Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 14th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?" – David Dixon


"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." – Justice Kennedy


"What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins. Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world." – Mark Steyn


"There's a fine line between protecting creators and a police state." – Scott Brison


































June 14th, 2008




Customers Cry Fraud Over Comcast P2P Meddling in New Lawsuit
Jacqui Cheng

Comcast may have agreed to end its practice of using forged TCP reset packets to hinder the P2P traffic of its customers, but the cable provider isn't out of the woods yet. Three class-action lawsuits were filed against Comcast this week in California, Illinois, and New Jersey, alleging that the company deceived and misled consumers by advertising that it offered "unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer."

For those just catching up, complaints from suspicious customers began surfacing last fall about Comcast using questionable methods to block BitTorrent traffic on its network. In October, the Associated Press decided to perform its own independent tests to see if the allegations were true, and found further evidence that Comcast had been sending "fake" TCP reset packets claiming to be from its customers attempting to use BitTorrent, therefore timing out their downloads and seeds. In November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report detailing its own investigation, confirming that BitTorrent performance was being selectively degraded by unexpected TCP reset packets.

Comcast, of course, repeatedly denied the allegations. Finally, the Federal Communications Commission opened up proceedings over Comcast's network management practices in January, and in March, the cable giant announced a pact with BitTorrent to ensure that traffic runs more smoothly over the network. One of the first tangible results will be the end of Comcast's current practices. Instead, the company will use a platform-agnostic technique that may ultimately slow down P2P traffic from its heaviest users, which it will begin testing very soon. But Comcast's change of heart has come too late for some irate customers.

According to copies of the complaints seen by Ars, Comcast did not tell customers that it would engage in this type of traffic shaping when the company promised "unfettered access," and was not authorized to do so by its customers. As a result, the plaintiffs and other Comcast customers believe they paid for a service that they didn't receive, resulting in deceptive business practices and deceptive advertising on Comcast's part. Additionally, they say that Comcast misrepresented its "merchandise," and Comcast's denials of the practice represented fraud and false pretense.

"Comcast's clandestine techniques are similar to those used by totalitarian governments to censor the use of the Internet," reads the complaint filed in Illinois. "No doubt Comcast would characterize the behavior as illegal and malicious hacking if perpetrated by others on Comcast and its customers." The lawsuits, which join a previous suit filed in November against Comcast, ask that Comcast be barred from continuing to violate various state laws, in addition to unspecified damages.

Trouble for Time Warner, too

Comcast isn't the only cable provider getting into hot legal water this week. The city of Los Angeles has also announced that it is suing Time Warner Cable for deceptive business practices and false advertising. Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo said that city residents were forced to suffer "months of cable television and Internet outages, substandard technical and customer service and improper price increases" after Time Warner's takeover of nearly all cable services in L.A. Delgadillo is asking the court to prohibit the company from continuing its allegedly unlawful practices, and wants $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law. He also demands an additional $2,500 civil penalty for each violation perpetrated against one or more senior citizens or disabled persons.

"We're bringing this civil law enforcement action against Time Warner Cable because the company has broken multiple laws, and harmed countless Los Angeles consumers,” said Delgadillo in a statement. “Time Warner Cable must be held accountable for illegally deceiving and ripping off its subscribers." In response, a spokesperson for Time Warner denied to the New York Times that it had misled customers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...w-lawsuit.html





Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector
Daniel A. Begun

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting -- that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.

In an article written by Cade Metz, a reporter for The Register, Metz explains that when the net neutrally debate first popped up at Google, Google actually considered playing along with the network-throttling ISPs:

"We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available. We could essentially buy prioritization that would ensure we would be the search engine used by everybody. We would come out fine – a non-neutral world would be a good world for us."

But more idealist minds prevailed at Google, and the company has advocated network neutrality ever since--"or as Whitt likes to call it 'broadband neutrality'." Whitt didn't mention when the network analysis tools would become available.

Other participants of the panel discussion had very different opinions on network neutrality, such as "George Ou and Richard Bennett, two networking-obsessed pals who have vehemently defended Comcast's right to throttle peer-to-peer traffic." The one thing that everyone on the panel appeared to agree on, however, was that ISPs need to be transparent with how they manage their network traffic. Google's stance is that if the ISPs won't disclose that information to the public, then consumers should have the tools at hand to determine for themselves what their ISPs are doing.
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Goog...ling_Detector/





Rogers Says its Internet Interference is Necessary, but Minimal
Peter Nowak

Rogers Communications Inc. is defending its control over the flow of internet traffic as necessary but light-handed, amid growing complaints from users and the threat of intervention by regulators.

The Toronto-based company, Canada's second largest internet service provider with 1.5 million high-speed customers, said its interference with how subscribers are using their connections is limited to slowing down the upload speeds of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent.

Rogers also said it does not throttle download speeds, block any applications or use a network management method called "false resets," which some companies, including Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. service provider, use to trick internet connections into dropping when peer-to-peer traffic is detected.

Dermot O'Carroll, Rogers's senior vice-president of engineering and network operations, told reporters during a briefing on Tuesday that the management practices are necessary to cope with the ever-expanding amount of internet traffic, particularly video.
"We're not complaining about it; that's just the business we're in," he said. "If you build a network and don't manage it, it fails."

Peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent have emerged as an efficient way to distribute large files such as video because they allow users to download small bits of the same file stored on a large number of computers, which can be anywhere in the world. The method has been a favourite of users trading copyrighted works such as movies, but it has also gained cachet with legitimate businesses looking for a quick way to distribute large files without having to pay for large amounts of bandwidth.

Under the client-server model, which is what streaming services such as television networks or downloads-for-sale operations such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes use, customers get their files from one source. If the television network or Apple wants to provide its customers with a fast download experience, it must pay for the bandwidth capacity.

With the peer-to-peer model, that cost is shuffled off from the content provider to the network operator, which is inefficient for the ISP. If the content provider wants to sidestep those distribution costs, it opens itself to the ISP's network management practices, said Mike Lee, Rogers's chief strategy officer.

"If you decide to cost ship, you lose the ability to control that [distribution]," he said. "It's a trade-off."

Lee said peer-to-peer traffic has been singled out because it is an application that cannot be satisfied by simply adding more capacity. Peer-to-peer, by design, constantly seeks out faster connections whenever it is in use. That means if capacity is added by an ISP in Canada, for example, peer-to-peer applications elsewhere in the world will find the network and flood it.

"You can't spend your way out of this problem," Lee said. "It has a behaviour that swamps all other behaviours."

ISPs taking heat

Rogers and several other ISPs, particularly Bell Canada Inc., the country's largest, have taken heat from a growing number of critics over the past few weeks for their network management practices.

About 300 internet users gathered on Parliament Hill two weeks ago to protest the ISPs' actions, while Liberal and NDP MPs have filed individual private members' bills seeking greater transparency and stricter rules governing internet access.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, prompted by a complaint from the Canadian Association of Internet Providers — a group of 55 independent ISPs that rent portions of Bell's network — in May launched an inquiry into the big ISPs' so-called "traffic-shaping" practices, with a public comment period closing on June 12.

Bell and CAIP will have further opportunities to comment before the June 26 cut-off, and the CRTC expects to make a ruling on the issue by late September.

Traffic-shaping practices also prompted the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, a University of Ottawa legal group, to file a complaint with the privacy commissioner last month. The group said the technology being used by ISPs to identify different uses of the internet is a violation of users' privacy.

A spokesperson for the commissioner said the matter is under investigation.

More regulations not needed: Rogers

Lee said he does not believe Rogers's network management practices violate customers' privacy because its detection technology does not need to probe traffic deeply to determine whether it is peer to peer.

Applications such as BitTorrent are easy to detect because they are the only uses of the internet that reassemble files from a large number of different computers.

"Other than knowing what type of application has been requested, I have no way of knowing if it's a Word file or a JPEG," Lee said.

He also said additional regulations are not needed since the CRTC has all the tools it needs to prevent "unreasonable" network management under Sec. 27 (2) of the Telecommunications Act, which reads:

"No Canadian carrier shall, in relation to the provision of a telecommunications service or the charging of a rate for it, unjustly discriminate or give an undue or unreasonable preference toward any person, including itself, or subject any person to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage."

Sec. 36 also says: "Except where the commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public."

Lee acknowledged that those provisions, as far as internet access is concerned, have yet to be properly challenged.

"We need to test that," he said.

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, however, last month said the regulator needs additional tools in the form of monetary fines to punish ISPs if they break the rules.

In the United States, Comcast was scared into promising that it will cease throttling peer-to-peer usage by the end of this year after appearing before a Federal Communications Commission probe in February.

The company has not yet announced its solution.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ch-rogers.html





Copyright Law Could Result in Police State: Critics
Peter Nowak

Minister of Industry Jim Prentice says his copyright reform bill is 'made in Canada,' but critics say it has been crafted by U.S. lobbyists.

The federal government has introduced a controversial bill it says balances the rights of copyright holders and consumers — but it opens millions of Canadians to huge lawsuits, prompting critics to warn it will create a "police state."

"We are confident we have developed the proper framework at this point in time," Minister of Industry Jim Prentice told a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday. "This bill reflects a win-win approach."

However, Liberal industry critic Scott Brison blasted the government for its lack of consultation with Canadian stakeholders and for not considering the implications of the bill if it passes.

"There's no excuse for why the government has not consulted broadly the diverse stakeholders," he said. "The government has not thought this through. It has not thought about how it will enforce these provisions."

"There's a fine line between protecting creators and a police state."

Bill C-61 spells out consumers' rights in how they are allowed to copy media and clears up some grey areas. Existing laws do not specifically allow consumers to copy books, newspapers, periodicals, photographs, videocassettes and music. The new bill would expressly allow them to make one copy of each item per device owned, such as a computer or MP3 player. The bill would also expressly allow consumers to record television and radio programs for later viewing.

The Conservatives' bill, however, also contains an anti-circumvention clause that will make it illegal to break digital locks on copyrighted material, which critics say could trump all of the new allowances. CD and DVD makers could put copy protections onto their discs, or television networks could attach technological flags to programs that would prevent them from being recorded onto TiVos and other personal video recorders. Cellphones would also be locked down, so when consumers buy a device from one carrier, they will be unable to use it with another. Breaking any of these locks could result in lawsuits seeking up to $20,000 in damages.

University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist, a vocal opponent of the legislation, said the anti-circumvention clause invalidates all the other new provisions.

"They've got a few headline-grabbing reforms but the reality is those are also undermined by this anti-circumvention legislation. They've essentially provided digital rights to the U.S. and entertainment lobby and a few analog rights to Canadians," Geist told CBCNews.ca. "The truth of the matter is the reforms are laden with all sorts of limitations and in some cases rendered inoperable."

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the influential Boing Boing blog, said the anti-circumvention clause will lead to a revival of digital rights management, or the software that prevents media from being copied. The entertainment industry has for the past few years been moving away from protecting its content with DRM because consumers have shied away from buying restricted media.

"You have to wonder what they're smoking on Parliament Hill if they think there's this compelling need for DRM, given that the marketplace seems to be rejecting it left, right and centre," he told CBCNews.ca.

YouTube uploads could bring lawsuits

People caught downloading music or video files illegally could also be sued for a maximum of $500, but uploading a file to a peer-to-peer network or YouTube could result in lawsuits of $20,000 per file.

Canadian internet service providers, meanwhile, would continue to be immune to lawsuits from copyright holders for infringements over their networks. The bill recognizes ISPs as intermediaries and would only require them to pass on violation notices from copyright holders to their customers.

Prentice deflected questions about potential lawsuits by saying the bill is necessary to modernize Canada's laws and bring it up to date with its obligations under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty it signed more than a decade ago.

"You can get into hypothetical situations," he said, "but the purpose of the bill has been to expand the balance of protection between consumers and copyright holders."

"In fact, it touches each and every one of us, and it is no surprise to find so many different points of view with respect to copyright," he said.

The bill will receive its second reading after Parliament's summer break, which is expected to begin soon. Brison told CBCNews.ca that the Liberals plan to put together amendments to the bill over the summer.

Bill praised by video game, music industry groups

Some copyright holders voiced their support for the new bill. The Entertainment Software Association of Canada, the video game industry's lobby group, praised the legislation for trying to protect Canada's industries and artists from theft.

“It’s simple: Every time someone acquires an illegal copy of a video game, money, in turn, is not going to those Canadians who work so hard to develop and publish games. That’s money that cannot be reinvested in creativity, job growth and industry development,” Joan Ramsay, president of the group's board of directors, said in a statement. “Copyright reform is essential to strengthen our competitiveness as an industry.”

A coalition of eight music lobby groups, including the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) and the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), jointly thanked the government for tabling the bill. The coalition, which said it represents 21,000 performers and 15,000 musicians, artist managers, music publishers, music retailers, manufacturers, record labels, and distributors and retailers of musical instruments, said the legislation was overdue.

"Vocal opponents of this bill will characterize it as mimicking what's already been done in the U.S., but that's oversimplifying things," Stephen Waddell, ACTRA's national executive director, said in a statement. "Around the world, 64 countries have already implemented the WIPO copyright treaties. Canada is at least going in the direction of finally catching up."

Prices of computers, iPods could jump

Intellectual property experts said the bill is mixed in the benefits it would provide and the problems it would create.

Mark Hayes, partner in the intellectual property group of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Toronto, said ISPs — which got the exemption from prosecution they wanted — and educational institutions, which would be able to copy materials from the internet that they previously could not, were among the winners. Consumers would also benefit because what they can do with their media has now been spelled out.

"They get some recognition of the rights to time shift and format shift," he said. "Before, nobody knew what the rules were."

Among the losers could be consumers shopping for electronics devices. The bill would raise the cost of electronics by extending the private copying levy, a tax currently in place on blank media such as CDs and DVDs, to any device with a hard drive.

"Owners of computers and iPods are probably going to end up paying quite a bit more for those products in the future," Hayes said.

Downloading on the rise

According to the latest survey from Statistics Canada, one in five Canadians aged 16 and older who used the internet at home said they had downloaded or watched TV or movies over the internet, an increase from 12 per cent in 2005.

The percentage of home internet users who downloaded music — either paid or for free — also increased from 37 per cent to 45 per cent in the two-year span. Part of that increase can be attributed to a change in methodology, as Statistics Canada for the first time included 16- and 17-year-olds in the study, a demographic more likely to download media than older groups.

Critics feared the bill will mirror the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which similarly brought in restrictive measures and opened the door for copyright owners to enact huge lawsuits against violators.

The minister was forced to retreat on introducing the bill in December after being hit with major public opposition. More than 20,000 people joined a protest group started on social networking site Facebook by University of Ottawa internet and e-commerce Prof. Michael Geist, an outspoken critic of the bill.

The opposition to the legislation has only grown since then, with the Facebook group counting more than 40,000 members before the bill was introduced. More than 1,000 new members joined the group on Thursday, with many expressing their outrage with the proposed legislation.

"I was a Conservative until this morning. This one has crossed the line," one member wrote. "We need an election. NOW!"

Canadian artists, librarians and students, as well as a business coalition made up of some of Canada's biggest companies — including Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp., as well as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. — have expressed their opposition to any legislation that imposes harsh copyright restrictions.

Opposition widespread

The chorus of opposition was joined last week by a coalition of consumer groups — including Option consommateurs, Consumers Council of Canada, Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), and Online Rights Canada (OnlineRights.ca) — that wrote a letter to the two ministers. The consumer groups expressed dismay they had not been consulted on the legislation.

Prentice responded to questioning in the House of Commons last week by saying he would not introduce the bill until he and Heritage Minister Josée Verner were satisfied that it struck the right balance between consumers and copyright holders.

Geist has repeatedly attacked the government on his blog for its lack of consultation with the Canadian public on the issue. However, Prentice has met with U.S. trade representatives and entertainment industry lobbyists to discuss the legislation.

"Prentice should be honest about the core anti-circumvention rules that are likely to mirror the DMCA and run counter to the concerns of business, education and consumer groups," Geist wrote on his blog. "Those rules are quite clearly 'Born in the USA.'"

The government said a second reading of the legislation wouldn't occur until the next sitting of the house. With the government breaking soon for the summer, such a reading would not occur until the fall.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...copyright.html





Irish Voters Appear to Reject European Treaty
Eamon Quinn and Alan Cowell

In a stunning setback for efforts to reform Europe’s unwieldy institutions, a senior Irish official said Friday that voters had rejected a revised European Union treaty designed to change the way the bloc governs itself and presents itself to the world.

If that outcome is confirmed in official results, it will mean that the 27-member bloc will be in turmoil, its latest attempt to reform stymied by less than one percent of its population of almost 500 million.

Justice Minister Dermot Ahern declared on television: “It looks like this will be a ‘no’ vote. At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have spoken.”

Speaking later on Irish radio he said: “We are in uncharted territory.”

Even though there was no final, official tally, Micheal Martin, the minister of foreign affairs, acknowledged: “Perhaps there is a disconnect between the European institution and its people that we need to reflect on.”

Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament who supports the treaty and the spokesman on constitutional issues for the Liberal Democrats, described the vote as a “tragedy for Ireland, the EU and Europe’s place in the world”.

“The problems the treaty was established to address are still there: effectiveness, democracy and capacity to act," he said. "If the outcome of this is that we are obliged to struggle on with the existing treaty, then the Irish will have done no favors for themselves or us."

Mr. Duff added that EU leaders will have to try to assemble a new strategy when they meet for a summit in Brussels next Thursday.

“I think the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, will have to explain himself at the summit. If he brings a credible and coherent proposal to extricate the EU from this mess, then he will be listened to. But I suspect he can’t because there isn’t one.”

“I think we are probably going to have to wait for quite a considerable time before political circumstances have improved to the degree necessary to acquire public consent.”

Officials began counting votes Friday after a referendum Thursday on the so-called Lisbon Treaty. The official result was expected late Friday afternoon.

Ireland is the only country in the European Union to put the pact to a referendum. l The other member states are approving it through their parliaments and 18 have backed it so far , but European Union rules require unanimous support for the treaty to come into effect.

The apparent defeat followed an emotional campaign that ranged over many topics not directly connected with the treaty.

Those who supported the treaty accused their adversaries of confusing the issue for voters, leading them to make their decisions for reasons other than an assessment of the Lisbon accord.

“It is very regrettable that totally untrue arguments about taxation, abortion, neutrality and even euthanasia have been put before the Irish people,” Mr. Cowen said Thursday.

The Lisbon Treaty is 287 pages long and many voters have complained that it is difficult to understand. It is supposed to make the EU function more efficiently, its supporters say, and would give the European Union its first full-time president and create a new and powerful foreign policy chief. The Irish government and political establishment has been campaigning for a “yes” vote, but a surge of opposition recalled earlier occasions when Irish voters rejected European initiatives.

The Lisbon Treaty emerged after voters in France and the Netherlands rejected a European constitution in 2005.

“The problem is that it’s not a very exciting treaty,” Gail McElroy, a lecturer in political science at Trinity College Dublin said before Thursday’s vote. “Institutional efficiency is very hard to get people excited about.”

Eamon Quinn reported from Dublin and Alan Cowell from Paris. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/wo...14ireland.html





Mod Chips Found Legal In The UK

For many years, we've wondered why some folks considered the process of mod chipping to be illegal. After all, if you own a device, why shouldn't you be able to modify it? It's not illegal to modify your computer, so why would it be illegal to modify a game console? Well, thanks to the DMCA in the US, the question wasn't entirely clear -- because console makers use encryption, they consider any modification to be a circumvention of that encryption, and the DMCA has that pesky anti-circumvention clause. In the US, it's become even more bizarre, with federal officials taking up the cause and fining mod chippers while claiming (seriously) that mod chipping was a national security issue.

Luckily, it looks like the courts in Europe are a lot more reasonable about all of this. A few years back, we noted that an Italian court ruled that mod chips were perfectly legal (Update: Well, darn. As a commenter notes, the Italian decision was later overturned). And, now, a tipster alerts us to the news that a UK appeals court has found the same thing, tossing out all of the charges against a mod chip seller, noting that mod chips do not circumvent copy protection systems. Not only that, but the defendant was awarded legal fees. This is a big deal, as the lower court had found the guy, Neil Higgs, guilty for selling mod chips he had imported from Hong Kong. So, now that's Italy and the UK that recognizes modifying your gaming consoles shouldn't be illegal. Anyone else?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...55131385.shtml





Cable: Deregulation Good for Consumers; Ars: Like Heck it is
Nate Anderson

If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that the cable industry in the US is focused on openness, innovation, and customer satisfaction; but if we can't keep the government's knuckleheaded regulators out of our cable lines and off our Internet, cable's nearly absurd level of innovation will be throttled down more effectively than BitTorrent uploads on Comcast's network. Well, so says the cable industry, at least.

Cable: pro-consumer and innovative

Kyle McSlarrow heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the trade group that represents cable. Any job that involves getting up on a regular basis and defending cable's insane rate hikes as consumer-focused measures that spur innovation can't be a real laughfest, but McSlarrow soldiers on. Yesterday, he gave a major speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC that made the above points (though with fewer digs at Comcast) and claimed that cable was "a great American success story."

In the speech, McSlarrow described cable's basic approach as one characterized by "embracing innovation and open markets and platforms" and "focusing on the customer." (I know, right?) The point of the speech wasn't just to talk up cable, though, and it opened with a call for a "public policy approach that relies on 'self-regulatory' actions that facilitate collaborative private-sector solutions to complicated technology and business disputes" like network management and net neutrality.

It closed the same way, with the statement that "the evidence is overwhelming that marketplace collaboration and self-regulation is a pro-consumer approach that deserves our support."

So let's do as McSlarrow suggests and take a look at the evidence.

What hath deregulation wrought?

Business don't always dislike regulation; if regulation throws up such stiff barriers to entry that new competitors rarely emerge, that's great for incumbents. And if you can "capture" your regulator in such a way that you have a cozy industry/government connection that doesn't rely on market forces or respond to customer pressure, that can work out pretty well, too. But in most other cases, businesses would prefer deregulation, the more the better.

It's an idea that flourished in the last few decades, but regulatory enthusiasm is making a comeback. In the just-released new issue of The Atlantic, editors count down the "11½ Biggest Ideas of the Year," and number seven is "the return of regulation." Clive Crook notes that "this empowerment of the market was usually advantageous, sometimes bungled, and nearly always controversial—but for years the trend was mostly one-way. Now a major rethink is underway."

Certainly deregulation has been good to cable. Consumers Union, the nonprofit that puts out Consumer Reports magazine, took a look at the results. Their conclusion? It led to much, MUCH higher prices.

"Until 1984, local governments kept cable prices in check," says CU. "Then deregulation resulted in a torrent of price hikes, interrupted only by a brief period, 1993-1996, when rates were regulated. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the flood gates to deregulation and more price hikes. Since passage of the 1996 Act, cable rates have increased by 59 percent—almost three times the rate of inflation—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

The lost art of customer service

So maybe the prices are high and the competition is low, but customer service is just phenomenal. Unfortunately, it's not. Even McSlarrow admits, "You might expect me to avoid the subject of customer service." When the spinmeister-in-chief for the industry admits there are serious issues, the situation is probably dire.

For a quantitative look at just how dire it is, we can turn to the widely-watched American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan. McSlarrow admitted that "we don't find the kind of customer feedback you see reflected in some surveys acceptable," and this was certainly one of those surveys he had in mind. In 2007, the ACSI found that cable satisfaction scores were, if not actually in the toilet, at least perched on the edge of bowl.

In 2008, despite McSlarrow's newfound customer commitment, cable scores lagged below the satellite TV operators as Charter and Comcast lost even more ground (Time Warner did gain a single point, though). Smaller operators improved their satisfaction scores, but Comcast set "an all-time low for the largest cable provider in the country," according to Dr. Claes Fornell, who heads the study. Fornell also noted last year that "there seems to be an element of monopoly-like pricing in the cable industry."

Given these results, it's unclear how McSlarrow arrived at his statement that "on a fundamental level, consumers love our services and they intuitively understand the great value they receive." No one I have ever spoken with about cable service has made such claims, but perhaps I simply know the wrong sort of people.

Net neutrality: a "private sector dispute"

So, given how well Congress' "wise decision in 1996 to deregulate our industry" has worked when it comes to traditional cable television service, it's at least fair to be skeptical about cable's continued calls for government to stay completely away from network management and net neutrality issues.

To its credit, the cable industry and America has at least provided a real alternative to DSL (one not seen in much of Europe, where line-sharing is used to create competition instead), and cable companies have put some much-needed pressure on incumbent telcos with VoIP home phone services. Finally, cable has built a broadband infrastructure that, even if it's not cheap or particularly fast compared to other leading countries, reaches most Americans and is generally capable of faster speeds than DSL. With DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades currently beginning, cable should get significantly faster than DSL over the next few years.

And all of this without much in the way of government regulation!

But one has only to look at the recent FCC oversight hearing on network management that has focused on practices at Comcast to see how important it is to have a public-interest regulator looking over the shoulders of these companies. With the Internet now a key resource that has quickly come to rival water, heat, and power as a utility, such issues are surely a bit more than some mere "private sector dispute" (as McSlarrow put it). Even he admits that cable has had "helpful public-policy nudges" along the way, and one thinks about Comcast's recent decision to investigate fairer, user-focused throttling that doesn't target particular protocols or applications.

While new laws and increased regulation may not prove necessary to keep the Internet healthy in America, it would still be a shame if Congress and regulators like the FCC were so much of McSlarrow's mindset that oversight proved a mere formality and enforcement became toothless. This isn't a "reflexive desire by some to involve government in every private sector dispute," but a recognition that Internet access in a less-than-fully-competitive marketplace is too important for total self-regulation.

"Foxes" and "henhouses" come to mind, but when the henhouse is actually the most innovative henhouse in the world, a place of almost magical scope and variety where eggs of every shape and color are laid by all the chickens of the world, any prudent farmer would at least pay someone to sit at the door with a shotgun.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ell-it-is.html





Verizon Offers Details of Usenet Deletion: alt.* Groups, Others Gone
Declan McCullagh

Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.

Rabe had told us earlier in the week that some newsgroups would be restricted, but didn't have the details until we spoke with him on Thursday.

No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups--out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist. In a press release, he took credit for the companies' blunderbuss-style newsgroup removal by saying: "We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers...I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry."

Usenet is a pre-Web technology that, for most of its history, relied on companies, Internet service providers, and universities to operate servers that would exchange messages posted by their users. Each server operator can choose what newsgroups they wish to offer. Today, some companies like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com offer newsgroup access for a fee. (Unlike, say, mailing lists, Usenet has no central repository.)

What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions. Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist.

That means not carrying perfectly innocuous--and, in fact, very useful--newsgroups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie.

The alt.hierarchy is even more extensive. In the discussion thread attached to our earlier story, one of our readers said: "This is ridiculous. I actually met my wife on alt.personals, 14 years ago... I still use usenet - there are a lot good discussions and a person can get answers to questions on specific topics pretty quickly. It's nice to have a decentralized place to hold discussions, one that is not beholden to a sysadmin to correctly run a forum, one that's free of blinking gifs and flash ads."

The only Usenet newsgroups that Verizon will continue to offer customers are the comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies. Customers will continue to be able to connect to other non-Verizon Usenet servers; no blocking is taking place.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-99....html#comments





Virgin Media Cable Says that the Record Industry is in Charge of Your Router Configuration
Cory Doctorow

Will McGree got a letter form Virgin Media (his cable provider) and the British Phonographic Institute (the UK version of the RIAA -- of which Virgin -- also a record label -- is a member) telling him that he could be sued and disconnected from the Internet because someone used his open WiFi to download music. It wasn't Will -- the program used for file-sharing is a Windows app, and he runs Linux. It was one of his neighbours.

Virgin and BPI take the position that being a copyright holder means you get to specify the router configuration of every computer connected to the Internet. That just because open WiFi makes it harder for the BPI to hunt downloaders, no one should be allowed to offer it, no matter how convenient useful open WiFi might be. I've run open WiFi networks for close to a decade now -- I rely on open networks when I'm out and about, so it only seems fair to return the favour. Plus, closed WiFi networks are a pain in the ass if you have houseguests, exotic wireless devices, or older consoles and the like that can't handle passwords gracefully.

If I play my music with my window open, my neighbour might decide to open his window and listen in, instead of buying his own music. Does that mean that the record industry gets to order me to bolt my window shut?

Just one more reason not to pay for Virgin Broadband -- they're just not on their customers' side.

Virgin Media are the only ISP sending out BPI notices. They don’t have to - there’s no law or industry regulation that says so. They just leapt into bed with the BPI and the BPI couldn’t be happier that they’ve got someone doing their “policing” for them.

In September, we’re building a home server in our flat. It’ll be a Tor node so that finally Virgin Media don’t need to worry themselves with what’s flowing through their routers. It’s just data. Like I paid for.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/14...a-cable-s.html





U2 Manager Slams Internet Providers

McGuinness Likens ISPs to 'shoplifters'
Patrick Frater

U2 manager Paul McGuinness launched a blistering attack on the world's Internet providers Wednesday, accusing them of strangling the music industry.

Speaking at the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness likened ISPs to "shoplifters" and accused them of "turning their heads" away from the music industry's troubles and "rigging the market."

"The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help -- not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest," McGuinness said.

He and numerous others speaking on the first day of the confab said the industry was caught between rampant piracy and ISPs' extortionate terms of trade.

Warner Music prexy Lachie Rutherford pointed out that the 2% of revenues from downloads and ringtones is shared with performers. "There are huge amounts of money being made from music (by portals and carriers) that are not supporting music or radio or magazines," Rutherford said.

McGuinness targeted many for contributing to the music biz's ills. "Cable operators, ISPs, device manufacturers, P2P software companies -- companies that have used music to drive vast revenues from broadband subscriptions and from advertising. They would argue that they have been neutral bystanders to the spectacular devaluation of music. I don't believe that is true," he said.

But McGuinness saved his sharpest criticism for China and Chinese companies.

"ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded music business -- but they have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business," he said. "That's true nowhere more than in China. China Mobile makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year from sales of ringtones yet pays a minuscule fraction of that to performers, producers and composers."

McGuinness said ISPs were unwilling to act against piracy and had ignored music-industry proposals -- even though they were not being asked to police the Internet.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...&cs=1&nid=2570





U2 Manager Accuses All of You of "Shoplifting" Music
Jackson West

While the focus of his ire was Internet service providers, U2 manager Paul McGuinness also blasted "device manufacturers" for the "spectacular devaluation of music." Like, you know, when Apple hired U2 for a commercial and packaged a bunch of low-bitrate, DRM-laden MP3s of U2's back catalog for $149 at the iTunes store.
http://valleywag.com/5013494/u2-mana...plifting-music





RIAA Dismisses Warner v. Cassin, "Making Available" Case
Ray Beckerman

The RIAA has voluntarily dismissed Warner v. Cassin, the White Plains, New York, case in which a motion to dismiss the complaint has been pending since July, 2007.

Substantial briefing had taken place in the case over the "making available" issue, and further rulings were brought to the court's attention on the subject from such cases as Atlantic v. Brennan, Interscope v. Rodriguez, Elektra v. Barker, Arista v. Does 1-21, Atlantic v. Howell, and Capitol v. Thomas.

The notice states that the dismissal is "without prejudice".

However, Fed. R. Civ. P. 41 (B) states "if the plaintiff previously dismissed any federal-or state-court action based on or including the same claim, a notice of dismissal operates as an adjudication on the merits." It is believed that the plaintiffs learned of the defendant's identity through a prior, "John Doe", proceeding, which it also voluntarily dismissed, so that the dismissal in this case "operates as an adjudication on the merits".

Although the notice was submitted on May 27th, signed by the Judge on June 4th, and entered by the Clerk on June 5th, we just learned of it today, June 11th.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...in-making.html





Judge Shoots Down Universal's Bogus Infringement Allegations

Ruling Affirms Right to Resell Promo CDs
EFF release

A federal judge has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller's right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores.

Troy Augusto, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law firm Keker & Van Nest, was sued by UMG last year in the United States District Court for the Central District of California for 26 auction listings involving promo CDs. At issue was whether the "promotional use only, not for sale" labels on those CDs could trump Augusto's right to resell materials that he owns, guaranteed by copyright law's "first sale" doctrine.

In dismissing UMG's lawsuit late Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero ruled that the promo CDs are gifts distributed by UMG, as they are mailed free and unsolicited to thousands of people without any expectation or intention of their return. The first sale doctrine says that once the copyright owner sells or gives away a copy of a CD, DVD, or book, the recipient is entitled to resell that copy without further permission.

"This is a very important ruling for consumers, and not just those who buy or sell used CDs," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "The right of first sale also protects libraries, used bookstores, and businesses that rent movies and videogames. This ruling affirms and protects the traditional balance between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the public."

"It was clear to the court that these CDs were the property of Mr. Augusto, and therefore he had the right to resell them," said Joseph C. Gratz, attorney with Keker & Van Nest. "Copyright holders can't strip consumers of their first sale rights just by sticking a 'Not for Sale' label on a CD."

Mr. Augusto's victory comes almost one hundred years to the day after the United States Supreme Court's June 1, 1908 decision in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908), established the first sale doctrine as a central part of American copyright law.

EFF has long fought efforts to override the first sale doctrine, arguing in 2004 that Lexmark should not be permitted to use a "label license" to prohibit the resale of laser printer toner cartridges.

For the full order:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/um...03106SJO-O.pdf

For more analysis:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06...-umg-v-augusto
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/06/11





Microsoft Goes After 'Career Pirates'
Shaun Nichols

Microsoft has filed 21 lawsuits in US Federal courts as part of an effort to stop those who continually pirate its software.

Microsoft has filed 21 lawsuits in US Federal courts as part of an effort to stop those who continually pirate its software.

The suits span 14 states and target people and businesses that have allegedly sold pirated copies of Microsoft software.

Eight of the suits target companies that Microsoft refers to as "repeat offender software pirates". The eight firms had already been sued by Microsoft for selling counterfeit software.

Several of the suits also address pirated software pre-loaded onto PCs and then sold as bundled software, a process known as hard-disk loading.

"These legal actions are about protecting Microsoft's customers from falling victim to some dealers who operate a business model of peddling pirated and counterfeit software," said Microsoft attorney Sharon Cates.

"Some companies previously involved in these lawsuits have discontinued their illegal business practices. Others have not."

Microsoft has stepped up its pursuit of software pirates in recent years. The firm's Windows Genuine Advantage Programme warns users who often unknowingly purchase pirated copies of Windows, Office and other Microsoft offerings.

The company estimates that pirates counterfeited more than US$8 billion of software in the US alone in 2007.

Microsoft is warning users to be wary of unusual packaging, suspicious CD labels and the absence of a certificate of authenticity.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/78119,...r-pirates.aspx





MGM: A Lion or a Lamb?
David M. Halbfinger

ON a Thursday morning last month, hundreds of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer workers filed out of the studio’s Century City office tower and into a movie theater across the street. This rare, companywide meeting was a premiere of sorts: the introduction of Mary Parent, once a top production executive at Universal Pictures, as the new chairwoman of MGM’s motion picture group.

After Ms. Parent told her troops about green-lighting enough projects for MGM to roar into theaters with as many as 12 of its own movies in 2010, and about why she’d given up a lucrative producing career to accept her new job, the man who offered it to her — Harry E. Sloan — took the podium to deliver a confidence-booster.

“We are talking right now to a number of people about getting money for Mary to make all these pictures,” Mr. Sloan said, according to several people in attendance. “There’s no doubt that we’re going to get the money. It’s just a question of what the terms are going to be.”

But Ms. Parent’s lofty new title and lush, $6 million pay package obscure a harsh reality: despite its enduring legacy as one of Hollywood’s most legendary movie studios — and a seemingly stubborn refusal to disappear — MGM hasn’t fit the profile of a full-fledged production company in years.

Yet Ms. Parent, who had never marketed or distributed her own films before, was being asked to turn MGM into a player, and do it quickly. That feat will require hundreds of millions of dollars that the studio doesn’t yet have. What MGM does have, however, is a daunting pile of debt and other financial challenges.

Two and a half years ago, Mr. Sloan — MGM’s chief executive and the would-be heir to Louis B. Mayer — invested about $15 million of his own money in the faded studio, gambling that he could turn it around.

But MGM is choking on $3.7 billion in debt, forcing it to cough up more than $300 million in annual interest payments while it delays paying down the principal, its financial statements show. Bargain hunters are circling the company as it continues to bleed cash. For the fiscal year ended in March, MGM lost about $400 million; it lost about the same amount a year earlier.

The mounting losses have caused financial headaches for an investor group led by Sony, which brought together Comcast and four private equity funds to buy MGM from Kirk Kerkorian for $5 billion in 2004.

A bright spot for MGM has been its prized library of old film titles. That unit threw off $558 million in cash in the latest fiscal year. But amid an industrywide downturn in DVD catalog sales, by the end of August MGM will have received the last in a series of guaranteed video-distribution fees totaling $625 million from 20th Century Fox. Though that deal has three more years to run, the guarantees are expiring, which means that a source of steady income will be far less predictable.

And Ms. Parent’s production spree — after unsuccessful moves putting the MGM logo on other companies’ poor-to-middling films and turning over MGM’s United Artists unit to Tom Cruise — could drive MGM’s costs through the roof next year.

Mr. Sloan, undeterred, says Ms. Parent’s push could also bolster the studio’s value in a sale. (Comcast, which owns 20 percent of MGM, has already passed on buying the rest; 20th Century Fox, which releases MGM’s movies overseas in addition to managing its library, is seen as MGM’s ideal buyer. Neither company would comment.)

“I think when people see that there’s a strong pipeline for 2010 and beyond, the value goes up,” said Mr. Sloan in a recent interview.

Still, MGM’s unexpected re-entry into the production business is sowing dissent among its financial backers, with conference calls becoming “contentious” at times, according to one participant, who, like other investors, insisted on anonymity to avoid upsetting other partners.

For the moment, the uncertainty has left Mr. Sloan and Ms. Parent in the unenviable position of having to compete for filmmakers and actors by assuring them that MGM will have the money to shoot their movies, even if it has to resort to its dwindling supply of cash.

That means the pressure is on MGM to deliver hits, with little margin for error. “Nothing else matters — it’s just the movies,” Ms. Parent says. “And making sure that the people driving the movies aren’t panicking. And that they’re not panicking because they think we don’t have money.”

SITTING in his 14th-floor office, just off a rotunda where MGM’s ancient Oscars are displayed behind glass, Mr. Sloan ticks off his accomplishments in the last six months.

It’s a recap of news releases: “Quantum of Solace” and “The Pink Panther 2” went into production; Peter Jackson will produce two new films based on “The Hobbit”; “American Gladiators” became a prime-time hit for NBC; Mary Parent was hired; MGM joined with Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate in announcing a pay-TV channel to take the place of their expiring deals with Showtime; and the new MGM HD channel, yet another outlet for its film library, has been picked up by the five biggest domestic cable and satellite distribution systems.

“I think there’s a lot of evidence that we’ve begun the turnaround,” Mr. Sloan says, looking up from his talking points.

Even so, MGM appears to be — literally — buying time, which is only the latest plot twist in the saga of a company that seems oddly indestructible. Its golden age was already over when Mr. Kerkorian bought it for the first time in 1969, then began unloading assets and scaling back its filmmaking. He sold it to Ted Turner in 1986, then bought much of it back when Mr. Turner’s financing collapsed. Mr. Turner held onto the fabled MGM library, while Mr. Kerkorian sold MGM again in 1990 to the freewheeling Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti.

In 1996, after Mr. Parretti foundered and a French bank, Crédit Lyonnais, took over MGM, Mr. Kerkorian stepped in for a third time and led a $1.3 billion buyout of the studio. For his third act, Mr. Kerkorian cobbled together a new mix of film and television libraries, overseas distribution deals and modest commercial successes like “Legally Blonde” and a remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

But MGM made fewer big bets during this time, even slowing its output of James Bond films. In the spring of 2004, Mr. Kerkorian loaded the company with $2.4 billion in debt to finance a one-time $1.89 billion cash dividend, and pocketed his three-fourths share. He also put the studio and its library up for sale. He declined to comment.

With a format war looming over the next generation of DVD players, MGM’s library of 4,000 films gained heightened importance and set off a bidding contest for the company. To bolster its Blu-ray players, Sony of America, blocked by its Japanese parent from buying MGM outright, persuaded Providence Equity Partners and the Texas Pacific Group to put up the bulk of the equity. Toshiba, which was pushing a different DVD standard, quietly backed Time Warner in a rival bid.

Once Comcast joined Sony’s side, the group got MGM for about $5 billion. Sony planned to shutter MGM’s studios and use Sony Pictures to distribute the MGM catalog, remake some MGM titles and produce only the best-known MGM franchises like James Bond and the Pink Panther.

That blueprint also called for MGM to make about four new films a year, to keep its library relevant to retailers. But Sony home-video executives bridled at the plan, and MGM’s private equity owners quietly sought a new distributor.

Enter Harry Sloan, a lawyer turned jet-setting entrepreneur who considers Rupert Murdoch to be his role model. (Their wives, both Chinese, are friends, and the two women recently set up a film production venture together.)

Mr. Sloan had steered the movie company New World Entertainment into TV production and comic books in the 1980s, but New World became hobbled by debt problems and was sold in 1989.

A year later, Mr. Sloan formed SBS Broadcasting and built it into Europe’s second-largest broadcaster, which in turn became the largest shareholder of Lions Gate Entertainment; Mr. Sloan was Lions Gate’s chairman until April 2005. That fall, he sold SBS for $2.6 billion. He declined to say how much he made, but at the time he owned 11 percent of the stock.

Five days later, he was named chairman and chief executive of MGM. Executives at Providence Equity, who were familiar with Mr. Sloan’s track record, recruited him to execute the strategy behind the $5 billion buyout.

After hiring Rick Sands, a former Miramax and DreamWorks executive, as his chief operating officer, Mr. Sloan outsourced filmmaking to independent producers. Mr. Sands, who resigned after Ms. Parent’s hiring, persuaded 20th Century Fox to commit to the five-year distribution deal for MGM’s library.

“We were looking at probably making a move to Warner, setting up our own unit, or joint venturing with CBS — a lot of possibilities,” Mr. Sloan says. “The guys from Fox came in and blew me away.”

Although the switch to Fox was a humiliating blow for Sony, Mr. Sloan said that it was necessary. “What was important was to rebuild the business,” he says. “The value of a static library is going to decline anyway, and on top of that you’re going to fall off a cliff if you’re only depending on the guarantee.”

Fox has lost $15 million on the guarantees, but made slightly more than that in distribution fees on MGM’s international releases, executives familiar with the deal said. On the other hand, outsourcing production to independents has been a disaster for MGM’s image and has done little for its bottom line.

Aside from “1408” ($72 million) and “Halloween” ($58 million) — both from the Weinstein Company — 17 other MGM titles last year averaged just $12 million in ticket sales, according to boxofficemojo.com.

“The quality of the movies, I admit, weren’t what we expected,” Mr. Sloan says. “But you would’ve expected Tom Rosenberg, coming off ‘Million Dollar Baby’ — but what does he give us? ‘Feast of Love.’ ”

Mr. Rosenberg, chairman of Lakeshore Entertainment, said he had shown that film to MGM’s publicity, marketing and distribution team and asked for a box office estimate. “They said between $40 and $50 million,” he said. “We decided to release the film through MGM based upon their enthusiasm for it. Sometimes good films lose money.” The movie’s box office receipts were $3.5 million.

As for Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who have voiced frustration to others that MGM has feckless relations with exhibitors, Mr. Sloan says: “Nobody wants to tell you they made a bad movie; they want to blame the distributor. I thought I was making a deal with the guys who’d just come off Oscars for ‘Chicago,’ ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘Aviator.’ Instead they went to the festivals, picked up movies and arbitraged MGM’s deal on Showtime. But we still made money on every single Weinstein picture.”

In response, Harvey Weinstein said: “I understand Harry’s frustration, because in the beginning, we didn’t have time to produce our own movies. We had a pipeline to fill, and we relied on acquisitions. The success or failure of our movies is our responsibility, not anybody else’s.”

Mr. Sloan says that while MGM’s string of duds may be embarrassing, it hasn’t sullied MGM’s image. After all, the ubiquitous MGM lion still roars on TV, computer and theater screens.

“You might say there was some damage to the brand in that the movies weren’t great,” he allows. “But I don’t believe people pay much attention.”

IF buying into the MGM library on the theory that it would be a huge cash cow didn’t work because it had to be nurtured with expensive new films, and renting out MGM’s distribution system didn’t work because of quality control problems, Mr. Sloan’s team still had other cards to play — like forging a partnership with Tom Cruise.

Mr. Cruise’s ejection from the Paramount lot in 2006, after his sofa-jumping antics the year before, created an opportunity in Mr. Sloan’s eyes. He quickly gave a 35 percent stake in the dormant United Artists film label to Mr. Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner. The hope was that UA would provide the four or so films a year that Sony was originally to have produced to keep the MGM library refreshed.

After saying early last year that UA was close to securing $500 million in financing from Merrill Lynch, it took Mr. Sloan and MGM’s investors an additional six months to complete the deal. The resulting production fund, which would cover up to $60 million of a single film’s budget, required MGM to kick in $75 million and cover any excess costs.

When UA released “Lions for Lambs,” a film about war and politics that cost about $35 million to make and even more to market (though Mr. Cruise, one of its stars, worked without pay), it flopped at the box office. MGM immediately lost about half of its $75 million UA investment, Mr. Sloan said.

UA then green-lighted a second war movie, “Pinkville,” about the My Lai massacre, from Oliver Stone. It spent $6 million on preproduction costs before canceling the movie a week after the opening of “Lions for Lambs.” That leaves “Valkyrie,” a costlier star vehicle for Mr. Cruise that was already surrounded by negative buzz.

In that film, Mr. Cruise portrays a heroic Nazi officer who turns on Hitler. The release date for “Valkyrie” has been delayed twice, contributing to a cloud of gloom hanging over the project. The film cost close to $95 million to make and will cost about as much to market, putting its worldwide break-even point north of $200 million in box office receipts, MGM executives said.

MGM’s financial records show that UA has already consumed about $150 million of its $500 million financing fund. But if the UA fund begins to dry up, Mr. Sloan says he is ready to replenish it.

“We’re not going to let that thing fail,” he said. “That is a non-duplicatable asset today, in these credit markets.”

Dennis Rice, a UA spokesman, said that UA was excited about “Valkyrie” but that its financing was not dependent on any one movie. “We expect to have hits and misses just like any other studio,” he said, adding that UA is close to deals for three other films with top talent. “We stand by our business plan and want to be judged over the long haul.”

As MGM continues to monitor its relationship with UA, it recently decided to end another with Showtime, the cable TV network.

Because Showtime offered only half of what it previously had paid to license MGM films for pay-TV programming, MGM formed a new cable network with Paramount and Lionsgate. But the three partners have yet to identify any distributors, and analysts are skeptical about its eventual reception.

On the theatrical front, MGM has already punted for 2009 to avoid the quality problems that have bedeviled it. Mr. Sloan says the breathing room allows Ms. Parent to put together classier projects.

“If you don’t have a major summer and a Christmas picture, you’re not a player at the studio level,” he said. “The best you’re going to be is Lionsgate.” A Lionsgate spokesman declined to comment.

In the interim, Ms. Parent says she has faith in the films that MGM will distribute with its partners. The James Bond movie this year, and the “Pink Panther” sequel next year, both to be released domestically by Sony Pictures, have already been paid for. A recent screening of “Valkyrie,” meanwhile, caused her to breathe “a sigh of relief,” she says.

“It didn’t get out of the gate right, so we have to make sure there’s adequate time to contextualize the film,” Ms. Parent says. “It’s a hard sell. It just is. But it’s a film that people will be proud of.”

Ms. Parent has been buying books and pitches, any one of which she says could become a major 2010 release. “The Matarese Circle,” a thriller based on the popular Robert Ludlum book, is being developed for Denzel Washington. A remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is planned, as is a romantic comedy from the director of “Wild Hogs.”

SHE also says she has been wooing talent by casting MGM’s negatives as positives. So, Ms. Parent says, the studio isn’t understaffed; it’s “streamlined.” It’s not desperate; it’s “hungry.”

As for complaints about MGM’s marketing, she says, “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of it.” Insiders say MGM has offered the top marketing job to Terry Press, formerly head of marketing at DreamWorks; Ms. Press confirmed that she had been approached, but declined to say more.

Meanwhile, speculation continues in Hollywood and on Wall Street that MGM will be bought, leaving Mr. Sloan scurrying for the same thing everyone else in Hollywood is seeking: cash. He says he wants to raise a new, $650 million production fund to keep MGM’s perilous finances intact — and maybe find new investors to pay down its debt.

Time is of the essence. Mr. Sloan’s and Ms. Parent’s talk of possibly dipping into MGM’s cash coffers to have movies launched drew a sharp response from one member of the studio’s board who requested anonymity to avoid friction with other directors and managers. “We are not going to jeopardize or compromise the financial health of this company based on funding negative costs of films,” the board member said.

While Mr. Sloan says he’s prepared to use MGM’s cash, what he won’t do, he says, is ask existing investors to double down.

“I think it’s a character of private equity that the last thing they’d want to do is put themselves in the situation where they said, ‘We didn’t capitalize the company optimally,’ ” he says. “So I kind of see it as my job to take the deck that I was dealt, which is a lot of leverage, and make it work. I think I can make this work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/bu...dia/08mgm.html





Hollywood Is Burning
Jonathan Kuntz

THE most famous back lot fire in Hollywood history was intentional. In 1938, David O. Selznick staged the burning of Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind” by torching the old “King Kong” Skull Island set on RKO’s back lot and then filming the spectacular results.

Another Kong, this one a 30-foot, animatronic gorilla featured in the Universal City tour, went up in flames this week, along with various sets, film prints, audio recording and videotape storage vaults, as Universal Studios suffered its latest conflagration. The tour quickly reopened and now offers a view of the fire damage as part of the tram ride.

Most of the back lot acreage built up during Hollywood’s classic studio era was long ago sold off for housing developments and commercial space (Century City lies on much of the old 20th Century Fox back lot), but Universal Studios has always held onto its 230-acre lot, once a chicken ranch, supplementing profits from moviegoers with tickets to tourists eager for a behind-the-scene glimpse of Hollywood.

Catastrophe has been too common from the start: in fact, Universal City’s elaborate grand opening in March 1915 was cut short by disaster — a stunt flier was killed when his plane crashed near the horrified crowd.

There have also been many studio fires in Hollywood’s 95 years, including about a half-dozen at Universal: made of wood, sets catch fire easily. From the earliest days, film producers prided themselves on having well-trained, vigilant fire departments. Bragging rights went to the lot with the biggest water tower.

Among the sets that burned this week were the courthouse square from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Back to the Future,” and a New York street from countless films and television shows. These sets themselves had been damaged and altered many times, and were mostly false fronts to begin with — so what has really been lost? The physical residue of great movie memories, no more, simulations of simulations. The studio can rebuild the sets, as they have before — now configured as much to the tour tram as to the camera — and they’ll likely be better fakes than ever.

More serious may be the loss of the circulating 35-millimeter theatrical prints. While not original masters, these are the copies made for screenings at repertory theaters, art museum retrospectives and in college classes. Universal has already canceled screenings of “Rear Window” and Howard Hawks’s “Scarface” for the U.C.L.A. film history class I teach, along with all their other titles for the indefinite future.

Universal controls a big chunk of Hollywood history. Their own prodigious output includes “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the third film to win the Oscar for best picture; classic monster series like “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy” and “The Wolfman”; the comedies of Abbott and Costello; the melodramas of Douglas Sirk; and hundreds more. In addition, through wise acquisitions in the Lew Wasserman era, Universal also owns the rights to many additional Paramount titles, including various Alfred Hitchcock classics, the Marx Brothers movies and Billy Wilder’s film noir “Double Indemnity.” Prints of many of these seem to have been destroyed.

This latest fire, I hope, will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles like “Duck Soup,” “Dracula” or “Vertigo” — which will surely be reprinted and return to circulation — but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.

Still, Hollywood can never be reduced to its physical remains, to false fronts or plastic film. This is an industry that delights in creating something memorable out of something fake, and creative destruction, rebuilding and reuse have always been part of the magic.

After all, the burning of Atlanta in 1938 was actually a beginning. Selznick and his crew immediately cleared the Kong wreckage, and then used the space to build the dozens of structures, from the Atlanta rail yards to Tara, needed for “Gone With the Wind.”

Those sets were used many more times: Atlanta was recycled into Mayberry for “The Andy Griffith Show” and then Gotham City in the television series “Batman.” The area is now an industrial park.

Jonathan Kuntz is a professor of film at the University of California, Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/op...7kuntz.html?hp





Jim McKay, Pioneer Sports Broadcaster, Dies at 86
Frank Litsky and Richard Sandomir

Jim McKay, the genial ABC Sports broadcaster whose calm voice and trustworthy demeanor were synonymous with the network’s Olympic broadcasts and the celebrated sports anthology series “Wide World of Sports,” died Saturday at his country estate in Monkton, Md. He was 86.

The death was confirmed by LeslieAnne Wade, a spokeswoman for CBS Sports where Mr. McKay’s son, Sean McManus, is the president.

Mr. McManus said his father, who hosted and commented on Triple Crown races for ABC, might have had only one regret in his life: missing Big Brown’s chance on Saturday to be the first winner of the Triple Crown since 1978.

Mr. McKay was a hype-averse optimist and poetic storyteller who left analysis and brickbats to co-workers like Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona, Jackie Stewart and Bill Hartack.

Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete had won a gold medal in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Mr. McKay said: “If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?”

No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed Mr. McKay “to play Uncle Sam for two weeks.”

Mr. McKay’s sincerity came through. Bob Costas of NBC Sports, a younger-generation sportscaster, once said: “Jim McKay had a very important quality. You never felt what he expressed wasn’t genuine. You never felt his reaction was, ‘What’s called for here is a tear.’ You never had a sense that he professed to be moved and when they went to a commercial he blew his nose.”

His professionalism and sensitivity melded in 1972. During the Munich Olympics, as he left the hotel sauna and was about to go into the swimming pool on his only day off, he received word that Arab terrorists had invaded the Israeli living quarters in the Olympic Village. Mr. McKay hurried to the studio, and for 16 consecutive hours he anchored ABC’s extraordinary news coverage, with field reporting from Peter Jennings, Howard Cosell and others.

The episode ended with the murder of 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and trainers. When that word reached Mr. McKay, he said he thought that he would be the person who told the family of David Berger, an Israeli-born weight lifter whose family lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio, “if their son was alive or dead.”

He looked at the lens and said, “They’re all gone.”

When ABC finally signed off, Mr. McKay, physically and emotionally spent, returned to his hotel room. Only then did he realize he had been wearing a wet swimsuit beneath his trousers.

The next day, Mr. McKay received this cable from an old CBS colleague: “Dear Jim, today you honored yourself, your network and your industry. Walter Cronkite.” Mr. McKay’s work at Munich won him an Emmy Award for news coverage, the first for a sportscaster, and the George Polk Award. Through the years, he would win 12 more Emmys.

Mr. McKay was born James Kenneth McManus — the name he used on his passport and for hotel reservations — on Sept. 24, 1921, in Philadelphia. He moved at age 13 to Baltimore, where in 1943 he received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola College. He served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, including a period in which he captained a minesweeper escorting convoys from Trinidad to Brazil.

In 1946 and 1947, he was a police reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun before being shifted to the newspaper’s new television station as a broadcaster, writer and producer. In 1950, when he moved to CBS in New York to host a local daily 90-minute variety show, he was told that his new name, at least for TV, would be Jim McKay, to suit the title, “The Real McKay.” During his debut, Mr. McKay sang “It Had to Be You.”

The next decade brought more television stints at WCBS-TV and the CBS network as a weatherman, a public affairs moderator, a game show host and a sportscaster. He covered the Masters golf tournament, did play by play of Ivy League football games and provided sports reports on CBS’s answer to NBC’s “Today,” the “Morning Show,” which was hosted by Mr. Cronkite.

Mr. McKay was designated to host CBS’s broadcast of the 1960 Winter Olympics from Squaw Valley, Calif., but he had a nervous breakdown and Mr. Cronkite took over. At the Summer Games that year in Rome, Mr. McKay began his run as the TV personality most intimately identified with the Olympics until the late 1980s. He covered 10 Olympics for ABC and his last, for NBC, in 2002. His connection to the Olympics is so strong that it seems as if he were the prime-time host more than he really was.

Before ABC revolutionized Olympic broadcasting and satellites transmitted sports events instantly, CBS had videotapes shipped from the Rome Games daily to New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International), where a remote broadcast unit put the footage on the air while Mr. McKay narrated from a studio erected at Grand Central Terminal.

“The tapes came in frozen one night,” he said in 2002. “The producer and I held the tapes against our bodies to warm them.”

In 1961, Roone Arledge, the executive producer of ABC Sports, needed a host for “Wide World” when one of his producers suggested Burrhead, a reference to Mr. McKay’s crew cut. Mr. Arledge called Mr. McKay at the noisy press room at Augusta National Golf Club during the Masters, which was his last assignment for CBS. In his autobiography, “The Real McKay,” Mr. McKay said Mr. Arledge promised him only 20 weeks as the host of a summer replacement series that would cover “a number of sports not normally seen on TV.”

It lasted for 37 years, with Mr. McKay the host for at least 25 of them, and became the most honored anthology series. As the adventurous host, he traveled more than five million miles in all to cover boxing, skiing, soccer, gymnastics, track and field, figure skating, rodeo, barrel jumping, horse racing, cycling, demolition derby and Eiffel Tower climbing. A promoter once demanded $100,000 for the rights to cliff diving in Acapulco, but Mr. McKay moved in and offered the divers $10 each. They accepted.

He and Mr. Arledge were believed to have collaborated on the introduction to “Wide World,” which Mr. McKay narrated over a montage of sports scenes. The enduring script included the phrase “the thrill of victory,” followed by a melodramatic pause, ominous music and the words “the agony of defeat.”

Mr. McKay is yet another of ABC Sports’s early giants to die: Mr. Arledge is gone, as are Mr. Cosell and Chris Schenkel.

“Because of the profession I’m in, not a day goes by when someone doesn’t stop me and say, ‘We think of him all the time’ and ‘We admire him,’ ” Mr. McManus said Saturday. “That tells you a lot about the kind of man he was.”

In recent years, Mr. McKay owned racehorses and lived in a 19th-century farmhouse in the horse country of Monkton, north of Baltimore. His most recent work including commentary from the Winter Games in Salt Lake City and writing and narrating a documentary about himself for HBO.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret Dempsey, a former columnist for The Baltimore Evening Sun; his son, Sean, the president of CBS News and Sports; a daughter, Mary Guba, of Sparks, Md.; and three grandchildren.

Except for his globetrotting, Mr. McKay and his wife were nearly inseparable during a nearly 60-year marriage. In sedentary semiretirement, he said in 2002, he read to her from newspapers and recalled a recent illness that did not allow her to move her arms or legs.

“When she said, ‘I’m dying,’ it was the worst moment in my life,” he said, with both fear and love in his familiar voice.

Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/sports/08mckay.html





NBC’s Tim Russert Dies
Katharine Q. Seelye

Mr. Russert was a towering figure in American journalism and moderated several debates during the recent presidential primary season.

Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on the air at 3:39 p.m. and reported that Mr. Russert had collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work. He had just returned from Italy with his family.

“Our beloved colleague,” a grave Mr. Brokaw called him, one of the premier journalists of our time. He said this was one of the most important years in his life, with his deep engagement in the network’s political coverage, and that he “worked to the point of exhaustion.” Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Russert was a true child of Buffalo and always stayed in touch with his blue collar roots and “the ethos of that community.”

He said Mr. Russert had just moved his father, who is in his late 80s, from one facility to another in Buffalo. He said he loved his family, his Catholic faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals.

“This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice,” Mr. Brokaw said.

After Mr. Brokaw made the announcement, the network switched to Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC News, who is reporting from Afghanistan this week. Mr. Williams broke down as he tried to describe what the loss meant to his network family.

The network is struggling through shock and grief to bring the story of Mr. Russert’s life and journalistic achievements to its viewers immediately. Andrea Mitchell is describing him as “the pre-eminent journalist of our time” and said he was her mentor.

Mr. Williams said that Mr. Russert, trained as a lawyer, was “always about fairness.” The network is replaying moments of Mr. Russert and Mr. Williams co-moderating a recent debate.

Mr. Russert worked for two prominent New York Democrats, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo, before being hired in 1984 by NBC in its Washington bureau. He became bureau chief four years later.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp





Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable
David Carr

Maybe it’s because I’m from Minneapolis, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Saturday nights on CBS that I spent with Mary Tyler Moore during her show’s heyday in the ’70s. Sure, Saturday night on the Tiffany network also had “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” but who else could take a nothing day, a Saturday for instance, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

How about Kimbo Slice, a massive guy with a Unabomber beard and bare hands capable of performing autopsies?

A week ago, Mr. Slice — and I mean absolutely no disrespect, in case his range of interests includes this newspaper — stepped into the ring on “CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights,” the first in a series of mixed martial arts cage matches on the network, and solved a few mysteries.

1) Who would watch this stuff on network television? A lot of folks, 4.9 million of them in fact, including the precious young males advertisers love.

2) Is Saturday night, as Frank Sinatra suggested, the loneliest night of the week? Not when Mr. Slice has drawn a bead on you. Son, if that’s the case, you have plenty of company.

3) Most compellingly, what could possibly be inside the cauliflower ear of Mr. Slice’s opponent, a tomato can named James Thompson? As all of us found out by the end of the fight, some really yucky stuff.

In CBS’s Saturday night pantheon, the girl who could turn the world on with her smile has been replaced by a man whose missing teeth may be his most compelling feature.

Confronted by an audience that is either on the Web or a milk carton, and a writers’ strike that left the scripted cupboard a little bare, networks are opting in on all manner of contests and challenges, including human cockfighting.

Randomly flip on a network broadcast and people are dancing, fighting, singing and conniving their way to the top. The sitcom laugh track is petering out, as are the kinds of tent-pole dramas and news coverage that gave networks their brand identity.

However, for anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom.

Channels like TNT, AMC, FX and others came up with their own versions of “Trading Places” and carved out niches, sometimes huge ones, by letting viewers know that narrative, quality and drama have not gone off the grid. Those characteristics have just switched coordinates. Sure, “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” still rule the water cooler, but shows like “Mad Men,” “The Closer” and “Saving Grace” are bubbling up as well.

Need more evidence of cable’s sneaky plan to produce quality programming to get quality audiences? NBC’s big push for next season is expanding “The Biggest Loser” to two full hours. Those of us who are looking forward to the third season of “Friday Night Lights,” a riveting drama about the American family through a pigskin prism, will have to wait because the network decided to share the property with DirectTV by splitting production costs and letting satellite viewers get first dibs.

If networks are no longer in the business of coming up with must-see serials that mature over time — we all know that “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” you-name-it took a long time to turn into hits — what business are they in?

“They are on an endless search for the next big thing,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which includes TNT and TBS. “There is very little consistency in what they are doing, and people don’t know what to expect when they turn on the broadcast networks. They are still in the business of appointment television, but there are fewer and fewer appointments. There’s a great big opportunity for cable networks.”

The writers’ strike may have done some damage to the network mode, as well. Not only did viewers tune out in droves — all three networks were down double digits — but competitors also grabbed a tasty share of that pie, with ad-supported cable audiences up 9 percent. Over the course of the strike, cable grew to a 48 percent share, up four points, all of it coming from the hide of the networks.

And it’s not just broadcast entertainment that is hurting. Part of the reason that networks seem to be losing their exalted status is that news programming, typically great for the image and not so much for the ratings, has been given over to the cable news stations. When issues of civic moment are nigh, consumers have been trained to tune in to Wolf or Chris, not Brian or Katie.

Last Tuesday night was a historic one, given that a black candidate became the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party. ABC made the lonely decision to cut away from regular programming to give its viewers a seat on history. NBC covered it with short news breaks while telling its viewers to head over to MSNBC for news. And CBS broadcast the speech only to pre-prime-time West Coast audiences.

For its trouble, ABC was beaten in the ratings by a cable station, CNN. According to my colleague Brian Stelter, it was only the second time in history that a cable news network attracted more viewers than a broadcaster during a major news event. (Fox News lodged the first during the Republican convention in 2004.)

There are other signs that the signal between cable and networks is being scrambled. Tonight at 8 p.m., CBS will broadcast an episode of “The Bill Engvall Show,” a TBS sitcom. In exchange for getting a shot on network air to promote the second season of the show, which begins on Thursday on the cable network, TBS has agreed to give CBS space this coming fall to promote its new lineup.

The move suggests that cable commercial time, once thought of as the province of cheap kitchen gadgets and cut-rate loan sharks, has gained luster. And it will give additional momentum to a “The Bill Engvall Show,” a goofy family program of the kind in which networks used to excel. Last year, the show gathered 4.1 million viewers.

Turner is not only sporting networklike numbers, but it is also beginning to act like a network. Last month, the cable network went toe to toe with the networks at the upfronts, giving a presentation during the same week. Mr. Koonin did everything he could to etch a shift in paradigm, pointing out with a pop quiz from the stage that while TNT has shows with gilded performers like the Oscar winner Holly Hunter and the Emmy winner Kyra Sedgwick, the networks were pushing shows about talking cars and guys in leotards.

ABC finished the upfronts with a flourish of its own, hyping “Wipeout,” a contest that brings the aesthetic of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — gee, that looked like it really hurt — to a set that involves robotic boxing gloves and giant rubber balls. ABC picked YouTube’s pocket to bring a little mayhem to the small screen with better resolution by producing “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.” Now if it could just get a series out of that video where a bear gets shot out of tree with a tranquilizer gun, hits a trampoline and lands on a 4-year-old, my life would be complete.

Sensing an opportunity, ad-supported cable networks will jump in front of the fall network television station lineup with new episodes of “The Closer,” starring Ms. Sedgwick, and “Saving Grace,” starring Ms. Hunter, in July, while USA has already introduced its heavily promoted show about the witness protection program, “In Plain Sight,” and Lifetime’s spicy “Army Wives” came back for a second season last night.

In the meantime, network viewers will have to settle for Mr. Slice. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, but then, so is just about every night on the network schedule.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/bu...ia/09carr.html





Who Altered British TV? ‘Who’ Indeed
Sarah Lyall

RUSSELL T DAVIES, perhaps the most admired writer and producer working in British television drama, was once confronted at a wedding by a fellow guest bristling with indignation about a scene in Mr. Davies’s hugely successful, family-friendly science fiction series, “Doctor Who.” In the scene Capt. Jack Harkness, a swaggering intergalactic hero who exuberantly lusts after both men and women, plants quick kisses on the mouths of both the title character and the title character’s female sidekick as they face imminent death. (Everyone survives.)

Mr. Davies’s first instinct — as a reasonable person, as a happily gay man — was to be relaxed and placatory, he said. But something snapped.

“I was standing there saying, ‘You’re a bad mother, and your children will either grow up to be lesbians, or they will be taken into care because they’ve been badly raised,’ ” he recalled in a recent interview near the “Doctor Who” set. He began to chuckle. “ ‘You are ignorant, and you’re bringing up your children in ignorance, and that will backfire on you.’ ”

Luckily, the woman’s husband escorted her away before a fistfight broke out. But the incident was jolting, in part because it was such an anomaly. Mr. Davies, 44, had already won these arguments, at least with most people, years before. So successfully has he pushed the boundaries of British television that he sometimes forgets how far it, and he, have come.

“He has basically changed the face of television in the U.K.,” said John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack in both “Doctor Who” and a spinoff series, “Torchwood,” which is aimed at adults. “He has taken subject matter that nobody else will touch, and he has put in characters that nobody else will bother doing.”

And he has done it with mainstream programs that are immensely popular. In the last three and a half years he has built “Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and another spinoff, “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” into Britain’s most successful homegrown drama franchise. Mr. Davies recently announced that he would step down as executive producer and head writer of “Doctor Who” at the end of 2009, in order to pursue other projects (he won’t say what they are). But at a time when young audiences are fleeing television for the Internet and other hipper media, “Davies has made family television cool again,” in the words of The Guardian.

It is hard to overstate “Doctor Who’s” significance for Britons of a certain age. First broadcast in 1963, when many households here were just getting used to that novel new device, the television set, it was a triumph of family viewing, a science fiction show that (unlike, say, “Star Trek,” with its particular audience) parents and children stayed home to watch together.

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices. It remained on the air in one form or another until 1989, the potential awkwardness of having a succession of different actors in the title role explained airily away by the Doctor’s ability to morph into a different body every few years.

The new “Doctor Who” is broadcast during Britain’s family friendliest hour — just after dinner on Saturday nights — and it too has morphed into something else altogether, science fiction that is playful, sophisticated, emotionally resonant and peppered with lightning-quick allusions to literary works, to classic “Doctor Who” episodes from long ago, and to historical events and people. But Mr. Davies presses his grown-up themes with a whisper and a laugh, not a shout. No one actually has sex on screen in “Doctor Who.” And when Captain Jack makes an appearance (only rarely, since he now has his own show), his sexuality is an issue only in that his constant, equal-opportunity flirting tends to annoy his colleagues, busy as they are fighting intergalactic evil.

“He takes ‘Doctor Who’ and pushes the envelope the whole time, not in terms of taste and decency but in terms of ideas and emotional intelligence, the size of feeling and epic stroke of narrative breadth,” said Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction. She said that no one at the BBC had ever had a problem with Captain Jack or with any of Mr. Davies’s plotlines. “How ridiculous would it be that you would travel through time and space and only ever find heterosexual men?” Ms. Tranter said.

Hiring Mr. Davies to remake the beloved but, finally, creaky old series was a daring, even counterintuitive move by the BBC. First there was the worry that “Doctor Who” had already had its day, that it belonged to another era altogether. But more than that, Mr. Davies was a risk taker with no obvious science-fiction credentials other than a fanatical lifelong devotion to “Doctor Who” and a headful of ideas about where to take it next. At the time, in 2003, he was best known for “Queer as Folk,” a 1999 series that chronicled the lives of a group of hedonistic gay men in Manchester with a frankness never shown before on mainstream television. (It was later remade in the United States.)

“Queer as Folk” was revolutionary not only because of its racy subject matter but also because of the matter-of-fact way it presented its characters: ordinary people, if unusually attractive and sexually frisky, who happened to be gay. Criticism of its content tended to be overshadowed by admiration for its wit and verve and for the mature fun of its story lines. Mr. Davies used the same philosophy when Captain Jack came on the scene in “Doctor Who” — make it entertaining, not didactic.

“I thought, ‘It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television,’ ” he said, laughing.

He tends to see the joke in most things and talks about television with a words-spilling-over-each-other enthusiasm. What better way to introduce a charming bisexual character, he asked, than to make him “an outer space buccaneer?”

“The most boring drama would be” — here he put on a whiny, fractious voice — “ ‘Oh, I’m bisexual, oh my bleeding heart’ nighttime drama. Tedious, dull. But if you say it’s a bisexual space pirate swaggering in with guns and attitude and cheek and humor into prime-time family viewing: that was enormously attractive to me.”

“Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” which is aimed at children and stars one of the original characters from early “Doctor Who,” have helped win numerous awards and accolades for Mr. Davies, who was named Industry Player of the Year in 2006 at the Edinburgh Television Festival. This season’s opening episode of “Doctor Who” drew 9.14 million viewers — more than one-seventh of the population of Britain. (In the United States “Doctor Who” appears on the Sci Fi Channel. “Torchwood” appears on BBC America and this season was its highest-rated program ever.)

Mr. Davies, who was born in Swansea, Wales, is tall and solid, his broad face dominated by a pair of black-rimmed glasses similar to those worn by Doctor Who himself. His middle initial doesn’t stand for anything; he added it early in his career to distinguish himself from a radio host who shared his name. He lives partly here and partly in Manchester and has a longtime companion who works as a customs inspector for the British government.

After a childhood in which his twin obsessions were television and comic books, he found work as a writer and producer in children’s television. He wrote for soap operas, contributed to long-running dramas and, before “Queer as Folk,” wrote “The Grand,” a multipart drama set in a hotel in the 1920s. Some of his programs have been more successful than others, but most get talked about. In 2003 he tackled religion, to controversial effect, with “The Second Coming,” a two-part drama in which a video-shop owner from Manchester realizes he is the son of God.

But it is the transformation of “Doctor Who” that has cemented Mr. Davies’s reputation. In the old days the program could be one-dimensional, almost cheesy, with cheap special effects that sometimes verged on the Ed Woodian. But serious money is being lavished on the new production. And under the care of Mr. Davies, who writes or supervises the writing of every episode, it has been imbued with newfound sensitivity, pathos and humor.

The hope is that that will be true even after Mr. Davies leaves. After the 2009 season, which is to consist of four specials rather than weekly episodes, he will be succeeded by Steven Moffat, the writer behind the successful series “Coupling” who has written some memorable “Doctor Who” episodes in the past few years.

Over these recent seasons the Doctor has traveled to far-off planets where unspeakable creatures do unspeakable things. He has traveled to Pompeii while Vesuvius erupted. He has rescued Queen Victoria from a giant werewolf, embarked on a heartbreaking love affair with Madame de Pompadour — it ended tragically, on account of her mortality — and saved Earth from annihilation by numerous bad-tempered aliens.

Mr. Davies’s “Doctor Who” has examined the bonds that tie us to even annoying family members. It has plumbed the mysteries and possibilities of chaste love. It has made the case against slavery and violence, played with existential questions about past, present and future and explored what happens when everyone is about to be annihilated by poison gas spewing from automotive exhaust pipes.

Alert viewers will notice the frequent juxtaposition of peril and comedy — the Doctor and his sidekick, Donna, start bickering about how to pronounce the name of some extraterrestrial villains who are within an inch of murdering her, for instance — as well as other signature Davies touches. When the Doctor meets Shakespeare in an episode set during the writing of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Shakespeare throws him a lustful glance.

“Davies dresses these things up in such a friendly plotline that we all have a warm glow, and he gets away with murder,” said Peter Bazalgette, the former chief creative officer of Endemol, the production company that has been responsible for some very popular British programs, including “Big Brother” and “Deal or No Deal.” “It genuinely represents the liberalization of society, which he is leading and reflecting. I think he’s a genius.”

Then there is “Torchwood,” which Mr. Davies describes as “science fiction for adults.” Broadcast later in the evening, it follows the adventures of a group of operatives who thwart the aliens that have a habit of finding their way to Cardiff. It is darker, sharper and less chaste than “Doctor Who.” Mr. Barrowman looks like a bigger and better Tom Cruise and has the charismatic bravado the role requires. Captain Jack makes no apologies; no one asks him to.

In one episode Captain Jack has a full-on fighting-and-making-out session with a former lover turned enemy. Whatever he does, Captain Jack has great fun doing it, which is the point, Mr. Davies said.

“I often get asked to write dramas or films about a man coming out of the closet to his wife, or a man coming out of the closet to his children, or a man who’s beaten up because he’s secretly gay,” Mr. Davies said. “I always refuse if it’s a negative take on homosexuality — if the only aspect being portrayed is the trouble, the tears and the angst.”

He continued: “There’s enough of that out there. Why bother? Drama is easy when it’s tragedy. Anyone could write a scene of a man crying in the rain saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ But actually it’s much more fun to see a man in a bar trying to pick up another man. That’s tense. There’s a whole minefield of emotions there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/ar...on/15lyal.html





Digital TV Coupons Tough to Redeem

Lawmakers seek to extend life of government-issued vouchers for converter boxes, as consumers find the devices hard to obtain.
AP

Some Americans are finding the government-issued coupons used to help pay for digital television converter boxes are expiring before they can be redeemed, House lawmakers said Tuesday.

Consumers also are having a tough time finding converter boxes, which are sold out in some stores, and should be given more time to buy them even after the coupons expire, several lawmakers said during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing.

"If you can't get a box within the 90 days, what good is this?" said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who held up one of the coupons that resemble plastic gift cards.

The government established a $1.5 billion coupon program to help millions of consumers buy the converter boxes before the nationwide transition to digital programming in February.

Households are eligible for two $40 coupons, which are aimed primarily at up to 21 million owners of the older-model sets that rely on antennas to watch TV. If they don't get a converter box when the country's broadcasters complete the switchover, they will wind up staring at a blank screen. Cable and satellite TV subscribers do not need the boxes.

Overall, about 8.5 million households have requested 16 million coupons since the program started earlier this year, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is overseeing the coupon program. Nearly 3 million coupons have been redeemed so far.

There are 1,819 participating retailers in the coupon program, such as Best Buy Co (BBY, Fortune 500)., RadioShack Corp (RSH)., Target Corp (TGT, Fortune 500). and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT, Fortune 500).

Rules violations: While Stupak said there has been some evidence that several retailers have defrauded customers, NTIA Associate Administrator Bernadette McGuire-Rivera said there have been "no egregious instances of waste, fraud and abuse" in the coupon program.

Still, several unnamed retailers have been decertified from the program for various rules violations, and the agency has taken action to ensure that stores correct adverse effects on consumers.

"We have had to pull a dozen bad apples out of the barrel," McGuire-Rivera said.

Of the roughly 840,000 coupons that recently expired, 42% were redeemed, the agency said. Under current government rules, consumers with expired coupons cannot reapply for new ones.

Rep. Charles Gonzalez, D-Texas, said if 58% of consumers are ineligible to get new coupons that could present "some real serious problems."

Deadline dilemma: Several lawmakers have urged the NTIA to be flexible with consumers whose coupons expire, either by extending the deadline or allowing them to reapply for new coupons.

The statutory deadline cannot be changed, said NTIA spokesman Todd Sedmak, but the agency is examining the "new idea" that consumers can reapply for new coupons. He said the agency is weighing several factors, including whether there are enough funds to implement the idea.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/10/tech...V.ap/index.htm





Router Crashes Blamed on Windows XP SP3

Been having problems with your broadband router rebooting unexpectedly? Windows XP SP3 has been named as the culprit.
Dan Warne

Broadband modem/router maker Billion says XP SP3 has been causing its BiPAC 5200-series routers to go into a constant crash and reboot cycle.

The company has produced firmware upgrades that solve the problem.

Although Windows XP SP3 has been available for manual download from Microsoft since May 6, it has just hit Windows Update as an automatic upgrade, which will cause unexpected problems for owners of “unpatched” Billion BiPAC 5200 routers, and possibly other brands or models of router.

The affected BiPAC 5200 firmware versions are 2.9.8.x and 2.11.0.x~2.11.33.x.

Firmware is the software that runs your router, and can be upgraded via the router's web interface, accessible by typing the router's address into your web browser (generally 192.168.1.254).

PC Range managing director Raaj Menon said only a few users had reported problems since Microsoft began offering the Windows XP SP3 as a manual download last month. “However, as Microsoft plans to make Windows XP SP3 an automatic upgrade this month, the number of affected routers may increase significantly,” he said.

“We want to let any customers with affected BiPAC 5200 know about this issue so they can download the new firmware in order to avoid experiencing any problems.”

The following links provide access to downloadable firmware that can resolve this Windows XP SP issue:

5200G: http://au.billion.com/downloads/5200...9_3_10_5_0.zip

5200N: http://au.billion.com/downloads/5200...9)3_10_5_0.zip

http://apcmag.com/router_crashes_bla...ows_xp_sp3.htm





Top Free Hosts To Store Your Files Online
Will Mueller

Recently, the need for space has become immense. Files have become increasingly larger, there are more things to download and so on. Personally, I run out of space on multiple drives all the time. Maybe you are trying to get a file sent to someone, but it’s too large for an attachment on your email. Possibly you want to backup some files to download later or multiple times. That is why there are file hosts.

I have found numerous different file hosting companies, many of them that supply users with an extremely small amount of space or limited features. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Filedropper - Filedropper is amazing. All you need to do to upload a file is click “Upload” and select a file.

Many free file hosting sites give users the option to upload file of up to 100-150MB, yet Filedropper allows users to upload an amazing 5GB!

When you finish uploading a file, Filedropper gives you the link and the source code to add to a website, if you like.

2. Fileqube - Fileqube is another free file hosting site. It has an awesome site design that definitely shows it’s intentions. It is also extremely fast. When you upload a file, a link is provided to download the file, a link to remove the file, and HTML code to add to a website, etc. Unfortunately, Fileqube only allows for uploads of up to only 150MB, yet most certainly one of the best.

3. MyFreeFileHosting- MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.

4. Fileden - Fileden is one of the most useful file hosting services. Users are allowed to upload files, without an account, of files up to 100MB, yet you are allowed to register an account for free as well and receive unlimited diskspace, unlimited bandwith, the option to create projects, the ability to replace files, file statistics, project statistics, etc.

5. Easyshare - Easyshare adds even more features to file hosting. Registering and uploading files occur quickly, with accounts allowing for downloading files multiple times. Unlike other free file hosts though, Easyshare pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times, you’ll apparently receive $20. If you have a personalized toolbar on your website, you can receive money from their uploads through that toolbar and if you refer another person to Easyshare you’ll receive 10% of their earnings.

Another neat thing about this site is the upload options. You can upload on the site from your computer, upload using an FTP server, upload using their free software, or use a remote upload from another server. The maximum file size for a free account is 100MB.

6. FileFactory - Filefactory is similar to all of the previous file hosts, except it supports the option to send a notification email to a person of an uploaded file. Unfortunately, Filefactory contains a large amount of ads if you do not receive the premium service. Yet, unlike the other file hosts, the maximum file size is 300MB which is a large amount per file in comparison. Similar to Easyshare, users are paid for each download they receive from a certain file.

7. Badongo - Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-free-file-hosts/?%3F





Times Imposes Security Measures After Climbers’ Stunts
James Barron and Robin Pogrebin

Executives of The New York Times Company undertook security studies in planning its new headquarters after 9/11, focusing on terrorist threats but apparently never considering that the building — sheathed in rows of horizontal ceramic bars — could become an urban ladder for climbers, as it did twice on Thursday.

Michael Golden, the vice chairman of the Times Company, said he did not recall any discussion about the possibility that someone could try to scale the 52-story building. “I don’t remember that, no,” he said on Friday.

A day after one man followed by another used the building as a giant jungle gym, the executives responsible for security and engineering met with police officials. The Times Company and Forest City Ratner, the real estate company that owns 48 percent of the building, agreed to a short-term plan to keep would-be climbers away.

The plan, which involved hiring security guards and putting up plywood barriers to close gaps that climbers could squeeze through on their way up, reflected both the seriousness of the issue and the unexpected sense of vulnerability at the Times Building. The ceramic rods are one of the building’s most distinctive features, a lattice of silvery-gray bars that forms an extra outer skin, several feet beyond the plate-glass windows that run to the ceiling on each floor. The plywood installed on Friday gave a construction-zone touch to a metal-and-glass building whose look had been carefully thought out.

The skyscraper, on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, is the work of the Italian architect Renzo Piano, who declined to be interviewed on Friday, saying that Mr. Golden had specifically instructed him not to speak to the newspaper’s reporters. Mr. Golden acknowledged this, saying, “I’ve told Renzo, I don’t think there’s any good that comes from this kind of publicity.”

The design work on the building began long before the 9/11 attacks, and after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Mr. Golden said, “there was a great deal of discussion and design changes made for the security” of the new Times Building — “not for people climbing outside, but the kinds of issues 9/11 raised.” He would not discuss the details.

He said he was deeply troubled by Thursday’s events. “I hate the fact that it happened — there’s no good that comes of it,” he said.

But as to whether the Times Company would consider removing the ceramic rods, he said, “No.”

The first climber, a French stuntman named Alain Robert, said in an interview on Friday that the ease of climbing the Times Building was quite obvious to him — on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, he rated it a 1. Even so, he said, his stunt required some planning. He said he had scouted the building some weeks ago and had even done a brief trial climb about 2 o’clock one morning, apparently undetected.

Ever since the mountain climber George H. Willig scaled the south tower of the World Trade Center in 1977, architects have been careful to avoid making tall buildings easy to climb. “There is a certain logic to how accessible you make the building — how readily are you actually creating a ladder up to the top?” said T. J. Gottesdiener, a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed the Freedom Tower being built at ground zero.

“This is going to be a real big consideration on everybody’s list” because of the two incidents at the Times Building, he said.

For the Freedom Tower, Mr. Gottesdiener said, the architects designed a base of vertical, prismatic glass to avoid climbable ledges. Security issues regarding the facade were discussed at length. “It’s very practical — whether people can actually come and stick their toe in it and start to climb up it,” Mr. Gottesdiener said. “You’ve got to think about what kind of opportunities you’re presenting to people.”

Soon after The Times moved into the building last year, security duties were divided. Security in the lobby was split between officers who worked for the Times Company and others who worked for First New York Partners, a management and operations arm of Forest City Ratner. Under that arrangement, the Times Company was responsible for security on its floors — 2 through 27, and part of 28 — and First New York was responsible for the remaining floors and the exterior of the building.

Abbe R. Serphos, the director of public relations for the Times Company, said that the arrangements had changed in recent weeks. She said that security employees of the Times Company had “started to report to” First New York Partners. “They oversee our security team now,” Ms. Serphos said.

She said the Times Company’s longtime director of security, Jay McKillop, had left recently and “moved on to another opportunity.” Reached by cellphone on Friday, Mr. McKillop declined to discuss the security planning for the Times Building or say whether the issue of climbers had been considered.

John Garrity, an employee of First New York Partners who is director of security for The New York Times Building, also declined to comment. He said he had been instructed not to speak by executives of the Times Company.

No one could recollect a climbing incident at The Times’s former headquarters on West 43rd Street.

Mr. Robert and the other climber, Renaldo Clarke of Brooklyn, were both charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Both were released on bail on Friday.

Steven Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a nonprofit public interest group in Washington, said the fact that two climbers scaled the building in one day with such ease showed flaws in preparedness. Neither man used any equipment, unlike Mr. Willig, who designed special climbing apparatus for his World Trade Center ascent.

Mr. Emerson said that any news media organization needed tight security, and added that he was surprised that the Times Building did not have “prohibitive perimeter security” — something at street level to stop would-be climbers from getting a foothold. “I just naturally assumed that in the construction of the new building they would have accounted for the fact that it would be a natural magnet, particularly in a post-9/11 world,” he said.

Mr. Robert said in an interview on Friday that he chose the Times Building because climbing it seemed simple.

He said his prime goal was to ascend as quickly as possible to a height beyond the reach of the Fire Department’s ladders, which he figured was about 200 feet.

Once he knew he could not be stopped, he paused to unfurl a banner and attach it to the building. The banner promoted thesolutionissimple.org, the Web site of an environmental group that sponsored his climb.

Mr. Robert, a slight man with shoulder-length brown hair and a nose bent like a prizefighter’s, said he was neither flattered nor insulted by Mr. Clarke’s same-day ascent.

“Since climbing this building is like climbing a ladder, it doesn’t mean he is a good climber,” Mr. Robert said. “For me, it doesn’t change anything.”

Mr. Robert said he had been planning to climb the Times Building for several weeks. He described it as a “perfect target” because of the ladderlike curtain of rods, which runs from the second floor to the roof. To reach the lowest rods, he shimmied up a beam from the sidewalk on 41st Street to a glass overhang, he said.

Al Baker and Patrick McGeehan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/ny...7building.html





Military Supercomputer Sets Record
John Markoff

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/te...aflops.html?hp





90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots
Matthew C. Nisbet

If the author is skeptical of mainstream science, is there a conservative think tank behind them?

A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

In the study, the authors first offer a conceptualization of environmental skepticism as an ideology and movement:
In summary, environmental scepticism consists of four key themes. First, environmental scepticism is defined by its denial of the seriousness of environmental problems and dismissal of scientific evidence documenting these problems. This primary theme sets environmental scepticism apart from earlier environmental opposition movements like the US 'wise use movement' and 'sage brush rebellion' (Switzer 1997). Second, environmental scepticism draws upon the first theme to question the importance of environmentally protective policies. Third, environmental scepticism endorses an anti-regulatory/anti-corporate liability position that flows from the first two claims. Lastly, environmental sceptics often cast environmental protection as threatening Western progress.

Using this definition as a guide, they then search publishing databases to identify books between 1972 and 2005 that fall into this ideological category, observing indicators of author affiliation, sponsorship, and/or publication by conservative think tanks. As they report:
...of the 141 books which promote environmental scepticism, 130 (92.2 per cent) have a clear link to one or more CTTs -either via author affiliation (62 books) or because the book was published by a CTT (five books) or both (63 books). Furthermore, most of the remaining 11 books clearly reflect a conservative ideology, but are not connected to a CTT and are not coded as such here. Indeed, it appears that only one of the 141 books was written by a current self-professed liberal - Greg Easterbrook (1995).

Here's the conclusion to the study:
Our analyses of the sceptical literature and CTTs indicate an unambiguous linkage between the two. Over 92 per cent of environmentally sceptical books are linked to conservative think tanks, and 90 per cent of conservative think tanks interested in environmental issues espouse scepticism. Environmental scepticism began in the US, is strongest in the US, and exploded after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of global environmental concern stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit. Environmental scepticism is an elite-driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement. Promoting scepticism is a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement coordinated by CTTs, designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement's efforts to legitimise its claims via science. Thus, the notion that environmental sceptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as sceptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations.
http://scienceblogs.com/framing-scie...viro_skept.php





For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else
Robert Levine

One of the biggest music events of the summer has already taken place in Fayetteville, Ark. From Tuesday through Thursday last week, the Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas presented shows by Journey, the country singer Keith Urban, the “American Idol” personality Carrie Underwood and the alternative rock group All-American Rejects.

The occasion that brought this all-star line-up together? Not a festival or cause but Wal-Mart Stores’ annual shareholders meeting. Wal-Mart was the largest music retailer in the country last year, so musicians (and their labels) are eager to maintain good relationships, appearing in the special concerts for the chain, which are also open to the public.

During her performance, Ms. Underwood volunteered that a Wal-Mart had recently opened in her hometown, Checotah, Okla., and Keith Urban changed his lyrics from “Goodbye, city, I’m country-bound” to “I’m Wal-Mart-bound.” And the retailer is using its leverage to aggressively pursue new deals.

On Tuesday Wal-Mart started selling on an exclusive basis a three-disc collection by the popular 1980s band Journey called “Revelation.” The difference, however, is that there is no middleman: the album was bought directly from the band without the help of a record label. Journey went right to Wal-Mart and kept most of the money a record company would normally take as profit for the group. Last year Wal-Mart made a similar deal with the Eagles, who like Journey are represented by Front Line Management, the nation’s largest music management company.

The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.

The Eagles’ double disc, “Long Road Out of Eden,” sold 711,000 copies in its first week and three million since its release, according to Nielsen SoundScan, impressive numbers at a time when CD sales are declining. Journey sold 45,000 albums in its first three days on sale, and Irving Azoff, founder and chief executive of Front Line Management and a music industry veteran who ran MCA Records in the ’80s, predicted that it would sell more than 80,000 copies in its first week. That is probably enough to debut in the top five, and significantly more than its last album sold in total.

“With the downturn, the labels couldn’t match the marketing commitments that Wal-Mart could make,” Mr. Azoff said. “It was well in excess of anything a label could do.”

Front Line took on some of the traditional work of a record label, producing a video and promoting songs to radio. But most of the marketing was done at Wal-Mart itself. The chain ran print, radio and television advertisements that promoted the exclusive availability of the Eagles album. Stores display the Eagles and Journey albums in several locations, not just the music department, and this week some stores had the Journey DVD playing on their big-screen televisions.

In some ways, the arrangements that Wal-Mart has made with Journey and the Eagles represent the mainstream equivalent of the path that artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have taken by releasing albums on the Internet without a traditional label.

“It just goes to show you that fewer artists need to be associated with record companies,” said Larry Mestel, chief executive of Primary Wave Music Publishing and former chief operating officer of Virgin Records. “They don’t need to give up a big chunk of money to the record companies when they’re iconic. They can go direct to Wal-Mart and make four to five dollars per CD.”

It’s hard to tell how much traditional labels are threatened by the prospect of artists’ selling directly to retailers. New albums from more established acts can be less profitable if they have negotiated a higher royalty rate. And although the Eagles are reliable sellers, Journey is what industry executives delicately refer to as a “heritage act,” a steady summer concert attraction that sells relatively few albums of new material.

One reason the Eagles and Journey albums have sold so many copies is their price: $11.98. That’s an unusually low retail price, especially for “Revelation,” which consists of one CD of new songs, one CD of new renditions of Journey classics and one DVD of a recent concert performance. But one of Wal-Mart’s goals in promoting such releases is drawing customers into stores with a bargain they can’t find anywhere else.

“The goal with almost everything we do is to figure out how to make some kind of a profit,” said Gary Severson, Wal-Mart’s head of home entertainment. “But this can also give us the opportunity to add to the brand, and I hope we’ve accomplished that as well.”

Exclusive album deals have been happening for some time with that goal in mind. Wal-Mart and Best Buy, the two largest physical retailers of music, often get special editions of albums, with exclusive songs or video footage. In 2005, Wal-Mart made a deal to become the exclusive distributor of Garth Brooks albums, including a new collection of outtakes. But the Eagles and Journey are the first two major acts that have released albums of new material that are available at only one retailer. And although record labels tread carefully around such deals, for fear of upsetting rival stores, bands need not be so sensitive.

This summer Wal-Mart will carry an exclusive release by the young country singer Taylor Swift in a promotion that also calls for Ms. Swift to promote L.E.I. jeans. (In this case, Ms. Swift’s label was part of the deal.) And Mr. Azoff said that he was already talking to Wal-Mart about an exclusive deal for Fleetwood Mac’s next release. “Classic rock really works there,” Mr. Azoff said.

Front Line is only one of the major management companies that are trying to take on roles that have traditionally been filled by labels. The Nettwerk Music Group, which manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan, has set up custom labels for some small artists. And Q-Prime, which manages Metallica, recently hired an executive to start an independent label of sorts.

The idea of treating the label as a middleman that can be cut out fits Wal-Mart’s approach to cost-cutting. In the past the chain has pushed record labels to lower their wholesale prices, arguing that customers would buy more CDs if they were less expensive.

“I think that with any product, when the price goes up, the demand goes down,” said Mr. Severson. “Sometimes it’s about the right artist with the right product at the right price.”

For Journey, some of the success of “Revelation” is also about the right timing. For a band that hit its commercial peak in the early ’80s, Journey has enjoyed an unlikely revival in the last few years. The song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” has been licensed for “Family Guy,” “Scrubs,” “Laguna Beach” and, most famously, the last episode of “The Sopranos,” and the exposure increased the song’s sales on Apple’s iTunes store. Journey, which has gone through several vocalists, recently hired a new singer, Arnel Pineda, whom Journey’s guitarist, Neal Schon, discovered singing the band’s covers on YouTube.

But Journey would almost certainly not be selling as many albums without the support of Wal-Mart.

“Shelf space has shrunk so much over the last five years that for anyone to give you shelf space and exposure is a big deal,” said Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwerk Music Group. “Should the labels be worried? There’s been a move away from the labels for a number of years now. And it’s not necessarily their fault. The shelf space to have those records sell just isn’t there. That’s the market reality.”

Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Rosenbloom contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/bu...09walmart.html





Coldplay Album Selling Fast, Music to EMI's Ears

Coldplay sold 125,000 copies of its new album on the first day of release in Britain, a solid tally industry experts say should be music to the band's ears and those of its ailing record label EMI.

"Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends" now looks "certain" to top Sunday's album chart, according to The Official Charts Company which tracks record sales, even though it was released on Thursday rather than at the start of the week.

"Coldplay are an international act ... and these sales figures in the UK are the first indication of how the album will be received, and EMI will be very pleased," said The Official Charts Company managing director Martin Talbot.

"X&Y," Coldplay's last album and most successful to date, sold 465,000 copies in its first week in Britain.

EMI, and its boss Guy Hands, will now turn their attention to the world's biggest music market in the United States, a more important barometer of the album's success when it is released there next week.

The band has expressed relief the recording process is over for one of the year's most eagerly anticipated records.

" feel very relieved that the album is finally released out into the big wide world," the band said on its Web site. "It's out of our hands now. It doesn't belong to us any more."

Interview Walkout

Lead singer Chris Martin, married to Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow, has appeared uncomfortable discussing the record in a series of radio interviews this week.

Late on Thursday, he walked out of an interview on BBC's Radio 4, saying he was "not really enjoying this" and accusing his interviewer of "twisting" his words. He also rejected the description of the new album as "morbid."

EMI, the smallest of the four major record labels which was taken private last year, lost two of its biggest acts in 2007 -- Paul McCartney and Radiohead -- and representatives for Coldplay and Robbie Williams also suggested they may look elsewhere.

Pop stars are considering alternatives to traditional record deals as Internet piracy and declining CD sales mean touring and merchandise are often more lucrative than the music itself.

McCartney launched a venture with coffee chain Starbucks while Radiohead offered their latest album "In Rainbows" over the Internet on a "pay-what-you-want" basis.

Other labels have also been affected, including Warner Bros. which was dropped by Madonna for a recording, touring and merchandising partnership with concert promoter Live Nation.

Coldplay followed the recent trend of digital initiatives by giving away "Violet Hill," the first single from their new album, for free over the Internet. Media reports said the offer was taken up by two million people.

Like other record labels, EMI is seeking to develop new models of distributing music digitally to keep pace with rapid changes that are eroding physical music sales.

The company, which announced up to 2,000 job cuts in January, has appointed former executives from online virtual world site Second Life and Google.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...21605220080613





Radiohead Catalog Finally Available on iTunes
Eliot Van Buskirk

ITunes customers can now buy music from Radiohead's EMI label days, following a change in heart on the part of the band regarding the unbundling of albums into individual songs.

"There has been massive demand for Radiohead's music on iTunes," EMI communications SVP Jeanne Meyer told Listening Post. "Once In Rainbows was unbundled, it was a natural progression to unbundle (the rest of) their catalog" so that it would be available there.

Radiohead had previously allowed EMI to sell its albums digitally on music services only in album form. Apple refuses to do this, so Radiohead declined to sell its music on iTunes -- by far the largest of the digital music stores. However, the band's approach changed with In Rainbows, which the band released for unbundled sale on iTunes following its pricing-optional debut.

Radiohead's back catalog of EMI albums, its videos and its new Greatest Hits album are all available in the iTunes Plus store, in the DRM-free AAC format.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/06/...-sells-ra.html





Some Retailers Give Vinyl Records a Spin
Sarah Skidmore

It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.

This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by the Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy Co. is testing sales at some stores. And Amazon.com Inc., which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The bestseller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But bands including the White Stripes, the Foo Fighters, Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."

According to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36% from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17% during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound -- though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog. Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality.

But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan in Portland.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon. Nearly 450 million CDs were sold in 2007, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million this year.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,3936629.story





A Flashy Facebook Page, at a Cost to Privacy

Add-Ons to Online Social Profiles Expose Personal Data to Strangers
Kim Hart

Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.

Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, allow users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information -- home town, schools attended, employment history -- and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy users.

"Everything requires you to give access to personal information or it forces you to ask your friends to do the same -- it becomes a real nuisance," said David Dixon, 40, an information technology consultant in Columbia who recently deleted most of the applications he had downloaded to his Facebook profile after reading on a blog that developers may have access to his information. "Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?"

Even private profiles, in which personal details are available only to specific friends, reveal personal information, said Chris Soghoian, a cyber-security researcher at Indiana University. And they're allowing access to their friends' information -- even if their friends are not using the application. That's because MySpace and Facebook, the largest online social networks, let outside developers see a member's information when they add a program.

"You want to be social with your friends, but now you're giving 20 guys you've never met vast amounts of information from your profile," he said. "That should be troubling to people."

A year ago, Facebook started allowing outside developers to create small software programs for members to download. Since then, the company said, about 24,000 applications have been built by 400,000 developers. They've become enormously popular, with users playing poker, getting daily horoscopes and sending one another virtual cocktails, to name a few. More than 95 percent of Facebook users have installed at least one application, the company said.

Applications have grown so much that venture-capital firms have formed exclusively to fund their development, and there is a Stanford University course devoted to creating them.

In February, MySpace also opened up to developers. It has more than 1,000 applications. The company, along with other social networks such as Hi5 and AOL's Bebo, allows applications under OpenSocial, a Google-led initiative that lets developers distribute games and other programs across multiple social networks.

Each site has come up with its own policies on the data that developers are allowed to see. MySpace, the largest social network, with 110 million members, said developers can see users' public details -- name, profile picture and friend lists -- when they download a program. When a user installs one on Facebook, which has 70 million members, the developer can see everything in a profile except contact information, as well as friends' profiles. Members can limit what is seen by changing privacy controls, and both companies say developers are allowed to keep those data for only 24 hours.

Developers can collect other data from members once they've download the applications.

Ben Ling, director of Facebook's platform, said that developers are not allowed to share data with advertisers but that they can use it to tailor features to users. Facebook now removes applications that abuse user data by, for example, forcing members to invite all of their friends before they can use it.

"When we find out people have violated that policy, there is swift enforcement," he said.

But it is often difficult to tell when developers are breaking the rules by, for example, storing members' data for more than 24 hours, said Adrienne Felt, who recently studied Facebook security at the University of Virginia.

She examined 150 of the most popular Facebook applications to find out how much data could be gathered. Her research, which was presented at a privacy conference last month, found that about 90 percent of the applications have unnecessary access to private data.

"Once the information is on a third-party server, Facebook can't do anything about it," she said. Developers can use it to provide targeted ads based on a member's gender, age or relationship status.

Consumer advocates have voiced concerns over how software developers are using such data. The Center for Digital Democracy is urging the Federal Trade Commission to look into the privacy policies surrounding third-party applications.

Some developers acknowledge the value of the data at their fingertips but say they're careful not to abuse it.

"We don't care who their favorite musicians are, and we're not looking at their pictures," said Dan Goodman, co-founder of Loladex, an application that lets users find friend-recommended businesses, such as plumbers and pizzerias. Loladex does keep track of user-provided data, such as Zip codes.

Goodman said he hasn't ruled out using the data for targeted advertising, but "we're not trying to push the privacy envelope."

Hungry Machine, based in Georgetown, has created 25 Facebook applications, including programs that let users recommend movies, books and music.

"Leveraging that data would make a lot of sense," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder of the company. But he said no plans are in the works.

Slide, which designed three of the most popular Facebook applications -- SuperPoke, FunWall and Top Friends -- said it uses personal details only to make applications more relevant to users. For example, Slide collects friends' birthdays so it can remind you to "poke" them on the right day.

Many Facebook users don't mind using the tools to express themselves. Gabby Jordan of Baltimore uses the Flirtable and Pimp Wars programs to connect with friends.

"If there are too many, you could easily delete them off your profile and not have to worry about it," she wrote in an e-mail.

But revealing information on quizzes or maps of places visited, for instance, may also make it easier for strangers to piece together tidbits to create larger security threats, said Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of public policy and information systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

Some online activities ask users to list pets' names or to display their high school's mascot, answers to common security questions asked by financial companies.

"Nowadays, some people have downloaded so many [applications], it's a constant flow of information about what they've done, what they're doing, which can be mined by your friends and also by someone you don't know anything about," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061103759.html





The Wiki-Way to the Nomination
Noam Cohen



Barack Obama is the victor, and the Internet is taking the bows.

Commenting on the Democratic presidential primary campaign, the blogger Andrew Sullivan praised Mr. Obama’s success in mastering “Facebook politics.” Roger Cohen, writing online in The New York Times, likened the rapid success of Mr. Obama to that of a “classic Internet startup.” And The Atlantic Monthly, in a much discussed article titled “HisSpace,” described what Mr. Obama’s impressive online fund-raising apparatus owes to the enhanced social networking of sites like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.

Mr. Obama is hardly alone in making use of the Web (remember Howard Dean in 2004). What sets him apart is his openness to contributions from those working outside the campaign organization. As he described it to a Time magazine reporter last week, “We just had some incredibly creative young people who got involved and what I think we did well was give them a lot of latitude to experiment and try new things and to put some serious resources into it.”

Consider the video “Yes We Can,” Mr. Obama’s words set to music by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which has been viewed more than 18 million times online, first at YouTube, and now at the Obama campaign’s portal, my.barackobama.com. And there is also the ubiquitous poster of Mr. Obama (with the captions “Progress” and “Hope”) created by the street artist Shepard Fairey and later incorporated into the campaign and sold on its Web site.

Mr. Fairey posted the image (inspired by the famous photograph of Che Guevara) on his own site early in the primaries, and said in an interview that “the official campaign had been hit up so many times, they asked, ‘Can we get you to do an official thing?’ ”

The receptiveness of the Obama campaign to such bottom-up influences raises a question: might the candidate actually model his approach to politics on the informal communal spirit the Internet encourages?

It is not easy to say, because Mr. Obama draws on a range of influences, not the least of which is the high rhetorical tradition of American politics. As Garry Wills recently suggested in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Obama’s characterization of himself as an “imperfect candidate” draws on Lincoln’s idea “that the preamble’s call for ‘a more perfect union’ initiated a project, to make the Constitution a means for its own transcendence.”

But at the same time, Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”

Wikipedia is the influential online encyclopedia that is in a constant state of revision, thanks to its tens of thousands of contributors around the world. There is no single “editor,” no presiding panel of experts for its 2.4 million articles in English. Indeed, anyone can pick up an article and make changes immediately (“wiki-wiki” is Hawaiian for fast).

Similarly, open-source software is created by groups working on “patches,” as programmers call them. Anyone can contribute, and the most useful ideas thrive. A result has been successes like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Internet browser.

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.”

For this reason there are thousands of people working across the Internet to build enthusiasm for the campaign, some of it even gently mocking, like Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, a site listing the many examples of Mr. Obama’s magical compassion. (“Barack Obama carries a picture of you in his wallet”; “Barack Obama thought you could use some chocolate.”)

For his part, Mr. Obama is quick to take himself out of the narrative, even as he promises to remake Washington. This isn’t simply modesty. It reflects the utopian, community-building vision central to the Internet. Wikipedia’s unpaid collaborators, for example, hope to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language,” says the site’s mastermind, Jimmy Wales. So too the thousands of programmers in the open-source world intend not just to develop a free operating system, but vanquish Microsoft.

In this scheme, Mr. Obama’s role, at least in the rhetoric, is less leader than facilitator, a conduit for decentralized collaboration as described by James Surowiecki in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” “The ethos of the Net is fundamentally respectful of and invested in the idea of collective wisdom, and in some sense is hostile to the idea that power and authority should belong to a select few,” Mr. Surowiecki wrote.

This is not to say that open projects always produce the best results. Thousands of ordinary people having their say can lead to dubious outcomes. And in politics, particularly at the presidential level, where decisions affect the lives of millions, the risks can be great.

For a candidate, there is always the danger of “making yourself vulnerable” by “giving participants control of chunks of the enterprise,” Mr. Benkler said. Mr. Obama has to walk a careful line. It’s one thing to help popularize a campaign, quite another to shape policy. And Mr. Obama’s team has been as adamant as any about staying on message.

To some extent, however, Mr. Obama has invited policy ideas from outsiders. Deb Barry, an Obama supporter in New Hampshire, said she was impressed that the organization she belongs to, Educators for Obama, had a chance to speak with his education-policy staff members before the primary there. “I went into that conference call, kind of with the impression that the purpose was for us to ask questions,” she said. In fact, “they were picking our brains. They had specific questions they wanted to ask us, and were seeing how we felt about what had already come out from the campaign.”

Not that Ms. Barry expects to play a direct role in shaping government policy. “There is a huge limitation about how much contact someone like me can have with the big decision makers,” she said, but a critical first step is reaching out: “Not just reaching out to experts, with big titles and degrees after his name, but people with experience.”

Other online activists are more skeptical about the openness to outsiders. “The Obama campaign is still very much a top-bottom operation,” Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, of the influential DailyKos Web site, wrote in an e-mail message. “They’ve made it very easy for people to hop on the bandwagon, but those in the back of that wagon still get no say in where the campaign is going.”

Yes, someone is driving the bandwagon, even if he constantly plays down his role — describing himself as a Rorshach image on whom others project. Even Wikipedia has administrators who monitor the work there, and open-source projects have their “leaders,” who keep them on course.

In truth, there is no such thing as purely collective decision making. As Mr. Surowiecki summed it up in his book: “It has historically been unusual for change to bubble up from below on its own. So it is, in fact, more likely that someone will take it on himself to champion the idea of collective wisdom, and in that way create the conditions that allow it to flourish. This is paradoxical, but no more so than the fact that an individual, not a crowd, wrote ‘The Wisdom of Crowds.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/we...w/08cohen.html





Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
Jim Rutenberg

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron
during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp





Old NASA Footage Shows Space Program in New Light
Barry Garron

High definition is not just a way of making video look crisp and bright. It also is a reason for making programs -- maybe the reason -- as "When We Left Earth" suggests.

One can say, as the Discovery Channel does in its press materials, that this comprehensive and authoritative six-hour miniseries running June 8, 15 and 22 was produced to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA and the U.S. exploration of space. In reality, though there is abundant history on the space program, there is scant information that hasn't already been seen, heard or written somewhere else.

What makes this mini different from all those other projects is that, for the first time, we get to see rare NASA footage -- sort of like the space agency's home video -- which was removed from cold storage and transferred to high definition just for this project.

And what footage it is. Not merely breathtaking space and launch photos but clips that reveal the risks, danger and anxiety of NASA employees and astronaut wives at each new venture.

It is so simple and certain in hindsight but the NASA films show the palpable tension in Mission Control, such as just before Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon and broke out of lunar orbit. Other highlights include training for the unexpected, fiery rockets and the cool blue of an Earth rise seen from the moon.

In between clips of vintage NASA footage (more than 100 hours of old film was converted to high definition for this project) are bits of recent interviews with astronauts and flight directors, often recollecting events of decades past as if they had just happened that morning.

Like the space capsules themselves, this mini speeds through its mission. Each of the first three hours, for example, are spent, respectively, on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Tune in to learn about the strategy of each launch and for those amazing vintage films. Keep in mind, though, that with the focus so squarely on NASA, there is little reference to other concurrent but related events, such as domestic politics or the Cold War.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...43265620080608

[JackSpratts]

MPAA Wants to Stop DVRs from Recording Some Movies
Matthew Lasar

At the request of theatrical film makers, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday quietly launched a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology that does this is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs.

"The Petitioners' theatrical movies are too valuable in this early distribution window to risk their exposure to unauthorized copying," MPAA wrote to the FCC last month. "Distribution over insecure outputs would facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets." Less than a month after the request, the FCC has given MPAA a public comment period on the question that will last through July 7.

Expedited distribution—with one, big caveat

MPAA has pressed its Petition for Expedited Special Relief on behalf of Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Brothers. How did these media companies get an FCC proceeding so fast? Ars bets that hiring former FCC Commissioner Kathleen Q. Abernathy as their attorney helped. Abernathy supported former FCC Chair Michael Powell's drastic relaxation of the agency's media ownership rules in 2003, along with Kevin Martin, now head of the agency.

Movies go through a timeline of staged releases that lasts about three years. First they go to theaters; 60 days after that they start showing up in airplanes and hotels; in 120 days from their theatrical release they transfer to DVD and Internet download; about a month later to video on demand/pay-per-view; by the end of the year to premium subscription systems like HBO and Showtime; and eventually to basic cable and free TV.

MPAA says these studios want to release their movies to multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) "significantly earlier and prior to DVD release"—although the trade groups' filing won't say exactly how much sooner. But in exchange for the accelerated service, MPAA wants permission to obtain SOC blocking of recording capabilities. The group promises that once said movies have reached the home video sale/rental stage, the blocking will stop.

The movie lobby wants a waiver from FCC rules prohibiting MVPDs from adding code to digital video streams, that, among other restrictions, could block copying. Here is the rule: "A covered entity shall not attach or embed data or information with commercial audiovisual content, or otherwise apply to, associate with, or allow such data to persist in or remain associated with such content, so as to prevent its output through any analog or digital output authorized or permitted under license, law or regulation governing such covered product."

MPPA notes that the Commission did say in 2003 that it would consider adjusting this policy around SOC. "We nonetheless recognize that selectable output control functionality might have future applications that could potentially be advantageous to consumers," MPAA observes that the FCC declared in a late 2003 Report and Order, "such as facilitating new business models."

We're here to help

MPAA argues that, in addition to getting first-run movies to the public sooner, giving movie studios a break on this issue could also aid the DTV transition. The enhanced service "will encourage the purchase of HDTV sets by consumers, and thereby ensure that a greater number of citizens have the necessary equipment to receive broadcast digital programming by February 17, 2009."

But unquoted in MPAA's petition is this passage from the same FCC Report and Order: "We also recognize consumers’ expectations that their digital televisions and other equipment will work to their full capabilities, and the potential harm to the DTV transition if those expectations are frustrated," the Commission observed. "In particular, we are concerned that selectable output control would harm those 'early adopters' whose DTV equipment only has component analog inputs for high definition display, placing these consumers at risk of being completely shut off from the high-definition content they expect to receive."

Needless to say, this proposal is likely to get a very cold reception from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF already warns that SOC and "down resolution"—strategically lowering the level of digital quality—could undermine HDTV. "Many current and novel devices rely on unrestricted outputs, particularly component analog connections," EFF says.

Not surprisingly, the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) opposes SOC too. "In the long term, imposition of SOC could have the effect of driving from the market any home interface that supports home recording," the group observes. Fears that MPAA's proposal represents a foot in the door to much wider interference with consumer digital applications may also play a role in this discussion.

The FCC wants comments and oppositions to MPAA's proposal by June 25 and replies to comments by July 7.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...me-movies.html





Digital Copyright: it's All Wrong
Graeme Philipson

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it.

The US (surprise, surprise) has circulated a draft "Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting, in Tokyo in July. The full text of the document has been published on Wikileaks (wikileaks.org).

The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

The draft contains other draconian measures. It proposes a governing body for copyright protection that would operate outside organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN. In short, it proposes a global police force, answerable to no one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concept of intellectual property.

The proposed treaty is being sponsored by a small group of US Congress members, all of whom Wikileaks says have received significant contributions from major record companies and film studios. As they say, "follow the money".

The first newspaper to break the story was Canada's The Ottawa Citizen, which in a story by Vito Pilieci on May 24 picked up on the Wikileaks posting. Since then the blogosphere has been rife with stories about the move. Most commentators are outraged that such a proposal is even being considered.

For 10 years in this column and elsewhere I have been arguing that the concept of copyright, and by extension most forms of so-called "intellectual property", are irrelevant in the digital era. I was once, with just a few others, a voice in the wilderness. Now most people I talk with agree.

The copyright mafia have tried all sorts of things, including the absurdity of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which attempts to use technology to hobble technology. They have maliciously prosecuted individuals for the "crime" of copying music from one medium to another.

DRM is struggling, but we still see stupidity everywhere. Apple doesn't let you copy stuff off your iPod - you have to use third-party software to perform what should be a simple task. Foxtel's iQ and Austar's MyStar don't let you copy stuff off those boxes to other media.

Downloaded movies self-destruct after a limited time. It is still illegal in Australia to copy a CD to another CD (only "format shifting" is allowed), or to record a TV show for any other purpose than watching it once.

Whether this absurd treaty becomes reality or not, it indicates the lengths to which some are prepared to go. They will use any means to fight a technology that threatens their anachronistic monopoly of the distribution of digital content.

Clever people are taking advantage of the technology to develop new business models and reach new audiences. Bands are bypassing record companies and going direct to consumers. Authors are publishing online. Small moviemakers are finding new outlets through the wonders of the internet.

The big record companies and film studios have a clever answer - turn everybody into criminals. Use treaties and laws to try to prevent people doing what comes naturally and, in the digital age, easily.

The most that can be hoped of the proposed ACTA treaty is that, if it comes into being, it will further expose the futility of legislating against the key advantage of digital technology - the ease with which content can be stored, copied and transmitted. Where the technology is liberating people and content, the powers of reaction are attempting to stifle it.

Fortunately they are on the wrong side of history. When the full details and consequences of this treaty become widely known, I believe the effect will be the opposite of what its authors intend. It contains so little understanding of the way the digital world works that the backlash against it will be massive, accelerating the inevitable death of the out-of-date business models it is vainly trying to protect.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/perspecti...863545123.html





A History of Copy Protection
Adam Swiderski

The epic struggle between game makers and pirates has yielded some crazy copy protection methods over the past decades. Here's how far we've come in the realm of security...

Recently, Bioware technical producer Derek French caused a stir by announcing that PC versions of both Mass Effect and Spore would utilize online SecuROM copy protection that required the games to automatically re-check with a central server every ten days. The idea was roundly and vigorously panned by the gaming community, to the point at which EA chose to relent and alter its plans rather than suffer the public relations backlash.

All's well that ends well, and yet this minor kafuffle is only the latest salvo in a war that has been waged for decades between those who produce and sell the games we play and the software pirates who would see them copied and illegally distributed. It's made copy protection a hot topic of discussion lately in PC gaming. Its roots, however, reach all the way back to the dawn of computer gaming as a pursuit.

The Early Years

Software piracy has always been a thorn in the side of the gaming world, but in the beginning, it was less of an issue than it is today. The industry was in its infancy, and the idea that games would someday be the kind of multi-billion dollar behemoth that would be plagued by the effects of widespread piracy was unfathomable. The PC was still primarily a business and productivity tool, and what gaming experience it could offer often came in such primitive formats as magazine-based code that had to be manually typed into DOS.

What's more, pirating and sharing games back then was hard. Software at the time tended to ship in formats such as cartridges, which were incredibly difficult for anyone without an engineering background to duplicate, or audio cassettes, in a time when the dual cassette deck had yet to achieve widespread market penetration.

All of this changed with the arrival of the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Suddenly, data could be copied easily and without degradation via PC from one media to another. The benefit to developers was great in terms of the amount of information and complexity they could now sink into their games, but they were also faced with a generation of gamers who were learning how easy it was to copy and share among their friends.

The response was to enact some of the earliest and most primitive forms of copy protection. Games would sometimes ship on diskettes with holes laid out in precise locations. Others wrote files to a disk after installation that would make it impossible to install that game from the same disk a second time. Needless to say, these methods made the experience for legitimate users complicated and problematic, and more than a few fled to the then-gestating online communities of BBSs for custom-made hacks and software duplication applications. It was time for a more creative solution.

The Era of Doo-Dads and Decoders

Fortunately, the games industry is creative, and thus it was that the offline copy protection was born and flourished. One of its most prevalent forms was an in-game quiz that would require gamers to refer to the manual for specific information - you'd be asked, for example, to enter the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 14. Some titles took a punishing approach to this little Q & A: SSI's Star Command required a documentation check prior to each in-game save, while Master of Orion would respond to a failed manual check by gradually becoming so difficult that it was impossible to win. Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra's King's Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a "Game Over" screen.

Other developers eschewed straight manual checks for in-box tools and items that were more integrated into the games with which they shipped, especially once photocopiers became more accessible and allowed would-be pirates to quickly and easily duplicate documentation. LucasArts made a name for itself in this field, utilizing such gems as the Monkey Island series' multi-level code wheels. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Other games, like Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shipped with the kind of color-masked text one would find in old-school decoder rings; the documents could not be reproduced by the photocopiers of the day and would require the application of a transparent red plastic filter in order to get at their contents.

The ultimate evolution of offline copy protection was the integration of in-box contents into the gameplay, itself. Infocom was one of the earliest practitioners of this methodology. Famous for the novelties it would ship with its titles, the adventure games company would go so far as to have the likes of Zork Zero ask you to refer to a packed-in scroll for clues to its final puzzle and respond with quips like "Good luck, Blackbeard" to incorrect answers. LucasArts' aforementioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tie-in included a very well-done "Grail Diary" designed to mimic Sean Connery's item of the same name in the movie, and made excellent use of it to help guide the player through the game, a tactic it would duplicate with 1990's Loom and its Book of Patterns.

Pack-ins and manual checks were certainly tedious, at times, and often took the gamer out of the experience while they rifled through manuals or boxes of tchotchkes, but one could argue that they added an element of fun to an industry necessity that is rarely anything but a chore for the end user. Still, they weren't foolproof, and as the cost of game development rose, elaborate packaging and its usefulness as a copy protection mechanic fell by the wayside. This coincided neatly with the spread of a new form of media: The CD-ROM.

The Era of Shiny Disks

The arrival of the CD-ROM meant that games that previously required dozens of floppies could be shipped in a single jewel case, and opened the door for new multimedia possibilities in game development. But it also brought with it the CD-RW drive, capable of duplicating massive (at the time, anyway) amounts of data quickly and easily. It was a software pirate's dream.

The response to this development from a copy protection standpoint was technological in nature. The first salvo was the use of unreadable disk sectors or other hidden files that could not be read or accurately duplicated by the software used to copy CDs at the time. Of course, this was rapidly made obsolete by the development of software that could read and copy an entire disk. So software companies turned to schemes like SafeDisc and early forms of SecuROM designed to make copies of discs that used the systems unreadable.

Unfortunately, many of these methods run up against one of the fundamental issues that has caused PC games developers headaches over the years: Compatibility. Simply put, it is impossible to create a mechanism that is going to work with every system setup or optical drive on the market. This has led to controversy when gamers who legitimately purchased titles like The Sims 2 and BioShock have been unable to play them thanks to the incompatibility of their hardware, anti-virus software, or other system components with CD-based copy protection.

None off this, however, has engendered quite the outrage brought on by system-side copy protection solutions like StarForce. Very difficult to crack but also difficult to remove on uninstall of a game, these mechanisms have been accused by outlets from the lowest tech blog to gaming comic Penny Arcade to CNet of executing a malware-level invasion of a system on which they are installed. Given that there are documented cases of system performance degradation thanks to remnant StarForce code, it's easy to see why solutions like this have become extremely unpopular even among consumers who have no interest in pirating or sharing games.

A Series of Tubes

No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media - including games - is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, 'Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-'90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.

The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it's been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA's efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we've heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games - store-bought or downloaded - to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it's certainly not going to be the last we'll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.

And then, there's the interesting case of Stardock, makers of strategy titles Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. Stardock has taken the bold stance that it does not plan to take any steps beyond the use of a unique serial number to copy-protect its products, a decision that has endeared it to fans but that famously led a StarForce forum moderator's posting of a link to a site where an illegal copy of Galactic Civilizations II could be easily downloaded. The game has sold well despite its lack of defense against piracy, but one has to wonder whether such a strategy would work for a larger publisher producing more mainstream titles.

With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...0800&Itemid=50





House Passes PRO IP Bill
Susan Butler, N.Y.

The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed, under suspension of House rules, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act. An official quorum vote is expected on the House floor this evening.

Introduced by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers Jr. last December, the Act (H.R. 4279) would create the office of a U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative in the White House to represent and advise the president on IP issues. The representative would produce a national joint strategic plan to protect and enforce IP rights, and would be responsible for seeing its implementation by various government agencies.

Conyers says that the Act will: (1) prioritize intellectual property protection to the highest level of our government; (2) make changes to IP law to enhance the ability of IP owners to effectively enforce their rights; (3) make it easier to criminally prosecute repeat offenders; and (4) increase penalties for IP violations that endanger public health and safety.

"This bill will go a long way towards making sure law enforcement agencies have what they need to get the job done," says David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers' Assn. and former Justice Department chairman of the Intellectual Property Task Force. "Of note is the fact that this legislation garnered support from a bipartisan majority of members, and a diverse group of industry, trade groups and labor unions."

The Act would also establish a formal IP Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General. Currently, the DOJ has an IP Task Force. An IP Enforcement Officer, appointed by the attorney general and reporting to the deputy attorney general, would head the division.

"This is a strong, common sense measure that provides new tools and resources to help protect one of this nation's most important economic engines," says Mitch Bainwol, chairman/CEO of the RIAA. "We are transitioning from a nation whose economy was driven by what we created with our hands to one driven by what we create with our minds. This creative and economic genius deserves to reach its full potential, and this bill is an important step toward achieving that goal. The unanimous bipartisan support for this legislation speaks to a widespread recognition by policymakers of the economic importance of the creative industries and the necessary tools to protect it."

Specifically, federal civil law would be amended to: (1) provide a safe harbor for copyright registrations that contain inaccurate information so such technical errors would not prevent a judgment for infringement; (2) provide that copyright registration requirements, like the necessity of filing a registration before suing an infringer, apply to civil -- not criminal -- infringement actions; (3) require courts to issue protective orders to prevent disclosure of seized records relating to copyright infringement; (4) revise standards for civil damages in copyright infringement and counterfeiting cases; and (5) prohibit importing and exporting of infringing copies of copyrighted works.

Federal criminal law would be amended to: (1) enhance criminal penalties for infringement of a copyright, for trafficking in counterfeit labels or packaging, and for causing serious bodily harm or death while trafficking in counterfeit goods or services; and (2) enhance civil and criminal forfeiture provisions for copyright infringement and provide for restitution to victims of such infringement.

No companion bill has yet been introduced in the Senate.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...8a825cc2f79780





Inside the Music Industry's Piracy Battle

Deep inside the national headquarters of the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) is a purple room.

Tinted windows shade the faces of young men and women working behind computer screens. They are part of the team investigating the illegal sharing of music files over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and they protect their identities carefully.

Such precautions are a reflection of the charged environment in which the music business is operating. The RIAA, the trade group for the major US labels, views anti-piracy enforcement as vital to the recording industry's future.

Since 2003, labels have filed more than 28,000 lawsuits against individual file sharers. Only one suit has reached trial. Jammie Thomas, a single mother who was ordered by a federal jury in Minnesota last October to pay $222,000, is waiting for the federal court's decision on her request for a new trial.

Piracy on university campuses is a big part of the problem. In the past year, the RIAA has sent more than 6,000 "pre-litigation settlement letters" to students around the country, giving them the opportunity to avoid a potential lawsuit by settling out of court for a reduced fee. About half have settled, and the other half face formal lawsuits.

Some university administrators complain that record companies unfairly target their campus networks to find infringers. Some judges have questioned whether proof of users making music files available in a P2P network's "shared folder" is sufficient evidence of copyright infringement. Emotions have run so high that death threats targeting RIAA lawyers and executives haven't been unheard of.

Despite the RIAA's efforts, data suggest that demand for pirated content remains strong. A recent NPD Group report estimates that 19 per cent of US internet subscribers 13 and older download free music from P2P services, barely less than the 20 per cent reported when the RIAA began its user litigation campaign in 2003.

While it is all but impossible to gauge how much additional illegal downloading its enforcement actions may have deterred, the RIAA remains determined to clamp down on internet piracy. Billboard visited the trade group's Washington, D.C., offices for a demonstration of how it tracks down file sharers.

In their world of "hash" files and virtual handshakes, the investigations don't seem dark and sinister. The search begins simply - with a song.

The Stash

An RIAA investigator and technology specialist, who asked for anonymity, clicked the keyboard on his laptop. The LimeWire interface appeared on a large screen.

New York-based LimeWire LLC touts on its website that its software is "the fastest file-sharing program on the planet." The site offers a free version of its software, but it also offers the revenue-generating upgraded version for around $20. LimeWire is one of many software programs that run over the Gnutella file-sharing network.

To root out illegal file-sharing activity, the RIAA works with Maryland-based MediaSentry, which has developed customized programs that also operate over the Gnutella network. MediaSentry has a list of recordings owned by RIAA-member companies and, like any P2P user, can search for a music file by song title.

MediaSentry then collects alphanumeric "hash" codes it discovers online that are associated with these recordings. LimeWire and similar programs will identify how many users are sharing the same file as identified by the hash code. The combination of song titles and hash codes listed in the ever-growing database are the foundation and starting point of all RIAA investigations.

When a consumer rips a song from a CD and gives the digital file a name, the computer hardware, ripping software and other digital data together create a digital file identified by a distinct hash code. If the user rips the same song with an older computer - even with the same software - the file will have a different hash code. The slightest change in the music source, computer hardware, ripping software, P2P protocol, file name or length of recording will change the hash code identifying the resulting MP3 file.

For example, while searching for a Madonna song at the RIAA offices, dozens of users were sharing the same Madonna title over LimeWire - but six users were sharing the digital files with identical hash codes. Since it is highly improbable that more than one user would have the exact combination of equipment and timing to create identical hash codes, the investigator says, the six users are likely sharing copies of the same file that one person originally uploaded to the internet and that was later downloaded and shared by other users.

When MediaSentry observes that an MP3 file of a particular song is available for sharing over a P2P network but the hash code doesn't match one in its database, the company downloads the file. Then it runs the file through a digital fingerprint system operated by Audio Magic to verify that it is an RIAA-member recording, which has been fingerprinted by the record company when the recording was made. If the file is in fact a copy of the recording, MediaSentry saves the hash code in its database.

What MediaSentry and RIAA investigators do next depends on whether they're preparing a take-down notice for a university or planning to pursue litigation against an individual.

Take It Down

Copyright holders cannot possibly sue every copyright infringer. But they can notify an internet service provider when a user is infringing a copyrighted work. The ISP is required under federal law to block that material from the internet after receiving a take-down notice from the copyright holder, as long as the notice complies with requirements set out in federal regulations. Many universities have their own computer networks and, as such, act as ISPs.

A take-down program begins with the RIAA's list of about 700 current, popular titles of recordings owned by its member companies. The list is compiled - and continually updated - from Billboard and online music services' sales charts. The user-litigation program uses many more titles, but the RIAA won't disclose the number.

Once the MediaSentry search for a title identifies a hash, the software then tries to match it with popular hashes shared among P2P users listed in the database.

"We look for the most popular hashes," the RIAA investigator says. "It's then very unlikely that the person ripped it from his or her own CD collection and is making it available for the first time. It's more likely this person has downloaded it from somebody else. The hash can't be one we've seen many times before if somebody ripped it for the first time."

Once the popular hash is identified, the MediaSentry program makes contact with the user through a "TCP handshake" - essentially a conversation between the Web server and the Web client, like LimeWire, via the internet transmission control protocol.

"Are you online and do you have this hash code?" the program asks. If the user's program says "yes," then the user is pegged. Just one digital file is enough for the RIAA to send a take-down notice.

The user doesn't have to be sitting at the computer to be sharing a file. LimeWire and similar programs continue to share files over the P2P network as long as the computer is on, the program is open and the file-sharing component is on.

MediaSentry records the IP address, the name of the company or university that owns the ISP, the date and time of the handshake, the user name and the infringed title. The company sends it to the RIAA.

RIAA personnel then review the information, manually prepare the take-down notices and send them to the university.

"There is an idea that we target certain universities," the investigator says. "That is completely incorrect and, technically, not possible. We find what we find by song and through public means; we don't try to get into a university's internal system."

Meet John Doe

The RIAA uses litigation to target some of "the most egregious users we find," the investigator says.

This process, too, begins with the song search, but entails the collection of far more data on an individual user than is required for a take-down notice. After MediaSentry finds popular hash codes, the company's software - just like LimeWire - allows a search of all the files the user is sharing.

The company collects the list of music files the user is sharing, identifies songs that belong to RIAA-member companies and downloads the files. MediaSentry also collects very detailed text logs as evidence of its activities throughout the entire process.

The ISP associated with an IP address is easy to identify. The American Registry for internet Numbers, a nonprofit organization, provides the information via a search on its website.

MediaSentry sends the information to the RIAA, which has staff that listen to each downloaded file to verify the identify of the song. The RIAA notifies the ISP to preserve the evidence connected to the IP address. The record companies then file a lawsuit naming "John Doe" as the unnamed defendant.

Once they file the suit, the labels may then have the court issue a subpoena for the ISP to identify the registered user for the IP address. That person then replaces John Doe as the defendant.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...0515239&pnum=0





XM, EMI Settle Portable Radio Lawsuit

Satellite Radio Holdings Inc <XMSR.O> and EMI Music said on Tuesday they have resolved a lawsuit brought by EMI against XM over its Pioneer Inno, a portable satellite radio with advanced recording features.

The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement.

Privately held EMI Music, the world's fourth largest recorded music company, has withdrawn as a party to the complaint filed by major record companies against XM in May 2006.

In December 2007 major record companies Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi <VIV.PA>, and Warner Music Group Corp <WMG.N> and in February 2008 Sony BMG Music Entertainment reached similar agreements with XM. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp <6758.T> and Bertelsmann AG <BERT.UL>.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...AS782820080610





High Court Rules Against Multiple Royalties
Pete Yost

The Supreme Court on Monday limited the ability of companies to collect multiple royalties on their patents, the latest step by the justices to scale back the power of patent-holders.

The unanimous decision, which was helpful to customers of Intel Corp., involved a longtime Supreme Court doctrine that in recent years had been eroded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., which handles patent cases nationally.

Justice Clarence Thomas reined in the appeals court, saying that "for over 150 years the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of patent exhaustion" and that it applies in this case. The doctrine says that the sale of an invention exhausts the patent-holder's right to control how the purchaser uses it.

In the case before the Supreme Court, a South Korean company, LG Electronics Inc., licensed some of its patents to Intel Corp.

LG then sued some of Intel's customers for patent infringement, saying they owed royalties to LG because the customers combined Intel's microprocessors and chipsets with non-Intel products.

Patent laws can carry triple-damage awards when a court finds willful infringement.

Thomas said that "everything inventive about each patent is embodied in the Intel products" and that the non-Intel devices with which they are combined are "standard parts."

The Intel customers are computer system manufacturers that include Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc. System manufacturers sell to industry brand names such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp. and Gateway Inc.

A number of companies including chip maker Qualcomm Inc. supported LG in the court fight, saying any rule that forces patent owners to license only one level in the production chain is unworkable.

The Bush administration supported Intel's customers. It cited inconvenience, annoyance and inefficiency of multiple royalty payments being passed down the chain of distribution with no obvious stopping point.

Also weighing in against multiple royalties was the private group Consumers Union.

Monday's decision marks another instance of the Supreme Court reversing the Federal Circuit to weaken the position of patent-holders. Last year, the justices made it easier to invalidate patents, reining in a legal test that has fueled an era of protection for new products. Separately, the court ruled that U.S. patent law doesn't apply to software sent to foreign countries. In 2006, the court also allowed lower judges to be lenient in punishing companies found to have infringed on patents.

The case is Quanta v. LG Electronics, 06-937.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...sQj-gD916MQ682





AP Targets Bloggers Over Story Excerpts
Jordan Golson

The Associated Press, the not-for-profit news cooperative, has filed DMCA notices against social news/blog The Drudge Retort for posting short excerpts of AP stories. In a letter to Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of The Retort, the AP believes "the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."

The "AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."

The AP sent DMCA notices to the Drudge Retort, demanding that the site to take down content that the AP believes infringes on its copyright. Seven notices were sent in total, some regarding headlines and first paragraph excerpts, but at least one referencing a two-paragraph excerpt from the end of an AP story. It seems the AP is serious about protecting all its stories from virtually any sort of excerpting.

The Associated Press is a wire service that sells license to reprint stories for a hefty fee to member press outlets. Contrary to what Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks, the AP doesn't have "inbound links" or "search juice" -- only member organizations do. The AP believes that by reproducing AP content without paying for it, the Drudge Retort is diminishing the benefit its pay customers get from its product. That is, why pay for AP content when you can just republish it for free?

This isn't the first time in recent months that AP has resorted to legal action against sites that it felt were misappropriating its content.

In October, the AP sued news aggregator Moreover for fair-use violations. That company, owned by VeriSign, provides news from a wide variety of sources to paying subscribers. The AP charged that Moreover was "scraping," or copying, the full text of AP stories and sending them to Moreover's customers without paying AP for the rights.

Unlike the Retort case, Moreover was accused of commercially using full-length AP stories without any payment. AP believes (correctly, in my non-lawyer opinion) that this is far outside any reasonable interpretation of fair use.

(Disclosure: Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my former boss at Valleywag, was a cofounder of Moreover)

"Fair use" is a legal term-of-art and one that is frequently misunderstood. There are a number of requirements and standards that must be met for a use to be considered "fair" and it is far outside the purview of this article to define it. In fact, it is impossible to define as fair use is generally considered on a case-by-case basis, but these are the most common determinants:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

• The nature of the copyrighted work.

• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The AP believes that by posting excerpts of its content, The Retort (and presumably anyone else using AP content without paying) is reducing the value of its subscription service.

There has not been a significant blogger v. mainstream media copyright battle yet, but the Associated Press sure isn't making any friends with this maneuver. Influential media critic Jeff Jarvis slams the organization in a blog posting titled "FU AP". Jarvis has a long-standing beef with the AP about the organization's lack of credit for original reporting and linking when it repurposes reporting from member newspapers.

Jarvis feels the AP is "declaring war on blogs and commenters" and wants bloggers to reproduce the full length of an AP story to show "solidarity" with the Drudge Retort.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...-long-excerpts





Impasse on Spying Could Lead to Tighter Rules
Eric Lichtblau

With Congress at an impasse over the government’s spy powers and intelligence, congressional officials are bracing for the possibility that the government may have to revert to the old rules of terrorist surveillance, a scenario that some officials predict could leave worrisome gaps in intelligence.

That prospect seemed almost inconceivable just a few months ago, when congressional negotiators and the White House promised a quick resolution to a bruising debate over the government’s surveillance powers. But the dispute has dragged on. Though both sides say they are hopeful of reaching a deal, officials have been preparing classified briefings for Congress on the intelligence “degradation” they say could occur if there is no deal in place by the summer.

The deadline is considered critical because of a series of secret one-year wiretapping orders that were approved last August under a controversial temporary wiretapping law. The law allowed the National Security Agency to use broad blanket court orders to target groups of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists based overseas. But those orders are growing staler by the day, officials said, and will begin to expire this August if nothing is done.

“We’ll start losing intelligence capabilities,” Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said in an interview.

Civil libertarians who oppose the government’s broadened new surveillance authorities said a return to the more restrictive rules may be just what is needed to restore necessary checks on the government’s powers.

But government and congressional officials said in interviews that they saw it as a dangerous step backward. A return to the old rules, they said, would mean that numerous government lawyers, analysts, and linguists would once again have to prepare individual warrants, potentially thousands of them, for surveillance of terrorist targets overseas.

Telecommunications companies would also have to spend considerable time shutting down existing wiretaps, and then to start them up again if ordered under new warrants, officials said. In some instances, the broad orders given to the companies starting last August cover tens of thousands of overseas phone numbers and e-mail addresses at one time, people with knowledge of the orders said.

A senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration was concerned that reverting to the older standards and requiring individual warrants for each wiretap would create a severe gap in overseas intelligence by raising the bar for foreign surveillance collection.

In some cases, the government might simply be unable to establish in court why it suspected that a foreign target was connected to terrorism. Part of the problem, officials said, is that communications going from one foreign country to another sometimes travel through a telephone switch on American soil and, under some interpretations of the older rules, could not be tapped without an individual warrant. (Wiretaps aimed at Americans already require individual warrants issued by a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, or F.I.S.A. court.)

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has described the idea of reverting to the older standards of foreign surveillance as “unthinkable,” adding, “I still hope and actually think that it won’t happen.”

Even some Democrats, at odds with the White House for months over the surveillance issue, said they were worried about the summer scenario. “Until August, we’re O.K.,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide involved in the negotiations. “After August, we’re not O.K.”

A second Democratic congressional official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “We don’t even want to get close to the expiration, because it will force the intelligence community to make preparations and transition back to the old system. Having to go back to the old way of doing things is problematic.”

Congress began debating the agency’s spy powers in December 2005, after it was revealed that President Bush had authorized the agency to conduct wiretaps without court warrants on the international communications of Americans suspects of terrorist ties.

Nearly 2 1/2 years later, the stalemate on the issue reflects the deep divisions in Congress over how to suture the wounds created by the wiretapping program. Few people in Washington thought the debate would drag on this long, through dire warnings from the White House about potential harm to national security, through retreats and push-backs by the Democrats, and now through a game of chicken over how to resolve the impasse.

“I was hoping we’d made progress,” said Senator Bond, who has been the White House’s point man in the negotiations. “But the longer this drags on — I’m not so sure.”

Democrats and Republicans have been negotiating behind closed doors for months, with occasional appearances by senior administration officials. The main stumbling block has been whether or how to give the phone companies immunity from lawsuits over their role in helping President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program; dozens of such suits are pending. Both sides have given some ground in the talks.

The Republicans have yielded somewhat on immunity for the companies: The current proposal from Mr. Bond would allow the F.I.S.A. court to review the administration’s requests to them and determine by a “preponderance of the evidence” whether the companies acted properly in response.

Mr. Bond’s proposal would also re-establish that the act is the “exclusive” means for authorizing intelligence wiretaps, even in the face of Mr. Bush’s claims of constitutional authority to order surveillance on terror suspects outside the courts. And it would allow for a congressional review of the wiretapping program, something Republicans had tried to avoid.

House Democrats, meanwhile, appear willing to settle for the F.I.S.A. court having a smaller oversight role in approving the National Security Agency’s surveillance procedures in advance. They offered a counterproposal to Republicans late last week that left both sides optimistic.

In fact, though, every week over the last four months has brought talk of a pending deal on Capitol Hill that soon collapsed again. Mr. Mukasey said that Justice Department negotiators “come in and talk to me and are sort of more optimistic and less optimistic from minute to minute, and I try to not have my mood go up and down.”

As hard as the White House has pushed on the issue, Democrats may have even more at stake. They acknowledge not wanting to risk reaching their national convention in Denver in August without a deal, lest that create an opening for the Republicans and Senator John McCain, their presumptive presidential nominee, to portray themselves as tougher on national security — a tried-and-true attack method in the past — just as the Democrats are nominating Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Bush used that line of attack repeatedly in January and February, imploring Congress to renew the broadened spy powers it had granted the agency last August. The surveillance plan was essential, Mr. Bush said at the time, because terrorists were planning attacks on American soil “that will make Sept. 11 pale in comparison.”

Despite the president’s pleas, House Democrats refused to buckle, a rare instance when they stood their ground against Mr. Bush on a matter of national security. They allowed the August law to expire in February.

Caroline Fredrickson, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office, said Democrats should continue to resist the White House’s pleas for broadened spy power, even in the face of political pressure.

A return to the older surveillance rules, requiring individualized warrants for all wiretaps, would be a positive step, she said. The last thing Congress should do, she said, would be to enact a major overhaul of the nation’s spy powers just before Mr. Bush leaves office.

“Why not just kick it down the road” through a short-term extension, she asked. “If there’s a need to do something, they should do the least harm possible.”

“We don’t think this Congress should give President Bush the gold watch he’s looking for in authorizing his warrantless wiretapping program,” Ms. Fredrickson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/wa...on/10fisa.html





Groups Ask Court to Review Laptop Searches

EFF and ACTE file brief asking court to rehear and reverse decision that allows border agents to routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices
Grant Gross

U.S. border agents should not be able to search travelers' laptops without a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, despite a court ruling allowing such searches, two groups said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the full court to rehear and reverse a decision by a three-judge panel that ruled that border agents can routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices.

The random searching of laptops is "widespread," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the EFF. The U.S. Department of Justice "claims that U.S. border agents have the power to do so, no suspicion needed, and there are plenty of reported incidents," he added.

There have been multiple media reports in recent months of laptops or other electronic devices searched and seized at U.S. borders, Tien noted. In some cases, travelers have not gotten their electronic devices back from customs officials, he said.

The case the two groups have asked the court to review involves a U.S. man named Michael Arnold, who returned to Los Angeles International Airport from the Philippines in July 2005. A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer asked to see Arnold's laptop, and customs officers found pictures of naked women and, later, pictures they believed to be child pornography.

Customs officials seized Arnold's laptop and later had him arrested.

Arnold's lawyer argued that the search violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. His lawyer argued that the pictures obtained in the search should not be allowed as evidence in a trial, and a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California agreed with Arnold's lawyer.

However, the three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit overturned the district court's ruling. U.S. border agents have broad authority to search luggage and their contents at borders, Circuit Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote in the panel's April 21 decision.

"Courts have long held that searches of closed containers and their contents can be conducted at the border without particularized suspicion under the Fourth Amendment," O'Scannlain wrote. "We are satisfied that reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border."

The EFF and ACTE argue in their brief that "invasive" searches of electronic devices should be treated differently from searches of luggage. "Your computer contains a vast amount of information about your private life, including details about your family, your finances, and your health," Tien said. "All that information can be easily copied, transferred, and stored in government databases, just because you were chosen for a random inspection."

Tien said he expects a decision on whether to rehear the case within a few months.

Asked if defending an alleged child pornography user was a tough place to make a stand on laptop searches, Tien disagreed. "If they randomly search your machine, don't find anything interesting, and let you go, would you sue them?" he said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...earches_1.html





Nation Watches Open-Records Case
Kim Hackett

The open-government lawsuit involving Venice City Council members' e-mails on personal computers is drawing national interest.

Judges have ruled that private documents on public computers can remain private.

But a circuit judge's ruling in Sarasota County this week is the first time public officials have been ordered to turn over private computers to comply with public records requests, said Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.

"It's extraordinary," said Davis. "It's really a big case; the national freedom-of-information movement will be watching."

Circuit Judge Robert Bennett issued a decision Friday granting an emergency request for access to City Council members' government-related files on their personal computers.

The three-page order said Councilmen John Moore and John Simmonds, and Mayor Ed Martin could not "alter, reconfigure or dispose of" computers that had been used to send or receive city-related messages.

Bennett also ordered the three to quit using their personal computers and turn them over to the city clerk.

Within 30 days, a computer expert selected by Sarasota activist Anthony Lorenzo, who is suing the city and four council members, will be allowed to copy files on the computers to see if they contain public information.

The examination will be supervised by City Manager Marty Black, according to the judge's order, and steps will be taken to protect the council members' privacy.

Bennett also outlined a process under which Moore and Martin could avoid the examination, by providing a sworn affidavit about their personal computer use and submitting to questioning by Lorenzo's attorney.

In a suit filed last month, Lorenzo alleged that council members Sue Lang, John Moore and Mayor Ed Martin improperly communicated about public business by both public and private e-mail accounts on home and city-issued computers.

He argued, among other things, that the e-mails violated Florida's Government-in-the-Sunshine Law.

The lawsuit followed questions this spring about the City Council's handling of the development of a controversial airport plan, and comments by City Manager Black that council members had to be repeatedly reminded of the Sunshine Law's requirements.

Last month, city officials received numerous requests for e-mail records, from the Herald-Tribune, Lorenzo and others.

Simmonds, who was not part of Lorenzo's initial Sunshine Law complaint, said he could not comply with records requests because he had deleted e-mails from his private e-mail account on his home computer.

Lorenzo added Simmonds to his suit and filed an emergency motion to preserve evidence.

In a hearing Wednesday, Lorenzo's attorney, Andrea Mogensen, questioned five of the seven council members on their use of private e-mail to conduct public business and whether they deleted files.

Moore was out of town on vacation and Martin did not appear, despite being subpoenaed. City Attorney Robert Anderson said Martin did not receive proper notice and unsuccessfully moved to have the subpoena quashed.

Council members Lang, Vicki Noren, Rick Tacy and Ernie Zavodnyik testified that they had turned over any e-mails from their private computers and had not deleted any. They were not required to submit their home computers for an examination.

But because Moore and Martin were not in court to testify, the judge ordered them to surrender their home computers. They would be subject to the exam unless Mogensen is satisfied that they have not destroyed public records.

After Wednesday's hearing, Black asked all council members to surrender their city-issued laptops while the case proceeds.

Last week, the city locked the public server so no files could be deleted and ordered all city board members and council members to preserve their records.

"The order is reasonable, and I assure you it will be complied with," Anderson, the city attorney, said of the judge's decision.

Bennett will resolve any disputes about public vs. private information on the home computers.

"We're very pleased with the decision," said Mogensen. "It was not unexpected."

Retrieving deleted files is easier on a home computer than on a public server because there is typically not as much activity, said Thomas Sadaka, an attorney and computer forensic expert.

There have been cases that were close to going before a judge but were settled at the last minute. In 2001, following the contentious presidential election recount in Florida, the New York Times had demanded to examine the hard drive of then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris under the public records law to see how absentee ballots had been counted.

Harris' attorney said the files had been deleted. The Times demanded to examine the hard drives. Harris initially refused but later relented.

"What is so extraordinary about this case is the judge is making something personal available to determine what is public," said Adria Harper, director of the First Amendment Foundation.

"It would set important precedent and make public officials understand public records law and its broad reach."
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article.../1001/NEWS0105





U.S. Government Sought Customer Book Purchasing Records from Amazon.com
David Gutierrez

Recently unsealed court records shed more light on the federal government's attempts to secure the online book purchase records of 24,000 Amazon.com customers.

In 2006, federal prosecutors investigating Robert D'Angelo, a Madison, WI official accused of fraud and tax evasion, subpoenaed online book retailer Amazon.com for transaction records on anyone who had purchased books from him through Amazon Marketplace since 1999. Prosecutors said they were hoping to find witnesses to testify against D'Angelo.

Amazon agreed to tell prosecutors what books D'Angelo had sold, but refused to turn over information on the buyers, citing its customers' First Amendment rights to privacy. The government came back with a request for only 120 customers, but Amazon still refused. The case went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker, who ruled in June to strike down the subpoena on First Amendment grounds.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote in his ruling. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Crocker also expressed concerns that allowing the government to pry into people's reading habits could function as intimidation, thereby depriving them of their right to read what they wish.

"The chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," he wrote.

Under Crocker's urging, prosecutors reached a compromise with Amazon in which the company would send letters to the 24,000 customers sought in the initial subpoena, inviting them to contact prosecutors if they wished to testify.

Crocker also criticized prosecutors for seeking to force Amazon's hand rather than seeking a compromise on their own.

"If the government had been more diligent in looking for workarounds instead of baring its teeth when Amazon balked, it's probable that this entire First Amendment showdown could have been avoided," he said.
http://www.naturalnews.com/023388.html





British Terror Bill Divides Labor

The government is to offer wavering Labour MPs a last-minute concession over the issue of pre-charge detention in an attempt to stave off a Commons defeat that could cause potentially irreparable damage to Gordon Brown.

Terrorist suspects held for more than the current limit of 28 days but not subsequently charged could receive 3,000 pounds for each extra day in custody, the BBC said.

Up to 30 Labour MPs are expected to join opposition parties in voting against the planned extension to 42 days on Wednesday evening.

The government says it may need to hold terrorist suspects without charge for that long in particularly complex cases but opponents of the plan say it is a gross infringement of civil liberties.

No other country, they point out, feels the need to hold suspects for anything like as long without charge.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the vote was one of principle as well as practical police pressures.

"I said to the Home Secretary at least three times ... 'show me the evidence' and I'm afraid we were never shown the evidence," he told the BBC.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said he expected the vote to be "very tight", but thought the government would win.

"With the concessions, people should be able to move and come across to us," he told the BBC.

"I may be the only optimist in the House but I think common sense will prevail and this important part of the bill will pass."

The vote is so close that Foreign Secretary David Miliband was ordered to scrap planned meetings with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem on Tuesday and return to London.

The nine MPs of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party -- who say they are inclined to support the government -- could become crucial, although newspapers reported that some individual opposition members plan to vote with Labour.

Brown's poll ratings are at an all-time low after the loss of the formerly safe Crewe and Nantwich seat and a drubbing in local elections.

Defeat in the security vote would erode the prime minister's authority still further and, analysts say, would be bound to fuel talk among Labour MPs of replacing him as Labour leader before the next general election due by 2010.

Attempts by his predecessor Tony Blair to extend detention without charge to 90 days in 2005 ended in his first Commons defeat as prime minister.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/busin...ention.html?hp







Opera 9.5
Espen André Øverdahl

Today we released the final public release of our flagship Web browser, Opera 9.5. Opera's cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance has culminated into our most powerful browser yet.

What's new in Opera 9.5:

Opera Link: Your bookmarks, Speed Dial and even notes taken in the Opera browser can follow you anywhere. Opera Link keeps you synchronized between any Opera 9.5 desktop browser and Opera Mini, Opera's free browser for your mobile phone. In Opera 9.5 write a note - copy directions, create shopping lists or jot down anything you need to remember - and access it on any Opera 9.5 browser by simply logging in.

Find anything: Remember a word from a page you've read earlier? Find that page easily with Quick Find. Just enter a word in the address bar to find matching text from any page you have visited.

Looking sharp: Opera makes a move to modernize its look and feel to a sharp new skin with clean lines and clear icons. The 'New Tab' button and other elements have been modified to make the switch to a better Web experience more intuitive. You may also select any of our platform-specific skins to help Opera's appearance adapt to your operating system of choice.

Strengthened defense against malware and phishing: Opera's Fraud Protection not only protects you from fraudulent Web sites, it is now the first browser publically available to protect you from malware and other malicious software on the Web. Powered by Haute Secure, Netcraft, and PhishTank, Opera's Fraud Protection technology automatically blocks offending Web pages to keep you out of harm's way.

Speed: Opera continues to lead in performance. Opera 9.5 makes dramatic speed improvements to the e-mail client, RSS feeds and the browser itself, so you can spend more time getting things done online.

Of course Opera 9.5 includes many features Opera users have already come to know and love. Speed Dial, notes, the ability to save and restore browsing sessions after you close the browser, a trash can for accidentally closed tabs or e-mails, mouse gestures and many others bring a fresh approach to browsing the Web.

Discover Opera for yourself today.

"Opera 9.5 represents the culmination of two years spent listening to our community and transforming our browser to add features and capabilities they have requested," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Opera 9.5 offers new possibilities and capabilities. It's faster, lighter and pushes us further out in front of other browsers, by blending the mobile and desktop worlds together in new and powerful ways. We invite everyone to join us as we continue to shape the way the Web will evolve."
http://my.opera.com/community/blog/opera-9-5





One Laptop Meets Big Business



The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child
Steve Hamm and Geri Smith

One by one, the children ran into the school yard, lining up in a grassy field next to a low-slung building of classrooms topped by a rusty steel roof. Most of these children in Luquia, a tiny, impoverished town 13,200 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, wore ragged navy-blue uniforms, and many had not bathed in days. Their small adobe homes have dirt floors, no running water, and no bathrooms. They share sleeping space with dozens of squeaking guinea pigs, which scamper underfoot before becoming the family's rare meal of meat. The children, then, were understandably giddy with excitement in May as principal Pedro Santana handed them the most valuable thing they had ever owned: a small green-and-white laptop computer.

These children are among the first in Peru to receive laptops from a trove of 140,000 the government plans to distribute to poor rural students this year in a bold bid to revolutionize the country's dismal educational system. Yet even as the students enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of their lives, the organization behind the computers, One Laptop per Child, was in danger of cracking.

The outfit begun by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte had been thrown into turmoil by the stress of trying to achieve the audacious goal of transforming learning by supplying millions of the world's poor children with laptops. Six weeks earlier, OLPC President Walter Bender, who helped launch the Peruvian deployment, quit abruptly in a dispute with Negroponte, the group's chairman. Software security leader Ivan Krstic left, too. Those departures followed a messy breakup with chip giant Intel (INTC) in January. Cambridge (Mass.)-based OLPC's travails seemed to signal that a group that had promised to rescue the world's poor children from ignorance was itself in need of a lifeline.

The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.

Since its launch three years ago, OLPC has fallen woefully short of Negroponte's initial goal of supplying Third World children with 150 million laptops by the end of 2008. Development of the XO laptop and software took longer than expected; the price came in at $188 each rather than the $100 first targeted; countries including Libya and Thailand reneged on initial pledges to buy large quantities; and competition from tech titans like Intel slowed momentum. Although pilot programs began in 2006 on test laptops, the final version wasn't ready until late last year. Now pilots are running in 20 countries, distribution has begun in two, and about 370,000 laptops have been shipped.

The group seems to have backed away from the brink in recent days. On May 15 it announced a tie-up with Microsoft (MSFT) to run the Windows operating system on the XO laptop, gaining credibility with a number of governments. And other backers like Google (GOOG) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are holding firm. During the week of May 18, Negroponte ran a four-day conference in Cambridge that brought together education and tech leaders from 44 countries. About 500,000 orders were placed, bringing the total to 750,000 outstanding orders.

A chastened Negroponte no longer predicts mass adoption in short order, but he remains confident that OLPC can have a major impact. He sees it playing the role in computer-aided learning that Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank has had in the global spread of microcredit. Grameen started something that many others now practice. "We're not building an empire. We're building a movement," Negroponte says.

Now, as the initial tech development phase has wound down, the organization faces a more daunting challenge: deploying and integrating millions of laptops in schools and communities. If something goes awry, the fragile credibility it has stitched together in recent weeks could rip apart. "This is the moment of truth," says Chuck Kane, a longtime software industry executive who became OLPC's president on May 2. "One unsuccessful deployment and it might mean the end of the project."

Searching For The Internet

Spending time in villages where the laptops have been distributed shows both OLPC's promise and immense challenges. In Luquia, Justo Miguel Común, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later. On a chilly evening, his mother, Alejandra, who quit school after first grade, watched proudly as her 11-year-old son sat at a small table outside their adobe house with his face illuminated by the light from the screen. "This computer is going to be a very good thing for learning," she said.

Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities. His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't find anything," he explained. He seemed to think the Net was something contained within the machine.

Such are the challenges of introducing not just a strange new machine but an alien world to a child brought up in isolation from outside culture. The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.

Cultural Imperialism?

While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."

Some observers accuse OLPC of cultural imperialism. "It's arrogant of them. You can't just stampede into a country's education system and say, Here's the way to do it,'" says William Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

In fact, though OLPCers still have faith in Constructionism, they don't force the approach. Nor do they still insist on open-source software, a change that has caused some of the deepest rifts within the group. Originally, rather than using Microsoft's pricey Windows and ready-made commercial applications, they chose the Linux open-source operating system and created a new user interface and applications designed specifically to aid in learning by doing. A key reason to support open source: It allows students to tinker directly with software. However, some countries, such as Libya, which initially agreed to buy more than 1 million laptops, backed out and chose a Windows-based alternative from Intel. One attraction: Microsoft cut the price of a software package for poor schools from $150 to $3.

So when Negroponte chose to do business with Microsoft, turmoil erupted within the organization. After an Apr. 1 meeting during which the board agreed to break bread with Microsoft, Bender resigned. For weeks, OLPC's online message forums lit up with an angry debate. The anti-Microsoft side believes software shouldn't be owned but shared freely. To Negroponte, the choice was simple—and necessary—pragmatism. "It's like Greenpeace cutting a deal with Exxon. You're sleeping with the enemy, but you do it," he says.

Negroponte has had to fend off critics from the start. Early on, Intel and Microsoft executives, confronted by this charismatic rabble-rouser with his promise of affordable computing for the masses, called the XO a toy. They rushed out alternatives. Suddenly, Negroponte and his band were up against two of the most powerful tech giants in the world. And the giants played rough. Even after Intel joined with OLPC last year to help design a version of the XO powered with its chips, some of its people belittled the XO to governments who had agreed to buy it. Negroponte accused Intel of undermining his cause. Intel complained he was pressuring it to stop selling its Classmate PC for poor students. Negroponte now says he wishes he had been able to hold his temper and avoid a split.

He also faults himself for not managing his organization more effectively. "I'm a visionary, not a manager," he says. He ran the organization like a science project rather than a business. People had overlapping responsibilities. The staff of 23 regular employees and 26 consultants lacks the resources to support the needs of the pilot programs and deployments now under way—much less massive expansion. Negroponte, who travels incessantly to visit heads of state and education ministers, was spread too thin. So was Bender. Kane, who joined the organization as a part-time chief financial officer last year, is now running day-to-day operations. Already, the operational chaos has diminished. Now he's busy closing deals with countries and lining up business partners to help produce the technology for the next-generation XO. "We're moving from academic brainstorming mode to execution mode," Kane says.

Debatable Usefulness

OLPC might not be in such turmoil if Kane had been promoted earlier. Nigeria had agreed to buy 1 million XOs, but after a competition among three alternatives, the country chose Intel's Classmate PC instead. Why did OLPC lose out? Intel provided more support, writes Isa Muhammad Ari, director of administration for Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, in an e-mail.

With OLPC, most of the weight of training is carried by local education officials. In Peru, the Education Ministry is racing to prepare teachers. It gives them a 40-hour course that includes an introduction to the learning programs, instruction on basic repairs, and tips on how to use the laptops to enhance their lessons. Teachers BusinessWeek spoke to in two villages where the machines have been distributed seemed excited about them. One recent morning, teacher Ananias Richard Inga played a catchy song programmed in Spanish into the laptops to teach his first- and second-graders how to write and pronounce vowels. When seven-year-old Idelma Huarocc, her brown cheeks burned and peeling from the sun, typed "Idelma ama a mamá" (Idelma loves mama), she wiggled with pleasure as the computer's voice read her sentence. "This really motivates them, and it makes it easier for kids to advance at their own pace," says Inga. Teachers at another school where the laptops were tested in a pilot project that began a year ago report their students' reading comprehension has improved significantly, the drop-out rate is down, and students who once said they expected to be farmers like their parents are now dreaming of becoming lawyers, accountants, or engineers.

Even with these results, the Unified Union of Education Workers of Peru, representing some 320,000 public school teachers, is skeptical. "These laptops aren't part of a comprehensive educational, pedagogical project, and their usefulness is debatable," says Luís Muñoz Alvarado, the union's general secretary. Muñoz never had a chance to explore the laptops, though. In what seems an easily avoidable blunder, the Education Ministry has not explained the program to the union.

Recognizing the need to integrate the laptops into communities, OLPC is scrambling to develop guidelines for deployment based on the experiences in Uruguay and Peru, the two countries with the largest distribution so far. The group is also bringing in consultants to advise countries on how to integrate the PCs. One, Edith Ackermann, a visiting scientist at MIT, says OLPC should have involved more educational experts in creating and testing the applications. Instead, she says, "The hackers took over." The result is some programs are too complex for many children to use. "Now we have to deal with this. I don't know if it's too late," says Ackermann.

While some critics have called on OLPC to hire aggressively so it can provide on-the-ground support for dozens of countries at a time, Negroponte and Kane plan instead to rely even more on outsiders. They'll forge alliances with local tech companies and nongovernment organizations that will provide deployment support.

Although each country has a different situation, they can learn from common experiences. OLPC plans on using Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, to test ideas about how to best integrate the computers with society and to create a template for other countries.

Just getting started in Haiti will be a challenge. The group's second trip there was delayed by riots over food shortages in April. The first shipment of laptops was held up in customs for weeks. Donors are paying for some laptops, but not all. Asked how Haiti can afford to pay for PCs when its citizens are starving, Guy Serge Pompi, the Haitian educator coordinating the project, answers: "You can't just focus on the present. The starving is the present. The future is education. We need to train our students for better jobs and a better future."

The desire to educate students for a better future was shared by officials from Rwanda, Colombia, Afghanistan, Senegal, and other countries. Although large-scale studies have not been done to show whether the laptops improve learning, initial successes in Uruguay and Peru have emboldened others to make the effort. In Peru itself, the laptops are gaining momentum. Regional governors have asked the Education Ministry to order a total of more than 500,000 additional laptops. "We aren't so overly optimistic to believe that distributing laptops is going to resolve the social demands of people who have been marginalized and submerged in extreme poverty for decades, but we believe it is a great step forward," says Education Minister José Antonio Chang.

With Nandini Lakshman in Mumbai
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...8048125608.htm





Elgan: The '$100 Laptop' May be a Glimpse of the Future
Mike Elgan

You've no doubt heard of the "$100 laptop" project. The idea is to help poor kids around the world by providing them with simple, durable, usable and wireless laptops for downloading and using textbooks and educational software, playing games and communicating.

The first iteration, the XO 1.0 -- a.k.a. the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop -- looks like a toy for baby aliens (fluorescent green with two antennas). Besides a few innovations, including mesh networking and a water-resistant rubberized keyboard, the laptop is largely comparable to today's ordinary low-cost laptops.

A prototype of the next version was unveiled last month, and it looks a lot like the laptop you're going to buy in five years. No, I'm not kidding. Your laptop will look and function more or less like the XO 2.0. It's a brilliant -- and prescient -- design.

The most conspicuous and best feature is that the bottom half of the clamshell is a screen, just like the top half. Here's what it looks like.

I've talked to a lot of readers and other users who say they'll never give up the tactile feedback of a real keyboard and many who don't want to let go of the mouse, either. But I believe most users will be willing to sacrifice both keyboard and mouse in order to take advantage of the all-screen laptop of the future.

The XO 2.0 clamshell form factor works in four ways (compared to just one with conventional laptops).

1. Tablet mode. By opening the clamshell all the way, the two screens snap together in the middle to form one semicontinuous touch screen.

2. Laptop mode. By laying the bottom flat and setting the top half at an angle, the bottom becomes the keyboard and touchpad, and the top functions as the screen, just like a conventional laptop, but the keyboard is on-screen and virtual.

3. Book mode. When you the hold up the XO 2.0 like a book, the text can be displayed on two "pages," which can be "turned" virtually.

4. Two-person mode. By setting the laptop open and flat like "tablet mode," but pressing an on-screen button, one screen orients up and the other down. If you set it on a table between two people, they both get their own properly oriented touch screen, which is great for games or any other two-person usage applications.


The different modes of the next-gen OLPC laptop. (Photos courtesy of One Laptop per Child)

With today's desktops, software and usage models, the two-screen clamshell design of the XO 2.0 laptop may not appeal. But in five years, I believe everyone will intuitively understand why this is the best possible way to design a mobile computer because of four current trends and where they're taking us.

Trend No. 1: Multitouch, physics and gestures, oh my!

I've reported and prognosticated extensively in this space on the next generation or "third generation" of user interface (the first two generations being the command line and the graphical user interface).

This new user interface will dominate the operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, the Linux vendors and others. There will be qualitative differences, as always, in the next-gen versions of Windows, the Mac OS and Linux, but all will revolve around the three core elements: multitouch, gestures and physics. That's why I'm now calling this UI type the multitouch, physics and gestures UI, or MPG for short.

We've already seen all three of these elements in the iPhone, in Microsoft Surface and also in the demo of Windows 7.

This radical departure will, after several decades, render obsolete today's desktop form factor of a screen, keyboard and mouse on the desk. In fact, it will make the keyboard optional and the mouse obsolete forever.

As I've described, the desktop PC of the future will be used at an angle, like a drafting table (but can pivot to vertical "presentation mode" or horizontal "desk mode") like this. This form factor will be dictated by the software, just as the current mouse-centric form factor was dictated by the GUI.

But what about mobile computers? One thing is clear about MPG user interfaces: Big screens are very desirable, and touch rules. The XO 2.0 concept maximizes screen real estate during use and minimizes size for transport. The XO 2.0 is designed for low cost, and the screens are small. But for business users, the MPG laptops of the future will be much larger. If you can jam a laptop with a 17-in. screen into your carry-on luggage, the all-screen clamshell will fold out to double that for using Windows 7 with your fingers.

The reason you'll want to do this is that you'll become totally accustomed on your Windows 7 desktop to the MPG UI, virtual keyboards and interacting with touch instead of a mouse. And future applications will fully support this mode.

Trend No. 2: Minilaptops

The ASUS Eee PC mainstreamed tiny notebooks. Because they're so small and so cheap, increasing numbers of people will want two laptops, a big one for full-powered work, and a tiny one for quick-and-dirty on-the-go usage. I think this trend will continue well into the era of MPG operating systems. We can look forward to all-screen clamshell minilaptops.

One of the limitations of the ASUS Eee PC-size devices is that the keyboard isn't big enough. But imagine if the keyboard consisted only of letter and number keys, and that "command" keys -- Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, Ctrl, BackSpace, Delete, Enter and so on -- didn't exist?

A Taiwan company called E-Lead showed off a minilaptop at Computex this week (which it also demonstrated at CES) with an innovative keyboard. The product, called Noahpad EL-460, is designed to compete with the ASUS Eee PC and other subnotebooks.

The EL-460's keyboard doubles as a touchpad. You run your fingers over the same keys you use to type to send gesture commands to the system. Those gestures replace various command keys, which enable the letter and number keys to be the same size they would be on a full-size laptop.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the Noahpad EL-460 has a prayer of being successful. And I'm always suspicious of anyone who tries to re-invent the QWERTY keyboard. But the design suggests an innovation for the MPG future, where everyone is learning and using gestures anyway. It's easy to imagine a software keyboard on a multitouch screen doubling as a gesture area that could replace command keys on the keyboard. When you peck on the numbers, they're thrown up on the screen like a keyboard. But when you do gestures over the keys, the commands are received by the system.

Trend No. 3: The e-book revolution

The Amazon.com Kindle made the world safe for wireless electronic books. As people become increasingly comfortable with reading books, magazines and newspapers on a handheld electronic gadget, they'll want to do so on their laptops, too. The all-screen clamshell functions much like a paper book, with pages on both sides. A simple gesture while in e-book mode, say, swiping your finger from the upper-right corner toward the center, "turns the page."

The Kindle comes with a leather cover that lets you hold the one-screen Kindle like an open book, with the Kindle on the right and, well, leather on the left. Before my Kindle arrived, I assumed I would just throw away the leather cover and hold the Kindle by itself. But I, like many Kindle users, have found that holding it like a book with the leather cover is more natural and comfortable. As e-books go mainstream, people will increasingly become comfortable with an open clamshell form factor for reading, just like a paper book. This is an e-book reader design you can "curl up in bed with."

Trend No. 4: Wireless peripherals

Wireless Bluetooth keyboards and mice have been around for a while, and recent innovations around batteries and charging have made them even more useful. The MPG user interface will make keyboards and mice optional, but not necessarily obsolete. You'll still have real input devices if you want them.

Keyboards and mice are inexpensive and trivial to connect wirelessly via Bluetooth. I think touch typists and tactile keyboard enthusiasts will go out and buy their ultimate physical keyboard and mice, then use them with all their devices. Writers, programmers and graphic designers will use physical input devices, but the masses will do without.

So there it is, the laptop of the future. Poor kids will probably get it before you do, but mark my words, the all-screen clamshell laptop will eventually trickle up to business travelers, road warriors and digital nomads of all stripes.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...tsrc =hm_list





Apple Unveils a Faster, Cheaper iPhone
John Markoff

Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, introduced a new cheaper iPhone model that connects to the Internet faster, expanded its distribution overseas and displayed a range of new applications and services in order to establish Apple as a major player in the cellphone industry.

Apple, the Cupertino, Calif., maker of consumer electronics and computer equipment, had set a goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would establish it as one of the major smartphone makers in the less than two years since it began shipping the original iPhone. Apple has sold six million phones globally since its introduction.

Analysts said that Mr. Jobs, one of the world’s best product marketers, had largely accomplished what he set out to do and they welcomed the moves he outlined in a presentation before software developers on Monday.

“This is the phone that has changed phones forever,” Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Jobs said the new iPhone 3G, to be available in the United States through AT&T beginning on July 11, will sell for $199 for the 8-gigabyte model and $299 for a 16-gigabyte model. He said the biggest barrier to people buying the phone had been price.

Analysts and industry executives said they believed the lower prices would bring in new consumers who had been put off by its $399 price. “The price is clearly correct,” said Mike McGuire, a research vice president at Gartner, a market research firm based in San Jose, Calif.

As widely anticipated, the phone will run on so-called 3G wireless networks that allow much faster Internet connections than the original iPhone. During a 110-minute presentation, Mr. Jobs went to some lengths to compare the speed of the new iPhone 3G to the current phone and to rival phones like the Nokia N95 and the Palm Treo 750. He called downloads “amazingly zippy.”

The phone, sleeker than the original, will also have built-in Global Positioning System capability to allow location-based services. It will also have a longer battery life in some cases, five hours for talking on the 3G network and 24 hours for playing music on the phone.

The announcements came on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where several developers showed off software that turned the iPhone into a game console and a musical instrument. Others demonstrated programs that used the phone’s ability to locate its users on a map.

At one point during his demonstration, Mr. Jobs showed a tracking feature making it possible to watch on a Google map as an iPhone user drove down Lombard Street, the twisty tourist attraction in San Francisco.

Mr. Jobs also indirectly challenged Microsoft with a mobile Web service call MobileMe, intended to permit a user to synchronize a phone, calendar and contact information on the iPhone and multiple devices including PCs and other iPhones. The service, which will cost $99 a year and comes with 20 gigabytes of data storage, is similar to a service offered by Microsoft.

Apple’s obstacle in offering the new service is that its competitors, like Google, offer similar services for less. Google offers 10 gigabytes of e-mail storage for $20 a year.

Apple announced that it would begin selling the iPhone in 70 countries this summer; the current phone is being sold in six countries.

“Given the feature set, ecosystem partners, launch countries and the pricing of the iPhone, they are likely to hit the 10 million mark by September-October,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent consultant on the wireless data communications industry.

The company announced on Monday in a regulatory filing that it would sell the 3G phones under different business arrangements in the United States. In the past, Apple shared service plan revenue with AT&T and other cellular firms. The second-generation iPhone will be sold without the recurring revenue streams and without the exclusivity arrangements it was previously able to command.

While trying to convince cellular carriers around the world that they should carry the iPhone, Apple realized that it needed to change the financial deal that it had with the carriers in the first six countries.

“We’ve changed our business model, from getting a cut of the future revenues to just a more traditional model,” Mr. Jobs said in an interview on Monday. “That’s enabled us to roll out around the world much faster.”

AT&T said it would subsidize the phones to attract consumers. Under the plan, unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, in addition to voice plans starting at $40. Business users will be charged $45 a month for data.

By giving back the revenue to the carriers, which they may use for subsidies, Apple is hoping to dramatically increase its volume, as well as sell more Macintosh computers to iPhone users.

“It’s not about the iPhone,” said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at Needham & Company. “There’s a tradeoff that Apple is making. The iPhone halo effect will be far more powerful than the iPod halo effect was. It’s going to stimulate Mac sales among iPhone users.”

Damon Darlin contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/te...0apple.html?hp





Samsung Launches iPhone Lookalike

Korean technology group Samsung <005930.KS> launched a new touchscreen smartphone on Monday, hours before Apple <AAPL.O> Chief Executive Steve Jobs was expected to announce a new version of the iPhone.

Like the iPhone, Samsung's Omnia aims to make Internet browsing easy, and has a wide screen for viewing video as well as music capabilities and a 5 megapixel camera. It runs on Microsoft <MSFT.O> Windows Mobile software.

The original iPhone transformed the market for so-called smartphones with computer-like functions a year ago and the industry is eager to see whether Apple can repeat its success with a new version, expected to run on faster, 3G networks.

According to photographs released with a statement from Samsung, the Omnia resembles the original iPhone in its dark, shiny finish, curved edges and slim form.

The phone will be unveiled at the CommunicAsia trade fair in Singapore starting June 17 and go on sale in southeast Asia that week. It will be available in Europe in July.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Louise Ireland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...25987720080609





Lost Cameras "Phone Home" to Catch Thieves
Franklin Paul

Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera "phoned home."

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon's camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

"I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras," said DeLauzon, a native of New York's Long Island suburb. "Not only is it the guy who stole our camera ... but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera."

DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.

Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.

Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon's home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.

Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data -- from family phone numbers to business budgets -- that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.

Macs E-Mail Video To Victims

Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.

An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder -- an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.
A few years ago, there was a well-publicized case of a Sidekick mobile phone that was first lost in a New York taxi, then found by a 16-year-old who used it to take pictures and send instant messages.

But the device's mobile service provider automatically backed up such data on remote computers, allowing the owner's friend, Evan Guttman, to uncover a trail -- and launch an online shaming campaign against the 16-year-old, who was eventually arrested.

While passive systems have helped reunite missing gadgets with their owners, more aggressive measures can be employed to protect everything from laptops to iPods and BlackBerrys.

GadgetTrak, of Beaverton, Oregon, sells software that can be loaded onto any of those devices. If a BlackBerry, for example, falls into the wrong hands, the software grabs information from the new user's SIM data card and e-mails it to the rightful owner.
With an Apple Mac computer, the software instructs the built-in camera to take video of the thief and sends to the owner, along information about nearby wireless networks.

Some 20,000 GadgetTrack licenses have been purchased in about one year -- including 10,000 from storage company Seagate

"The reason we have been so successful is that people are not expecting this kind of software to be installed," said Ken Westin, the company's founder. "No security solution is 100 percent -- there are always going to be work-arounds. But your average thief is not going to be a computer expert."

DeLauzon didn't want to press charges against the people who had her camera: Both were employees at the restaurant where she dined and accidentally left her photo equipment.

Sure, they were fired -- but getting justice was not as important to her as retrieving her memories of her baby boy.

"When we finally got it back, my husband and I spent the night just sitting and watching the videos -- stupid videos, like him feeding himself for the first time or him pulling himself up in his crib for the first time. We sat down one night and just relished it."

(Editing by Brian Moss)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...43208620080606





Compressed Web Phone Calls are Easy to Bug
David Robson

Plans to compress internet (VoIP) phone calls so they use less bandwidth could make them vulnerable to eavesdropping. Most networks are currently safe, but many service providers are due to implement the flawed compression technology.

The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds.

That happens because the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like "ow", but cut down for simple consonants like "c". This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.

VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, has shown that simply measuring the size of packets without decoding them can identify whole words and phrases with a high rate of accuracy.

VoIP systems accessed via a computer like Skype have become popular in recent years, and internet-based phone systems are increasingly appearing in homes and offices too to connect conventional telephones.

Matching packets

Only a few services currently employ the vulnerable compression method, but more networks had hoped to include it in future VoIP upgrades, says Charles Wright, a member of the John Hopkins team. "We hope we have caught this threat before it becomes too serious."

Eavesdropping software the team has developed cannot yet decode an entire conversation, but it can search for chosen phrases within the encrypted data. This could still allow a criminal to find important financial information conveyed in the call, says Fabian Monrose, another team member.

The software breaks down a typed phrase to be listened for into its constituent sounds using a phonetic dictionary. A version of the phrase is then pasted together from audio clips of phonemes taken from a library of example conversations, before finally being made into a stream of VoIP-style packets.

That gives an idea of what the phrase would look like in a real VoIP stream. When a close match is found in a real call, the software alerts the eavesdropper.
Jargon catcher

In tests on example conversations, the software correctly identified phrases with an average accuracy of about 50%. But that jumped to 90% for longer, more complicated words.

Wright thinks these phrases may be the most important. "I think the attack is much more of a threat to calls with some sort of professional jargon where you have lots of big words that string together to make long, relatively predictable phrases," he says. "Informal conversational speech would be tougher because it's so much more random."

Philip Zimmermann, the founder of the Zfone VoIP security project, says the compression schemes lesson no longer seem like a good idea.

"I'd suggest looking for other alternatives," he says. Networks could solve the problem by padding out the data packets to an equal length, he adds, although this would reduce the extent of the compression.

A paper on the Johns Hopkins team's work was presented at the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, in Oakland, California, US, last month.
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...sy-to-bug.html





Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business

A VP at the Finnish handset maker says open-source developers should be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works
David Meyer

Open-source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules including digital rights management, Nokia's software chief has claimed.

Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.

Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer's open-source operations, said: "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."

Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these "go against the open-source philosophy", but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. "Why do we need closed vehicles? We do," he said. "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too."

Nokia's primary play in the open-source sphere thus far has been Maemo, the Linux-based operating system that runs on its N800-series tablet devices. These devices are popular among developers in the Maemo developer community but, being something of a testbed, have not yet seen much traction in the mass market.

In his speech, Jaaksi detailed some of the lessons Nokia had learned in its work with the Maemo developer community, primarily the need to avoid 'forking' code. He said: "Don't make your own version. The original mistake we made was to take the code to our labs, change it and then release it at the last minute. The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no-one was pushing it other than [us]. Everybody wants to make their own version and keep it too close to their chest but that leads to fragmentation."

The manufacturer has one other significant investment in open source, however: the software maker Trolltech, Nokia's purchase of which finally went through in the last few days. Trolltech makes Qt, a graphical toolkit that is used in the KDE Linux desktop environment and in much commercial software and is an apparently non-participatory member in the LiMo Foundation.

LiMo is an industry consortium that is creating a common middleware layer to help Linux-based software make it onto handsets from a variety of manufacturers. However, neither LiMo nor Maemo use Qt or KDE, opting instead for the GTK+ toolkit and a Gnome-based desktop environment. This has led to a level of industry speculation that Nokia may withdraw Trolltech from LiMo, to use it for other purposes. Nokia stated—when it announced it was to buy Trolltech—that the purchase was to help it move into the applications market.

Speaking to silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk after his presentation, Jaaksi said Nokia was "only now" able to start thinking about what to do with LiMo. He said he felt Nokia had "a huge responsibility from a desktop and user interface point of view to see how we play our cards", and expressed a keenness to see KDE and Gnome brought "closer".

Jaaksi added that he believed Symbian, the proprietary operating system in which Nokia has a major share, would still "in years to come [be] the best platform on which to create smart phones".
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...bal+bu siness





Ari Jaaksi of Nokia Wants to Educate the Linux Community
Bruce Perens

Ari Jaaksi of Nokia wants to educate the Linux developers:

There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.

...Jaaksi said in This ZDNet Story.

But perhaps the community has some education for Jaaksi and Nokia. Jaaksi hosted me at a Nokia dinner in 2000, he's a nice guy and has been interested in Linux for a long time. But Nokia's barking up the wrong tree this time, because Nokia can do everything it wants with DRM, IPR, and SIM locks without bothering the Linux developers about it - and both Nokia and the Linux developers will like it better that way. It's surprising that Nokia doesn't understand that at this late date.

Of course Jaaksi's concerned that developers are unsympathetic to technologies that attempt to shackle the customer. He acknowledges that such technologies "aren't the Open Source way". And those developers have put their preference in writing, with the GPL and especially GPL3, which requires that there be means to change the software in embedded devices without disabling any of the functionality.

This is important to the Open Source / Free Software developers because without hardware, software isn't of much use. A future of locked-down embedded devices wouldn't leave much room for Free Software to run, especially software other than applications, like the Linux kernel. Thus, the provisions in GPL3 that require a path to change the software in hardware are important. But how does one do DRM, SIM locking, and protect critical copyrighted property in that context?

The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side.

And so we can have what I call a bright-line system. That's a system that is designed, from the start, to separate those two pieces. In a properly engineered bright-line system, you can replace every byte of the Free Software, and yet the DRM keeps working as it should, the SIM locking continues to lock, and the GSM stack, which is the precious "intellectual property" of most cellular companies, is still hidden away where nobody can see it. Many of my consulting customers are building these systems into their products today.

To build a bright-line system, you need an effective partnership between your legal team and engineering. I spend a lot of time building that bridge for various companies. It requires that engineers learn enough about the law to know when to ask the right questions, and to know not to answer them by themselves. That's important: my expert-witness practice has been fed by lawsuits in which engineers did what lawyers should have. And goofed.

The law team in a bright-line engineering partnership has to operate differently than they're used to. They have to be conscious that engineers are scored on meeting a timeline, and can't stop development while they're waiting for an answer from legal. Thus, legal has to be able to take on-impulse calls from engineering, and answer them in a timely fashion.

That's too expensive!, say the lawyers and managers. But it's part of the cost of doing business today. When I learned electronics, engineers built products by soldering together resistors and transistors. But today, the job of engineers is to build derivative works by combining units of intellectual property owned by third parties. That's not what they're trained for, and it's a mine-field of potential litigation for every company that puts software in its products - whether or not that software includes Open Source. Without an effective partnership between legal and engineering, your company walks that mine-field every day.

Once they've built an effective partnership between legal and engineering, it's time to design the system. There are three ways to keep Free Software separated from proprietary software effectively, and a fourth that has been tried but is too legally dangerous for me to recommend. They are:

Separate CPU:

Most cell phone designs include two CPUs, often on the same ASIC: an ARM9, an embedded CPU capable of running a full-featured operating system like Linux, and an ARM7, a smaller CPU that usually runs a real-time operating system. Generally the GSM stack lives in the ARM7. The ARM9 runs a full-featured OS like Linux, does high-level functions, and stays asleep when the phone isn't being used.

This is an ideal structure for a bright-line system, because all of the software that needs to be locked down can live in the ARM7, and all of the Free Software can live in the ARM9. The way the two CPUs communicate should be publicly documented or should be a full Open Standard to meet the requirements of GPL3.

Most phones use, believe it or not, the Hayes Modem control protocol to communicate between the two CPUs today. But obviously a better communication path is needed to send streaming media to DRM. If there is to be no potential to tap the unencrypted media stream from the Free Software, there must be a path to the display and audio output hardware from the ARM7.

Kernel under a Kernel

You may have noticed this statement that Linus Torvalds placed as a prelude to the GPL that comes with the Linux kernel:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

Linus' statement is unnecessary, as the terms of the GPL say that anyway. But the point here is that an application that just calls normal system services of the kernel is not a derivative work of the kernel. Similarly, a real-time kernel under the Linux kernel, exporting a publicly-documented set of system services to Linux, would not be a derivative work of Linux. DRM, SIM-locking, the GSM stack, and other such software could live in such a real-time kernel and could be protected from the Linux kernel and other Free Software.

User Mode

You can put anything you like in a user-mode program that runs on top of the kernel, as long as that program only links to programs that don't have strong reciprocal (or share-and-share-alike) terms like the GPL. Most Linux libraries are under the LGPL and similar licenses to make this easy for you. It's possible to implement DRM, SIM locking, and other lock-down features in a user-mode program, but it's not as proof against attacks on the security of those systems as the two methods above. If all you want to do is separate two pieces of copyrighted property, this is a good way to do it.

How Not To Do It

One method used by various companies is to place the proprietary property in a run-time dynamicaly-linked kernel module. I don't recommend this because it's legally ambiguous. The law doesn't define what constitutes a derivative work in software because copyright law was written before there was software. And various lawyers that I ask have opined on either side of the debate. But fortunately, you don't have to win this argument. Your goal shouldn't be to win lawsuits, but to not be sued at all. That means that your design must be so unambiguous in its separation of the Free Software from the proprietary software that there is no issue to be litigated. So, don't use dynamic linking as a means of keeping proprietary and Free Software separate.
http://technocrat.net/d/2008/6/11/43198





Not all USB Drives are Created Equal

Performance and reliability vary, but getting product specs for flash drives can be tricky.
Robert L. Scheier

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.

Differences in the type of memory and, to a lesser extent, the type of I/O controllers used by USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last (theoretically, at least) 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo.

Unfortunately for the average user, there are no accepted industry standards or certifications to judge what's inside a USB 2.0 flash drive on a store shelf. Without checking reviews or running benchmarks, the only rule of thumb is that the more expensive drives (and those which post performance numbers on the packaging) will tend to be the fastest and, perhaps, last the longest.

The casual user may not ever notice. "For the average user, moving a few files around, or even 20-50MB of data, a slower drive is probably sufficient," says Cameron Crandall, a technology manager at memory vendor Kingston Technology Corp. And while the memory in less expensive drives has a shorter life span than that in more expensive drives, even that is enough to last the lifetime of the drive for an average user.

However, these differences can matter if you're storing large amounts of data, using the drives to store critical information or are using a USB drive to supplement system memory using the ReadyBoost feature in Windows Vista.

Key performance factors
The USB 2.0 standard supports a maximum throughput of 60MB/sec., although "nobody's pushing that limit" with the flash memory used in current USB drives, says Pat Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC Inc., a Santa Ana, Calif., manufacturer of memory and storage products.

The single biggest factor in USB drive performance is whether it contains one of two types of memory: SLC (single-level cell) or MLC (multilevel cell). SLC stores one bit, and MLC stores two bits of data in each memory cell. SLC is twice as fast as MLC, says Wilkison, with maximum read speeds of about 14 MB/sec. and write speeds of about 10-12MB/sec. Not surprisingly, almost all current USB flash drives are built using MLC memory, since SLC costs about twice as much as MLC.

Users would see the greatest performance difference between SLC and MLC if they were performing many operations involving small files, rather than relatively few read/write operations on larger files, says John Whaley, principal engineer at MokaFive Inc., whose virtualization software makes it possible for virtual machines to be stored on USB flash drives.

SLC memory also lasts about 10 times as long as MLC, says Crandall, which means one cell in an SLC-based USB drive should last for about 100,000 cycles of writing and erasing data before it fails. However, this difference won't be of much concern to many users.

"If you save a file out to your USB drive and use 100 bytes, you're probably not going to write to those same 100 bytes again for a long time, unless for some reason you decide to delete that file or change it," says Crandall. As a result, "the usable lifetime of the device will extend long beyond" the customary five-year warranty, says Mike Sager, vice president of public relations at Kingston.

When USB drives do begin to fail, they do so one cell at a time, not across the board, says Crandall. This is why an SLC-based drive might be worthwhile for a user storing, say, a virtual machine on a flash drive to restore their system after a disaster, according to Wilkison. If the drive began to fail, dropped bits might not be noticed in a photo or music track but could crash the system if they disappeared from a key part of an operating system.

There are features in the I/O controller that can boost performance in USB drives as well. One is the use of multiple channels to simultaneously move data to and from memory, says Brad Anderson, director of product marketing at USB flash drive vendor Lexar Media Inc. Another, he says, is interleaving, which intermixes data flows to and from multiple flash memory chips within the drive to ensure the channel is used to its maximum potential.

As with many other design details, it's difficult for consumers to determine which I/O controller is used in a specific drive and which features it provides. While a consumer could try to find out which I/O controller is used in a specific drive and investigate how that controller works, most buyers will, according to Wilkison, have to "extrapolate from the speed" of the drive what type of controller is in it.

No standard
Right now, possibly the only way to know whether you've bought a drive that uses SLC memory is how much it costs -- the more expensive the drive, the more likely it is to have been built using SLC.

There is one way to judge the quality of a drive besides the price: the Windows ReadyBoost logo, which indicates that the flash drive can be used to supplement system RAM and thus speed the performance of Windows Vista-equipped PCs.

However, the minimum specifications for Windows ReadyBoost are just 2.5MB/sec. for random reads of 4KB of data, and 1.75MB/sec. for random writes of 512KB of data, which Crandall says are typical of lower-priced and lower-speed USB flash drives. Customers who want the maximum benefit from Windows ReadyBoost should opt for a USB drive marketed as a high-performance device and probably priced at the high end of the average for its capacity.

The future
In the first half of 2009, Wilkison predicts, controller manufacturers will begin shipping drives with dual- and even four-channel controllers, which will increase speeds even for slower MLC memory by increasing the number of lanes through which data can be written to and from the memory cells. USB drives combining four-channel controllers with MLC memory will reach speeds of about 60MB/sec. for reads and 30MB/sec. for writes, coming closer to -- but not quite -- saturating the USB 2.0 interface.

For the average consumer for whom price is more important than speed or reliability, any reasonably priced USB drive should do. But if speed or longer life is critical, look for drives advertised as high performance, do your research online and expect to spend more. But even then, you can't be absolutely sure you're getting more speed for your money.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...intsrc=kc_feat





Blogging--It's Good for You

The therapeutic value of blogging becomes a focus of study
Jessica Wapner

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.
Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

Scientists’ understanding about the neurobiology underlying therapeutic writing must remain speculative for now. Attempts to image the brain before and after writing have yielded minimal information because the active regions are located so deep inside. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that the brain lights up differently before, during and after writing, notes James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. But Pennebaker and others remain skeptical about the value of such images because they are hard to duplicate and quantify.

Most likely, writing activates a cluster of neurological pathways, and several researchers are committed to uncovering them. At the University of Arizona, psychologist and neuroscientist Richard Lane hopes to make brain-imaging techniques more relevant by using those techniques to study the neuroanatomy of emotions and their expressions. Nancy Morgan, lead author of the Oncologist study, is looking to conduct larger community-based and clinical trials of expressive writing. And Pennebaker is continuing to investigate the link between expressive writing and biological changes, such as improved sleep, that are integral to health. “I think the sleep angle is one of the more promising ones,” he says.

Whatever the underlying causes may be, people coping with cancer diagnoses and other serious conditions are increasingly seeking—and finding—solace in the blogosphere. “Blogging undoubtedly affords similar benefits” to expressive writing, says Morgan, who wants to incorporate writing programs into supportive care for cancer patients.

Some hospitals have started hosting patient-authored blogs on their Web sites as clinicians begin to recognize the therapeutic value. Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations, Morgan explains: “Individuals are connecting to one another and witnessing each other’s expressions—the basis for forming a community.”
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-healthy-type





Among Scientific Treasures, a Gem
Dennis Overbye

One thing you can say about the copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s book “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), on sale next week at Christie’s auction house, is that it looks and feels old.

Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

The party, known as the Enlightenment, is still going strong. It was a thrill to hold Copernicus in my hands on a recent visit to the back rooms of Christie’s and flip through its hallowed pages as if it were my personal invitation to the Enlightenment. No serious library should be without one. Just in case you are missing your own copy, you can pick up this one for about the price of a Manhattan apartment next Tuesday, according to the Christie’s catalog, which estimates its value at $900,000 to $1.2 million.

The Copernicus is a cornerstone in the collection of a retired physician and amateur astronomer, Richard Green of Long Island, that constitutes pretty much a history of science and Western thought. Among the others in Dr. Green’s library are works by Galileo, who was tried for heresy in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest for his admiration of Copernicus and for portraying the pope as a fool, as well as by Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Malthus and even Karl Marx.

One lot includes Albert Einstein’s collection of reprints of his scientific papers, including his first one on relativity. Another is a staggeringly beautiful star atlas, Harmonia Macrocosmica, by the 17th-century Dutch-German cartographer Andreas Cellarius, with double-truck hand-colored plates.



Pawing through these jaw droppers, I found my attention being drawn again and again to a small white book, barely more than a pamphlet, a time machine that took me back to a more recent revolution. It was the directory for world’s first commercial phone system, Volume 1, No. 1, published in New Haven by the Connecticut District Telephone Company in November 1878, future issues to be published “from time to time, as the nature of the service requires.”

Two things struck me. As an aging veteran of the current rewiring of the human condition, I wondered whether there might be lessons from that first great rewiring of our collective nervous system.

Another was a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein’s father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was: the flow of tiny negatively charged corpuscles of matter called electrons.

The New Haven switchboard opened in January 1878, only two years after Alexander Graham Bell, in nearby Boston, spoke the immortal words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” It was the first commercial system that allowed many customers to connect with one another, for $22 a year, payable in advance.

The first directory consisted of a single sheet listing the names of 50 subscribers, according to lore. By November, the network had grown to 391 subscribers, identified by name and address — phone numbers did not yet exist. And the phone book, although skimpy, had already taken the form in which it would become the fat doorstop of today, with advertisements and listings of businesses in the back — 22 physicians and 22 carriage manufacturers, among others.

Customers were limited to three minutes a call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.

“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point.

You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.”

The other person should respond, “O.K.”

Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear.

“Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately,” the company said.

If only they could hear us now. On second thought, maybe it’s better they can’t. Today we are all on a party line, and your most virulent thoughts are just a forward button away from being broadcast to the universe. Would it have killed the founders of the Internet to give us a little warning here?

Near the back of the book is an essay on another promising new wonder that “has attracted renewed attention both in this country and in Europe.”

Many of the streets and shops of Paris, it is reported, are now illuminated by electric lights, placed on posts. “People seated before the cafes read their papers by the aid of lights on the opposite side of the way, and yet the most delicate complexions and softest tints in fabrics do not suffer in the white glare of the lamps. Every stone in the road is plainly visible, and the horses move swiftly along as if confident of their footing,” the book says.

It makes you wonder what could come next. Oh yes, those horses. No revolution is ever done.

That is all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/science/10auct.html





Hard Drive Withstands Fire and Water
Wolfgang Gruener

Most small businesses and consumers do not have elaborate disaster recovery plans in place, which means that their data may be at risk, especially if backups are stored nearby. Fire and water can wipe out at least portions of the contents stored on hard drives in a matter of seconds. ioSafe announced new hard drives that promise to withstand fire and water and offer a type of product for all those who don’t invest in off-site storage.

ioSafe claims that it is the first company to offer fire- and waterproof hard drives, which may be worth a look not just for businesses, but also families who are looking for ways to keep those digital family pictures safe, even when a house burns down. The company uses 2.5” drives within 3.5” enclosures are specially equipped with heat and water barriers.

Fire protection is provided by the firm’s “DataCast endothermic insulation technology”, which the manufacturer claims forms a chemical bond with water molecules that, at temperature above 160 degrees Fahrenheit, releases water vapor to limit the internal temperature of the unit. Combined with the insulation, ioSafe claims that the drive can sustain outside temperatures of up to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 15 minutes and short term peak temperatures of up to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the case of a fire, the plastic tabs on the inside of the 3.5” casing will melt at a temperature of 250 degrees Fahrenheit, closing the drive and blocking airflow. The manufacturer said that the inside of the 2.5” drive should not get hotter than 210 degrees Fahrenheit during a fire, as 98% of radiant heat can be deflected. Typical house fires reach a heat of about 1100 degrees Fahrenheit with 3 to 5 minutes.
There was no detailed information on the water protection technology, other than the claim that the drive will be protected from fresh or salt water damage, both in full submersion and spray/splash scenarios. Full submersion protection is guaranteed for up to 24 hours in up to 5 ft of water.

Just in case the drive is damaged, ioSafe offers an optional data recovery plan that is activated through the registration of a product. The service, which is offered free of charge, provides access to data recovery experts and includes up to $2500 payment by ioSafe to a third-party data extraction service plus replacement product, if required.

Not surprisingly, ioSafe’s hard drives come at a premium over regular hard drives. The price list ranges from $330 for a 5400 rpm 80 GB drive to $460 for a 7200 rpm 200 GB drive. The highest capacity is offered by a 320 GB 5400 rpm model for $450.
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/cont...37855-135.html





Is a New Digital Video Service Derailing Amazon.com?
Brad Stone

Amazon.com had another bad day.

After a two-hour outage on Friday, the site again had intermittent problems Monday. Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet performance management firm based in San Mateo, Calif., says a new round of problems with the online retailer started at 10:03 a.m. this morning Pacific time and lasted for 20 minutes. During that time, the site’s availability was down to 30 percent.

Later that hour, at 10:56 Pacific time, the site’s availability dipped back down to 68 percent for around 3 minutes, according to Keynote.

Amazon.com now appears to be operating normally. Though it informed its merchants Monday of the new problems, Amazon, characteristically, has not addressed the cause of the outages.

But analysts at Bank of America Equity Research had one interesting theory. In a note to investors on Sunday night, analysts Brian J. Pitz and Brian P. Fitzgerald speculated that the problems may be related to preparations for the coming relaunch of Amazon Unbox, the company’s TV and movie download service.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said last month that the company would soon introduce for-pay live video streaming of shows and movies from the site. In support of their theory, the analysts note that the outages did not appear to affect Amazon Web services and were mostly limited to the United States, where the streaming service will likely be introduced first.

Researchers at Keynote Systems and Narus, an Internet traffic intelligence firm that is also studying Amazon traffic patterns, have largely ruled out a denial of service attack orchestrated by hackers and the DNS issues that crippled Youtube earlier this year.

Dr. Supranamaya Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff at Narus, says Amazon is typically adept at “load balancing” — responding to customer visits by spreading its computing resources efficiently between the computer servers that are in the best position to respond to that customer at that time. But during the outages, he said, that was not the case; his visits to Amazon.com were often handled by faraway or already overloaded servers.

“That does lead me to conjecture that they are in the process of re-architecting the whole way their content distribution system works and the causes for this could have been this new Unbox service,” Dr. Ranjan said.

Amazon itself isn’t commenting.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ing-amazoncom/





Return to Vendor
Dan Mitchell

Nearly all the electronic gadgets returned by customers turn out to be in perfect working order, according to a report from the consulting firm Accenture (accenture.com).

More than two-thirds of the returns were of products that worked fine, but did not “meet customers’ expectations for some reason,” PC World reported. “Either they thought it was defective when it wasn’t, or there was an expectation gap,” said Terry Steger, an executive at Accenture.

The report concluded that manufacturers and retailers themselves are largely to blame. Too many companies, according to Accenture, see processing returns as a “normal cost of doing business.” But significant savings can be drawn from “improving design, packaging and documentation; setting customer expectations and providing adequate customer identification; and providing after-sales support and accessories,” the report states.

Still, Accenture says that 27 percent of returns are because of “buyer’s remorse, or as Joshua Fruhlinger of engadget.com put it, “The implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/te.../07online.html





Swedish Left Party Wants to Legalize Piracy
Ernesto

This Sunday, the Swedish Left Party voted in favor of a motion calling for the legalization of sharing copyrighted files for personal use. The party, which currently holds 22 seats in the Swedish parliament, sees piracy as something positive, much like public libraries.

At the party’s congress this weekend, party members had to vote on a motion that would legalize the uploading and downloading of copyrighted material for personal use, as long as it is not for commercial purposes.

“To many of us in the Left Party, file sharing is something positive in the same obvious way that public libraries are,” the motion read, going on to describe the general opinion on file sharing in Sweden.

In addition, the motion stated that the various measures taken for trying to stop file sharing, such as big brother-like surveillance, or arbitrary sentences against individuals, are unacceptable.

The Pirate Bay, the main reason why piracy is such a hot topic in Sweden, was also mentioned in the motion. “The farce that is the ongoing legal procedures against The Pirate Bay also shows how legal security is in risk of being compromised by those trying to enforce the current ban on file sharing,” it read.

The motion concluded that legalizing piracy is the solution, and that the Left Party should take a stand for opening the possibilities to make copies for personal use.

The congress was split on the issue, and debate was heated before the vote on Sunday, but when the vote was taken it fell in favour of the motion legalizing file sharing.

“We obviously want to be the cultural workers’ party in the future, but legislation which makes the majority of the adult population criminals must be changed,” Elise Norberg Pilhem of the party’s board said.

Today, only a few hours after The Left Party’s new stance on file sharing, another initiative in the same direction was presented from across the aisle. The Swedish Center Party - the third largest party in Sweden, currently in government with four cabinet ministers, has called for an improvement in current copyright legislation.

Earlier this year the party had no success in convincing their colleagues in the government coalition to legalize non-commercial file sharing. Today, the party demands a complete oversight of the copyright legislation, and the appointment of a commission to investigate how a new copyright law could be constructed.

We now see a younger generation questioning copyright more and more, and with that there will be demands for updated copyright legislation. We need a legislation that is accepted by as many as possible, says Annie Johansson, the Center Party’s spokesperson on copyright.

It looks like things are changing for the better in Sweden.
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-left...piracy-080609/





Metallica Goes Diva on the Internet…Again
Niki D’Andrea

What the hell is wrong with Metallica? I had some empathy about the whole Napster snafu in 2000, when the band complained about copyright violations and being ripped off for royalties when Napster was a free file-sharing site. Metallica won a settlement from Napster (now a pay site), and alienated a lot of fans in the process.

I was one of them. See, you can’t stop bootlegs. Metallica, of all bands, should know that -- their initial fan base was built upon bootleg copies of tapes that metal fans traded and passed along. I’d never heard of Metallica until a friend gave me a taped copy (yes, a copy) of the band’s 1986 album, Master of Puppets. That bootleg copy led me to purchase all of Metallica’s albums, several T-shirts, and tickets to their shows when they came to town.

Of course, that was before Metallica made the “One” video in 1989 and became MTV darlings. Ever since the band got the corporate culture machine behind them, they’ve vehemently turned their backs on the old school, grassroots metal community that helped put them where they are today.

Now, it seems they’re taking their prima donna behavior a step further.

Last Wednesday, Metallica invited several bloggers to a “listening party” in London for its upcoming album. Now, “listening parties” are public relations stunts. Anybody who’s been in this business for longer than a week knows that PR companies hold listening parties for the purpose of generating pre-release press and hype. Listening parties can be expensive and time-consuming, and so they are generally not done just for fun.

Metallica uber alles.

But when bloggers wrote reviews of what they’d heard at the listening party, Metallica went ballistic, demanding that the reviews be taken down. One site in particular, The Quietus, has reported that the band’s management asked the site to remove the blog about the new album, even though Metallica’s management did not ask the blogger to sign a non-disclosure agreement (which would have legally prevented attendees from writing about the listening party or the six songs they’d heard previewed there).

Other publications whose reporters attended the listening party and wrote reviews – including Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, and Rock Sound – were reportedly asked to remove their reviews, as well.

Ironically, none of the now-removed reviews were negative. The least glowing review was that on The Quietus, and Quietus editor Luke Turner told Blinded By Hype that “if you were lucky enough to read [the review] before it was taken down, was full of praise about a return to form.”

Metallica’s management has refused to comment on the matter. But in this case, the band’s behavior is comment enough.
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/upo...on_the_int.php





Shatner on 'Trek': 'You Know, That's Rather Good'
AP

One recent week, William Shatner did something he hadn't done for many years -- watched the original "Star Trek." It was kind of an accident.

In the "Trek" episode "A Piece of the Action," Spock and Kirk traveled to a planet modeled on 1920s gangsters.

Now, you might think that a bit odd. But Shatner rarely watches himself work. When it comes to acting, he says, he lives in the moment and moves on. Same thing these days with his work as Denny Crane on ABC's "Boston Legal."

This particular night, though, he was recovering from hip surgery and couldn't sleep, so he was watching TV. An old episode came on -- the one where the crew of the USS Enterprise visited a society that had modeled itself after Chicago gangsters of the 1920s. Kirk and Spock dressed up in pinstripe suits and held court as tough guys.

Watching, Shatner was more pleased than he expected.

"I haven't seen myself playing Captain Kirk in a long, long time," he says. "And I watched it now, from my perspective of 40 years later, and I thought, 'You know, that's rather good.' It's a starship captain trying to do the accent, the Noo Yawk accent, trying to play tough, trying to be one of the guys. It's not quite right, but it's what a starship captain would have done -- a decent imitation, enough to fool those guys but not the audience."

Shatner won't be playing Kirk in the upcoming reboot of "Star Trek" directed by J.J. Abrams. Leonard Nimoy plays an aging Spock, but the Jim Kirk character -- a young version -- is portrayed by actor Chris Pine. Shatner has said he's sad but not angry at the decision, which springs from the killing off of Kirk in the 1994 film "Star Trek Generations."

The recent late-night TV watching got Shatner thinking, though, about the character of Kirk and how it has endured.

"That was a good hero," Shatner says. "He made decisions. He was forceful. He was compassionate. He was the instigator. He fought hard and long physically and emotionally. He carried the dilemma of whether to intrude or not to intrude. It was all the classic forms of good Greek playmaking: The hero has the dilemma and resolves the dilemma."

Even the series' renowned cheesy production design, done on an increasingly tight budget through the show's 1966-69 run, didn't put him off.
"The actors were wonderful. And I didn't care about the sets or anything like that or the cheesy spaceship," Shatner says. "I think that's what happens in 'Star Trek.' Your eye goes past all the faults because you're concentrated on the actors and the plot."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/0....ap/index.html





Net Providers to Block Sites With Child Sex
Danny Hakim

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.

The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million customers between them.

Negotiations are continuing with other service providers, Mr. Cuomo said.

The companies have agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet. Usenet began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online, but as the World Wide Web blossomed, Usenet was largely supplanted by it, becoming a favored back alley for those who traffic in illicit material.

The providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography.

While officials from the attorney general’s office said they hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the material online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from tracking their activity.

The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.

By pursuing Internet service providers, Mr. Cuomo is trying to move beyond the traditional law enforcement strategy of targeting those who produce child pornography and their customers. That approach has had limited effectiveness, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in part because much of the demand in the United States has been fed by child pornography from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” said Mr. Cuomo, who promised to take up the issue during his 2006 campaign. “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he added. “To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’ doesn’t capture it.”

“The I.S.P.s’ point had been, ‘We’re not responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals, we’re not responsible,’ ” he said, referring to Internet service providers. “Our point was that at some point, you do bear responsibility.”

Representatives for the three companies either did not return calls or declined to comment before the official announcement of the agreements on Tuesday.

Internet service providers represent a relatively new front in the battle against child pornography, one spearheaded in large part by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Federal law requires service providers to report child pornography to the National Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report, and few visitors to illicit newsgroups could be expected to complain because many are pedophiles themselves.

Last year, a bill sponsored by Congressman Nick Lampson, a Texas Democrat, promised to take “the battle of child pornography to Internet service providers” by ratcheting up penalties for failing to report complaints of child pornography. The bill passed in the House, but has languished in the Senate.

“If we can encourage — and certainly a fine would be an encouragement — the I.S.P. to be in a position to give the information to law enforcement, we are encouraging them to be on the side of law enforcement rather than erring to make money for themselves,” Mr. Lampson said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children collaborated on Mr. Lampson’s bill and with Mr. Cuomo’s office in its investigation and strategy.

“This is a major step forward in the fight against child pornography,” Ernie Allen, the president and chief executive officer of the center, said in a statement. “Attorney General Cuomo has developed a new and effective system that cuts online child porn off at the source, and stops it from spreading across the Internet.”

As part of the agreements, the three companies will also collectively pay $1.125 million to underwrite efforts by Mr. Cuomo’s office and the center for missing children to purge child pornography from the Internet.

One considerable tool that has been assembled as part of the investigation is a library of more than 11,000 pornographic images. Because the same images are often distributed around the Web or from newsgroup to newsgroup, once investigators catalog an image, they can use a digital identifier called a “hash value” to scan for it anywhere else — using it as a homing beacon of sorts to find other pornographic sites.

“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And it’s ongoing.”
The most graphic material was typically found on newsgroups, the online bulletin boards that exist apart from the World Wide Web but can be reached through some Internet search engines. The newsgroups transmit copies of messages around the world, so an image posted to the server of a service provider in the Netherlands, for example, ends up on other servers in the United States and elsewhere.

The agreement is designed to bar access to Web sites that feature child pornography by requiring service providers to check against a registry of explicit sites maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Investigators said a few providers, including America Online, had taken significant steps on their own to address some of the problems their competitors were being forced to tackle.

Mr. Cuomo said his latest investigation was built on agreements he and other state attorneys general had reached with the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to protect children from sexual predators.

“No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we deem you responsible to an extent,” he said. “This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/ny...ternet.html?hp





France Blocks Online Child Porn, Terrorism, Racism
AP

France is joining at least five other countries where Internet service providers block access to child pornography and to content linked to terrorism and racial hatred, the French interior minister said today.

The agreement will take effect in September. A blacklist will be compiled based on input from Internet users who flag sites containing offensive material, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie said.

All service providers in France have agreed to block offending sites, he said.

"We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography," Alliot-Marie said. "We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer."

Offensive sites will be referred to judicial authorities, the minister said.

A similar deal was announced Tuesday in New York, where Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable agreed with New York state officials to block access to child porn.

Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and New Zealand are among other countries that have already implemented similar measures.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





9th Circuit's Chief Judge Posted Sexually Explicit Materials on His Website

Alex Kozinski, who is presiding over an obscenity trial in L.A., admits he posted sexually explicit photos and videos. He says he didn't think the public could see the site, which is now blocked.
Scott Glover

One of the highest-ranking federal judges in the United States, who is currently presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, has maintained his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as "funny."

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

After details about the website were published on latimes.com this morning, the judge offered to entertain motions to recuse himself from the obscenity trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs, who is accused of distributing criminally obscene sexual fetish videos depicting bestiality and defecation.

Prosecutors said they were conferring with supervisors within the Department of Justice about how to proceed. In the meantime, they wanted jurors to be admonished to disregard publicity in the case. Defense attorney Roger Diamond made no objection to Kozinski continuing to hear the case, which began with opening statements this morning.

This afternoon jurors were taken to the appeals court's offices in Pasadena to view three videos at issue in Issacs' trial.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told The Times that Kozinski should recuse himself from the Isaacs case because "the public can reasonably question his objectivity" concerning the issues at hand.

Gillers, who has known Kozinski for years and called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary," said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters," but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order."

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

The sexually explicit material on Kozinski's site earlier this week was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear. There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

Kozinski, who was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year, is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He has a national reputation for a brilliant legal mind and has developed a reputation as a champion of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the Issacs trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appeals court judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Kozinski said he didn't think any of the material he posted on his website would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The judge said he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

He keeps the things he finds interesting or funny with the thought that he might later pass them on to friends, he said.

Times staff writers Ben Welsh and Eric Ulken contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,6220192.story





J’accuse…moi!

Judge Wants Panel to Investigate His Porn Postings
Michael R. Blood

The criminal prosecution of a hard-core pornographer turned into a personal trial for the presiding judge, who called for an investigation Thursday into his own conduct over lewd photos and videos stored on his family's publicly accessible Web site.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked an ethics panel of the court to initiate proceedings after the disclosure about his trove of sexually explicit material.

"I will cooperate fully in any investigation," Kozinski said in a statement.

Kozinski, 57, left court Wednesday without comment after suspending the trial of Ira Isaacs, who is charged with obscenity for selling movies depicting bestiality and fetishes involving feces and urination. The delay until Monday will give lawyers time to consider whether to ask for Kozinski to step down from the case.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that Kozinski had posted sexual material on his personal Web site and then blocked access after being interviewed about it Tuesday evening. He told the Times he was responsible for posting at least some of the images and videos.

The computerized cache included a picture of two nude women on all fours painted to look like Holstein dairy cows, images of masturbation, a video of a man being pursued by a sexually aroused donkey and a slide show featuring a striptease with a transsexual.

"If you found this kind of thing in your kid's bedroom you would wash your kid's mouth out with soap. We expect more from a judge," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Loyola University Law School. "Character counts for judges because they have so much power and affect so many people's lives."

Kozinski who has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court candidate, is known for his intellectual rigor, writing flourishes and an outlandish _ some say boorish _ personality.

But the graphic material has opened questions about his fitness to serve on the high-profile obscenity case as well as the standard for what types of images are taboo, particularly on a judge's personal Web site.

Although he requested an investigation, it's unclear what, if any, discipline Kozinski could face. Circuit judges are appointed for life and can be fired only by Congress, though fellow jurists can censure them.

Kozinski asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to assign the inquiry to a panel of judges outside the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction of nine western states. Court rules permit such investigations to be transferred in high-profile cases or when a decision within a district might weaken public confidence in the outcome.

Kozinski did not immediately respond to a request for an interview Thursday.

The judge, a married father of three sons, claims to build his own computers but told the Los Angeles Times he didn't know the Web site was accessible to Internet surfers. One of his sons, Yale Kozinski, later told The New York Times that the site is registered to him and he maintains it, but neither father nor son made clear who posted the images in question.

Federal rules say judges should "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary." But does material on a judge's personal Web site cross that line?

"Even if it is private, the problem for him is the cat is out of the bag," said Tom Fitton, president of conservative Judicial Watch. "You're going to have questions about his impartiality."

But Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Irvine, said the material would not permanently harm Kozinski's reputation.

"It's much ado about very little," Chemerinsky said. "There is no indication that this material is even close to obscenity."

Cyrus Sanai, a Beverly Hills lawyer who has had a long-running dispute with the 9th Circuit, took credit for bringing the graphic material to light.

Sanai said he discovered the sexual content in December while monitoring the judge's Web site as part of his legal rift with the court. After downloading the files, Sanai said he began contacting reporters at various publications in January to bring attention to what he called widespread ethical problems on the 9th Circuit.

He provided a copy of the files to The Associated Press on Wednesday, which appeared to mirror the Times' descriptions of videos and pictures on the Web site.

___

Associated Press writers Paul Elias, Erica Werner and Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061200645.html





Weiner: Bring on Hotties from Overseas
Jo Piazza and David Saltonstall

Give me your torrid, your pure, your totally smokin' foreign babes.

Feast your eyes on the latest immigration push by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a likely 2009 mayoral contender who has introduced a bill in Congress to make it easier for foreign fashion models to get visas to work in the U.S.

Apparently, the 43-year-old Weiner - now going steady with Hillary Clinton aide and Vogue hottie Huma Abedin - thinks New York needs more professional catwalkers from Europe, Asia and other fabulous places.

"From Fashion Week to our vibrant publishing industry to the many designers that call New York City home, fashion is a vital part of our economy that drives thousands of jobs," Weiner told the Daily News.

Staffers insist Weiner is mostly trying to redress a flaw in the nation's immigration policies. Models must compete against computer geeks, doctors and other brainiacs for H-1B visas, generally reserved for the "highly specialized."

Demand has outstripped the 165,000 available H-1B's, leaving many models out in the cold.

Some red-blooded American fashionistas yesterday accused Weiner of trying to make life harder for American beauties by easing the way for imports.

"Forget trying to bring in new meat," said ex-supermodel Janice Dickinson, who hosts the "Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" reality show. "Let's divvy it up between the Americans on American soil, please."

Other fashion bigwigs argued Weiner is right - designers and photographers won't just hire American. They'll more likely take job-producing shoots to another country.

The highest-paid model in the world is Brazilian Gisele Bundchen, who made $33 million in 2007, compared to the $5 million earned by top American model Carolyn Murphy.

"If there are girls that we can't get into the United States, the client is going to take that business elsewhere," said Corinne Nicolas, president of Trump Model Management. "The market is calling for foreign girls."

Weiner's bill, first reported by Politico.com, would send models sashaying out of the prized H-1B category of visas and over to the easier-to-get P visas, mostly for entertainers and athletes.

Applicants can't be just another pretty face, though. In language that only Washington bureaucrats could dream up, the legislation spells out the requirements for America's next top non-American models.

An applicant must be "a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability" seeking to enter the U.S. temporarily "to perform fashion modeling services that involve events or productions which have a distinguished reputation."

In other words, no pole dancers.

The supermodels don't have to worry, though. The Gisele Bundchens and Naomi Campbells of the world already qualify for platinum-plated O-1 visas - set aside for foreigners of "extraordinary ability," such as Nobel Prize winners.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...verseas-1.html





Pixel Perfect

Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality.
Lauren Collins

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M•A•C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs. Dangin’s company, Box Studios, has eighty employees and occupies a four-story warehouse in the meatpacking district. “I have Patrick!” an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor of Runway, exclaims in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but her real-life counterparts probably log as much time speed-dialling Pascal.

Dangin is, by all accounts, an adept plumper of breasts and shrinker of pores. Using the principles of anatomy and perspective, he is able to smooth a blemish or a blip (“anomalies,” he calls them) with a painterly subtlety. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, said, “He has this ability to make moves in someone’s facial structure or body. I’ll look at someone, and I’ll think, Can we redefine the cheek? Can we, you know, change a little bit the outline of the face to bring definition? He, on the other hand, will say, ‘No, no, no, it’s her neck.’ He will see it in a way that the majority of people don’t see it.” Dangin salvaged a recent project at W by making a minute adjustment to the angle of a shoulder blade.

The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible. To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux—the “Sopranos” ads, for example—he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.) He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue—“much redder, almost brown in a way”—that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.

As renowned as Dangin is in fashion and photographic circles, his work, with its whiff of black magic, is not often discussed outside of them. (He is not, for instance, credited in magazines.) His hold on the business derives from the pervasive belief that he possesses some ineffable, savantlike sympathy for the soul of a picture, along with the vision (and maybe the ego) of its creator. “Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you’re good,” Leibovitz said. “If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”

His job description is enigmatic. People I asked about him invariably resorted to metaphor: he is a translator, an interpreter, a conductor, a ballet dancer articulating choreographed steps. These analogies, though, don’t account for pursuits that, while probably contributing less to Dangin’s income than wrinkle extermination does, occupy more of his time and intellect. He has become a master printer, “digitally remastering” old negatives and producing fine-art prints for exhibition. “When I see a print, I could probably tell you if it was a Pascal print,” Charlotte Cotton, the head of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said. “It’s immaculate, and there’s a kind of richness to the pixellation. It feels like you could almost sink your finger into it.” Books are another love: he is the publisher of SteidlDangin, an imprint of lush art volumes—for instance, a collection of a thousand Philip-Lorca diCorcia Polaroids.

A tinkerer and an autodidact, who started out as a hairdresser, Dangin brings to mind, actually, a building superintendent: he knows how to do a lot of jobs, and those he doesn’t he figures out through trial and error. He is, more than anything, the consigliere for a generation of photographers uncomfortable with, or uninterested in, the details of digital technology. According to Cotton, “Pascal is actually an unwritten author of what is leading the newest areas of contemporary image-making.”

His digital brushstrokes can be as deliberate as Jasper Johns’s or John Currin’s are on canvas, but they are not as consistent—part of Dangin’s skill lies in being able to channel the style, and the fancy, of whatever photographer he is collaborating with. In the spring of 2004, the Prada campaign, shot by Steven Meisel, had a retro, vacationy look—tie-dyed cardigans, hairbands, sailboat prints. Using a Photoshop tool called a smudge brush, Dangin applied extra color to every pixel, giving the pictures—hard and flat, at the outset—a dreamy, impressionistic texture, as if they had been wrought in oil and chalk.

The walls of the third-floor meeting room at Dangin’s headquarters, on West Fourteenth Street, hold magnets in the manner of a refrigerator door. One afternoon in November, grease pencils, in the colors of the rainbow, were stuck, by magnets, to one wall. Nearby, several of Dangin’s assistants were hanging a blueprint—a scaled rendition of the Petit Palais museum, in Paris, where, in September, Patrick Demarchelier will have a retrospective. Dangin was designing the exhibit, from the pictures (many of which he would retouch) and their frames down to the traffic-flow patterns of the museumgoers who would look at them. Dangin would do all of the printing. He was also publishing a companion monograph.

Demarchelier arrived shortly after two. The first order of business was to sift through several notebooks full of photographs to decide which ones to put in the show. Dangin and Demarchelier sat near each other, on two couches. “Ça, ça, ça, ça oui, ça oui, ça non,” Dangin said, marking his choices with a red grease pencil. “Ça on jette, non?” Demarchelier mostly followed the lead of Dangin (“Do you remember that story in French Vogue? Normandy? Wide angle?”), who drew quick, dismissive X’s over the pictures he did not like until the notebook resembled a game of tic-tac-toe.

Once the pictures had been narrowed down, Dangin began explaining to Demarchelier his concept for organizing the show. “Je pensais nuages d’images”—clouds of images—he began. He pointed to the blueprint, explaining that they should show lots of oversized prints, interspersed with thematic groupings of smaller portraits. Dangin had a plan for freestanding frames. “If we build an upside-down T, then we can just insert the print,” he said. “Two feet in Plexiglas and one riser casing. And the steel we can manufacture with José here in the shop.”

“Patrick, I’m going to show you American Vogue and Seven Jeans,” Dangin said, turning to some current projects. Dangin is on the short side, with a scruffy mustache and finger-in-the-socket frizz. He maintains the hours of a Presidential candidate; lately, he is a little tubbier than he would like. He was wearing, as is his custom, an all-navy outfit: New Balance sneakers, ratty cords, woollen sweater with holes in the armpits. He is not immune to the charms of things—he owns an Aston Martin, along with houses in Manhattan, Amagansett, and St. Bart’s—but, for someone who can pick apart a face in a matter of seconds (he once, apologetically, described his eyes as “high-speed scanners”), he is remarkably free of vanity. “I’m not a stud,” he told me one day. “I don’t have the six-pack chocolate bars, I have a belly. Would I want to look like that? Yes. Am I ever going to achieve that? No. Am I happy? Yes.” He has an earthy streak and a digressive manner of thought, but he issues orders commandingly.

Dangin and Demarchelier walked over to a wall affixed with a dozen color photographs of a famous actress in her late twenties. Demarchelier approached one of them, a closeup of the actress’s face. She was smiling, her head slightly tilted, posed in front of a swimming pool.

“Let’s soften the lines around her mouth,” Demarchelier said, tracing the actress’s nasolabial folds and the flume of her upper lip with the tip of one of the temples of his eyeglasses.

Dangin grabbed a grease pencil off the wall. “The blue in the background is off. We have to make that brighter. Especially for the cover.” By the time they were done, the actress’s face was streaked with black markings, like a football player’s.

They moved on to the jeans campaign. Dangin thought the model’s face was too “crunchy” (meaning that the contrast was high, making her look severe); Demarchelier wanted the denim—a pair of white bell-bottoms—to pop. “Then the only thing is the background here—is it too heavy compared to that one?” Dangin asked, comparing two pictures with the same windswept hills. “See the gradient here? This is a little more black-and-white, this is a little more gray. I prefer that,” he said, indicating the shot with the richer contrast.

Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

“I like her in this one, because she looks very natural,” Dangin said.

“Yes,” Demarchelier agreed. “In that other pose, she looks like an actress.”

“But she’s also very good here,” Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

“Yes, she’s very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?”

“No, no. I’m going to keep it for the ass,” Dangin said.

“Maybe we could redo the ass.”

“Yes, the ass is quite heavy.”

Later, Dangin retreated to his basement workroom to refine the pictures. He likes to retouch alone, late into the night. His work does not always involve riddance. “During this whole period of grunge,” he told me, “I used to spend hours deciding, Which is the cool wrinkle to leave?”

Pascal Dangin began his career as a shampoo boy in a no-name salon in Paris’s Fifteenth Arrondissement. “I was with girls a lot, so that’s always good when you’re a teen-age boy,” he said one day at his office. “But what was fascinating was that I had to learn someone’s life in a very short amount of time. Like, fifteen seconds to figure out, Where does she go and eat? What does she wear? Is she married? Imagining this whole life and then defining a style for the person. Hair, to me, is really one of the most important retouchings that you can do. Because I look at life as retouching. Makeup, clothes are just an accessorization of your being, they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”

Little in Dangin’s early life suggested that he was bound for distinction, or anywhere other than the various small towns in Corsica where he lived with his family. His mother was a piano teacher, his stepfather a classical guitarist. Dangin had two sisters and a tumultuous, itinerant childhood, which he does not like to recall. He was indifferent to music (he still is). One happy memory: His grandfather had a small press, on which he produced an underground newsletter about village politics. Dangin liked to stick twigs onto the cylinders and print the negative image.

Dangin left home at the age of fourteen. Just as he was settling into salon work in Paris, he was drafted by the French Army. “I had just done a lingerie show, my first taste of fashion,” he recalled, “and then, three days later, at 6 A.M., I’m in the barrack in the dead of winter.” Miserable, he spent his free time immersed in a biography of Coco Chanel. “I can honestly say, without sounding too corny, that Chanel and her story helped me through this ordeal. I loved that a woman in the twenties, someone back then, was as defiant as that.”

After three months in the Army, Dangin obtained a discharge and returned to Paris, resuming his work as a hairdresser. Every day, he sat at Café Flore reading the International Herald Tribune, until he could puzzle out bits of English. The next stage of his picaresque was a move to America, in 1989. “I symbolically left in January,” he said. He took the first flight out of Paris on New Year’s Day.

Dangin had always loved machines—“I am a manual-laborer type of guy,” he says—and while doing hair for photo shoots in New York he became interested in the crossover between cameras and computers. He had a friend who had a Mac Quadra. “We had a deal where at night I could use his computer,” Dangin recalled. “I used to go to his studio at seven-thirty, disconnect his computer, put it in a tote bag, and walk six blocks to my apartment. I’d work all night long, learning programming, and then by 7 A.M. have to stop so that when he woke up his computer would be there.”

Eventually, Dangin got a computer of his own, a Toshiba laptop. Hanging around shoots, he would make suggestions to photographers about how they could change their angles or correct their colors. A few of them began asking him to ply his effects on their images. “I always said no,” Dangin recalled. “I was very secretive in my studio. I hated the simple fact that, unless I got really good, I would have to be there waiting like a chimpanzee for someone to say, ‘Make it darker over here.’ ” He continued to hone his techniques and, in 1993, finally accepted his first paid retouching job: splicing a curtain onto a rod for the cover of a window-hangings brochure. In 1995, he married Laura Tiozzo, a fashion editor. The next year, their daughter, Cecilia, was born, and Dangin opened Box. Dangin and Tiozzo divorced in 2004. Two years later, he married Sarah West, a British-born former photography agent whom he had hired to work for Box in London. “Oh, God, he’s looking for perfection,” Sarah recalled thinking, upon becoming romantically involved with Dangin. “But he definitely separates it. He doesn’t sit at the computer and think, Phwoar, I wish I could give her one.”

One night in April, Dangin agreed to show me his basement laboratory. He led the way down a flight of stairs, past rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling with books and back issues of every conceivable publication. Enormous data processors, encased in glass cubes, whirred in the distance, as though we’d landed in a NASA laboratory. As a habitat, it suited Dangin, whose presence in the industry—shadowy as, by necessity, it is—is regarded almost mythologically. “Many people are deeply suspicious of Pascal and his control,” Charlotte Cotton told me. Dennis Freedman elaborated: “Because he’s not playing the music necessarily as it’s written, not unlike a conductor who can be criticized for taking too much liberty with the material—there’s a difference, you know, between Boulez and von Karajan—there are those, though I disagree with them, who may feel that sometimes he’s toointerpretive.”

On our way down, a young woman approached Dangin, her arm outstretched to support a proof of an ad for a men’s cologne. “There’s no hair there,” Dangin told her, pointing to a raw, shiny spot on the model’s forearm. “Either add hair or burn it in.” (“Burning” refers to deepening the color and texture of a picture by exposing the paper to more light.) “Let’s get rid of the black spots on his chest”—freckles, as they’re known in nature—“and add a little to the jaw.”

Finally, we reached a cool concrete room with no windows. It was pitch-dark, except for the ambient light of monitors. (For eighty hours a week, these screens are Dangin’s exclusive visual stimuli.) “This is what we call Las Vegas, because it’s always the same weather, it’s always the same time,” he said. “It’s always seventy degrees. If it rain, shine, snow, we don’t know.”

Dangin took a seat in front of a triptych of computer screens, all running Photoshop. Clicking the mouse, he pulled up a layout: a series of elaborate fashion pictures featuring an actress with a movie coming out this spring. In one of them, the actress was standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Dangin clicked again, and the picture changed almost imperceptibly, like a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture game for kids. In the “after” version, Dangin explained, he had shuffled the buildings in the background and eliminated an unsightly valve on the roof’s ledge. The sky had been too yellowy, which made Dangin think of pollution. “I gave it some more white,” he said, “like a Boucher painting.”

He proceeded to a shot of the actress reclining on a divan in a diaphanous couture gown. “She looks too small, because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up, pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the mouse so that the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. Ultimately, he had minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix.

“Her face is too high and elongated, mainly by the angle of the camera,” he said. “But I love her, too. I don’t want her to become someone else.” He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is structured. It leads to a very generic look.” (Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest—higher, tighter—of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.)

In another shot, the actress stood in the middle of a busy city street, in front of a limestone building. Dangin blew up the segment of the screen that showed her feet, which were traversed with ropy blue veins. Click. Gone.

“There’s a little slumpiness, and the knees look really big,” he said, stroking a touch pad with a gray plastic stylus to contour the actress’s legs. Big knees. Small knees. Big knees. Small knees. He morphed them back and forth, as if viewing her in a fun-house mirror. The windows on the building seemed to have buckled, so he realigned their panes.

“Nothing is a problem and everything can be a problem,” he said.

Postproduction work is nothing new: by the eighteen-forties, less than twenty years after the invention of the permanent photograph, printmakers, using a mixture of pigment and gum arabic, were hand-tinting daguerreotypes to mimic painting. “There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries—we understand not less than £1 a day—in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation,” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, the art historian and critic, noted in an essay in 1857.

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

“I think retouching is too much when it reaches the point of disfiguring,” Dangin said. “I want people to have an understanding of the skeleton and musculature and how it works. There is nothing worse than looking at an ankle or a calf that’s wrong. This is what bad retouching can do—you see in magazines girls having their legs slimmed and they no longer have tibias and femurs, and it’s weird.” William J. Mitchell’s book “The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era” offers some notable bloopers: the wife of a newspaper publisher in England insisted that the testicles be removed in a photograph of a prize bull, whereupon the bull’s owner sued for misrepresentation; the Orange County Register color-corrected a picture of a swimming pool that was supposed to illustrate a story about how vandals had dyed the water red. TV Guide was busted for grafting Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margret’s body—her husband noticed a familiar ring on the composite woman’s finger.

Dangin requires his artists to take in-house classes in anatomy and figure drawing; prospective hires must complete a fifty-six-question quiz covering everything from computer science to art history. Cheekbones, he said, are the classic locus of amateur flubs. “The minute you change this delicate balance of light and shadow, if you change by removing shadow because the girl has a lot of bad pores, suddenly this girl will look as if she has been Botoxed,” Dangin said. (The photographer Henry Peach Robinson concurred, writing, in 1896, “It is not, however, retouching in itself that is condemnable, but the bad retouching, at present almost universal, which turns the human face divine into a semblance of marble busts or, still worse, turnips or apple dumplings.”)

At one point, speaking of the Demarchelier project, I asked Dangin what he was planning to do with the actress’s buttocks, which had struck me as fairly enviable. “It is purely a proportion issue,” he said. “Because of the angle of the camera, her bottom might feel distorted, whereas if he had used a longer lens he probably would not have had the problem.” A good photograph, he said, directs the viewer in how to look at it. “So there’s scanning pattern—whether it’s three, four, or five points, there’s a hierarchy. You say, ‘O.K., I want the person to look face, back, legs, floor, and then maybe the background,’ or whatever it is. You guide the viewer through the visit of an image.”

“Pascal is no longer on pimple patrol,” Philip-Lorca diCorcia told me. “He has lots of well-trained pimple removers. He’s kind of free to hold the hand of his many temperamental photographers.”

As Dangin has developed relationships with photographers, his level of involvement in the making of their images has expanded. There are the varied ways he applies retouching itself: for fashion ads, for instance, he’ll do a Middle Eastern version, transposing clothes onto models who are showing too much skin.

Craig McDean told me, “On occasion I have prints and I give him carte blanche to do what he wants.” McDean shot Kate Moss for W. “I wanted to use old solarization techniques”—with solarization, light appears dark and dark appears light—“like I used to a long time ago. I showed Pascal some pictures by Man Ray, and he just does it himself without me sitting over him.”

People hire Dangin, in the broadest sense, for the assurance that behind every abstruse technical step there will be an artistic intention. “Technology is in many respects mechanical, but somebody’s got to run the machine,” diCorcia said. “And even with a program that comes on a disk there are a lot of subtleties. Pascal is tireless in exploiting all the capabilities of the technology and even possibly creating some new capabilities.” Dangin, to illustrate the idea that a large part of his currency is his assertion of taste, invoked the example of a successful plastic surgeon. “Why is there a Mr. Lips and a Mr. Hips and a Mr. Buttocks out there? Why do they exist? Because people have an idea about what they don’t want but not an idea about what they do. A doctor will do a million noses because he has a flair for what noses should be.” Despite his knack for the artificial, Dangin is a purist, in that he believes creativity should lead technology, rather than the other way around. “It’s dangerous when you just press a button and go, ‘Oh, that looks cool,’ without any reason why you’re doing it,” he said.

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

Occasionally, a client asks Dangin to attend a photo shoot, so that he can be in on shaping the images from the start. “If Linda”—Linda Wells, the editor of Allure—“wants the cover to be sunny, I can explain to the photographer,” Dangin said. “Sometimes it’s just mediating to everybody. I should have a diplomatic passport.”

In March, I met Dangin in Los Angeles, where he had gone to work on the Lanvin ad campaign, to be shot by Steven Meisel. At six in the morning, he picked me up at my hotel—in a red Mini Cooper—and drove to Smashbox Studios, a sprawling complex of soundstages in Culver City.

We arrived to a mostly empty set. Fifteen full-sized wheelie suitcases were waiting for the makeup artist, Pat McGrath. One of them was labelled “Gold-Blonde Wigs.” Dangin went to get a cup of coffee at the craft-services table.

Edward Enninful, the stylist for the shoot, greeted him, and they began to discuss another campaign they were working on, which had been shot earlier. Dangin had just received the raw pictures.

“What was going on with the hair?” Dangin asked.

“I don’t know,” Enninful replied. “It was twenty different ways, doing it, undoing it.”

“It feels compromised,” Dangin said. “This way looks . . . bourgeois. It needs to be a little fucked up. Maybe I can do something with it.”

“See if you can.”

Dangin approached the middle of the soundstage, where a team of P.A.s, like roadies setting up for a concert, were unloading coils of wire and cable and a huge apparatus that looked like an industrial-sized toaster oven (it turned out to be a printer). Dangin stage-directed as they dragged a couple of long tables to form an L-shaped console, where he would sit as Meisel shot, monitoring the action on two large computer screens, like an assistant director on an action movie.

“Have you seen the new fibre paper that came out?” one of the assistants asked Dangin.

“Yeah, it’s not very good.”

Dangin grabbed a box of printer paper from his console and handed pieces out to each of the assistants, who ogled it, checking every angle for fibre and gloss, in the way of shoppers at the grocery store feeling up the fruit.

There were two models on hand, Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman. Meisel would shoot them separately against a black dropcloth—equivalent to the sort of blue screen a weatherman uses—to set off the movement of the clothes. The idea was for Dangin to take Meisel’s favorite shot of each woman and splice the two onto some sort of artificial urban background of his own creation.

Dangin huddled with Lanvin’s designer, Alber Elbaz, along with McGrath, Enninful, and the creative director for the ad campaign, Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. After some debate about just what sort of glamour the team was going for—“We’re doing our downtown smoky burlesque woman, right?” “So, rich rather than dangerous?”—Meisel arrived, and the shoot began.

At one point, Dangin, examining the pictures at his console, approached Meisel. He had an inspiration: he would be able to do a cool halo effect on the silhouettes of the models’ bodies if Meisel shot them with some backlighting, to simulate an exposure delay with the flash. Meisel came over to the computer table, where Dangin prepared a quick mockup. They switched to backlighting. (Dangin doesn’t always get his way. “Have the airbrushing elves at Vanity Fair gotten a little too nip-and-tucky in their April cover story on Madonna?” the Hollywood blog Defamer asked last month, after the Daily Mail pointed out that Madonna’s normally chiselled upper arms had been rendered almost unrecognizably svelte. I asked Dangin if the conspicuousness of the retouching was a failure on his part. “It’s not a failure, because she was very happy with the way she looked, and the magazine loved it,” he said. “Would I have done less personally? Yes.”)

Later that night, Dangin showed me some prototype images that were the result of the day’s work. One of them featured Kebede, wearing a black strapless gown with ruffles down the front, and Zimmerman, in a plum-colored dress that tied around the neck, in the middle of a dark city street. They looked kinetic, caught in mid-motion, as if they were about to hail a cab. Behind the pair were the blurry lights of New York in the rain. Or so it looked. Dangin had actually assembled the cityscape mostly from hundreds of random images that his staff had culled from the Internet. A restaurant marquee in the top left corner of the image was borrowed from a picture of Shanghai. The opposite side had looked inert, he thought, so he imported a white storefront from Amsterdam.

Afew weeks later, in his studio, Dan gin returned to the magazine spread of the movie actress. “I love two colors next to each other that don’t really make sense, like baby blue and chocolate, or pale blue with orange,” he said, pulling the pictures up on the screen. He was in a philosophical mood. “I am fascinated with the way that color can be indicative of sentiment,” he continued. “Why do we have baby pink for girls? Where did that come from? In medieval color charts, there were not names such as red or blue, but they actually gave nature words, like beau soleil. We are so touched by color all the time.”

Dangin tapped his stylus on a touch pad. “I can change someone’s character just by doing work on the eyes,” he said. Using a slim paintbrush from the Tools menu of Photoshop, he began tracing black circles—as if applying eyeliner—around the woman’s lids. “Suddenly she looks more ‘vroom,’ see?” He erased the eyeliner and lowered the contrast curve. The woman’s eyes turned weak and filmy. “See how quickly she loses contact with the camera?” he said. “Suddenly, she is gone from this world.”

Dangin went back to the Tools menu, which he had customized with homemade implements that he had saved from other projects. There were round brushes of every thickness, like the phases of the moon, libraries of human lips and irises. He opened a file, and more bespoke effects appeared: “Flames/Smokes,” “Stars/Nights,” “Bubbles & Particles.” There was a pattern for a wrapping paper, called “Chocolate Box,” that he had made for Sarah out of a patchwork of their wedding pictures. Over the years, like a Hollywood prop master, Dangin has collected hundreds of “bump maps”: expandable three-dimensional templates of facial features given in gray scale. He had twenty-five hand-drawn pairs of eyelashes.

Dangin’s next dream, in addition to founding a photography school, is to open a postproduction facility in Los Angeles. (Last year, a private equity firm invested in Box.) “There’s a whole world of photography that is basically unknown to the world of cinematography,” he said. I wondered whether the recent omnipresence of paparazzi pictures, with their aggressively ungainly, megalensed closeups, had affected the way he constructs artifice. Pictures of stars with mustard on their chins and pictures of stars who appear to have never eaten, he suggested, form a necessary antimony of extremes, each equally unrealistic. “I think it’s probably a natural reaction to what we do in magazines,” he said. “The world needs almost, like, pills against it. It’s a natural reaction to have to the sort of plastering of perfection out there. But this world is not reality—it’s about drawing people toward an ideal vision, if we’re talking about fashion photography. You have to think that celebrities are playing roles the same way they do in movies.”

Days later, he was still perfecting the Lanvin campaign. In one version, the street had seemed too narrow, so he widened it: a Parisian boulevard born of a downtown alley. “The right side looked too boring,” he said, “so I put in some neon sign from Las Vegas.” He had streaked the models’ calves, so that a spotlight might have been shining on them from one of the looming warehouses. “I did this sort of vibration here,” he said, indicating stipples of brightness that fell across their faces. The halo effect was working—a watery crimson glow traced the outlines of the women’s figures, as if they were delineated by the flashing lights of an ambulance, reflected in a puddle. Somewhere in every picture, Dangin said, he likes to sneak in something red. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...printable=true





Out of Step With Allies, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend
Adam Liptak

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatens Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean’s magazine, the nation’s leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.

As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone.” The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughtering of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though the march was deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry racist mob immediately to assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — aimed at stirring up racial hatred surely does not.

Mr. Lewis wrote that there is “genuinely dangerous” speech that does not meet the imminence requirement.“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”

Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, disagreed.

“When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”

“Free speech matters because it works,” Mr. Silverglate continued. Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.

“The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Mr. Silverglate said. “Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.”

Mr. Silverglate seemed to be echoing the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United Stateseventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Justice Holmes wrote.

“I think that we should be eternally vigilant,” he added, “against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

The First Amendment is not, of course, absolute. The Supreme Court has said that the government may ban fighting words or threats. Punishments may be enhanced for violent crimes prompted by race hate. And private institutions, including universities and employers, are not subject to the First Amendment, which restricts only government activities.

But merely saying hateful things about minority groups, even with the intent to cause their members distress and to generate contempt and loathing, is protected by the First Amendment.

In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a leader of a Ku Klux Klan group under an Ohio statute that banned the advocacy of terrorism. The Klan leader, Clarence Brandenburg, had urged his followers at a rally to “send the Jews back to Israel,” to “bury” blacks, though he did not call them that, and to consider “revengeance” against politicians and judges who were unsympathetic to whites.

Only Klan members and journalists were present. Because Mr. Brandenburg’s words fell short of calling for immediate violence in a setting where such violence was likely, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be prosecuted for incitement.

In his opening statement in the Canadian magazine case, a lawyer representing the Muslim plaintiffs aggrieved by the Maclean’s article pleaded with a three-member panel of the tribunal to declare that the article subjected his clients to “hatred and ridicule” and to force the magazine to publish a response.

“You are the only thing between racist, hateful, contemptuous Islamophobic and irresponsible journalism,” the lawyer, Faisal Joseph, told the tribunal, “and law-abiding Canadian citizens.”

In response, a lawyer for Maclean’s all but called the proceeding a sham.

“Innocent intent is not a defense,” the lawyer, Roger D. McConchie, said, in a bitter criticism of the British Columbia hate speech law. “Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.”

Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which has intervened in the case, was measured in his criticism of the law forbidding hate speech.

“Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.”

Many foreign courts have respectfully considered the American approach — and then rejected it.

A 1990 decision from the Canadian Supreme Court, for instance, upheld the criminal conviction of James Keegstra for “unlawfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements.” Mr. Keegstra, a teacher, had told his students that Jews are “money loving,” “power hungry” and “treacherous.”

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Robert Dickson said there was an issue “crucial to the disposition of this appeal: the relationship between Canadian and American approaches to the constitutional protection of free expression, most notably in the realm of hate propaganda.”

Chief Justice Dickson said “there is much to be learned from First Amendment jurisprudence.” But he concluded that “the international commitment to eradicate hate propaganda and, most importantly, the special role given equality and multiculturalism in the Canadian Constitution necessitate a departure from the view, reasonably prevalent in America at present, that the suppression of hate propaganda is incompatible with the guarantee of free expression.”

America’s distinctive approach to free speech, legal scholars say, has many causes. It is partly rooted in an individualistic view of the world. Fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable plays a role. So does history.

“It would be really hard to criticize Israel, Austria, Germany and South Africa, given their histories,” for laws banning hate speech, Professor Schauer said in an interview.

In Canada, however, the laws seem to stem from a desire to promote societal harmony. Three time zones east of British Columbia, the Ontario Human Rights Commission — while declining to hear a separate case against Maclean’s — nonetheless condemned the article.

“In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be,” the commission’s statement said. “By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West,’ this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others.”

British Columbia human rights law, unlike that in Ontario, does appear to allow claims based on statements published in magazines.

Mr. Steyn, the author of the Maclean’s article, said the proceeding here illustrated some important distinctions. “The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they’re not about facts,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re about feelings.”

“What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins,” Mr. Steyn added. “Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?hp





Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts
Linda Greenhouse

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States Naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

In one of two dissenting opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted “devastating” and “disastrous consequences” from the decision.

“It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

The decision left some important questions unanswered. These include “the extent of the showing required of the government” at a habeas corpus hearing in order to justify a prisoner’s continued detention, as Justice Kennedy put it, as well as the handling of classified evidence and the degree of due process to which the detainees are entitled.

Months or years of continued litigation may lie ahead, unless the Bush administration, or the administration that follows it, reverses course and closes the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which now holds 270 detainees. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court here said the court’s judges would meet in the next few days with lawyers for both sides to decide “how we can approach our task most effectively and efficiently.”

There are some 200 habeas corpus petitions awaiting action in the District Court, including those filed by the 37 detainees whose appeals were before the Supreme Court in the case decided on Thursday, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195.

In a concurring opinion on Thursday, Justice Souter said the ruling was “no bolt out of the blue,” but rather should have been anticipated by anyone who read the court’s decision in Rasul v. Bush in 2004. That decision, part of the initial round of Supreme Court review of the administration’s Guantánamo policies, held that because the long-term lease with Cuba gave the United States unilateral control over the property, the base came within the statutory jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear habeas corpus petitions.

Congress responded the next year, in the Detainee Treatment Act, by amending the statute to remove jurisdiction, and it did so again in the Military Commissions Act to make clear that it wanted the removal to apply to cases already in the pipeline. The decision on Thursday went beyond the statutory issue to decide, for the first time, the underlying constitutional question.

President Bush, appearing with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy at a press conference in Rome, said he was unhappy with the decision. “We’ll abide by the court’s decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it,” the president said, adding that “it was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented.”

The dissenting opinions, one by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other by Justice Scalia, were vigorous. Each signed the other’s, and the other two dissenters, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., signed both.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing in more mild tones than Justice Scalia’s more apocalyptic dissent, said the decision represented “overreaching” that was “particularly egregious” and left the court open to “charges of judicial activism.” The decision, he said, “is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.” The public would “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges,” he added.

The focus of the chief justice’s ire was the choice the majority made to go beyond simply ruling that the detainees were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions. Under two unrelated Supreme Court precedents, formal habeas corpus procedures are not necessarily required, as long as Congress provides an “adequate substitute.”

Congress in this instance did provide an alternative procedure that might be viewed as a substitute. The Detainee Treatment Act gave detainees access to the federal appeals court here to challenge their designation as enemy combatants, made by a military panel called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

The detainees’ lawyers argued that because this process fell far short of the review provided by traditional habeas corpus, it could not be considered an adequate substitute. The appeals court itself never decided that question, because it ruled in February 2007 that the detainees had no right to habeas corpus in the first place, and that all their petitions must be dismissed. It was this ruling that the Supreme Court reviewed on Thursday.

Justice Kennedy said that the Supreme Court, having decided that there was a right to habeas corpus, would “in the ordinary course” send the case back to the appeals court for it to consider “in the first instance” whether the alternative procedure was an adequate substitute.

But he said that “the gravity of the separation-of-powers issues raised by these cases and the fact that these detainees have been denied meaningful access to a judicial forum for a period of years render these cases exceptional” and required the justices to decide the issue for themselves rather than incur further delay.

The majority’s conclusion was that the alternative procedure had major flaws mostly by not permitting a detainee to present evidence that might clear him of blame but was either withheld from the record of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal or was learned of subsequently. The tribunals’ own fact-finding ability was so limited as to present “considerable risk of error,” thus requiring full-fledged scrutiny on appeal, Justice Kennedy said.

Eric M. Freedman, a habeas corpus expert at Hofstra University Law School, said the court was “on the right side of history” to reject what he called “habeas light.” Calling the decision “a structural reaffirmation of what the rule of law means,” Professor Freedman, who was a consultant to the detainees’ lawyers, said it was as important a ruling on the separation of powers as the Supreme Court has ever issued.

President Bush, in his statement in Rome, said the administration would decide whether to ask Congress to weigh in once more. Success at such an effort would appear unlikely, given that the Supreme Court decision was praised not only by the Democratic leadership, but by the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Senator Specter had voted for the jurisdiction-stripping measure, but then filed a brief at the court arguing that the law was unconstitutional.

In addition to removing habeas corpus jurisdiction, the Military Commissions Act also provided authority for the military commissions that the court’s 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld said was lacking. The case the court decided on Thursday did not directly concern military commissions, which are due to conduct trials of the several dozen detainees who have been charged with war crimes. The Department of Justice said on Thursday that the decision would not delay those trials.

Divided as the Supreme Court was in this case, the justices were unanimous, surprisingly so, in a second habeas corpus ruling on Thursday. Again rejecting the Bush administration’s position, the court held in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts that two civilian United States citizens being held in American military custody in Iraq were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions.

Proceeding to the merits of the petitions, the court then ruled against the two men, Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Ahmad Omar, who are facing criminal charges under Iraqi law. Their release through habeas corpus “would interfere with the sovereign authority of Iraq to punish offenses against its laws committed within its borders,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

The administration had argued in the case, Munaf v. Geren, No. 06-1666, that because the men were technically held by the 26-nation multinational force in Iraq, federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear their habeas corpus petitions. Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, what mattered was that the men were held by “American soldiers subject to a United States chain of command.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Rome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/wa...scotus.html?hp





Youths Ordered to Apologize on YouTube
Dawn Kawamoto

Two teenagers who posted a malicious "fire in the hole" prank on YouTube were slapped with a court order to post an apology on the same video-sharing site, according to a report in Florida Today.

The sentence, devised by the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, was created to serve as a deterrent to what is viewed as a growing problem of youths filming malicious, or violent, acts and posting them online, in the hope of generating notoriety.
In this particular case, a 23-year-old Taco Bell employee was stationed at the drive-up window, when a car loaded with teenagers drove up. After taking their order and handing the group their drinks, the teens yelled "fire in the hole" and threw a 32-ounce soda at the employee as she handed them their change.

The employee initially thought it was a personal attack, until learning from customers that a video of the prank had been posted on YouTube. The employee then engaged in a little sleuthing and tracked down the teens.

From the YouTube video, she found the boys' MySpace pages, where they had bragged about the incident. While keeping her identity secret, she befriended the boys and confirmed that they were involved in the attack, according to the Florida Today report.

Using a phone book, she located the mother of one of the teens, who identified the others involved in the prank.

The driver, who threw the drink, and the teenager who filmed the attack were charged with two counts of battery and one count of criminal mischief, according to the report.

As part of their sentence, the teens had to write, film, and post their video apology on YouTube, as well as pay $30 to clean the restaurant and serve 100 hours of community service.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9964565-7.html
















Until next week,

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