Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 29th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

































"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost ripping a CD." – Dawn C. Chmielewski


"This is one issue that really skews with age. People who grew up in the age of the remix, who grew up with file sharing, do not perceive it to be a moral problem." – Aram Sinnreich


"It's out there. You might as well use it." – Jordan Krinke


"CDs sound better, but no one's buying them. The age of the audiophile is over." – David Bendeth


"I am grateful to the WGA for granting us this agreement. We're happy to be going back to work, and particularly pleased to be doing it with our writers." – David Letterman


"What has changed over the years is our sense of ourselves as dramatis personae. We no longer seem content to play second banana to our official stars. And why not? In the panoptic culture we have created, in which cameras run from every possible angle day and night, we are always all enjoying our 15 minutes. Once, we created gods and goddesses in our image, idealized visions of our most perfect selves. In time, our gods started to descend, mumbling with Method-actor sincerity about how they wanted to join us on Earth. We welcomed them initially, but after a while we grew to resent them and hold them in contempt. We still love them, but we hate them too, because now the mirror image they hold up is irreparably cracked." – Manohla Dargis


"It is like the [FBI] agents got up in the morning, brushed their teeth, opened other people's mail and tapped some phones." – Fred Jerome


































December 29th, 2007





The Pirate Bay: Torrents and Peers Double in 2007
Ernesto

Hollywood had hoped otherwise, but it has been a good year for The Pirate Bay, despite all the legal hassles. Most impressive is the explosive growth in number of torrents and peers that are using the Pirate Bay tracker.

The Pirate Bay now tracks nearly 1 million torrents and over 8 million peers at any given point in time. This is quite a change compared to last year, and there is no sign that this trend will stop anytime soon.

December 2006
576.080 torrents
4.274.698 peers

December 2007
914.717 torrents
8.390.682 peers

To keep up with the growing demand from its users, The Pirate Bay has added more and more hardware to their server park. Another significant change this year is the migration from Anakata’s Hypercube to the open source Opentracker software. The new software is more stable, uses less resources and supports UDP tracking.

The Pirate Bay’s Brokep told TorrentFreak that they should be able to double the amount of peers on the trackers without any hardware upgrades. “Since the last performance tweaking and router-tweaking we’ve removed all bottlenecks.” Brokep said, and he expects the tracker to hit 10 million peers during the next big holiday.

There is also a downside to this positive news of course. The growth of The Pirate Bay is in part due to the problems at Demonoid had this year and the fact that Isohunt (TorrentBox) disabled access for US users to their trackers because of the issues they have with the MPAA.

Demonoid and TorrentBox were the second and the fourth most used public BitTorrent tracker respectively, so this was a great loss. It is estimated that approximately 50% of all public .torrent files are now tracked by The Pirate Bay, it is scary to imagine what will happen if their servers will stop working.

Luckily there’s also good news, as new trackers such as sumotracker.org and denis.stalker.h3q.com became pretty popular in just a few months. Both newcomers track more than a million peers now. Besides this, The Pirate Bay have already announced that they’re not going anywhere. They told us that they will simply move to another country if they are outlawed in Sweden, without downtime!
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...double-071225/





Japanese File-Sharing Increases 180%
Andre Yoskowitz

According to results of an online survey, in a little over a year, the number of internet users file sharing in Japan has surged by 180 percent. The average number of files downloaded increased by over 250 percent. The survey has basically conveyed that "the numbers of internet users in Japan sharing music, movies and software has increased dramatically to reach an all-time high."

The survey was carried out online and was financed by the RIAJ (like the RIAA), the Japanese MPAA and the ACC. It concluded that "the number of internet users sharing authorized media climbed from 3.5 per cent in June 2006, to 9.6 per cent by September 2007."

Winny was the P2P app of choice with 27 percent of users citing it. Limewire was second with 19 precent and WinMX close behind at 15 percent. Suprisingly, BitTorrent placed fourth with a measly 7.4 percent.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/12273.cfm





IFPI Wants ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay, Filter P2P Traffic
Janko Roettgers

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) wants European ISPs to build the copyright equivalent to the Chinese firewall, and its counting on the help of European lawmakers to achieve this goal.

The music industry association approached the EU parliament with a set of recommendations to "develop cooperations with ISPs", something that the paper calls "key to the future of the music business." So what can ISPs do to cooperate, you might ask? Well, that's easy: Just filter out any illegitimate content, block P2P protocols and block access to websites like The Pirate Bay. That's all.

Here's what IFPI exactly has in mind:

ISPs should use acoustic fingerprinting-based filtering solutions like the one industry darling Audible Magic is offering to block any transfer of unlicensed sound recordings. The IFPI paper likens this to filtered / licensed P2P applications like iMesh and Kazaa, but it doesn't even specify whether these filters should only affect P2P, meaning that possibly every song transfer via IM or FTP could be affected as well.

ISPs should also block any type of Bittorrent or Gnutella traffic. From the paper:

"It is (...) possible for ISPs to block their customers' access to specific P2P services that are known to be predominantly infringing and that have refused to implement steps to prevent infringement, while not affecting regular services such as web and email."

And finally, ISPs are supposed to block "infringing websites" that are located in "rogue jurisdictions" or "refuse to cooperate" with the industry. One example quoted is Allofmp3.com, another one is The Pirate Bay, a site the IFPI calls "an infamous infringing service locaded in Sweden".

The German IT news website heise.de is reporting that IFPI has succeeded in getting some political support for these ideas. The Committee for Culture and Education will decide in January whether they want to incorporate recommendations for ISP-based filtering into a dossier about the future of cultural industries in Europe.

This in itself may sound like a small step, but the EFF Europe is already up in arms about it, calling ISP filtering "an ill-considered and damaging quick fix."
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-439.html





Shareaza.com Hijacked and Turned Into a Scam Site
enigmax

Shareaza.com, the home of the hugely popular Shareaza multi-network sharing application, has been hijacked by scammers. Unsuspected visitors to the site will be completely unaware that they will be tricked into downloading something that isn’t Shareaza at all, but subscription-based malware infected software instead.

The announcement on the SourceForge page of the Shareaza client was ominous:

“As of December 20th, “Shareaza.com” is mirroring “Shareazaweb.com” - A known scam site. While we are working to resolve the matter, any help to contain this would be appreciated.”

The site looks convincing enough, labelled as it is “The Official Home of Shareaza” with the new operators of the site having seen fit to steal some of the original Shareaza artwork (originally created by ‘RocketX and Kid’) to complete the look. So who has taken over the domain?

According to Skinvista, a developer from the ‘real’ Shareaza, the situation is as follows:

“At this time the Shareaza.com destination is now controlled by iMesh/MusicLab LLC, an unauthorized Madison Avenue (New York) based company, with servers in Israel. MusicLab LLC previously acquired iMesh.com and Bearshare/Bearflix.com following lawsuits. It now appears the known scamsite Shareazaweb.com was a placeholder for the planned takeover of Shareaza, relating to another ongoing lawsuit.

It is urgent that people understand the software on these iMesh/MusicLab sites is suspicious, misrepresented, and illegal -breaking GPL and DMCA among other laws.”

As if this strange case needed any more twists in the plot, consider this. On October 26th 2007, the main Shareaza site went down due to unknown “personal matters”.

TorrentFreak asked ‘Wildcard’ a ‘real’ Shareaza developer what happened to the site. He explained: “That’s one of the mysteries. The main hosting server went offline, it had the Shareaza site, wiki and forums on it. The only information that made it this far, was that it was down due to personal problems with the owner of the server machines. what those personal problems were, medical or legal, we don’t know.”

Luckily the Sourceforge site was restored from an earlier backup.

However, the hijacked Shareaza.com domain now points to a server where it is hosted along with some other questionable sites, including bandoo.com, bearflix.com, bearshare.com, daemonsearch.com, imesh.com, imesh.net and musiclab-llc.com.

Apparently, there are lawyers involved now but the loose-knit Shareaza team are advising that it may be prudent to move forward on the basis that the domain won’t be recovered. A source close to this case has told TorrentFreak that Jonathan Nilson, the owner of the Shareaza.com domain has been contacted and he has confirmed that he has sold the domain to the scammers. It looks like the domain is lost forever, a big impact following the loss of the main site in October.

‘Wildcard’ explained that the software on offer from the hijacked site although labeled “ShareazaV4.exe”, is not Shareaza at all but likely a clone of the new malware infested iMesh/Bearshare client and should not be downloaded under any circumstances. Once installed, the software wants to install a search bar and make contact with a central server. Unlike Shareaza - which is abslutely free and has a reputation for being non-profit and shunning involvement with money - the hijackers are touting a subscription based product.

Indeed, the operators of iMesh even tried to trick people into thinking that the reputable GRC site endorsed the iMesh client - an assertion which is completely untrue.

Anyone wishing to find the real Shareaza client should head over to the project’s SourceForge page.

Developing story

Update: A contact of Jonathan Nilson is reporting that Nilson can neither confirm nor deny that he sold the domain to the scammers.
http://torrentfreak.com/shareazacom-...m-site-071224/





Hackers Run Wild Spending BitTorrent Tracker’s Donations
enigmax

The SuperTorrents BitTorrent tracker has been the subject of a major security breach, with hackers gaining access to private accounts from which the donated all the site’s money to a religious group. The hackers even went as far as contacting the site’s host and canceled all of their seedboxes.

Earlier this year, the anti-piracy company MediaDefender was torn apart when its email system was compromised and hackers laid the companies secrets bare for the world to see. Some months later, the SuperTorrents (ST) BitTorrent tracker has been the victim of hackers. According to a so-called ’scene notice’ circulating at the moment, the 35,000 member site was compromised when the hackers discovered that the admin of ST used the same password on a lot of other sites, as he does on other accounts - email etc. This is the same mistake that MediaDefender made.

The notice begins:

Now this is the story all about how Ersan’s life got flipped turned upside down and I’d like to take a minute and just sit right there and tell you how Ersan became the prince of a town called bel air. This weeks source of lulz is provided free of charge via a site called supertorrents.org and the nicest Administrator you’ve ever met, Ersan.

The hackers discovered that the same password secured the site’s PayPal donations account. They claimed that due to the admin of ST making derogatory comments about a religious group, they decided to donate all the site’s available donations - over $2000 - to an Internet portal dedicated to that same religion.

While the hackers said they had fun deleting and disabling some more minor accounts like the admins YouTube account, they had rather more malice in mind when they managed to get access to the admins Gmail account (same as MediaDefender again). They discovered the admin’s real name, address, age and even the car he drives. After having fun making a mess of the account, the hackers said: “At this point we just deleted his account, because maximum lulz were achieved.”

The hackers then accessed the site’s admin panel for communicating with their host: “we logged into his [hosts] account panel where he hosts the supertorrents seedboxes and canceled them.”

The hackers give an explanation of the way they compromised the site:

“This all began a few days ago. Me and some friends were scoping around supertorrents irc network, when we discovered that they had a public prechan. Upon discovering this moderate scene security problem some friends and I decided to check the security of said prebot, turns out it was not so secure. Upon rooting the box and grabbing the unsecure predb and some scripts to play with we then rainbow tabled’d his password hash”

The motives for hacking the site seem to be twofold. Many Scene members consider torrent sites to be to blame for compromising their security and there does seem to be indication that this provoked the hacking in part. Money is mentioned quite a lot, in that it seems the hackers are annoyed at the level of donations at SuperTorrents, even appealing to the members to consider where their money is going.

It’s also claimed that many torrent sites are getting their releases from the same place and there are suggestions that this supply to the BitTorrent community should be strangled.

No doubt the MPAA will be delighted to hear this.

Update: More information is coming through which suggests that Ersan feels that his address hasn’t been compromised and he doesn’t drive the car the hackers say he does. Ersan says that his host did not cancel the seedboxes and he further says that his Google email (far from being deleted) is actually recovered and the password has been reset. He continues: “From what I can tell, the server that they’re talking about was not rooted, but I’m going to reload the OS on it anyway. This has no effect on SuperTorrents in any way, it just screws with my personal email and finances for a few days. The worst part is not knowing the extent of the damages that have been done, if all that was done was what was stated above then I’ll be fine. If they downloaded all of my emails and chat logs or something then I have a real problem on my hands”

Update 2: The hackers seem to have responded: “Nice attempt at damage control. :/ We do have your real street address, among with a few others you were using. If we were just going to blank it out anyway, whats it matter? Shouldn’t you be happy we did that, I guess we could go with the unedited copies of your name and addresses for the third notice. You just made an order XXXXXXX.com (lol, nerd) would you like us to post the usps tracking number & address? (1) Your address is talked about many times in google chats, once again you’re lucky we dont post them here. You did buy a BRANDX(car), for $12,000. Heres some screenshots (2&3). We could always post more information about it, as we have your entire email box from a few weeks ago until now. Would you like us to? was it your father or brother that you got the carfax for, lol?”

In reponse to Ersan’s claim that the host did not cancel his servers: “Correct, [host] did not cancel your servers, they did however cancel your account. Oh well I guess we can’t win them all.”

The hackers then go on to deny that Ersan has recoverd his Gmail account and provide some sort of screenshot as proof. They also ask Ersan to stop sending ‘forgot my password’ to his own account as “it’s not helping.” They then go on to use Ersan’s real name and in what could be seen as a veiled threat say: “Be thankful Eric, that we didn’t give you the raging that was easily possible with all of the email and google chat logs we have. We PROBABLY won’t release those, but hey you never know! :)”

thanks r10t
http://torrentfreak.com/hackers-spen...ations-071229/





What Should the Torrent Community do in aXXo’s Absence?

aXXo : A screen name that bittorent users will never forget. Simply the best, aXXo has provided the world with high quality movies, time after time.In real life, aXXo is probably just an average person, but on the Internet he’s a celebrity, with over a million people downloading his DVDrips every month.

The search term “aXXo” is among the top searches on every torrent site, and even anti-piracy organizations use his name to trap people into downloading fake torrents.He has been worshiped among the torrent community and there is even a prayer written in his respect:

Our Ripper, who art on mininova,
aXXo be thy name.
Thy torrents come.
Seeding will be done,
Here as it was on suprnova.
Give us this day our latest rips.
And forgive us our leeching,
As we forgive those that leech from us.
And lead us not on to private trackers;
But deliver us from the MPAA:
For thine is the ripping, the seeding, and the glory,
For ever and ever.

Amen…

How ever aXXo has decided to take a break and has not officially uploaded any torrents since november 10th.So what should we do in his absence? Besides praying for him to come back as soon as possible a great way to support him is to go on seeding his high quality DVDRips and keep his torrents alive!

In the mean time while aXXo enjoys his much-deserved time off, here is a list of other well-known release groups that also upload quality DVDRips:

• aAF
• ALLiANCE
• ANiVCD
• ARTHOUSE
• ASTEROiDS
• BLiND
• BeStDivX
• BETAMAX
• BugZ
• CAMERA
• C H W D F
• COALiTiON
• COCAiN
• DiAMOND
• DIMENSION
• DMT
• MiNO
• DoNE
• DragonRipper624
• DUQA
• DvF
• ESPiSE
• ESiR
• ELiA
• FiCO
• FLAiTE
• FXG
• FxM
• HLS
• HLSretailSupplier
• HooKah
• IDE
• iMBT
• iNTiMiD
• KLAXXON
• LPD
• mVs
• MEDiAMANiACS
• NANT
• NeDiVx
• NEPTUNE
• NhaNc3
• PreVail
• PUKKA
• SATIVA
• SEPTiC
• SiNK
• SiNNERS
• SiLU
• TBG
• TNAN
• TURKiSO
• TUS
• TWiST
• UNiVERSAL
• VCDVaULT
• VH-PROD
• VoMiT
• XanaX

The easiest way is to download your torrents from Torrent Geek I try to put only high quality DVDRips with high number of seeders so that they will be downloaded faster.You can also subscribe to Torrent Geek Feed to keep up with my last posts.

PLEASE NOTE:
There are large quantities of fakes released under some of these release group names.
If you see one, check it against www.vcdquality.com. If the Rip does not appear on VCDQuality, then it’s fake. SIMPLE AS!
http://torrentgeek.wordpress.com/200...axxos-absence/





Maine Law Students vs the RIAA
p2pnet news

One of the most important, but as yet largely unrecognized, Big Music stories to break this year centres on a small university legal clinic in Maine.

And, it’s about to cause a revolution in the P2P filesharing war launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, p2pnet posted just before Christmas, going on:

“In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of fellow students.

“Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki from the Cumberland clinic are now officially representing two Maine students.

“Ames and Chmelecki are being guided by clinic director and U of M associate professor Deirdre Smith.”

We added:

“This could be the true beginning of the end for the RIAA in its attempts to bring students to heel, turning them into compliant consumers of corporate product under threat of legal persecution and severe financial penalties no student can afford.”

Below, Smith tells p2pnet readers what the Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic is all about >>>

The Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic is a program of the University of Maine School of Law providing third-year law students with the opportunity to practice law under the close supervision of members of the faculty.

Under Maine court rules, students who meet certain eligibility requirements can be certified as ’student attorneys’ and appear before federal and state courts on behalf of clients.

Students are the lawyers on their cases and are responsible for all aspects of the representation including working with clients and the opposing party or opposing counsel, discovery, drafting pleadings and motions, and appearing in court for hearings, trials and other proceedings. Faculty supervisors provide extensive guidance, support and mentoring, co-sign all pleadings, and accompany students to court. Students in our program work on cases in a wide variety of areas including family law, criminal law, domestic violence, juvenile law, and miscellaneous civil cases.

Our clients are all low-income and therefore unable to afford an attorney. Indeed, for most of our clients, they would not have the assistance of an attorney at all if the Clinic did not help them.

We got involved in the RIAA litigation here in Maine when we were contacted by a student seeking legal help after receiving notice from the University of Maine that s/he had been named as one of the ‘Does’ in the latest round of litigation brought against students here in Maine and that the plaintiffs had served a subpoena on the University of Maine to disclose his/her identity.

Another student in the same situation contacted us soon thereafter. We accepted the case for a variety of reasons. We are foremost an educational program that teaches law students how to be trial lawyers, and we saw the case as providing an excellent opportunity for our students. In many respects, the case represents a very different sort of matter from the ones we generally take on.

Students rarely have the opportunity to work on cases in federal court, for example, and therefore this case provides them with the chance to develop their litigation skills in that challenging forum.

Also, this case may well be one of the first intellectual property cases that the Clinic has taken on in its history. IP is a growing and important field in which many students have expressed an interest, and we were glad to provide them with the opportunity to develop their knowledge in that area. If the case proceeds, we expect to draw on the considerable expertise in IP among members of our faculty and the Maine Center for Law and Innovation, another program of the Law School.

These cases may be a particularly good fit for law school clinical programs because student attorneys are generally younger than most practicing attorneys and likely to be more familiar with the technology involved with these cases. It is also beneficial for the student-defendants to be able to work with an advocate who is closer to them in age; they can build a rapport and trust more easily than perhaps with older attorneys.

I would also add that our students are quite enthusiastic about being directly connected to a case with a national scope and significance, as well as having the chance to help fellow students in a positive and important way.

In other respects, however, this case is no different from the hundreds of others we take each year in that our clients have a legal problem but cannot afford an attorney. Indeed, in this case, our clients face even greater potential financial liability than most of our other clients.

Since the clients in these file-sharing cases are so young, they may have little or no understanding of the legal system or their rights, and are usually overwhelmed by the prospect of being liable for statutory damages. Therefore, they are particularly ill-prepared to represent themselves.

For these reasons as well, we regarded this case as ideally serving our dual mission of providing hand-on training for future attorneys while also providing much-needed representation to clients who would otherwise be unable to afford an attorney.

Will the Maine case show other US universities with law programs, besieged by RIAA threats and extortion letters, a way to help both their own students and perhaps people at other schools, at the same time providing invaluable and highly relevant training?

And for anyone who’s thinking students won’t be up to par, “An experienced practicing lawyer, I reviewed the brief prepared by student attorneys Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki, under professor Smith’s supervision, and these young people did a bang-up job in exposing the fact that the RIAA has no case,” Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman told me, going on:

“I think this is a very important development, and may represent a turning point in the RIAA’s unlawful campaign against college and university students.

“The RIAA’s campaign employs a false legal theory, nonexistent evidence, illegal ‘ex parte’ practices to catch the students off guard, and improper joinder of unrelated cases, to make it economically and practically impossible for the students to fight back.

“By taking up their cause, university law school legal clinics can make an important contribution to copyright jurisprudence at this historic time, and allow the cases to be decided on their merits, rather than on default.

“The Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Maine has taken an historic first step. I believe many others will follow, and that the RIAA’s litigation campaign will be altered by this new and important addition to the ranks of the defenders.”

As I said in our first post on this, “If other student from clinics not only in the US but around the world follow the examples of Ames and Chmelecki, the stage will be set for a series of confrontations and lightning strikes even the highly paid expert Big 4 legal teams won’t be able to handle.”
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14477





Giving, Taking Pirated Carols

Ubiquitous Christmas songs are the perfect fodder for file-sharing networks. Older people tend to buy the CDs.
Dawn C. Chmielewski


Winter wonderland

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost ripping a CD.

Online piracy is creating a modern-day twist on "The Christmas Song." Nat King Cole's recording of the holiday standard is among the most popular downloads on file-sharing networks this year.

More than 1.2 million people were offering digital copies of Cole's version on file-sharing networks recently, according to BigChampagne, a Beverly Hills-based online media measurement firm.

Other versions by Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra and the Temptations also cracked the Top 10 of pirated holiday songs, which was led by Faith Hill's "Where Are You Christmas?"

Christmas music is the perfect fodder for file-sharing networks, analysts say. The songs seem as perishable as eggnog, they're perfect material for mix CDs and they're so ubiquitous that it's easy to justify not paying for them.

"You don't want to look at that stuff in July," BigChampagne Chief Executive Eric Garland said.

"And you don't want to go out and buy the complete Christmas works of Olivia Newton-John. You want this song and that song."

Swapping copyrighted music is illegal. But people such as 17-year-old Jordan Krinke of Yorba Linda say they don't experience even a twinge of guilt about downloading pirated Christmas music. In fact, Krinke said she used the tracks she found free on LimeWire to create holiday compilation CDs for her friends.

"It's out there," she said. "You might as well use it."

Downloading seasonal classics falls into the same moral vacuum as copying song lyrics for Christmas caroling. If they bother to consider it at all, people tend to think of these older works as living in the "public domain" where the copyright has expired, Forrester Research analyst James L. McQuivey said.

"It suggests that people have a notion of public domain associated with these older tunes -- that these songs belong to everyone," he said.

Aram Sinnreich, a New York University media professor, said young people hadno problem grabbing songs from file-sharing networks.

"This is one issue that really skews with age," he said. "People who grew up in the age of the remix, who grew up with file sharing, do not perceive it to be a moral problem."

The generational gap means there are plenty of people who still shell out money for holiday albums. This year's seasonal CD sales have been more robust than in the last three years, thanks to the success of Josh Groban's "Noel," according to Nielsen SoundScan. It became the year's bestselling album, with 2.8 million copies sold.

"Noel" held Billboard Magazine's top spot for four weeks, setting a record for the most weeks at No. 1 for a Christmas album in the chart's 51-year history. Elvis Presley had set the previous record in 1957 with "Elvis' Christmas Album."

Kim Shields, 42, of Utah said she purchased "Noel" for herself and as holiday gifts for teachers.

"I like him, but after one or two songs that's plenty," she said while eating lunch last week during a visit to Costa Mesa.

Holiday songs are also selling well as legal downloads. Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" was the top holiday track on Apple Inc.'s iTunes store last week, ranked at No. 11 overall by Nielsen SoundScan. It was also the third most-popular mobile phone ring tone, according to Nielsen RingScan.

Other popular holiday downloads on iTunes include Colbie Caillat's "Mistletoe" and Michael Buble's update of the classic "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=6&cset=true





$40K to Fill an iPod? One Third of PCs Use LimeWire Instead
Jon Stokes

Pop quiz: what music and movie downloading app is installed on over one third of the world's computers, according to a new report from Digital Music News and media tracking specialist BigChampagne? The answer isn't iTunes, nor is it any other DRM-encumbered media program that has been blessed by Big Content. The answer is LimeWire, with a presence on an estimated 36.4 percent of the world's PCs.

Clearly, the so-called "darknet" remains far and away the world's leading provider of online media content, drowning legit download services in a flood of "free." This data also should give the major labels pause in their ongoing attempts to convince Apple that $0.99 per song is way too cheap.

The labels may be tempted to take comfort in the report's other finding that, as prevalent as LimeWire is, its uptake has been virtually flat over the past year. But a recent report on nighttime P2P traffic levels found Bittorrent to be the dominant P2P protocol, suggesting that either BT clients are even more popular than the already ubiquitous LimeWire application, or that BT users download more and/or larger files.

Between LimeWire and Bittorrent, the ongoing and extremely widespread popularity of P2P as a media delivery vehicle suggest that music prices remain stuck at too high a level while the capacity of portable media players continues to balloon. Does anyone remember the iPod launch, when there were jokes about how it would cost a user a few grand to fill up an iPod at the iTunes music store? Now that number is well into the five figures for a current-generation iPod, a fact that forces users to turn to other sources of digital content if they're to come even close to filling their iPods.

And when I say "filling iPods," I do mean the iPod specifically, and not portable media players generically. Unlike non-Apple DRM offerings from movie and music providers, LimeWire happens to be 100 percent compatible with the most popular media player on the planet. This has to be a factor in its ongoing popularity—it's a free alternative to iTunes for users who just want that single or bootleg NOW, or who don't care that it takes 45 minutes to put together a complete album plus artwork at a decent bitrate.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-limewire.html

Note: Limewire’s reported market share is indeed some 36%, but according to TorrentFreak only around 50% of PCs have P2P programs installed to begin with, so the actual percentage of all computers with Limewire is about half that figure, or some 18% - Jack.





Hollywood Headed for Banner Year at Box Office
Steve Gorman

Hollywood is poised to end the year with a record $9.7 billion in domestic movie receipts, up 4 percent from 2006, but the gain will be fueled largely by higher ticket prices, box office tracking service Media By Numbers said on Thursday.

A handful of holiday season hits, led by Will Smith's sci-fi thriller "I Am Legend," propelled the movie business out of its autumn slump and set the stage for 2007's theatrical film revenues to surpass the 2004 benchmark of $9.45 billion.

Through Christmas Day, total U.S.-Canadian ticket sales stood at about $9.3 billion, already matching the year-end tally for 2006, when revenues grew by 3.8 percent.

But analysts said much of the increase was a function of ticket price inflation that offset a lack of growth in film attendance. Media by Numbers said ticket prices were up about 4 percent from last year.

Movie admissions are expected to remain nearly flat for the year, with Media By Numbers projecting a scant 0.17 percent increase over 2006 to 1.42 billion tickets sold. That would still be down considerably from the high-water attendance mark of 1.6 billion admissions in 2002.

Admissions were especially hard hit this year during a string of post-summer movies with somber themes, like "Michael Clayton" and war-related dramas "In the Valley of Elah" and "Rendition." The films were praised by critics but left audiences cold.

"I Am Legend," grossing more than $150 million since its record December opening two weeks ago, helped reinvigorate the market, along with "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and last weekend's top film, the Nicolas Cage adventure sequel "National Treasure: Book of Secrets."

Will Smith And Chipmunks To The Rescue

"Those movies really turned things around, giving us a nice boost at the very end of the year," said analyst Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers.

All three movies are emblematic of the kind of escapist fare that was most successful this year -- adventures and fantasy themes, family films and comedy, he said.

Sequels, too, were a big part of the equation, especially the trio of "threequel" blockbusters that launched a record $4 billion-plus summer season in May -- superhero tale "Spider-Man 3," computer-animated storybook satire "Shrek the Third" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."

Each grossed well over $100 million in its debut weekend, an unparalleled cluster of smash openings that provided momentum for a string of summer hits that followed, including "Transformers," "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," "The Simpsons Movie" and "The Bourne Ultimatum."

Brandon Gray, president of online movie publication Box Office Mojo, was less enthusiastic about sequels and the overall health of the industry.

He said only one sequel this year, "The Bourne Ultimatum," exceeded its franchise predecessor at the domestic box office. He added a greater number of wide-release films this year, a record 189 playing in 600 theaters or more, helped account for this year's revenue gains.

The year started off with first-quarter hits like geriatric biker comedy "Wild Hogs," the Will Ferrell ice-skating spoof "Blades of Glory," the warrior epic "300" and the comic thriller "Disturbia."

(Editing by Arthur Spiegelman and Peter Cooney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...26800820071228





Airborne Internet Might Bring Turbulence
Anick Jesdanun

Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep.

Welcome to the promise of the Internet at 33,000 feet — and the questions of etiquette, openness and free speech that airlines and service providers will have to grapple with as they bring Internet access to the skies in the coming months.

"This gets into a ticklish area," said Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's chief inventors and generally a critic of network restrictions. "Airlines have to be sensitive to the fact that customers are (seated) close together and may be able to see each other's PC screens. More to the point, young people are often aboard the plane."

Technology providers and airlines are already making decisions. Some will block services like Internet phone calls altogether while others will put limits and install filters on content. And traffic management tools that are frowned upon on terra firma could be commonplace in the air.

Panasonic Avionics Corp., a Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. unit testing airborne services on Australia's Qantas Airways Ltd., is designing its high-speed Internet services to block sites on "an objectionable list," including porn and violence, said David Bruner, executive director for corporate sales and marketing.

He said airlines based in more restrictive countries could choose to expand the list.

The company also is recommending that airlines permit Internet-based phone calls only on handsets with wireless Wi-Fi capabilities — the technology delivering access within the passenger cabin. Bruner said the company believes Wi-Fi handsets use less bandwidth than telephone software that runs on laptops.

Airlines, he said, also could block incoming calls — and the annoying ring tones they produce — or designate periods of quiet time.

OnAir, which has European certification for airborne cellular services, plans to give airlines similar choices, Chief Executive Benoit Debains said. Although some airlines are concerned about noise, Debains said, enabling voice would generate more revenue than data-only services.

Air France, which plans to start allowing cellular calls through OnAir within months, said it would see how people use such services before crafting rules.

"Are you going to reach your wife to tell her what you did the entire day or just tell her, `Can you pick me up at the airport?'" Air France spokeswoman Marina Tymen said, adding that passengers might tell the airline that data services fulfill all their needs.

U.S. airlines are largely taking the opposite approach.

With possible exceptions for crew and federal air marshals, flights on AMR Corp.'s American Airlines and Alaska Air Group Inc.'s Alaska Airlines won't have access to Internet-based phone services like eBay Inc.'s Skype.

Discount startup Virgin America is also considering a ban.

"An airborne environment is a confined environment," said Charles Ogilvie, Virgin's director of in-flight entertainment and partnerships. "You don't want 22B yapping away or playing on a boom box."

Airlines have offered in-flight phone services before, but their high costs have limited their popularity. By contrast, Internet phone calls are free or cheap, particularly for passengers already paying for in-flight access to check e-mail or surf Web sites.

Meanwhile, American, Alaska and Virgin have no plans to filter sites based on their content. At most, an airline may manage traffic and delay large downloads, or in Virgin's case give passengers the option of enabling controls for their kids.

"We think decency and good sense and normal behavior" will prevail, said Jack Blumenstein, chief executive of Aircell LLC, which is launching service on some American and Virgin flights in 2008.

Alaska, which plans to start offering service on some flights in the spring, said the same guidelines apply whether a passenger is flipping through a magazine, watching a DVD on a laptop or surfing the Web.

"Occasionally we do have conversations with customers about content," Alaska spokeswoman Amanda Tobin Bielawski said.

In many ways, airlines are facing issues similar to those encountered by Wi-Fi networks on the ground — at airports, coffee shops and other public places.

Glenn Fleishman, editor of the Wi-Fi Networking News site, said operators of public networks generally do not filter because users are conscious that others can see what they surf. A coffee shop employee might occasionally ask a customer to leave, Fleishman said, "but those stories tend to be pretty far between."

Airplanes, however, are different because customers are in closer quarters and are more likely to include kids.

Allowing porn could subject an airline to harassment complaints much like an employer that refuses to clamp down, said John Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor.

"I think they have a right to (filter), but I come up short of saying they have the responsibility," Palfrey said. "I'd rather have the responsibility in the hands of passengers and require them to be accountable for what they do on laptops and airplanes."

Airborne Internet activities — such as hacking and piracy — could raise new questions about which country's laws apply.

The in-flight services also could exacerbate long-standing grievances.

What if the passenger in front of you wants to recline, making it difficult to surf comfortably on your laptop? What if you're finishing a crucial e-mail on deadline and an adjacent passenger needs to leave for the bathroom? What if the person next to you keeps peering over while you're trying to review a confidential Web site?

Steve Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who specializes in Internet studies, said passengers and flight crews would need to undergo "the kinds of learning the ropes and learning the etiquette anytime we put new technology in new settings."

Just as most people have come to set boundaries for cell phone use in public settings, he said, "we will see develop social norms for using the Internet in flight."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071224/...borne_internet





Australia to Get Net Censorship
AAP

NEW restrictions on online chatrooms, websites and mobile phone content will be introduced within a month to stop children viewing unsuitable material.

From January 20 new laws will be in effect, imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones.

It is the first time content service providers will have to check that people accessing MA15-plus content are aged over 15 years and those accessing R18-plus and X18-plus content are over 18.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will be able to force content providers to take down offensive material and issue notices for live content to be stopped and links to the content deleted.

But ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said adults will not be affected by the new laws.

"In developing these new content rules, ACMA was guided by its disposition to allow adults to continue to read, hear and see what they want, while protecting children from exposure to inappropriate content, regardless of the delivery mechanism," Mr Chapman said in a statement.

Providers of live services, such as chatrooms, must have their service professionally assessed to determine whether its "likely content" should be restricted.

Personal emails and other private communications would be excluded from the new laws and so would news or current affairs services.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sto...005961,00.html





Australia Dumps National ID Card
Cory Doctorow

Australians got a wonderful xmas surprise this month -- the new Labour government has scrapped the plan for a universal surveillance identity card.

Opponents of Australia's controversial Access Card received an early Christmas present earlier this month when the incoming Rudd Labor Government finally axed the controversial ID program. Had it been implemented, the Access Card program would have required Australians to present the smart card anytime they dealt with certain federal departments, including Medicare, Centrelink, the Child Support Agency, or Veterans' Affairs...

Encrypted information contained within the card's RFID chip would have included a person's legal name, date of birth, gender, address, signature, card number, card expiration date, and Medicare number. Provisions were also included that would allow additional information deemed to be necessary for either "the administration or purposes of the Act."

Australians were unhappy about being forced to carry a unique ID card merely for the purpose of interacting with basic human and health services, and the proposal faced opposition from its very inception. The defeat of John Howard in the Australian polls was the last gasp of the Access Card program, which was killed off as one of the very first acts of the new Labor government, lead by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Link

Update: Patrick Gray sez, "You posted an Ars Technica piece about the new Australian Government ditching the proposed Access Card. While that's technically true, Labor's being a tad loose with regard to its plans for a similar scheme. They have so far refused to rule out introducing their own 'access card'. I've covered this all year on my security podcast.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/25...umps-nati.html





Angry Populace Burning British Surveillance Cameras
Bruce Sterling

(((Woah. This looks like a sport with a bright future.)))
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm Link: Speed Cameras.

"This page is probably the highlight of the entire site. To my knowledge this is the largest collection of wrecked Gatsos on the internet, and its growing rapidly. So long as these cameras are robbing motorists of their cash they will continue to be destroyed.

"Five Gatsos have just gone up in Nuneaton. One of them was completely destroyed before it had even gone live. The workmen hadn't even finished installing it...."

(((And check out the chest-pounding vigilante manifesto here... my goodness me.)))
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/index2.htm

"A Summer of MADness?

"Motorists Against Detection, the vigilante anti-speed camera group have announced a summer of MADness which will see them target for destruction all speed cameras in the UK. It’s now going to be a period of zero tolerance against all speed cameras, said their campaigns director Capt Gatso. (((A remote descendant of General Ludd, I reckon.)))

"The group claims speed cameras are just money-making machines and they have given the authorities long enough to prove their worth. The first camera to fall in the summer campaign is in south east London on the A2 at the Sun in the Sands roundabout on-slip heading northbound towards the Blackwall Tunnel.

"Capt Gatso, the group's campaigns director, (((he's a multitalented guy))) said: "We have completely pulled it out of the ground, it is now lying flat. You can see some of our handiwork posted on www.speedcam.co.uk.

"He added: In many areas the cameras have not saved one life - the statistics for road deaths haven't gone down. In some areas they have actually gone up - in Essex, for instance, which has a high density of cameras there are more people being killed. We are now planning to target any and all cameras until the Government sees sense and rethinks its road safety policy. Before we had speed cameras we had the safest roads in Europe - since their introduction this is no longer true."

The announcement will surprise many in road safety circles since the group has publicly declared it would not attack cameras outside schools or on high streets. But Capt Gatso said: We need to focus attention on what the cameras are about. We’ve said we wouldn’t attack the ones in built up and urban areas but that’s not where most of the cameras are. There are a lot of frustrated people among our members who have seen the number of cameras increase while road safety levels have fallen. Indeed, the only thing the cameras have done successfully is to reduce the number of traffic officers patrolling our roads and lose a lot of decent people their driving licences and their livelihoods. (((Giving them lots of spare time to wander around with big jugs of petrol and huge flammable tires to be flung round the necks of videocams.)))

"MAD is the UK’s only direct action anti-speed camera group and it’s been going since summer 2000. (((!))) In that time they have taken out just over 1,000 cameras. (((Can such things be?))) Their membership who are normally law-abiding people - vary in numbers but there is a hard core of around 200 (((I'd be guessing this figure means "20," but wow, for a saboteur gang, that's a lot))) people throughout the UK who use Internet chat forums, encrypted email and pay as you go phones to keep in touch and plan campaigns.

"The group says it has perfected a new and quick way of destroying speed cameras which will enable them to destroy a roadside camera in just a few seconds...".
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/...g-british.html





FBI Campaign Against Einstein Revealed
Dr David Whitehouse

A new book reveals the 22-year effort by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to get Albert Einstein arrested as a political subversive or even a Soviet spy.

Uncovered FBI files are revealed in a book by Fred Jerome who says it was a clash of cultures - Einstein's challenge and change with Hoover's order and obedience.

From the time Einstein arrived in the US in 1933 to the time of his death, in 1955, the FBI files reveal that his phone was tapped, his mail was opened and even his trash searched.

Einstein became world famous in 1906 for his Special Theory of Relativity that deals with light.

His General Theory of Relativity, published in 1919, deals with gravity and has been called mankind's greatest intellectual accomplishment.

Derogatory information

The Einstein File begins with a request by J Edgar Hoover in 1950: "Please furnish a report as to the nature of any derogatory information contained in any file your bureau may have on the following person."

That person was Albert Einstein, and the request intensified a secret campaign to discredit him.

Hoover was worried about Einstein's liberal intellectualism and his dabbling in politics, something that has been forgotten today. It has been overtaken by Einstein's absent-minded professor image.

But Einstein was outspoken against social injustice and violations of civil rights.

The fledgling state of Israel once offered Einstein its presidency. Einstein declined.

The broad outline of this story has been known since 1983, when Richard Alan Schwartz, a professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, obtained a censored version of Einstein's 1,427-page FBI file.

But Jerome uncovers new material.

He sued the US Government with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group to obtain all the documents in the Einstein file.

Stalin comparison

The new material shows how the bureau spied on Einstein.

"It is like the agents got up in the morning, brushed their teeth, opened other people's mail and tapped some phones," he told the BBC.

After he left Germany, appalled by the barbarism of the Nazis, Einstein lent his name to a variety of organisations dedicated to peace and disarmament.

Because of this, the Woman Patriot Corp wrote a 16-page letter to the State Department, the first item in Einstein's file, in 1932, arguing that Einstein should not be allowed into the United States.

"Not even Stalin himself" was affiliated with so many anarchic-communist groups, the letter said.

Fred Jerome reveals that the 1,800-page document prepared about Einstein by the FBI shows that the agency even bugged his secretary's nephew's house.

The files reveal that for five years J Edgar Hoover tried, and failed, to link Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2033324.stm





U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons

Court is asked to bar detainees from talking about interrogations
Carol D. Leonnig and Eric Rich

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Because Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for "sensitive compartmented information."

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney for Khan's family, responded in a court document yesterday that there is no evidence that Khan had top-secret information. "Rather," she said, "the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "

Kathleen Blomquist, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said yesterday that details of the CIA program must be protected from disclosure. She said the lawyer's proposal for talking with Khan "is inadequate to protect unique and potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country's ability to fight terrorism."

Government lawyers also argue in court papers that detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA sites have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because the new Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. That law established separate military trials for terrorism suspects.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is considering whether Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The government urged Walton to defer any decision on access to lawyers until the higher court rules.

The government filing expresses concern that detainee attorneys will provide their clients with information about the outside world and relay information about detainees to others. In an affidavit, Guantanamo's staff judge advocate, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, said that in one case a detainee's attorney took questions from a BBC reporter with him into a meeting with a detainee at the camp. Such indirect interviews are "inconsistent with the purpose of counsel access" at the prison, McCarthy wrote.

Dorn said in the court papers that for lawyers to speak to former CIA detainees under the security protocol used for other Guantanamo detainees "poses an unacceptable risk of disclosure." But detainee attorneys said they have followed the protocol to the letter, and none has been accused of releasing information without government clearance.

Captives who have spent time in the secret prisons, and their advocates, have said the detainees were sometimes treated harshly with techniques that included "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. Bush has declared that the administration will not tolerate the use of torture but has pressed to retain the use of unspecified "alternative" interrogation methods.

The government argues that once rules are set for the new military commissions, the high-value detainees will have military lawyers and "unprecedented" rights to challenge charges against them in that venue.

U.S. officials say Khan, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States for seven years, took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning U.S. reservoirs and considered him for an operation to assassinate the Pakistani president.

In a separate court document filed last night, Khan's attorneys offered declarations from Khaled al-Masri, a released detainee who said he was held with Khan in a dingy CIA prison called "the salt pit" in Afghanistan. There, prisoners slept on the floor, wore diapers and were given tainted water that made them vomit, Masri said. American interrogators treated him roughly, he said, and told him he "was in a land where there were no laws."

Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized in Pakistan.

The family said Khan was staying with a brother in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003 when men, who were not in uniform, burst into the apartment late one night and put hoods over the heads of Khan, his brother Mohammad and his brother's wife. The couple's 1-month-old son was also seized.

Another brother, Mahmood Khan, who has lived in the United States since 1989, said in an interview this week that the four were hustled into police vehicles and taken to an undisclosed location, where they were separated and held in windowless rooms. His sister-in-law and her baby remained together, he said.

According to Mahmood, Mohammad said they were questioned repeatedly by men who identified themselves as members of Pakistan's intelligence service and others who identified themselves as U.S. officials. Mohammad's wife was released after seven days, and he was released after three months, without charge. He was left on a street corner without explanation, Mahmood said.

Periodically, he said, people who identified themselves as Pakistani officials contacted Mohammad and assured him that his brother would soon be released and that they ought not contact a lawyer or speak with the news media.

"We had no way of knowing who had him or where he was," Mahmood Khan said this week at the family home outside Baltimore. He said they complied with the requests because they believed anything else could delay his brother's release.

In Maryland, Khan's family was under constant FBI surveillance from the moment of his arrest, his brother said. The FBI raided their house the day after the arrest , removing computer equipment, papers and videos. Each family member was questioned extensively and shown photographs of terrorism suspects that Mahmood Khan said none of them recognized. For much of the next year, he said, they were followed everywhere.

"Pretty much we were scared," he said. "We live in this country. We have everything here."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110301793.html





Navy JAG Andrew Williams Resigns Over Torture
t-dub

Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, recently resigned his commission over the alleged use of torture by the United States and the destruction of video tapes said to contain instances of that torture.

As ThinkProgress reported in December, Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture.

Explaining his resignation in a letter to his Gig Harbor, WA, newspaper — the Peninsula Gateway — Williams said Hartmann’s testimony was “the final straw”:

The final straw for me was listening to General Hartmann, the highest-ranking military lawyer in charge of the military commissions, testify that he refused to say that waterboarding captured U.S. soldiers by Iranian operatives would be torture.

His testimony had just sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river. Indeed, he would not rule out waterboarding as torture when done by the United States and indeed felt evidence obtained by such methods could be used in future trials.

Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.

In the middle ages, the Inquisition called waterboarding “toca” and used it with great success. In colonial times, it was used by the Dutch East India Company during the Amboyna Massacre of 1623.

Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai. In World War II, our grandfathers had the wisdom to convict Japanese Officer Yukio Asano of waterboarding and other torture practices in 1947, giving him 15 years hard labor.

Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.

Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out.

Williams’ resignation follows on the heels of several high profile issues relating to the JAG corps. In 2006, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was passed over for promotion and forced out of the Navy after he vigorously defended Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. And just this month, the Bush administration planned to take control of the promotion system for military lawyers, a plan which was dropped due to the uproar it caused in the military and in Congress.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/29/...-williams-jag/





The Dangers of the “Thought Crimes” Bill -- Interview with Law Professor Peter Erlinder

On October 23, with very little notice in the media, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007” (HR 1955). This bill is an amendment to the 2002 Homeland Security Act which authorized the most massive re-organization of the federal government since World War 2 and dramatically increased its repressive powers. The bill is now in the Senate. Revolution recently interviewed Peter Erlinder, law professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, about this bill and its implications.
Revolution: You and others have been sounding the alarm about the “Violent Radicalism and Homegrown Terrorism” bill. Tell us what is so dangerous about this bill.

Peter Erlinder: A Congressperson named Harman, who is a conservative Democrat from California, promoted her draft of the bill, and it was taken up by the House leadership as something non-controversial. So the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress passed it 404 to 6 without much discussion and debate. It’s understandable why that would be, because it is called the “Prevention of Violent Radicalism and Homegrown Terrorism” bill, and it does two things. One is that it funds the Department of Homeland Security to carry out sort of academic research into “violent radicalism and homegrown terrorism.” And perhaps that is something that is within the ambit of government.

But the problem is that the way that it defines “violent radicalism and homegrown terrorism” is so broad that it subjects nearly any political activist or group of political activists to investigation by a legislative commission that is also established by the bill. Now the problem with the legislative commission, at least as it’s described in the bill, is that the face of the bill does not make clear what the inherent powers of this legislative commission are. And without that, the real danger in the bill is not apparent to someone who would read it for the first time and who doesn’t remember history.

The bill defines “homegrown terrorist” as anyone who “intimidate(s) or coerce(s) the United States government, the civilian population…or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social belief.” This would, or could very well, include Americans who organize mass marches on Washington for the purpose of coercing changes in government policy. It defines “violent radicals” as Americans—and this applies to citizens as well as non-citizens who are in U.S. territory—as those who “promot(e) extremist belief system(s) for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious or social change.” In other words, this applies to Americans who haven’t done anything illegal, but who the commissioners believe have thoughts that might lead to violence. The bill doesn’t target all thoughts or all belief systems that might result in violence, but only those in which force or violence might be used to promote political or religious or social beliefs. And that’s exactly the kind of violence that might result whenever people gather to demonstrate for or against important issues. For example, the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle would fit under this definition.

The commission that is set up is supposed to last for 18 months and have hearings around the country, and then report every six months as to what they’re finding about these “dangerous” people in our midst. What that means is that virtually any politically, socially, or religiously active person or group can be targeted by this commission to find out who is and who is not the “hidden enemy.” The problem is that witnesses who refuse to testify can be held in contempt of Congress, as former members of the Bush Administration, Harriet Miers and others, are finding out now. And if witnesses do testify and say things that the commissioners and the staff think are not true, they can be charged with perjury or lying to a federal official, like Scooter Libby was. In either case, it requires people to talk about their political associations and their beliefs on pain of jail if they don’t comply.

Revolution: You’ve compared these commission hearings to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Peter Erlinder: The HUAC, yeah. It’s very much the same thing, because when HUAC was set up in 1938, it was originally supposed to investigate who the “dangerous” Americans were at that time. The Ku Klux Klan was mentioned as one, but once HUAC got rolling, it began to call before it people who the House Un-American Activities Committee thought knew something about communists or communism. And for 40 years, HUAC investigated all sorts of groups and individuals, and jailed people like the Hollywood 10 when they refused to talk, blacklisted other people like Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Richard Wright. And it required people to either inform on those they knew, or face ostracism, which is precisely what this commission has the power to do. George Santayana, the 20th-century American philosopher, said, “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It seems like the members of Congress who voted for this thing have forgotten history. Another great American philosopher, Yogi Berra, put it best when he said, “It seems like déjà vu all over again.” And of course, it is.

Revolution: Can you speak more to what the powers of this commission would be?

Peter Erlinder: The powers that are inherent in any legislative investigative body. Which means—and these are inherent in any committee investigations undertaken by Congress—they have the power to subpoena people to come to testify, and if they don’t come to testify they can be jailed for contempt of Congress, which is what is facing Harriet Miers now and the other members of the Bush administration who refuse to appear before Congressional committee. In addition to that, if someone swears to tells the truth and doesn’t, they can be charged with perjury. And even if they aren’t sworn to tell the truth, there’s a statute that has actually been enforced after HUAC was disbanded in 1975 that makes it a crime to lie to a federal official—or to say anything that a federal official thinks is a lie. So the general structure that exists inherently in this commission is the ability to compel attendance and testimony on pain of contempt—and if one does testify, facing prosecution for either perjury or lying to a federal official if the commissioners or their staff think the person is not telling the truth. But in any case, if the commission follows through on the mandate given it by the Congress, it will of necessity have to call people before it people who might have information about Americans who the commissioners think have these “extremist belief systems” or who might be connected with people or organizations that might have folks with “violent thoughts” in their circle. So for example, anyone in a mosque could be called to testify about what they know about everybody else in the mosque—or a church, or a social activist group, or a political group.

Revolution: This bill doesn’t specifically change existing laws or set up new punishment. But could this be a basis for repressive new laws?

Peter Erlinder: What it does is it creates a target for investigation. And the target it creates is so broadly defined that any person on American territory who does more than watch TV and go into the ballot box is subject to being investigated.

Revolution: You mentioned at the beginning the role of the Democrats and in particular Jane Harman, who has been in the news recently because it turns out she knew about the CIA torture tapes back in 2003. Can you talk a little about the role of the Democrats in this?

Peter Erlinder: The reason that the vote was so lopsided, according to a couple of Congresspeople from Minnesota that I’ve talked to, is that this was promoted by the House leadership as something that didn’t require much attention because it wasn’t controversial. And for people who have not studied HUAC, which was disbanded only in 1975, but still that’s 30-odd years ago, for people who aren’t familiar with what HUAC did and the damage it caused, and because the bill itself doesn’t mention the inherent powers of this commission, people who should have been concerned about this allowed it to slide through, apparently. But this is plainly a Democrat-sponsored bill pushed by the House leadership, Nancy Pelosi and Company.

Revolution: How do you see this bill in the context of the overall repressive climate in this country, the laws and actions of Bush like Patriot Act, wiretapping, legitimizing torture, and so forth?

Peter Erlinder: Well, I think a lot of people are familiar with the famous quote from Pastor Niemoller: “First they came for the Communists, and I wasn’t a Communist so I didn’t speak up…” And then they came for the labor organizers, and then they came for the Jews. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up. That is a description of a political reality that’s playing itself out, and we can see it happening. And it occurs whenever one group is targeted as being the “enemy.” Inevitably the boundary of that stain begins to blur. And we’ve seen it time and again in our history that once the process gets started, it requires conscious political opposition to turn it back.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/200...4/18468719.php





Drawing the Year to a Close





How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time
Randall Stross

WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.

Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only “for cause.” The rest of us are “at will” employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.

A line needs to be drawn — Day-Glo bright — that demarcates the boundary between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after hours, as long as no laws are broken, is none of the company’s business. Of course, what we used to call “off hours” are fewer now, and employees may connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible.

In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.

Millersville University, in a motion asking the court to dismiss the case, contends that Ms. Snyder’s student teaching had been unsatisfactory for many reasons. But it affirms that she was dismissed and barred from re-entering the school shortly after the high school staff discovered her MySpace photograph. The university backed the school authorities’ contentions that her posting was “unprofessional” and might “promote under-age drinking.” It also cited a passage in the teacher’s handbook that said staff members are “to be well-groomed and appropriately dressed.”

MR. LENARD said last week that protections for employees for off-duty behavior varied widely from state to state. Colorado and Minnesota have laws explicitly protecting all employees from discrimination for engaging in any lawful activity off premises during nonworking hours. In other states, like Pennsylvania, where Ms. Snyder lives, such protection doesn’t exist.

What some employers regard as imprudent disclosure online may seem commonplace to the rest of us. On Dec. 16, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a study, “Digital Footprints,” showing that 60 percent of Internet users surveyed are not worried about how much information is available about them online.

The findings reflect a significant change within just a few years in public attitudes about privacy and disclosure. In an earlier Pew study, “Trust and Privacy Online,” published in 2000, some 84 percent of respondents expressed concern about “businesses and people you don’t know getting personal information about you and your family.”

Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project and an author of both the 2000 and 2007 surveys, told me that she was surprised by the reduced concern about online publication of personal information. Internet users are not just passively allowing personal information to slip from their control and end up online, where it is searchable; they are also actively putting the information online themselves. The “Digital Footprints” study coined a new phrase, “active digital footprint,” to refer to the personal information that individuals increasingly place online voluntarily.

Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew study included an unexpected finding: Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

Tight privacy settings won’t always keep personal information placed on social networking sites safe from an employers’ prying eyes. A manager could literally look over your shoulder or afterward check a history of sites you visited.

Ms. Snyder had not adjusted her MySpace privacy settings to restrict public access, but why should she have done so? She anticipated that her profile page would be seen by school authorities. On it she declared that as an adult, over the age of 21, she believed that “I have nothing to hide.”

The day may come when nothing that is said online will be treated as embarrassing because we will have become accustomed to everyone disclosing everything. The Pew study phrases this possibility as a question: “Will we come to be more forgiving of embarrassing or unflattering information trails as more of us have our own experiences with personal data leftovers gone bad?”

In the interim, some people will be more cautious than Ms. Snyder. Ms. Fox of the Pew project recently paid a visit to New Orleans for a bachelorette party with female friends — husbands not included. She wanted to make sure that details of the festivities did not find their way to the Internet. She instructed her friends: “If you’re going to upload the pictures, don’t tag with real names.” The photos went up, without traceable digital fingerprints.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html





Adobe Replies To Privacy Spy Concerns
Allen Stern

Update December 29 - Please check out the initial Adobe spying post as well.

Yesterday we wrote about Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) and their potential spying on CS3 customers. The questions were based on screenshots showing a domain "2o7.net" which is owned by tracking firm Omniture. The screenshot (posted below again) shows what appears to be an internal IP address which it's not. Why would Adobe try to hide the tracking with a fake IP address?

John Nack, Adobe Photoshop product manager has provided a reply to the privacy concerns. He mentions that Adobe is closed this week and so his reply is the best he could find out while everyone else is away. We appreciate the effort John, thank you.

John notes that there are three places that Adobe CS3 reports data to Omniture:

• The welcome screens in some Adobe apps include a Flash SWF file that loads current news, special offers, etc. These requests hit Adobe.com servers and are logged, like regular browser-based traffic, by Omniture.
• Adobe Bridge embeds both the Opera browser and the Flash Player, both of which can be used to load Adobe-hosted content. These requests are also logged.
• Adobe apps can call various online resources (online help, user forums, etc.), and those requests are logged.

He concludes with, "Tracking user habits can be a good thing that benefits customers by helping software creators notice trends & improve their tools. When Adobe has pursued this kind of thing, it's always been on a strictly opt-in basis."

So John, let me throw it back over to - you note that I can opt-out of the tracking. Where in the installation process is the opt-out screen? Can you post a screenshot of the opt-out screen on installation? And why does Adobe try to hide the tracking by using a fake IP address? Don't say because that's how Omniture said to set it up. Thanks!





Connecticut

Rell Seeks to Safeguard Citizenry's Private Information from Online Search Sites
Harlan Levy

Complaints about online directory assistance sites that reveal extensive personal data have prompted Gov. M. Jodi Rell to start developing a legislative package to help

In a news release, Rell said Monday that she's received complaints about online search engines that list not only names, addresses, and telephone numbers but also people's ages, places of work, and other personal information.

Rell said she plans to propose restrictions that would likely be in the form of an "opt-out" registry that's an electronic version of the state and federal "Do Not Call" list, which blocks telemarketing calls to citizens whose phone numbers are on the list.

"Anyone who goes to WhitePages.com or 411.com will find personal information published that many people may want protected," Rell said. "This is a safety and security issue, particularly for our elderly citizens who too often are targeted by scam artists and other opportunists."

A third site, veromi.net, provides the names of possible relatives and roommates, as well as a person's name, address, age, and other information.

The opt-out registry Rell outlined would establish a centralized, one-time process for Connecticut residents to remove some or all of their private information from Internet search sites, credit card solicitations, direct mail lists, and other records.

"There have long been Web sites that, for a modest fee, specialize in taking bits and pieces from each of these sources and assembling a surprisingly complete profile of an individual, including Social Security number, address history, employer and even the make and model of their car," Rell said in the release.

"Now some sites are adding even more personal information to search results ... I am concerned this 'personal information creep' will put more and more individual privacy at risk."

Rell said she understands that these sites are breaking no law by gathering and disseminating this information. Nevertheless, she said, an opt-out registry "will in no way jeopardize my commitment to transparency in government," because "I believe there are reasonable protections we can explore without compromising the Freedom of Information Act and the principles of open government."

One impediment is that the First Amendment of the Constitution prohibits the restraint of free speech. That means that the directory-assistance Web sites cannot be forced to remove any data that is public. And one's name, spouse's name, address (unless unpublished), age, and workplace are probably all available to the public, whether they can be easily found or not.

If it's public, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said, "there are no constitutional problems that I would foresee. The government cannot censor what's in the public realm.
"
What the government can censor, Blumenthal said, is a party tracking and selling the private information that comes from an individual's Internet dealings and purchases without the individual's knowledge.

Three weeks ago Blumenthal proposed a "Do Not Track" list similar to a Canadian program that would prohibit such conduct by telemarketers and others who use, buy, or sell such information that they surreptitiously obtain without consent. Blumenthal wants next year's legislature to enact the measure.

"The basic concept is to prevent collecting information without the consumer's consent," Blumenthal said.
"If the consumer objects to collecting the information and says, 'Do not track me when I travel the Internet,' that wish should be respected, and this law would compel marketers to protect that right under consumer privacy."

That protection would come from state law and not under the right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment, Blumenthal added.

"The Fourth Amendment right is against the government invading my privacy and telling me what to do," he said.
Privacy laws being scrutinized

Rell noted that many states are examining their privacy laws, security measures, and the kinds of information they collect, manage, and distribute in light of identity theft, fraud, and other computer crimes.

The state has endured several recent incidents of misplaced computers with vast amounts of unprotected personal data. Protective reactions followed soon thereafter.

In October, Rell announced that the Department of Information Technology had selected a new encryption tool for use by state agencies for laptop computers and other mobile computing and storage devices.

On Sept. 10, Rell announced a new mobile computing and storage device security policy requiring agencies to adhere to new restrictions and accountability measures, including mandatory risk assessments and written authorization from the agency head for any instance in which restricted or confidential data must reside on a mobile device for business reasons.

Any data residing on a mobile device under these controlled circumstances must be encrypted, the amount of data and length of time it may reside on the mobile device must be limited, and protections from unauthorized access and disclosure are required.

Rell also directed all agencies to assess and purge sensitive data currently on laptop computers and portable storage devices if there was no compelling business need for the information to be so stored.

"Privacy concerns are constantly evolving," Rell said. "We must not only keep up with them but do our best to stay ahead of the curve."

Rell said she will ask state agencies to review private information about residents that the state collects, manages, and distributes.

"While bearing in mind such traditional functions such as tax collection, media and freedom-of-Information requests and law enforcement, I want to ensure that the security of private information within state government is protected," Rell said.

Recent new laws in other states sharply curtail the business use and release of Social Security numbers and specify that businesses may not retain information from the "magnetic stripe" on the back of credit and debit cards for longer than 48 hours.
http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/...161556&rfi= 6





Sex Offenders Are Barred From Internet by New Jersey
AP

New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.

In signing the restrictions into law, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, who is filling in while Gov. Jon S. Corzine is vacationing, noted that sexual predators were as likely to lurk at a computer keyboard as in a park or playground.

No federal law restricts sex offenders’ use of the Internet, and Florida and Nevada are the only other states to impose such restrictions.

The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime. It also may be applied to paroled sex offenders under lifetime supervision, but it exempts work done as part of a job or search for employment.

Assemblywoman Linda D. Greenstein said the new law, which she cosponsored, updated Megan’s Law, which requires sex offenders to register with the state after being released.

“When Megan’s Law was enacted, few could envision a day when a sex offender hiding behind a fake screen name would be a mouse-click away from new and unwitting victims,” she said. “Sex offenders cannot be given an opportunity to abuse the anonymity the Internet can provide as a means of opening a door to countless new potential victims.”

Under the new law, convicted sex offenders will have to let the State Parole Board know about their access to computers; submit to periodic, unannounced examinations of their computer equipment; and install equipment on their computer so its use can be monitored.

The State Parole Board currently supervises about 4,200 paroled sex offenders whose sentencing guidelines call for lifetime supervision — regardless of whether their original crime involved the Internet.

The board approved new rules last month banning those convicts from using Internet social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/ny...8offender.html





Home Porn Gives Industry the Blues
Edward Helmore

Given the comparative lack of dialogue, pornographers and triple-X movie stars of the San Fernando Valley have been unaffected by the screenwriters' strike crippling Hollywood's movie industry. But that does not mean all is going smoothly.

America's adult entertainment workers claim their $13bn industry is in trouble. Sales are down by as much as half as customers learn that what they once paid for can now be free. Pirated pornography is flooding the internet while thousands of 'amateurs' post their activities on websites such as YouPorn.

Last week, Vivid Video, one of the largest porn studios, took legal action against Pornotube, a website the company claims is depriving the industry and its performers of legitimate revenue by allowing the streaming of copyrighted material.

According to surveys, sites such as YouPorn and Pornotube draw more internet traffic than CNN. Like YouTube, the phenomenally popular, Google-owned website, X-rated sites depend on users streaming videos to the site - and YouPorn is adding 15 million new users a month.

'The adult entertainment industry is starting to get aggressive,' says Farley Cahen, an editor at Adult Video News. 'The problem is that more and more people are finding out about these sites and that they can get this free content.'

After a decade of double-digit growth, the porn industry is seeing sales of DVDs - its biggest money-maker - slip. Last year, total sales were down 15 per cent. The industry says it is laying off workers.

'Some people say porn is porn is porn, but consumers have preferences,' says Cahen. 'Some like amateur, with neighbours in their socks in a poorly-lit setting.' But 'most consumers like a more polished product with high quality production and prettier girls doing fun things'.

YouPorn is a mysterious entity. There is no contact information, no hint of where it is based. A man claiming to be the owner named 'Stephen Paul Jones' told Portfolio magazine that he was 27 and worked at a California hedge fund, where he managed billions in assets.

He claimed the site was not intended to make money: 'If you wanted to be philosophical about it, it's kind of an exploitative industry and this is sort of the opposite.' It is more probable that YouPorn is owned by Zach Hong, a Malaysian businessman who lives in Australia and is thought to be looking to sell it.

Regina Lynn, Sex Drive columnist for magazine Wired, says the easier it becomes for people to make and distribute their own content, the more they will do it. 'Despite social and professional stigmas, a lot of people are putting themselves on the internet. It fits into this era of people expressing themselves,' she said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world...228220,00.html





YouPorn Blocked by Google.de
Kristen Nicole

It’s been noted that the German Google.de has blocked search results for the site YouPorn.com (NSFW).

This web 2.0 site offers user-generated video content of the pornographic type, and wouldn’t necessarily be the type of site you’d think should be included in a search ban from Google. Apparently Google.de has removed search results for YouPorn as a result of a legal request that had been submitted to the search company, nearly two years ago. It’s not clear what German regulatory organization placed this request with Google.de, but to some, this type of censorship seems unfair.

While you can still access YouPorn in Germany, you cannot find it in the Google.de search results. Is it fair that search results are being blocked with no due explanation? Not really. Sites similar to YouPorn, like StumblePorn, are not blocked from Google.de. And if Google is compliant with this particular legal request, what else is going on that the general public is largely unaware of?
http://mashable.com/2007/08/17/youporn-blocked/





New Law Spells Death For Social Porn?
Stan Schroeder

Social networking didn’t just revolutionize the way we interact online (and caused a lot of very, very ugly profiles to appear); it has also revolutionized porn. Believe it or not, YouPorn [link obviously NSFW], a site that lets its users post erotic/pornographic images and videos of themselves is currently the most visited adult site out there. It’s bigger than CNN, and that’s a lot of traffic.

But, the proposed changes to a US law 18 U.S.C. 2257 might be the end of sites like YouPorn, because they would require every performer (this would include social networks like YouPorn) to disclose about his/her age and identity. Want to post that raunchy picture of you and your girlfriend in the bathroom? Your ID, please.

Of course, this would probably not sit well with many users - hell, let’s be honest here, it wouldn’t sit well with anyone. It would also pose a great deal of problems for the network owners, which would have to maintain records on every single picture or video on the network, and that’s a lot of database records.

Basically, it’s probably down right impossible for adult social networks to comply with these changes, and if the new changes are accepted into law, “interesting” times await ahead for YouPorn and similar sites.
http://mashable.com/2007/10/19/new-l...r-social-porn/





Finally: A Porn Site for ADHD Sufferers
Pete Cashmore

For busy, multi-tasking, ADHD afflicted geeks, even porn is too time consuming. The industry tried breaking the videos down into 5 minute segments, but even that couldn’t hold the average geeks’ full attention. Cue the latest innovation: dual-video porn, which pits two YouTube-style videos head to head, giving each your partial, divided attention.

We’re not kidding: Pornhorneo (NSFW) takes the “adult YouTube” concept pioneered by YouPorn and Pornotube, and puts two videos on the screen, rather than one. This has been done for loftier purposes already - like comparing political policies on HeadtoHead08 - but these days the adult industry isn’t as cutting edge as it used to be, and there are even reports that social networking is now a more popular use of the web. Pornhorneo lets you vote for your favorite, or course, and embed clips elsewhere. The content is user generated and submitted via an upload form, the unnamed founders told us in an email.

I’m glad that adult content is now said to be losing popularity - for too long, it was easy for non-techies to dismiss the web as a hub for pornography, gambling and child predators. It’s still a massive business, of course, and you’d be remiss to ignore it completely, whether or not you think it’s socially acceptable.
http://mashable.com/2007/05/12/pornhorneo/





Tens of Thousands of Adult Website Records Compromised
Keith

A popular software program called NATS, which powers the backend of about 35% of all adult paysites online today has reportedly been in a compromised status for several months while the company that owned and manages the software did little to nothing to correct the issue, according to information obtained by ICWT. NATS is made by Freehold, New Jersey-based Too Much Media (TMM) and is used to provide a management and reporting interface that adult paysite owners use to report affiliate sales and earned commissions to affiliates as well as track and manage sales of memberships.

How It Happened:

ICWT first learned of the massive security breach when a series of posts were made on an adult industry web bulletin board known as “GFY“, where webmasters from the adult community congregate to discuss business. Exact details of the incident are still being pieced together, similar to a jigsaw puzzle.

The story started to break when staff at OC3 Networks, a webhosting company that provides website hosting to numerous adult websites started to notice a pattern of customers who ran the NATS software reporting that their systems had been broken into sometime back in October of 2007. One of the executives who runs OC3 Networks recently posted a thread to GFY about their experiences with NATS and how it related to the break-ins, after working to secure their clients as well as companies having servers at other webhosts. OC3 says it also discussed the issue with Too Much Media upon discovery as well.

Discussions further down in that same thread make reference to allegations that Too Much Media did everything it could to keep news of its exploit out of the public limelight and not much to fix the security issue itself. It is rumored that Too Much Media had even threatened to sue several people who spoke of the exploit in public, a rumor that seems to be confirmed by ICWT’s experiences with them (more on this below).

Shortly after OC3 Networks published it’s report, TMM also released a statement on GFY regarding the flaw which later turned into a quite heated discussion. While details on the breach remain very sketchy and what exactly has been affected (TMM has not been forthcoming with full details on exactly how this issue came to be or how much information is at risk), on information and belief, the breach affects anyone who has purchased a membership to an adult site that uses the NATS software to manage or track its sales as well as adult webmasters who promote the pay sites by placing links on their websites with embedded NATS tracking code, which then allow them to earn a portion of the sale as a commission.

From what ICWT has gathered, the integrity of the NATS system was compromised at some point during or perhaps prior to October, 2oo7 when an unknown person(s) gained access by unknown method(s) to a server in TMM’s office where they stored a listing of the passwords used to maintain their client’s installations of the NATS software. This much has been confirmed by TMM staff in their statement on the situation.

TMM apparently required webmasters who used its software to keep an SSH account available on the webmaster’s server for the purported purpose of maintaining the NATS software. It has been widely commented on within the webmaster community that NATS personnel often accessed the servers without warning and with usage patterns that could be described as strange. While some webmasters turned off the accounts and only re-enabled them when NATS staffers needed to do maintenance of upgrades, it seems to have been a standard practice to setup the accounts and forget about them.

There is also speculation that this whole thing could have been an inside job. We do not have confirmation of this.

What Information is Affected:

The number of records potentially compromised is not known, but is believed to be in the tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of accounts. The NATS system is deployed on an estimated 35% to 40% of all adult sites, so if someone purchased a membership to an adult site since October, 2007 - there is a good chance that they are potentially effected.

The information that was compromised appears to possibly include, with regard to those who bought memberships on adult sites appears to include name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, IP address, billing information and possibly other information provided or collected during signup.

For webmaster affiliates, the information that may have been compromised could include your name, address, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses, sales and payment history, taxpayer ID, IP address and possibly other information provided or collected at some point in the relationship.

At this time, there does not appear to be any concrete proof that data was actually taken off the servers or used, just that an intruder did manage to access the system. However, there is reason to wonder whether the data has been misused, there have been numerous recent reports of people who signed up with a paysite running NATS receiving large amounts of spam after signing up.

What Should Users Do:

Users who have purchased a membership at an adult site at any time this year that uses NATS should first check their statements for the payment method they used to sign up for the adult site for any unusual activity and report same to their financial institution immediately. If such action is noticed, or if users have experienced other invasions or violations of their privacy, users should contact TMM and request that they be compensated for any losses or damages that they may have incurred and additionally, demand that TMM provide them with credit monitoring services and other identity theft recovery services at TMM’s expense.

Webmaster affiliates who have suffered a loss or violation of their privacy as result of the issue should contact their attorneys to investigate legal options for recovery and compensation as well as representatives from companies issuing any insurance policies to them that may cover malpractice or incompetence on the part of other parties with whom they do business. Additionally, those companies should also contact TMM and demand compensation.

Regardless of whether they are consumers or webmaster affiliates, all parties who have suffered a loss or experienced an invasion of their privacy or misuse of personal information should file complaints with their local police departments, the attorney general of their state, the Federal Trade Commission , The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and contact a reputable attorney specializing in fraud, consumer protection or contract law as may be applicable. Generalized resources for victims of identity theft can be found at The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Users who receive telemarketing calls or spam as a result of this incident should file complaints with the FTC for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act or with the FCC for violations of the Do Not Call List if users are registered on it. Those who receive junk faxes should start by getting help here.

Additional Concerns and Problems:

TMM also very recently purchased an adult billing company known as Segregated Payments, Ltd. (more commonly called “SegPay“) which currently process payments for adult paysites in the EU. TMM has announced plans to launch TMMSegPay which will provide payments services to the US market sector as a registered Visa IPSP. In light of the information ICWT has uncovered, we’re very concerned about this both for the integrity of the adult industry and the safety of user’s credit card information.

Perhaps this is more an interesting footnote, but TMM’s John Albright seems to be connected to a stats tracking site (now defunct) similar to Sex Tracker that was known as Porn Graph. That site was accused by numerous adult webmasters of putting code into its website that installed malicious software without the knowledge or consent of end users. Several webmasters claimed this resulted in numerous domains getting banned from search engines.

John (who at that time reportedly used a different board alias “GoGoBar”) claims that he sold the site and the new owners were responsible for these actions and that he couldn’t comment on the ordeal, but according to a confidential source within the adult industry, ICWT has learned that after the supposed sale, only the domain’s whois information changed but the hosting was never moved. It would be possible for one to infer that this indicates that the claimed sale never took place.

Whats Being Done & Possible Legal Action Against ICWT:

Rumor has it that the FBI has been called in to investigate the situation, we have no confirmation of this. In fact, it looks like the industry and TMM may attempt to sweep this under the rug and as such, thats the main reason for it getting reported here. Other than this, TMM has made a statement and supposedly told its customers how to secure their installations of the software. Many in the industry are skeptical on whether the instructions provided by TMM fully address the issue.

The editor of ICWT has been contacted via GFY and publicly threatened with a libel lawsuit by John Albright with Too Much Media. John appears to be an executive officer of the company. ICWT has a contingency plan in place for legal action that is taken as a result of stories that are published here. I am not concerned about the ability of ICWT to continue operations should legal action be taken and furthermore, I am confident that ICWT is on firm first amendment grounds in any such claims. ICWT will ultimately prevail.

ICWT will follow this story and keep you updated as to any new developments.

Update #1: Too Much Media / NATS Possibly in Breach of Laws of Nearly 40 States

On information and belief, Too Much Media did not notify its clients of the supposed breach until within the last week, the last couple of days or the last couple of hours - depending on which report you want to go by. In most cases, this is insufficient to satisfy the legal requirements of nearly 40 states that consumers be notified of breaches of personal information. Most laws require that the notifications be done immediately upon discovery of the breach or as soon as practical.

Consumers are advised to examine this page which lists states that have enacted notification requirements and determine if Too Much Media was required to notify you of the breach and failed to do so. Too Much Media is organized in New Jersey and even if they were organized in another state, under the New Jersey Notification Law they would be required to notify all New Jersey residents because they did business in that state. This will vary from state to state, you can determine your individual situation by clicking the link above and reviewing the statute for your particular state. If you need assistance in deciphering the legal code, we apologize but we cannot help you with this, you’ll need to contact an attorney or your local bar association and ask for a “court advocate” who may be able to answer simple questions without charge.

Update #2: Rewrite to Clarify Sources Relied Upon for this Report

The amount of information used to construct this report is both lengthy and hard to manage. For those unfamiliar with the Adult Entertainment Industry, most of the discussion and debates amongst various parties takes place message boards (some open, some closed to the public), instant messengers like AIM and ICQ and at conventions or meetings organized for that purpose. And it often happens in a very messy and heated manner that results in mud slinging and name calling. To help get our readers right to the facts, we have re-written this post with links directly to the relevant posts.

Update #3: Too Much Media Told Affiliates There Were No Exploits

On another adult industry forum known as Just Blow Me, TMM’s John Albright told affiliates back on 10/27/07 that “There are no known exploits in NATS. There was no exploit found.” and hinted at suing people for spreading what - according to him - was “misinformation”.

Update #4: TMM’s John Albright Implies More Legal Action, Slashdot Picks Up the Story + Small Retraction

TMM’s John Albright is busy on GFY implying more legal action against people who speak out against him. This time, it appears he is threatening employees of his competition, MPA3.

Additionally, I am pleased to announce that this story has accomplished its goal to ensure that the adult industry will not be able to sweep this matter under the rug. Earlier this morning, this story hit the revered Slashdot. It will be almost impossible for this issue to miss getting the scrutiny it desperately needs.

Finally, it has been brought to my attention that NATS does not enjoy 80% to 95% market penetration as was originally reported here. Instead, that number is more like 35% to 40% of all porn sites online today, according to an industry source who requested that I not name him. I am very sorry for implying that Too Much Media was more successful than it really is. ICWT and I both regret the error.
http://www.icwt.us/index.php/2007/12...s-compromised/





Why Does Deluge Have an Internal, Anonimizing Browser?

It is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent. If an ISP is throttling or blocking bittorrent traffic, you can pretty much bet that they're tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users. Are we just paranoid? Maybe, but I've worked for an ISP in the past, and I can assure you that there is a need for this service.

Am I totally anonymous?

You're totally anonymous. We keep absolutely no logs...which means that even if we're served with a court order to hand over our records, there are no records to hand over. Simple enough :)
http://deluge-torrent.org/faq.php#4n01





XM Settles With WMG
FMQB

XM Satellite Radio and Warner Music Group announced on Friday, December 21 that they had settled a lawsuit over the Pioneer Inno device, a portable satellite receiver with advanced recording functionality. The two companies signed a multi-year deal covering all XM radios with similar technology. XM and Universal Music Group settled a similar suit last week, with UMG and the satcaster inking a similar deal.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=537132





Public Access to NIH Research Made Law

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

"Facilitated access to new knowledge is key to the rapid advancement of science," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Nobel Prize Winner. "The tremendous benefits of broad, unfettered access to information are already clear from the Human Genome Project, which has made its DNA sequences immediately and freely available to all via the Internet. Providing widespread access, even with a one-year delay, to the full text of research articles supported by funds from all institutes at the NIH will increase those benefits dramatically."

"Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). “Improved access will enable universities to maximize their own investment in research, and widen the potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for others to build upon.”

“Years of unrelenting commitment and dedication by patient groups and our allies in the research community have at last borne fruit,” said Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. “We’re proud of Congress for their unrelenting commitment to ensuring the success of public access to NIH-funded research. As patients, patient advocates, and families, we look forward to having expanded access to the research we need.”

“Congress has just unlocked the taxpayers’ $29 billion investment in NIH,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). “This policy will directly improve the sharing of scientific findings, the pace of medical advances, and the rate of return on benefits to the taxpayer."

Joseph added, “On behalf of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, I’d like to thank everyone who worked so hard over the past several years to bring about implementation of this much-needed policy.”

For more information, and a timeline detailing the evolution of the NIH Public Access Policy beginning May 2004, visit the ATA Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.
http://www.sciencecodex.com/public_a...ndate_made_law





Email in the 18th Century
Kris De Decker

More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane – wireless and without need for electricity.

Email leaves all other communication systems far behind in terms of speed. But the principle of the technology – forwarding coded messages over long distances – is nothing new. It has its origins in the use of plumes of smoke, fire signals and drums, thousands of years before the start of our era. Coded long distance communication also formed the basis of a remarkable but largely forgotten communications network that prepared the arrival of the internet: the optical telegraph.

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Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain.

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Throughout history, long distance communication was a matter of patience – lots of patience. Postmen have existed longer than humans can write, but the physical transport of spoken or written messages was always limited by the speed of the messenger. Humans or horses can maintain a speed of 5 or 6 kilometres an hour for long distances. If they walk 10 hours a day, the transmission of a message from Paris to Antwerp would take about a week.

Already in antiquity, post systems were designed that made use of the changing of postmen. In these stations, the message was transferred to another runner or rider, or the horseman could change his horse. These organised systems greatly increased the speed of the postal services. The average speed of a galloping horse is 21 kilometres an hour, which means that the distance in time between Paris and Antwerp could be shortened to a few days. A carrier pigeon was twice as fast, but less reliable. Intercontinental communication was limited to the speed of shipping.

A chain of towers

Centuries of slow long-distance communications came to an end with the arrival of the telegraph. Most history books start this chapter with the appearance of the electrical telegraph, midway the nineteenth century. However, they skip an important intermediate step. Fifty years earlier (in 1791) the Frenchman Claude Chappe developed the optical telegraph. Thanks to this technology, messages could be transferred very quickly over long distances, without the need for postmen, horses, wires or electricity.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

1,380 kilometres an hour

Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.

The technology today may sound a bit absurd, but in those times the optical telegraph was a genuine revolution. In a few decades, continental networks were built both in Europe and the United States. The first line was built between Paris and Lille during the French revolution, close to the frontline. It was 230 kilometres long and consisted of 15 semaphores. The very first message – a military victory over the Austrians – was transmitted in less than half an hour. The transmission of 1 symbol from Paris to Lille could happen in ten minutes, which comes down to a speed of 1,380 kilometres an hour. Faster than a modern passenger plane – this was invented only one and a half centuries later.

From Amsterdam to Venice

The technology expanded very fast. In less than 50 years time the French built a national infrastructure with more than 530 towers and a total length of almost 5,000 kilometres. Paris was connected to Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Toulon, Perpignan, Lyon, Turin, Milan and Venice. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was possible to wirelessly transmit a short message from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour’s time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month’s time to do the same.

The system was copied on a large scale in other countries. Sweden developed a country-wide network, followed by parts of England and North America. A bit later also Spain, Germany and Russia constructed a large optical telegraph infrastructure. Most of these countries devised their own variations on the optical telegraph, using shutters instead of arms for example. Sweden developed a system that was twice as fast, Spain built a telegraph that was windproof. Later the optical telegraph was also put into action in shipping and rail traffic.

A real European network never really existed. The connection between Amsterdam and Venice existed for only a short period. When Napoleon was chased out of the Netherlands, his telegraph network was dismantled. The Spanish, on the other hand, started too late. Their nationwide network was only finished when the technology started to fall into disuse in other countries. The optical telegraph network was solely used for military and national communications, individuals did not have access to it – although it was used for transmitting winning lottery numbers and stock market data. (Map : Ecole Centrale de Lyon)

Intercontinental communication

The optical telegraph disappeared as fast as it came. This happened with the arrival of the electrical telegraph, fifty years later. The last optical line in France was stopped in 1853, in Sweden the technology was used up to 1880. The electrical telegraph was not hindered by mist, wind, heavy rainfall or low hanging clouds, and it could also be used at night. Moreover, the electrical telegraph was cheaper than the mechanical variant. Another advantage was that it was much harder to intercept a message – whoever knew the code of the optical telegraph, could decipher the message. The electrical telegraph also made intercontinental communication possible, which was impossible with the optical telegraph (unless you made a large detour via Asia.

The electrical telegraph was the main means of communication for transmitting text messages over long distances for more than 200 years. At first, electrical wires were used; later on radio waves were used to communicate. The first line was built in 1844, the first transatlantic connection was put into use in 1865. The telegraph made use of Morse code, where dots and dashes symbolize letters and numbers.

Not the telephone, nor the railroads, nor radio or television made the telegraph obsolete. The technology only died with the arrival of the fax and the computer networks in the second half of the 20th century. Also in rail-traffic and shipping optical telegraphy was replaced by electronic variants, but in shipping the technology is still used in emergency situations (by means of flags or lamps).

Keyboard

The electrical telegraph is the immediate predecessor of e-mail and internet. Since the thirties, it was even possible to transmit images. A variant equipped with a keyboard was also developed, so that the technology could be used by people without any knowledge of Morse code. The optical as well as the electrical telegraph are both in essence the same technology as the internet and e-mail. All these means of communication make use of code language and intermediate stations to transmit information across large distances; the optical telegraph uses visual signs, the electrical telegraph dots and dashes, the internet ones and zeroes. Plumes of smoke and fire signals are also telegraphic systems – in combination with a telescope they would be as efficient as an optical telegraph.

Low-tech internet

Of course, e-mail is much more efficient than the optical telegraph. But that does not alter the fact that the low-tech predecessor of electronic mail more or less obtained the same result without wires or energy, while the internet consists of a cluster of cables and is devouring our energy resources at an ever faster pace.

(Edited by Vincent Grosjean)
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/...in-the-18.html





Book Argues That Bell Stole Phone Idea
Brian Bergstein

A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.

In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.

Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999.

The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound electromagnetically over a wire. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876 — when Bell went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work — he suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was the one that proved successful.

As Bell described that new approach, he sketched a diagram of a person speaking into a device. Gray's patent documents, which describe a similar technique, also feature a very similar diagram.

Shulman's book, due out Jan. 7, recounts other elements that have piqued researchers' suspicions. For instance, Bell's transmitter design appears hastily written in the margin of his patent; Bell was nervous about demonstrating his device with Gray present; Bell resisted testifying in an 1878 lawsuit probing this question; and Bell, as if ashamed, quickly distanced himself from the telephone monopoly bearing his name.

Perhaps the most instructive lesson comes when Shulman explores why historical memory has favored Bell and not Gray — nor German inventor Philipp Reis, who beat them both with 1860s telephones that employed a different principle.

One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...OuBsgD8TPA7980





Press Release Source: The SCO Group, Inc.

SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter

The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobile services, today announced that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.

About SCO

The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX - News) is a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobile services. SCO offers UnixWare for enterprise applications and SCO OpenServer for small to medium businesses. SCO's highly innovative and reliable solutions help customers grow their businesses everyday, especially into the emerging mobile market. SCO owns the core UNIX operating system, originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and is the exclusive licensor to UNIX-based system software providers. The Me Inc., product line focuses on creating mobile platforms, services and solutions for businesses and enhances the productivity of mobile workers.

Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of thousands of resellers and developers. SCO Global Services provides reliable localized support and services to partners and customers. For more information on SCO products and services, visit http://www.sco.com.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/071227/lath028.html?.v=101





Pushdo - Analysis of a Modern Malware Distribution System
Joe Stewart

Recently, Sophos published a blog entry detailing the trouble they are having with the Pushdo trojan, a fairly new and prolific threat being circulated in fake "E-card" emails. From their description, it is clear that the author(s) of Pushdo are making a concerted effort to spread their malware far and wide. But what exactly is Pushdo, and how does it work? We decided to take a closer look at this malware family.

Pushdo is usually classified as a "downloader" trojan - meaning its true purpose is to download and install additional malicious software. There are dozens of downloader trojan families out there, but Pushdo is actually more sophisticated than most, but that sophistication lies in the Pushdo control server rather than the trojan.

When executed, Pushdo reports back to one of several control server IP addresses embedded in it code. The server listens on TCP port 80, and pretends to be an Apache webserver. Any request that doesn't have the correct URL format will be answered with the following content:

The Bender Bending Rodriguez text is simply misdirection to mask the true nature of the server - if the HTTP request contains the following parameters, one or more executables will be delivered via HTTP:

The malware to be downloaded by Pushdo depends on the value following the "s-underscore" part of the URL. The Pushdo controller is preloaded with multiple executable files - the one we looked at contained 421 different malware samples ready to be delivered. The Pushdo controller also uses the GeoIP geolocation database in conjunction with whitelists and blacklists of country codes. This enables the Pushdo author to limit distribution of any one of the malware loads from infecting users located in a particular country, or provides the ability to target a specfic country or countries with a specific payload.

Pushdo keeps track of the IP address of the victim, whether or not that person is an administator on the computer, their primary hard drive serial number (obtained by SMART_RCV_DRIVE_DATA IO control code), whether the filesystem is NTFS, how many times the victim system has executed a Pushdo variant, and the Windows OS version as returned by the GetVersionEx API call.

The use of the physical hard drive serial number as a identifier is interesting - it not only provides a unique ID for the infected system, but can also reveal information such as whether the code is running in a virtual machine or not. For instance, a VMware system might return a serial number of "00000000000000000001" or simply "00", which is very easily spotted in a list of serial numbers of major hard drive vendors. This could be a way for the malware author to spy on anti-virus companies using automated tools to monitor the malware download points.

As another anti-anti-malware function, Pushdo will look at the names of all running processes and compare them to the following list of anti-virus and personal firewall process names:

• avp.exe
• Armor2net.exe
• kpf4ss.exe
• blackd.exe
• PXAgent.exe
• ipfsrv.exe
• safensec.exe
• mcagent.exe
• mpsevh.exe
• mcuimgr.exe
• mcpromgr.exe
• mcusrmgr.exe
• mcupdmgr.exe
• mclogsrv.exe
• mctskshd.exe
• NPFSVICE.exe
• outpost.exe
• symlcsvc.exe
• sspfwtry2.exe
• vsmon.exe
• xcommsvr.exe
• vsserv.exe
• livesrv.exe
• drweb32w.exe
• nod32krn.exe
• PAVFNSVR.exe
• PAVSRV51.exe

Instead of killing off these processes, as many other trojans/viruses attempt to do, Pushdo merely reports back to the controller which ones are running, by appending "proc=" and a list of the matching process names to the HTTP request parameters. This type of reconaissance is useful when determining which anti-virus engines or firewalls are preventing the malware from running or phoning home, by their absence from the statistics. This way the Pushdo author doesn't have to maintain a test environment for each AV/firewall product.

Most of the 421 malware samples from the Pushdo controller we examined were either the Wigon rootkit or the Cutwail spam trojan, however the following other trojans were being served by the controller:

• PRG/Wsnpoem
• PSW.LdPinch.NEL
• TrojanDownloader.Agent.NPQ
• Agent.AIA
• BHO.NAT
• Rustock.NBK
• TrojanDownloader.Small.NYK

The large proportion of Cutwail/Wigon leads us to believe the same group is behind all three malware families. The Wigon rootkit is dropped onto the system when Pushdo is first executed, and is used to hide the Pushdo process and any subsequent malware that Pushdo might download.

It is able to determine which processes to hide by looking for a specific byte at a predetermined offset of the PE header. Cutwail also seems to share some similar code/programming techniques (as well as the use of the Wigon rootkit) with Pushdo. For instance, the use of environment variables to determine system paths, rather than more canonical Win32 API calls. This programming approach may also indicate the author of Pushdo (and Cutwail and Wigon) is more at home with Unix-like operating systems than Win32 platforms, although clearly he/she has proficiency on both.

The fact that other malware families are being distributed using the Pushdo system suggests that the author is also willing to take payments from other malware authors in return for use of his distribution channel. Such arrangements are becoming more and more common, as participants in the malware economy seek out niches in which to provide services in the underground marketplace.

The Pushdo controller is remotely administered using a custom protocol over the HTTP channel. An administrator connects using the same URL that an infected system might, except the version parameter is set to a predetermined key. At that point the following commands can be issued over the TCP channel:

• STAT (gets the server status)
• TRCK (dump the statistics log)
• CARG (upload a new malware payload database)
• FLTR (upload a new whitelist/blacklist filter database)
• FINA (end session)

As we were writing this analysis, we received an e-card email containing a newer variant of Pushdo. Apparently taking notice that the Bleeding Snort project had published a signature (sid 2006377) to detect the Pushdo request variables in transit, the author has now changed the request to be less fingerprintable. An example of the new request format is:

GET /40e800142020202057202d4443574d414c393635393438366c0000003c66 000000007600000002 HTTP/1.0

The length of the request will likely change between different service pack levels of Windows. IDS/IPS signatures can still be written around such a request, taking advantage of the fact that no other HTTP headers are sent as one characteristic to key in on. However, even with this approach, false positives may still occur.

Clearly the author of Pushdo is intent on evading detection for as long as possible, in order to have the maximum amount of time to seed Cutwail spambots into the wild. Although it is unclear just how large the Cutwail botnet has become, the ambition of the project rivals that of other more well-known spam botnets, such as Storm. Only time will tell if it will rival Storm in size as well.
http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/pushdo/





Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage
Ian Urbina

This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs — marked “free” — on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

Though not new, shopdropping has grown in popularity in recent years, especially as artists have gathered to swap tactics at Web sites like Shopdropping.net, and groups like the Anti-Advertising Agency, a political art collective, do training workshops open to the public.

Retailers fear the practice may annoy shoppers and raise legal or safety concerns, particularly when it involves children’s toys or trademarked products.

“Our goal at all times is to provide comfortable and distraction-free shopping,” said Bethany Zucco, a spokeswoman for Target. “We think this type of activity would certainly not contribute to that goal.” She said she did not know of any shopdropping at Target stores.

But Packard Jennings does. An artist who lives in Oakland, Calif., he said that for the last seven months he had been working on a new batch of his Anarchist action figure that he began shopdropping this week at Target and Wal-Mart stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“When better than Christmas to make a point about hyper-consumerism?” asked Mr. Jennings, 37, whose action figure comes with tiny accessories including a gas mask, bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails, and looks convincingly like any other doll on most toy-store shelves. Putting it in stores and filming people as they try to buy it as they interact with store clerks, Mr. Jennings said he hoped to show that even radical ideology gets commercialized. He said for safety reasons he retrieves the figures before customers take them home.

Jason Brody, lead singer for an independent pop-rock band in the East Village, said his group recently altered its shopdropping tactics to cater to the holiday rush.

Normally the band, the Death of Jason Brody, slips promotional CD singles between the pages of The Village Voice newspaper and into the racks at large music stores. But lately, band members have been slipping into department stores and putting stickers with logos for trendy designers like Diesel, John Varvatos and 7 for All Mankind on their CDs, which they then slip into the pockets of designer jeans or place on counters.

“Bloomingdale’s and 7 for All Mankind present the Death of Jason Brody, our pick for New York band to watch in 2008,” read a sticker on one of the CDs placed near a register at Bloomingdales. “As thanks for trying us on, we’re giving you this special holiday gift.” Bloomingdales and 7 for All Mankind declined to comment.

For pet store owners, the holidays usher in a form of shopdropping with a touch of buyer’s remorse. What seemed like a cute gift idea at the time can end up being dumped back at a store, left discretely to roam the aisles.

“After Easter, there’s a wave of bunnies; after Halloween, it’s black cats; after Christmas, it’s puppies,” said Don Cowan, a spokesman for the store chain Petco, which in the month after each of those holidays sees 100 to 150 pets abandoned in its aisles or left after hours in cages in front of stores. Snakes have been left in crates, mice and hamsters surreptitiously dropped in dry aquariums, even a donkey left behind after a store’s annual pet talent show, Mr. Cowan said.

Bookstores are especially popular for self-promotion and religious types of shopdropping.

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics. At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a spokesman for the group.

Mr. Jennings’s anarchist action figure met with a befuddled reaction from a Target store manager on Wednesday in El Cerrito, Calif.

“I don’t think this is a product that we sell,” the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. “It’s definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about.”

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before putting the dolls back on store shelves.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, said he was not sure if shopdropping was illegal but that some forms of it could raise safety concerns because the items left on store shelves might not abide by labeling requirements and federal safety standards.

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?”

Christopher Maag contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/us/24shopdrop.html?hp





Bible Incident Draws Concerns
Frank Schultz

A Parker High School student tore pages from a Bible in class earlier this month, raising constitutional and ethical issues for school officials and his classmates.

Some students were upset, while others rallied to the cause of free speech.

The student was suspended, his mother said. She was told he couldn’t return to school until he had undergone a psychological evaluation. He was out of school for a week.

“They wanted to make sure he was safe,” the mother said, but she believes he was never a threat to anyone.

In the wake of the suspension, three students wore T-shirts with words supporting the student’s free speech rights.

Parker officials had the three remove the shirts because they could have caused a disruption, said Principal Dale Carlson.

One student set up an Internet conversation site to discuss the incident, and according to postings on that site, the T-shirts read: “So long as a man thinks, he is free,” “Bring (the student’s name) back” and “Those who mind do not matter, and those who matter do not mind.”

Carlson said the plea to bring the student back was the objectionable part of the T-shirts’ message.

Officials believed it was likely that the shirts’ reference to the Bible incident would have caused a disruption “with other students that were involved in this incident,” Carlson said.

Carlson would not confirm the suspension. He said his decisions in the matter were not tied specifically to the ripping of the Bible pages and that other circumstances played into the decision to deal with the student and his family.

The boy’s mother said her son was delivering a speech about a paper he had written for an English class. She said she was “not happy” that her son was disciplined for expressing himself in a class assignment.

The mother said she also wasn’t happy her son ripped the Bible or with the language he used.

“I’m a Christian. He was raised a Christian,” she said. “But he’s struggling right now, and that’s fine.”

Kids should be able to speak their minds, “and I don’t think they helped the matter by suspending my child,” she said.

District officials requested an opinion on the matter from their legal counsel, attorney David Moore. The Janesville Gazette obtained a copy of the opinion, which described the Bible incident.

The opinion states that a student was giving a presentation in class that involved his opposition to religion.

“In the course of doing so, he stated that no word of the Bible is true, that those who thought so were ‘idiots,’ that he would prove that persons in the class were ‘ignoramuses for believing in the Bible,’ and that the Bible was written by ‘a bunch of old Mesopotamian men with sand up their (expletive.)’

“He further said, ‘See, I can do this to the Bible and not be harmed because it is not true,’ and then proceeded to rip pages out of a Bible,” according to the document.

“Certain parents and students have understandably raised objections to the student’s conduct,” Moore’s opinion continues. “They have framed the question presented in terms of whether Parker High School will permit a student to rip up a Bible in class.”

Moore’s legal opinion is that a student can’t be disciplined only for ripping the Bible, but the school could discipline him for using offensive language and for promoting “negative stereotyping that degrades or flagrantly demeans any individual or group by negatively referring to religion.”

Students have a constitutional right to free expression Moore wrote, but that right must be balanced with the legal rights of other students “not to be denied the benefit of educational programs or discriminated against on the basis of religion.

“In addition, the school has the right to maintain order and discipline ...”

However, “the act of ripping up a Bible, in and of itself, is a form of (constitutionally) protected expression,” Moore wrote.

The student’s actions and words did not rise to the level of a crime, in the opinion of the police officer assigned to the school, Scott Wasemiller.

Wasemiller said he was involved in a meeting with the student and his parents but made no arrest or citation.
http://gazettextra.com/news/2007/dec...aws-concerns/?





Piracy, Morals and The Need for Change
Ernesto

Morals are often defined by what the general public sees as right or wrong. Most people don’t feel that they’re doing wrong when they download an MP3 or share a movie, but in most countries they are actually breaking laws, laws which do not reflect what the general public considers to be legal, fair use, or even moral.

Law and morals are clearly out of sync when it concerns sharing copyrighted works on the Internet. To give an example, David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times often questions his public during talks to find out where the line between wrong and right lies in this case. He starts of with a simple statement such as:

“I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.”

He then asks the public whether they think it’s wrong or not. Normally the more extreme the examples are, the more hands are raised, but when he spoke to an audience of 500 college students, something different happened.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.” There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever. “Who thinks that might be wrong?” Two hands out of 500.

Pogue was blown away by this response, and he realized that there is a clear generation gap when it comes to copyright morals. Indeed there is, but what else do you expect from a generation grew up with iPods, CD-burners and the biggest copying machine ever invented (the Internet) at their fingertips. There’s a whole industry built around filesharing, take the 160GB iPod for example, any idea how much it costs to fill that with legally purchased songs?

Computers and the Internet made it easier than ever to reproduce and share files, and it is virtually impossible to stop people from sharing and copying music and videos online. I’m not talking about copying movies for profit here, just for personal use. Besides, sharing files is not as bad as most anti-piracy lobbies want people to believe.

A recent study has shown that people don’t buy less CDs when they download songs, instead, they discover music they otherwise wouldn’t have listened to, and buy more CDs than people who don’t download. On top of this, research continues to show less popular artists actually profit from piracy simply because it allows people to try new music.

From people who missed an episode of their favorite TV-show I often get the question whether it is legal for them to download these off BitTorrent. For them, the only way to see that show is to download it, again, they don’t make any money off it, they just want to see an episode they missed. Is that immoral?

Personally I think it is all about alternatives. Movie, TV and music companies should put their content online and make it available in high quality for a reasonable price without restrictions such as DRM. At the moment there are often no products online that can compete with their pirated counterparts in quality. Sure, there are ways to download (some) music and movies online, but apart from the ridiculous prices, these products are often offered in a low quality format and restricted through DRM.

The thing is, the entertainment industry should learn how to embrace technology and compete with piracy, instead of fighting its customers. The rise of illegal downloading is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels, it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free, as illustrated by the missed TV-show example.

Honestly, the real problem isn’t so much about protecting the rights of the artist, but about protecting the revenue stream for the big media companies. The people who actually create the movies and music want their content to be shared, only the large corporations behind it are too afraid to move on. Lobby groups such as the MPAA and the RIAA represent the distributors of movies and music, NOT the creators. They even pay politicians to support their cause by voting for or against laws so that legislation is made with their interests in mind. Is that moral?

The main reason why these corporations are hesitant to go online is because they are trying to make most of their money of something that can easily done by the public - distribution. They are striving to preserve outdated business models because that’s how they make their money. I’m not proposing that everyone should just pirate everything, but I suggest that the movie and movie industry make their content available online for a reasonable price.

The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because they cling onto their old business models.

So should sharing copyrighted material be legalized? Not per se, but the entertainment industry should focus on monetizing filesharing networks instead of bringing them down. Sharing is a good thing and there are tons of possibilities to profit from it.
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-moral...change-071323/





Movie Industry: DRM Is For Customers, Not For Members
Ernesto

A DVD-player that has been designed to prevent DVD-screeners from leaking to the public will be phased out because industry insiders say the DRM hurts their viewing pleasure. It seems that DRM is fine when it’s annoying the public but unacceptable when it’s affecting them.

This week several DVD-screeners leaked on BitTorrent. “I Am Legend”, “Gone Baby Gone” and several other movies showed up at BitTorrent sites, presumably leaked with the help of industry insiders.

December is traditionally the month when a lot DVD-screeners are sent out to the Oscar voters, and also the time when a lot of these screeners leak. Unfortunately for some, there are pirates among the members of this elite group of movie industry insiders, and measures have to be taken to make it harder to leak the films.

One of the measures is watermarking where the DVD-screeners all get a unique, hidden watermark, so potential leaks can be traced back to the source. Another, perhaps even more effective preventive measure that was used by some studios is the SV-300, a custom-made DVD player that’s been in use since 2004.

The player is developed by Cinea, a division of Dolby Laboratories, and it is used to play encrypted disks that will only play on this particular player. The SV-300 makes it nearly impossible to copy and leak a screener, but surprisingly, the developer decided to phase out the machine because of the negative feedback from the Academy members. It turns out that the Oscar voters don’t like the DRM-machine because it hurts their viewing pleasure:

The machine operating the S-View software that scored few points for being user-friendly in its brief run. Its user base complained of the impracticality of having to lug the machine around on vacation during the holiday season, the height of the screening period.

So what they basically say is: “We don’t like DRM”. I can’t agree more of course, but it is kind of ironic that they tend to get more aggressive in imposing DRM on their customers because they are afraid of piracy, while they abandon this effective anti-piracy player because the DRM doesn’t allow them to watch the screeners on vacation.

Don’t think that the industry insiders are unaware of this, hypocritical as they are, they try to talk it right with some strange arguments. Industry insiders now say that Oscar screeners are not considered a primary contributor to movie piracy. This is strange because only 4 years ago Hollywood lobbied for a total ban of Oscar screeners.

I guess it’s all different when your personal viewing pleasure is at stake.
http://torrentfreak.com/drm-is-for-c...embers-071227/





Old Media Hits the Skids as New Models Roil Market

Broadcast networks, newspapers, music labels struggle while Internet rises
Joyce Hanson

Leave it to a group of Hollywood screenwriters to script a perfect scene showing the struggles that old media faces in the digital era. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike in November, it drummed up sympathy by posting countless videos of rallies and marches on YouTube—and received no compensation for the content.

From broadcast to print to music, New York's old media companies stumbled in the face of the chaos brought about by new media in 2007. The future of some of the city's most venerable companies and brands looks suddenly shaky.

Not enough network hits

Facing increased competition from cable and new forms of entertainment on the Internet, the broadcast networks have seen their hold on the American psyche slipping. This trend continued in 2007, when after a fairly promising upfront early in the year, the networks failed to produce the hits they needed to re-establish themselves. As of December, the networks' prime-time ratings in the key 18- to 49-year-old age category were all down: at NBC by 11%, at CBS by 10% and at ABC by 5%.

Newspapers also struggled mightily in 2007, in ways that hinted at underlying problems in the business. The New York Times canceled its Times Select online tool because not enough viewers were willing to pay for content.

The Times may be about to face a street fight from the new owner of The Wall Street Journal. In another sign of the chaos overtaking the print world, the Bancroft family sold its controlling interest in Dow Jones & Co. for $5.6 billion to media baron Rupert Murdoch, causing a hue and cry among observers who worry that the owner of Fox News and the New York Post will dumb down the Journal.

Some of the city's most well-respected magazine brands got into in trouble as the year wore on. The world's largest magazine company, Time Inc., saw ad pages decline at Time, Fortune, Money and Business 2.0 and finally killed the last title. Critics said Time Inc. had been too slow in developing a Web presence for its magazines.

Meanwhile, the future of Time's giant parent, Time Warner, remains unsettled. Time Warner said last month that Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Bewkes will take over the company when Chief Executive Richard Parsons steps down Jan. 1. Mr. Bewkes is charged with the tough task of reinvigorating the company—and preparing Time Inc. for a possible sale.

Sad songs

The old media business suffering the most in the new media upheaval may be music labels. In 2007, companies were beset by plunging album sales and shrinking profit margins. While sales of single songs have been rising, sales of traditional albums had fallen a whopping 15% through Dec. 16, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pb...FREE/465255421





Mr. Murdoch Builds His Dream House
Christopher Gray

USUALLY, the apartments of the rich are very private, their marble floors and high ceilings hidden from view. But the renovations of Rupert Murdoch’s triplex at 834 Fifth Avenue are so expansive that they are visible from the street.

Mr. Murdoch bought the triplex from the estate of Laurance S. Rockefeller for $44 million in 2005. At the time, the monthly maintenance was $21,469.07. Plans were filed for alterations that same year, but a wealthy man’s house is a complicated thing.

The exterior of the triplex on the top three floors of the building is now covered in plywood, netting and protective boards as the renovation plays out at least in part in public view.

The construction of this unusual two-part building began just before the 1929 stock market crash and expanded in scope in the summer of 1930, creating one of the most massive of Rosario Candela’s apartment towers.

The builders, the Campagna family, became Candela clients in the early 1920s, commissioning run-of-the-mill apartment houses on West End Avenue. Soon they graduated to superluxury buildings, like the all-limestone 960 Fifth Avenue, at 77th Street, completed in 1928. The following year they began 834 Fifth, another all-limestone apartment at what was initially a midblock site between 64th and 65th Streets.

The crash apparently did not faze the Campagnas, who in May 1930 — about seven months after construction began on 834 Fifth — were able to buy an adjacent 30-foot-wide lot at the 64th Street corner. They revised the drawings to expand, even though the steelwork was already being erected. There were about 20 apartments, with at least 10 duplexes, some as large as 15 rooms.

Except for the location and the limestone, there is not much visible from the exterior to distinguish 834 Fifth from lesser works. It has rows and rows of identical windows; the only hint of extravagance is on the 64th Street side, where a double-height opening on the 11th and 12th floors lights the stair hall of the duplex there.

For that apartment, the original drawings show that a visitor, alighting at the elevator landing, would enter a gallery dominated by the broad window and a curving four-foot-wide staircase leading to the duplex’s upper floor. The main floor has a 20-by-20-foot library at the corner and a 20-by-38-foot living room facing Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The upper floor has four bedrooms, the one at the corner with a fireplace.

According to an account in The New York Times in September 1929, Hugh B. Baker, a banker and stockbroker, bought the building’s top three floors: “two terrace apartments to meet the requirements of Mr. Baker and his associate.” The 1930 census does not illuminate that peculiar wording; it says that Mr. Baker lived with his wife, Mabel, and a nurse.

It appears that Mr. Murdoch’s triplex generally corresponds to the Baker apartment. The original plans show the 14th floor as the principal bedroom level. The master bedroom was at the southwest corner, and a dressing room next door measured 14 by 20 feet.

A sweeping stairway connected all three levels. The 15th floor was for entertaining, with a 21-by-33-foot living room on the north side and a 19-by-27-foot dining room on the south. The living room had a small conservatory designed by Howard & Frenaye, and the plans for the dining room indicate a niche, perhaps for a fountain or large piece of sculpture.

The 16th floor, on the roof, was drawn with a high square observatory, perhaps 20 feet on a side, flanked by terraces north and south, each one double the size of the room itself.

Because of the addition of the 64th Street lot, Candela had to enlarge the building. He designed a series of duplexes on the south side — the A line — and simplexes on the north side — the B line — each with its own elevator.

Perhaps because Mr. Baker had already bought his triplex, Candela designed a separate penthouse for the south end of the building. The tops of his buildings are usually quite considered, but this one looks clunky from the street.

The owner-shareholders lost 834 Fifth Avenue in foreclosure in 1936, and in 1946 Laurance S. Rockefeller, a grandson of John D. Rockefeller Sr., bought the building and took over the old Baker triplex. He made the building a co-op again in 1952. In a 1986 article, The Times reported that the first sale of a Manhattan apartment for more than $1 million was believed to have occurred in 1978 when a duplex at 834 Fifth reached that figure.

Recently, some of Mr. Murdoch’s windows were completely open to the weather, and it was possible to see construction lights strung around the apartment’s interior. Completion does not seem to be nigh.

Asked if Mr. Murdoch would permit a reporter to take a tour, his spokesman, Howard J. Rubenstein, laughed and said, “That’s not very likely, but I’ll ask and call back.”

No word yet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/re...te/30scap.html





What Would Henry Luce Do? Looking Forward at Time Warner
Tim Arango

For someone with a reputation for being unsentimental about his company, it was perhaps surprising that Jeffrey L. Bewkes looked to the past when he spoke at a Time Warner management retreat in Miami in late November — his first since being tapped as the company’s next chief executive.

Before the top 200 executives at a ballroom in Miami’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, Mr. Bewkes invoked the legacies of Henry R. Luce and Ted Turner in ticking off the accomplishments of the assembly’s predecessors: inventing the newsmagazine (Time), and spearheading cable news (CNN) and pay television (HBO), according to three executives in attendance who spoke on condition of anonymity because it was a private meeting.

But Mr. Bewkes’s task is very different. Those pioneers built the modern Time Warner. Mr. Bewkes, who will take over from Richard D. Parsons on Jan. 2, may be the person who tears it apart. The question, therefore, is how Time Warner will look after a Bewkes administration and what he will do first.

There is no end to the theories of why Time Warner has stalled. The stock price has been moribund for years, following the disastrous merger with AOL in early 2001. On May 16, 2002, the day Mr. Parsons took over from former chief executive Gerald M. Levin, Time Warner stock closed at $18.35; lately, the stock has traded near $16. Wall Street analysts have complained about confusion during the executive transition, and there is a widespread view that there is no logical reason for the company’s disparate assets — CNN, HBO, publishing empire Time Inc., the Warner Brothers movie studio, Time Warner Cable and AOL — to be under the same umbrella. The various divisions mostly operate independently, and Mr. Bewkes has voiced skepticism of the idea of wringing much synergy between them.

“If you have been an investor in Time Warner for a one-, two-, three-, five- or seven-year time frame, you have not made money,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein and Company. “Therefore you have to look at the construction of the company and ask, ‘Why is the company built like this?’ ”

Mr. Bewkes (pronounced BEW-kess) has outlined his so-called three pillars of growth for the company: increasing revenue from digitizing content; expanding internationally; and broadening the appeal of Time Warner content to attract a more diverse audience. All worthy ideas — but they don’t exactly tip his hand as to his overall corporate strategy.

But ask a sampling of Time Warner observers, everyone from investors to analysts to other media executives, what Mr. Bewkes’s strategy should be, and you will likely get as many different answers as there are people in your sample. Sell the slow-growth Time Inc.; spin-off the cable unit; beef up the cable networks by acquiring Discovery Communications or the Scripps Networks; merge AOL with Yahoo or MSN to better compete with Google. Or, something even more radical: merge with NBC Universal, an idea that has been publicly floated.

For the past year, Time Warner’s board of directors has received a briefing on possible strategic alternatives at each meeting, among them a radical break-up. In other words, Mr. Bewkes has heard it all, and there is nothing that he will do that has not already been considered by the board behind closed doors.

“It’s been analyzed to death,” said a high-level Time Warner executive.

Mr. Bewkes, who earned his executive bona fides at the company with a successful run at the helm of HBO in the 1990s, is skiing this week and declined to comment. But during his speech in Miami, he made clear that in a year or two Time Warner may look like an entirely different company with a different mix of assets.

“His message was that he would take a hard look at the structure of the company and see if it’s right for the individual companies to move forward together, with the upshot being some companies may work better apart,” is how one Time Warner executive in attendance paraphrased Mr. Bewkes’s remarks.

While Mr. Bewkes will take Time Warner into the future, his pedigree links him to the company’s past. The company’s founding fathers Henry Luce and Britton Hadden germinated the idea for Time magazine before they graduated from Yale in 1920; Mr. Bewkes graduated from Yale in 1974. And like Mr. Luce and Mr. Hadden, who attended the Hotchkiss School together, Mr. Bewkes is also the product of an elite prep school, in his case, the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

Last week, the CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien interviewed Mr. Bewkes and Mr. Parsons on a closed-circuit broadcast for employees and posed this question to Mr. Parsons: “What is the biggest difference between you and Jeff?”

Mr. Parsons responded, “I’m a defensive guy. It’s hard to get the ball from me if I have it. But Jeff is an offensive guy and he’s going to find a way to take the company in new directions.”

The pair’s differences don’t end there. While the adjective most associated with Mr. Parsons is “diplomatic” — an attribute that helped him glide through the 2005 crisis when activist investor Carl C. Icahn bought up Time Warner stock and pushed for a break-up — Mr. Bewkes, while polished and charming, is not afraid of confrontation. He was famously dispatched by Mr. Parsons in 2002 to confront AOL’s founder Stephen M. Case in a meeting about the poor performance of the online unit.

“As an operating executive, particularly at HBO, he had a great track record,” said Spencer Wang, an analyst at Bear Stearns. “In media circles, he’s very well regarded, very personable, and I think Wall Street shares that view.”

Investors have already jotted down three key dates for Time Warner in their BlackBerrys: Feb. 6, April 1 and July 1.

On Feb. 6, Mr. Bewkes will preside over his first quarterly earnings call as chief executive. Analysts and investors are expecting him to reveal some details of his vision for the company and a possible break-up.

The second date, April 1, is perhaps more important. This will mark the fifth anniversary of the restructuring of Time Warner Entertainment, a complicated partnership with Comcast whose unraveling resulted in Time Warner taking control of Time Warner Cable. After April 1, Time Warner can spin off more of Time Warner Cable — earlier this year it sold a 16 percent stake to investors — without incurring a large capital gains tax.

Whether or not to completely separate cable from Time Warner’s content businesses is seen as Mr. Bewkes’s most important decision.

“It’s my belief that Time Warner Cable will be spun off,” said Mr. Nathanson. “Because when I hear them speak about what cable needs from a financing standpoint, it seems they are saying it could be a standalone company.”

Slicing cable, which accounted for 36 percent of Time Warner’s revenue last quarter, would leave a more pure-play content company that includes the Turner cable networks, Warner Brothers, publishing and AOL.

“The first thing is you spin off cable entirely,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Then you ask, why is AOL part of this company? Then Jeff is left with a shrunken, but much more targeted cable network and studio business that looks a lot like Viacom. And then you go from there. Do you become an acquirer or a target?”

If cable were spun off, the speculation — which is not dismissed by insiders — is that Time Warner would seek to either acquire or enter a joint venture with NBC Universal. General Electric has publicly said it has no plans to sell NBC Universal, but speculation in media circles is that the company would consider it following the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which NBC will broadcast. One investment banker who recently discussed the issue with G.E. said he was told, “come speak to us after Beijing” (this banker declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of the message). When Robert Wright stepped down as chief executive of NBC Universal earlier this year, he predicted in Fortune magazine that a Time Warner spin-off of cable in 2008 would spur talks to merge Time Warner and NBC Universal.

Other potential acquisition targets, if Mr. Bewkes wants to beef up his stable of cable networks, are Discovery and the Scripps network, which owns the Food Network and HGTV.

The final important date is July 1, when Google, which bought a 5 percent stake in America Online in 2005, can force Time Warner to either take AOL public or buy back Google’s stake at “fair market value.” That amount would be something less than Google paid for its stake; at the time, AOL was valued at $20 billion.

“I think that will force the board to consider alternatives for AOL,” like striking partnerships with MSN or Yahoo, two potential deals the company has discussed in the past, said Mr. Wang.

Mr. Bewkes is already absorbing one important lesson from Mr. Parsons while riding shotgun during l’affaire Icahn: how to deal with angry investors.

“I’ve recommended to them that they should have an analyst day as soon as possible,” said Larry Haverty, who runs the Gabelli Global Multimedia Trust fund and owns about 205,000 shares of Time Warner. Mr. Haverty complained about a lack of communication between Time Warner and the investment community lately. “We’ve been in this horrible hiatus period before Bewkes takes the reins,” he said.

Mr. Haverty admits he was recently invited to meet with Mr. Bewkes in New York, but declined because he had just arrived in Florida and did not want to deal with the hassles of New York’s John F. Kennedy International airport to get back in time. Time Warner insists that Mr. Bewkes has been making time for investors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/bu.../24warner.html





Broadband TV | Advances Rattle Cable Companies

Networks experiment with putting shows online
Jon Van

About one-third of people who subscribe to cable TV or satellite services said they would drop that service if they could get TV shows they wanted over a broadband computer connection, paying a flat fee.

Those survey results give cable executives the willies, said Gerry Kaufhold, an In-Stat analyst, and it isn’t just Google that has them scared. Right now, the National Football League is giving Comcast and other cable operators fits by offering several choice games online at www.nfl.com/nflnetwork.

NFL and the cable boys are scrapping over NFL demands that cable operators run its channel on the cable operators’ basic tier and fork over 2 cents a day per subscriber for the privilege. This amounts to about $484,000 a day for Comcast, which instead offers the NFL Network on a premium tier, sparing the bulk of its subscribers the added cost.

“The NFL is using the cable modem to try to show the cable operators just how popular their games on Thursdays and Saturdays are,” Kaufhold said.

TV networks also are experimenting with putting their fare online, trying to get a handle on how it fits into their business models, he said.

“Broadcasters are using Internet delivery to figure out where and when people will watch episodes of shows they missed,” he said.

One interesting trend is that a show broadcast on a Tuesday evening during primetime is often watched on the Internet on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays over the lunch hour. This suggests that when people miss a favorite show on TV, they try to watch it from work on a computer while munching a sandwich, Kaufhold said.

For some series, when a viewer misses one show, the plotline is lost and viewership drops, he said.

“Providing shows online may actually bring back eyeballs to watch later episodes on TV,” he said. “But providing those shows as video-on-demand over cable may not help because people don’t have access to TV during their lunch hour at the office.

“This is a learning experience for everybody.”
http://www.thestate.com/101/story/267658.html





Strike Hiatus Prompts Hollywood Writers to Go it Alone
Dan Glaister

Forget Warner Brothers, Universal and Disney. Say goodnight and good luck to CBS, NBC and Fox. The Hollywood studio model is about to be turned upside down.

Leading film and TV writers, accompanied by actors, directors and Silicon Valley investors, are poised to announce the creation of new ventures aimed at bypassing the studios.

"It's a whole new model to bring content directly to the masses," said screenwriter Aaron Mendelsohn. "We're gathering together a team of A-list TV and film writers, along with their A-list equivalent from Silicon Valley."

Article continues

Mendelsohn is not alone. Seven groups are thought to be working on forming companies to challenge the dominance of the studios. The new companies plan to create programmes and films and distribute them via the internet, circumventing the old model of big studios owned by even bigger parent companies churning out content and controlling when and where it is seen.

The developments come as the screenwriters' strike shows no sign of a resolution. A report presented last week to a city council committee estimated that the strike would cost Los Angeles between $380m and $2.5bn (£190m to £1.25bn).

As the two sides in the dispute - the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers - trade insults, one perhaps unintended consequence of the standoff is that the people who make the programmes and films have seen that they can get their message out without the help of the studios.

"The strike videos confirmed that you can create content directly for the internet and find an audience," said director and writer George Hickenlooper, who has made a series of short films in support of the writers.

Those films, under the title Speechless, have featured big stars - from cinema great Woody Allen to TV personalities such as Jay Leno - and attracted big audiences on the internet.

Some of those involved have even said that when they are next out of contract they may go straight to the internet, taking advantage of services such as Google Video or YouTube, to bypass the studios altogether.

Some big TV names, including Leno, are already subtly shifting the way their programmes are made. Worldwide Pants, late-night talkshow host David Letterman's production company, is in talks with the union to allow it to return to screens with a script in early January.

Other late nighters are expected to return - some without writers - in the first week of the new year. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is due back a week later, again without writers.

But doing his heavily scripted programme without a script is the least of Stewart's problems. He is hosting the Oscar ceremony in February, an event that could fall foul of the strike.

The Golden Globes ceremony, due to take place in mid-January, is already shrouded in uncertainty: the union has refused the event a waiver and writers are promising to picket the red carpet.

Will nominated stars such as George Clooney dare to cross a picket line? Will the event be cancelled? What about the parties?

The irony for the writers involved in setting up the new ventures is that at the core of the current dispute is the question of how to reimburse writers for work that is distributed on the internet.

The studios say that it is still too early to say if the internet will generate income to be shared with the writers. The writers counter that the studios crow to Wall Street about the profits to be made from the digital sector.

"The internet is a place where they can't maintain control," he said. "They are trying to introduce an old-school control-orientated way of thinking into a system that rejects and repels that tradition of control."

The hi-tech community, he notes, is more comfortable with the notion of relinquishing control over its investments.

"It's a different model," he says. "They really believe in the free and open source software movement; a sharing, egalitarian system."

Hickenlooper is also teaming up with a high-tech entrepreneur, in this case Jordan Mechner, who created the Prince of Persia videogame. One of their first projects is a feature film released in daily segments.

"We're doing low-budget content that will be distributed on a daily basis through the internet," he said. "The idea is to use A-list talent. It's not George Clooney but it's names we know." The film will be released over a month or 50 days and subsequently released in its entirety on DVD.

The notion of the creatives taking control of the means of production is not a new one to Hollywood. United Artists started, as its name suggests, as just that, an effort by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, DW Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks. But that effort ended in rancour and disorganisation, and the vision was eventually swallowed up by a series of corporate mergers. Last year Tom Cruise and his producer Paula Wagner took over the moribund studio.

"The launching pad of United Artists is a nice inspiration for us," said Mendelsohn. "But having Tom Cruise own us in 70 years' time is not part of our game plan."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2232935,00.html





Letterman And Writers Strike Deal, Giving CBS The Edge
Paul Farhi

David Letterman will have some help being funny when his talk show returns to the air next week.

Letterman's production company yesterday became the first to cut a deal with the striking Writers Guild of America, enabling "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" to resume production with their writing staffs.

Letterman's Worldwide Pants, which owns both shows, worked out the agreement just days before late-night talk shows will resume after an eight-week hiatus. The disruption was caused by the writers' strike that has stopped production of dramas, sitcoms and talk shows. Almost all of the talk shows have said they will return Wednesday, but without writers. "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central will return the following Monday, Jan. 7.

The agreement gives huge leverage to Letterman and CBS, which will now have the only late-night shows with material written by professional writers. That will include topical monologues and other bits, such as Letterman's signature top 10 list. Other talk shows are still scrambling to patch together material without writers. Under union strike rules, the shows' staffs can't write anything that the writers would have written.

In addition, Letterman and Ferguson will be the only shows that can regularly attract big-name celebrities without fear of a picket line. Out of solidarity with striking writers, TV and movie actors have been reluctant to appear on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Last Call With Carson Daly," the two talk shows that have gone back on the air. The writers' guild has objected to both. Neither Letterman nor Ferguson have announced guest lineups for their first shows next week.

By creating a separate agreement with Letterman, the writers' union hopes to put pressure on all of the networks to come to a comprehensive settlement. Without writers or famous guests, the other shows will probably lose viewers to Letterman.

"I am grateful to the WGA for granting us this agreement," Letterman said in a statement issued by his company. "We're happy to be going back to work, and particularly pleased to be doing it with our writers. This is not a solution to the strike, which unfortunately continues to disrupt the lives of thousands. But I hope it will be seen as a step in the right direction."

A deal between the union and Letterman, who is a 30-year member of the writers' union, was possible because his company owns the two talk shows. The other talk shows are owned by the networks and the studio conglomerates against which the writers are striking.

A key issue in the dispute is how writers should be compensated when the networks and movie studios distribute films and TV shows over new media, such as the Internet. The WGA called its deal with Worldwide Pants "a comprehensive agreement that addresses the issues important to writers, particularly new media. . . . Today's agreement dramatically illustrates that the Writers Guild wants to put people back to work, and that when a company comes to the table prepared to negotiate seriously, a fair and reasonable deal can be reached quickly."

While CBS continues to hold the digital rights to Letterman's shows, a union representative, Neal Sacharow, said Worldwide Pants will "take full responsibility" for paying writers when CBS makes money from the shows in new-media formats.

The union said that Worldwide Pants "had accepted the very same proposals that the Guild was prepared to present to the media conglomerates when they walked out of negotiations on Dec. 7," adding, "It's time for NBC Universal to step up to the plate and negotiate a company-wide deal that will put Jay Leno, who has supported our cause from the beginning, back on the air with his writers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122802625.html





Steal This Film 2 Goes Live
Ernesto

We’ve been waiting… and waiting… but STEAL THIS FILM II has finally been released, and it’s available for free. The League of Noble Peers announce that film is intended to ‘bring new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think ‘after intellectual property’, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity’.

TorrentFreak was invited to a ‘preview’ screening a couple of months ago, and we think they might achieve their goal!

Steal This Film 1 already was a huge success with nearly 3 million downloads, and we think this will be no different for part 2. The film, again produced by The League of Noble Peers, features some people from the BitTorrent community such as Erik from mininova and Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay. Dan Glickman from the MPAA also makes a short appearance stating that they will never be able to stop piracy, but I guess we already knew that.

Jamie King of the League Of Noble Peers was answering chat requests today, so we caught up with him to ask a couple of questions:

TF: You must be excited about releasing the film finally. What’s been the delay?

JK: To be honest, the film simply took a lot longer than we’d imagined to make — it’s a big step forward from STF I for us. And then we got sidetracked with The Oil Of The 21st Century, a conference some of us were involved in organising in Berlin this year. It was great and we got to preview the film there for some friends, but we’re sorry to everyone who was waiting. We’re sure no one has been that upset!

TF: Are you working with anyone to promote the film this time?

JK: Of course we’ll be working with The Pirate Bay again to do a bit of promotion, as we’ve really discussed the project a lot with those guys. We’ve also got to know the people at Mininova who’ll be seeding the torrent and promoting it a bit. I was also really pleased to hear that BitTorrent themselves will be featuring the film since we met them during a screening of STF II in Amsterdam. We’re really up for working with anyone who’d like to feature STEAL THIS FILM so get in touch!

TF: Is there a streaming version anywhere?

JK: We discussed this a lot. There will be a streaming version (and of course we can’t and wouldn’t want to prevent anyone transcoding it and uploading it whereever they like) but right now, it’s about BitTorrent. With The Pirate Bay and Mininova seeding it, there shouldn’t be any problem with the download speeds.

TF: Are you asking for donations?

JK: Yes, but not for this film :D We have a new project in development — based around our ‘Oil Of The 21st Century’ idea — and we’re headed out to Asia in the new year to start investigating. We’re asking anyone who wants to help us with this project to donate $5 or more (or whatever they can afford really) to donate@stealthisfilm.com. Oh! And we’re giving away a secret giftpack to anyone who donates $15 or more.

TF: Any final words?

JK: Only that we’re really pleased to be releasing STF II after more than a year and we’re looking forward to all the argument we hope it will generate. And we’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone who supported us so far. You rock.

—

You can download Steal This Film 2 over here.
http://torrentfreak.com/steal-this-film-2-live-071228/





Free Software Brings Affordability, Transparency to Mathematics
Hannah Hickey, UW Office of News and Information

An international army of volunteers working on Sage is led by project leader William Stein (seated on the left). Here he is surrounded by UW undergraduate and graduate students who are helping to develop the free software.

Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software.

The tool, called Sage, faced initial skepticism from the mathematics and education communities.

"I've had a surprisingly large number of people tell me that something like Sage couldn't be done -- that it just wasn't possible," said William Stein, associate professor of mathematics and lead developer of the tool. "I'm hearing that less now."

Open-source software, which distributes programs and all their underlying code for free, is increasingly used in everyday applications. Firefox, Linux and Open Office are well-known examples.

But until recently, nobody had done the same for the everyday tools used in mathematics. Over the past three years, more than a hundred mathematicians from around the world have worked with Stein to build a user-friendly tool that combines powerful number-crunching with new features, such as collaborative online worksheets.

"A lot of people said: 'Wow, I've been waiting forever for something like this,'" Stein said. "People are excited about it."

Sage can take the place of commercial software commonly used in mathematics education, in large government laboratories and in math-intensive research. The program can do anything from mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming.

The idea began in 2005, when Stein was an assistant professor at Harvard University.

"For about 10 years I had been really unhappy with the state of mathematical software," Stein said. The big commercial programs -- Matlab, Maple, Mathematica and Magma -- charge license fees. The Mathematica Web page, for example, charges $2,495 for a regular license. For another program, a collaborator in Colombia was quoted about $550, a special "Third World" discount price, to buy a license to use a particular tool, Stein said.

The frustrations weren't only financial. Commercial programs don't always reveal how the calculations are performed. This means that other mathematicians can't scrutinize the code to see how a computer-based calculation arrived at a result.

"Not being able to check the code of a computer-based calculation is like not publishing proofs for a mathematical theorem," Stein said. "It's ludicrous."

So Stein began a year and a half of frenzied work in which he created the Sage prototype, combining decades' worth of more specialized free mathematical software and filling in the gaps.

"I worked really, really hard on this, and didn't sleep much for a year. Now I've relaxed. There are a lot more people helping out," Stein said. "It seems like everyone in the field has heard of Sage now, which is surreal."

Among those helping is a team of five UW undergraduate students who work part-time on the code -- everything from writing new formulas to improving the Google-ish graphical interface. (Even when Sage runs on an individual computer, not over the Internet, you use a Web browser to enter commands.)

Regular meetings, named "Sage days," bring together volunteer developers. The fourth Sage day, held in Seattle in June, drew about 30 people. The sixth Sage day was held last month in Bristol, England. Forty-one people attended talks and many participated in coding sprints. Dozens of other people around the world contribute through Sage's online discussion boards.

Last month, Stein and David Joyner, a mathematics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., published a letter in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in which they argue that the mathematical community should support and develop open-source software.

Soon Sage will face off against the major software companies in physical space. In early January, thousands of mathematicians will gather in San Diego for the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. In the exhibition hall, Stein has paid the first-timers' rate of $400 to rent a booth alongside those of the major mathematical software companies, where he and students will hand out DVDs with copies of Sage.

"I think we can be better than the commercial versions," he said. "I really want it to be the best mathematical software in the world."

Sage research and student support is made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation. The Sage meetings are supported by various mathematical associations. The project has also received several thousand dollars in private donations.

The Sage project is at www.sagemath.org.
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/arti...rticleID=38459





Convincing the Military to Embrace Open Source
Danelle Barrett, Boyd Fletcher and Dave Huff

One common misconception about open source software is that it can be changed by anyone and is less secure; however, most open source is strictly governed. For example, the Apache Software Foundation has tight configuration management controls for developers. Its products are so good that most major software vendors include some Apache software in their products including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun.

Misconceptions about open source software have made many U.S. Defense Department sectors reluctant to employ this technology. Although a 2003 department policy allows its use, many still believe that open source software poses an increased security risk to networks and that it is not supported as well as commercial products.

An example of such software is the U.S. Joint Forces Command's (JFCOM's) J-9 Joint Futures Laboratory redact tool. JFCOM developed a free open source software redaction tool to remove changes from standard office documents. "Secure Save" uses OpenOffice.org software to redact non-viewable text, images, metadata and other undesired elements of standard office documents. This tool could be applied to remove information from documents to declassify them and transfer them between networks of different classifications. Today when operators declassify information, they delete it from a document, but the changes are retrievable and could result in the inadvertent disclosure of classified/sensitive information.

This was the case in 2005 when the text from a redacted classified document from Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) was unintentionally exposed to the public. MNF-I issued a report in Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Portable Document Format that described the investigation into the shooting of an Italian journalist. While the actual report posted on the Internet appeared to be unclassified, an Italian citizen was able to recover the deleted classified text by cutting and pasting the document into Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Notepad.

What's the Difference?

The cost of cleaning up a "network spill" that introduces classified material on an unclassified network is running about US$11,000 per incident on the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), so the free Secure Save tool could produce monetary savings for the Navy. Additionally, it would cover more file formats than the costly commercial redaction product currently available on the NMCI. The Navy is missing the opportunity to use this solution because a misunderstanding of the risks of open source software and Defense Department (DOD) apprehension are at the forefront.

Some of the confusion stems from a lack of understanding regarding the differences between open standards, open source, freeware and closed-source software. Open standards are generally described as a specification for a procedure, protocol or technology developed by a recognized standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium , that is available for anyone to implement. The standard must be patent-free or under reasonable and nondiscriminatory patent license to be considered open.

Freeware is software that is distributed completely free of charge and may be open or closed source. Adobe Reader is a good example of freeware. Open source software is available for anyone to view, modify, compile and use. It is not necessarily free or unsupported. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux is a good example, as is MySQL. MySQL Database, though open source, does not allow people outside the company to contribute software to the product. It is essentially no different from Microsoft SQL, except everyone can see the source code. Open source also can mean a different vendor support model whereby instead of paying for a license and support, customers obtain support from any vendor.

Closed source software, which provides no access to source code, also could be freeware. For example, the PocketMac BlackBerry software is free, but it is not open source. Closed source software is a misnomer, as it is often not really closed. For example, Microsoft shares its source code with a number of national governments, including China.

Open source software is not necessarily free throughout its life cycle. The cost of maintaining this software must be budgeted or there is a risk of fielding an unsustainable capability. While cost is often a factor, capability and adaptability are important; but perhaps the more important criterion of source software is improved interoperability.

An excellent example of public sector use of open source software providing a model for DOD to emulate is from the state of California's Air Resources Board. The board's chief information officer, Bill Welty, has long been a proponent of open source for its flexibility, adaptability, cost savings, innovation and interoperability.

"Sixty five percent of our applications run on Linux, and over 60 percent of our databases leverage open source solutions. We use Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python and Perl (a combination of software programs known as LAMP stacks). Over the years, since 1994, we've easily saved more than $500,000 in software licenses. While the cost benefits have been substantial, improvements in interoperability along with quick procurement cycles and boosts to staff morale -- programmers really like 'owning their code' -- have been key driving forces. This has been the true value of LAMP and our other open source initiatives," Welty said.

Open Source Is More Secure

One common misconception about open source software is that it can be changed by anyone and is less secure; however, most open source is strictly governed. For example, the Apache Software Foundation has tight configuration management controls for developers. Its products are so good that most major software vendors include some Apache software in their products including Microsoft, IBM (NYSE: IBM) , Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Sun.

A number of DOD communications systems use Apache software. When it comes to security and who contributes the code, it is no different from the global contributors for commercial code. Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Oracle have massive investments in code development overseas. Rarely is DOD, the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the National Security Administration able to see that code. In several instances, potential backdoors, usually unintentional, with closed source software packages occur. It comes down to trust in the software suppliers and their processes to validate security. Open source code is available for all to inspect. With open source, there is a chance for DOD code review.

Another common misconception is that commercial software vendors are more responsive to fixing identified security problems. No objective statistical evidence exists to prove that theory. There also is no legal requirement for any vendor to develop fixes for DOD. In fact, dozens of outstanding security issues exist with several major software vendors' products. The end user license agreements (EULA) of most DOD software state that vendors are under no obligation to fix the software, and in many cases, they have not. One commercial software vendor had a security hole in its intercept communications that took months to patch.

A bug in OpenSSL was found, fixed and the fix released within days. That type of responsiveness is required to support the warfighter. Many DOD-identified security problems with open source software are corrected in the same time frame or faster than commercial software. Because the code is open, security experts can inspect it to verify the fix. The government, as a software user, also can contribute to the development of that software by detecting and even correcting vulnerabilities.

Transparency Equals Security

Several large companies whose software is in heavy use in DOD advocate a shared source code model in which people can view the source code but not change it. This shared source code approach has some problems, though. By sharing source code with organizations, the users have the ability to find flaws in the software. However, because they are not able to fix code security flaws, unscrupulous organizations may use access to source code to develop software that exploits the bugs. This shared source code approach potentially contributes to the rise in zero-day exploits in a number of commercial products. The best approach for truly secure systems is transparency -- release the software as open source because security by obscurity rarely works well.

Concern exists that open source code development in nations not necessarily friendly to the United States could make command and control systems vulnerable to future attack. However, most commercial software used in DOD and the intelligence community is partially or completely developed overseas. Five major software companies have software development operations in Russia, India, Israel and China. The U.S. government cannot sue these companies because of security problems as a result of the EULAs. People have tried and failed because they accepted the agreement when they used the software. DOD does not inspect every line of code in every software program it uses, and leadership accepts some risk. Because open source code is transparent, issues are quickly discovered and corrected by the community. No software system is perfectly secure, and all have vulnerabilities, making a security-in-depth architecture critical. The right mindset is to assume that all software might have back doors, intentional or unintentional, and to build a security architecture that can detect, mitigate and counteract such attack vectors.

Another open source misconception is that it is harder to have the software accredited. Open source software was approved for use within DOD in 2003 as long as it meets the security and validation requirements in National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Policy Number 11 and other DOD configuration guidelines just the same as commercial software. The main accreditation system for products that have information assurance capabilities is Common Criteria. In the United States, the National Information Assurance Partnership is responsible for Common Criteria evaluations. One challenge for the open source community and most small business software vendors is the extremely high cost of having a product Common Criteria evaluated. This high cost of entry actually lowers the government's security posture by reducing the number of vendors and solutions that can be used by government customers.

The costly Common Criteria evaluation process continues to be a significant ongoing issue for open source software. Fortunately, due in part to commercial partnerships, several critical open source software products have evaluations completed. A recent success story was the FIPS-140(2) certification of OpenSSL achieved by the Open Source Software Institute and its consortium.

Already in Use

When commercial companies deem certification of open source software is in their best interest, they often pay for Common Criteria Certification evaluations. Examples are Red Hat and Suse Linux operating systems, which have achieved Common Criteria evaluation at Evaluation Assurance Level 4 and are authorized for use on all DOD and intelligence community networks, as well as OpenSSL. Other widely used open source software is available with no evaluations planned, including PostgreSQL and Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol Server. Hopefully the trend for industry to obtain the evaluations will continue, but for some open source software, the government may need to fund evaluations where considered critical.

A MITRE study for the Defense Information Systems Agency on the use of free and open source software in DOD discovered 115 open source software applications being used in more than 250 settings. The Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) was one of those organizations. FNMOC runs the only Navy operational nonresearch supercomputer . Its mission is to provide around-the-clock weather/ocean products for DOD. FNMOC has used open source software operationally for 10 years. The organization cut costs significantly and has not experienced any major security problems. An important safeguard is to download from authoritative sources and check the cryptographic signatures on all packages. Their front end e-business suite runs on a 230-node IBM Cluster under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and their front-end Web tier is based on the JBoss-Tomcat application server with Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol Server. They use PostgreSQL because the performance is on par with commercial software but with significant cost savings. Recently, their high-performance computing group moved from proprietary symmetric multiprocessing operating systems to Linux. This speaks to the maturity of open source software.

Additionally, FNMOC has a Navy Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to "identify, document and facilitate the transition of open source solutions into selected naval enterprise architecture environments and Web services programs."

As DOD engineers and acquisition professionals move forward in developing and procuring future networks, open source software should be a key consideration. Understanding common misperceptions about its risks and benefits is imperative.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/60965.html





Freedom of Expression at Risk
Michael Connor and Farnum Brown

It goes by the unremarkable and unrevealing moniker, "network neutrality." Yet it represents one of the most important subjects brewing in the field of communications today. Network neutrality would ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) such as AT&T and Verizon treat all content that goes across their networks the same. Consumer groups are pushing for a net-neutrality law that bans ISPs from degrading content and charging extra for Web sites to load as fast as possible. The issue is at the heart of a debate over peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

Comcast, Verizon and AT&T need to come clean.

Those three — and other cable and telephone companies — need to disclose exactly how they decide to restrict the freedom of expression of hundreds of millions of Americans. They need to explain exactly how they decide to limit Americans' access to the Internet and other information services. As consumers, investors and citizens, we have a right to know.

As should be clear, we're no longer dealing with our grandparents' telecom companies. In the old days, a large body of "common carriage" regulations required companies to be neutral carriers of whatever communications users chose to have. No more. Since 2005, federal regulations have given telecom and cable companies much more control over the information — voice, data, audio and video — that passes through the companies' "pipes."

Three recent examples suggest these companies are not yet prepared to handle these new powers responsibly:

• In August, AT&T censored its webcast of a performance by Pearl Jam, blocking the audio feed when singer Eddie Vedder ad-libbed some nonobscene but politically pointed lyrics. When confronted, AT&T blamed an overzealous subcontractor but admitted to a "handful" of similar incidents of censorship. The company has since disclosed a "new policy," but that policy apparently applies only to similar Web performances. AT&T is not saying how the First Amendment is being treated in other service offerings.

• In September, Verizon Wireless denied a request by NARAL Pro-Choice America, the abortion-rights group, to use the company's network for a text-messaging program for individuals who had agreed to receive the messages. Verizon said the subject of the text messages was too "controversial." Following a New York Times story on the incident, Verizon permitted the campaign, saying its earlier decision had been based on "an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy." Verizon continues to assert its right to decide what text messages are permissible but has yet to disclose on what grounds such decisions will be made.

• In October, The Associated Press reported that its own tests indicate Comcast "actively interferes" with attempts by some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files on peer-to-peer networks. Comcast's interference apparently was both surreptitious and disguised to prevent user detection. Comcast acknowledged that it "delays" some Internet traffic, and customer service representatives were told to say: "We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good experience online and we use the latest technologies to manage our network." Comcast hasn't made public its "network management" policies.

In each of these cases, a company with control over large portions of our communications infrastructure actively restricted the freedom of expression of its customers, even though it had no reason to believe those customers were breaking any law or regulation. Americans have a right to know why these companies did what they did — and how they will handle similar situations in the future.

As consumers, we have a right to know in advance when and if a service we pay for may be intentionally disrupted by our provider. If we're lawyers who do peer-to-peer file sharing of large digitized documents over the Internet, we may want to use an Internet service provider other than Comcast.

As investors, we want to know if a telecom company's "brand" is at risk. We want to know if AT&T has policies and procedures in place to avoid similar PR nightmares. Could it be good for AT&T's stock price that Pearl Jam fans, who number in the millions, now think of AT&T as the company that wants to Reach Out and Hush Someone?

Finally, as citizens of a democracy whose most cherished freedom is that of expression, we should be outraged whenever anyone is silenced without very good and clearly stated reasons.

So that's what we're asking for: an open, candid and public discussion of the reasons for such actions. Our hope is that such a discussion will lead us to a future where media, information and communication companies profit most by amplifying rather than restricting our freedom of expression.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...openmic20.html

[JackSpratts]

MIT Spinoff's Little Green Laptop a Hit in Remote Peruvian Village
Frank Bajak

ARAHUAY, Peru — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them — if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India — and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.

Mass production began last month and Negroponte says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through "Give One, Get One," a U.S.-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates — animals without backbones.

Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.

Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

"What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record," says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins.

Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.

When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director.

The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said.

Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete.

Teachers will get 21/2 days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.

Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.

The first is the ability of teachers — poorly trained and equipped to begin with — to cope with profoundly disruptive technology.

Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears "a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers."

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.

The second big concern is maintenance.

For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it.

"What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview.

One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.

The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity.

Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops.

Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.

Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by "Caliente," his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.

A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.

Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.

Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

"We never imagined having a computer," said Arrendondo, a cook.

Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate?

"No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around."

Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop.

"It's also got chess, which I sort of know," she said, pausing briefly.

"I'm going to learn."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,6878223.story





Q&A: Craig Newmark, of 'Craigslist' Fame, Looks Back -- and Ahead
Todd R. Weiss

Twelve years ago, Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark was still a software programmer at Charles Schwab & Co. But that changed after he began sending out self-composed e-mails to a small group of friends to tell them of cool art exhibits and high-tech events going on in his adopted city of San Francisco. Newmark quit his job, did freelance programming and dove into what he saw as the promise of the Internet as a place to share information. From those original, e-mailed events lists arose Craigslist.org, a mostly free site for online classified ads. It's now grown into listings for some 450 cities and towns around the world, where people can buy and sell, find a date, and barter for goods and services. Newmark, 55, founded Craigslist -- it was incorporated in 1999 -- as a for-profit company, and works there today as a customer service representative. More than 30 million people globally use the site each month. He talked with Computerworld recently about how his site began and where it's going.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

So how did it happen that you created Craigslist?
The effort started in 1994 when I was at Charles Schwab, working then on overall security architecture. But I also saw people using the Internet and figured it was going to be important eventually for anyone in the brokerage business. So I started evangelizing that at Schwab. While I was looking around at the Internet, I saw a lot of people helping each other out and thought that I should do something, too. So in 1995, I began to e-mail a bunch of friends about art and technical events in San Francisco. Over the months that followed, people kept asking if I could add the occasional job posting and listings for things to sell, too. Then I said, "Let's add apartment listings, too." It was all done through a very simple e-mail, a cc: list. This is the sort of pattern we still have today -- people suggest stuff to us, we do what makes sense and then we ask for more feedback.

I left Schwab around the same time I began Craigslist. Soon I went freelance and had a lot of fun, while working on Craigslist as a hobby. One milestone was hit in the middle of 1995. At that point, I was sending my e-mails to about 240 people, but the list at that point had gotten around to friends of friends as well. At 240 addresses, though, the cc: list mechanism broke. Then I had to use a listserve. I was going to call it SF Events, since it was still mostly events, but friends told me that they already called it Craigslist, that I had created a brand unintentionally and that I should keep calling it that because it was personal and quirky.

The thing just kept growing. Later on in 1995, I remembered that I was a programmer and that I could turn code into HTML, so I would be able to do instant publishing. It suddenly occurred to me that I could write code and that I could make Craigslist into a Web site where the code would do most of the work for me.

Was making the move from the listserve to a Web site a big transition for you?
Not much at first. People started using the site, but the mailing list was still the big deal then for users. In a sense, back then it was not much different than it is now. At that point, the mailing list was still more popular than the Web site, but I have no idea when the crossover occurred. I'm guessing in the early 2000s.

You began this on a whim. Was leaving your job at Schwab a risky thing or are you a person who doesn't have such fears?
The first three years of Craigslist I ran this by myself and it somehow built critical mass. At the end of 1997, there were three milestones hit: hitting a million page views a month; then the folks from Microsoft Sidewalk wanted to run banner ads on the site. And at market rates, that would be all the money I needed to live. So I figured, hey I'm an overpaid programmer, I don't need the money, and many banner ads are pretty dumb, so I decided not to run them. And the third milestone, [occurred when] a few people approached me about running Craigslist on a volunteer basis. I tried that in 1998, where we would all work together on a volunteer basis. We tried it, but it failed. Things just didn't get done. It just started slowly dying.

How did you not suffer the fate of many businesses that make unsuccessful changes, then never recover their initial momentum and eventually shut down? Why did Craigslist survive that tumultuous period of experimentation?
Well, when I'm committed to something, I'm committed. Then at the end of 1998, some people approached me and helped get me out of denial about what was going on and then I made Craigslist into a real company in the beginning of 1999. I did a mediocre job at best, because I'm not very good at it in terms of the business end of the operation. I had the first ideas about it, but most of what we do is based on what people in the community suggest. Fortunately, in 2000 I hired a guy named Jim Buckmaster. He's turned out to be a natural manager and he does a great job with it.

Is it crazy to say that it's an accident that you created this site?
In a way, this site is a happy accident. We built critical mass and made things happen just by doing what feels right. That statement reflects the first five years of running it. Then, when Jim took over, he made it operate much more smoothly. We're on a very firm footing right now.

Tell me more about that footing. How does the company make money?
The idea is that we're a community service. Almost 100% of the site is free, but we do charge for job postings in 11 cities. We charge for brokered apartment listings in New York.

Why only in New York? I mean, in Seattle, San Francisco and other places, you'd make money.
I understand, but the apartment brokers who we charge asked us to charge them because they figured it would cut down on the perceived need to post and repost the same places and they figured it would get rid of some of the scammers. The principle behind this -- in 2000 I asked a lot of people, "What's the right way for us to pay the bills, and maybe do better than that?" People told us to charge people who already paid too much for less effective ads. Specifically, the consensus was it was OK to charge employers and recruiters and to charge apartment brokers and real estate agents. And so we've done that, but only a little.

And this makes enough money for the company to survive and for your 25 San Francisco-based employees to get their paychecks?
Right. It ain't bad. We just do what feels right and plug away.

So you founded Craigslist, but you aren't an executive? Why is that?
Inside the company, my job is customer service. Jim is a much better CEO. And my skills are not management skills; however, I'm a really good customer service representative. I'm part of a customer service team and we handle things like cases of abuse from users of the Web site.

OK, so here you have Craigslist at your disposal. How do you use Craigslist? Do you buy things or list things for sale?
Once in a while I do all the above. I do so a little gingerly because it kind of feels like a conflict of interest because when I do that I have to disclose who I am. That isn't a conflict of interest, but it still to me feels a little bit like one. I feel the way I do and so I do things gingerly and that seems to be fair.

Five years from now, what do you see changing at Craigslist? Where else can you take this?
It's going to be more of the same, more cities, more languages. It's now in English and we've recently introduced Spanish, starting with Madrid. We're just starting. We have to improve technologies like multicity search. In some cases, we need to be able to search in nearby cities rather than doing multiple searches. We always need to improve customer service -- for example, we need better tools to detect and remove spam listings. One thing we found doing customer service is that there are not that many bad guys out there, that the people with good will far outnumber the bad guys. However, the bad guys make a lot more noise.

Is there anything you'd personally like to see happen with the site in the future? Will we ever see a massive redesign from the white, mostly text-based listings to something with more pizzazz and color?
We're pretty much not really changing. We do one thing well and we don't want to screw it up. And regarding our look and feel, someone said that our site has the visual appeal of a pipe wrench and that was intended and taken as a compliment. We don't need much new fancy stuff in general. We need tools that get the job done.

Why has Craigslist been so successful? How did you get the whole world to know about it and use it?
There are some easy reasons. We were an early mover doing what we do and it does help that the site is almost all free. We think we have a really good culture of trust and that's because without consciously doing so, we have stood by some core-shared values. The fundamental value is that we feel you should treat people like you want to be treated, which means that you provide good customer service and it means that you should have a "live and let live attitude," and it means that now and then you give the other person a break. These are values that most everyone in the world shares. The problem that a lot of people have is following through with those values. That's hard to do sometimes. And I do want to add, that there's nothing noble or altruistic or pious about this; it just feels right.

That's an interesting approach. A lot of companies, though they rake in fortunes from consumers, may not care as much about their own customer service. So why do you have this approach?
Good point. I do feel as the world changes and people get together on the Internet more and more, the companies that don't provide good customer service will either change or will go out of business.

There have been ongoing concerns and criticisms from the newspaper industry that free online ad sites like Craigslist are eating them alive and drastically reducing their revenues. What's your reaction?
No one in the newspaper industry seriously says that. I've spoken to a lot of publishers, editors and industry analysts. They say that our site does have a small but measurable effect on classified revenues. But they say the bigger problems are those niche-classified sites which go after the more profitable classified categories, specifically cars and jobs. There's Autotrader.com and Monster.com. Newspapers have much bigger problems. Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that's a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9053838





Masters of Invention

For the first time, Condé Nast Portfolio has identified the world's most prolific inventors alive—three of them have more patents than Thomas Edison—and asked them the big question: Where do the big ideas come from?
Kevin Maney

Shunpei Yamazaki is the most prolific inventor in history, but you’ve probably never heard of him. He is 65, runs a research and development company—Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, in Atsugi, Japan—and holds 1,811 U.S. patents, nearly 700 more than Thomas Edison. This neatly dressed, polite, trumpet-voiced man, who comes across as something of a mystical seeker, attributes his success to six years under a mentor who taught him the “emotional spirit” of inventing. For Yamazaki and his peers, inventing is much more than just making money from intellectual properties; it’s anything from a compulsion to a calling. Invention is the engine of industry and the raison d’être of nearly every technology company. More than that, it advances civilization. Yet our greatest creators don’t have rock-star status. Oh, there’s Edison, the Elvis of inventors, and a thin sliver of society knows about contemporary pioneers like Dean Kamen, who created the Segway, and Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with envisioning the World Wide Web. But the most successful living exemplars have a Q rating somewhere below that of an extra in Gigli.

Inventors are undervalued but not without controversy. Nearly 90,000 U.S. patents were granted in 2006, up 50 percent from a decade ago—an explosion that has created a mess for some companies. Rampant legal fights over who devised what have become yet another cost of doing business, especially in the technology sector. Overwhelmed examiners sometimes grant questionable patents, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so inundated that years can go by between submission and approval.

Despite the systemic muddle, anyone who ranks in Edison’s class has lived a remarkable life. I wanted to interview the top 10 living patent holders worldwide—ranked here in order of their number of U.S. patents—in the hope of gaining some insight into the creative spark behind invention. But first I had to find out who they are. Astoundingly, the patent office does not keep such a list. No one does. At the request of Condé Nast Portfolio, the Patent Board, a Chicago patent research and advisory firm, ran the query and came back with the names. (Granted, a tally of the number of patents does not necessarily identify the “greatest” inventors, just as book sales rarely reveal the finest writers. But such a list is the only objective measure we have.) These men—the group is all male—have rarely, if ever, talked to the media. During four months of phone calls and cajoling, I persuaded nine of the top inventors to agree—often reluctantly—to interviews.

Identifying them turned out to be easier than tracking them down. Two of the men do not work in the United States. Four are with a relatively small company, Micron Technologies of Boise, Idaho. Six, including Yamazaki and the four from Micron, work on computer chips. Missing from the list is George Spector, No. 4, who is apparently not an inventor at all. For decades, he ran a New York business that helped small-time inventors obtain patents for novelty innovations such as a motorized pot-washing tool. Spector then added his name to those patents, ultimately netting him 722.

None of the top 10 created any game-changing devices on a par with Edison’s lightbulb, but most people benefit every day from some discovery by the creative minds in the chip business whose efforts have improved laptop computers, cell phones, and digital cameras. Kia Silverbrook, the most secretive, runs Silverbrook Research in Sydney, where he has led a decadelong, superstealth effort to create new computer-printer technology that could be on the market by 2009. At the opposite end of the technology spectrum, Donald Weder holds 1,350 patents, all from his work at Highland Supply Corp. in Highland, Illinois—a decorative-packaging company founded by his father in 1937. Among his contributions to humankind: a patent titled “Performed pot cover formed of polymeric materials having a texture or appearance simulating the texture or appearance of paper.”

The most prolific female inventor alive is biologist Gisela Lorenz, who retired six years ago from the German chemical company BASF. Lorenz has 363 U.S. patents, mostly in the realm of “crop protection”—fertilizers and pesticides. Her prolificacy is partly because she oversaw a team of researchers and her name went on patents she worked on regardless of whether or not the main idea was hers. (When reached at her home in Germany, Lorenz said she had no idea she was the leading female holder of U.S. patents.) Two of the other top women are Jennifer Hillman and Olga Bandman, who both worked for the U.S. biotech company Incyte and have 327 and 250 patents, respectively.

Yet such an output among women is rare. A 2006 Harvard University study found that while women are no less inventive than men, traditionally they have not been in a position to seek patents. “For a long time, I was the only woman in the kind of job I had at BASF,” Lorenz says. “It’s getting better now.”

What can be learned from the leading inventors about the origins of their extraordinary creativity? Certainly education plays a role: Most of the chip inventors have doctorates in science and engineering. But, interestingly, none of the group cites degrees as a key. Instead, many talk about the usefulness of a broad education and how it helps them patch together solutions by calling upon their knowledge of multiple disciplines. “My background is in digital electronics and software, but I’ve deliberately become multidisciplinary—jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” Silverbrook says.

Not surprisingly, most successful inventors were born with an engineering mind-set. Most of them were kids who either built things or took toys and gadgets apart to see how they worked. Micron’s Salman Akram grew up in Nigeria. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a mathematician. He says his parents fostered his creativity by giving him parts of toys and encouraging him to improvise. Joseph Straeter, Weder’s former colleague at Highland Supply, grew up on a dairy farm, the second youngest of six brothers. He says, “Anything that wasn’t worth anything anymore, I took apart.”

How do inventors actually think of inventions? Most of them say they first define a problem, then come up with a way to solve it. “I look for something not being done efficiently,” says Micron’s Leonard Forbes. “I tour around a lot of conferences and keep up on the literature to try to identify problems. I’ll go through different approaches. It’s not usually an ‘aha’ moment, but more a process of elimination.”
What happens next is the strange, incomprehensible part: finding the answer. Yamazaki says he gets his best ideas after dozing. “Oftentimes, I’ll fall asleep while taking the train home at the end of the day,” he says. “I wake up, and I have an inspiration.”

Mark Gardner, who stopped working for the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2005, also cogitates while snoozing. “I wake up every day thinking of inventions,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing.”

Other innovators don’t close their eyelids to find inspiration but know that their brains function best when they’re not trying to work on a problem. “A lot of times, you don’t come up with solutions right away,” says Akram. “I keep a problem in the back of my mind, thinking about it in different settings, adding a little here and there. Some of this thinking occurs when I’m on a plane or driving my car.” Hearing this, Akram’s colleague Warren Farnworth pipes in, “I hate to say it, but there’s something about standing in the shower, rubbing my head with shampoo, and I’ll go, Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?”

Also important is an environment that encourages experimentation. All the men say they have to feel free to propose any idea, no matter how outrageous. “When chasing an invention, you have to not be very critical of suggestions,” Weder says. “You have to try not to snicker.” Even when the wildest solutions don’t work, they can spark discussion that might lead to other ideas. “There are two kinds of supervisors,” says Akram. “One says, ‘Why are you wasting our time?’ The other says, ‘This is so cool!’ ” Micron’s researchers have thrived under the latter.

Then there is another, less romantic reason why these men have so many patents. All work for firms that value patents, systematically and aggressively apply for them, and reward those who win them. At Micron, the patent lawyers’ offices are next to the R&D lab, so engineers can stop by and quickly find out if an idea is patentable. Yamazaki and Silverbrook now run companies that essentially produce nothing but patentable technology—and they make money licensing it to manufacturers. In his 24 years at A.M.D., which relies on patentable inventions to compete with archrival Intel, Gardner figures he made more than $1 million in bonuses from his patents.

Which brings up the subject of wealth. It’s tempting to think that owning hundreds of patents must be the key to riches, but it’s not necessarily true. Inventions created while working for a company usually belong to that company. The leading inventors are all well paid—their firms understand their value—but none is cruising the Aegean on his yacht or lining up to buy the Yankees. Silverbrook has the best shot at great wealth, if his printer technology takes flight.

Silverbrook, Yamazaki, and Weder will continue to chase one another at the top of the list. They each have nearly twice as many patents as the fifth-ranked inventor, Micron’s Gurtej Sandhu. They are the reticent megastars of invention, each eclipsing Edison just as Barry Bonds roared past Babe Ruth. These three, especially, deserve a place not just in the popular imagination, but also in history.
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/...ific-Inventors





Inside Apple Stores, a Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful
Katie Hafner

It was 2 o’clock in the morning but in the subterranean retailing mecca in Midtown Manhattan, otherwise known as the Apple store, it might as well have been midafternoon.

Late one night shortly before Christmas, parents pushed strollers and tourists straight off the plane mingled with nocturnal New Yorkers, clicking through iPod playlists, cruising the Internet on MacBooks, and touch-padding their way around iPhones.

And through the night, cheerful sales staff stayed busy, ringing up customers at the main checkout counter and on hand-held devices in an uninterrupted stream of brick-and-mortar commerce.

The party inside that store and in 203 other Apple stores around the world is one reason the company’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.

The popularity of the iPhone and iPod and the intended halo effect those products have had on sales of Apple computers are behind Apple’s vigor. But the company’s success in retailing, as other competitors struggle to eke out sales growth, has been the bonus.

Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006.

Apple stores generate sales at the rate of about $4,000 per square foot a year, according to a report last year by Sanford C. Bernstein analysts.

As other electronics makers like Dell, Nokia and Sony still struggle to find the right retail formula, Apple seems to have perfected it.

Not only has the company made many of its stores feel like gathering places, but the bright lights and equally bright acoustics create a buzz that makes customers feel more like they are at an event than a retail store.

The close attention paid to detail in the stores’ designs, such as the maple veneer tables used for product displays, gives the impression that Steven P. Jobs himself, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, signed off on every square aesthetic inch of every store.

“Apple’s retail offering is very compelling,” said Andrew Neff, senior managing director at Bear Stearns, “but the other key is the product. The retail concept ties in very much to the product.”

But the secret formula may be the personal attention paid to customers by sales staff. Relentlessly smiling employees roam the floor, carrying hand-held terminals for instant credit-card swiping. Technicians work behind the so-called genius bar, ministering to customers’ ailing iPods, MacBooks and iPhones. Others, designated “personal trainers,” give one-on-one instruction and lead workshops.

Personal shoppers are available by appointment, and last month the company took the concept of personalized service to a new level, with concierge teams stationed throughout each store.

“They’ve become the Nordstrom of technology,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research, referring to the department store that is known for its service.

Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president for retail, said he believed the high level of service played a large role in the success of the stores.

“The idea is that while people love to come to retail stores, and they do it all the time, what they really appreciate the most is that undivided personal attention,” Mr. Johnson said. The result is far fewer qualms among consumers about paying premium prices: $30 for an iPhone case, $200 for an iPod Nano or $1,200 for a computer.

This month, Apple opened its third Manhattan store, in a three-story, 10,500-square-foot renovated building in the meatpacking district on West 14th Street. With one entire floor dedicated to individualized services, along with small seminar series, Mr. Johnson’s goal is to make the 14th Street store “the most personal store ever created.”

Mr. Gartenberg said people often first go to an Apple store out of curiosity. “Apparently a lot of them like what they’re seeing in the stores, they like the experience and they go back to buy the products,” he said.

The stores’ architecture also makes consumers feel good about spending money there.

In nearly a dozen high-profile urban centers — including New York, San Francisco, London and Glasgow — the signature feature is a glass staircase. Some of the staircases go straight up and others ascend in a spiral skein that appears to be held in place by nothing more than Apple hype.

A customer entered the 14th Street store last week with his two whippets. Their reaction to the impressive stairs was more fear than awe. When the dogs refused to climb the steps, their owner scooped both of them into his arms and carried them up.

Apple stores encourage a lot of purchasing, to be sure. But they also encourage lingering, with dozens of fully functioning computers, iPods and iPhones for visitors to try — for hours on end.

The policy has given some stores, especially those in urban neighborhoods, the feel of a community center. Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business.

Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.

Not only did store employees not mind, but at closing time they often made certain to shut Ms. Jade’s computer down last, to give her a little extra time. A few months later, the store invited her to give an in-store reading from her manuscript.

“Everyone is free to use the Internet and do anything they want — within reason,” said Paul Fradin, the general manager of the SoHo and 14th Street stores. Visitors spotted surfing pornographic Web sites are quietly asked to leave, and are escorted out.

Visitors can bring almost anything they like. Ms. Jade showed up nearly every day with her full set of notes, and enough food to see her through a few hours of writing.

Meanwhile, the Sony flagship store on West 56th Street, a few blocks from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, has the hush of a mausoleum. And being inside the long and narrow blue-toned Nokia store on 57th Street feels a bit like being inside an aquarium.

The high-end Samsung Experience showroom, its nuevo tech music on full blast one recent morning, was nearly empty. And although that store professes to encourage hands-on exploration of its products, the showroom has a clinical, forbidding feel. (Nothing is actually sold there; it’s just for display.)

“Whenever we ask consumers to cite a great retail experience, the Apple store is the first store they mention,” said Jane Buckingham, president of the Intelligence Group, a market research firm in Los Angeles. “Basically, everything about it works. The people who work there are cool and knowledgeable. They have the answers you want, and can sell you what you need. Customers appreciate that. Even the fact that they’ll e-mail you a receipt makes you feel like you’re in a store just a little bit further ahead of everyone else.”

This could be part of the reason that Jack Graham, 16, visiting for the holidays from Worcester, England, spent at least an hour each day of his visit at one of the three New York Apple stores, his parents sitting by patiently, happy to watch the crowd.

“These stores are going to become iconic places that people go to see when they come to New York,” said Mr. Gartenberg, the analyst. “Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall and Apple’s great glass cube on Fifth Avenue.”

As for Ms. Jade, whose modeling career is advancing, she has yet to buy a computer from the Apple store. But she is still welcome to check her e-mail — and stay as long as she likes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/business/27apple.html





Apple Flushes Out Fox to Offer Latest Films for Rent Via iTunes
Matthew Garrahan and Kevin Allison

Apple has signed up News Corp's 20th Century Fox studio for a video-on-demand service, in a deal that could change the way people pay for online films.

The agreement would allow consumers to rent the latest Fox films by downloading them from Apple's iTunes digital media store for a limited time, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Walt Disney is the only Hollywood studio selling its new releases on iTunes at present, but these are available to buy rather than rental.

Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate only sell older titles.

Apple, whose shares hit $200 for the first time yesterday in intraday trade, has spent the past 12 months courting other studios but had had no success until its deal with Fox.

The agreement has the potential to transform film distribution because, apart from letting -people rent online, Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.

A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in Fox DVD releases, enabling a film to be transferred or "ripped" from the disc to a computer and video iPod. While DVDs can be transferred to computers and moved to an iPod, this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

The launch of iPod-ready films on DVD would "help Apple sell a load more video iPods", said one studio executive.

Other websites offer films to rent and buy as downloads but none has the mass appeal of iTunes.

"Fox and potentially other -studios are coming around to the idea that there is nobody out there to challenge iTunes," said Jonathan Weitz, a principal with IBB Consulting, which focuses on cable, media and mobile -companies.

"Over the last couple of years users have started to watch their media in different places and different formats," he said.

The computer maker is also understood to have been in talks with Sony Pictures, Paramount and Warner Bros about making their new releases available on iTunes to buy and rent.

Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros declined to comment.

Apple is understood to be keen to make the Fox deal a showpiece announcement at the Macworld convention, which starts in San Francisco on January 14.

Apple and News Corp declined to comment.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/195b43ac-b...nclick_check=1





Wal-Mart Cancels Movie Download Service
Gina Keating

Wal-Mart Stores Inc quietly canceled its online video download service less than a year after the site went live, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Wal-Mart shut down the download site after Hewlett Packard Co discontinued the technology that powered it, Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said in an e-mail. She added that it will not look for another technology partner.

HP spokesman Hector Marinez said the company decided to discontinue its video download-only merchant store services because the market for paid video downloads did not perform "as expected." He noted that the Internet video business remains uncertain and is changing rapidly.

Wal-Mart will continue offering physical DVDs for sale at its stores and online, but would not continue the online downloads business, said Colella, who declined to disclose the number of downloads sold on the site.

A message at www.walmart.com/videodownloads said the service was stopped on December 21 and Wal-Mart offered no refunds for the downloaded videos.

Videos purchased on Walmart.com can be played using the Microsoft Windows Media Player or the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager, but cannot be transferred to a computer other than the one used to download them, according to the site.

The giant retailer's foray into online video downloading began in February and was hailed by media industry experts as a "game changer" that could introduce millions of DVD buyers to the practice of downloading.

Wal-Mart was the first major retailer to partner with all of the major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks to offer downloads the same day titles were released on DVD.

Wal-Mart's attempt at downloading came two years after it pulled out of online DVD rental and directed its subscribers to Netflix Inc, and months after it protested Walt Disney Co's move to sell movies on Apple Inc's iTunes online music store at below-retail prices.

Download sales equaled about 1 percent of the $24.5 billion in DVD and home video sales and rentals in 2006, but industry experts expect downloads to grow to 10 percent within a decade.

The news of the Wal-Mart download service's demise comes on the same day that reports surfaced of an agreement between News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox and Apple to offer the first movies for rent at the iTunes store.

Shares of Wal-Mart closed down 1.3 percent, or 61 cents, at $47.77 on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Gina Keating, editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...26104120071228





Amazon to Sell Warner Music Minus Copy Protection
Jeff Leeds

In the recording industry’s latest move away from its reliance on digital locks to reduce piracy, the Warner Music Group said on Thursday that it would sell songs and albums without anticopying software through Amazon’s fledgling digital music service.

The shift by Warner Music is another step in the decline of copy-protection software, which has led to consumer confusion over the jumble of incompatible schemes governing the use of digital music players and downloaded songs.

Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. Sony BMG Music Entertainment has continued to hold out, though it is expected to experiment with selling MP3s through a promotion early next year.

Warner, which releases music by artists including Josh Groban and Matchbox Twenty, was considered to be particularly reluctant to drop restrictions on copying. In February, after Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, called on the major record companies to abandon D.R.M., Edgar Bronfman, Warner’s chairman, retorted that since movies and games carry copy protection, the notion of withdrawing it from music was “completely without logic or merit.”

The music companies had argued that Apple, which dominates the digital music market with its iPod player and iTunes service, should license its copy protection software to rivals. But Mr. Jobs has refused, saying that such a move would invite several problems, including the possibility that hackers would crack the technology. EMI Group broke ranks with the other major labels and agreed to sell unprotected music through iTunes in April.

Now, some music executives are privately backing the idea of dropping the software from music sold through virtually every service except iTunes, in order to strengthen Apple’s rivals and potentially diminish Mr. Jobs’s advantage. The major labels have been upset with Apple’s inflexibility on music pricing, among other issues.

Warner’s move comes roughly four months after the industry’s biggest company, Universal Music Group, part of Vivendi, said it would sell music without restrictions through an array of services, including digital stores run by Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon, but not iTunes.

Warner may not adopt the same approach. A person briefed on Warner’s plans said the company was seeking to negotiate a deal to sell unprotected files through iTunes.

The move also comes as the industry faces increasing pressure to bolster digital music sales as its traditional business — selling CDs — suffers a sharp decline.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/te...y/28music.html





The Death of High Fidelity

In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
Robert Levine

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get[listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

"If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas. "When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing — you're being hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."

Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl records, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun."

It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."

Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more convenience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."

But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Nevermind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto..._high_fidelity





Trekkie Claims Auctioned Prop Was a Fake
David B. Caruso

A Trekkie who paid $6,000 for a poker visor that was supposedly worn by the android Data on the television show "Star Trek: The Next Generation" claims in a lawsuit against Christie's auction house that the prop is a fake.

Ted Moustakis, of Towaco, N.J., said he began to doubt the authenticity of the visor and other items he purchased at an auction of CBS Paramount props in 2006, after he brought it to a convention in August to have it autographed by the actor who played Data, Brent Spiner.

According to the lawsuit, Spiner recognized the visor as the one that had been sold by Christie's and told Moustakis that it wasn't the real deal. The actual visor had been sold by the actor himself some time ago.

Moustakis, who became a Star Trek fan at age 7, said he was humiliated.

"I thought this was a great piece of memorabilia to have, and I was so proud to get it," he said.

Christie's spokesman Rik Pike stood behind the authenticity of the auction and said the disgruntled buyer's case had no merit.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Manhattan, demands millions of dollars in punitive damages and a refund for the visor and two other items Moustakis bought at the 2006 auction: a table that was part of a set on "The Next Generation" and a uniform that was in Data's wardrobe. Moustakis said he paid $6,600 for the table and $11,400 for the uniform.

He said that, upon close inspection, the table doesn't look like the ones that appeared the show, and the uniform appeared to be one of several made for the program, not a one-of-a-kind, as Moustakis believed it to be.

"They defrauded collectors, fans, honest people," said Moustakis' lawyer, Richard Borzouye. "It's negligent misrepresentation."

Calls and e-mails to CBS Paramount weren't immediately returned.
http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=290392&gt1=7703





Shifting Coupons, From Clip and Save to Point and Click
Dan Levin

COUPON lovers, take heart. The era of waiting, scissors in hand, for the Sunday newspaper circular is over.

On Jan. 3, Valassis Communications, which distributes paper coupons for products like Eggo waffles and Dr Pepper cola, will take a giant leap onto the Internet by introducing a portal for coupons called RedPlum.com. Until now, Valassis had distributed coupons primarily through newspaper inserts and snail mail envelopes.

Now the company will focus on promoting the RedPlum brand, using its traditional paper circulars to direct people to the Web site. The idea is to lure shoppers — particularly women — online with the promise of coupons, then keep them on the site with other content, like Consumer Reports-style product reviews and a searchable database of recipes, á la Epicurious.com. Valassis has hired three people to create content for the site, and it plans to bring in more.

RedPlum will join a small cadre of similar sites, like CoolSavings.com, Coupons.com and ValPak.com, that have struggled to build traffic and wean consumers off paper coupons. In the 12 months that ended in October, the number of visitors to coupon sites grew by only 6 percent over the previous year, to 20.3 million from 19.1 million, according to ComScore, an Internet marketing research company.

RedPlum will try to stand out by offering helpful features — like the ability to plug in a shopping list and get a matching list of coupons — and by letting people visit its site anonymously. In addition to grocery coupons, the site will offer discounts on items like digital cameras and special deals on family vacations.

“If Google owns search and Amazon owns shopping, RedPlum wants to own value,” said Suzie Brown, chief marketing officer of Valassis, which is based in Livonia, Mich. “To hit the radar screen, we will have to do a fair amount of revenue, we’re not looking for this to replace anything we’re doing currently.”

Ms. Brown said that RedPlum was trying to be different from sites like CoolSavings.com and Eversave.com that require people to enter their full name, e-mail address, birth date and gender. “The single biggest thing is, consumers do not want to give out personal information, and we don’t ask them for anything,” she said. People who want to get coupons specific to where they live will have the option of entering a ZIP code, she said.

•

Valassis has been working on an Internet strategy for more than two years. The goal was to create a brand that would resonate across all forms of media, particularly with women, said Andrea Sullivan, executive director for client services at Interbrand New York, a subsidiary of the Omnicom Group, which worked with Valassis on the project.

“The name RedPlum creates a strong visual and emotional connection for customers, one that’s about celebrating the little pleasures in everyday life,” Ms. Sullivan said. She said that discount seekers like to share their finds with friends and family, so the brand could catch on through word of mouth. For these shoppers, “part of the fun is the hunt,” she said.

Much of the design and content of RedPlum is written for women by women, from pithy snippets about trends to advice for buying flat-screen televisions. “Our target market kept repeating, ‘Don’t write for men,’” said Brian Costello, the general manager for interactive media at Valassis. “Women buy differently, and we wanted to reflect their needs and wants.”

One big customer of Valassis, Domino’s Pizza, is enthusiastic about RedPlum. “We think RedPlum will be the one-stop shop for consumers looking for value coupons online,” said Rob Weisberg, a vice president for marketing at Domino’s. “It’s a great opportunity to ultimately have a relationship where we are willing to pay more for prominent placement and target the exact customer we are looking for.”

•

Valassis is hoping that RedPlum will also help it gain favor on Wall Street, where its stock price has dropped over the last two years. In early 2006, Valassis settled a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that it had attempted to collude with News America Marketing, its top rival, to eliminate competition between the two. Under a consent order, Valassis was barred from engaging in similar conduct.

Since then Valassis has filed an antitrust lawsuit against News America, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The case is scheduled to be heard in February in federal court in Michigan.

Wall Street also questioned Valassis’s $1.2 billion purchase this year of Advo, a direct-mail marketer. Valassis had sued to get out of the acquisition, saying it had found problems with Advo’s numbers, but the deal ultimately went through. The combined company says it reaches more than 100 million consumers a week — 90 percent of American households — with its newspaper circulars, bags and direct mailings.

One Internet analyst, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research, said she thought the RedPlum strategy might give Valassis a positive jolt. “Valassis knows their business, they’re just taking it to the next level with RedPlum, which sounds very promising,” she said. “My only question is, why did it take them so long?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/bu...ia/27adco.html





Study: Ads in Online Shows Work Better Than Ads on TV
Nate Anderson

Good news for TV networks: online ads work. As TV shows continue their lengthy migration onto the web, new research finds that the people watching those shows actually pay more attention to both advertising and content when they watch online.

A year's worth of research from Simmons, a media consultancy, shows that Internet video watchers are 47 percent more engaged by the advertising they watched than were traditional TV viewers, according to MediaPost. The same study found that viewers were 25 percent more engaged in the content on the shows as well.

That's excellent news for networks like NBC, which has been making aggressive moves to put its shows online (though not through iTunes) in advertising-supported streaming and downloadable formats. The network appears more interested in mimicking the traditional free, ad-supported model of television than it does in pushing paid downloads, and the Simmons study may vindicate that decision (even if NBC's strategy confuses some viewers in the process).

The study results will also provide fodder for both writers and producers in the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike, which has largely centered on the residuals formula for Internet-provided content. With online video proving so (potentially) lucrative, both sides may have extra incentive to dig in their heels so as not to leave too much cash on the table for the other side to snap up.

And all of this is happening at a time when online ad money continues to flow from the great Madison Avenue Money Spigot. Back in November, the Internet Advertising Bureau reported that Internet ad revenue topped $5.2 billion in the third quarter of 2007, up a full 25 percent over a year before. Combine that with consumers who actually pay attention to ads, and you have an adman's paradise in the making. How long will it be until the serpent of consumer overstimulation does to the new medium what it has already done to television ads?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ads-on-tv.html





Technology in 2008

Three Fearless Predictions

1. Surfing will slow

PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet. Phone companies and other large ISPs (internet service providers) have tolerated it for years because it would cost too much to fix. Besides, eliminating spam would only benefit their customers, not themselves.

How so? Because the big fat pipes used by ISPs operate symmetrically, with equal bandwidth for upstream and downstream traffic. But end-users have traditionally downloaded megabytes of information from the web, while uploading only kilobytes of key strokes and mouse clicks. So, when spammers dump billions of pieces of e-mail onto the internet, it travels over the phone companies’ relatively empty upstream segments.

That can’t last. For a start, millions of gadgets are joining the human hordes. Any gizmo worth its silicon these days has its own internet connection—so it can update itself automatically, communicate autonomously with other digital species, and anticipate its user’s every whim.

Part of the solution?

Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won’t be able to function properly without access to the internet. Expect even digital picture frames to have a WiFi connection so they can grab the latest photos from Flickr.

Meanwhile, users are changing the way they use the internet: they are now uploading, as well as downloading, gigabytes galore—thanks to the popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

Hailed by the industry as the wave of the future, “user-generated content” is proving to be a tsunami of unprecedented proportions. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly a budding Martin Scorsese, bent on sharing his or her home-made videos with fellow YouTubers.

Once the biggest files being shared via Napster and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks were MP3 music tracks occupying a few modest megabytes. Today, music videos and TV episodes of hundreds of megabytes are being swapped over the internet by BitTorrent, Gnutella and other file-sharing networks.

And it’s all two-way traffic. The whole point of P2P is that everyone who is downloading is simultaneously uploading to others.

That’s just the beginning. Legal or otherwise, swapping multi-gigabyte high-definition video and movie files is becoming increasingly common.

In fact, it will soon be the norm. Television networks have found they can make more money from advertising while giving their show away for free over the internet than they can from broadcasting them. Now the movie studios are learning to do much the same.

The result is a gridlock. That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders.

Cisco, the leading supplier of core routers used to direct traffic over the internet’s backbone, has just had another bumper quarter, with net income up 37% over the same period a year ago. Juniper Networks, another information-technology firm, did even better. Both companies credit the proliferation of social networks, the craze for internet searching, multimedia downloading, and the widespread adoption of P2P sharing for the surge in new business.

While major internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all plan to upgrade their backbones, it will be a year or two before improvements begin to show. By then, internet television will be in full bloom, spammers will have multiplied ten-fold, WiFi will be embedded in every moving object, and users will be screaming for yet more capacity.

In the meantime, accept that surfing the web is going to be more like travelling the highways at holiday time. You’ll get there, eventually, but the going won’t be great.

2. Surfing will detach

Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.

The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small.

Mobile phone companies lust after the 700 megahertz frequencies because of their long range and broadband capabilities. They see lots of lucrative things like mobile television and other broadband services to offer customers.

But the 700 megahertz band is also the last great hope for a “third pipe” for internet access in America. Such a wireless network would offer consumers a serious alternative to the pricey and poor DSL (digital subscriber line) services they get from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, and to the marginally better cable broadband Comcast provides.

Over the past couple of months, techdom has been abuzz with rumours about Google getting into the mobile phone business—with a G-Phone to trump Apple’s iPhone. That’s highly unlikely.

The speculation was triggered by the company’s recent unveiling of its Android operating-system for mobile phones. But the whole point of Android is not to allow Google to make fancy handsets, but to make it easier for others to do so.

The aim, of course, is to flood the market with “open access” phones that have none of the restrictions that big carriers impose—like not being able to download software and games from other makers, or search the internet freely, or make free VoIP (voice of internet protocol) calls from within a WiFi hotspot.

Android has been made available to a group of manufacturers orchestrated by Google and known as the Open Handset Alliance. One of the nimblest of the group, HTC of Taiwan, has already started showing a BlackBerry-like prototype based on the Android operating system. Expect to see a raft of Android phones from other manufacturers over the coming months.

Nor is Google in the business of building a network of cellular antennas and fat communications pipes. Should it win the bidding for C-block, it would presumably team up with Frontline Wireless, a startup with serious expertise and money behind it.

That’s because Google’s core business is organising knowledge and giving users access to it. Google makes its money—and lots of it—from matching advertisers to consumers who use its search engine to look up things, not from tinkering with slim-margin ventures like wireless networks.

But despite owning the world’s largest knowledge base—with over 60% of the online search market—Google is at the mercy of others who control the on-ramps to the internet. That rankles.

Worse, it has no way of getting at the other billion users who rely more on mobile phones than personal computers to organise their lives. Clearly, the time has come to muscle into the moribund mobile-phone business.

Bidding $5 billion or more (the reserve is $4.6 billion) to beat out wireless heavyweights like AT&T and Verizon could give Google the option to become a cell-phone operator in partnership with Frontline, with a ready supply of handsets from its alliance partners and none of the hassles of running a network. Alternatively, it could become an internet service provider with a long-range wireless network to rival the WiMAX networks being built by Sprint and others.

But Google may want to do neither. Sceptics note that Google single-handedly persuaded the FCC to attach all manner of “open access” provisions to the C-block of frequencies—something that was anathema to the mobile-phone companies. Verizon even sued the FCC in a bid to block its move to open access.

Having failed to do so, Verizon now says it will open its network to third-party devices sometime in the future—and presumably for an additional charge. But the FCC is not just taking Verizon’s word for it.

The winner of the C-block of frequencies, whoever that may be (and Verizon is the odds-on favourite), will have to open the network to any device that meets the basic specification. And the devices themselves will have to be open to other suppliers’ software and services.

In short, win or lose, Google has already achieved its objective. Internet searches will doubtless be as popular among mobile-internet surfers as among their sedentary cousins. Owning at least 60% of the mobile search market is the prize Google has been after all along.

3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open

Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.

Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it.

Apple’s initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.

The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).

Short of cash, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits against companies developing Linux software, claiming it contained chunks of copyrighted Unix code. Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.

But IBM, which uses Linux, was having none of it, and fought the firm through the courts until it won. SCO is now operating under Chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy code.

The verdict removed, once and for all, the burden that had been inhibiting Linux’s broader acceptance. Linux is now accepted as being Unix-like, but not a Unix-derivative.

Bulletproof distributions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell have long been used on back-office servers. Since the verdict against SCO, Linux has swiftly become popular in small businesses and the home.

That’s largely the doing of Gutsy Gibbon, the code-name for the Ubuntu 7.10 from Canonical. Along with distributions such as Linspire, Mint, Xandros, OpenSUSE and gOS, Ubuntu (and its siblings Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) has smoothed most of Linux’s geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop.

No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.

Like other Linux desktop editions, Ubuntu works perfectly well on lowly machines that couldn’t hope to run Windows XP, let alone Vista Home Edition or Apple’s OS-X.

Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive. When Michael Dell, the boss of Dell Computers, runs Ubuntu on one of his home systems, Linux is clearly doing many things right.

And because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs. It started with Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project that aims to deliver computerised education to children in the developing world. His clever XO laptop, costing less than $200, would never have seen the light of day without its clever Linux operating system.

But Mr Negroponte has done more than create one of the world’s most ingenious computers. With a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions, he has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into seeing how good a laptop they can build for less than $500.

All start with a desktop version of Linux. Recent arrivals include the Asus Eee from Taiwan, which lists for $400. The company expects to sell close on four million Eees this financial year. Another Taiwanese maker, Everex, is selling its gPC desktop through Walmart for $199.

When firms are used to buying $1,000 office PCs running Vista Business Edition and loading each with a $200 copy of Microsoft Office, the attractions of a sub-$500 computer using a free operating system like Linux and a free productivity suite like OpenOffice suddenly become very compelling.

And that’s not counting the $20,000 or more needed for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint server software. Again, Linux provides such server software for free.

Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ry_id=10410912





High Scores for the Games of 2007
Seth Schiesel

FOR gamers 2006 was all about the introduction of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii systems; there weren’t many great games released. This year, by contrast, has delivered one fabulous interactive entertainment experience after another. Even without Grand Theft Auto IV, which was delayed until next year, 2007 has witnessed the strongest lineup of new games since the fall of 2004, when Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and World of Warcraft were introduced.

Even with heavy hitters like Spore, G.T.A. IV and Super Smash Bros. on the horizon for 2008, it will be tough for next year to top the crop of 2007. Here are some of this year’s most important, intriguing and just plain amusing games and developments.

BEST NEWCOMER: BIOSHOCK It is rare for a new game to burst onto the market with little publicity and become an instant sensation. When that does happen, it is usually with a game with a unique play style, like Katamari Damacy in 2004 and the first Guitar Hero in 2005. Otherwise players and the press usually see the best games coming from far away. Not with BioShock. Take-Two, its publisher, delivered a game in perhaps the most competitive genre of all, the first-person shooter, that was so intelligently designed that it immediately sailed into the ranks of the best shooters of all time. BioShock is propelled by its lush evocation of an undersea dystopia and a story line capped by a piquant twist at the end.

MOST DIFFICULT DELIVERY: THE NEW E3 The game business may be one of the few in which everyday consumers actually care about the industry’s trade shows. That is because the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo has long been a showcase for the best games coming each holiday season. This year the industry radically downsized the event, known as E3, moving it from the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center to a constellation of ritzy beach-side hotels. It was a great idea but a logistical nightmare because the demonstrations were spread out among at least a dozen hotels, bars, restaurants and even an airplane hangar. The solution for next year can be summed up in one word (or is that two?): Las Vegas.

BEST ADAPTATION OF AN ADORED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE The dramatic and narrative butchery that could have ensued when Turbine set out to make a online role-playing game based on the “Lord of the Rings” books had Tolkien fans stockpiling torches. Not to worry. This game allows players to make their own stories in Middle-earth without trampling on the canonic tale of the One Ring.

BEST UNAMBITIOUS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE STATE OF THE ART: HALO 3 AND SUPER MARIO GALAXY Halo 3 is a polished gem of a science-fiction shooter. But that is all it is. It has suitably spruced-up graphics, and some of its new online features are welcome additions. But it is a refinement of the time-tested Halo formula rather than a daring attempt to provide a new sort of experience. That’s enough to generate hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is not enough to inspire.

Super Mario Galaxy presents similar questions. Galaxy is finely tuned and a worthy member of the Mario pantheon. Almost anyone can have fun playing it. But as with Halo, Galaxy is at some level mostly a reinvention of classic play modes. In Halo that means battling killer aliens. In Mario that means jumping and dodging and collecting stars to free the princess who, as she has been for more than 20 years, is locked away in a cartoon-style castle. That’s fun as far as it goes. But now that the Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto has gotten the Wii incarnations of his Mario and Zelda series out of the way, perhaps he will turn to creating something genuinely new. (Wii Fit, the fitness system coming to North America next year, could just be it.)

BEST SINGLE-HANDED RESCUE OF A MAJOR GAME SYSTEM: RATCHET & CLANK: TOOLS OF DESTRUCTION Sad to say, many of this year’s big-budget, exclusive games for Sony’s PlayStation 3, including Heavenly Sword and Lair, were mediocre at best. The action-adventure game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune seems strong, but the shining star for the PS3 this year was the new Ratchet & Clank, made by Insomniac Games. Analogies can be overworn, but playing Ratchet is actually like playing an animated film, and that’s a rare thing.

GAME OF THE YEAR: MASS EFFECT Story and characters aren’t everything, but these components of narrative have always been the weakest part of video games. For decades games have made up in frenetic action what they have lacked in dramatic depth. And that is a big reason why games have traditionally appealed most strongly to the demographic group that most enjoys frenetic action: young men. In its choice of milieu — science fiction — Mass Effect is not ambitious at all. But with its focus on character development, personal growth and moral tension, all fueled by a graphics system created to evoke emotional empathy, Mass Effect points the way forward. It may be a harbinger of a time when story and character are as important to video games as explosions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/arts/23schi.html





2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards
Ryan Singel

Once every year, Wired News compiles a list of the most entertaining tech-centric misstatements and verbal foibles from government officials, CEOs and tech luminaries.

Once every hundred years, an upstart Web 2.0 CEO says something so ridiculous it rockets to the top of the list faster than a story about Digg gets to the top of Digg.

This century's momentous proclamation came in November when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg trumpeted his social network's new ad technology, Beacon, saying:

"Once every hundred years, media changes."

Zuckerberg went on to describe how his company's mining and selling of Facebook users profiles would revolutionize ad sales, and thus media. Within weeks, Facebook did an about-face and apologized for not letting users opt-out of Beacon -- a system that announced to your Facebook friends what books, gadgets and movies you'd bought.

Journalists, advertisers and publishers around the world, however, took deep solace in knowing that media only changes once every 100 years, so they no longer need to worry about losing the new media war to free online news sites, blogs and YouTube. Instead, they just need to publish all their stories on their Facebook pages, until the next media change comes in 2107.

- - -

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, on the other hand, is the mouth that gives almost every year. In April, Ballmer took the opportunity to belittle the iPhone, telling USA Today:

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Six months after its debut, the iPhone is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined. But Ballmer can take heart, because the iPhone doesn't have developers (yet).

- - -

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs managed to lift his own foot over his turtleneck and into his mouth in September. Two months after Apple loyalists spent hours in line for the fetish item of the year, Jobs announced a $200 price drop for the 8-GB iPhone, then poured salt into early adopter's wound with this quote in USA Today:

"That's technology. If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that's what happens in technology."

A chastened Jobs issued an apology of sorts the next day, along with a $100 Apple Store credit to full-price payers. "We need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers."

- - -

"I love my job. I hate my customers," Motorola CEO Ed Zander told The Wall Street Journal. Zander, whose fortunes rose with the soaring -- but ultimately fleeting -- popularity of the RAZR, lost his love six months later. Rumor has it he still hates millions of people.

- - -

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, talked his way into retirement by telling a London newspaper that he feared for Africa because black people aren't as smart as whites.

Watson told The Sunday Times he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says, not really."

Watson subsequently resigned his position. After he published his sequenced genome online later in the year, Nobel Prize winner Watson was found to have 16 times more genes of black origin than a typical white European.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t.../YE_foot_mouth





Stopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong
A. O. Scott

BY the end of next week, the number of movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2007 will top out somewhere around 640. The traditions of movie criticism decree that I select 10 as the year’s most worthy candidates for immortality (or at least future Netflix rental). Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list.

That is partly because I liked so much of what I saw. I know it’s hard to believe, but during the past 12 months I sometimes went two or three weeks in a row without finding anything to mock, deflate or be disappointed by, and my inner curmudgeon was frequently elbowed aside by a wide-eyed, arm-waving enthusiast.

It also seemed, though, perhaps more than in other years, that the movies I liked did not entirely stand alone. It is, of course, inevitable that many of those 640 should arrange themselves in clusters and patterns of genre and theme. But apart from this kind of obvious sorting, even some of the more idiosyncratic and original films seemed to be carrying on a serendipitous conversation with one another, about the aesthetic possibilities of the medium and also about its ethical obligation to illuminate some aspect of human experience.

So apart from the top two entries, the list below consists of pairs (and in one case a trio) of films that complete, complement, contradict or otherwise engage each other. Taken alone each film on the list is in some way exemplary, but each is also enriched and complicated by its companion. The twinned selections might work as double features, or as possible alternatives (if not x, then maybe y); above all they demonstrate the vitality and mutability of this impossibly fertile art form. It’s a big world, and we can never have too many movies.

1. Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is the latest evidence of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema. Mr. Mungiu’s film, which will open in New York in January but which can’t wait for my 2008 list, derives some of its power from its charged subject matter: It’s about the ordeal of life under Communism and also about abortion. But what makes this a great movie is the mighty combination of Mr. Mungiu’s ruthless, formal discipline, the unaffected naturalism of the performances (especially Anamaria Marinca’s) and a moral honesty that goes far beyond what we usually think of as realism.

2. “Ratatouille,” for its part, dispenses with realism altogether, but like “4 Months” it still demonstrates a bracing integrity in its commitment to the highest ideals of art. Among these, of course, is the pursuit of pleasure, something Brad Bird, the writer and director, both rewards and defends. As he did in “The Incredibles,” Mr. Bird makes a passionate, somewhat contrarian case for excellence in a world (and a medium) that all too often tolerates and celebrates mediocrity. He also, not incidentally, puts us critics in our place, which is at the table with everyone else, in thrall to the new and ruled less by reason than by memory and desire.

3. Violence, vengeance, motiveless evil: these are on the verge of becoming movie clichés, but genuine, rigorous pessimism about human nature still has the power to shock. And when wedded to the kind of creative daring displayed by Paul Thomas Anderson in “There Will Be Blood” and Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” misanthropy can attain a jarring, revelatory intensity. As men driven by greed and grief, Daniel Day-Lewis (in “Blood”) and Johnny Depp (in “Todd”) are two of the most charismatic and terrifying movie monsters in recent memory.

4. The lives of popular musicians are irresistible to ambitious actors, Hollywood hacks, hip documentary makers and soundtrack marketers. Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” and Julien Temple’s “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten” can thus be seen as acts of resistance, upending clichés and matching the mystery and magic of their subjects with inventive visual and narrative techniques. Mr. Temple’s documentary about the leader of the Clash is more straightforwardly biographical than Mr. Haynes’s fractured fantasia on the life of Bob Dylan, but both films discover new and bracing ways to write history in sound and image.

5. Every political documentary has a point of view, but too many are content simply to affirm the presumed beliefs of a narrow, self-selecting (and usually liberal) audience, and too few grasp the difference between stating an opinion and making an argument. Two exceptions stood out this year. Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight,” a devastating and dispassionate chronicle of American folly and hubris in the early months of the war in Iraq, is perhaps not partisan enough to satisfy those who opposed the war from the start, but for just that reason it poses a profound intellectual challenge to the war’s supporters. It is the movie I would most want my conservative friends to see. Meanwhile “Terror’s Advocate,” Barbet Schroeder’s detailed, unsparing portrait of the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, is especially necessary viewing for those on the left who still harbor romantic ideas about political violence as a morally attractive response to oppression, real or imagined.

6. “12:08 East of Bucharest” is the first feature from the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu; “Live-in Maid” is the debut of Jorge Gaggero, from Argentina. They tell simple, almost anecdotal stories of ordinary people at the mercy of historical events. In “12:08” a singularly undistinguished television panel of provincial Romanians squabbles about the revolution of 1989; in “Live-in Maid” the relationship between a Buenos Aires lady and her maid is strained by economic turmoil. Mr. Porumboiu’s sensibility is more overtly comic than Mr. Gaggero’s, but both filmmakers show remarkable sensitivity and self-confidence, and in their low-key, observant ways each achieves something close to perfection.

7. We talk a lot about freedom — in life, in art, in politics — but what does it look like? You can find one set of answers in the restless, beautiful images of the American landscape in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” and another in the landscapes of memory and fantasy explored in Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Both films, based on the lives of real people, dwell on themes of liberation, and both filmmakers demonstrate an independence of spirit that helps to make their stories exhilarating as well as sad.

8. There will always be a place, and an eager audience, for melodramas of awakened conscience, in which a cynical, complacent or downright malignant character taps into an unexpected reservoir of decency. These films answer a need to believe that goodness can flourish in bleak times and against long odds, and their sentimental humanism is part of their appeal. It can always be argued that the real world is grayer and more nuanced than the East Germany depicted “The Lives of Others” or the corporate arena of “Michael Clayton.” But these movies, the directorial debuts of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“Lives) and Tony Gilroy (“Clayton”), work as intelligent, earnest fables of individual heroism, anchored in lead performances — George Clooney’s as the fixer in “Clayton” and Ulrich Mühe’s as the Stasi officer in “Lives” — of extraordinary gravity and conviction.

9. “The Savages,” written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, and Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her,” based on a story by Alice Munro, both deal with the indignities of old age. They are also about the vagaries and difficulties of long-term love, between the squabbling siblings (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) in Ms. Jenkins’s film and the married couple (Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent) in Ms. Polley’s. There is scarcely a moment of exaggeration or unearned sentiment in either film, and between them they feature some of the best acting of the year.

10. “Knocked Up” enjoys the distinction of being the most intensely argued about movie of the year, as well as one of the funniest. Its send-up of sexual confusion in early adulthood was topped only by “Superbad,” its younger, more anxious brother. The sharp, complicated feminism of “Juno” stands as both a complement to and an implicit critique of those boy-centered pictures. My wish for 2008 is that Diablo Cody, who wrote “Juno,” and Judd Apatow, the writer-director of “Knocked Up” and producer of “Superbad,” collaborate on a hilariously naughty comedy promoting proper condom use.

HONORABLE MENTIONS “Lady Chatterley,” “Into Great Silence,” “Starting Out in the Evening,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “No Country for Old Men,” “The Band’s Visit,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Bamako,” “Zodiac.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23scot.html





A List, to Start the Conversation
Manohla Dargis

THE whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect. (I have a suspicion that the sacred 10 is meant to suggest biblical certainty, as if critics are merely worldly vessels for some divine wisdom.) More than anything they are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function. I tell you what I liked, and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) or denounce it (which flatters you). It’s a perfect circle.

Mostly, these lists give me an excuse to remind readers of good and great films that they may have missed. (That’s the evangelist speaking, not Moses.) They allow me to revisit favorites, sift through the year and share a few thoughts that I didn’t or couldn’t get into print earlier, along with fragments, digressions and a few jabs. In some respects the actual list is the least of it, which is why I’ll dispatch with it now with minor annotation and, save for the first two titles, without numbers.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” which I will write about in detail when it opens on Wednesday, and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” which I wrote about when it was released in March, together constitute my 1 through 10. These aren’t necessarily the year’s best (impossible to determine given the glut of films), just the two that matter most to me, that dug in the deepest and rearranged my own givens. They made me feel like the woman in the start of Orson Welles’s film “Touch of Evil” who says, “I’ve got this ticking noise in my head,” just before she’s blown to smithereens by a time bomb. I’m still intact (more or less), but these films shook up my world in the best possible way.

My other favorite releases of the year are “Into Great Silence,” “I’m Not There,” “Killer of Sheep,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Eastern Promises,” “Michael Clayton,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,” “Lady Chatterley,” “Colossal Youth,” “Monika,” “Superbad,” “Southland Tales,” “No End in Sight,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “This Is England,” “The Savages,” “Year of the Dog,” “Paprika,” “The Host” and the under-appreciated action thriller “The Kingdom.” Each of these was reviewed in this paper, and most are now available on DVD or soon will be. This year’s Cannes Film Festival supplied a remarkable bounty that included Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” Catherine Breillat’s “Last Mistress” and Carlos Reygadas’s “Silent Light,” all of which are scheduled to open next year.

You’re probably wise to “The Bourne Ultimatum,” so instead let me share a few words about “Colossal Youth,” from the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. Obscure in more ways than one, this movie has not been picked up by an American distributor, making it hard for even intrepid filmgoers to see. Shot in digital video, it is a cryptic, arresting work that reveals its mysteries slowly. With their deliberate movements and long silences, Mr. Costa’s cast — nonprofessionals culled from a Lisbon slum — seem as monumental as marble, a heaviness that all but stops the flow of the movie and forces your attention directly on them. You really watch this movie or you flee. If it makes it to DVD, I promise to let you know.

“The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Colossal Youth” (now there’s a double bill) could not be more different: they’re limpid/opaque, frantic/composed, global/local, star-driven/real-peopled. Neither looks like the other or like anything else out this year. Each brings you into worlds through different formal means. “The Bourne Ultimatum” fragments the image, thereby mirroring the fragmented nature of its title character, and accelerates the pace, creating a shattered, violently trembling world that forces you to pay close attention or risk missing something, like the sight of Bourne jumping from a roof and through a window. “Colossal Youth,” by contrast, allows the world to cohere (almost congeal) around its characters, and it slows down its pace so drastically that unless you adapt your rhythms to it, you will never find a way in.

These films exemplify the perceptual extremes of my moviegoing year; somewhere in the middle is the Norwegian film “Reprise,” from the young director Joachim Trier. A coolly funny, touching, exhilaratingly intelligent mediation on identity and friendship, “Reprise” has a self-conscious visual style (jump cuts, freeze frames) that perfectly expresses the worldview of its two self-conscious lead characters, first-time novelists and increasingly alienated best friends. The film has bumped around the international festival circuit for the last year and a half, scooping up awards and love, though not until recently did it land an American distributor. (Look for it next year.) Enthusiastic reviews, intelligent filmmaking, even hot sex are no longer automatically enough to persuade a distributor to jump.

The problem is that the art-house audience that supported the French New Wave filmmakers to whom “Reprise” owes an obvious debt can no longer be counted on to fill theater seats. Or maybe it’s overwhelmed. For a variety of reasons, including the glut of releases, movies are now whisked on and off theater screens so fast that it’s hard for the audience to discover them, much less build a popular film-going culture. In 1984 Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” hung around in theaters long enough for people to learn how to spell his name. These days too many cool movies are just passing through on the way to your Netflix queue.

I don’t think anyone knows what the solution is, but this year IFC Entertainment hit its stride with its First Take series. Twice a month the company simultaneously opens a film theatrically, including at the IFC Center in the West Village, and releases it via video-on-demand on cable television. If the film does well in theaters, it might go wider than initially planned. IFC isn’t the first company to go the day-and-date route, but so far it’s letting people with great taste buy films — during a multifestival shopping spree, they picked up “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” “The Last Mistress” and “Paranoid Park” — so, until someone comes up with a better idea, more power to them.

IFC also had the smarts to snap up the Romanian film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” at Cannes before it won the Palme d’Or. (It had a brief Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles and reopens in January.) Directed by Cristian Mungiu, this is one of those putatively dark, difficult movies that industry mouthpieces try to use as proof that critics are out of touch with the audience when it is actually the audience that is out of touch with good movies. Americans consume a lot of garbage, but that may be because they don’t have real choices: 16 of the top box-office earners last weekend — some good, almost all from big studios — monopolized 33,353 of the country’s 38,415 screens. The remaining 78 releases duked it out on the leftover screens.

I doubt that most moviegoers would prefer the relentlessly honest “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which involves a young woman seeking an illegal abortion, over “Juno,” an ingratiating comedy about a teenager who carries her pregnancy to term. But I wish they had the choice. “4 Months” is aesthetically bracing, but “Juno” has easy laughs, dodges abortion quicker than a presidential candidate and provides a supremely artful male fantasy. Like “Knocked Up,” it pivots on a fertile hottie who has sex without protection and, after a little emotional messiness (and no scary diseases), delivers one baby and adopts a second, namely the man-child who (also) misplaced the Trojans. Both comedies superficially recall the male wish-fulfillment fantasies of “Sideways,” but without the lacerating adult self-awareness.

This year’s baby boom — more bellies popped in “Waitress,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “A Mighty Heart,” “Bella” and even the latest “Shrek” — may be purely coincidental or cyclical or just evidence of the limits of imagination. But because this year our movies also marched off to war — in “Redacted,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” among other titles — I can’t help but think we have embarked on a symbolic flashback to the 1940s and 1950s. In the way-back machine of the movies, we are simultaneously returned to the glories, agonies and clichés of cinematic war and to atavistic gendered stereotypes, embodied this year by beatific, inevitable maternity. Filmmakers may be shooting blanks on the war front, but back home they’re getting plenty of action.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23darg.html





Films That Look Death in the Eye
Stephen Holden

THE betrayal of the body, decrepitude and death: in 2007 an unprecedented number of serious films, along with the usual slasher movies, contemplated the end of life. Might they be a collective baby-boom response to looming senescence and a fraying social safety net? Or do they reflect an uneasy sense that humanity is facing end times, when global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the war in Iraq, or any combination thereof, could bring on doomsday?

At once the scariest and most exhilarating of such films, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” contemplates the world from the perspective of a stroke victim who can communicate only by blinking one eye. If its metaphor of human life as imprisonment in one’s own body is terrifying, the horror is partly countered by its portrayal of the imagination as a means of ecstatic liberation. It’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” elevated to a metaphysical plane.

In “Starting Out in the Evening,” a distinguished American novelist whose books have gone out of print struggles to complete a final opus while recovering from a heart attack and, later, a stroke. “The Savages” examines the tensions between a brother and sister whose father is moved from a retirement community into a nursing home to spend his final days. In “Away From Her” a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s slowly forgets her life while her husband watches helplessly.

Each of these films has at least one devastating performance. In “The Diving Bell” the dancing eyes of the French actor Mathieu Amalric freeze into a Cyclopean stare. In “Starting Out in the Evening” Frank Langella, wearing a look of weary resignation, allows himself to be photographed in all his elephantine dilapidation, being pulled naked from a bathtub. In “The Savages” Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman stand in for every grown-up child reacting to a parent’s decline. And in “Away From Her” the still-beautiful Julie Christie fails to recognize her husband and becomes a ghost of her former self.

For those who prefer their death and dying with a thick sugar coating, there is “The Bucket List,” in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play geezers dying of cancer who flee the hospital for a final glorious fling with life.

But it isn’t only in personal dramas about illness and mortality that the usual filter separating the movies from reality was removed. Several films flourishing an epic grandeur arrived without the usual romantic packaging. The only word to describe the Hobbesian vision of human nature offered by “There Will Be Blood,” “Sweeney Todd” and “No Country for Old Men” is merciless. All three films imply that happy endings are for fools.

Here are my Top 10 movies of 2007, in order of preference:

‘THERE WILL BE BLOOD’ Grounded in a titanic performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as a ruthless oil prospector who strikes it rich in early-20th-century California, Paul Thomas Anderson’s screen adaptation of ”Oil!,” a 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair, is a raw-boned, radically unsentimental fable about the birth of modern America. Speaking in oratorical cadences that evoke Sean Connery by way of John Huston, Mr. Day-Lewis’s oil baron, Daniel Plainview, dripping with black slime in the early scenes, is a fearsome creature whose soul rots as his income multiplies. Plainview is a proudly misanthropic, power-hungry loner in a world where women barely count.

In the movie’s pessimistic view of history, American capitalism has always been driven by parallel strains of limitless greed and a fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone Christianity preached by madmen and charlatans. As the drama builds to a final confrontation between these two strains, “There Will Be Blood” suggests a fusion of “East of Eden,” “Giant” and “Citizen Kane” with the Hollywood finery ripped to shreds.

‘THE LIVES OF OTHERS’ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s eerie portrait of East Germany before and after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall evokes an Orwellian nightmare in the age of surveillance and security. The quiet hero (Ulrich Müehe) of this study in state-sanctioned paranoia is a captain in the Stasi, the country’s secret police, assigned to eavesdrop electronically on a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his mistress (Martina Gedeck). His job is complicated by bureaucratic corruption. A great piece of storytelling with a poignant twist ending, the film demonstrates how a paranoid bureaucracy brings on its own destruction.

‘THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY’ Julian Schnabel’s cinematographic tour de force was adapted from a memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a bon vivant and editor in chief of Elle magazine in France who in 1995 suffered a stroke that left him with a rare condition called locked-in syndrome, mentally alert yet unable to communicate except by blinking an eye. His book was dictated by blinks correlated with letters in the alphabet. The movie takes place largely inside Mr. Bauby’s head, where a very rich, sensuous life exists in his memory.

‘PERSEPOLIS’ Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s four-volume series of graphic novels about growing up in contemporary Iran, and directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, this French animated film offers an autobiographical account of Iran’s troubled history from the days of the shah through the Islamist revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Marjane, the narrator, is a spirited young rebel from a closely knit, cultured family, struggling to define her identity in a repressive climate whose shifting political winds require wrenching personal adjustments. The same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and forceful drive that bold, simple animation encourages.

‘STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING’ Mr. Day-Lewis’s only rival for the year’s best male performance is Frank Langella’s portrayal of an aging novelist whose time has past. Stylistically his pensive, minimalist performance is the diametrical opposite of Mr. Day-Lewis’s brutal Shakespearean-size prospector. Resignation and an embattled nobility vie for precedence in his sad-eyed visage. Almost as impressive are Lauren Ambrose, as a beady-eyed graduate student who barges into his life, and Lili Taylor, as his neglected daughter.

‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’ In Joel and Ethan Coen’s icy adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, West Texas in 1980 (it could just as well be today) is the same deadly outlaw territory as the 19th-century Wild West. A county sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a hunter (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon a $2 million cache of drug money and a killer (Javier Bardem) who monitors the cash through a transponder in the money bag play terrifying cat-and-mouse games in a near-perfect modern genre movie that transcends itself.

‘SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET’ In Tim Burton’s movie of Stephen Sondheim’s musical-theater masterpiece the Grand Guignol is exaggerated to cartoon levels (the blood from slit throats spurts toward the camera), the score is somewhat abridged and the show’s lunatic humor all but eliminated. Johnny Depp’s Sweeney, who wears a continual scowl, takes little joy in his murders. His Sweeney, often filmed in close-up, is nevertheless a riveting creation, and all the more indelible for being in your face during much of the movie; he forces you to identify with him. Vocally he sounds a lot like David Bowie. Nearly 30 years after it arrived on Broadway the show now looks like the ultimate revenge tragedy for the age of Al Qaeda.

‘ATONEMENT’ Ian McEwan’s great novel, about the tragic consequences of an adolescent girl’s lie after observing acts she misunderstands, has been translated by the director Joe Wright into a glossy romantic movie with the same lush ethos as his 2005 debut, “Pride and Prejudice.” Keira Knightley and James McAvoy make fantasy-worthy star-crossed lovers, but the movie is stolen by Saoirse Ronan as the dissembling 13-year-old tattletale.

‘ACROSS THE UNIVERSE’ Julie Taymor’s movie is a rhapsodic ’60s fantasia in which the songs of the Beatles propel a love story about a poor boy from Liverpool and an American girl who go through the decade’s familiar tropes: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and revolution. Ms. Taymor’s puppetry, the ravishing psychedelic sequences and the performances of Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood make “Across the Universe” one of the headiest trip movies ever, carried off without a dash of irony or cynicism.

‘JUNO’ At last, an American movie about a real, down-to-earth teenager. The amazing young actress Ellen Page plays a sarcastic, punk-savvy 16-year-old girl impregnated by a boyfriend who decides to give the baby up for adoption and chooses the parents-to-be, a yuppie couple whose marriage is not as picture-perfect as it seems. Diablo Cody’s bitingly funny screenplay shatters the conventions of the Hollywood teenage movie.

RUNNERS-UP “Avenue Montaigne,” “Away From Her,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “Breach,” “Eastern Promises,” “I’m Not There,” “Lady Chatterley,” “Lust, Caution,” “Ratatouille,” “The Savages,” “This Is England,” “2 Days in Paris,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23hold.html





The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
Michael Cieply

TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.

Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)

But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”

Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.

At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.

But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.

To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.

DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.

All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.

“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.

One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.

Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?

For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)

According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.

As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”

In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/bu...a/23steal.html





Movie Review
Smiley Face (2007)


Anna Faris plays Jane F. in “Smiley Face,” a comedy directed by Gregg Araki.

Sunshine Daydream, With Pointed Point of View
Matt Zoller Seitz

“Smiley Face,” about a pot-addled would-be actress stumbling through a long, weird day in Los Angeles, is a contradiction in terms: a “stoner” comedy with a purpose.

Directed by Gregg Araki from a screenplay by Dylan Haggerty, the movie at first seems a psychedelic lark, in the spirit of “The Big Lebowski,” “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” and other works distinguished by picaresque narratives and cumulus clouds of marijuana smoke.

Mr. Araki, a trailblazer of early ’90s queer cinema, can stage a non sequitur with the best of them. He gets plenty of opportunities thanks to his lead actress, the “Scary Movie” star Anna Faris, whose freakishly committed performance as Jane F. suggests Amy Adams’s princess from “Enchanted” dropped into a Cheech and Chong movie.

Jane is a giggly, flirty goofball whose perpetual buzz is cranked up several notches when she scarfs a plateful of cannabis-spiked muffins baked by her roommate. Intending to bake a replacement batch, she orders a large amount of product from a dealer (a dreadlocked, droll Adam Brody) whom she can’t afford to pay; accidentally destroys her cellphone while cooking the muffins; then arrives late to an audition for a strait-laced casting agent who reports her drug use to the police; and so on.

Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.

The film depicts Jane’s habit as pathetic even as it plays for laughs. At the same time, though “Smiley Face” suggests that the “straight” characters Jane encounters — the casting director (Jane Lynch); a bullying beat cop (Michael Shamus Wiles); a college professor’s wife (Marion Ross) from whom Jane steals an original copy of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto”; a couple of amiably clueless meat delivery men (Danny Trejo and John Cho); the humorless Brevin (John Krasinski of NBC’s “Office”), who likes getting his teeth cleaned because it makes him feel “prosperous” — are in thrall to an even more powerful drug: the myth of the American dream.

At one point Jane, who has somehow ended up at the meat-packing plant that employs the delivery men, deflects a supervisor’s ire by claiming to be a union organizer, then fantasizes launching into a Marxist soliloquy about industrial oppression of labor. Mr. Araki intercuts Jane’s rant with unsettling close-ups of meat being sliced, ground and liquefied.

The film’s title is drawn from a scene in which Jane envisions the sun as a smiley face. The implication is subtle but clear: Americans fancy themselves free-willed strivers who live in the best of all possible worlds, but they’re really sentient vegetables, rooted in comfort and nourished by manufactured images of bliss. Jane’s apathy-as-rebellion recalls a quotation from Stella Adler: “A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.”

“Smiley Face” is rated R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes sexual situations, profanity and nonstop drug references.


SMILEY FACE

Opens in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Directed and edited by Gregg Araki; written by Dylan Haggerty; director of photography, Shawn Kim; music by David Kitay; production designer, John Larena; produced by Steve Golin, Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Mr. Araki, Kevin Turen and Henry Winterstern; released by First Look Studios. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

WITH: Anna Faris (Jane F.), John Krasinski (Brevin), Adam Brody (Steve the Dealer), Marion Ross (Shirley), Jane Lynch (Casting Director), John Cho (Mikey), Danny Trejo (Albert) and Michael Shamus Wiles (Officer Jones).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/movies/26smil.html





Long Before Video Cameras, a French Artist Brought Motion to His Images
Kathryn Shattuck

Ah, boredom, the curse of the rich and idle in 18th-century France. So how did the aristocrats while away their leisure time on dreary winter days?

The fortunate ones went to the movies.

In a new book, “Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment,” the historian Laurence Chatel de Brancion steps back into prerevolutionary France to explore the pastimes created by Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, in his role as resident entertainer at the court of the duke of Orléans.

At the heart of the volume are Carmontelle’s experiments with light and moving images: rouleaux transparents, or “rolled-up transparent drawings,” a precursor to modern cinema. The luminous scenes of verdant parks and splendidly attired people — between 12 and 19 inches deep and up to 138 feet long — were backlighted with natural daylight, wound between spindles and viewed in a boxlike precursor to the television, often accompanied by music or narrated by Carmontelle himself.

“It’s the first time that you see complete action without interruption, with a light from behind and made for the pleasure of the public,” Ms. Chatel de Brancion said in a telephone interview from Paris.

It’s enough to make Sofia Coppola swoon.

“Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies” will be published next month by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Ms. Chatel de Brancion will visit Manhattan in April to discuss her book at the National Arts Club.

“Carmontelle was a court artist, and he very much worked with the aristocracy and gentry and made things that would amuse them,” said Julian Brooks, associate curator of drawings at the Getty in Los Angeles, which has a 12-foot-long transparent drawing by Carmontelle, “Figures Walking in a Parkland,” in its permanent collection.

“I think for us now they give a glimpse of what life was like then,” he said. “All the dress, the carriage, the boat, the way the landscape was arranged, is very realistic. They’re like a window onto the time.”

Born in 1717, the son of a cobbler, Carmontelle insinuated himself into French society through his learnedness and charisma, traits that were in high demand in a culture rife with ignored wives and ennui. He also wrote art criticism, staged plays and made 750 full-length portraits of visitors to the duke’s court — among them Mozart and Voltaire — now considered some of the most useful iconography of the period.

But for the duke Carmontelle’s role was primarily that of party planner, in settings both indoors and out.

Gardening was the vogue at the time, and Carmontelle’s design for the duke’s 28-acre Jardin de Monceau, on the northwestern edge of Paris, reflected current trends: an irregular shape, more English than French in inspiration, the use of architectural follies and integration with the agricultural landscape outside the city.

Mirka Benes, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, said there was a major emphasis on entertainment in the garden. In a Chinese pavilion at the Jardin de Monceau, people in traditional costumes pulled a sort of merry-go-round; another pavilion featured people in Turkish garb.

“On the one hand it addressed the local agriculture on the steppe of Paris,” she said, noting that the royals could sample milk and cheese and even lift a hoe — without getting too sullied in the process — in these rural settings. “On the other hand it was highly international, like an armchair tour throughout the world.”

Carmontelle translated his visions — many of them drawn from his garden fantasies — onto fine English paper using watercolor, gouache and a special gum that allowed for brilliant transparent colors. Initially devising a “slide” that fit into windows between panes of glass, he traced exactly the view of leafless trees and bare gardens in the winter months, and then adorned them with luscious hand-drawn flowers and greenery. The effect from outside was an opaque white window. But from the inside it was like witnessing spring in full bloom.

At the same time Benjamin Franklin was astonishing Parisians with his displays of electricity, and light was the talk of the day, especially the white, oil-based kind already known in China and Russia. People were also experimenting with the magic lantern, an ancestor of the slide projector, and the concepts of the panorama and diorama.

Eventually Carmontelle concocted an invention that allowed him to combine the two. He created 11 known transparencies, many of which were later cut into sections and sold as individual paintings. Ms. Chatel de Brancion found seven in her explorations, including a 138-foot-long one that captures the lives of both the working classes and the gentry across four seasons in postrevolutionary France. Another depicts the slightly scandalous shift in fashion as inspired by Josephine Bonaparte.

Still no one — not Napoleon not the Russian czar — wanted to invest in Carmontelle’s innovation, either as a record of a forgotten society or as an idea to be expanded on. He died on Dec. 26, 1806, “heartbroken,” Ms. Chatel de Brancion wrote, “to see the invention that had documented an era stacked up once again in the back of his studio.”

Isn’t that just like the movies?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/ar...gn/27tran.html





Books

Hot Properties
Manohla Dargis

The Star Machine

By Jeanine Basinger.

Illustrated. 586 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

“God makes stars,” the pioneering movie producer Samuel Goldwyn once said. “It’s up to producers to find them.” In this era of D.I.Y. stardom, you don’t need God or Goldwyn to grab your 15 minutes; you need only a Webcam and the minor technological wherewithal to upload your own fabulousness. Information dissemination is cheap thanks to the Internet, and now so is fame, which has become the virtual-reality birthright of every Tom, Dick and Lonelygirl15 itching to go viral. In the new global meritocracy, anyone can be a star.

Jeanine Basinger, whose book “The Star Machine” examines how the old Hollywood studio system once manufactured stars as if they were widgets, thinks they don’t make ’em like they used to (stars, that is). “The importance of stardom has diminished over time,” she writes in this big, sprawling book, adding, “The stars of silent film and of the great studio system were gods and goddesses.” They had faces then, along with glamour and impeccable grooming. The studios taught their stars how to walk, how to talk, how to dance, sing, fence and ride a horse without sliding off the saddle. They plucked their eyebrows, trimmed their waistlines, shaved their hairlines, kept their secrets and tried to protect this human capital at all costs.

Look at Paris Hilton and you can’t help sympathizing with Basinger. Hilton has become a star of sorts simply because she or, more likely, the people she keeps on her payroll have a talent for promotion. Her paparazzi moments are as orchestrated as her red-carpet and clubland appearances, and coordinated for the same instrumental reasons: to get as many images of her out there as possible. But she’s a dull celebrity. Even the sex video that made the Internet rounds was boring (she answered her cellphone in the middle, so she sure looked bored). Compared with a glamour puss like Lana Turner, another bottle blonde who knew how to make an entrance, Hilton comes across as shoddy goods.

Basinger devotes half a chapter to Turner, calling her “the epitome of Hollywood machine-made stardom.” Echoing Goldwyn, she also writes of Turner, “Born a star, she died a star.” This is sentimentalism. By the time Turner died in 1995, she had long faded from the movies after late-career stinkers like “The Big Cube,” in 1969. (The cube refers to an LSD-laced sugar cube that Turner’s character ingests and that leads to her institutionalization. Happily, she’s later cured!) Kindly, somewhat ludicrously, Basinger believes that Turner could have developed as an actress if not for “a series of sensational events in her private life,” most notoriously the 1958 fatal stabbing of Turner’s mob-connected bedroom thug, Johnny Stompanato, by her 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane.

Even if her daughter hadn’t stuck a knife in the boyfriend, it’s unlikely that Turner, then 38, would have developed into much of an actress. Unquestionably she could hold the screen during her delectable physical prime, as she does in the tawdry 1946 noir “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” She plays a slutty goddess in that film, a poisonous honey pot, and all she has to do is look lovely and sexually available, which she does by gently parting her pretty plump lips. Part of what makes this work so well here and in her best movies — “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Imitation of Life,” in which she stayed close to personal type by playing famous actresses — is that you don’t believe a word she says. She’s a beautiful lie.

Turner received an enormous amount of help, of course, from her directors, producers, cinematographers, production designers, costume designers, lighting crews, editors, publicity photographers and fleets of other studio employees whose jobs were to polish and package the stars and sell them to the hungry, movie-crazy audience. Basinger gives approving nods to Turner’s greatest directors, Vincente Minnelli (“The Bad and the Beautiful”) and Douglas Sirk (“Imitation of Life”). But she doesn’t explain how each effectively exploited Turner’s artificiality and lack of naturalness (and lack of acting talent) to reveal her glamorous armature as nothing more than a mask, a construction. Instead, she offers up plot summaries and banalities: Turner “understands the role, and she makes it hers.”

Basinger, the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, can be a sharp, funny writer, and she’s particularly on point when it comes to the ridiculous clothes that sometimes swaddled stars of the golden age. (In one film, Turner wears so much fur “she’s practically an ecological disaster.”) She has an easygoing, even chatty prose style, willfully different from much contemporary academic writing and clearly aimed at a general rather than a specialized readership. The footnotes are conversational, not reference-oriented; the slim bibliography leans heavily on fan magazines and biographies; and many of the quotations are unattributed or loosely credited. (Only after I looked up one vaguely familiar description attributed to The New York Times did I realize I had written it.)

You can understand Basinger’s wanting to write a serious but accessible Hollywood history. But while you don’t need to write like an academic to be a good scholar, you also don’t need to resort to anti-intellectualism to affirm your populist cred. Basinger does herself no favors when she dismisses, in a footnote, those unnamed theorists and critics who write about the way Hollywood cinema constructs desire through “the male gaze.” Basinger may be on to something when she writes, “Not much has been said about how men underwent the same treatment,” but she drops this fascinating subject before she gets into it, leaving analysis and theory behind in favor of plot descriptions and recycled biographical details.

And Basinger has been done no favors by her editors. The book is repetitive, heavily padded and poorly organized, with entire sections that read like dribbling afterthoughts: “Bonuses: Oddities and Character Actors,” “The Fellas,” “Zanies,” “Exotics,” “Maria Montez,” “Abbott and Costello,” “Dogs and Kids.” The editors may not know that Hollywood High School still exists (Basinger apparently doesn’t), but they should have noticed that she mentions there are 14 Andy Hardy movies on one page, only to correct that tally to 16 several pages later. Though there’s no denying that Tyrone Power was a good-looking man, by the 16th time Basinger calls him “beautiful,” it’s hard not to think her moony appreciation and some lousy copy-editing have gotten the better of her criticism.

She’s more persuasive about Power when she sticks to the evidence offered by his actual films, by the number of his close-ups and the roles he was asked to play. He was built up quickly by 20th Century Fox, which put him in costume pictures, musicals and romantic comedies despite his desire to be a “serious actor.” (Evidently, being the brand-name attraction in movies was not serious enough.) Basinger writes that Power’s aspirations toward gravitas were thwarted by the very machine that had made him, which led to what she sees as his most enduring role: the long-suffering hero in that tragedy titled “The Heartless Movie Studio” (“He had signed on with a system that was driven by money”).

Studio contract stars like Power had it tough, to a degree. When you signed with a studio, you threw away your autonomy and more. As Clark Gable said, “I am paid not to think.” Though some remained freelance, many stars signed long-term contracts that were put up for regular review, though only at the studio’s discretion. Bette Davis fought bitterly with Warner Brothers for years, believing that her home studio was not giving her the roles she deserved. She eventually earned more, but she also had to swallow a five-year contract that stated she had to “perform and render her services whenever, wherever and as often as the producer requested.” If the studio wanted her to stand on her head, she did.

The star system was a cage, but it was a gold-plated, ermine-lined cage, and it provided material comforts and existential relief that most mortals can only dream of (those dreams are one reason movies even exist). This isn’t to deny it can be hard to clock 14 hours a day, six days a week, as stars were sometimes obliged to do. (Davis sought to make a maximum of four movies a year.) Then as now, stardom is a job. The movies invariably try to hide the work that goes into turning a star and the film itself into seamless illusions, which is why Bette Davis was a real Hollywood rebel. She tore out the seams.

Davis’s struggle against Warners wasn’t that of the creative soul aching to be free; it was a fight against an oligarchic industry. That isn’t sexy, but it’s truer than the heroic narratives that fill “The Star Machine,” exemplified by chapter titles like “Disillusionment” (Tyrone Power), “Disobedience” (Lana Turner and Errol Flynn) and “Defection” (Deanna Durbin and Jean Arthur). These stories are diverting enough as generalized biographical and creative portraits, but they say little about the historic construction of stardom and not enough about the machine’s coldblooded operational reality. The story Basinger doesn’t tell is of a business in which an executive like Louis B. Mayer seemed to successfully encourage an employee like Lana Turner to get an abortion because having a child wasn’t good for her image as, in his words, “a love goddess.”

There’s something touching about Basinger’s attempt to restore agency to the men and women who, as she repeatedly reminds us, were forced to surrender their individuality at the studio gate. Certainly this approach is far more expedient (and salable) than academic notions of stars as semiotic signs or sites of contradiction. The star system is more romantic and easier to grasp than the comparatively bland, faceless studio system, with its factory practices, bottom-line imperatives and ruthless genius. Stars are perfect narrative characters, ready-made dashing and lovely leads. But stardom can’t be reduced to personal will, beauty, charisma, oomph or guts, to being photogenic, sleeping with the bosses or having that voodoo magic we call “It,” even if all these can come into play when a Lucille Le Sueur is transformed into Joan Crawford.

Today’s stars, Basinger writes, become famous for the roles they play, while “yesterday’s stars became famous because fans believed they were that role and just ‘playing themselves.’ ” It’s unclear who these fans are (Basinger never identifies them), but it’s hard to buy the suggestion that, say, 1940s audiences were somehow more easily gulled by Hollywood’s dissembling machine than are modern audiences. Stars necessarily inhabit several roles when they step before the camera — the imagined real self, the manufactured icon, the scripted part — and they wear their masks simultaneously. These multivalent identities are always visible, and always were, as nicely shown by the magazine writer who in 1910 wrote of and perhaps to Mary Pickford, “We are glad to see you, little Mary, no matter what part you are playing.”

Stars of the past evoke great feeling in those who write about them, including Basinger. We look at these glamorous specters, these haunting beauties, and wonder what went wrong (why don’t they make them like they used to?) or yearn for plausible alternatives (George Clooney is the new Cary Grant). In doing so we turn our beloved stars into death masks, reminders of a film world long gone. And we turn the movies into a ghost town. This kind of embalming practice is a dangerous habit. It obscures the reality of the past, the uglier truths of the dream factory — including the institutional racism that prevented black performers from suffering the same rarefied anguish as Tyrone Power — and blinds us to cinema’s present.

The nostalgia for old Hollywood often seems to point to something beyond a desire for the comforting regularity of the well-run factories, for those assembly-line films that satisfy just by virtue of their refined craft, perfect lighting, unpalsied camerawork, spatial coherence and unrushed rhythms. From the outside, the old studio system seemed to run effortlessly, its gears slicked and slippery smooth, but in truth it was always plagued by cycles of uncertainty and retrenchment; it was a perpetual mutating machine. The standard line on Hollywood is that though the studios still exist, the system no longer does, having long been dismantled. But while the machine has been disassembled, it exists nonetheless; now the parts simply lie scattered across the factory floor. Movies are still made — stars too.

What has changed over the years is our sense of ourselves as dramatis personae. We no longer seem content to play second banana to our official stars. And why not? In the panoptic culture we have created, in which cameras run from every possible angle day and night, we are always all enjoying our 15 minutes. Once, we created gods and goddesses in our image, idealized visions of our most perfect selves. In time, our gods started to descend, mumbling with Method-actor sincerity about how they wanted to join us on Earth. We welcomed them initially, but after a while we grew to resent them and hold them in contempt. We still love them, but we hate them too, because now the mirror image they hold up is irreparably cracked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/bo.../Dargis-t.html





Quiet Year for Tech on Capitol Hill
Anne Broache

Democrats in 2007 controlled both chambers of Congress for the first time in a dozen years--and with the power shift came a scattershot year for technology policy.

Sweeping initiatives like elevating minimum wage and lowering prescription drug prices, not technology topics, took the forefront. What that meant was a year of largely unfinished business--or, less charitably, unfulfilled promises--for high-tech companies.

Attempts at overhauling the U.S. patent system proceeded further than ever before, with the House of Representatives backing the most significant revamp in decades. But the Senate hasn't acted yet amid lingering battles over the bill's approach, and now a vote isn't expected until 2008.

Another longtime Silicon Valley priority--bumping up the number of H-1B temporary worker visas and green cards for skilled foreign workers--once again appears destined to fail, already a casualty of a divisive immigration bill that perished earlier this year.

Post-election plans from the Democrats to require paper trails of all oft-maligned electronic voting machines used in federal races also appear to have collapsed, thanks to concerns from state election officials about the cost of implementing such a plan.

It was also a quiet year for an issue that so dominated the political debate in 2006: Net neutrality. Just after Congress opened its new session, two senators reintroduced a 2006 bill that would generally prohibit broadband operators from prioritizing Internet content, and House Democratic leaders predicted it would top their tech agenda this year. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. But no action has been taken on the Senate proposal; no counterpart bill has emerged in the House as of mid-December; and no congressional hearings were held, although thousands of comments on the topic poured into the Federal Communications Commission during the summer.

Still, the debate doesn't appear to be over yet: Sen. Barack Obama has pledged to enact Net neutrality laws if elected president, and reports this fall about Comcast's filtering of BitTorrent file-sharing traffic have spurred new calls for such legislation from the Hill. Rep. Edward Markey has said he plans to reintroduce a similar version of last year's House proposal, with hearings to follow, when politicians reconvene in January.

As usual, Congress did a lot of spouting off about how to manage perceived Internet perils. Hot topics this time around included foreign cybersecurity threats to U.S. government systems, terrorist cells flourishing on the Web, inadvertent file sharing through peer-to-peer networks, and sexual predators ensnaring unsuspecting youth through online social sites. And for a third time, the House passed not just one, but two, different bills aimed at deterring spyware.

Digital copyright-related moves were minimal, although the entertainment industry saw some action on its frustration with piracy on university networks, with a House panel backing a bill that would require schools to take a series of new antipiracy steps.

The year wouldn't have been complete without calling a number of technology-related companies onto the hearing-room carpet. Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin was forced to defend his company's proposed buyout of XM Satellite Radio; Google and Microsoft sparred over the search giant's plans to swallow up DoubleClick; and Yahoo executives, including CEO Jerry Yang, endured a verbal lashing from members of a House panel over the company's dealings in China.

Arguably the biggest victory scored by the high-tech industry--although some would say it didn't go far enough--was Congress' last-minute renewal of an expiring ban on Internet access taxes. After some jockeying over the length and breadth of the law, both chambers agreed to extend the moratorium until 2014.

Congress also managed to get President Bush to sign off on some $34 billion's worth of new government-sponsored research, education, and teacher-training programs in the science and tech arena over the next few years. There's no guarantee, however, that Bush will approve the follow-up spending bills that would actually bankroll those programs--and, in fact, he's already warned politicians on the hefty price tag and potentially "duplicative" efforts.
http://www.news.com/Year-in-review-Q...0-20&subj=news





John Edwards Not Playing Rupert Murdoch's Monopoly
KingOneEye

John Edwards isn't shy about letting Rupert Murdoch know how he feels. When asked a question about media consolidation at a recent campaign stop, Edwards said:

"I am not particularly interested in seeing Rupert Murdoch own every newspaper in America."

Nicely done, John. This answer responds directly to the heart of the question and points an incriminating finger at the industry's worst offender.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.
KingOneEye's diary :: ::

Edwards continues to solidify his position as the candidate most committed to media reform and supportive of efforts to rollback consolidation. He has spoken out on many occasions on the need for independence and diversity in the press and he has been a leading voice of opposition to the FCC's policy of weakening regulations on ownership caps. He was also the first candidate to refuse to participate in Fox News-sponsored primary debates.

But every time Edwards takes a principled stand, the pundidiots can't help but crack-wise at Edwards expense. In the item linked above, James Pindell of the Boston Globe follows the Edwards quote with this bit of irrelevancy:

"It should be noted that Edwards received nearly $800,000 in a book contract from one of Murdoch's companies, HarperCollins."

Why, pray tell, should that be noted? It is not a political contribution or evidence of electoral support. It is a payment for publishing rights to an author from a book publisher. It is the free market at work. And if anything is notable about it, it is that Edwards will act on his principles even if it is contrary to the interests of corporations who lay out big bucks to do business with him. In other words, they can't buy him.

This isn't the first time this canard has been raised. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post felt it necessary to note the same book deal after Edwards called on his opponents to refuse donations from Murdoch. Never mind that he was not admonishing them to refrain from doing business with News Corp., just from accepting the sort political funding that can be seen as buying influence. And lest anyone think that the book advance in itself has purchased any slice of Edwards' soul, just look to these statements for proof that his independence and integrity is in tact:

"High levels of media consolidation threaten free speech, they tilt the public dialogue towards corporate priorities and away from local concerns, and they make it increasingly difficult for women and people of color to own meaningful stakes in our nation’s media."

"It's time for all Democrats, including those running for president, to stand up and speak out against this [News Corp./Dow Jones] merger and other forms of media consolidation."

"The basis of a strong democracy begins and ends with a strong, unbiased and fair media — all qualities which are pretty hard to subscribe to Fox News and News Corp."

Contrast that with Hillary Clinton's qualifying remarks following a rather commendable statement against media consolidation:

"I'm not saying anything against any company in particular. I just want to see more competition, especially in the same markets."

While Clinton takes pains to soften the blow against her Foxic benefactor, Edwards comes right out and says what he thinks. For this he is often tagged in the press as a phony. That is the same characterization they make of him when he advocates for the poor - something the media apparently believes rich folks should never do. And for his trouble he is ganged up on by sanctimonious pundits that would rather point a finger at targets of their imagined hypocrisy than left a finger to help those less fortunate.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20.../35/222/426936





Regulating the Japanese Cyberspace, One Step at a Time
Shioyama

With little fanfare from local or foreign media, the Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication and information exchange within its national borders. In a series of little-publicized meetings attracting minimal mainstream coverage, two distinct government ministries, that of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and that of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing.

Public comments about Internet content regulation (from blogger tokyodo-2005)

On December 6th, in a final report compiled by a study group under the Somusho following up on an interim report drafted earlier this year, the government set down plans to regulate online content through unification of existing laws such as the Broadcast Law and the Telecommunications Business Law [1,2]. The planned regulation targets all web content, including online variants of traditional media such as newspaper articles and television broadcasting, while additionally going as far as to cover user-generated content such as blogs and webpages under the vaguely-defined category of "open communication" [3,4,5,6].

Only days following the release of the Dec. 6 report, again through the Somusho, the government on Dec. 10th requested that mobile phone companies NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank and Willcom commence strictly filtering web content to mobile phones for users under the age of 18 [7,8,9,10]. The move to filter content in this area comes at a time when the Japanese market has become saturated with mobile phones, a growing proportion of which are held by high-school and even grade-school students. The proposed policy, in part responding to fears and anxieties expressed by parents about online dating sites, is broad in scope and reportedly covers all websites with forum, chat, and social networking functionality.

Regulation of a third area of online communication, that of online file sharing, was meanwhile advanced through the Private Music and Video Recording Subcommittee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs (under the Mobukagakusho) in a meeting held on December 18th. Authorities and organizations pushed in this case for a ban on the download of copyrighted content for personal use, a category of file transfer previously permitted under Article 30 of Japan's Copyright Law [11,12,13,14].

The final report on Internet regulation released on December 6th, and the meetings about mobile phone regulation and copyright policy held on December 10th and 18th, collectively touch on nearly every aspect of modern network communication in Japan and together indicate a significant shift in government policy vis-a-vis the Japanese cyberspace. While granted little attention in mainstream media, a series of Japanese-language articles, government reports, and blog entries on the topic together sketch basic details of the proposed regulations. The main points of these documents are summarized below, with references to resources offering more in-depth discussion included at the end of the article.

Step 1: Web content

Plans for regulation of web content are summarized in two primary documents drawn up by the “Study group on the legal system for communications and broadcasting” under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and headed by Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University Horibe Masao. The first document is an interim report released on June 19th, setting down basic guidelines for regulating web content through application of the existing Broadcast Law to the sphere of the Internet [1,4]. Incorporating the views of a reported 276 comments from 222 individuals and 56 organizations collected shortly after publication of the interim report, the final report, made public on December 6th, sets down steps to move ahead and submit a bill on the proposed regulations to the regular diet session in 2010 [2,5,6].

One of the key points of both reports is their emphasis on the blurring line between "information transmission" and "broadcasting", a distinction that becomes less and less meaningful as content-transfer shifts from the realm of traditional media to that of ubiquitous digital communication (so-called "all over IP"). The reports deal with this difficult problem in part through the creation of a new category, that of "open communication", broadly described as covering "communication content having openness [kouzensei/公然性] such as homepages and so on" [3].

The term "open communication" may itself be vaguely defined, but implications of the new category are in fact very real. While previously largely excluded from government regulation thanks to the limited scope of existing broadcast legislation, all online content, with the exception only of private messages used only between specific persons (i.e. email, etc.), will henceforth be targeted under the proposed policy. Notably included in this category are hugely popular bulletin board systems such as 2channel as well as personal blogs and webpages.

Online content judged to be "harmful" according to standards set down by an independent body (specifics of which are unclear) will be subject to law-enforced removal and/or correction. While the interim report did not specify whether penal regulations would be enforced against policy violations, the final report, in response to concerns voiced in public comments over the summer, moved toward excluding such regulations for the time being at least. Nonetheless, the final report also notes that, if there is a need for it, the "adequacy of punishment should also be investigated" (page 22 of the final report) [5]. It thus remains an open question as to whether, if eventually enacted, penal regulations will be applied and, if so, what form they will take.

Step 2: Mobile phone access

As the number of elementary and high-school students with mobile phones in Japan has ballooned to over 7.5 million, the push for protecting young users from potentially dangerous content, such as online dating services and so-called "mobile filth", has gained momentum in recent years within Japan. The government responded to such concerns on December 10th by demanding that mobile carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank, and Willcom implement filtering on all mobile phones issued to users under the age of 18. While optional filtering currently exists and can be implemented at the request of the mobile phone owner, few users make use of or even know of this service. The proposed regulation would heavily strengthen earlier policy by making filtering on mobile phones the default setting for minors; only in the case of an explicit request by the user's parent or guardian could such filtering be turned off by the carrier [7,8,9].

According to the new policy proposal, sites would be categorized on two lists, a "blacklist" of sites that would be blocked from mobile access by minors and a "whitelist" of sites that would not. The categorization of sites into each list will reportedly be carried out together with carriers through investigations involving each company targeted. The Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) of Japan is indicating that the new policy will be enforced with respect to new users by the end of 2007 and applied to existing users by the summer of 2008 [8].

While it is not yet entirely clear what content will be covered by the new policy, a look at existing filtering services promoted by NTT Docomo reveals the definition of "harmful" content to be very broad indeed. As noted by a number of Japanese bloggers, notably social activist Sakiyama Nobuo, current optional filtering services offered on NTT Docomo phones include categories as sweeping as "lifestyles" (gay, lesbian, etc.), "religion", and "political activity/party", as well as a category termed "communication" covering web forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and social networking services. The breadth of this last category in particular threatens to bankrupt youth-oriented services such as "Mobage", a social networking and gaming site for mobile phones, half of whose users are under the age of 18.

Step 3: File sharing

While the cases of Internet regulation and mobile phone filtering primarily revolve on concerns over content, the third government policy proposal advanced this month in the domain of online communication targets the area of content transfer. On December 18th, the Private Music and Video Recording Subcommittee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, an advisory body under the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (Monbukagakusho), held a meeting to re-examine Article 30 of Japan's Copyright Law. With respect to online file transfer, the existing law currently bans uploading of copyrighted material onto public websites, while permitting copies for personal use only [12,13,14].

At the December 18th meeting, Kawase Makoto, general manager of the agency's Copyrighted Work Circulation Promotion Department, remarked that revising article 30 was "inevitable" [11]. Kawase's comment came less than a month after the same agency received more than 7500 public comments on the topic of the plans, the majority of which reportedly opposed any change to the current Copyright Law [15,16,17]. Haeno Hidetoshi , senior director of the Recording Industry Association of Japan, meanwhile described the state of the recording industry as "spine-chilling", arguing that if illegal file sharing was not stopped the business would hit a dead end [12].

IT and music journalist Tsuda Daisuke on the other hand argued that he did not see any need for legal revision, observing that if users uploading copyrighted files are controlled, then there should be no need to outlaw illegal downloads or file sharing. In an earlier Nov. 28th meeting, addressing the divide in opions among public comments about the regulation, Tsuda noted that results evidenced a "deep gap" between the views of copyright holders and those of consumers. He further warned that to ignore the views of those opposing revision, and to not attempt to understand their arguments, would be to invite further deepening of this gap [16,17].

One of the key issues raised by opponents of the proposed revisions regards the murky definition of "download" itself. Critics argue that a user cannot determine whether a file is illegal before they actually download it, and even once the file is downloaded, such identification remains difficult. Moreover, it is difficult for users to judge whether, at the time of downloading a file, the site from which the file was downloaded was itself illegal or not. While proponents of the legal revision have argued in favour of a "mark" to identify approved sites, this approach brings with it many new problems; most critically, it would mean that every site not bearing the approved mark would be considered "illegal", a blanket policy many consider extreme [17].

The murkiness of the definition of "illegal" file sharing also manifests itself in the difficulties legislators will potentially face in distinguishing between "downloading" and "streaming", difficulties which some argue may ultimately lead to the regulation of sites such as YouTube and Nico Nico Douga. As there is no fundamental difference between downloaded content and streamed content, given that in both cases content is copied locally before viewing, commenters expressed anxiety about how judges with no specialized knowledge will handle this murky middle ground.

The future of "open"

The various problems evident in the regulation policies described above are compacted by the fact that there is a lack of coordination between branches of government, the first two proposals being handled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications while the last is being handled by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Without a coordinated approach to regulation, legal conflicts inherent in the switch to "all over IP" are guaranteed to arise.

Even with such a coordinated approach, however, policy remains ill-defined and extremely vague. The future of online communication within Japan hinges on attracting attention to these issues and on drawing as wide a range of voices into the debate as possible. While current activism by groups within Japan such as the recently formed Movements for Internet Active Users (MIAU) have made important first steps in this direction, international attention is needed to coordinate support and confront the many pressing issues facing open communication in the Japanese cyberspace.
http://gyaku.jp/en/index.php?cmd=contentview&pid=000320





Dog Owner Takes On China's Web Censors

Man sues after government removes posting critical of canine height restriction
Edward Cody

Outraged that his Internet posting about dogs had been banned, Chen Yuhua wrote to the mayor of Beijing. No answer. He wrote to the city council. Still no answer. When all else failed, he consulted a lawyer, studied China's civil code and marched into court with a lawsuit.

"I was very careful to follow the correct procedure," Chen said, pointing at the official legal manual on his dining room table.

Chen's suit, filed Nov. 26, was a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China's 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers. It was a rare -- perhaps quixotic -- gesture in a country where the power of the Public Security Bureau and Propaganda Department to regulate speech is usually considered absolute, enforced with the threat of jail time.

But it was also a sign that, beneath the ever more prosperous surface, some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system in which anonymous bureaucrats decide what movies, plays, novels or social commentaries are safe enough for public consumption.

Chen's posting was an attack on the Beijing municipal government's regulations barring any dog over 14 inches high and restricting each family to only one dog. These rules are unreasonable and are enforced arbitrarily, he contended in his essay.

"It is so funny that people may have a 35-centimeter-high dog but may not have a 36-centimeter-high dog," he said.

Criticism of government policies and nonconformist political views, however, are not taken lightly in China.

More than 30,000 censors are employed to monitor the Internet alone, specialists estimate. They are equipped with advanced technology to block sensitive sites and sound the alarm when words deemed off-color or politically incorrect show up on the screen. The system, part of a vast apparatus extending to newspapers, theaters and art galleries, remains part of life for most people in a China otherwise modernizing at breakneck speed.

As far as is known, Chen's filing, at the Xicheng District Court in central Beijing, marked only the second time that a Chinese citizen has gone to court over party censorship. The first was a suit filed in Beijing last August by a lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, who was upset that his blog denouncing corruption was taken down on orders from the censor.

"I never violated the law," said Liu, whose case is on appeal. "All the cases I talked about had already been reported. I just wanted to express my opinion on them. A blog should be a platform for people to express their ideas. It is not right to make a judgment on someone's blog if it does not violate the law."

Chen, 65, a retired Commerce Ministry official and U.N. Development Program accountant, said he sued because he believes that, under China's law and the Communist Party's declared policies, the censors had no right to scratch his musings off the Internet. To back up his contention, he cited President Hu Jintao demanding at the party's 17th National Congress in October that China follow the path of "scientific development" and make government more transparent.

"What they do is not scientific," Chen said, denouncing Beijing's rules restricting dog ownership.

Chen has been fighting for the right to own the dog of his choice since 2003, when two policemen came to his door and said he had no right to keep his two-foot-high hound with floppy ears and an urge to run. Since then, the dog, a male, has mated with a neighbor's dog and produced a second big hound, which also has become part of Chen's apartment in the distant suburbs of northern Beijing. Officially, both dogs are illegal, he said, but he keeps a low profile and local police are less than zealous in enforcing the rules.

The posting, before it was deleted, had been put up on Chinapet.com, a site set up by Chen and other dog owners struggling to loosen official restrictions on their pets. When it was taken down, Chen in effect sued his own Web site. Although Chen knew the Internet host was acting on orders from a "black hand," or censor, legally his target had to be the host organization that physically knocked him off, he said.

"They explained. It's not their fault, and I understand that," he said.

After Chen filed his suit, the court had seven days to respond according to Chinese legal procedure. But seven days later, it replied it would need more time. On Dec. 14, Chen recalled, he was told by clerks that the district court, after referring to higher-level judges for advice, had decided to reject the case.

"They said, 'You know what things are like in China,' " Chen recalled in an interview. "They said I should understand, since I was a former government official. They said this is a sensitive matter. But for me, that is not sufficient."

The next step, Chen said, is an appeal to the Supreme Court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122501150.html





Google Thinks It Knows Your Friends
Miguel Helft

“Reader and Talk are Friends!”

That’s how Google announced earlier this month on one of its corporate blogs the expansion of the sharing features in Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs. The feature didn’t win Google a lot of friends.

Several bloggers and users have sounded the alarm about this, with some justification.

Here’s what the brouhaha is about. For some time now, Google has allowed you to share with your friends blog posts you view using Reader. You got to select the items you wanted shared and you got to choose your friends. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. (Technically, your shared items were on a public Web page, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, if those people could figure out how to find that page.)

Now Google is assuming that anyone you have had a conversation with using Google Talk is a friend, so they’ll automatically be able to see and read what you’ve read and marked as shared. You can still manage your friends list and explicitly tell Reader not to share with some of your newfound friends. Of course, you’d have to know that Google had started sharing your items more widely, which many people apparently did not, even though Google alerted them through a pop-up window.

I checked with a few of my tech-savvy colleagues whose shared items I was suddenly able to see and they had no idea that they were sharing them with me.

It seems that the problem is the following: Google is desperately trying to become a force in social networking. It wants to make many of its applications and services more “social,” to, for example, tell your friends what you are reading with Reader or cataloging with MyMaps. But unlike Facebook and other social networks, it doesn’t really know who your friends are. So it is creating a list of friends for you, assuming that anyone you Google Talked with is your friend.

Why Google Talk friends and not, say, those people who you’ve e-mailed with or have in your address book? “With Google Talk, the parties have mutually consented to chatting with each other,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “This type of mutual consent is not required for Gmail interactions.” In other words, they didn’t want to turn everyone you’ve e-mailed (or spammed) into your friend. Fair enough.

But Google Talking with someone and befriending them is not the same thing. Consider how two of my editors use Google Reader’s sharing feature: To alert another colleague about articles they believe deserve to be noted on the New York Times Web site. Now one of my editors has conversed with Google Talk with former colleagues who now work at competing publications. Do they really want those former colleagues to know what they think makes for interesting reading? Clearly not.

Google could have avoided a lot of flak allowing you to opt-in to, rather than opt-out of, the expansion of your Reader friends list. But it didn’t.

If Google wants to come up with its own social graph, the connections between people that are behind the power of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, it’s going to have to work a little harder — or risk alienating a growing number of users.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...nds/index.html





Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool
Marci Alboher

TO its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.

But while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.

But some companies are suited to blogging. The most obvious candidates, said Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of “The Everything Blogging Book” (Adams Media 2006), are consultants. “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.”

For other companies, Ms. Risdahl said, it can be challenging to find a legitimate reason for blogging unless the sector served has a steep learning curve (like wine), a lifestyle associated with certain products or service (like camping gear or pet products) or a social mission (like improving the environment or donating a portion of revenues to charity).

Even in those niches, Ms. Risdahl said that companies need to focus on a strategy for their blogging and figure out if they have enough to say.

“As a consultant, blogging clearly helps you get hired,” she said. “If you are selling a product, you have to be much more creative because people don’t want to read a commercial.”

Sarah E. Endline, chief executive of sweetriot, which makes organic chocolate snacks, said she started blogging a few months before starting her company in 2005 to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the business.

The kind of transparency is a popular reason for blogging, particularly for companies that want to be identified as mission-oriented or socially responsible.

A typical post on sweetriot’s blog described the arrival of the company’s first cacao shipment from South America and how Ms. Endline met the truck on Labor Day weekend after it passed through customs at Kennedy International Airport.

She wrote about climbing aboard to inspect the goods and then praised the owner of Gateway trucking company, who helped her sort through the boxes so that she could examine the product.

“At sweetriot we don’t use the word ‘vendors’ as we believe it is about partnership with anyone with whom we work,” she wrote.

For companies in the technology sector, having a blog is pretty much expected. Still, Tony Stubblebine, the founder and chief executive of CrowdVine, a company that builds social networks for conferences, said that one of his main reasons for blogging is to show that his business model is different from the typical technology start-up.

“Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on venture capital funding and having an exit strategy,” he said. “Because I’m not focused on raising money, I can focus on my customers, since they aren’t a stepping stone to some acquisition or I.P.O.”

He added: “I’m trying to create a community of help for small Internet businesses like mine. My blogging philosophy is like the open source model in software. It’s sort of a hippie concept. If I can help other people, it’s personally rewarding. And those people will likely pay it back in some ways.”

Mr. Stubblebine said he gets new customers largely by word of mouth, and he uses the blog as a way to share news with friends and people who wield influence in his industry as well as a reference check for customers. “That’s why I cover the growth of the company.”

David Harlow, a lawyer and health care consultant in Boston, said he started his blog, HealthBlawg, as a way of marketing himself after he left a large law firm and opened his own practice. Besides, he said, blogging was easy to get started and the technology was straightforward.

Now, after about two years of blogging, Mr. Harlow said he was pleased with the results. He gets about 200 to 300 visits a day, he said. He has also become a source for publications looking for commentary on regulatory issues in the health care field and has even gained a few clients because of the blog. In addition, he has formed relationships with other legal bloggers (who call themselves blawgers) and consultants around the country.

Many small business bloggers achieve their goals even if only a handful or a few hundred people read their blogs. But some companies aim much higher.

Denali Flavors, an ice cream manufacturing company in Michigan that licenses its flavors to other stores, for example, is a small company with a limited ad budget. It decided to use a series of blogs to build brand awareness for Moose Tracks, its most popular flavor of ice cream.

John Nardini, who runs marketing for Denali and is responsible for the company’s blogs, said he has experimented over the last few years with different types of blogs to see which would generate the most traffic. One blog followed a Denali-sponsored bicycle team that was raising money for an orphanage in Latvia. Another tracked the whereabouts of a Moose character that would show up at famous landmarks around the country.

But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday.

He uses free tools like Google Analytics and Site Meter to understand how people are finding the site and which key words are working. Free Money Finance receives about 4,500 visits a day and each visitor views about two pages, which means they see two ads for Moose Tracks ice cream. The effort costs about $400 a year, excluding Mr. Nardini’s salary.

The site also accepts advertising, which earns the company about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, all of which Denali donates to charity. “We run ads because it legitimizes the site; it’s really not about the money,” Mr. Nardini said. “We’re hoping people will go into Pathmark, see the Moose Tracks logo and say, ‘Hey, I just saw that on the Web site I go to every day.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/bu...ss/27sbiz.html





Casual Blogging Not Just Lunch Money Now
Candice Choi

Zach Brooks pocketed $1,000 this month blogging about the cheap lunches he discovers around midtown Manhattan ($10 or less, preferably greasy, and if he's lucky, served from a truck).

The site, Midtownlunch.com, is just a year and a half old and gets only about 2,000 readers daily, but it's already earning him enough each month for a weekend trip to the Caribbean -- or in his case, more fat-filled culinary escapades in the city.

In the vast and varied world of blogging, Brooks is far from alone.

It's no longer unusual for blogs with just a couple thousand daily readers to earn nearly as many dollars a month. Helping fill the pockets of such bloggers are programs like Google's AdSense and many others that let individuals -- not just major publications -- tap into the rapidly growing pot of advertising dollars with a click of the mouse.

In 2006, advertisers spent $16.9 billion online, up steadily each year from $6 billion in 2002, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. In the first half of 2007, online advertising reached nearly $10 billion, a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006.

Little technical skill is needed to publish a well-read blog, meaning just about anyone with something worthwhile to say can find an audience, said Kim Malone Scott, director of online sales and operations for Google's AdSense. That's attracted greater readership and advertising dollars, she said.

According to 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, said they read blogs, up from 27 percent in 2004, or 32 million.

That doesn't mean bloggers are suddenly flush with money. For every blogger earning a decent side income like Brooks, countless others will never earn a cent.

But with the right mix of compelling content and exposure, a blog can draw a dedicated following, making advertising a low-hanging fruit.

''This is really a continuation of how the Web in general has enabled smaller businesses and individuals to compete if not at a level playing field, at least a more equitable level,'' said David Hallerman, a senior analyst with the research group eMarketer.

Google's AdSense is an automated program that places targeted advertising on sites big and small. Other programs such as PayPerPost are just as user friendly; bloggers sign up and advertisers cherry pick where they want to place ads based on categories and the number of impressions a site captures.

Getting paid might even help validate what may otherwise seem like a silly or obscure obsession.

For Samuel Chi, BCSGuru.com started as a way to demystify the convoluted universe of college football rankings for fellow fans.

Chi, a former sports journalist with training in statistics, posts his calculations every Saturday night during the season before official results are released on Sunday. Between Saturday night and Monday, about 4,000 sports fans log on daily to check out the ''guru's'' forecast.

This season, Chi made about $8,000 total from the blog; ticket brokers contacted him directly after word about his site got out. Google's AdSense brought in another couple hundred dollars for Chi, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in Amelia Island, Fla.

Neither Chi or Brooks had to do much to gain a loyal readership; when it comes to such rarefied interests, word about a good site can spread rapidly in online communities.

''All it takes is a couple of mentions (on other sites) and hundreds of people can be directed to your site,'' Chi said.

BlogAds, which helps advertisers target relevant blogs for a commission, prices ads by the week, with sites tiered by the amount of traffic they get.

When the company started in 2002, founder Henry Copeland said it was mainly small advertisers selling T-shirts or promoting bands. Now he said ''there's no big brand that doesn't advertise on everyday blogs.''

About a third of BlogAds' 1,500 sites earn between $200 and $2,000 a month, Copeland said. Those sites get anywhere from 3,000 to 50,000 daily impressions.

Google's Malone Scott said access to advertising online is more democratic, since an ad click from a tiny site is just as valuable as a click from a site with a million readers.

Some advertisers have even found better response from smaller sites with more passionate, engaged audiences.

For ticket broker RazorGator, advertising on blogs like BCSGuru.com means reaching a very specific audience.

''We have found that more and more sports fans are turning to blogs and smaller fan sites to get their information so as an advertiser it makes sense to follow your audience,'' spokeswoman Toni Lamb wrote in an email.

The broker has advertised on smaller blogs like Chi's for the past two years; Lamb would not specify how many blogs it currently advertises on.

Despite rapidly rising advertising dollars online, blogs usually don't start out as a way to make money -- they're more a means of speaking to an audience of like-minded individuals. MidtownLunch.com started as a way for Brooks to indulge his food obsession, but he soon realized his quest struck a note with a legion of office workers.

Taking that extra step to get advertising was a no-brainer. Companies like Random House's Broadway Books have posted ads for food books on the site, along with the makers of independent films seeking a New York City audience.

Brooks only spends two hours at most each day on MidtownLunch.com. But the blog affects his life in other ways. Like Chi, he's met close friends through his site. He has also scored freelance writing assignments, and, above all, the site has given his endless fascination with greasy foods a sense of validation.
http://www.physorg.com/news117895164.html





Girl Power Is in Full Force Online
Alex Mindlin

Teenage girls are more likely than boys to have engaged in creating most kinds of online content, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are more likely to have created a blog, more likely to have joined a social-networking site like Facebook and more likely to post pictures online. The study used telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 935 Americans age 12 to 17.

Surprisingly, teenagers from single-parent households are more likely to have started a blog than teenagers living with married parents; those in lower-income houses are more likely to blog than those in families with higher-income brackets.

The Pew study also charts the decline in teenagers’ use of e-mail, which has been largely supplanted by cellphone text messaging and by the chat features of social-networking sites. Only 14 percent of the teenagers reported sending e-mail messages to their friends every day.

“E-mail is not the primary way you talk to your friends,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the report. “It’s used to talk with groups, if you’re planning something complicated and you need to send long, letterlike messages.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/te...y/24drill.html





A Babe Scorned

All I Want for Christmas is for FOX to Stop Using My Copyrighted Photos in Their NFL Broadcast Without Asking My Permission
Tracey Gaughran-Perez

Is that so much to ask? Seriously?

SO. Here's what happened.

Earlier this afternoon I was in our kitchen doing dishes, minding my own business. Jamie was in the living room, watching some NFL football.

It was quiet.

Too quiet.

Suddenly, Jamie called to me from the other room, claiming I had to come see something. When I entered the room, he unpaused the broadcast he had been watching (thanks, TiVo!), and immediately I saw the image of an adorable pug, dressed in festive Santa gear, pop up at the bottom of the screen beside FOX's Happy Holiday's ticker. I vaguely remember Jamie saying something to me to the effect of, “Gee, that dog looks a lot like Truman, doesn't it?”, but I couldn't really process something as complex and nuanced as language at that moment, what with MY FREAKIN' HEAD EXPLODING ALL OVER THE PLACE. Because that adorable pug? That pug didn't just look a lot like Truman. THAT ADORABLE PUG *WAS* TRUMAN.

After making Jamie pause and rewind and unpause and re-rewind the incriminating footage several times, I was convinced beyond a shadow of doubt. FOX had gotten hold of one of my photos of Truman -- specifically one in a series I'd recently posted here with him wearing a Santa suit -- very slightly doctored the image by removing the flash-flare lighting his eyes (good aesthetic choice there, FOX!), slapped a superfluous Santa Hat on his head, and then dropped the purloined pic into the on-screen graphic rotation for their Saints/Eagles telecast.

I know. Can you even believe that bald-faced shit?

It took another appearance of Hijacked Truman on FOX's broadcast to convince Jamie. Always the eternal doubter and naysayer, it wasn't until FOX threw up on the screen a second, much larger version of the same photo, and I stood beside the television with my laptop in hand pointing studiously to my original photo and then to the nicked one on the television, that he became a believer.

Durr? You gonna eat that pizza crust or what?

OMFG! I've been sucked into an alternate dimension against my will! LE HALP!

I can has all rights reserved copyrights nao?

Yeah, so as you can imagine, I'm a teensy-weensy bit... oh, how shall I say? On the enraged, indignant, and generally pissed-off side.

I'm trying to imagine what went through the person's head that did this. Did they think that FOX, being a big ol' monolithic Capitalism-with-a-captial-C company could sort of, err, do whatever the hell they wanted? That the words ALL RIGHTS RESERVED and COPYRIGHT somehow didn't apply to them, despite being visible on my flickr stream and on every page of this site, respectively? Did FOX Broadcasting, without my knowledge or consent, sign a contact with Truman behind my back giving them rights to all extant images of his adorable, fawn-colored smushiness? I mean, I know Truman's a bit hungry for fame, but I never expected this kind of shameless Eve Harrington shit out of him. Traitor.

What really, REALLY sticks in my craw is that following all this I was forced not only to sit through several more hours of football just to make certain they didn't show the image again (yes, please shower me with your pity), but I also had to endure the endless tape-loop of FOX's NFL copyright warnings, which seemed to repeat every five minutes or so. Hilariously enough, FOX Broadcasting and the NFL are apparently very, very concerned about legal rights to their telecasts and rebroadcasts of their telecasts. They're concerned about -- ho ho, it's rich -- PEOPLE STEALING THEIR SHIT. But as far as them stealing other people's shit goes? Errm, not so much. See also: Please to go fuck yourself if you aren't us.

Oh and let's not forget that this is the corporation who sued YouTube over leaked TV Shows. Because people, traffic of content between the web and broadcast TV matters. Like, a lot and stuff.

Oh god, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Listen, the bottomline is that this kind of thing has to stop. It's ridiculous. Hello, I OWN MY FREAKIN' CONTENT. How many times, and in how many different ways, do I need to say this? I have indicated on every single page of this site that my content is copyrighted. I have all rights reserved on my photos. So reason suggests that if you want to use a photo or some other content I've created on a national TV broadcast, YOU SHOULD ASK FIRST AND YOU NEED TO PAY ME FOR IT. And not in NFL-logo water bottles, commemorative hat pins, and autographed copies of The OReilly Factor For Kids. No no no. Greenbacks pleez, beeyatches. Dolla dolla bills, y'all.

In case it wasn't clear, FOX Broadcasting picked the wrong stupid Mommyblogger to mess with.

Oh and FOX legal -- if you're reading this -- you might want to get in touch. Jus sayin'.

PS: God bless us, every one! snort.
http://www.sweetney.com/001944.html





Egypt to Copyright Pyramids
AFP



In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.

Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP on Tuesday that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country's thousands of pharaonic sites.

"The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100-percent copies," he said.

"If the law is passed then it will be applied in all countries of the world so that we can protect our interests," Hawass said.

He said that a ministerial committee had already agreed on the law which should be passed in the next parliamentary session, while insisting the move would not hurt Egyptian artisans.

"It is Egypt's right to be the only copyright owner for these monuments in order to benefit financially so we can restore, preserve and protect Egyptian monuments."

However, the law "does not forbid local or international artists from profiting from drawings and other reproductions of pharaonic and Egyptian monuments from all eras -- as long as they don't make exact copies."

"Artists have the right to be inspired by everything that surrounds them, including monuments," he said.

Asked about the potential impact on the monumental Luxor Hotel in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas, Hawass insisted that particular resort was "not an exact copy of pharaonic monuments despite the fact it's in the shape of a pyramid."

On its website, the luxury hotel describes itself as "the only pyramid shaped building in the world," but Hawass said its interior was entirely different from an ancient Egyptian setting.

Hawass's declarations came after the opposition daily Al-Wafd published an article on Sunday called for the Las Vegas hotel to pay a slice of its lodging and gambling profits to the city of Luxor.

"Thirty-five million tourists visit Las Vegas to see the reproduction of Luxor city while only six million visit the real Egyptian city of Luxor," the paper lamented.

Samir Farag, head of Luxor town council in southern Egypt, home to the legendary Valley of the Kings, said that it would be difficult to prohibit use of pyramid shapes.

"We can't forbid people from using the name of Luxor and copying monuments from (Luxor) city, which is the world's richest city for monuments," he said, adding that "tourists going to Las Vegas doesn't affect our city's business."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...Z3O5S8f_6VhHww


















Until next week,

- js.



















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