But the auditorium at the Paley Center for Media was packed elbow-to-elbow for the panel discussion “Writers Speak: A Potentially Regrettable Evening with the Writers of ‘The Daily Show,’” part of the fifth annual New York Comedy Festival last week.

This was no dry forum, though. The panelists were grown-up versions of those guys who sat in the back of class making wisecracks, and the discussion was a Ping-Pong exchange of zingers, quips, one-upping and wry understatement.

Where Are The Women?

The panel was made up of 10 men, nine of them white (not unlike an old-time presidential cabinet). The moderator, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, began by asking, “O.K. boys, where are all the women?”

“What you are talking about?” asked Rory Albanese, one of the producers.

“We don’t hire women as a matter of company policy,” joked D. J. Javerbaum, the executive producer (and a part-time Broadway lyricist). “Is that a problem?”

Steve Bodow, the head writer, said the panel was not a good representation of the hundred or so people who work on “The Daily Show.” Many of the producers and the editors are women, even if the writers themselves at this point are all men.

The show’s sole female writer, Rachel Axler, just left for California to work on a spinoff of NBC’s “The Office,” Mr. Bodow said. And Allison Silverman, who had been a writer on “The Daily Show” for many years, is an executive producer of “The Colbert Report.”

The Political Season

• A long, intense presidential campaign proved to be a boon for “The Daily Show,” (among other TV programs). The show, along with “The Colbert Report,” has come into its own as a political force, and the panel opened up with a reel of the more memorable jabs in this election cycle:
• A parody of Barack Obama’s biographical video, based on “The Lion King,” complete with genuflecting zebras and Mr. Obama’s face superimposed on Simba, the lion cub.
• A clip of Karl Rove criticizing Gov. Tim Kaine as a prospective vice-presidential choice. Mr. Rove noted that Mr. Kaine had been governor for only three years and had served as mayor of Richmond — less populous than Henderson, Nev. — and said Mr. Kaine would be clearly a “political” selection. Months later, Mr. Rove praised Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, who had been governor of Alaska for less than two years and, previously, mayor of Wasilla, a town of 9,000.
• A piece mocking Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, describing it as the first one that could be “seen from space” and quipping that a more modest man might have delivered the speech at, say, the Grand Canyon.
• A clip of Bill O’Reilly saying that the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol was clearly a private matter — juxtaposed with an earlier statement in which Mr. O’Reilly blamed the parents of the teenage actress Jamie Lynn Spears for her pregnancy.

Mr. Remnick — who encountered criticism over a satirical New Yorker cover that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as terror-loving extremists — said he was grateful when “The Daily Show” made light of the brouhaha.

Mr. Remnick asked if the writers were going to miss President Bush, who has been a gift to comedy writers everywhere.

The consensus — which surprised some audience members — was no.

Mr. Bodow said the show’s writers had been blessed with “many, many, many comedic opportunities from George Bush” but were “very glad to see him go, politically and also comedically.” (Mr. Bush’s eight-year tenure has been longer than that of many writers on the show.)

“We’ve really been working with and on him for all this time,” Mr. Bodow said. “Let’s get some new material and some new challenges.”

Mr. Remnick asked whether they ever received any reaction from the White House. He noted that presidents have monitored how they were mocked: President Nixon used to pay close attention to “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” the sketch comedy show that began in the 1960s.

Jason Ross, one of the “Daily Show” writers, replied that “our show has probably never been on” in Mr. Bush’s White House. And Mr. Bodow said that Mr. Bush’s administration was different from Mr. Nixon’s — which was characterized by intense attention to criticism.

“I think their hallmark is not paying attention,” Mr. Bodow said of the Bush administration.

Given that Mr. Obama is “not hilarious,” Mr. Remnick asked, would the president-elect give “The Daily Show” sufficient material to work with?

Mr. Ross said of Mr. Obama:

The sort of myth, the romance of his story and persona, is sort of undermined by the banality of his politics. If you listen to what he’s saying, it’s usually not all that interesting. It’s definitely a contrast, and if you saw his press conference today it was pretty dull. I wouldn’t be that surprised to see that develops as a pattern with him.

Wyatt Cenac, a correspondent and writer on the show, observed that Mr. Obama is a “terrible improviser and he sort of likes to improvise these jokes.” He said that in a Friday news conference held after a meeting with his economic advisers, Mr. Obama had “two jokes that went horribly — the mutt joke and Nancy Reagan joke.” (Mr. Obama said his daughters might adopt a shelter dog — “mutts like me” — and said he had talked only with living presidents, since he “didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances.” Mr. Obama later called Mrs. Reagan, President Ronald Reagan’s widow, to apologize.)

John Oliver, a British comedian who is a “Daily Show” writer and correspondent, interjected, defending Mr. Obama for invoking a dead president: “It’s edgy. I’ll give him that.”

Mr. Javerbaum, the executive producer, said: “It’s a reactive show. As long as we’re given things to react to, we’ll be fine.”

At one point during the discussion, Mr. Albanese looked at City Room’s reporters and asked if we were transcribing everything they were saying (almost) and whether we were live-blogging (no, not on a Friday night).

The Daily Routine

Mr. Remnick asked the writers and producers what a typical day at “The Daily Show” is like. Based on their responses, here is a summary:

7 a.m.: About seven or eight producers start work, culling through video footage and material from the previous day, much of which is stored on a set of 15 to 20 TiVo digital-video recorders. Adam Lowitt, a producer who manages the studio production department, which keeps track of the footage, said that time is spent “gathering and finding these great gems that hopefully we can get on the show.”

Staff members will have e-mailed one another other the previous day about tidbits they saw on television and their approximate timestamps, as well as other ideas. Many of the most biting pairings footage were said to be the work of Adam Chodikoff, a researcher and “unsung hero” of the show, who was sitting in the audience. When asked if he watched a lot of television when he was a child, he replied, “The Brady Bunch.”

9 a.m.: Free breakfast (bagels from H & H, not Lenders). Then the staff member have their morning meeting, with the tidbits that have been pulled out by a rolling cast of writers, producers, graphics and researchers — many of whom have been working on ideas since the previous day, as news breaks. “We get specific about what angles we’ll be taking and we’ve all agreed to,” said Mr. Havlan, who has been working on the show since 1996. “We’re joking around from 9 to 10. Jokes from 9 to 10 frequently end up on the show.”

Jon Stewart sometimes joins in at the end. The staff members also keep in daily contact with the writers on “The Colbert Report” — also produced by Comedy Central — to see who is using what material, in what way, for that day’s shows.

10 to 11:30 a.m.: The writers write, using the themes and ideas discussed. It’s an intense but regimented routine. “We’re not at sea almost ever, as a writer on ‘The Daily Show,’” Mr. Ross said. “We know exactly what we need to get done at any period of time.”

He added: “We‘ve seen the video. We know there are four good sound bites for the story. It’s pretty laid out for you.”

Mr. Havlan said, “You get good at knowing what you need to attack.”

“They’re really fast and real good about it,” said Mr. Albanese, the producer, who said that comedy writing requires constant practice. “You get better at it. It’s a muscle and you work it out. It gets stronger.”

11:30 a.m.: The production staff members pop in and demand the material. The writers ask for five more minutes — which they are not given, but which they take, anyway.

11:37 a.m.: Hit print on the computer.

11:37 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.: The first-draft jokes from the writers go to Mr. Stewart, Mr. Bodow, Mr. Albanese, Mr. Javerbaum and Josh Lieb, an executive producer. They pick the jokes and shape the narrative arcs of the segments. The day’s script comes together through a couple of writing/editing sessions with various combinations of producers and writers, as needed. This happens in parallel with production and graphics staff members culling and editing together the video and images as needed.

3 p.m.: The script is ready. Production, art, control room and everybody else is putting the material together until rehearsal.

4:15 p.m.: Rehearsal begins with a final rewrite and a first run by Mr. Stewart at 4:45 p.m., lasting roughly an hour.

6 p.m.: Taping.

In a parallel process separate from the daily routine, there are longer-term segments being produced, like the “Lion King” segment that took three or four weeks of off-and-on work, including two weeks straight leading up to its showing during the Democratic National Convention.

Some video clips come together very quickly. The “Sarah Palin Goin’ Rogue” sci-fi montage, which spliced movie clips with media punditry, was created in a single day by the writers Tim Carvell and Rich Blomquist, as well as Jimmy Donn and Einer Westerlund.

And other pieces are not scripted at all, but based on improv and created during the editing, like a piece that Mr. Oliver reported from Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech at the convention.

Mr. Oliver said it was a bit strange “being at a genuine moment of history with the sole purpose of undermining it.” Among his improvisational moments: he chanted “Osama” as others chanted “Obama,” and he tried to kiss a television news correspondent (she quickly walked away).

Mr. Oliver said, “It was pretty overblown and pretty pompous but it was a genuinely moving moment, so striking the tone was really something we did in the edit.”

Mr. Javerbaum said, “Pieces thrown together in 24 to 48 hours often come out better than the ones you plan more.” Another panelist said that happens because you don’t have time to second-guess yourself.

The Path to ‘The Daily Show’

There was no typical path to “The Daily Show.” The backgrounds of the writers and producers ranged from stand-up comedy to advertising to magazine writing. Tim Carvell, a writer, was a writer and magazine editor for Fortune, Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated for Women.

Mr. Albanese, a producer, started nine years ago out of college as a production assistant. Steve Bodow, the head writer, was a freelance journalist writing for magazines, and a theater director.

Mr. Cenac, writer and correspondent, was previously a writer for the television series “King of the Hill,” did stand-up comedy in California and racked up an enormous amount of credit-card debt. J. R. Havlan started on the show on June 1, 1996, as a writer — and is still a writer — which he says “is totally fine with me.” (He also has taught a class called “Writing for The Daily Show.”) D. J. Javerbaum, an executive producer, has been with the show for almost 10 years. Rob Kutner, a writer, joined the show six years ago and was previously with Dennis Miller. Adam Lowitt, a senior producer, started as an intern more than six years ago. John Oliver, a writer and correspondent, did stand-up comedy in England.

Jason Ross, a writer and host of “Not the Daily Show,” was previously a print journalist and an ad copy writer.

Correspondents are given scripts to perform. People auditioning to be writer-correspondents, like Mr. Oliver and Mr. Cenac, will be asked to write something as well. Mr. Oliver had caught the eye of the “Daily Show” team with his reputation in England (and a recommendation from Ricky Gervais). He was brought over for an audition and was offered a role.

At the point that Mr. Cenac auditioned for the show, he said, he was living in Los Angeles, his car had been repossessed, he had “sort of gotten evicted and was living with a friend.” He said he took a bus to the audition: “An L.A. bus. It’s not like a New York City bus at all — it smells, like, twice the urine.” He auditioned before Mr. Albanese and the casting person. A few weeks later, they called him and flew him out to New York. He did the audition and got the job.

One audience member asked the panel for advice for people starting out in comedy.

“The law is a very stable profession,” replied Mr. Javerbaum, the executive producer.

Mr. Havlan, who teaches the writing class, said: “Say you live in New York and want to get a job on our show or any show here in New York. You should be watching those shows constantly, trying to write stuff that’s similar to that, trying to figure out what the submissions of those shows are. If you don’t do those things, then it’s not going to happen because there are too many people who want it who are doing it.” (Ms. Axler, the writer who recently left for Los Angeles, got her start in Mr. Havlan’s comedy-writing class.)

“You have to work way harder than we work now to get on the show,” Mr. Havlan said.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...daily-show/?hp





It’s Spanky and Gang: Hold on to Your Beanies
Dave Kehr


From left, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Darla and Spanky.

W. C. Fields is said to have been the source of the show business maxim “Never work with children or animals.” “The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection,” a boxed set of eight DVDs from Genius Entertainment, offers approximately 20 hours’ worth of reasons Fields was right: nobody could compete.

Warner Brothers

Irving Berlin as himself in “This Is the Army” (1943), part of a Warner’s boxed set.

Some 220 shorts were produced between 1922 and 1944 starring the “Our Gang” kids and their assorted animal companions. This set consists of the 80 sound films produced by Hal Roach and released to television in the 1950s as “The Little Rascals” — a name change made necessary because Roach had sold the “Our Gang” trademark to MGM in 1938. (MGM continued to produce “Our Gang” shorts, with diminishing results, until 1944.) For the generation that grew up with them, these 80 shorts are the essence of the series, and watching them is a Proustian experience, yielding wave after wave of memories.

But many of the “Our Gang” comedies are remarkable movies in their own right. Roach (1892-1992) was a pioneering independent producer of short comedies who also started the careers of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chase and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. According to Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann’s book, “The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang” (Three Rivers Press, 1992), Roach conceived the series while watching a group of children argue over bits of wood they’d taken from a lumberyard near his studio in Culver City, Calif.

Real kids, Roach believed, would be a richer source of comedy than the painted and pampered stage children usually seen in the movies, and drawing on recommendations from friends and studio employees, he put together a first cast of mostly nonprofessionals. After a couple of false starts, he also found a director, Robert F. McGowan, who could capture the natural behavior Roach had in mind.

McGowan would go on to direct most of the “Our Gang” films until he left Roach in 1933, reportedly exhausted by the stress of dealing with the dozens of child actors who passed through his care. But McGowan clearly had a profound rapport with children. He didn’t work from scripts, but instead guided the kids through structured improvisations, coaching them constantly as the cameras rolled (a technique no longer available when sound came in).

With their loose, loopy rhythms and start-and-stop pacing, the early-to-middle-period “Our Gang” films seem to resist the conventional constraints of storytelling. They shake off narrative in favor of a documentary-like texture — here are the real streets and storefronts, brand-new bungalows and refuse-strewn empty lots, of a still semi-rural Culver City — combined with strange, surrealist gags and bursts of anarchic, slapstick violence.

Luis Buñuel might have approved of a film like “Lazy Days” (1929), a pastoral reverie that consists largely of Allen Hoskins, known as Farina, one of the many African-American child actors featured in the series, dozing in an empty lot on a hot summer day. Bothered by an obviously unrehearsed bee that has landed on his nose, he asks his sister to swat it with a handy 2-by-4, with startlingly grotesque consequences.

The early sound shorts carry over many of the children from the silent films — husky Joe Cobb, the blond vamp Jean Darling, the eternally nonplussed Mary Ann Jackson — while gradually introducing new faces like Jackie Cooper and Dick Moore, who would both soon graduate to studio features. The cast most familiar from the television package coalesces around 1934: George McFarland (Spanky), Matthew Beard (Stymie), Carl Switzer (Alfalfa), Billie Thomas (Buckwheat), Darla Hood.

But it’s also around this time that the films become more professional and less appealing. McGowan was succeeded by two directors, Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, who were far more technically adept than he was. (Douglas would go on to direct some of the toughest films noirs of the 1950s: “Between Midnight and Dawn,” “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”). But the location settings gradually shift to studio work; the situations become more structured; and the youngsters seem less spontaneous.

In the earlier films the Gang had no set social identity: they could be farm kids in one film, stuck in an orphanage in another, living in a Dickensian slum in a third (as in “Pups Is Pups,” McGowan’s masterpiece of 1930). As the decade wore on, however, they became more and more snugly middle class — a tendency that the MGM-produced films (not included here) reinforced to a fatal degree. When the series ended in 1944, little of McGowan’s spirit was left.

The jacket of the Genius set promises “fully remastered, restored and uncut” versions of the films, which is a slight exaggeration. With one small exception, the films are presented as they were originally released, with the racial stereotyping intact. And while the majority of the shorts do look as if they had been transferred from original negatives, at least a dozen, though, are taken from 16-millimeter prints issued to the home market, and they show obvious flaws. This may not be the ideal “Our Gang” collection, but it’s perfectly “otay.” (Genius Entertainment, $89.95, not rated)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/mo...eo/11dvds.html





Fox Cancels 'Mad TV'

Sketch series ends run after 14 seasons
Michael Schneider

Fox is closing the book on "Mad TV" after 14 seasons.

Net confirmed Wednesday that the Saturday night sketch series, which had barely escaped cancellation in recent years, will end its run at the end of this season.

News comes soon after Fox announced plans to end the run of another long-running comedy franchise, "King of the Hill." But just as "King" may land a new home at ABC, the producers behind "Mad TV" are mulling ways to keep their show alive.

"There's been great interest in recent years," said exec producer David Salzman. "We've had a number of networks inquire as to whether the show was coming off Fox and saying that they'd be interested. We have not started to talk to them yet, but now is the time to begin those conversations. I think we have real prospects, but you never know, especially given the economy."

According to Salzman, production on "Mad TV," which received a shortened order this season, was set to wrap by December. The net decided to inform the show's producers of its decision now, rather than in May, in order to give them a chance to end the series with a bang.

"This will give us a proper sendoff, a chance to promote the finale and bring back old cast members," Salzman said.

Fox told Salzman the decision to ax the show was an economic one.

"They said it was too expensive for a daypart where dollars have been shrinking," he said. "Their thought was, the show is what the show is, and that essence needs to be maintained -- but it's hard to produce as big and ambitious a show as ours for less money than they're paying now."

In potentially shopping the show to other broadcast or cable outlets, Salzman said he'll look at ways to modify production and bring down costs.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central's deal to air reruns of "Mad TV" expires at the end of the year. Salzman said he hopes to find a net interested both in producing new episodes and airing the show's 326-episode library.

QDE, a joint venture between Salzman and Quincy Jones, launched "Mad TV" in 1995, utilizing Mad magazine's irreverent brand. Show, designed as a competitor to "Saturday Night Live," was created by Fax Bahr and Adam Small, who left after the show's third season.

John Crane, Salzman and Jones currently serve as exec producers. Season to date, the show has averaged 2.7 million viewers and a 1.2 rating/4 share among adults 18-49; both are unchanged from last year.

"Mad TV" made a name for itself with its pop-culture parodies; alums include Nicole Sullivan ("Rita Rocks") and Frank Caliendo ("Frank TV").

Current cast includes Arden Myrin, Bobby Lee, Crista Flanagan, Keegan-Michael Key, Nicole Parker and Johnny Sanchez.

Fox will likely decide the fate of its other Saturday latenight franchise, "Talkshow With Spike Feresten," in May. With "Mad TV" history, that makes it more likely the net will stick with "Talkshow" -- unless it develops other projects for the timeslot.

"Mad TV" reps Fox's most successful foray by far into latenight programming. After several tries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the net hasn't attempted a return to the late weeknight landscape. (That could change next year, as NBC's "Tonight Show" transition opens the door to several shuffles.)
http://www.variety.com/VR1117995723.html





The Show That Turned the Mockery Into the Message
Dave Itzkoff

“ALL along,” Joel Hodgson said, “I had a real healthy disrespect for Hollywood.”

It was more than two decades ago that Mr. Hodgson walked away from a thriving stand-up comedy career, retreating to Minnesota to build sculptures of robots. There Mr. Hodgson, now 48, discovered that his eccentric hobby of building automatons, and especially his aptitude for finding the flaws in mass media, could be combined into something greater.

“There was kind of an invitation there,” he said, “that if you can see the seams in this, you can figure out how to make a TV show.” The show Mr. Hodgson and a cadre of like-minded Midwesterners came up with in 1988 was “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (“MST3K” for short), surely the only comedy series about an outer-space castaway and his robots, who provide a steady stream of quips and comebacks while watching low-budget films.

“MST3K” may have been the first television show in which the commentary was more important than what was being commented on. You tuned in not to watch schlocky features like “Fire Maidens of Outer Space” or “Manos: The Hands of Fate” but to see how Mr. Hodgson and his crew would tear them apart. (You couldn’t hear the dismal opening score of “The Unearthly” in the same way after one of Mr. Hodgson’s robots shouted out, “Music by the Edgar Allan Poe marching band!”)

Twenty years after the debut of “MST3K” (with a new DVD boxed set from Shout! Factory to celebrate the occasion), the show’s creators talk about the show as if it were a mad scientist’s experiment, one that could have been produced only under a precise set of conditions that are practically irreproducible today.

“We could never have pitched the show on paper,” said Trace Beaulieu, who portrayed Mr. Hodgson’s robot companion Crow as well as his nemesis, the evil Dr. Clayton Forrester. “You had to show people what we were doing. And even then, they go, ‘What?’ ”

Before it was broadcast nationally on Comedy Central (and later on the Sci Fi Channel), “MST3K” was first broadcast on KTMA, a UHF station covering the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. While no one was looking, Mr. Hodgson and his colleagues used KTMA’s equipment and its library of rainy-day monster movies to produce the earliest episodes of “MST3K.”

“There were no camcorders or iMovie, so if you wanted to make TV, you needed at least a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of production gear,” said Jim Mallon, a KTMA production manager of who became an “MST3K” producer.

One year later, Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Mallon were able to sell the series to a fledgling cable network called the Comedy Channel, which offered them a meager budget of $35,000 an episode but allowed them to retain ownership of the show, and to continue producing it from Minnesota, without much interference from programming executives on the coasts. In its mid-’90s heyday “MST3K” was watched by fewer viewers than Comedy Central’s reruns of “Saturday Night Live,” but its cult following prevented scheduling changes and early efforts at cancellation.

Eventually efforts to translate “MST3K” into a movie led to the show’s demise. Mr. Hodgson quit in 1993 over his dissatisfaction with the film’s lack of ambition and was replaced on air by the show’s head writer, Michael J. Nelson. When “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie” — a feature-length riff, directed by Mr. Mallon, on “This Island Earth” — was finally released in 1996, it was a short-lived flop, and the show itself was canceled three years later.

“It’s really hard to make a movie,” Mr. Beaulieu said. “My hat is off to anybody who picks up a camera. Well, not everybody, but it’s a difficult thing to do.”

Today many of the “MST3K” players are still making fun of movies for a living. Mr. Nelson runs a Web site, RiffTrax.com, which provides satirical commentaries for blockbusters like “Iron Man” and “Transformers.” And Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Beaulieu are among the members of a new team called Cinematic Titanic, who mock B-movies in direct-to-DVD releases and live performances.

Like many of his “MST3K” colleagues, Mr. Hodgson says he’s still riffing on bad movies, partly to keep the tradition of the show alive and partly to show that, really, anybody can do it.

“We’re just capitalizing on what people normally do,” he said. “When you’re presented with something insane or silly, the human reflex is to speak out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/ar...on/09dave.html





RED's Digital Still and Motion Camera System Now Official
Thomas Ricker

After a morning of drip-fed images, RED just went official with its DSMC (Digital Stills and Motion Camera) System. The system starts with your choice of the professional Scarlet or "master professional" EPIC brains which can then be bunged into about 2,251,799,813,685,248 possible camera configurations, RED only half-jokingly chides. The brains are built upon Mysterium-X and Mysterium Monstro sensors which start at 2/3-inch and end at a whopping 6x17-cm -- when a new sensor comes out you just upgrade the brain. Scarlet will launch in 4 choices ranging from $2,500 (and possibly less) to $12,000 with a variety of lens mounts (yes, Canon and Nikon) capable of shooting 3K @120fps on up to 6K @30fps. Epic will offer similar mounts with capabilities spanning 5K @100fps ($28k) to 9K @50fps ($45k) -- a 28K system hitting 25fps is expected in 2010 for $55k. Still image resolutions will range from 4.9 megapixels to a freakish 261 megapixels. The first Scarlet systems could come as early as Spring of 2009 while EPIC should arrive by summer. Of course, the brain is just the beginning of the costs. RED also introduced a 3D camera today in true, "one more thing" fashion.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/13/r...-now-official/





Sharing Their Demons on the Web
Sarah Kershaw

FOR years they lived in solitary terror of the light beams that caused searing headaches, the technology that took control of their minds and bodies. They feared the stalkers, people whose voices shouted from the walls or screamed in their heads, “We found you” and “We want you dead.”

When people who believe such things reported them to the police, doctors or family, they said they were often told they were crazy. Sometimes they were medicated or locked in hospital wards, or fired from jobs and isolated from the outside world.

But when they found one another on the Internet, everything changed. So many others were having the same experiences.

Type “mind control” or “gang stalking” into Google, and Web sites appear that describe cases of persecution, both psychological and physical, related with the same minute details — red and white cars following victims, vandalism of their homes, snickering by those around them.

Identified by some psychologists and psychiatrists as part of an “extreme community” on the Internet that appears to encourage delusional thinking, a growing number of such Web sites are filled with stories from people who say they are victims of mind control and stalking by gangs of government agents. The sites are drawing the concern of mental health professionals and the interest of researchers in psychology and psychiatry.

Although many Internet groups that offer peer support are considered helpful to the mentally ill, some experts say Web sites that amplify reports of mind control and group stalking represent a dark side of social networking. They may reinforce the troubled thinking of the mentally ill and impede treatment.

Dr. Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatry professor at Yale who studies delusions, said a growing number of his research subjects have told him of visiting mind-control sites, and finding in them confirmation of their own experiences.

“The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be constantly fed,” Dr. Hoffman said. “If you don’t feed the delusion, sooner or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is that it needs to be repetitively reinforced.”

That is what the Web sites do, he said. Similar concerns have arisen about a proliferation of sites that describe how to commit suicide, or others that promote anorexia and bulimia, providing detailed instructions on restricting food and photographs of skeletal women meant to be “thinspiration.”

For people who regularly visit and write on message boards on the mind-control sites, the idea that others would describe the sites as promoting delusional and psychotic thinking is simply evidence of a cover-up of the truth.

“It was a big relief to find the community,” said Derrick Robinson, 55, a janitor in Cincinnati and president of Freedom from Covert Harassment and Surveillance, a group that claims several hundred regular users of its Web site. “I felt that maybe there were others, but I wasn’t real sure until I did find this community,” Mr. Robinson said.

There is no concise survey of mind-control sites or others describing gang stalking — whose users believe that groups of people are following and controlling them, as part of a test of neurological or other kinds of weapons likely conducted by the government — on the Net. But they are easy to find. Some have hundreds of postings, along with links to dozers of similar sties. One, Gangstalkingworld.com, welcomes visitors with this description: “Gang Stalking is a systemic form of control, which seeks to destroy every aspect of a Targeted Individual’s life. The target is followed around and placed under surveillance by Civilian Spies/Snitches 24/7.”

The site lists more than 71,000 visitors, and it has links to several other sites, including Harrassment101.com, which has 965 posts.

One poster to Gang Stalking World wrote in August: “It’s insane that I daily have to come home and try to figure out if my Web sites will still be up or shut down. This week they have really been playing with me, and so it was my time to play back.” The post directs readers to other gang-stalking sites should their favorite sites be shut down.

Mr. Robinson said in an interview that that he has been tortured and abused by gang stalkers and by “neurological weaponry” since leaving the Navy in 1982. “To read the stories and the similarity of the harassment techniques that were going on, to hear about the vandalism, appliance tampering and all the other things were designed to drive a person crazy, who do you go to with this?” he said. “People will say you are delusional.”

For Mr. Robinson and several other Web site users interviewed for this article — all of whom insisted they were not delusional, including one man who said he had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards — the sites provide the powerful, unfamiliar experience of being understood by others.

“By and large, most people are sane and coherent and can relate exactly what’s happening to them,” Mr. Robinson said. “They can say the things that would otherwise get them labeled as delusional.”

His group of self-described “targeted individuals” met offline in Los Angeles last month for their inaugural conference, he said, where they attended a meeting to share stories, including the humiliating experiences of being told they are insane.

Mental health experts who have closely looked at the Web sites are careful to say that there is no way to prove if someone posting on, say, Mr. Robinson’s site, Freedomfchs.com, which says its mission is to seek justice for those singled out by “organized stalking and electromagnetic torture,” is suffering from mental illness.

Vaughan Bell, a British psychologist who has researched the effect of the Internet on mental illness, first began tracking sites with reports of mind control in 2004. In 2006 he published a study concluding that there was an extensive Internet community around such beliefs, and he called 10 sites he studied “likely psychotic sites.”

The extent of the community, Dr. Bell said, poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person’s “culture or subculture,” it is not a delusion. The exception accounts for rituals of religious faith, for example.

Dr. Bell, whose study was published in the journal Psychopathology, said that it does not suggest all people participating in mind-control sites are delusional, and that a firm diagnosis of psychosis could only be done in person.

For people who say they are the target of mind control or gang stalking, there may be enough evidence in the scientific literature to fan their beliefs. Many sites point to MK-ULTRA, the code name for a covert C.I.A. mind-control and chemical interrogation program begun in the 1950s.

Recently the sites have linked to an article published in September in Time magazine, “The Army’s Totally Serious Mind-Control Project,” which described a $4 million contract given to the Army to develop “thought helmets” that would allow troops to communicate through brain waves on the battlefield.

And the users of some sites have found the support of Jim Guest, a Republican state representative in Missouri, who wrote last year to his fellow legislators calling for an investigation into the claims of those who say they are being tortured by mind control.

“I’ve had enough calls, some from credible people — professors — being targeted by nonlethal weapons,” Mr. Guest said in a telephone interview, adding that nothing came of his request for a legislative investigation. “They become psychologically affected by it. They have trouble sleeping at night.”

He added: “I believe there are people who have been targeted by this. With this equipment, you have to test it on somebody to see if it works.”

Dr. Bell and some other mental health professionals say that even if the users of such sites are psychotic, forging an online connection to others and being told — perhaps for the first time — “you are not crazy” could actually have a positive effect on their illnesses.

“We know, for example, that things like social support, all of these positive social aspects are very good for people’s mental illness,” Dr. Bell said. “I wouldn’t say it’s entirely and completely positive, but it can be positive.”

Some research has shown that when people with delusions undergo group cognitive therapy, the group process can be helpful in their treatment.

But the Web sites are not moderated by professionals, and many postings discuss the failure of medication and say that mental health professionals are part of the conspiracy against them.

“These people lead quietly desperate lives,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. “And if they are reinforcing each other and pulling people toward something, if they are using the Internet and getting reinforcement, that’s good.”

The mind-control sites remind some experts of the accounts of those claiming to have been abducted by aliens in the 1970s and ’80s. One person’s story begat another until many insisted they had had virtually identical experiences of being taken onto space ships by silvery sloe-eyed creatures.

Some of those now posting on mind-control sites say they are being remotely “sexually stimulated” by their torturers. Some alien abductees had said similar things. Subsequent research generally showed that those who believed they had been abducted were not psychotic, but suffering from severe memory and sleep problems, or personal traumas, Dr. Bell said.

Psychiatrists and researchers say it is too soon to say whether communication on the Internet among people who may be psychotic will negatively effect their illnesses.” This is a very complex little corner,” said Dr. Ken Duckworth, the medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group. “Some people may find it’s healing, but these are really hard questions. The Internet isn’t a cause of mental illness, it’s a complicating new variable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/fashion/13psych.html





EU Council Refuses to Release Secret ACTA Documents
Press release

Brussels, 10th November 2008 - The EU Council of Ministers refuses to release secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) documents. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) had requested these documents to make public and parliamentary scrutiny possible. After the Council's refusal, the FFII sent in a confirmatory application, for the EU Council to review its position, as allowed by Article 7(2) of the regulation dealing with public access to such documents.

ACTA's secrecy fuels concerns that the treaty may give patent trolls the means to extort companies, undermine access to low-cost generic medicines, lead to monitoring all citizens' Internet communications and criminalize peer-to-peer electronic file sharing.

The EU Council refuses to release the secret documents stating that disclosure of this information could impede the proper conduct of the negotiations, would weaken the position of the European Union in these negotiations and might affect relations with the third parties concerned.

The FFII reaffirms its application stating that the legislative process in the EU has to be open. If the agreement will only be made public once all parties have already agreed to it, none of the EU's national parliaments nor the European Parliament will have been able to scrutinise its contents in any meaningful way. To prevent this from happening, it may be necessary to renegotiate ACTA's transparency.

The FFII's confirmatory application letter questions ACTA's secrecy in no uncertain terms: "The argument that public transparency regarding 'trade negotiations' can be ignored if it would weaken the EU's negotiation position is particularly painful. At which point exactly do negotiations over trade issues become more important than democratic law making? At 200 million euro? At 500 million euro? At 1 billion euro? What is the price of our democracy?"

The Canadian government released documents under the Access to Information Act that provide additional insights into the secretive nature of the negotiations.

If the EU Council again refuses to release the secret documents, the FFII can take the case to the European Court of Justice. An earlier case on transparency of EU legislation took 6 years. By that time ACTA may long have entered into force.

Ante Wessels, FFII analyst, says: "We do not have so much time. The only solution we see is that the parliaments of Europe force the Council to publish the texts by making Parliamentary scrutiny reservations."
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases...ACTA_documents





AVG Virus Scanner Removes Critical Windows File

An update for the AVG virus scanner released yesterday contained an incorrect virus signature, which led it to think user32.dll contained the Trojan Horses PSW.Banker4.APSA or Generic9TBN. AVG then recommended deleting this file; this causes the affected systems to either stop booting or go into a continuous reboot cycle. So far, the problem only appears to affect Windows XP, but there is no guarantee that other versions of Windows don’t have the same issue.

Both AVG 7.5 and AVG 8.0 were affected by the update; a revised signature database has just been published that corrects this issue. People that have removed the user32.dll can either boot from their original Windows CD and choose the repair option, or use another CD to boot from and restore the file from C:\Windows\System32\dllcache. If you happen to need a bootable CD: my personal favorite is the Ultimate Boot CD (mirror of UBCD 4.1.1 ISO).

AVG claims to have approximately 80 million users worldwide; there is no official reaction on the AVG website yet, but FAQ item 1574 in their support section covers a “False positive user32.dll” and offers some advice on restoring your system using the Windows Recovery Console.

AVG’s popularity stems mainly from the free version they offer for home users; if you’re looking for an alternative free virus scanner for Windows I highly recommend Avast!. ClamWin is another alternative; it’s a Windows port of the popular Linux scanner ClamAV.

Update: AVG has responded on their forum, but there is no press release or other info on their main website yet, other than the info in their FAQ. The response in the forum:

Unfortunately, the previous virus database might have detected the mentioned virus on legitimate files. We can confirm that it was a false alarm. We have immediately released a new virus update (270.9.0/1778) that removes the false positive detection on this file. Please update your AVG and check your files again.

[...]

We are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your help.

Update 2: According to comments at ghacks, users of AVG version 7.5 might have an easier alternative: reboot in safe mode and disable the scanner, then update to the latest version.

Update 3: A reader suggested Avira as another alternative free virus scanner; I’ve never heard of it, but you can check it out here. And of course, if your virus scanner should ever detect a file that looks to you like a false positive, head over to virustotal.com and submit it to all major virus scanners at once!
http://securityandthe.net/2008/11/10...-windows-file/





Test Center Benchmarks: Windows 7 Unmasked

Measured by runtime specs and performance benchmarks, Windows 7 M3 looks like Vista, and it runs like Vista. Welcome to Windows Vista R2!
Randall C. Kennedy

It's here! After months of speculation, Windows 7 was finally unveiled last month at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Through a series of well-orchestrated keynote presentations and supporting breakout sessions, Microsoft walked conference attendees through the highlights of its new desktop OS: better performance, an improved user experience, and some nifty media-sharing features. Overall, Microsoft's pitch was quite compelling, and the PDC crowd was practically salivating at the chance to play with Microsoft's latest and greatest.

But after the stage props came down, and after the projectors finally went cold, attendees were left with a pre-beta copy of something that looked less like a new OS than the repackaging of an old one. At least that was my impression after I started exploring the Windows 7 M3 (Milestone 3) bits that came on my shiny new 160GB Western Digital USB hard disk (one of the better tchotchkes I've received at a conference). As I reported on my Enterprise Desktop blog, the more I dug into Windows 7, the more I saw an OS that looked and felt like a slightly tweaked version of Windows Vista.

Just what was so new about Microsoft's next Windows, apart from a rejuggled UI? Windows 7 appeared to suck memory like Vista, to consume CPU like Vista, and to have the same consumer focus. How would this product be received by enterprise customers, the vast majority of whom had soundly rejected its predecessor? After all, if Vista wasn't good enough for big business, then surely a Vista-derived encore would meet with a similarly chilly reception.

If any pre-beta software ever called for a close look and benchmark testing, Windows 7 M3 was it. With so many questions to answer, and the fate of Windows in the enterprise hanging in the balance, I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. I started by examining Windows 7's innards -- the kernel and other low-level structures -- then slowly worked my way out to subsystem behavior and application runtime characteristics. Because one of the focal points of Microsoft's keynote presentation was improved performance, I looked for signs that Windows 7 would be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Windows Vista.

Note: All the test tools I used for this article are freely available from the exo.performance.network Web site. You can also test your current PC for Windows 7 compatibility now, and then monitor Windows 7 performance on your own system when it enters public beta later this year, using InfoWorld's free Windows Sentinel tool.

The view from inside: a minor tweak to Vista
As I mentioned in the intro, I began my exploration of Windows 7 by poking around the OS's innards. Using a combination of the Windows Performance Monitor utility and some reference data I'd gathered from Windows Vista and XP, I began comparing the runtime structure and composition of various OS processes and services.

First up was the Windows 7 kernel -- aka the System process. When comparing Windows versions, it's always good to start with the kernel because this is where the most fundamental changes take place. For example, when Microsoft went from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the System process gained 21 execution threads in its default configuration. Likewise, when Microsoft introduced Windows Vista, the kernel gained 39 execution threads.

In fact, the kernel in each major new version of the Windows OS has spawned a different, typically higher number of threads. So when I examined Windows 7 and found a nearly identical thread count (97 to 100) for the System process, I knew right away that I was dealing with a minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite. This was not "MinWin," the mythical, streamlined new Windows kernel that promised a clean break with the bloated Vista.

Next up: the memory footprint for the kernel. Like the System process, memory footprint tends to vary widely from version to version, with successive releases showing an ever-expanding kernel working set. Based on the thread count values I observed in my previous example, I anticipated that the working set would be similar to Vista's. And in keeping with my initial suspicions, Windows 7 M3's System process indeed consumed a similar amount of memory (3.5MB to 4.5MB). So far, the new OS was looking a lot like Vista.

In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities. Key subsystems, including the Desktop Window Manager (dwm) and Client/Server Runtime (csrss), sported similar thread counts and working set sizes. When viewed side by side in Performance Monitor, Vista and Windows 7 were virtually indistinguishable.

Two of Microsoft's selling points for Windows 7 have been improved performance and lower resource requirements when compared to Vista. However, these sorts of gains traditionally have been difficult to realize without significantly modifying the OS at a kernel level, and the telltale signs were showing that the changes were minor. What would happen if I threw some test workloads at this OS?

Benchmarking Windows 7 Milestone 3
To test Windows 7, I employed the DMS Clarity Studio tools suite -- the same tools I used in March to show that Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP. Using a combination of the Clarity Studio's ADO (ActiveX Data Objects), MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface), and WMP (Windows Media Player) Stress workload objects, I was able to simulate a complex, multiprocess workload under Windows 7 consisting of client/server database, workflow, and streaming media playback tasks. I used the DMS Clarity Tracker agent to record system and process metrics during the test scenarios. All tests were conducted against a 2GB Core 2 Duo (T7200) laptop PC (the Dell XPS M1710) configured to dual-boot between Windows 7 Ultimate M3 and Windows Vista Ultimate SP1.

A nine-way test scenario, involving three concurrent instances of each workload object, turned in nearly identical average transaction times under Windows 7 M3 and Windows Vista. In fact, the scores were so close -- less than a 5 percent delta (in favor of Vista) on the database tasks, and a roughly 2 percent delta (in favor of Windows 7) on the workflow tasks -- that they fell within what I'd typically consider the margin of error for this sort of test.

An analysis of system and process metrics collected during testing showed both operating systems consuming a similar amount of RAM -- 637MB for Vista and 658MB for Windows 7 -- across all active processes, while the overall thread count showed a modest reduction under Windows 7 (712 versus 810 for Vista). Interestingly, Clarity Studio's process objects for the database workloads (ADO Stress) spent significantly less time (61 percent less) executing in kernel mode under Windows 7 than under Vista, perhaps indicating that some of the code paths related to Jet 4.0 database access have been moved into user mode. This could conceivably explain the modest, 5 percent slowdown of these same workloads under Windows 7. The additional Local Procedure Call overhead of moving portions of MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) out of the kernel would most certainly be felt by a time-sensitive, looping transactional workload like ADO Stress.

In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance. The few minor variations I observed during comparative testing are easily explained away by slight tweaks to the kernel (such as the aforementioned MDAC changes); they certainly don't indicate a significant performance overhaul. More important, these variations pale in comparison with the 40 percent gap in performance I've observed between Vista and Windows XP SP3. From a raw throughput perspective, Windows 7 promises to perform as poorly as its predecessor. "Pre-beta" notwithstanding, the reality is that any hope for closing of the performance gap with Windows XP is unlikely to materialize in Windows 7.

Visual cues and other hints show Vista under the hood
Much has been made, by Microsoft and others, of the significant changes to the Explorer UI under Windows 7. The M3 build provided at PDC lacks certain key features -- such as the reengineered task bar --but clearly shows that Microsoft felt the need to do some housecleaning. Printers and other peripherals, including Bluetooth devices, are now managed through a single Control Panel applet, the Device Stage. Some Control Panel items have been eliminated entirely, while others have been shifted around or rolled into neighboring categories (for example, Security and Maintenance).

Overall, the changes are mostly superficial. Even the new Task Bar is simply a twist on the existing Explorer UI model, not to mention a blatant rip-off of the Mac OS X dock. Moreover, none of Windows 7's UI goodness is the result of any architectural changes to the OS. The underpinnings are still clearly based on Vista, which explains why most Vista device drivers and services install without a hitch under Windows 7 M3. Not all Vista drivers behave, however; see the next section for some potential trouble spots.

Otherwise, Windows 7 operates much like Vista. There are subtle visual tweaks here and there, but nothing on the level of the dramatic XP-to-Vista transition. Ironically, Vista users may be more annoyed by the UI changes than users coming from XP. Because the Windows 7 and Vista Aero experiences are so similar, seasoned users of Vista will be more likely to look in the wrong places for common functions. By contrast, XP users won't be burdened with now-outdated Aero navigation skills.

Potential pitfalls: compatibility woes continues
One of the more surprising results of my Windows 7 M3 testing was the number of unexpected compatibility issues that plagued each stage of the process. For example, Daemon Tools, an ISO image-mounting utility that works great under Windows XP and Vista, refused to install under Windows 7. Worse still, when I tried to work around the problem -- by using the Compatibility tab in the MSI file's properties dialog -- I found myself stuck in an endless loop of failed installations and mandatory reboots.

The apparent source of the problem -- an incompatibility between the low-level CD/DVD-ROM simulator driver (SPD version 1.56) and Windows 7 -- was difficult to fathom, considering the kernel composition seemed so similar to Vista's. In fact, when I relayed my experience to some of the Microsoft folks on the show floor of the PDC Partner Pavilion, they were equally puzzled. They also seemed alarmed that Windows 7 was incompatible with anything that ran properly under Vista, a reaction I interpreted as tacit endorsement of my understanding of the Windows 7 kernel.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of my compatibility headaches. Running under Windows 7 M3 on a Dell Precision M6400 mobile workstation (review to come), Skype 3.8 would randomly crash without warning. Skype showed no debug dialogs -- it just disappeared. But the worst compatibility issue, and also the most alarming from an architectural standpoint, was with VMware Workstation 6.5.

After installing VMware Workstation on the Dell M6400, I was unable to launch any virtual machines. The VMware UI shell couldn't communicate with the VMware Authorization Service, a problem I eventually worked around by running the shell in Administrator Mode. But this "fix" came at a price: the loss of drag and drop between Windows 7 and the VMware guest OS.

Nor was this the only issue I encountered with VMware Workstation. It seems that the VMware Bridge Protocol -- another of those Vista-compatible device drivers you would expect to work unmodified under Windows 7 -- was nonfunctional, rendering VMware's bridged networking mode useless. (In VMware Workstation, bridged networking is the virtual network configuration that allows the guest OS to communicate with the host OS.)

As of this writing, I have yet to confirm the exact nature of the VMware issues. I suspect the VMware Authorization Service bug had something to do with Windows 7's revamped UAC (User Account Control) system. An attempt to bolster system security by requiring the user to confirm certain common functions via a dialog prompt, the nettlesome UAC has been one of the more unpopular features of Vista. In Windows 7, Microsoft has responded to the criticism by suppressing most UAC prompts by default. Because VMware Workstation 6.5 was designed to work seamlessly with the older, more intrusive Vista model, my guess is that Windows 7's attempts to suppress UAC breaks the VMware shell's UAC interaction logic; it's no longer able to traverse the various process privilege levels and speak to its Authorization Service component.

Just how many Vista-compatible applications will break in this manner is anybody's guess. But as a person charged with supporting a UAC-aware software product on Windows, I'm genuinely concerned. Even more disturbing are the unexplained driver compatibility issues. If Windows 7 really is Vista at its core -- as the close similarity of their System process, memory, and performance profiles suggests -- then the fact that Microsoft has still managed to break applications as popular as Daemon Tools and Skype (both have tens of millions of users) is disconcerting and perhaps even alarming. At the very least, it doesn't bode well for Microsoft's promises to make the Vista-to-Windows 7 transition truly seamless.

Lipstick on the pig
So where does this leave us? For starters, we can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista -- an "R2" release, to use Microsoft's nomenclature on the Windows Server side of the house. Key processes look and work much like they do under Vista, and preliminary benchmark testing shows that Windows 7 performs right on a par with its predecessor. Frankly, Windows 7 is Vista, at least under the hood; if nothing else, this should translate into excellent backward compatibility with Vista-certified applications and drivers.

Except that it might not. The M3 build of Windows 7 breaks all sorts of things that, frankly, it shouldn't be breaking. Worse still, the suspected source of a major compatibility bump -- the neutered UAC prompts -- is in fact architectural in nature, one of the few truly new features of Windows 7's secure computing stack.

Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.

IT organizations rejected Windows Vista en masse, and Windows 7 is Microsoft's response. Simply put, it's not enough. Slapping an upgraded UI onto an already discredited OS platform fools nobody and serves only to further alienate the very enterprise customers whom Microsoft claims to be wooing. What the company needs to do is listen to its corporate customers and implement the features that IT shops have been requesting: lower resource requirements, better backward compatibility, and a clear migration strategy from Windows XP. The window for lowering resource requirements in Windows 7 has undoubtedly closed. But it's not too late to fix Vista's spotty support for legacy Windows applications. Application virtualization technology is an ideal way to isolate troublesome applications. If Microsoft were to include its App-V bits in Windows 7 -- as part of a legacy-compatibility subsystem that could take over when a problem application is detected -- I'd take its claims of targeting the enterprise more seriously. As it stands, there's little in Windows 7 that IT shops will find compelling. Most of the new features are targeted squarely at consumers, which is the same formula that got Microsoft into trouble with Vista.

The larger question is what all those Vista refuseniks will do when their hopes for Windows 7 are crushed. Some will undoubtedly give in. After all, you can prop up Windows XP only for so long. However, for many shops, this may be the perfect opportunity to seriously explore the alternatives outside Microsoft. Ubuntu Linux gets more polished each quarter, while Apple hardware and Mac OS X continue to impress technical and nontechnical users alike.

One thing's for sure: Microsoft's once unassailable dominance of the enterprise desktop is wobbling on a precipice. Windows Vista has permanently eroded the company's reputation among IT decision makers, and from what we've seen of Windows 7 so far, Microsoft still does not "get IT."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...ndows-7_1.html





25 Years Ago Today, Bill Gates Announced Windows 1.0

Two decades and a half ago today, Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft's first operating systems. Oh, it wasn't for sale yet—no, no, it's still only 1983 and we wouldn't see Windows on store shelves until 1985. But that didn't stop the young heart throb Gates.

Gates wasn't at all shy when promoting his debut Windows OS at New York's Helmsley Palace Hotel that day, claiming that it, powered by a unique graphical interface, would be running 90% of IBM systems by 1984 (before missing the launch date by a year, of course). To his credit, that ridiculously lofty number is just about identical to the Windows marketshare of today.

Windows 1 wouldn't be around for long, with its Windows 2 predecessor following just two years later. But if you have a fond memory of the old OS, now would be a good time to share it with the class in the comments.
http://gizmodo.com/5082281/25-years-...ced-windows-10





Vista Lawsuit Spotlights Ties Between Microsoft, Intel
Benjamin J. Romano

Newly unsealed documents in a class-action lawsuit challenging Microsoft's practices for Windows Vista reveal that a controversial change made in the "Windows Vista Capable" marketing program in early 2006 may have saved key partners, including Intel, billions of dollars in sales of soon-to-be-obsolete hardware.

U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman ordered the documents unsealed late Thursday, letting loose a raft of internal Microsoft messages and e-mails between Microsoft and Intel executives.

While Pechman did not rule on any of the key issues in the case, the correspondence — which refers to communications between the companies' CEOs — pulls back the curtain on a high-stakes and often tense relationship at the heart of the computer industry.

The suit, filed in Seattle in March 2007, alleges consumers who purchased PCs labeled "Windows Vista Capable" in 2006 — before the operating system's launch — were deceived.

Some PCs that had the "Vista Capable" logos could only be upgraded to run a basic version of the operating system.

The program was designed to buoy demand ahead of the launch of Vista on Jan. 30, 2007. The PC industry was concerned about the "Osborne effect" — "the phenomenon of consumer purchase delays awaiting the release of products incorporating new technology," plaintiffs attorneys wrote.

A key issue in the case surrounds the inclusion in the "Vista Capable" requirements of a specific new graphics technology.

The plaintiffs, represented by Seattle law firms Keller Rohrback and Gordon Tilden Thomas & Cordell, filed a motion for partial summary judgment on the so-called Windows Device Driver Model (WDDM) issue in September. This motion and several others were unsealed Thursday.

WDDM was required to run the translucent "Aero" user interface, a key Vista selling point. But it would also improve stability, reliability and security, according to statements by Microsoft workers and plaintiffs' expert witness.

In January 2006, Microsoft changed the date Vista Capable-marked PCs would begin appearing in stores from June 1 to April 1.

In e-mails, including at least one marked confidential, an Intel executive asked Microsoft to stick to the original June start date, giving Intel and its PC-maker customers time to sell inventory that would not meet the Vista Capable requirements.

A Microsoft employee estimated the potential cost to Intel of starting the program in April at $600 million in lost sales, according to the motion. But the bigger issue was that a widely used Intel 915 chip set would not support WDDM.

"Intel will continue to see loss in market share due to this decision," Microsoft marketing director Rajesh Srinivasan wrote. "Here is how their potential costs could get into billions."

Between June 24, 2005, and Jan. 26, 2006, three PC manufacturers — Dell, Sony and Fujitsu — had asked Microsoft for waivers on the WDDM requirements.

Will Poole, who ran Microsoft's Windows Client business at the time, wouldn't budge on the date the marketing program would begin, the motion said.

But the matter caught the attention of Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who wanted to share "feedback" with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, according to an e-mail from an Intel executive.

Microsoft continued to deliberate internally and Poole told Intel on Jan. 30 that Microsoft was dropping the WDDM requirement from the Vista Capable program.

Inside Microsoft, the decision was greeted with scorn.

Jim Allchin, then co-president of the Windows division, was described as "apoplectic." When he was briefed on the possibility of dropping WDDM, his initial reaction was "this plan is terrible."

"I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program," he wrote.

The move at first surprised Renee James, the Intel executive in charge of the company's relationship with Microsoft. But by the end of the day, her concerns were alleviated and she thanked Poole for his "commitment to embrace 915."

She also noted that Otellini sent a note to Ballmer "thanking him for listening and making these changes (I know you did it.)."

Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster said via e-mail Thursday that "Ballmer has no unique knowledge of the facts in this case. Anything he knows about the Windows Vista Capable program he learned from executives whom he empowered to run the program and make decisions."

(The plaintiffs have asked to depose Ballmer. Pechman has yet to rule on that request.)

Bowermaster described the unsealed communications as "the normal back-and-forth discussion about an internal decision Microsoft made in January 2006, long before it began communicating about the Windows Vista Capable program to consumers in May 2006.

"Ultimately, we provided choices to consumers, giving different options for Windows Vista Capable PCs at various price-points to meet their needs," Bowermaster said.

"We conducted a comprehensive education campaign through retailers, PC manufacturers, the press, and our own Web site that gave consumers the information they needed to choose an affordable computer that would run the edition of Windows Vista that best fit their needs or lifestyle."

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "We typically do not comment on cases where we're not a party."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...crosoft14.html





Colombia Signs Up for OLPC Laptops with Windows

Colombia signed on as the second country to use OLPC laptops armed with Windows XP.
Dan Nystedt

Colombia will become the second country to use the One Laptop Per Child Project's (OLPC) XO laptops running Microsoft Windows XP in schools after signing an agreement for pilot programs in two towns, Microsoft said late Monday.

Schools in the towns of Quetame and Chia will be outfitted with the small green XO laptops developed by the OLPC. The pilot programs are expected to expand over time.

Microsoft and OLPC will donate the XO laptops and work with teachers on how to use them in schools. The groups did not say how many laptops would be handed out as part of the trial nor when it would start.

With the agreement, Colombia became second behind only Peru to adopt XO laptops with Windows XP in schools. Microsoft and OLPC worked together to tweak the OS and OLPC laptops to use the Microsoft software. Prior to their work, which was announced in May, the hardware on the XO could not handle the OS.

The Colombia pilot programs are an effort to introduce more technology into schools and prepare kids for high tech jobs in the future. OLPC started as an effort to develop a low-cost US$100 laptop to distribute in developing nations to help maker sure kids and other people aren't left out of the computing revolution.

Installing Microsoft software in OLPC's laptops has been controversial. OLPC started out offering Linux on the devices because the OS costs nothing and organizers believed it made the device run more efficiently. Some open-source software advocates hoped the XO would spread the use of Linux and the open source philosophy to the 5 billion people living without computers in the developing world.

Microsoft hopes to capture these 5 billion people for its future market potential.

The decision to put Windows on the laptops came about because officials in some countries feared a non-Windows laptop would ill prepare students for the real world, in which Microsoft software dominates. OLPC ultimately decided to ignore the controversy and follow its mission of delivering laptops to kids in developing nations, no matter which OS countries ask for.

The group now offers XO laptops with either Linux or Windows XP.

Last month, OLPC announced that several towns in Colombia were in the process of buying or deploying its XO laptops, most of which use a Red Hat Fedora Linux OS core customized by OLPC and a graphical user interface aimed at kids called Sugar.

An initial 20,000 laptops will be handed out at schools in the capital, Bogota, thanks to several Colombian foundations and private donors. Another 90,000 laptops will be deployed in Cartagena.

Around 1,000 XO laptops have been earmarked for schools in regions where the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Army of Colombia) rebel group remains active. The hope is kids become more interested in computers than joining the rebels, though the organization Human Rights Watch notes that many kids in the area are forced into the group and shot if they try to leave.

The XO is already being used in the Marina Orth School in a poor neighborhood in Medellin, birthplace and former home to famed drug lord Pablo Escobar.
http://goodgearguide.com.au/article/266947





1.5TB Barracuda Freezes: Seagate Speaks Out
Cyril Kowaliski

Last week, we stumbled upon multiple user reports of intermittent hangs with Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive. According to folks on the Seagate support forums, the drives randomly freeze for around 30 seconds at a time in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista. Freezes allegedly occur in tasks like streaming video or transferring files at low speeds, and they happen regardless of drive configuration or Serial ATA controller type.

We shot off an e-mail to Seagate last week to inquire about these problems. We've now received a response from company spokesman Mike Hall, who's written the following:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware.

We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions.

Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18.

Support contact information:

Technical Support in the USA: 1.800.SEAGATE (1.800.732.4283)
Technical Support in Canada: 1.405.324.4700

Other regions please go to our support web page: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/

For the record, many users who posted in the Seagate support forums say they've received unhelpful responses from the company's support staffers, including some saying the 1.5TB 'cuda doesn't support Linux or RAID setups. (Desktop RAID is still among the list of "best-fit applications" on the official product page.) One user posted about a similar response as early as last Saturday.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863





NebuAd, ISP Partners Targeted in Class Action Suit
Zachary Rodgers

NebuAd and 26 of its ISP partners are the targets of a class-action suit that was filed this week in a California Federal District Court.

The complaint, filed Monday on behalf of 16 plaintiffs, claims NebuAd and Internet service providers committed illegal privacy and computer security breaches against Internet subscribers. ISPs named in the suit include CenturyTel, WOW, CableOne, Embarq, Knology, and Bresnan Communications. The filing also targets an additional 20 unnamed ISP defendants, referred to as "John Does," which it claims also worked with NebuAd.

The six ISPs identified in the complaint retained NebuAd earlier this year to conduct trials of the vendor's behavioral advertising platform. None have active relationships with the company now, however. Indeed, NebuAd backed away from ISP behavioral targeting (ISP-BT) earlier this fall after drawing scrutiny from Congressional leaders and privacy advocates.

The class action suit alleges the defendants violated two federal laws (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) as well as two California laws (the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the Computer Crime Law). To those, plaintiffs added charges of aiding and abetting, civil conspiracy, and unjust enrichment.

Regarding the Electronic Communications Privacy Act violation, the suit alleges "Defendants have intentionally used such electronic communications with knowledge...that the electronic communications were obtained through interception for an unlawful purpose."

Plaintiffs in the suit reside in five states, including Alabama, Kansas, and Georgia. However their complaint asserts claims on behalf of future class members in all 50 states.

MediaPost first reported the lawsuit on Tuesday.
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631662





IBM to Help Build Broadband Network in Power Lines

Broadband over power lines gets a needed endorsement from a big player in computing
Andrew Vanacore, AP Business Writer

IBM Corp. is throwing its considerable weight behind an idea that seemed to have faded: broadband Internet access delivered over ordinary power lines.

The technology has been around for decades, but most efforts to implement the idea on a broad scale have failed to live up to expectations.

Now, with somewhat scaled-back goals, improved technology, and a dose of low-interest federal loans, IBM is partnering with a small newcomer called International Broadband Electric Communications Inc. to try to make the idea work in rural communities that don't have other broadband options.

Their strategy is to sign up electric cooperatives that provide power to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States. Rather than compete toe-to-toe with large, entrenched cable or DSL providers, International Broadband is looking for customers that have been largely left out of the shift to high-speed Internet.

Signing on IBM, perhaps the highest-profile company to buy into the idea, could juice a technology that has failed to make much of an imprint.

"The technology is important but what's really important is this is a seminal moment in the delivery of broadband services to rural customers," said Bill Moroney, the head of the Utilities Telecom Council, an industry trade group. "Here's a beginning and really a great leap forward."

That's a claim likely to be met with some skepticism. Other companies touting broadband access over power lines and through wall outlets have come and gone, dogged by technical hurdles and opposition from amateur radio operators who said the technology interfered with their signals.

In the most recent case, a Dallas utility that planned to provide broadband access to 2 million customers on its power grid decided to shelve the idea in May. Instead the company, Oncor Electric Delivery Co., said it would use the equipment only to monitor the grid.

Federal Communications Commission statistics for 2006, the most recent year available, showed that fewer than 5,000 customers in the U.S. had broadband access through power lines.

IBM and International Broadband say their approach has a better shot.

Neither see big utility companies ever adopting broadband over power lines, which struggles to match the speed of phone or cable lines.

"Broadband service by any of the major utilities doesn't make sense," said Ray Blair, IBM's head of advanced networking. "It will never be able to compete head on."

But in rural areas, where other broadband providers can't afford to build infrastructure, Blair said the technology has come far enough in the past few years to make the power line model economical.

Progress has been slow going, he said, because the technology suppliers in the industry are smaller players without large budgets for research and advertising.

The technology involves sending data on the same wires that provide electricity. Every half a mile or so, a device clamped to the line perpetuates the signal. Inside homes, customers plug a modem into any wall outlet and sign on.

But that stream of data has often run into interference with other wireless devices that happen to be nearby. Ham radio operators have been particularly irked, and even sued the FCC over it.

The key innovation introduced in the past few years, Blair said, is the ability to remotely control the devices fixed to power lines. That way it can be told to switch frequency when it meets interference.

IBM has signed a $9.6 million deal with International Broadband to provide and install the equipment. International Broadband Chief Executive Scott Lee said putting the network in place should take about two years and cost as much as $70 million.

The company will have access to 340,000 homes in Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin, about 86 percent of which have no cable or DSL access, Lee said.

Capturing a large segment of that market would be a huge step for International Broadband, which currently provides only about 1,400 customers with broadband, most of them starting in the past year and half.

The basic service will start at $29.95 per month, which provides Internet download speeds of about 256 kilobits per second. That's just a few times faster than dial-up, but higher-end plans will offer up to 3 megabits per second, more comparable with DSL and cable. Also, upload and download speeds are the same over the power line service; upload speeds are generally lower on DSL and cable.

International Broadband has had help along the way from the federal government: Lee said the company has received $70 million in low-interest loans from the Department of Agriculture. Federal officials have seen broadband over power lines as an attractive option for spreading economic development in rural areas.

"Most of these people have broadband at school or at work but when they get home they lose all of those advantages," Lee said. "It's a service that is desperately needed."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/IBM-to...-13540586.html





Taiwan Makes Fastest 60GHz Wireless System on a Chip, 100 Times Wifi Speed for Less Than $1

National Taiwan University announced their latest invention System on a Chip (SOC) yesterday, the smallest such product at the lowest cost and consuming the least electricity. The NTU research team claims that the transmission speed of the chip is 100 times as fast as WiFi and 350 times as fast as a 3.5G cell phone. Lee indicated that the chip size has been reduced to 0.5 millimeter, one-tenth of that of existing chips, and the cost is less than one-tenth of the traditional communication module and could be further lowered to only US$1. The SOC successfully combines RF Front-End Circuits and an antenna array to reach the highest transmission speed.

The transmission speed may reach WiFi 100 times, 3.5G handset's 350 times, the total power will be one fortieth similar type's of chip, the chip area is one tenth the size of similar chips.

The chip uses the 60GHz frequency band and has reached 5Gigabit per second transmission speed. Total power usage is below 300 milliwatts.

The demonstration was a prototype chip. Future versions will use better antennas.

In 2008, Intel researchers agreed that 60 ghz wireless is the way to go.

With 60 GHZ spectrum there is a potential for moving data at over one Gigabit per second (1 Gbit/s) and up to 8 Gbit/s (over ten meter distances for personal area networks). This will allow things like fast video transfer at a kiosk where you will buy a movie for your Mobile Internet Device (MID) or mobile smartphones. 60 GHz has an advantage with seven GHz of unlicensed spectrum bandwidth available from the FCC.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/11/tai...-chip-100.html





AMD Launches First 45nm CPUs
Ben Hardwidge

Shanghai workstation and server chips provide a glimpse of what we could expect from AMD's next line of desktop CPUs

AMD has been stuck on the 65nm boat for a while now, and its current chips are now looking pretty crusty when you consider that Intel’s 45nm Xeon CPUs were doing the rounds at the end of last year. However, the wait for AMD’s next-gen CPUs is finally over. The company has now officially launched its first 45nm ‘Shanghai’ Opteron chips for servers and workstations, which may well give us a glimpse of what we can expect from its forthcoming desktop CPUs, codenamed 'Deneb'.

AMD’s move to a 45nm process relies on immersion lithography, where a refractive fluid fills the gap between the lens and the wafer, which AMD says will result in ‘dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.’ It’s also enabled AMD to increase the maximum clock speed of the Opterons from 2.3GHz with the Barcelona core to 2.7GHz with the Shanghai core. Given that current Barcelona-based Phenoms top out at 2.6GHz, this could mean much faster clock speeds for AMD’s future desktop chips.

Shanghai chips also feature much more cache than their predecessors, with 6MB of Level 3 cache bumping the total up to 8MB, and the chips share the same cache architecture as Barcelona CPUs, with a shared pool of Level 3 cache and an individual allocation of Level 2 cache for each core. As well as this, the Shanghai chips use HyperTransport 3.0, allowing bandwidth of up to 17.6GB/sec. Meanwhile, AMD plans to start introducing its six-core ‘Istanbul’ Opteron chips next year.

AMD is expected to launch its 45nm Deneb desktop CPUs before the end of the year, and they will also be fabricated on a 45nm process. However, unless the chips offer a serious improvement in performance over the current Phenom CPUs, the new chips will have a hard time competing with Intel’s recently launched Core i7 CPUs unless AMD dramatically undercuts them in price.
http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/60517...45nm-cpus.html





Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread
Miguel Helft

What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in?

That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool that Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, unveiled on Tuesday, just as flu season was getting under way in the United States.

Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will probably turn to the Web for information, typing things like “flu symptoms” or “muscle aches” into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states.

Early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some public health experts say that could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

It could also offer a dose of comfort to stricken individuals in knowing that a bug is going around.

“This could conceivably provide as early a warning of an outbreak as any system,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. Ms. Finelli noted that people often search the Internet for medical information before they call their doctor.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” Ms. Finelli said. Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, Ms. Finelli said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths.

Google Flu Trends (www.google.org/flutrends) is the latest indication that the words typed into search engines like Google can be used to track the collective interests and concerns of millions of people, and even to forecast the future.

“This is an example where Google can use the incredible systems that we have to come up with an interesting, predictive result,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning.”

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other techniques, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

If Google provided health officials with details of the inner workings of the system so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Mr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the data sprinkled throughout the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that could be used to make predictions. Commercial Web sites mine this information to predict airfares or home prices.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its home page. It analyzes what its users are interested in and then programs its Web site accordingly.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns. And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends. It found both promises and limitations.

“This works remarkably well, but tends to miss ‘turning points,’ times when the data changes direction,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be immensely valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be used to identify individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenzalike illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Ms. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received little traffic, so its usefulness is limited.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/te.../12flu.html?hp





The Cognitive Benefits of Nature
Jonah Lehrer

Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which are crucial mental talents. The basic idea is that nature, unlike a city, is filled with inherently interesting stimuli (like a sunset, or an unusual bird) that trigger our involuntary attention, but in a modest fashion. Because you can't help but stop and notice the reddish orange twilight sky - paying attention to the sunset doesn't take any extra work or cognitive control - our attentional circuits are able to refresh themselves. A walk in the woods is like a vacation for the prefrontal cortex.

Strolling in a city, however, forces the brain to constantly remain vigilant, as we avoid obstacles (moving cars), ignore irrelevant stimuli (that puppy in the window) and try not to get lost. The end result is that city walks are less restorative (at least for the prefrontal cortex) than strolls amid the serenity of nature. Here's the abstract of a new paper in Psychological Science [not online], by Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephan Kaplan:

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) provides an analysis of the kinds of environments that lead to improvements in directed-attention abilities. Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention abilities a chance to replenish. Unlike natural environments, urban environments are filled with stimulation that captures attention dramatically and additionally requires directed attention (e.g., to avoid being hit by a car), making them less restorative.We present two experiments that show that walking in nature or viewing pictures of nature can improve directed-attention abilities as measured with a backwards digit-span task and the Attention Network Task, thus validating Attention Restoration Theory.

I think you could also make a plausible case that being in nature induces a state of relaxation that is also conducive to insights, which I discuss in this New Yorker article.

The paper, "The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature," will be published in a forthcoming edition of Psychological Science. For more, see here.
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/...ts_of_natu.php





How Your Unique Body Odour Could Identify You as Effectively as a Fingerprint

Your body odour, like fingerprints, would remain distinctive even if you changed your diet, a new study revealed

Every person has a unique body odour, like their fingerprints, that could be used as an 'odourprint' to identify them, a new study has found.

Scientists revealed an individual's odour signature remains detectable even when their diet is changed to include strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices.

Mammals such as mice and humans are known to have unique genetically-determined body odours, called 'odourtypes'.

The Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia conducted tests on mice, which were given different diets affecting their odour.

The results found their natural smell stayed the same and allowed them to be recognised by their peers.


'These findings indicate that biologically-based odorprints, like fingerprints, could be a reliable way to identify individuals,' said Monell chemist Jae Kwak.

'If this can be shown to be the case for humans, it opens the possibility that devices can be developed to detect individual odorprints in humans,' he added.

According to Kwak's colleague Gary Beauchamp, similar approaches are being used to investigate body odour differences associated with disease. Such research could lead to the development of electronic sensors for early detection and rapid diagnosis of disorders such as skin and lung cancer and certain viral diseases.

Monell conducts research on the senses of smell and taste. The results of their latest study are detailed in the October 31 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ngerprint.html





Circumventing Down Under

As activists and consumer advocates in the U.S. gear up to petition the Library of Congress for a few, measly exemptions to the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing technological protection measures, they might want to cast a longing look Down Under and ponder what the New Zealand government has wrought. The Copyright Amendment Act of 2008 there, which took effect on Oct. 31, includes a section granting consumers unprecedented leave to circumvent TPMs for purposes of "Permitted Acts," a category of enumerated uses that encompasses much of what would fall under fair use here, and then some.

A press release summarizing the new law issued by the New Zealand government pretty well buries the lede. But if you scroll all the way down to the last line, there it is, in understated black and white:

• It introduces new provisions to enable the actual exercise of permitted acts where TPMs have been applied.

Fortunately, Sections 226A-E of the statute itself is more explicit. In a nutshell:

• It remains illegal to import, traffic in or sell circumvention tools to consumers, but it is now legal for consumers to possess such tools (assuming they can somehow come to possess them without someone else trafficking in them, which I take it makes sense to New Zealanders but seems a bit weird to me).
• It is now legal for consumers to use such tools to circumvent TPMs for purposes of exercising "permitted acts."
• It is now legal to import, traffic in or sell circumvention tools to or on behalf of "qualified persons," a category spelled out in the statute that includes librarians, educators, archivists and encryption researchers (Ed Felten, phone Wellington).
• If consumers are unable to perform the permitted circumvention themselves they can ask the copyright owner for "assistance." If such assistance is not forthcoming, consumers can prevail upon a qualified person to perform the circumvention for them.

So far as Media Wonk is aware, the New Zealand statute goes farther than any other national law in permitting circumvention of TPMs.

So, the $64,000 question: What are the "Permitted Acts"? Glad you asked. You can find the list contained in Part 3 of the 1994 Copyright Act, which can be downloaded here (very large PDF). The list is voluminous, but covers things like incidental copying, criticism, review or news reporting, a wide variety of educational uses and archival copying. (The new law also amends some of the permitted acts listed in the 1994 statute but the complete, updated list is not yet available online.)

Significantly, the list includes format shifting for audio but not for video, which will be of some relief to the studios, but which has also come under fire from critics who want the format-shifting exemption expanded.

The legalization of circumvention tools, of course, isn't the only unprecedented measure in the New Zealand law. As of Feb. 28, 2009, ISPs in New Zealand will be required to have in place a procedure for warning and then cutting off Internet access to incorrigible illegal downloaders. (The effective date of Section 92A was delayed to give ISPs time to develop their plans.)

In effect, New Zealand is poised to become the first country to implement the "three strikes" rule first proposed in France and recently approved by the French Senate (although not yet by the full Parliament).
http://www.contentagenda.com/blog/15....html?nid=3041





Viewing Employees’ Text Messages May Be Illegal
OliviaGoodkin

On June 18, 2008, an important case regarding employees’ privacy in the workplace was decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case, Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Company, looked at whether the Ontario Police Department had violated an employee’s right to privacy when supervisors viewed the contents of his text messages that were transmitted using Department pagers.

According to the court, the Department’s policies regarding the monitoring of e-mail, computer and text messages were overridden once a supervisor told employees their text messages would be audited if they failed to pay for overages on the text-message plan. Because the employee in the case had paid all overages resulting from his use of pager text messages, the review of the employee’s text messages was deemed illegal.

Inside the Case: Looking at the Ontario Police Department’s Policies

The Ontario Police Department issued a pager with text-messaging capabilities to Sergeant Jeff Quon. He acknowledged the Department’s “Computer Usage, Internet and E-Mail” policy, which explained that the City of Ontario had the right to monitor and log all network activity, including e-mail and Internet use. The policy also stated that users should have no expectation of privacy in their communications when using these forms of communication.

Later, the Department announced at a staff meeting that the policies also applied to using pagers. Under the City’s contract with Arch Wireless Operating Company (“Arch”), the company providing the paging service, each pager was allotted 25,000 characters. The City was required to pay any overage charges.

The Oral “Amendment” to the Written Computer, Internet and E-Mail Policy

Quon’s supervising officer, Lieutenant Duke, told him it was not his intent to audit employees’ text messages for the purpose of seeing whether or not the texts were personal messages. He said he would only conduct an audit if Quon did not pay for the overages. Quon paid the City for overages each time they occurred.

When several officers went over their 25,000 character limit, Lieutenant Duke was ordered to obtain the transcripts to see if the messages were personal or business-related. Arch provided the transcripts, which included personal messages, including several from Quon to his wife.

Quon and others sued Arch for divulging the transcripts of their text messages, and also sued the Ontario Police Department and some of its supervisors.

The Right to Privacy and Fourth Amendment Issues

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the right “of the people” to be secure in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Quon and others involved sued under this Amendment, alleging that a public entity (the Ontario Police Department) obtained the text messaging transcripts improperly.

The court said that Quon’s expectation of privacy “turns on the Department’s policies regarding privacy in his text messages.” The court pointed out that if the policies of the Department were reflected only in the written Computer, Internet and E-mail policy, with the oral amendment applying to text messages, then the case would end there. Those polices clearly indicated that Quon should have no expectation of privacy in using those resources.

However, once Lieutenant Duke told Quon and the staff that he wouldn’t audit their text messages as long as they paid for any overages, the policies were in effect amended, and created an expectation of privacy. Since Quon paid for overages as they occurred, it was reasonable for him to expect his messages to remain private.

Because the Quon case involved a Fourth Amendment claim, which applies when there is a “state” or government action, the court decided there was a violation of the Fourth Amendment because the search was unreasonable.

Why the Quon Case Applies to Your Private Company

An employee’s expectation of privacy can apply to any case involving a California employer – whether public or private. The key issue for California employers is that a verbal statement made by a supervisor can override the written policies of a company. In this case, Lieutenant Duke’s assurance that he would not review text messages, except in the limited situations that did not apply to the Quon case, superseded the written policies that specifically restricted employees’ rights of privacy.

What Should Employers Do Now?

Employers must train supervisors regarding policies and procedures. It is not enough to have written policies that define privacy rights. Review written Internet, computer, e-mail, cell phone and other electronic usage policies to see if they reflect company needs. Then, discuss the policies with all company supervisors to ensure that they understand the repercussions of making exceptions to those policies.
http://www.resourcenation.com/blog/v...may-be-illegal





Harry Potter Lexicon Decision Appealed
Ray Beckerman

"Copyright and Fair Use" at Stanford Law School reports that the defendant publisher, RDR Books, has filed an appeal from the Judge's decision in Warner Bros. Pictures v. RDR Books, the case involving the Harry Potter Lexicon.

The Judge, after a bench trial, issued an injunction and statutory damages of $6750 holding that the Lexicon was not protected by fair use due to (a) sloppiness in attribution in sections, (b) the length of some of the quotes, and (c) imitation of J.K. Rowling's writing style in portions.

I recently wrote an article criticizing the opinion, but doubting that an appeal would be taken in view of the small damages award.

I guess I underestimated the resolve of the defendants and defendants' lawyers -- who include the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...-appealed.html





Study: Unlicensed Stories Reel in Internet Readers
Michael Liedtke

Here's another reason for ailing newspaper and magazine publishers to wince: On average, the audience perusing unauthorized online copies of their articles is nearly 1.5 times larger than the readership on their own Web sites, according to a study released Thursday.

However, the problem, flagged by copyright cop Attributor Corp., could turn into a golden opportunity if media companies figure out a way to mine advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories posted on blogs and other sites.

Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimates the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.

It's an unscientific estimate, based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that aren't owned by the copyright owners.

If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the opportunity for fleeced publishers. The Redwood City-based company already is working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor's vice president of marketing.

"The people creating all this content are not being justly rewarded and publishers are clamoring for every dollar of revenue that they can get in this environment," Pearson said.

There's a whiff of self-interest in Attributor's findings. The privately held company stands to profit if it can persuade potential customers that the Internet is riddled with copyright abuses that could translate into more revenue if the poachers are identified. Attributor's current customers include The Associated Press, Reuters and The Financial Times.

But the issue of copyright infringement was a sore point for media executives long before Attributor began developing its detection system in 2006.

In the most extreme cases, the copyright backlash has triggered bitter legal battles like the one that culminated in the demise of the music sharing service Napster. In a showdown still unfolding, Viacom Inc. is suing Internet search leader Google Inc. for alleged copyright infringement on its video-sharing site, YouTube.

The worst copyright headaches diagnosed in Attributor's study occurred in stories about automobiles, travel and movie reviews. The readership of unlicensed stories in those three categories was four to seven times higher than on the Web sites where the content originated.

Even if they can extract more money from the unauthorized use of their content, newspaper and magazine publishers seem unlikely to recover the revenue that has evaporated as more advertisers shifted their spending to the Internet during the past five years.

That's because Internet ads generally cost a fraction of print ads — a dichotomy that has caused newspapers to lay off thousands of workers to offset double-digit percentage declines in their revenues.

Attributor's study, conducted from Sept. 12 through Oct. 12, reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor's current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...rdi3QD94E5IH82







JPEG isn’t always right. If you are one of those people who just assumes JPEGs rule the world and make all images JPEG, please stop. There is a time and a place where you have to put the JPEG encoder down. It’s not a silver bullet.

I’ve seen a whole slew of web comics using JPEGs. Not good. Sometimes I see things by supposed technology websites that make me want to cry. Seems to me that if you are using the web to publish things, you should know what you are doing. You should care about making them look correct. Maybe they have their reasons. Maybe they want to save to bandwidth while making their graphics look trashy.

Maybe no one notices but me.
http://lbrandy.com/blog/2008/10/my-f...last-webcomic/





FCC Chairman Martin Plans To Stick Around
FMQB

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Kevin Martin said he has no plans "to be going anywhere yet," despite the incoming Democratic administration of Barack Obama. Martin, a Republican, likely would lose his Chairman position shortly after President-elect Obama is sworn in and either designates one of the commission’s Democrats as Chairman or names a new one. Martin has been expected to depart, but he does have the alternative of staying at the FCC as a Commissioner. He hinted that he might stay on at the FCC when Obama takes over, at least through the February 17 digital television transition, according to TV Week.

Asked by reporters whether he might remain through the transition, Martin said only, "I don’t have any particular plans to be going anywhere yet." He declined to be any more specific, says TV Week.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=979195





Spam Volumes Drop by Two-Thirds After Firm Goes Offline

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted on Tuesday after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was taken offline.

Experts say the precipitous drop-off in spam comes from Internet providers unplugging McColo Corp., a hosting provider in Northern California that was the home base for machines responsible for coordinating the sending of roughly 75 percent of all spam each day.

In an alert sent out Wednesday morning, e-mail security firm IronPort said:

In the afternoon of Tuesday 11/11, IronPort saw a drop of almost 2/3 of overall spam volume, correlating with a drop in IronPort's SenderBase queries. While we investigated what we thought might be a technical problem, a major spam network, McColo Corp., was shutdown, as reported by The Washington Post on Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net's graphic shows a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around ten per second -- if I'm reading that graphic correctly.

A number of other spam-fighters today reported a similar drop in junk e-mail volumes. I heard from a reader named Martin who works at a small hosting facility in Germany. He wrote in after noticing a lack of spam banging on his company's e-mail servers. He sent in this graphic and asked that we not use his full name or identify his employer.

Security Fix reader Ted wrote in to say his small Internet service provider also charted a massive collapse in spam volumes yesterday and into today. Ted, who also requested we use only his first name, writes:

Dear Mr. Krebs,

Thank you for your outstanding contribution to bringing down McColo Corp.

I can clearly see the impact you've had, by looking at the spam graph of the small ISP which hosts the web site [omitted] for me:

The daily 15 minute graph reports the rate of spam over a 29 hour period. Time is UTC. As I write, it is about 12:00 UTC, and detected spam is arriving at less than half the rate of the same time yesterday.

The world saw a similar -- if short-lived -- drop in spam volumes in September, following the demise of Intercage, a.k.a. "Atrivo," another Northern California based ISP that security experts identified as a major source of badness online. In that case, it only took the spammers a few days to find a new home. It seems likely that the same will happen in this case as well, and that this minor victory will be short but sweet.

Nilesh Bhandari, product manager with IronPort, said the company sees an average of about 190 billion spam e-mails each day. Then, at around 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday, IronPort saw a huge decline in spam levels. For the 24 hour period ending Tuesday, the company tracked about 112 billion spam messages.

Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.

"We're seeing a slow recovery," Bhandari. "We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/





Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren't Really Looking for Him
Ryan Singel

When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked him up online.

But once he'd parted with the $15, Michaels learned the shocking truth: No one he knew was trying to contact him at all. Classmates.com's come-on was a lie, and he'd been scammed.

At least that's what the San Diego resident alleges in a lawsuit filed against one of the net's original social networking sites, whose banner ads featuring unflattering yearbook pictures remain a staple around the internet. If the lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, succeeds, it could raise the minimum standards of honesty for online businesses.

"Upon logging into his Gold Membership profile in order to view the classmate contacts … Plaintiff discovered that in fact, no former classmate of his had tried to contact him or view his profile," the complaint reads. "Of those www.classmates.com users who were characterized ... as members who viewed Plaintiff's profile, none were former classmates of Plaintiff or persons familiar with or known to Plaintiff for that matter."

The putative class action suit, filed in a California state court on October 30, says there are hundreds of thousands of Anthony Michaels around the country who were similarly duped. The lawsuit asks the court to force the company to refund millions in subscription dollars and fine the company for deceptive advertising.

Lawsuits that seem funny are not always a laughing matter, according to Scott A. Kamber, a plaintiff's attorney with KamberEdelson.

"Cases that seemingly have a similar chuckle factor are rooted in a real consumer fraud that influences a consumer purchase decision," Kamber said. "Sometimes people are defrauded and misled and obviously there is a financial benefit in companies making those claims or they wouldn't do it."

Classmates.com could have a good defense, according to internet law expert Mark Rasch, if someone was actually contacting Michaels but was defrauding Classmates.com by claiming to have gone to a certain high school.

"Or were they making statements they know to be false to induce a person to pony up the oney for a premium service to learn these statements weren't true?" Rasch asked. "A lot of this comes down to knowledge and intent on the part of Classmates.com."

Classmates.com was founded in 1995, years before Friendster, MySpace or Facebook grew popular, and is one of the net's largest advertisers, having spent $30 million in 2005, for example, on online advertising.

The company claims to have 40 million registered users, some of whom pay $15 every three months to be able to send and receive messages. The site's billing practices are complained about nearly daily on ConsumerAffairs.com.

The suit is not the first legal action accusing a prominent online company of deception. In 2003, Bonzi Software settled a class action lawsuit that alleged its banner ads (which mimicked Windows operating system warnings) were deceptive. And in January, Member Source Media agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint about the company's spam messages that promised consumers, "Congratulations. You've won an iPod video player."

While the FTC and state attorneys general have handled some deceptive advertising claims, in tight financial times the burden of online fraud fighting is increasingly falling on class-action attorneys, according to Kamber.

"Attorney General offices are seriously under budget pressure and federal enforcement in last eight last years has not been picking up the slack for the state budget issues," Kamber said. "That leaves class action attorneys on the front line of technology in the consumer area."

Neither Classmates.com nor Michaels' law firm, Kabateck, Brown and Kellner, responded to requests for comment.

Attorney Eric Sinrod, a partner at Duane Morris in San Francisco and a legal columnist at Findlaw, says that legitmate companies make a better target for lawsuits than outright scammers, like those sending fraudulent offers of long-lost Nigerian fortunes.

"Classmates.com is not some fly-by-night company -- it is a real service, not something being operated by unknown people offshore," Sinrod said. "So they are subject to U.S. law and regulators if they are conduct themselves improperly."
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/ne.../11/classmates





CloudShield Selects Shenick for DPI Network Testing
Press release

Shenick’s diversifEye Emulates and Measures in Real Time Stateful Layer 4-7 Application Flows up to 10Gbps Levels

Shenick Network Systems, provider of per-flow IP communications test and monitoring systems, announced that CloudShield Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of services management and infrastructure security solutions, is using diversifEye to test carrier-class deep packet inspection (DPI) and peer-to-peer (P2P) anomaly detection. With diversifEye, CloudShield can emulate stateful application flows in real time as well as analyze each application flow down to individual users.

A small percentage of users create the majority of residentially generated traffic, consuming valuable resources which impact service providers’ revenue-generating traffic. CloudShield’s rule-based, services control solution provides granular visibility into application traffic transiting service providers’ networks and enables traffic policy management. With Shenick’s diversifEye, CloudShield can emulate in real time, even the most elusive application traffic and thereby test and tune its solutions. CloudShield applications help service providers reduce congestion and operating costs, increase revenue and prevent customer churn.

“As traffic volume continues to grow, so do service providers’ transit and peering imbalance charges along with their capital expenditure for infrastructure build-outs,” said Peder Jungck, CTO and founder of CloudShield. “Working with Shenick’s diversifEye gives us the ultimate power to perfect the services we offer service providers” to manage their traffic flow. Using diversifEye means we can emulate and identify the most difficult to detect application traffic in a test environment - we also have the critical ability to view each flow in real time.”

“Accurate DPI testing requires testing layers 4 to 7, emulating real, individual users running a range of IP applications including constantly morphing application traffic, not just sending packets across the network,” said Robert Winters, chief marketing officer, Shenick. “diversifEye can help CloudShield identify all types of traffic on layer 4 to 7 and granularly view applications and individual user flows in a test environment.”

DPI helps ensure end user quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) by managing networks to ensure all traffic types; P2P, video on demand (VoD), VoIP and Web browsing, run seamlessly across networks to deliver fair usage for all. Shenick is the only company in the market to have the capability to test applications such as IP video, triple play, network security testing, P2P, traffic shaping and IPv4/IPv6 right down to every individual flow. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Added to this, Shenick was the first test equipment vendor to initiate P2P emulation for cause and effect testing for delay sensitive applications such as VoIP, IPTV (News - Alert), VoD, service deployment and even multiple security attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS).

Shenick is the proud recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2008 Global Innovation Award for its pioneering work on DPI test systems.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/11/10/3774904.htm





Peer-to-Peer May Share Some Nightmares
Tresa Baldas

Unknown to corporate America, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that allow music and movies to be shared could be sharing something else with the public: company secrets and personal data.

Management-side lawyers are sounding alarms to their corporate clients, warning that peer-to-peer networks are increasingly becoming a gateway for trade secrets, confidential financial information and personal data.

Many of these security risks, they note, have already materialized.

In Washington, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center is investigating the possible disclosure of the personal information of roughly 1,000 military health beneficiaries, whose data may have been leaked through unauthorized sharing on a P2P network.

In 2007, Citigroup Inc.'s ABN Amro Mortgage Group reported that the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 5,000 customers was leaked when a business analyst signed up to use a P2P file-sharing service on a home computer containing the personal information.

Also in 2007, Pfizer Inc. was hit with a P2P problem, whereby the names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 current and past employees were leaked after the partner of an employee downloaded file-sharing software onto a company laptop.

P2P file-sharing technology, which emerged in 1999 with the online music file-sharing service Napster, is used by millions to share electronic files with one another. Computer users, known as "peers," can share communications and data files that contain a number of things, such as vacation photos, literary works, music or movies. Among the risks, however, is inadvertent file sharing, which happens when computer users mistakenly share more files than they intended.

Opening A Window

"It's like opening a window in downtown Manhattan and watching all of the documents fly out," Jackson Lewis partner Joseph Lazzarotti said of inadvertent P2P disclosure. "And it's not just personal information. Company secrets get out, minutes of board meetings and proprietary information -- that's all just running around on these networks that are created by P2P software. That's what's going on."

Unfortunately, said Lazzarotti, many companies are still unaware of the risks "because people don't really realize how many times this has happened."

David Bateman, a partner in the Seattle office of K&L Gates, agreed that P2P file sharing is a growing problem for companies. He said he has dozens of clients who are "actually concerned about it and taking proactive steps to limit the risk."

Bateman said a nightmare situation would be employees taking work home with them on a laptop or copying sensitive company data onto their home computer. Then they or their teenager goes onto the laptop or home computer and sets up a P2P account and "shares all that data with the world."

But corporate America is aware of the threat, Bateman believes, and starting to respond to it.

"I am seeing more and more companies coming to learn of the risk and then consult with me," Bateman said.

Maybe so, but corporate counsel are being very tight-lipped about P2P concerns. More than a dozen corporate counsel at major companies were contacted for this story, but none would comment. Private attorneys also asked clients if their general counsel would speak, but none would do so.

The Association of Corporate Counsel had no comment on the subject.

Rodney Satterwhite, a partner at Richmond, Va.-based McGuireWoods, said P2P file sharing is part of a bigger problem for employers: trying to keep up with technological advancements. New technologies are continually cropping up, he said, and workplace policies can't keep up.

"There's always a new frontier of technology that employees get first," Satterwhite said, noting that P2P file sharing is the latest headache for employers.

Joan Canny, a management-side attorney in the Miami office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, agreed, saying P2P technology is just one more technological headache for employers.

"If people embrace a new tool before we've had time to allow our security systems to catch up, we're going to have some of these problems," she said.
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnolo...=1202425950083





PeerApp Takes $8M for Peer-To-Peer Traffic Policing
Chris Morrison

PeerApp, an infrastructure company for Internet service providers that helps them deal with peer-to-peer traffic, has raised an $8 million second round of funding less than a year after taking its first.

The company’s UltraBand caching system stores chunks of P2P files locally, so that repeated downloads of popular files don’t overburden the network. Tangential to the needs of the ISPs, the product can also speed up the downloads for the end user.

Over 100 UltraBand systems have been deployed to date, according to the company’s release, freeing up an average of 30 percent of an ISP’s bandwidth for the circuits it’s used on.

The funding round was led by existing investors Pilot House Ventures, Cedar Fund and Evergreen Venture Partners. PeerApp’s first round, taken this January, was for $3 million. The company is based in Newton, Mass.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/11/pe...ffic-policing/





FAST Rallies for Stricter P2P Laws

Regulatory body claims government's moves on illegal file sharing don’t go far enough
Andrew Wooden

The Federation Against Software Theft has attacked government proposals to reduce illegal peer-to-peer file sharing for being insufficient.

The government’s proposals would require corporation between ISPs and copyright holders to crack down on file sharing websites.

However FAST claims that any moves that are voluntary, such as the plans set out by the governments Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in July, will be difficult to implement.

“It is dependent on a full consensus being achieved; to date this has not been successful,” said FAST chief executive John Lovelock.

“ISPs will be reluctant to take action against their customers, thereby risking alienating and losing them. Some regulatory requirements will inevitably be needed, as this will take the decision out of the hands of the ISPs themselves.”
http://www.pcretailmag.com/news/3077...icter-P2P-laws





Report: Man Who Shared 'Chinese Democracy' to Plead Guilty
Greg Sandoval

The man accused of copyright violations after posting tracks from Guns N' Roses upcoming album--Chinese Democracy--has agreed to plead guilty, according to a published report.

Dave Kravets over at Wired.com reports that Kevin Cogill, 27, confessed to uploading nine songs last summer to his site, Antiquiet and now faces a misdemeanor charge of copyright infringement.

Los Angeles federal prosecutor Craig Missakian told Kravets that Cogill's guilty plea was part of a plea deal that will be entered on December. 8. Last August, Cogill became the first Californian charged under a 3-year-old federal antipiracy law that makes it a felony to distribute unreleased copyright works online.

As part of the deal, Cogill will only face up to one year in prison instead of the five years that a felony conviction could have
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10093213-93.html





Police Vet Live Music, DJs for 'Terror Risk'

Locking down garage...and RnB, basement
Andrew Orlowski

A dozen London boroughs have implemented a "risk assessment" policy for live music that permits the police to ban any live music if they fail to receive personal details from the performers 14 days in advance. The demand explicitly singles out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community: garage and R&B, and MCs and DJs.

However all musical performances - from one man playing a guitar on up - are subject to the demands once implemented by the council. And the threat is serious: failure to comply "may jeopardise future events by the promoter or the venue".

UK Music chief Feargal Sharkey told a House of Commons select committee that the policy had already been used to pull the plug on an afternoon charity concert of school bands in a public park organised by a local councillor.

"No alcohol would be sold, tickets were limited to three maximum, and the councillor offered to supply eight registered doormen. Police objected on the grounds that the names, addresses and dates of birth of the young performer could not be provided," said Sharkey, speaking to the Department of Culture Media and Sport's hearing on venue licensing today.

"Live music is now a threat to the prevention of terrorism", he concluded.

In response, Detective Superintendent Dave Eyles from the Met's clubs and vice office told us that 10,000 such Risk Assessments would be processed this year. He said they weren't compulsory:

"We can't demand it - we recommend that you provide it as best practice. But you're bloody silly if you don't, because you're putting your venue at risk."

The Risk Assessment, or to give its official name "Form 696" can be found here (Word doc 184kb or Google HTML cache). We've highlighted a couple of excerpts below.

Bashment Jaxx? Black urban musical styles are singled out

Licensing of live music is nominally under the democratic control of local authorities. However, few councillors dare contradict the advice of the constabulary - even when such advice exceeds the police's authority, as it does here.

John Whittingdale, the Culture select committee chairman, described it as "a consequence of the Metropolitan Poice exceeding what is required by law".

The police want information 14 days in advance to assess the risk of a terror threat

'Propensity to violence'

"Have a look at the papers and tell me where the black-on-black shootings happen? They're around the night time economy," said Eyles.

"Music promotions attract people who have a propensity to use violence. That's not speculation. We have a duty to prevent that from happening."

But even if that's true, why vet then the performers? Unless the performers attack the audience, Sid Vicious-style in the fictional Great Rock and Roll Swindle?

"We're not vetting the performers - we're looking at the audience. It's not the music it's the people who follow it, who use that event as a catalyst to commit crimes.

But, Form 696 explictly vets the performers. We read it out.

"Some venues use their inhouse DJs all the time - others fly them in from around the world. It's not just their track record in the UK we're looking at but we're looking worldwide - what has happened historically at those events".

With the police groaning under bureaucracy, was 10,000 extra forms really justified?

"We can effectively look at those venues and say by putting in some measures as a last resort, canceling the event, we can prevent crime."

But didn't Sharkey's example - a kids concert in the park - suggest that the system was being abused?

"I would doubt that's factually correct," said Eyles. "I've never known an event to be cancelled because a Risk Assessment wasn't completed. If we went to the organisers and asked them to pull it, we would be laughed out of court. I cannot believe that would happen. In itself, it's not grounds to shut an event down."

Readers can browse 696 and judge for themselves.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11..._terror_trawl/





Local news

The Mild-Mannered Librarians Who Took on the Patriot Act... and WON!
markthshark

Two men in black appeared in the doorway of the Library Connection in Windsor, Connecticut as though they just stepped off the film set of the old 1960’s action series "The F.B.I." starring Efram Zimbalist Jr.

With a quick flash of their badges, the agents shuffled past the assistant and walked straight over to the man nearest the Xerox machine behind the counter. After a short introduction, the library’s director George Christian ushered the two agents into his office and closed the door. In a voice barely rising above the din of the copier outside the door, the lead agent explained to the director that the bureau was requesting "... any and all subscriber information, billing information, and access logs of any person of entity" that had used computers between 4pm and 4:45pm on February 15, 2005, in any of the 27 libraries whose computer systems were managed by the Library Connection, a nonprofit co-op of library databases.
markthshark's diary :: ::

The agent handed Christian a document known as a ‘national security letter’ (NSL) saying the information was being sought "... to protect against international terrorism."

Still somewhat confused about the whole thing, Christian stared at the men. His eyes followed the agent’s finger as it traced the document’s text down to one line in particular. Christian read the text silently. The recipient of the letter could not disclose to any person "... that the FBI has sought or obtained access to information or records." But that was only the beginning. It was a lifetime gag order. If he broke it, Christian could be looking at up to five years in jail.

The story appears in Mother Jones:

"I believe this is unconstitutional," said Christian politely. In response he got a threatening scowl, a business card, and instructions to have his lawyer call the FBI.

Christian did call his lawyer as soon as the agents were gone—and then he called Peter Chase, another library director and member of the Library Connection's executive committee.

"Where is the court order?" Chase asked.

"There is none," replied Christian. "They said they didn't need one."

Christian was being ordered to turn over records on library patrons simply because an FBI agent had told him to. He called a huddle with the rest of the Library Connection's executive committee, librarians Janet Nocek and Barbara Bailey. There, they passed around the NSL. Their attorney then announced that by virtue of having read the letter, everyone in the room was now bound by its provisions, and therefore gagged. It was as if they'd been exposed to radioactivity. That was the beginning of a yearlong battle pitting the four librarians, barred from speaking publicly and identified in the media only as "John Doe," against the anti-terrorism enforcers of the Bush administration.

There’s no doubt that so-called national security letters are insidious tools used controversially by the FBI nearly every day across America in pursuance of foreign intelligence surveillance in obtaining phone, financial and electronic records without court approval. Although in existence for decades, NSLs were rarely used before September 11, 2001, and have since been tweaked for even more power and secrecy. Their use exploded in number of times used after the Patriot Act drastically unconstitutionally eased restrictions on their use. The Patriot Act allows FBI agents to serve NSLs on anyone whether or not they were the subject of a criminal investigation.

And, when I said their use exploded after 9-11 that was not hyperbole.

• in 2000, 8,500 NSLs were issued.

By contrast...

• between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 143,000 NSLs, only one of which led to a conviction in a terrorism case.

But it’s not just the frequency of their use that goes against the very core of our democracy; instances of abuse have risen right along with the outrageous numbers of their use. Just last year, an investigation revealed that even the soft regulations meant to govern the use of NSLs were flagrantly broken in more than 1,000 cases. Violations ranged from...

• failing to get proper authorization
• making improper requests under the law
• shoddy even negligent record-keeping to unauthorized collection of telephone and/or email records.

Such misuse has cast a long-lasting shadow over countless innocent Americans. Even when an investigation is closed, information gained through an NSL is kept indefinitely in the FBI files.

To protect their patrons, the four librarians engaged the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York. They challenged the constitutionality of NSLs; they also wanted their gag order lifted so they could participate in the national debate over renewal of the Patriot Act.

"People say very confidential things to our reference librarians," explains Chase. "They have medical issues, personal matters. What people are borrowing at a public library is nobody's business."

A federal court in Bridgeport, Connecticut was the site of the first hearing in the Library Connection case back in August 2005. Since someone might guess the identities of the plaintiffs, government advocates argued that the mere presence of the four librarians posed a grave threat to national security. The judge concurred and ordered the librarians barred from attending the hearing. They were only allowed to view the proceedings on closed-circuit tv.

Similarly, when the "John Doe" librarians went to an appeals court hearing in Manhattan, their ACLU attorneys instructed the four not to enter the room together so that no one might guess who they were. John Doe New York—an Internet service provider whose case had been joined with the librarians' on appeal—was also in the room, but the librarians did not know who he was.

Not surprisingly, being the target of such a terrorism investigation became an overwhelmingly surreal experience. Chase recalled one day when his 21 year old son ran out the house to meet him, saying that the FBI was investigating their whole family. "Is that true?" he asked sheepishly. "Why haven’t you told us?"

Of course, Chase didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t want to lie to his son but he knew if he told his son the truth he would get caught up in the NSL mess. Inevitably, the frightened look on the young one’s face forced him to try. "I'm involved in a case," he said slowly and deliberately. "I can't talk about it. And it would be best if you didn't tell anybody about that phone call."

That incident happened back in November 2005.

The Patriot Act was reauthorized in March 2006. Six weeks later, the ACLU was informed by the Justice Department that they would no longer contest the Connecticut librarians’ demand to lift the gag order hanging over them. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, who ordered the Justice Department to unseal the court documents in the case. What was revealed was bizarre.

The Justice Department was trying to keep secret:

• quotes from previous Supreme Court cases
• copies of New York Times articles
• the text of the Connecticut law that guarantees the confidentiality of library records
• sealed arguments made by the ACLU attorneys, including this passage: "Now that John Doe's identity has been widely disseminated, the government's sole basis for the gag has wholly evaporated."

A federal court finally ruled in the case of John Doe (New York) in September 2007. The court found that the entire national security letter provision of the Patriot Act was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero commented that secretive NSLs are "... the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values."

Of course, the Bush administration has appealed the court’s decision. Consequently, John Doe (New York) is still gagged. However, another librarian in San Francisco managed to win in court against the use of the letters.

It’s unclear if that victory resulted in the FBI withdrawing a NSL to a digital library called the Internet Archive, but the bureau did so after a joint legal challenge brought by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

"A miscarriage of justice was prevented here," EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann said at the time. "The big question is how many other improper NSLs have been issued by the FBI and never challenged?"

There’s no doubt that the FBI still uses NSLs in counterterrorism investigations. However, the absence of news on the matter is somewhat encouraging, and that absence could be due to the stubborn, patriotic stance taken by four librarians in Connecticut.

I salute you. Well done, citizens.

Peace
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20.../61/521/659522





TorrentFreak Turns Three
Ernesto

Exactly three years ago, November 12, 2005, TorrentFreak first saw the light of day. Since then we have published 1,788 articles, while our readers wrote 88,987 comments. It’s been a great ride so far, thanks to all of you…

When the first article was published on TorrentFreak, I never imagined that the blog would be where it is right now. One of the main purposes of TorrentFreak has always been to cover file-sharing news from the perspective of file-sharers, often to counter the misleading messages that are put into this world by anti-piracy lobbyists.

Initially, I started to write up a few ‘tips and tricks’ type articles, complemented by the occasional news item. Right from the start, TorrentFreak got some decent traffic thanks to the community on Digg.com, which was a real motivator to continue blogging. Over time, TorrentFreak developed into a more serious news outlet, more and more articles were unique and the quality of writing improved.

As the popularity of BitTorrent grew, so did TorrentFreak’s traffic, and with that came the opportunity to meet some great characters, including most of the people who run the BitTorrent sites I love to write about. A few months after TorrentFreak was born, I became we. Smaran was the first writer to join the blog, and although he stopped contributing in 2006, he played his part in the evolution of TorrentFreak.

Running a blog like TorrentFreak is an impossible talk for one person, and I was more than happy when Enigmax (Andy) joined me in early 2006. For almost two years now, Enigmax and I have been running the daily operations at TorrentFreak, and together we spend most of our free time writing articles. Unlike some people think, TorrentFreak is not a professional operation, that is, Enigmax and I both have full-time jobs aside. TorrentFreak is a hobby project, and we write because we are passionate about BitTorrent and file-sharing, not because we need to, in a job sense.

Although we would love to, it would be impossible to mention everyone who has contributed to TorrentFreak. We’ve had several guest writers and received thousands of tips from readers - they have all contributed to the site in some way or another. Besides Enigmax and myself, Ben Jones is the third regular on TorrentFreak. Although he prefers to do research instead of writing, his contributions can’t be missed.

At TorrentFreak we don’t see ourselves as journalists. We are P2P enthusiasts, who love to document how the Internet, and BitTorrent in particular, is changing how we interact with online media. We also write extensively on how the world, and the law, reacts to this (re)evolution. We write about things that interest us, and hope that others are interested in them too.

We write because it’s our passion. Cnet UK did a piece on us today, and Nate Lanxon sums us up nicely: “The rise of blogging has been fueled less by money, and more by the desire to write about subjects people truly care about. And in the world of news, that often means writing at ungodly hours, for ungodly hours on end.”

Of course, we won’t stop here and we hope to bring you many more articles in the future. Even though our time is limited, we aim to publish at least one article each and every day. In a way our limited time is also a quality check. It’s not that hard to publish 4 or 5 articles a day, but if you only have time for one, you’ll have to make sure it’s unique, and worth it. Of course we are always open to contributions from readers, or aspiring bloggers who want to help out.

We have some pretty exciting plans for the future which we will will announce soon, and a redesign is being worked on as well. Writing for TorrentFreak has been a a great endeavor thus far, most of all thanks to you, our readers We’re here to stay, and hope the next three years will be as much fun as the first.
http://torrentfreak.com/torrentfreak...-three-081112/





Brookhaven Honors a Pioneer Video Game
Bruce Lambert



“I BRAG to people that I was probably the first kid to play a video game,” said Robert Dvorak Jr.

That happened half a century ago here at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Mr. Dvorak’s father had assembled what was arguably the first video game, called Tennis for Two.

The game, primitive by modern standards, featured two control boxes whose buttons prompted a bright green ball of streaking light to bounce back and forth over a symbolic net. The action took place on a round oscilloscope screen that measured all of five inches across. “It was very simple to operate,” said Mr. Dvorak, now 57 and an electrical engineer in Saugerties.

As a child, Mr. Dvorak periodically tagged along with his father to the laboratory, and he fell in love with the fledgling electronic game on one visit. “I remember it being a lot of fun,” he said.

“When you look at Pong, they’re not all that different,” he said, referring to the 1972 Atari game.

Over the decades, Mr. Dvorak’s delight in the simple game would be duplicated as millions of other players — adults as well as youths — enjoyed successors like Pac-Man, Super Mario, Mortal Kombat, Halo, Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero.

The technology progressed to screens measured in feet, not inches, with simulated 3-D color animated graphics, sophisticated sound effects, interactive rumble controllers, Wii wireless and long-distance competitions with multiple players via the Internet.
Critics have deplored video games as the bane of contemporary childhood. But their popularity has been undeniable, as video gaming mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar industry and worldwide phenomenon.

Whatever video gaming’s vices or virtues, its origins here had a modest goal. Fifty years ago, the chief of the laboratory’s Instrumentation Division, William A. Higinbotham, was trying to dream up an exhibit that would grab public attention at the institute’s open house.

While reading the instructions for an early computer at the lab, Dr. Higinbotham had his eureka moment. The documents explained how the computer could simulate the trajectory of a bullet, a missile or a bouncing ball. Ergo, why not a tennis game?

“It might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which could convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society,” Dr. Higinbotham later wrote, recalling his thinking.

He designed the circuitry in about two hours. Figuring out the component resistors, capacitors and relays took another couple of days. Then Mr. Dvorak’s father, who died in 1969, built the system in about three weeks, followed by a day or two of testing and debugging with Dr. Higinbotham.

At the open house on Oct. 18, 1958, Tennis for Two proved to be a hit beyond Dr. Higinbotham’s wildest expectations. “Hundreds of people were lined up out the door,” said a laboratory spokeswoman, Mona Rowe.

Crowds waited patiently to serve and volley the little ball of light, pressing the button on the control box to hit the ball and turning a knob to adjust the angle, the hits punctuated with a satisfying clicking sound.

So popular was the game that Dr. Higinbotham worried that it distracted from rather than promoted the lab’s serious business. Discoveries here have been recognized by six Nobel prizes.

Tennis for Two made an encore appearance in 1959 in an improved version. The screen diameter doubled, and players had the options of playing tennis simulating the light gravity of the moon or the heavy gravity of Jupiter.

Though he may have regretted it later, Dr. Higinbotham never sought a patent for the game. His reasoning was that the game was not such a leap from the initial computer he had used. And the federal government, which finances the lab, would have owned the patent. The notion of the federal treasury profiting from video games is intriguing.

Dr. Higinbotham, a physicist who lived in Bellport and died in 1994, had a distinguished career far beyond Tennis for Two and sometimes lamented that it threatened to overshadow his other accomplishments.

Credited with 20 government patents for circuitry, he worked during World War II on radar research and the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. He became an ardent advocate for nuclear nonproliferation as the Federation of American Scientists’ first chairman.

Some experts have debated what qualified as the first video game. In 1982 Creative Computing magazine credited Tennis for Two as the first, and Video and Arcade Games magazine reached that conclusion the next year.

Rivals for the honor include a 1948 amusement device, but it required pictures placed over the screen in contrast to Dr. Higinbotham’s self-contained system. The Nimrod computer was used for a game in 1951 but it did not have a screen or show motion. A 1952 computer version of tic-tac-toe was designed for a single user and did not have motion beyond displaying Xs and Os.

The Brookhaven lab celebrated the game’s 50th anniversary last month. The guests included Mr. Higinbotham’s son, William B. Higinbotham of Bellport, who said that as a young man he enjoyed early arcade games like Donkey Kong but at the time was unaware of his father’s role.

Robert Dvorak Jr.’s younger brother, Charles, 55, of Milford, Conn., recalled standing on a milk crate to play Tennis for Two. Recalling the lab in that era, he said matter-of-factly, “I think they were building the second atomic reactor at the time.”

While video games have their detractors, the fans remain unapologetic.

“Games are great,” Robert Dvorak Jr. said. “You a learn a lot about strategy, you interact with people, you use tools and creativity. I’m a gamer, period.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/ny...09videoli.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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