Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 23rd, '08

[JackSpratts]

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"Don would look out over the audience as the lights dimmed. Then he'd say, 'Now, close your eyes and think of Hank.'" – Paul Hemphill


"A whole bunch of people don't have access to knowledge. The knowledge in college textbooks, thousands of people hold that knowledge, those skills. And there's no reason for a small amount of money they couldn't produce books that are pretty good, and provided for free." – R. Preston McAfee


"It's an interesting reflection on the claim that there is a free market for broadband. If there was competition, could you slow down your best customers?" – Art Brodsky


"More than 60 present and former telecom lobbyists work for McCain's campaign as staffers and volunteers, some in high-echelon posts while on leave from their firms." – Greg Gordon


"Barack doesn’t need my 50 bucks, but John [Odum] does." – Nate Freeman


"I just went into Dad’s room, and he was playing drums in his sleep. He had a smile on his face and was tapping on his chest." – Summer Harman


































August 23rd, 2008




Moore Warns Against Suing File-Sharers
Ellie Gibson

EA Sports boss Peter Moore has said he doesn't support the move to sue consumers for illegal downloading - warning, "It didn't work for the music industry."

Moore was speaking to Eurogamer at the Leipzig Games Convention, following the announcement that five games companies are taking legal action against 25,000 file-sharing internet users.

"I'm not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer," he said. "Albeit these people have clearly stolen intellectual property, I think there are better ways of resolving this within our power as developers and publishers.

"Yes, we've got to find solutions," Moore continued. "We absolutely should crack down on piracy. People put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into their content and deserve to get paid for it. It's absolutely wrong, it is stealing.

"But at the same time I think there are better solutions than chasing people for money. I'm not sure what they are, other than to build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games."

According to Moore, there are lessons to be learned from the experiences of other industries. "If we learned anything from the music business, they just don't win any friends by suing their consumers," he observed. "Speaking personally, I think our industry does not want to fall foul of what happened with music."

When asked whether EA has any plans to go down the same road as Atari, Codemasters and the other publishers launching the legal action, Moore replied, "Not as far as I'm aware. Regarding what EA needs to do - I can't comment on that. EA takes piracy very seriously, and people deserve to get paid for content they create.

"But as far as I'm aware, we have no plans, that I know of, to partner with Atari and Codemasters and chase down consumers," he added.

To read the full interview with Moore, where he discusses EA, E3 and the console race, visit Eurogamer.net.
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=220176





Game Sharers Face Legal Crackdown
BBC

A British woman who put a game on a file-sharing network has been ordered to pay damages to the game's creator.

Topware Interactive has won more than £16,000 following legal action against Isabella Barwinska of London, who shared a copy of Dream Pinball 3D.

Three other suspected sharers of the game are awaiting damages hearings.

The test case could open the floodgates for litigation against thousands of other Britons suspected of sharing the game.

'A lot more'

In the case heard at London's Patents County Court the game maker won damages of £6,086.56 plus costs of £10,000.

"The damages and costs ordered by the Court are significant and should act as a deterrent," said David Gore, a partner at Davenport Lyons who acted for Topware.

He added: "This shows that taking direct steps against infringers is an important and effective weapon in the battle against online piracy."

"This is the first of many," said Mr Gore. "It was always intended that there would be a lot more."

Mr Gore said details of "thousands" of suspected file-sharers of the game who might now face legal action were known.

On file-sharing or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks the files being shared are held on members' computers and those who want a particular game, music track or video get bits of it from everyone else who has it.

Topware Interactive started its campaign against pirates of Dream Pinball 3D in early 2007 after legal action forced 18 British net firms to pass on details of suspected pirates that it had identified.

Following this it sent out about 500 letters to Britons it had identified as making the game available via file-sharing networks such as eMule, eDonkey, Gnutella and many others.

In the letters the company asked for a payment of about £300 as a "settlement" figure that would head off further legal action.

Some of those accused of sharing the game chose to fight the legal action and it was in one of these contested cases that Topware Interactive won its claim for damages.

"This is a proper Intellectual Property (IP) court that has made this judgement," said independent IP barrister David Harris. "The previous ones were default judgements where defendants never turned up."

The hearing in the IP court meant the case had been rigorously analysed and the law properly understood, said Mr Harris.

"It's a much more interesting case in that respect," he said.

But, he said, he was not sure if this case meant game makers were getting more aggressive about chasing and prosecuting pirates.

"I do not get any sense that there's been any fundamental shift in the desire to litigate," he said.

Becky Hogge, director of the Open Rights Group that campaigns on cyber liberties issues, said: "An open court process with a full report is certainly preferable to justice of the type being mooted by the government on P2P, where activity takes place behind closed doors through industry action."

She added that awards for damages had to be realistic and not made to act as a "deterrent".

"In relation to the orders for release of personal data, it is important that court processes do not become rubberstamps for industry action but retain judicial safeguards and independence," said Ms Hogge.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7568642.stm





Thousands of File-Sharers Face Legal Action in Britain
Peter Griffiths

Thousands of people suspected of sharing music, films and games over the Internet will be pursued through the courts for damages, lawyers for entertainment companies said on Wednesday.

London-based law firm Davenport Lyons said it would apply to the High Court to force Internet service providers to release the names and addresses of 7,000 suspected file-sharers.

They could be subject to civil action in the courts under Britain's copyright laws.

David Gore, a partner at Davenport Lyons, said it had already begun proceedings against several people in Britain who it says have uploaded protected material to the Internet.

The firm won a case at the Patents County Court in London against a woman who shared a pinball game online. She was ordered to pay damages of 6,000 pounds and 10,000 pounds in legal costs to the game's maker, Topware Interactive.

"Illegal file-sharing is a very serious issue resulting in millions of pounds of losses to copyright owners," Gore said in a statement.

Record companies, film studios and games makers have stepped up attempts to curb illegal file-sharing after losing millions of pounds in revenue to online piracy.

A government-backed deal was struck last month between Britain's six biggest Internet service providers and the entertainment industry under which file-sharers would be sent warning letters.

Taking direct action against file-sharers will become an "important and effective" weapon to tackle online piracy, Gore added.

The number of people prosecuted by Davenport Lyons for sharing games could reach 25,000, according to a report in the Times on Wednesday. They would be offered the chance to pay 300 pounds each to settle out of court, the report added.

The first 500 who ignored the letters would face immediate legal action brought on behalf of five games developers, including Atari, Techland and Codemasters, it said.

No one at Davenport Lyons could immediately be reached to comment on the Times report.

The suspected file-sharers were identified by a Swiss forensic computer company Logistep. It searched for the users' IP address, a unique number allocated to every computer that connects to the Internet.

The BPI, a music industry body, says more than 6 million people in Britain regularly download music illegally, cutting profits for record companies and making it harder for them to invest in new music.

Supporters of file-sharing dispute that and say it could boost sales by making it easier for people to hear new music.

"For the copyright holder, it's like free advertising," said Gerry, a contributor to an online debate on file-sharing at www.reuters.co.uk. "It really is a new world out there and it's time the new reality was accepted for what it is."
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...17419220080820





RIAA Settles for $6K in Elektra v. Barker
Richard Koman

The RIAA has settled (PDF) for a mere $6,000 in the case of Elektra v Barker. The RIAA had sought maximum statutory penalities for each of a long list of files found in the defendant’s “shared” folder. So this is a come-down from many tens of thousands of dollars (recall the verdict in Thomas was over $200,000) to $6K, probably not much more than they originally offered her to settle.

The case was a leading repudiation of the RIAA’s “making available” theory, in which they asserted that the mere presence of files in a defendant’s “shared” folder constitutes distribution under the Copyright Act.

In Barker, the judge rejected the “making available” claim but allowed the RIAA’s case to go forward to prove actual distribution of the files.

But the case was not a slam-dunk for RIAA defendants, as Ray Beckerman relates in a recent paper:

The Court also suggested a different theory — one not hitherto suggested by the RIAA lawyers or by the evidence — that the plaintiffs might use, of “offering to distribute for purposes of further distribution”, and gave them leave to replead if they chose to do so. The decision is completely silent as to what plaintiffs would have to prove in order to establish such an “offer”. In the opinion of William Patry, author of the Patry on Copyright treatise, (and in the opinion of the undersigned), Judge Karas erred in equating “publication” with “distribution”. It appeared to the undersigned that Judge Karas erred in delving into the legislative history of the 1976 Act in order to determine what a distribution is, while the statute — 17 USC 106(3) — is unambiguous and required no such analysis.

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3946





MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
David Kravets

A federal judge is handing a Louisiana man a year in prison for pirating thousands of DVDs and CDs in a case highlighting the Motion Picture Association of America's wildly varying valuation of pirated discs.

In the case of Tanner Hills of Louisiana, according to court records, an MPAA expert concluded that the 3,557 bootleg DVDs seized from the defendant's Jefferson Parish apartment outside New Orleans was valued at $67,583. That's $19 a disc for such films as Borat, Bambi, 300 and Premium.

And if you think those numbers are high, consider last year when the MPAA said 200,000 illicit DVDs seized in Australia were worth $83 per movie disc. Some 6,200 pirated discs were also found in Hong Kong that year, and the MPAA affixed value at $20 million, meaning each disc was worth $3,225.80. We're not kidding.

For Hills, the inflated figures don't really matter. The two counts of criminal copyright infringement to which he pleaded guilty require an illicit cache of $2,500 or more.

But it matters when the MPAA, the movie studios' lobbying arm, declared Tuesday that movie piracy costs foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators "$18 billion annually as a result of movie theft."

The MPAA said "More than $7 billion in losses are attributed to illegal Internet distributions, while $11 billion is the result of illegal copying and bootlegging."

It's eye-popping figures like these that get lawmakers' attention.

Los Angeles officials recently adopted an eviction ordinance for pirates based largely on MPAA numbers. Now Congress, pressed by lobbying by the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America, is considering creating a Cabinet-level copyright czar and granting the U.S. attorney general the authority, for the first time, to file civil lawsuits for copyright infringement.

And in case you're wondering, the RIAA valued the 2,896 CDs seized from Hills' apartment at $39,791, or $13.74 a disc. Artists included Tupac, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dog, Jay-Z and R Kelly.

The RIAA said Tuesday that "global theft of sound recordings cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion in lost revenue and more than 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages to U.S. workers."

The RIAA floated the numbers and the MPAA touted its numbers when urging Congress to adopt the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which requires universities to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as to plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

The Senate passed the measure two weeks ago. It is awaiting President Bush's signature.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...affling-o.html





Copyright violations may be harder to prove

Music File-Sharing Decision To Have Broad Impact If New Trial Is Granted
Sarah McBride

A coming federal-court decision holds consequences for the Recording Industry Association of America and the thousands of people it is suing over shared music files.

Last year, a jury in federal district court in Duluth, Minn., found Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement based on songs the RIAA said it found in her computer. Ms. Thomas was told to pay up, to the tune of $222,000.

But the judge in the case, Michael Davis, says his instructions to the jury might have been wrong.

Judge Davis told the jury that making songs available online for distribution to others was copyright violation and that the record companies did not have to prove distribution took place. He has since learned of a federal district-court case in Phoenix that ruled that making songs available was not copyright violation. He is weighing granting Ms. Thomas a new trial.

If one is granted, one outcome could be a higher bar for what record labels need to prove to demonstrate that copyrights have been violated. For example, evidence that more than a handful of songs on a shared file folder were distributed to others may be needed.

"It's going to be more difficult for them to prove" if they can't simply rely on showing that songs were in somebody's shared file folder, says Brian Toder, a partner at Minneapolis-based Chestnut & Cambronne who is representing Ms. Thomas.

Record companies say they already go beyond simply showing that songs were on a computer. Their investigators download a selection of songs, proving distribution, they say. If the songs were illegal copies to begin with, they can generally prove that, too, they say.

"Whatever the court decides, it was not the 'making available' issue that prompted a jury to unanimously decide that Ms. Thomas had massively and deliberately committed music theft," meaning copyright infringement, says Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA. "And regardless of this particular question, we do have complete downloads of songs in the case against Ms. Thomas, as we do in all our download cases."

Ms. Thomas maintains "that these songs were never on her computer," says Mr. Toder, her lawyer. He calls the RIAA's evidence "circumstantial" and says somebody else could have hacked into her computer.

Judge Davis said he would decide by the end of September whether to grant a new trial. If he grants one, it would take months for a new jury to figure out what it makes of the charges against Ms. Thomas, whose shared-file folder, the RIAA says, included Green Day's "Basket Case" and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."

The RIAA has taken legal action against about 40,000 people since 2003. Most are accused of illegally uploading music over the Internet by putting it in files where it can be taken for free by other Web users.

Nearly every month, the RIAA files several hundred suits in federal court, with seemingly little impact on the amount of online piracy that has eaten away at the legitimate paying market for music over the past decade.

Many of those accused settle the cases for $3,000 to $5,000 rather than going through a costly court battle. Others simply ignore the RIAA's notices; the courts eventually make default judgments against these people. Only about 5% of those targeted by the RIAA choose to fight back, says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents some defendants and writes a blog on the lawsuits.

The RIAA first used the "making available" argument in a case three years ago involving Mr. Beckerman's client Denise Barker, whom the RIAA says had a computer with more than 600 songs available in a shared folder. That means anyone else on her file-sharing network, Kazaa, could take the songs they wanted, free. The RIAA says simply making the songs available constituted a copyright violation. Mr. Beckerman argues it did not.

Mr. Beckerman's argument appears to be making headway. In a recent federal-court opinion in Manhattan in the Barker case, which was otherwise generally favorable to the RIAA, Judge Kenneth Karas wrote that "the support in the case law for the 'make available' theory of liability is quite limited." The case, still in pretrial stage, has just been assigned to a new judge, Richard Sullivan, because Judge Karas has moved to another district.

The Thomas case in Minnesota is important because if it moves forward quickly and changes the previous decision, it could set a precedent that could help Ms. Barker and dozens of other defendants. Many defendants are already trying to chip away at the RIAA's argument that making songs available is enough to prove copyright violation.

At the University of Maine, for example, law students working at a legal clinic are helping some of their fellow students caught in a batch of lawsuits filed by the RIAA last year. The clinic staffers assigned to the case are using several arguments to fight the charges, including the position that making files available doesn't equal distribution.

In some courts, judges have sidestepped the issue. And in at least one court, the defense has not panned out. A federal judge in Eugene, Ore., upheld the RIAA's position on availability in late 2006. And many legal experts cite a 1997 ruling from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in which the judge ruled that making a copyrighted work available for library lending does amount to copyright violation, even if nobody borrows it. However, appeals-level decisions in other circuits contradict that ruling.

Because of the legal fog surrounding the issue, some, including Mr. Toder, say the Minnesota case could wind up in the Supreme Court.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121875652064642585.html





The Pirate Bay Appeals Italian Blockade
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay has decided to fight the decision of an Italian judge after it ordered ISPs to block access to the popular tracker. The blocks didn’t prove particularly effective as traffic from Italy only increased but nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is determined to reverse the decision.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay filed an appeal against the decree that forced Italian ISPs to block the BitTorrent tracker. Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi are convinced that they have a strong case. “The decree can be defined as ‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best” they told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay administrators are accused of making copyrighted material available on the Internet for commercial purposes. Giovanni and Francesco told us that this is a strange accusation, considering the nature of the site. “…even the judge who issued the decree states that no infringing material is hosted on The Pirate Bay, which provides just a tracker search engine,” they told us.

“The judge tries to ‘create’ a sort of contributory infringement accusation against The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers explained. It is alleged that the tracker and the search engine are absolutely necessary for the users to “search and locate the content on single computers”. That’s not all, the judge goes even further by stating that the name of the site, ‘The Pirate Bay’, signals intent to infringe copyright.

The lawyers think that because of the lack of jurisdiction, the block should not have been issued in the first place. They also dispute the claim that The Pirate Bay is distributing copyright infringing material. “We will bring all our arguments before the Tribunal, and we are confident of the Tribunal’s decision,” they said.

In previous articles, we suggested that the IFPI, Pirate Bay’s arch rival, might have had a hand in the block. The reverse DNS of the ‘blocked page’ pointed to IFPI’s servers, although they have changed that now. This is suspicious to say the least, and Pirate Bay’s lawyers told us: “It is clear that this decree has been strongly backed up by FIMI (the Italian IFPI),” citing a press release FIMI published where they applauded the Pirate Bay block.

A Tribunal of three judges will now look into the appeal, and a decision is expected in a few weeks. After that, the decision of the Tribunal can be further appealed by both parties before the Higher Court.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...ockade-080820/





Fox Is Allowed to Press Warner Over Rights to ‘Watchmen’
Michael Cieply

The dark and damaged superheroes of Warner Brothers’ “Watchmen,” set for release next March, have a new problem on their hands: a federal judge here ruled last week that they may belong to 20th Century Fox.

The judge, Gary A. Feess of United States District Court for the Central District of California, denied a request by Warner last Wednesday to dismiss Fox’s infringement claims.

In the suit, Fox said Warner had infringed its copyrights and interfered with contracts by filming the movie in spite of earlier agreements under which Fox acquired rights to the graphic novel on which it is based.

Fox lawyers have said they plan to seek an injunction blocking release of the film — one of next year’s most anticipated — pending a trial over its rights. In a statement, Scott Rowe, a Warner spokesman, said the judge’s ruling, while allowing the litigation to proceed, did not reflect on the merits of the case. “We respectfully disagree with Fox’s position,” Mr. Rowe’s statement said.

Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Gibbons, “Watchmen” tells the story of superheroes who have fallen into a netherworld of disgrace and personal torment. Long considered too difficult for a Hollywood film, it became a hot property after Zack Snyder, the director of Warner’s hit “300,” took it as his next project, with a budget that published reports have put at about $120 million.

According to Fox’s lawsuit, however, Warner, in acquiring rights through the producer Lawrence Gordon, failed to acquire certain rights already owned by Fox, including the right to distribute any picture made by Mr. Gordon’s company.

The case, originally filed in February, echoes an earlier court fight that was resolved in 2005 when Warner agreed to pay the producer Robert B. Clark at least $17.5 million to settle claims that it had infringed his rights by making the “The Dukes of Hazzard” film with Johnny Knoxville.

The settlement came after Judge Feess, who presided in that case as well, issued a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the film’s release.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/bu...a/19movie.html





Olympic Torrents More Popular Than Ever
Ernesto

This week, close to two million people have downloaded the Olympics opening ceremony, which makes it the most pirated TV-show of the week - again. The International Olympic Committee is not too happy about it, and they are urging the Swedish government to take on The Pirate Bay.

Last week we reported that the Opening Ceremony had been downloaded by more than a million people, and this figure has doubled over the past 7 days. However, there is less demand for the other Olympic events, as most of these get less than 20,000 downloads.

Compared to 2004, the availability of Olympic events on BitTorrent has grown significantly, both in quantity and quality. Interestingly, the demand for Olympic torrents is the greatest in China, as 65% of the people who downloaded the Openings Ceremony come from the host country.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is not pleased seeing their shows on BitTorrent sites though. Yesterday they even sent a letter (read it here) to the Swedish Minister of Justice, urging her to take on The Pirate Bay. From the letter, it looks like they have been reading last week’s article. “Our technical advisor Informs us that as many as 1 million copies of the Opening Ceremony have been illegally downloaded worldwide, with the most significant activity taking place through Pirate Bay,” they write.

The IOC claims to have contacted The Pirate Bay with a takedown request, but turned to the Minister when they got no response. The Pirate Bay denies this, and Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde writes: “The phone hasn’t rung. And I guess their e-mail probably got caught in the Chinese firewall, since TPB is blocked there.”

From the letter, it seems that the IOC is predicting that the Closing Ceremony will hit BitTorrent immediately after the fireworks. “We are also gravely concerned about the upcoming Closing Ceremony on August 24, as it is entirely predictable that illegal copies of that event will be immediately made available through the Pirate Bay.” They are right of course, and we’re afraid that the Swedish government can’t do much about it either.

Today, the Minister said in a radio interview that The Pirate Bay is not really good promotion for Sweden (although some would disagree), but that there is indeed little they can do to stop the tracker from hosting torrent files.

It is not clear why the IOC is going after the Pirate Bay, and not any of the other BitTorrent sites. Of course, they are the most outspoken, but the majority of all the Olympic torrents are downloaded from other sites. Most BitTorrent sites do take down torrents when they are asked to, so it might be a good idea to start there….

Below is this week’s chart of the most pirated TV-shows on BitTorrent, the Olympics Opening Ceremony tops the chart again. The data for the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.
http://torrentfreak.com/olympic-torr...n-ever-080819/





Olympic Committee Rethinks Copyright Infringement Claim on YouTube
Stephanie Condon

The International Olympic Committee has retracted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request it sent to YouTube over a Tibetan protest video.

According to Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the IOC requested earlier this week that YouTube remove the video called "Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony." The video, posted by Students for a Free Tibet, is a montage of scenes from Tibet protests around the world. The Olympic rings are shown in the video briefly a couple times.

YouTube initially removed the video, but subsequently questioned whether the IOC could truly file a DMCA claim and asked the group to withdraw its takedown notice. The EFF also questioned the IOC on its copyright infringement claims. The IOC retracted its request, and the video was reposted.

The IOC has been working with YouTube to provide content as well as to monitor for copyright violations.

McSherry said that such takedown requests have little to do with copyright infringement, but are instead "timed to directly interfere with the impact of a political message."

YouTube has not yet responded to a request by CNET News for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10018234-38.html





Google, Other Tech Giants Start Battle with Broadcasters
Frank Davies

Using YouTube videos and old-fashioned lobbying, Google launched a campaign Monday to mobilize public support for opening up unused portions of the TV spectrum for unlicensed Internet devices and expanded broadband access.

Google executives and community activists said the online campaign is designed to enlist consumers in what has been a largely technical debate, with billions of dollars at stake, over how to use valuable chunks of "white spaces" on the spectrum when TV broadcasting shifts entirely to digital in February.

Broadcasters oppose the plans by Google and other tech companies such as Microsoft, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, arguing that unlicensed use would interfere with their signals, distort TV pictures for millions of viewers, and give tech giants free use of the spectrum.

The battle between the two heavyweight industries is shaping up as a classic Washington struggle over future regulation. The Federal Communications Commission will make decisions about the unused spectrum in the next few months after tests to collect data, amid intense and expensive lobbying and public relations campaigns by both sides.

Unlicensed use of the spectrum could revolutionize access to wireless broadband and especially help rural and minority communities that lack such access, said Wally Bowen, director of the Mountain Area Information Network, a non-profit organization in North Carolina.

"We're looking beyond the chess game inside the Beltway to what the real needs of people are," said Bowen, who spoke along with Google executives during a conference call with reporters.

But the National Association of Broadcasters is urging TV viewers to contact the FCC and Congress so they "don't allow unlicensed personal and portable devices to operate in the 'white spaces' of the television spectrum."

"Americans deserve and expect to have interference-free digital TV," the broadcasting industry said on a Web site featuring a football game on TV freezing and breaking up because of intrusive signals.

Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager for Google, acknowledged that while unlicensed use of the spectrum is in the public interest, "we have a clear business interest in this, along with our business peers."

The campaign's Web site, freetheairwaves.com, allows users to submit their own YouTube videos and asks them to sign a petition to go to the FCC and members of Congress. Richard Whitt, Google's Washington counsel and a telecommunications expert, said congressional leaders "are fully aware of our position" and that "Free the Airwaves" would try to counter the lobbying power of broadcasters.

Whitt noted "there is some disparity" between the influence of broadcasters and newer Washington players such as Google, "but average consumers can help balance that."

Whitt was also sensitive to any notion that Google was creating a "grass-roots" campaign that was really an "Astroturf" effort — a Washington term for a corporate creation disguised as a consumer-generated effort.

"This is an open platform for people to make their voices heard, and the FCC has shown they will take note of that," Whitt said.

The FCC is conducting a series of tests on unlicensed device applications and whether they will interfere with television and wireless microphones. Broadcasters claim the tests so far show the devices are failing, while Motorola executives said this month that their devices performed well. The FCC plans to issue a report on the testing later this year.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Secrecy Claims on Copyright Treaty
Karen Dearne

THE Bush administration's plans for a copyright treaty, dubbed "Hollywood's Christmas list" by privacy advocates, may be disrupted as protests over "secret negotiations" emerge in participating nations, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

US Trade authorities had been hoping to conclude the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by the end of the year.

But documents posted on Wikileaks have raised global concerns that the treaty goes far beyond tackling counterfeit and fake goods trafficking, and overhauls existing intellectual property and digital copyright laws.

Electronic Frontiers Australia chair Dale Clapperton said the proposed multinational treaty had been "developed behind closed doors" in consultation with big music and film industry copyright owners.

Little information had been made available, but "there appears to be significant involvement by the Recording Industry Association of America and other copyright lobby groups", he said.

Without consultation over the legitimate interests of copyright users and the wider public, "the resulting treaty will look like Hollywood's Christmas list".

The association recently published its "suggestions for the content of the agreement", including criminal sanctions for copyright infringements on a commercial scale, and making it an offence to make or distribute devices that could be used to circumvent copyright protections.

It also proposes requiring internet service providers to monitor users for potential copyright infringements and disconnect or throttle internet access.

There are fears the treaty will extend the definition of "commercial copying", turning ordinary consumers into criminals for downloading music or entertainment files.

Internet Industry Association spokesman John Hilvert said the IIA was hopeful of getting a briefing from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade negotiators.

"It's certainly unusual," he said. "The treaty is being seen by some as an attempt to amend the current international trade agreements on intellectual property in a fairly secretive and unusually informal way."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013044,00.html





Your PVR Might Make You an Outlaw
Michael Geist

Canadians watching the Olympic coverage from Beijing can hardly have missed the Bell commercial touting a new digital video recorder that features an external hard drive permitting users to "record forever."

The functionality may sound enticing, but last week several media reports noted that Industry Minister Jim Prentice's Bill C-61 would forbid Canadians from recording television programs for archival purposes.

Indeed, the new time-shifting" provision in the Prentice bill contains at least a dozen restrictions that could leave consumers facing significant liability. Innovative businesses do not fare much better as they will also be forced to shelve potential new services if the bill becomes law. For example, Bill C-61 explicitly prohibits a network-based PVR that Telus has considered introducing into the Canadian market.

These restrictions leave Canadians trailing the United States, where consumers have enjoyed the legal right to time-shift for more than two decades without the statutory restrictions that Prentice has proposed. Moreover, earlier this month a U.S. court ruled that Cablevision, a leading cable provider, can legally offer its network-based PVR.

While it is tempting to focus on the need to improve the bill's PVR provisions, the reality is that the spotlight on Bell's promotion highlights a pervasive problem within Bill C-61.

Surprisingly for a political party that typically promotes "market-based solutions," the bill introduces a complex regulatory framework for everyday consumer activities and represents an unprecedented incursion into the property rights of millions of Canadians.

Just how far beyond restrictive television recording does Bill C-61 go?

The bill prohibits transferring a copy of most commercial DVDs to a portable video player. It blocks parents from creating backup copies of their toddler's DVDs.

It precludes audiophiles from making copies of their store-bought CDs into multiple digital formats. It renders it an act of infringement to transfer music from a copy-protected CD to an iPod. It provides that students violate the law when they by-pass digital locks on electronic books in order to copy and paste a paragraph of text for a class assignment. It stops cellphone users from unlocking their phones in order to move to a different carrier. It even places backup programs and devices under a cloud of illegality.

Consumer and civil liberties groups have expressed their concern about these effects. The recent revelations about Bell's PVR raises the question about the corporate responsibility of companies that are effectively downloading legal risk onto their customers by marketing products that could raise the prospect of liability.

Many companies have begun to speak out against the proposed legislation, but they may also need to include more direct warnings with their products.

Bell is certainly free to market the record forever PVR, but surely it should also advise customers that archiving television programs may lead to legal liability if the bill becomes law.

Similarly, as Apple touts the benefits of its Time Machine backup hard-drive, it should also warn purchasers that multiple backup copies of songs and videos would violate Bill C-61.

While the Prentice plan is still at an early legislative stage, consumers invest hundreds of dollars in these products with the expectation that they can use them as promoted for years to come.

Given the prospect that the law could render everyday uses illegal, Canadian consumers should be entitled to know that they may be buying more than they bargained for with their purchases.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/T...article/480217





Copyright Crusaders to Launch Cyber Campaign

Critics of the Harper government's proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill.

They're using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month.

At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members.

The group, which was created in December, has become so large that members have created local chapters by city and riding to better organize their efforts. Many of the local groups have also developed wikis -- online encyclopedic web pages -- to keep their members informed.

Geist said more Canadians are getting involved because they recognize how the proposed reforms could affect their daily lives.

"We're talking about more than just copyright here. We're talking about the digital environment," he said. "This legislation represents a real threat to the vibrancy of that online environment."

Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced the bill in June, calling it a "made-in-Canada" solution to online piracy. But critics responded that the bill was a carbon copy of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

If passed, Bill C-61 would make it illegal to circumvent "digital locks" on CDs and DVDs and impose a $500 fine on anyone caught downloading illegal copies of music or movies.

Geist also launched a video contest on YouTube inviting Canadians to give their thoughts on Bill C-61 in 61 seconds. A panel of five judges, including Ontario Privacy Commissioner Anne Cavoukian, will announce the winner on Sept. 15 -- the day MPs return to the House of Commons.

An Industry Canada spokeswoman said Prentice is interested to see the number of Canadians involved in the online discussions, but it's up to Parliament to study the issue further.

"The activity online proves that a broad range of stakeholders, with varying interests and vantage points, care deeply about this issue," said Stefanie Power, in an email response.

The movement isn't confined to the digital world. The online protests have spurred offline activism.

Kempton Lam, a business consultant from Calgary, used his blog and Facebook to organize a rally outside a breakfast hosted by Prentice last month. Lam said the online discussions have fuelled potential activists.

"There are so many Canadians that have issues will this bill," he said. "And the online forum has helped us get informed, which leads to offline rallies.

"After we meet, members write about what we learned, post videos back on to the blogs and Facebook group."

Members of the online movement are also trying to make their voices heard through letter-writing campaigns and one-on-one meetings with local MPs.

Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal held a town hall meeting last month to discuss the controversial legislation after his office was flooded with letters from concerned constituents.

It's not the first time this digital community has bared its teeth. The Conservative government was slated to introduce the reforms in December but delayed the bill after heavy criticism flooded the blogosphere.

Geist said he is optimistic that the activism will make a difference.

"When you get tens of thousands of Canadians speaking out like this, there's big political risk for any political party who chooses to ignore it," he warned.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...80817/20080817





RIAA Issue Prompts Muxtape Hiatus
Josh Lowensohn

Free music mixtape service Muxtape has temporarily been shut down due to pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). There's not much more information about downtime besides a small note on the front page of Muxtape.com saying that "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA."

Presumably the RIAA had gotten wise to the considerable amount of music that was being hosted and played on the service, bringing it into the same tier as some of the streaming radio services that have had to pay considerable licensing fees just to stream tracks to its users.

Back in April, my colleague Daniel Terdiman chatted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior intellectual property attorney, Fred von Lohmann, who said that a site like Muxtape was only able to scrape by if it did not reach a critical mass, and if it had good legal ground both in principle and on paper. We may be only beginning to see if the latter holds true.

Update: Muxtape's blog has posted a tidbit of information about the downtime:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10019778-2.html





"Functionally Voluntary" Music May Lead to Blanket Licenses
Nate Anderson

Jim Griffin consults for Warner, one of the four major music labels, and he sees a disturbing sight when he looks around at the digital music landscape. Taking music without paying for it may not be "morally voluntary," Griffin says, but he admits it has become "functionally voluntary." No civilized society, he adds, can endure "purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture." So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than "our generation's nuclear power." If our society can monetize music in a balanced, consumer-friendly way, the results will be awesome. If we can't... well, remember Chernobyl?

Speaking today at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen conference, Griffin made an impassioned case for music and the importance of monetizing it. He started from the premise, of course, that those who create art should be able to profit from their creative work. He told the story of a Parisian composer in the 1840s who went to dinner at a Champs Elysee restaurant, heard the orchestra there playing his tune, and left without paying for his supper. When hauled before a magistrate, the composer wondered why he should pay for dinner when the restaurant had paid him nothing for his own work. Out of the incident, the world's first collection society was born.

Collecting societies perform two tasks: collecting a pot of money, then distributing it fairly to artists. In the US, groups like ASCAP collect royalties from (among others) radio stations on behalf of songwriters; this arrangement allows DJs to spin any song they like without negotiating a separate deal with every writer or rightsholder.

The societies also make the process of paying for music more efficient. Rather than forcing every ASCAP royalty payer to track every single song ever played throughout the year, collection societies today generally rely on statistical sampling techniques to split up the money between performers in the same way that US TV networks sell advertising based on a small sample of Nielsen families.

Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme. The new collection society would then distribute the money to artists and labels.

Blanket licensing has been touted by groups like the EFF and bands like the Barenaked Ladies, but it's notable that a label like Warner has tapped Griffin to seriously investigate the idea. While quick to stress that he isn't in favor of a compulsory (i.e., government-mandated) blanket license, Griffin is convinced that a blanket license is the way to make it almost frictionless for consumers to access a huge collection of music. How this would work in practice still remains unclear—would users be allowed to keep the music they download after they stop paying a fee? What about bands and labels that don't sign on? etc.—and some versions of the idea start to sound a lot like existing subscription services.

Griffin wasn't ready to reveal any details of the organization he's putting together, but he did make clear that the entire issue of monetizing music is the "canary in the coal mine." Music has led the way when it comes to content online; print is too difficult to digitize and share in most cases, while movies have until recently been too large to transfer easily. Griffin argues that monetizing music, then, will establish the models for other forms of online content. If the music industry ultimately finds itself incapable of turning tunes into cash online, then Griffin believes there's little hope for other creators.

He wants Warner and the other major labels to do this by making art "feel free" to those who enjoy it, even if it isn't. This fits well with the paradigm articulated later in the morning by technology lawyer Jim Burger, who argued that network filters, three-strikes rules, and legislation won't save the content businesses. The real answer to online piracy problems will be a market answer; if content creators want to succeed online, they need to focus even more on "seducing" consumers than on pistol-whipping them.

"Honey draws more flies than vinegar," Burger said, and it's encouraging to see a major label like Warner at least serious about giving someone like Griffin the time and money to build a beehive.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...voluntary.html





New Fees Could Be "Last Stand For Webcasting"
FMQB

As the battle over Internet radio royalties continues, Webcasters still must pay out fees that many cannot afford. In an interview over the weekend with The Washington Post, Pandora founder Tim Westergren says that the highly popular streaming music site is "approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for Webcasting." He added, "We're losing money as it is. The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money."

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), who has been closely involved in the matter, is still attempting to broker a new deal between Webcasters and SoundExchange, but no solution is in sight. Berman told the Post, "Most of the rate issues have not been resolved. If it doesn't get much more dramatic quickly, I will extricate myself from the process."

Westergren says that when he heard about the Copyright Royalty Board's decision to increase streaming fees, "I thought, 'We're dead.'" The current rates could have Pandora paying out $17 million in 2008, with increases slated for 2010.

Pandora has upped its advertising staff to 30 people, almost 25 percent of the company's workforce, to make money to afford the fees. "We're taking this challenge very seriously," Westergren said. "When we have our board meetings, the central topic is the revenue trajectory, not how happy our users are." However, there may be a point in the near future where Pandora may have to give up the fight. "We're funded by venture capital," Westergren said. "They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn't feel like its headed towards a solution, we're done."

SoundExchange general council Mike Huppe merely told the Post, "Our artists and copyright owners deserve to be fairly compensated for the blood and sweat that forms the core product of these businesses." On the other hand, singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson, who recently testified in D.C. on the issue, told the paper, "Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me. The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue."

Rich Bengloff, President of The American Association For Independent Music (A2IM), has released a statement in response to the Post's story. "Like many we were troubled to hear Pandora refer to the current situation as a possible 'Last Stand For Webcasting.' As the primary advocacy group for the independent music community we feel a need to reiterate our strong support and commitment to a fair and equitable resolution to the CRB rate negotiations -- a solution that fairly compensates artists and labels for their creativity and investment but still allows the pure play webcasting community to continue to grow. These webcasters need to be supported, as they give independently produced music the opportunity to be heard and discovered, which is all too often not the case at traditional AM/FM radio. We've been fighting on this issue for some time, and we're optimistic all parties can get back on track towards a constructive solution."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=845889





Nashville Cats

Don Helms, 81, Who Put the Twang in the Hank Williams Songbook, Is Dead
William Grimes

Don Helms, whose piercing, forceful steel guitar helped define the sound of nearly all of Hank Williams’s hits, and who performed and recorded with a long list of other country greats, died Monday in Nashville. He was 81 and lived in Hendersonville, Tenn.
The cause was complications of heart surgery and diabetes, said Marty Stuart, a friend and fellow performer.

Mr. Helms played on more than 100 Hank Williams songs and on 10 of his 11 No. 1 country hits. He provided the dirgelike, weeping notes in songs like “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and added a catchy, propulsive twang to up-tempo numbers like “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” and “Hey, Good Lookin.’ ”

“After the great tunes and Hank’s mournful voice, the next thing you think about in those songs is the steel guitar,” said Bill Lloyd, the curator of stringed instruments at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “It is the quintessential honky-tonk steel sound — tuneful, aggressive, full of attitude.”

After Williams died in 1953, Mr. Helms embarked on a long career as a performer and songwriter. His guitar can be heard on the Patsy Cline hit “Walking After Midnight,” Stonewall Jackson’s “Waterloo,” the Louvin Brothers’ “Cash on the Barrelhead,” Lefty Frizzell’s “Long Black Veil” and Loretta Lynn’s “Blue Kentucky Girl.”

Donald Hugh Helms was born in New Brockton, Ala., and grew up on the family farm. As a boy, he listened to the Texas swing music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, whose steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe, was a big influence, as was a local player, Neal McCormick.

At 15, he got his first steel guitar, a Sears Silvertone that was held flat on the lap, unlike the table-style steel guitars he would later play. Since the farmhouse had no electricity, he played the instrument over a washtub to make it resonate.

While still a teenager, Mr. Helms became a member of the Drifting Cowboys, the backup band for Williams, then a local radio star who performed in small clubs and roadhouses. Mr. Helms enlisted in the Army in 1945 and by the time he was discharged two years later, Williams had signed a record contract and was on his way to perform as a regular on “Louisiana Hayride,” a Shreveport, La., radio show broadcast all over the South.

Mr. Helms stayed put in Alabama, where he had steady performing work, but after Williams joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1949 and created a sensation with his first No. 1 hit, “Lovesick Blues,” he became part of the new edition of the Drifting Cowboys that Williams put together in Nashville.

He was the last surviving member of that ensemble.

In 1945, he married Hazel Cullifer, who survives him, as do his two sons, Frank and Marc; two brothers, Glenn and Ted; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Initially, Mr. Helms played a Fender eight-string double-necked guitar, but in 1950 he acquired the Gibson Console Grand that most listeners associate with Williams’s hits. Later he would play a pedal steel guitar, but he kept the Gibson under his bed, pulling it out for special occasions.

The rough-hewn sound of the pre-pedal steel guitar suited Williams’s bluesy vocals. At the suggestion of the record producer Fred Rose, Mr. Helms favored the treble strings and played high on the neck, producing a penetrating sound that could cut through the background noise of the bars, honky-tonks and roadhouses where Williams’s records were most often heard

The Helms sound, said Mr. Lloyd of the Country Music Hall of Fame, helped move country music away from the hillbilly string-band accompaniment popular in the 1930s and toward the more modern electric style that took over in the 1940s.

“His tuning, and the way the tuning made the tone high-pitched, matched Hank Williams’s style just perfectly,” said DeWitt Scott, the founder of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame, which inducted Mr. Helms in 1984.

Mr. Helms played on Williams’s last recording session, in Sept. 1952, which generated “Kaw-Liga,” “Take These Chains From My Heart,” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” released after Williams’s death in January 1953.

“I played him an intro, and we sang the song through one time,” Mr. Helms said about the recording of “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” After that, he said, “I never saw him alive again.” His account of those years, dictated to Dale Vinicur, was published in 2005 in “Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”

After recording an instrumental record with the Drifting Cowboys, Mr. Helms and several of his fellow musicians worked with Ray Price, who renamed them the Cherokee Cowboys. Mr. Helms went on to record with a host of country music stars, including Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce and Ferlin Husky. He also played on Johnny Cash’s early albums for Columbia Records.

In 1957 he joined the Nashville Tennesseans, the backup band for the Wilburn Brothers, touring with them for years and performing on their syndicated television show. After performing with Hank Williams Jr. and Ernest Tubb in the late 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Helms reunited with the Drifting Cowboys in 1977. In 1989 he began touring with Jett Williams, Hank Williams’s daughter.

In his later years, he did recording sessions with younger musicians like Rascal Flatts, Bon Jovi and Kid Rock. At the time of his death he was working with Vince Gill on an album of uncompleted Hank Williams songs.

“He remained an active musician until the day he died,” said Mr. Stuart.

Mr. Helms was a regular performer at steel guitar conventions and concerts, where he could galvanize listeners with a few signature chords from country’s music’s most cherished hits. “Don would look out over the audience as the lights dimmed,” said Paul Hemphill, the author of “Lovesick Blues,” a biography of Hank Williams. “Then he’d say, ‘Now, close your eyes and think of Hank.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/ar...c/17helms.html





Buddy Harman, 79, Busy Nashville Drummer, Is Dead
Bill Friskics-Warren



Buddy Harman, a prolific and influential drummer whose rhythmic signature can be heard on thousands of recordings by the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and Simon and Garfunkel, died on Thursday at his home in Nashville. He was 79.

He had been suffering from congestive heart failure, said his daughter Summer Harman, who confirmed his death.

Mr. Harman played on an estimated 18,000 recordings, many of them major hits, in a career of more than five decades. He worked most sessions with the celebrated “A Team” of studio musicians who shaped the Nashville Sound of the 1950s and ’60s, performing on Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” along with scores of hits by Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Ray Price and others.

Mr. Harman also made his mark on the pop charts, making distinctive contributions to records like the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” Presley’s “Little Sister,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Boxer” (as a percussionist) and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” He played — bass, not drums — on Ringo Starr’s 1970 country album, “Beaucoups of Blues.”

Versatility and imagination were among Mr. Harman’s great strengths as a musician. He could play everything from big-beat rock ’n’ roll, as demonstrated by his pile-driving 4/4 on Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” to intimate cocktail jazz, as heard on his empathetic brushwork on Cline’s “Crazy.”

Drums were not commonly used in country music when Mr. Harman started working sessions in Nashville in the early 1950s. Later that decade, when he became the first house drummer for the Grand Ole Opry, he had to play behind a curtain because drums were not allowed on the show’s stage at the time. Before long, though, Mr. Harman had established his instrument as an integral voice in modern country music.

Murrey Mizell Harman Jr. was born Dec. 23, 1928, in Nashville. His mother, who played drums in the family band, was an early musical inspiration, along with jazz players like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

Mr. Harman began drumming while in his early teens and went on to perform in bands while serving in the Navy. Later, after two years of college in Nashville, he enrolled in the Roy Knapp School of Percussion in Chicago. On returning to Nashville in 1952 he played in the band of Carl Smith, a future member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and began doing studio work. By the mid-’50s, Mr. Harman had become the first-call drummer for recording sessions that were being booked on what became known as Nashville’s Music Row.

He was less active in the studio as the 1970s gave way to the ’80s. He eventually resumed work at the Opry, while also serving as the business agent for the Nashville chapter of the American Federation of Musicians.

Besides his daughter Summer, of Mount Juliet, Tenn., Mr. Harman is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Marsha Harman; his sons Mark, of Franklin, Tenn., and Stanley and Murrey M. III, both of Nashville; another daughter, Autumn, also of Nashville; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Another son, Richard, died in 2007.

“I just went into Dad’s room,” Summer Harman said in a telephone conversation in June, when her father’s health had been declining, “and he was playing drums in his sleep. He had a smile on his face and was tapping on his chest.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/ar.../23harman.html





CD Turns 26 and It Still Won't Die
Chris Moody

Another birthday for the CD has come and gone and yet the damn things just won’t die. On Aug. 17th, 1982, the Compact Disc was born into an age of rampant consumerism that was the 1980s. Big hair was in, big vinyl and the big snarls of tape from cassettes was out.

The CD of course wasn’t without its drawbacks. They disliked abuse and absolutely had to live in their cases. I replaced the bulk of my CDs with my first car player before going back to cassette so I could dub my own playlists and stop spending money on music I had already bought. Even the players then were delicate. My car CD player touted a 3 second anti-skip buffer for those canyons in the road called potholes. Of course back in east Texas they had washboard roads that could eat up that buffer and just ruin AC/DC’s Who Made Who.

It would be well over a decade later before semi affordable CD-Rs would arrive. Since then everything from music, to photos, to video, to Grandma’s recipes have been stored on CD.

Some really great things came on CD like, Windows 98, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and Starsiege: Tribes. I invested a big chunk of my life in Tribes.

Of course the CD is also responsible for bringing us some really bad things too. Remember Windows Millennium Edition? They should have melted down those CDs before they left the factory. Then there was Mary Schneider’s Yodeling the Classics. That thing should be classified as a method of torture.

Remember when AOL used to spew out those CDs to pimp their dialup service? I use to use them as coasters for my coffee cup. When a new one came into the office, (about every few days it seemed) I’d toss my old AOL coaster and put down the new one.

What do you think some of the best and worse things that have ever been put to CD are?
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new...still_wont_die





Disc Makers Launches New Elite Artist Services For Those Looking To Go Indie
FMQB

Just two weeks after their recent acquisition of CD Baby, the largest independent music seller in the world, Disc Makers today announced the launch of Elite Artist Services, a new division geared towards major artists who want to go independent. Elite Artist Services will offer established artists the opportunity to generate "substantial additional income" associated with selling CDs and downloads directly to the consumer, without the benefit of a traditional record label contract. Elite is offering major artists who go independent virtually all of the manufacturing, distribution, download, marketing and e-commerce infrastructure services required to release their projects.

"With major artists like Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and Tori Amos leaving their labels in increasing numbers, going independent has quickly shed its undeserved stigma, and is now seen for what it is – a major profit opportunity for established artists with a solid fan base," said Elite Artist Services vice president Jeffrey Epstein. "An artist that has already sold 100,000 records clearly has the name recognition to go out on their own, and could increase their profit margin by as much as tenfold with EAS."

"Disc Makers has numerous years of experience helping independent and established artists with successful releases," he told FMQB. "We're a trusted business partner for these artists, and we want to help them maximize their profits without compromising control."

The new service will offer a suite of services that includes graphic design, mastering, disc manufacturing and packaging, download sales through the artist’s web site and major sites like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon.com, CD distribution through Sony RED, custom merch production, product warehousing, ecommerce processing, web site development, and digital and print marketing. Long term contracts with the artist are not part of the company's business model, and the artist retains complete control over their music and their rights.

For more on the new service, as well as a look at their interactive revenue calculator, visit www.EliteArtistServices.com
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=845934





Take That, Stupid Printer!

How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner cabal.
Farhad Manjoo

I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?

To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Brother isn't the only company whose printers quit while they've still got life in them. Because the industry operates on a classic razor-and-blades business model—the printer itself isn't pricy, but ink and toner refills cost an exorbitant amount—printer manufacturers have a huge incentive to get you to replace your cartridges quickly. One way they do so is through technology: Rather than printing ever-fainter pages, many brands of printers—like my Brother—are outfitted with sensors or software that try to predict when they'll run out of ink. Often, though, the printer's guess is off; all over the Web, people report that their printers die before their time.

Enter OppressedPrinterUser. Indeed, instructions for fooling different laser printers into thinking you've installed a new cartridge are easy to come by. People are even trying to sell such advice on eBay. If you're at all skilled at searching the Web, you can probably find out how to do it for free, though. Just Google some combination of your printer's model number and the words toner, override, cheap, and perhaps lying bastards.

Similar search terms led me to find that many Hewlett-Packard printers can be brought back to life by digging deep into their onboard menus and pressing certain combinations of buttons. (HP buries these commands in the darkest recesses of its instruction manuals—see Page 163 of this PDF.) Some Canon models seem to respond well to shutting the printer off for a while; apparently, this resets the system's status indicator. If you can't find specific instructions for your model, there are some catchall methods: Try removing your toner cartridge and leaving the toner bay open for 15 or 20 seconds—the printer's software might take that as a cue that you've installed a new cartridge. Vigorously shaking a laser toner cartridge also gets good results; it breaks up clumps of ink and bathes the internal sensor in toner.

These tricks generally apply to laser printers. It's more difficult to find ways to override ink-level sensors in an inkjet printer, and, at least according to printer manufactures, doing so is more dangerous. I was able to dig up instructions for getting around HP inkjets' shut-off, and one blogger found that coloring in his Brother inkjet cartridge with a Sharpie got it to print again. But I had no luck for Epson, Lexmark, Canon, and many other brands of inkjets. There are two reasons manufacturers make it more difficult for you to keep printing after your inkjet thinks it's out of ink. First, using an inkjet cartridge that's actually empty could overheat your printer's permanent print head, leaving you with a useless hunk of plastic. Second, the economics of the inkjet business are even more punishing than those of the laser business, with manufacturers making much more on ink supplies than they do on printers.

Inkjet makers have a lot riding on your regular purchases of ink—and they go to great lengths to protect that market. In 2003, the British consumer magazine Which? found that inkjet printers ask for a refill long before their cartridges actually go dry. After overriding internal warnings, a researcher was able to print 38 percent more pages on an Epson printer that had claimed it didn't have a drop left. Lawyers in California and New York filed a class-action lawsuit against Epson; the company denied any wrongdoing, but it settled the suit in 2006, giving customers a $45 credit. A similar suit is pending against Hewlett-Packard.

There's also a long-standing war between printer makers and third-party cartridge companies that sell cheap knockoff ink packs. In 2003, Lexmark claimed that a company that managed to reverse-engineer the software embedded in its printer cartridges was violating copyright law. Opponents of overbearing copyright protections were alarmed at Lexmark's reach; copyright protections have traditionally covered intellectual property like music and movies, not physical property like printer cartridges. A federal appeals court dismissed Lexmark's case, but manufacturers have recently been successful in using patent law to close down third-party cartridge companies.

In the long run, though, the printer companies' strong line against cartridge makers seems destined to fail. Buying ink and toner is an enormous drag. Having to do it often, and at terribly steep prices, breeds resentment—made all the worse by my printer's lying ways. Some companies are realizing this. When Kodak introduced a new line of printers last year, it emphasized its low ink costs. Kodak claims that its cartridges last twice as long as those of other printers and sell for just $10 to $15 each, a fraction of the price of other companies' ink. When my Brother finally runs dry, perhaps I won't replace the toner—I'll replace the printer.
http://www.slate.com/id/2198316/





Free Digital Texts Begin to Challenge Costly College Textbooks in California

Would-be reformers are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college materials by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost online texts.
Gale Holland

The annual college textbook rush starts this month, a time of reckoning for many students who will struggle to cover eye-popping costs of $128, $156, even $198 a volume.

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."

McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.

Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices.

McAfee is a leader in his academic field, a featured speaker at the Yahoo Big Thinkers India conference in March. Tall and genial, he dresses in khakis, a polo shirt and geeky river sandals. A coauthor of the best-selling book "Freakonomics," Steven D. Levitt, has described him as brilliant. What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.

"I'm a right-wing economist, so they can't call me a communist," McAfee said.

Yet he turned down $100,000 to turn over his open-source textbook "Introduction to Economic Analysis" to a commercial publisher.

"What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do," he said. "Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."

McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005. With costs continuing to climb, it would be "reasonable to conclude that [individual student] expenditures can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today even after supplies are subtracted," the congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance said in a 2007 report.

"Publishers have broken an implicit contract with academics, in which we gave our time and they weren't too greedy," McAfee wrote on the web page for his book. McAfee said many publishers, going for the lowest common denominator, were making some books too simple.

Representatives of the textbook industry say they have invested in new products because instructors have demanded it.

"Do you think all these PhDs are so lazy, so stupid they buy junk?" asked Bruce Hildebrand, the Assn. of American Publishers' executive director for higher education. "God bless anybody who has got the energy and commitment to put three, four, five years of labor in on a book and then give it away."

Just mention textbook prices to university students and the response is outrage and a willingness to switch to online readings.

"I spent definitely over a grand on textbooks last year, and I did buy [used] off Amazon.com," said Matt Shiu, 18, a business economics major at UC Irvine.

"I'd rather do my reading on the computer," said engineering major Weheb Waheb, 20.

But sales of all electronic college materials -- CD-ROMs, e-books and online courses -- represented only $241 million of $3.5 billion in U.S. sales by major publishers in 2007, despite the fact that they typically sell at a discount, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. Free and open-source digital texts left too small a footprint to measure, experts said.

"For all its popularity in the press and on blogs, [online textbooks are] all very marginal now," said Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, a commercial e-book company.

Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use.

Universities for more than a decade have experimented with open-source educational sites and online libraries as a way to spread knowledge more equitably. Some seek to change the nature of the textbook by offering "chunks" of instruction that professors can mix and match to create their own content "collections."

California State University runs Merlot, a searchable collection of peer-reviewed, online multimedia materials. Connexions, from Rice University in Houston, stores free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare has placed virtually its entire curricula online -- video lectures, problems sets and exams for more than 1,800 courses in 33 disciplines.

Other open-source textbook projects have a subversive edge. Founders or advocates refer to themselves as "co-conspirators," profess a do-it-yourself ethic and declare an intent to overthrow the textbook industry.

Wikibooks, a collection of textbooks "anyone can edit," is based on the popular Wikipedia model, which invites users to make and correct entries.

In one inmates-take-over-the-asylum scenario, Old Dominion College in Virginia had students compete to write chapters in a wikibook on the "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education." Students voted for their favorites, and faculty chose the best versions.

More recently, academics have started embracing open- source resources as a way to reduce students' textbook bills. More than 1,400 faculty last year signed on to a pledge drive supporting open educational resources. (The drive was organized by Public Interest Research Groups from about 20 states.)

California State University is developing what it calls the Digital Marketplace, a website for selecting, comparing, sharing, approving and distributing both open-source and commercial online educational materials.

One of the biggest pushes for open educational resources has come from California community colleges, where students devoted nearly 60% of their education spending in 2007-08 to textbooks, according to a California State Auditor's report released last week.

The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in the Silicon Valley has teamed with the state's other two-year colleges to encourage faculty to create, use and select digital textbooks. The California Community Colleges Board of Governors voted in May to back open educational resources.

"One of the most heartbreaking things you can see is a student in the bookstore with a course catalog in one hand looking at the book prices to see what courses he can afford to take," said Hal Plotkin, a Foothill-De Anza trustee who was instrumental in the drive.

Several experts said a strong shift by California's public universities to open-source textbooks could be the jolt that brings them into wider use.

But the open-book movement will face competition from commercial e-book publishers, including CourseSmart, which this fall will begin offering digital versions of 4,300 widely adopted textbooks at half the price of print editions. Flat World Knowledge, a new company, plans to subsidize free digital titles starting next year, with sales of other materials and printed editions.

Diane Harley, principal researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, said professors weren't going to embrace digital course materials unless they were high quality and tailored to their often unique scholarship.

"Faculty are independent, they love their fields, and they hand-craft their courses," she said.

McAfee has high hopes for an enhanced version of his book that FlatWorld Knowledge plans to release this year.

"A whole bunch of people don't have access to knowledge. The knowledge in college textbooks, thousands of people hold that knowledge, those skills," he said. "And there's no reason for a small amount of money they couldn't produce books that are pretty good, and provided for free."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,4712858.story





British Government Caught Pirating On Prime Minister’s Website
enigmax

While the British government puts huge amounts of pressure on ISPs to clamp down on file-sharers, it is doing some pirating of its very own. It seems that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in serious breach of copyright, as it is based on a ripped-off Wordpress theme.

The issue of copyright is a hot one in the UK right now and the government isn’t scared of getting involved. It has been putting huge amounts of pressure on ISPs to take action against alleged music file-sharers, so imagine, if you will, the beautiful crimson color Prime Minister Brown’s face will turn today when he is declared a pirate too.

Amongst other things, Anthony from antbag.com makes WordPress themes - he gives them away for free but if someone wants to donate, they can. His work is released under Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that if someone wants to use a theme ‘as is’ or modified in some way, they are required to credit him. A link in the footer of every theme he creates points back to Anthony’s site - this is the minimum attribution he expects, which is pretty damn reasonable.

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

It is clear that Brown’s site indeed uses the Anthony’s theme - violating the Creative Commons license. Not only was the link to the the original removed, Brown’s site should have also made their version available under a similar license - share alike.

Still, the site even claims it is protected by Crown Copyright - a quick look at the CSS for the theme should dispel that myth.

Anthony sent an email to the company who developed the site who claimed that although they did some testing on the NetWorker theme, they then rebuilt it from scratch. Unfortunately, according to Anthony “they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that named the theme ‘NetWorker’ or to change the theme folder which is named ‘NetWorker-10′ (Networker version 1.0).”

There is a campaign running in the UK right now featuring “Knock-Off Nigel” along with cringe-worthy videos depicting this fictitious character as some kind of social outcast.

One would think that Mr Brown would avoid the sort of behavior that could easily make him the star of the next campaign but if it’s good enough for the MPAA, it must be good enough for him.
http://torrentfreak.com/british-gove...ebsite-080820/





Music, Movie Lobbyists Push to Spy on Your Net Traffic
Declan McCullagh

Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States.

A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out."

"Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "We need the help of ISPs. They have the technical ability to manage the flow over their pipes...The good news is that we're beginning to see some of these solutions emerge, in particular in Europe and Asia." (IFPI is the Recording Industry Association of America's international affiliate.)

During a discussion at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's technology policy conference here, Perlmutter said one filtering solution would involve identifying particular files that are (or are not) permitted to be sent to particular destinations. That would be a "very tailored approach," she said.

The idea isn't exactly new: the Motion Picture Association of America said nearly a year ago that ISPs should police piracy, and one of its member companies asked federal regulators to make this a requirement. AT&T said in January that it's testing technology that would let it become a copyright network cop, and the MPAA subsequently suggested that piracy-prone users should have their accounts terminated because they're "hogging the bandwidth."

In a statement sent to CNET News on Monday, an AT&T spokesman said: "There is nothing inherently wrong with P2P applications, which are legal technologies that are used and welcomed on our network. We have consistently said that AT&T will not become an enforcement agent on the Internet, nor will we inhibit the ability of our customers to access any legal content they want."

Not one of multiple AT&T representatives we contacted responded to our followup question, which was: "Can you confirm that AT&T is not monitoring and has no plans to monitor its customers' traffic or other online activities to detect possible copyright infringements?"

(What's a little odd is that the conference organizers said they couldn't find any broadband provider representatives to participate in the panel discussion--even though Jeff Brueggeman, AT&T's vice president for regulatory planning and policy, was listed as attending the event, and executives from Comcast and Verizon were sitting, silently, in the audience.)

Also at the conference on Monday, IFPI's Perlmutter rattled off a list of countries that have taken at least some steps toward antipiracy filtering, through laws enacted by the legislature or other means: France, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, and Australia. In addition, Canada's copyright lobby has pushed for legally-mandated filtering.

In the U.S., she said, referring to broadband providers, "increasingly they will be partnering with us--they will be doing deals with us."

Michael O'Leary, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, said the relationship between content companies and broadband providers had become less adversarial than before and both sides had left the "us against them era" behind. (This was probably a reference to the political trench warfare that led Verizon to reject the RIAA's request to identify a subscriber and the fuss over one proposal in Congress to implant anticopying technology into consumer devices.)

O'Leary welcomed what he described as today's "multifaceted approach that involves working effectively with the ISPs and universities."

MovieLabs did conduct tests last year of about a dozen "digital fingerprinting" technologies from companies such as Gracenote, Vobile, and Audible Magic. Certain products worked well in some environments, like on user-generated Web sites and on university networks, MovieLabs' chief executive told us in January. But that's not the same as saying it'll work well for tens of millions of AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon subscribers.

Even if the content industry can sign deals with broadband providers, there are still a slew of unanswered questions--including ones about customers' privacy and how filtering will work in practice. Will piratical transfers be automatically interrupted? Or just slowed? Will piracy-prone users merely find--this is what the IFPI suggests--their accounts suspended? How to detect whether content is licensed, or protected by fair use rights, which vary based on the situation? What if the transfer is encrypted?
Looking ahead a few years from now, the content industry may not be satisfied with voluntary agreements. Let's say that AT&T and some of its larger rivals start to filter pirated material and demonstrate (at least to a first approximation) that it's possible, but one ISP does not. Look for the RIAA and MPAA and their political allies to ask Congress for a law that would transform theretofore "voluntary" agreements into mandatory ones.

CNET News reporter Marguerite Reardon contributed to this report
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10019622-38.html





A Smart Bet or a Big Mistake?
Saul Hansell

Four years ago, Verizon Communications embarked on an ambitious and expensive plan to run fiber optic cables, which can deliver ultra-fast Internet service and dozens of high-definition video channels along with old-fashioned telephone service, past 19 million homes, roughly half its territory.

When it was announced, Verizon’s $23 billion planned investment in the service, called FiOS, was met by a chorus of skeptics, both on Wall Street and among rivals.

Everyone understood that the copper wires of the phone system were being left behind by the faster networks of the cable industry. But why spend so much money on new wires when cellphones are becoming ubiquitous and profitable? Verizon rejected cheaper alternatives and decided to build the fiber system at an estimated cost of about $4,000 for every customer.

Now, as Verizon begins to roll out FiOS in its hometown, New York, the company argues that the service is proving to be more successful than it promised when it started the project.

Despite prices that average well above $130 for a bundle of Internet, TV and voice services, 20 percent of the homes where FiOS is available have signed up for its video service, and 24 percent buy the Internet service, which offers speeds up to five times faster than cable competitors.

“I have yet to see a market where penetration has stopped growing,” said Robert J. Barish, Verizon’s senior vice president and the chief financial officer of its wired communications division. The cost to run the fiber through neighborhoods is also falling below $760 per home passed, Verizon’s initial estimate. (The company spends an extra $650 in equipment and labor to hook up each house ordering the service.)

Still, it might be a decade before anyone really knows whether Verizon’s bet on FiOS is a smart investment in the future or a multibillion-dollar black hole.

The company has had to spend more than it would like on advertising and expensive giveaways, like flat-screen TVs, to get new customers. Comcast and other cable companies are preparing to bolster their own Internet speeds and digital offerings.

In many ways, the long-term success of FiOS will depend on what new services are developed that will take advantage of the vast bandwidth of the fiber and how much customers will pay for them.

Mr. Barish argues that by spending now on the fiber network, Verizon will save a lot of money moving forward. And unlike its competitors, Verizon will not need further upgrades to offer faster data speeds or more HDTV channels.

“The network we are putting in is pretty future-proof,” he said. Also, “if we weren’t doing FiOS, we would have invested a lot more money in our core network. We haven’t needed to do that.”

Verizon’s logic is starting to convince investors, especially when compared with the cheaper approach taken by AT&T, the nation’s other large phone company. AT&T is relying on pumping more data through copper wires, but the company’s technology has taken longer than expected to develop and appears to have far less capacity to deliver HDTV than FiOS.

“There was a raging debate a couple of years ago about who got it right, AT&T or Verizon,” said Blair Levin, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. “Initially the investment community thought it was AT&T, but increasingly Verizon got their begrudging respect.”

Verizon’s stock, which lagged AT&T’s after FiOS was first announced, is now performing better. From 2005 to the end of 2006, Verizon’s shares fell by 4.6 percent, while AT&T’s shares rose by 38.7 percent in the same period. From the beginning of 2007 to now, Verizon has outperformed, with its shares falling 6.3 percent, better than the 12.2 percent decline of AT&T.

As of the end of the second quarter, there were 1.4 million FiOS television customers, up from 515,000 a year ago. Verizon also had two million FiOS Internet customers, up from 1.1 million last year.

Despite that customer growth, some critics say the revenue structure of FiOS does not justify its high capital costs.

“If I were an auto dealer and I wanted to give people a Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen, I’d have some seriously happy customers,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “My problem would be whether I could earn a decent return doing it.”

In a recent report, Mr. Moffett, one of Verizon’s most persistent critics, walked his clients through detailed projections of how much Verizon would earn from FiOS and how much it would save because the fiber network is cheaper to maintain than the old copper wires. He concluded that Verizon would be $6 billion in the hole when all was said and done.

Other analysts have reached different conclusions from the available data. Christopher Larsen of Credit Suisse calculates that if Verizon can get at least 20 percent of the potential customers to sign up for FiOS video, it will earn an acceptable profit.

And David Barden of Banc of America Securities argues that, for new Verizon investors, the return on Verizon’s original investment does not matter.

“If you are an investor today thinking about what the prospects of FiOS are tomorrow, you don’t look at what has been spent. You look at what needs to be spent,” Mr. Barden said. “The 2008 investors owe the 2003 investors a debt of gratitude because the 2008 Verizon is in a vastly better competitive position than it otherwise would be.”

Even if Mr. Moffett is right and Verizon comes out $6 billion behind on FiOS, that amount is almost lost in a company that has annual revenue of nearly $100 billion and spends $17 billion a year on capital improvements. Indeed, Verizon is dominated by wireless and business services. Service over wires to people’s homes makes up only 15 percent of its revenue.

One option that Verizon did not find palatable was just sitting still. Voice telephone lines are headed toward extinction, dropping 8.5 percent in the last year alone. And the speed of the digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., technology used to offer Internet service over copper wires has topped out at three megabits a second for many customers.

Meanwhile, cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner have been very successful in bundling Internet-based phone service with lots of TV channels and high-speed Internet service of 6 to 12 megabits a second. As consumers have demanded more video in their living rooms and on their computers, the cable companies have gained market share.

With FiOS offering current top Internet speeds of 50 megabits a second and a large menu of video offerings, Verizon is betting its packages will allow it to leapfrog over its cable rivals. Moreover, Verizon’s fiber network has the capacity to add more data speed, video channels and other services without rewiring.

The service has been particularly popular among the more sophisticated customers attracted by higher Internet speeds, said Karl Bode, the editor of BroadbandReports.com.

“Deliver quality technology and cutting-edge speed, and customers respond,” he said. “I’m preparing to move into a new home, and FiOS availability actually played a part in where I was willing to move. And I’ve probably been one of Verizon’s most outspoken critics over the years.”

The cable systems, in turn, are responding by cutting prices on voice service and developing new technology that can match the data speeds of FiOS and cram in more TV channels.

AT&T’s less radical approach essentially seeks to match, rather than surpass, the speed of cable’s Internet service. And while AT&T’s Internet-based video service has some fancy features, it can transmit only one, eventually two, HDTV signals to each home at once.

Because it is using less mature technology than FiOS, AT&T’s upgrade has gotten off to a slow start. At the end of the second quarter, AT&T’s video service, called U-Verse, had 549,000 customers, up from only 51,000 a year earlier. That is just a bit more than 10 percent of the homes that could buy the service.

John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, said the company might string fiber optic cables to its customers’ homes in the future. But he argues that it was a smarter choice to try to get as much life out of the copper wire as possible, betting the cost of fiber will drop over time.

“The last thing we want to do is overdeploy fixed capacity into the ground where there is no recovery for being wrong by putting in too much,” he said. “The ideal way to deploy technology is on the last day as fast as possible, because it gets more capable and cheaper every day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/te...gy/19fios.html





If You Thought the Internet was Cool, Wait Until it Goes Space Age

A founding father of the web says it's come a long way, but its potential for worldwide change can and will be greater still
Vint Cerf

The internet is still very young. It was only November 1977 when a group of computer scientists successfully connected three networks around the world, including one at University College London. It took until 1989 for the internet to become commercially available and about another decade after that for it to achieve widespread household use in Europe and the United States. Only then did we emerge from what I think of as the 'internet comma' days, when its mention in the media was always followed by a comma and a short description.

From there, we've got to the point where I, because of my long history with the technology, now run afoul of The Observer style guide. I remain convinced that as a unique entity the word requires capitalisation. You'll see that the newspaper is so comfortable with the term that it doesn't.

This reflects that in a very short time the internet has had a profound impact on the way we live, so it's hardly surprising that some people have expressed scepticism of its effects. Writing in Atlantic magazine, for example, Nicholas Carr recently asked whether Google is making us stupider, while Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture last December included what many saw as an attack on the internet.

Yet such a transformative technology is bound to ruffle a few feathers. I have no doubts that its social repercussions will take decades to be fully understood, but it has already done much to benefit the world. It has provided access to information on a scale never before imaginable, lowered the barriers to creative expression, challenged old business models and enabled new ones. It has succeeded because we designed it to be both flexible and open. These features have allowed it to accommodate innovation without massive changes to its infrastructure.

And innovation on the internet happens at a rapid pace. Ten years ago, Google was simply an idea being explored by two graduates in California. The years to come will offer more that is new and exciting. It's easy to forget, sitting in the UK or the US, just how far the internet still has to go. Today, there are only about 1.4 billion users, representing a bit more than one-fifth of the world's population, and a substantial amount of the content on the web is still written in English. But the internet is becoming more global. Asia has more than 500 million users and Europe nearly 400 million and internet-enabled mobile phones will help extend the net to Africa, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. We're about to see further waves of innovation.

There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world's population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.

It's amazing how quickly those of us with internet access have come to take for granted the remarkable amounts of information we have at our disposal, but we're only seeing the beginnings. The bulk of human knowledge remains offline. As more of us get access to the internet, more of the world's information will find its way online.

The web is already making strides toward becoming truly global. While I was chairman of ICANN, one of the organisations that helps ensure that the internet works uniformly around the world, we adopted rules to allow the system of domain names to accommodate non-Roman characters, making the web more accessible to people whose languages use other scripts, such as Arabic, Korean or Cyrillic.

There are improvements in automatic language translation tools and, in particular, the field that we call machine learning. It is already possible to do a Google search and explore the results in English across web content in 23 different languages, from Czech to Hindi to Korean. Speakers of any of those languages can now explore content on the web written in any of the others.

The technology isn't perfect yet, but it's rapidly improving. Even in its present form, it's easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which automatic translation will allow two people in the world to message one another in real time, each experiencing the chat in his or her tongue. Just imagine what a significant step that will be.

The technological progress of the internet has set huge social changes in motion. As with other transformative innovations before it, from the telegraph to television, people will continue to worry about the effects; the printing press and the rise in literacy that it effected were long seen as destabilising forces. Similar concerns about the internet are being raised, but if we take a long view, its benefits far outweigh the discomforts of learning to integrate it into our lives.

After working on the internet for more than three decades, I'm more optimistic about its promise than ever. It has the potential to change unexpected parts of our lives: from surfboards that let you surf the web while you wait for the next wave to refrigerators that can email you suggested recipes based on the food you already have.

My colleagues at Nasa and I are even working on an interplanetary internet, which will make getting information to and from spacecraft in the far reaches of the solar system more reliable.

Closer to home, we're at the cusp of a truly global internet that will bring people closer together and democratise access to information. We are all free to innovate on the net every day and we should look forward to more people around the world enjoying that freedom.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...nternet.google





Telecom Rollouts Raise Ire Over Utility Boxes
Deborah Yao

The road to advanced video, Internet and phone services is bumpy — and the bumps can be almost as big as refrigerators.

As cable and phone companies race to upgrade services or offer video for the first time, they're doing it by installing equipment in boxes on lawns, easements and curbs all over American neighborhoods. Telecommunications rollouts have always been messy, but several towns and residents are fighting back with cries of "Not in my front yard!"

AT&T Inc.'s nearly fridge-sized units, which route its new U-verse video product to customers, are drawing particular ire. A few caught fire or even exploded. AT&T said it has fixed that by replacing the units' backup batteries.

That's not much comfort to David Crommie, who thinks the boxes are an eyesore. Crommie, who is president of a San Francisco neighborhood group called the Cole Valley Improvement Association, complained after seeing some boxes sprout in town and managed to delay AT&T's plans to install up to 850. AT&T now is expected to reapply for an exemption to the city's environmental-review procedures.

"We have nothing against the technology. We just don't want that delivery system," Crommie said. "It's 19th century packaging for 21st century technology."

AT&T's rival Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, apparently thought so too. It ran ads in Illinois calling the cabinets "giant utility boxes." In most locations, U-verse cabinets are 4 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep.

AT&T didn't think it was funny and sued Comcast in March for running a "false, deceptive and disparaging advertising campaign." The companies signed a standstill agreement in May.

But Comcast has utility box problems of its own.

Several residents in Lower Makefield Township, about 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia, got upset when new green boxes from Comcast popped up around town, sometimes between driveways.

"All of a sudden we have cable boxes appear," said 64-year-old resident Bernie Goldberg. "They seem to think our community is their open job site."

He wants to know why Comcast can't bury the new boxes, which are about a foot tall and wide, and 2 feet long. Comcast said aboveground boxes can be accessed more easily and are more reliable.

But Goldberg noted that Verizon Communications Inc. was able to bury its fiber-optic boxes underground in town — a fact the phone company was more than eager to confirm. (Of course, Verizon also has had installation mishaps with its new FiOS service, such as fires at homes in Pennsylvania and Virginia.)

For Goldberg and other residents of Lower Makefield Township, arguing with Comcast over cable boxes is a familiar fight. They battled the installation of aboveground boxes in the 1990s with Comcast's predecessor and won.

This time, Township Supervisor Matt Maloney said residents felt Comcast's boxes were an "intrusion."

"They're putting it in without permits," he said. "It is their contention they are not required to do so. It's our contention that they are."

Comcast, which has installed 50 boxes and doesn't plan to add more, said it is working with the township to resolve these issues.

A resolution has yet to come to Geneva, Ill., where Mayor Kevin Burns is furious with AT&T.

A few years ago Geneva passed a 180-day moratorium that effectively stopped installations of AT&T's U-verse cabinets. The phone company sued Geneva and six other Illinois municipalities for restricting its plans. AT&T claimed it had the right to use public rights of way for its telecom network.

Burns said his city merely wanted some say.

"If we were going to have our landscape dotted with refrigerator-size boxes, we should have some control over them," Burns said.

Illinois passed a law last year fast-tracking approval for cable rivals to enter the pay-TV market, stripping away much of the clout wielded by municipalities. Geneva dropped a countersuit against AT&T in 2007 and gave it permits for installing U-verse boxes in early August.

But all this time, AT&T has maintained its suit against the city. Burns said that "is beyond my comprehension."

An AT&T spokesman would not comment on the lawsuit.

There are signs AT&T is learning from its earlier missteps.

In Springfield, Ill., AT&T has agreed to pay the city $1,500 for each of the 75 to 100 U-verse cabinets it plans to install. The money will be used for landscaping that can make the boxes blend with the environment, said city spokesman Ernie Slottag.

AT&T also recently installed about 120 U-verse boxes in Santa Rosa, Calif., after that city worked with the phone company and Comcast to find locations for their equipment. Eric McHenry, the city's chief technology officer, said AT&T's units were trickier to place since they were much larger than Comcast's boxes.

But while Santa Rosa had limited say on the cabinets — units go into public utility easements and, like Illinois, California had passed a fast-track video franchise law — McHenry said AT&T relocated boxes when requested.

"We didn't theoretically have the ability to say no," he said. "We asked them to move certain locations and they voluntarily did."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080822/...ly_cable_boxes





FCC Commissioner: Fairness Doctrine Could Bleed Into Web Content
FMQB

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told the Business & Media Institute (BMI) that the return of the Fairness Doctrine could potentially be intertwined with the net neutrality battle, resulting in the government regulating content on the Web. The Fairness Doctrine is a dormant FCC rule that says broadcasters are required to grant equal air time to opposing ideologies. President Bush has already spoken out against it, but McDowell noted that the net neutrality effort could win the support of "a few isolated conservatives" who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

"I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view," McDowell said, according to the BMI Web site. "I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy – which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem – then whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that. It’ll be called something else. So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?"

McDowell told the BMI that the Fairness Doctrine isn’t on the FCC’s radar right now, and it will probably not be voted on this year in Congress either. A new administration could renew Fairness Doctrine efforts, but likely under a different name.

"The Fairness Doctrine has not been raised at the FCC, but the importance of this election is in part – has something to do with that," McDowell said. "This election, if it goes one way, we could see a re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine. There is a discussion of it in Congress. I think it won’t be called the Fairness Doctrine by folks who are promoting it. I think it will be called something else and I think it’ll be intertwined into the net neutrality debate."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=838452





FCC Finalizes Comcast's Filtering Penalties
Declan McCullagh

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday finally released the text of its 3-2 ruling saying Comcast violated the law when throttling BitTorrent transfers, marking the first time any broadband provider has been found to violate Net neutrality rules.

Comcast will be required to take these steps in the next 30 days: disclose "the precise contours" of its current and future network management practices, and submit a "nondiscriminatory network management" compliance plan so government regulators can decide whether they approve. The company will not be fined.

If Comcast fails to comply, it will be automatically required to "suspend the network management practices" associated with handling BitTorrent transfers.

Comcast is widely expected to appeal the FCC's 67-page order to a federal court, most likely the D.C. Circuit, which has taken a dim view of the commission's expansions of its authority in the absence of a law passed by Congress.

Comcast representatives told CNET News as recently as Tuesday that the company's lawyers needed to review the order before they were able to discuss an appeal; they did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The majority bloc of FCC commissioners--not one is an engineer--wrote in Wednesday's order (PDF):

It is our expert judgment that Comcast's practices do not constitute reasonable network management...Comcast's practices contravene industry standards and have significantly impeded Internet users' ability to use applications and access content of their choice.

Moreover, the practices employed by Comcast are ill-tailored to the company's professed goal of combating network congestion. In sum, the record evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that Comcast's conduct poses a substantial threat to both the open character and efficient operation of the Internet, and is not reasonable."

In March, Comcast and BitTorrent declared a truce, with the broadband provider saying it will adopt a "capacity management technique that is protocol-agnostic" by the end of 2008. Before the announcement, Comcast had responded to network congestion caused by BitTorrent users by sending forged TCP reset packets, which disrupted transfers and prevented some users from uploading files.

Not helping Comcast's credibility was its poker-faced denial in August 2007 of initial allegations that it was filtering BitTorrent traffic. A few months later, though, it turned out that Comcast really was throttling BitTorrent, after all, and the company was forced to concede to the FCC that it blocks only "excessive" traffic. (The FCC picked up on this in its order, saying "Comcast's first reaction to allegations of discriminatory treatment was not honesty, but at best misdirection and obfuscation.")

As I wrote in an article a few weeks ago, the FCC may have trouble defending its actions in court.

In 2006, Congress rejected five different bills, backed by groups including Google, Amazon.com, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, that would have explicitly handed the FCC the power to police Net neutrality violations.

Even though the Democrats have enjoyed a majority on Capitol Hill since last year, their leadership has shown zero interest in resuscitating those proposals. While the FCC did adopt FCC broad principles (PDF) in August 2005 saying consumers may use the applications of their choice, the agency admitted on the day of their adoption that the guidelines "are not enforceable."

Robert McDowell, one of the two dissenting commissioners, said at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's conference this week that the FCC had relied on dubious evidence, including unsigned declarations.

"Governments need to make sure they have a very thorough record," he said. "The FCC of late has not been doing that."

Also at the conference, Verizon's chief technologist said delaying some peer-to-peer traffic may be necessary to prevent voice applications from being unusable (the company says it is not currently prioritizing traffic in this manner).

The ruling from the FCC stems from a request submitted in November by Free Press and its political allies, including some Yale, Harvard, and Stanford law school faculty. They claim that the FCC has the authority--under existing law--to "impose additional regulations" declaring Comcast's throttling to be illegal. They also enlisted the help of computer scientists from schools including MIT and Carnegie Mellon who argued that Comcast's throttling did not amount to reasonable network management.

(Ironically, some of the same interest groups that sued the FCC over its claim to possess unfettered authority--even in the absence of congressional authorization--to enforce broadcast flag rules are now backing its theories of unfettered authority to police Net neutrality violations. Public Knowledge, for instance, claimed the FCC's use of so-called ancillary authority was "arbitrary and capricious" and "unlawful." Now it loves the idea.)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10021222-38.html





Comcast to Slow Web Service at Times to Its Heaviest Users

The Comcast Corporation plans to slow service to its heaviest Internet users during periods of congestion after regulators ordered the company to devise a new method for managing its Web traffic.

Top Internet speeds for the heaviest users will be reduced for 10 to 20 minutes to keep service to other users flowing, said Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager for online services.

The Federal Communications Commission found on Aug. 1 that Comcast had improperly blocked peer-to-peer programs like BitTorrent that are used to share video and other files.

In an order posted on its Web site on Wednesday, the F.C.C. gave the company 30 days to provide details of its “unreasonable network management practices” and show how they would be changed by year-end.

A heavy Comcast Web user being impeded would have Internet speeds equivalent to “a really good DSL experience,” Mr. Bowling said. DSL, or digital subscriber line, is an Internet service offered by telephone companies. After a slowdown ended, Comcast would return Internet service to normal.

Comcast, which calls the new system fair share, will fine-tune it further before introducing it, Bowling said. In trials, Comcast has found the fair-share system to be effective if the slowing lasted for “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes,” Mr. Bowling said.

Comcast has about 14.4 million Internet users.

“We’re going to really have to see all the detail and have all the information,” said Marvin Ammori, a lawyer for Free Press, which promotes universal access to communications and filed the complain with the F.C.C. along with Public Knowledge, an advocacy group. Both organizations are based in Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/te...21comcast.html





Comcast Says No New Traffic Management Plan Yet

Some reports suggest that Comcast will slow traffic for heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of peak network use
Grant Gross

Comcast has made no final decisions on how to manage network congestion, despite news reports Wednesday that it will slow traffic for heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of peak network use.

Comcast has been looking into new network management practices after the furor caused by an Associated Press report last October that said the cable modem service provider was quietly slowing BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) traffic as a tool to fight network congestion.

Net neutrality advocates called on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to take action against Comcast, and early this month, the FCC voted 3-2 to prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing specific applications on its network.

Comcast has been conducting tests on new network management techniques since the end of May, said Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. Among the leading options is to slow all Web traffic from heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of heavy network traffic.

When the congestion is resolved in under 20 minutes, the heavy users' traffic would be slowed for shorter times, sometimes for only a minute or two, he said. Heavy users' traffic would still move over the Internet, but it would "become de-prioritized" during times of congestion, Douglas said.

This approach would be "protocol agnostic," Douglas added. By not blocking specific applications, Comcast likely would comply with the FCC's Aug. 1 vote.

Asked why Comcast doesn't slow all users' traffic during times of congestion, Douglas said it's not fair to subscribers who aren't clogging up the pipes. "It's the heaviest of users that are directly contributing to the degradation of the service for the other people on the network," he said.

Representatives of Free Press and Public Knowledge, two digital rights advocacy groups that filed a complaint against Comcast for slowing P-to-P traffic, expressed reservations about Comcast's apparent new direction.

"It's an interesting reflection on the claim that there is a free market for broadband," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge. "If there was competition, could you slow down your best customers?"

Comcast was "dishonest" in the past about its network management practices, added Ben Scott, Free Press policy director. The broadband provider originally denied it was degrading BitTorrent streams.

"We have to be skeptical and vigilant," Scott said. "The FCC has required them to disclose all the details -- so we look forward to seeing that before we can fully evaluate. Any move that doesn't involve blocking consumers' access to the Internet is a positive step -- but we won't know for sure about this particular practice until we see the details."

On Wednesday, the FCC released the full text of its Aug. 1 order prohibiting Comcast from blocking legal Web applications. Public Knowledge and Free Press praised the order, with Scott calling it "a major milestone in Internet policy."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...lan_yet_1.html





Verizon: We Need Freedom to Delay P2P Traffic When Necessary
Nate Anderson

There has "always been a requirement for network management," said Verizon CTO Richard Lynch Tuesday at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen conference on tech policy, even in the analog age. In the wake of the FCC's recent Comcast decision, debates over "network management" have escaped the engineers' offices and now take place even among skeptical consumers who worry about what such management will do to their Internet connections. Lynch laid out Verizon's view on the matter: time-sensitive packets like VoIP should be prioritized over less-sensitive packets like P2P, but the company remains committed to "deliver any and all data requested by our customers."

Thanks to its fiber-to-the-home commitment, Verizon doesn't face the same congestion issues that plague many cable operators. While current cable networks may share a single uplink between several hundred homes, Verizon's fiber nodes serve an average of only 32 homes—and the uplink has more bandwidth to begin with. Verizon can currently offer 50Mbps symmetric connections, with 100Mbps connections already in trials, and it can add capacity on lit fiber simply by turning on additional wavelengths.

But Lynch rejects the idea that the only acceptable form of network management is none at all—that is, that Verizon and other ISPs should all commit to delivering all packets, all the time, with zero delay. At the last conference where Lynch presented his idea, he was "accused quite vocally and loudly of all sorts of horrific things" and told that Verizon should just keep investing money.

Lynch oversees Verizon's capital expenditures and notes that the company pumps $17 billion a year into its network infrastructure. But building a network that could, even at peak times, deliver every single packet without delay could prove prohibitively expensive as traffic continues to grow at 50 percent a year. If Verizon built a network that could ensure no packet ever got delayed, "customers would be upset" over what Verizon would have to charge to make that possible.

Finding a balance of cost, performance, and service quality depends on an optimized traffic flow, and to Lynch, this means dividing traffic into two classes: time-sensitive and everything else. Such a management technique amounts to protocol discrimination, though Verizon commits not to deal in content discrimination—all VoIP calls, from all services, will receive the same treatment. Under heavy loads, the network would prioritize the time-sensitive protocols and delay the others until capacity is available. Lynch believes that few customers would even notice the "22ms delay" in other services.

Whatever techniques Verizon ultimately adopts, though, Lynch believes that the way to alleviate customer suspicion is transparency. "We don't have all the answers yet," he said, adding that he was personally still thinking through some of these issues. But full disclosure of network management practices is the "best way to go about it."

Deep packet inspection would power such a solution, and Lynch has a message for all the "DPI haters" out there: look at the issue from an engineer's perspective. In his view, this is the only rational way to manage a network for the largest number of users.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...necessary.html





In Senate, McCain has Been Reliable Ally of Big Telecom Firms
Greg Gordon

John McCain broadcasts his affection for Theodore Roosevelt, but his opposition to regulating the local telephone industry suggests that he may not share the former president's passion for busting huge corporate trusts.

Unlike Roosevelt, who railed against "malefactors of great wealth," McCain's positions frequently have echoed those of the giant regional Bell phone companies, now consolidated as AT&T, Verizon and Quest, the big survivors of the telecommunications wars of the last quarter-century.

McCain's opposition to the 1996 Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act, intended to spur competition by pressuring the Bells to lease their lines and switches to competitors cheaply, offers a window into how he might view regulation of other markets as president.

The Arizona senator characterizes his unsuccessful stand against the measure, and his later attempts to thwart its implementation, as in keeping with his commitment to free markets and his maverick positions on behalf of American consumers. He was the only Republican senator to vote against the legislation.

Critics charge, however, that McCain backed an approach to telecommunications that has limited competition and kept prices high. They note that executives of the big three telecom giants and their lobbyists have raised and donated millions of dollars for his political committees.

With McCain on their side, the Bells wound up escaping the stringent sanctions of a 1982 federal court antitrust case that broke up AT&T and the curbs of the 1996 law. They now dominate local and long-distance phone markets.

In two stints as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1997 to 2004, McCain proposed legislation and sent tough letters aimed at hindering the Federal Communications Commission from implementing the 1996 law. He even tried to persuade a nominee for FCC chairman not to appeal a court ruling that would have neutered the law. McCain's legislation stalled, and the Clinton-era FCC stood its ground in court.

But watchdog groups and former FCC officials say that McCain had an impact, especially in 1997, when the Clinton administration let him pick Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell, who would later become President Bush's secretary of state, for a Republican FCC seat.

They charge that later, as Bush's first FCC chairman, Powell undercut the law, leading to the collapse of hundreds of fledgling companies and ensuring the Bells' and cable giants' dominance over U.S. telephone and Internet markets.

McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said the senator had stated openly that the 1996 law "was flawed and didn't serve consumers, so it is not surprising that he took actions to block its enactment or impede its implementation."

McCain backed Michael Powell "because Powell shared McCain's belief in a free marketplace," Bounds said.

Watchdog groups charge that McCain has been too cozy with the phone giants. Executives of the consolidated Bells, the head of their trade group and their present and former lobbyists have raised as much as $4.25 million for McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, data from the nonprofit groups Public Citizen and Campaign Money Watch show.

More than 60 present and former telecom lobbyists work for McCain's campaign as staffers and volunteers, some in high-echelon posts while on leave from their firms.

Bounds said McCain "has never taken legislative action on behalf of any special interest," including the Bells.
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1173708.html





The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived
Amanda M. Fairbanks

WHEN Pam Spaulding heard from two contributors to her blog, Pam’s House Blend, that they couldn’t afford to attend the Democratic National Convention, she knew that historic times called for creative measures.

Getting convention credentials for her blog, a news site for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, was the easy part. As air fare, lodging and incidentals began piling up, paying for the trip to Denver became the bigger obstacle.

For Ms. Spaulding, 45, who works full time as an IT manager at Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., blogging is her passion, an unpaid hobby she pursues at nights and on weekends. So she called on her 5,500 daily readers to help raise funds: “Send the Blend to Denver” reads the ChipIn widget on her blog’s home page that tracks donations from readers; so far they have pledged more than $5,000 to transport Ms. Spaulding and three other bloggers to the convention.

Beginning Monday, hundreds of bloggers will descend on Denver to see Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination. Next week, hundreds more will travel to St. Paul to witness John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But now these online partisans, many of whom are self-financed, must contend with all the logistical and financial hurdles just to get there — not to mention the party politics happening behind the scenes.

This year, both parties understand the need to have greater numbers of bloggers attend. While many Americans may watch only prime-time television broadcasts of the convention speeches, party officials also recognize the ability of bloggers to deliver minute-by-minute coverage of each day’s events to a niche online audience.

“The goal is to bring down the walls of the convention and invite in an audience that’s as large as possible,” said Aaron Myers, the director of online communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee. “Credentialing more bloggers opens up all sorts of new audiences.”

But some bloggers see the procurement of credentials as less of a privilege and more of a right, in recognition of their grass-roots influence. “This is stuff we deserve — we helped the party get people elected,” said Matt Stoller, a political consultant and a contributor to the blog Open Left, who worked as the volunteer in charge of getting credentials for bloggers at the Democratic convention four years ago. “Maybe in 2004 it was about being accommodating and innovative — but this time around there’s a real fight for power in the party.” The major political parties first gave credentials to bloggers in 2004. The Republicans allowed a dozen bloggers to attend their convention in New York, while the Democrats gave bloggers 35 seats in the nosebleed section of the Fleet Center in Boston.

This year, the R.N.C. gave credentials to 200 bloggers as a means to “get Senator McCain’s message out to more people,” said Joanna Burgos, the press secretary of the convention.

For bloggers attending the Democratic convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, two types of credentials are offered. The first is a national credential, which offers the same access granted to members of traditional news media organizations.

The second, more coveted credential is the state blogger credential. It allows one blogger per state to cover the convention alongside its state delegation, with unlimited floor access. Inspired by the strategy of Howard Dean, the D.N.C. chairman, to organize in all 50 states, the state-blogging credential was highly sought after, with as many as 14 blogs vying to represent a single state.

D.N.C. organizers said the recipients of these credentials were chosen by looking at the posts and mission statements of the competing blogs, and at the traffic these sites generated. But controversy soon arose in the blogosphere about whether political favoritism played a role.

“It’s a recognition from the D.N.C. of the work that you’ve done, of your import, your significance,” said Phillip Anderson, 38, whose blog, the Albany Project, has covered New York State politics since 2006. “We were the site the D.N.C. was talking about — we just assumed we would get it,” said Mr. Anderson, who received a national credential instead of the state honor.

Mr. Myers of the Democratic National Convention Committee conceded that tough calls had to be made. “Nobody here, certainly not I, believes there’s only one good blog in every state,” he said. “It’s just not true.” In the last week, the D.N.C. released an additional 100 credentials that will allow multiple contributors from the same blog to cover the convention in tandem.

But the last-minute disbursement of credentials has only exacerbated many bloggers’ frustrations.

“It’s unprecedented access for bloggers, yes, but it’s certainly not equal access,” said Ms. Spaulding, who learned last week that Pam’s House Blend would receive two extra credentials. “What, pray tell, is the big secret?”

The annoyance felt by many bloggers is familiar to those who previously attended conventions as correspondents for smaller print publications. “This is very reminiscent of being at the low end of the totem pole,” said Micah Sifry, the co-founder of the group blog Techpresident.com, who formerly wrote for The Nation magazine and attended his first convention in 1984. “They can’t buy a sky box, they’re scrambling.”

One perk that bloggers will have access to in Denver is the Big Tent, an 8,000-square-foot two-story structure adjacent to where the convention is being held. For a $100 entrance fee, 400 credentialed bloggers will be allowed to enter the air-conditioned space, hosted by a coalition of progressive blogs and organizations and sponsored by the Web sites Google and Digg, where they can eat meals and find work spaces with Wi-Fi.

“I’m telling everyone to meet me at the Big Tent,” said Fred Gooltz, 30, an online strategist with Advomatic, a Web development and strategy firm. “That’s where I’ll be meeting everyone else who’s like me, folks that I’ve only met online or blogged and e-mailed with.” Mr. Gooltz sees the $100 fee as a bargain, especially since he would rather network “with movementarians, who see themselves as a progressive movement, separate from the Democratic Party hierarchy.”

Markos Moulitsas, whose Web site, the Daily Kos, is one of the Big Tent’s organizers, said he would probably remain in the tent for much, if not all, of the convention. “I have no interest in going to the convention hall and chances are I will not,” he said. “There’s nothing happening in the convention hall that would justify braving the long security lines and crowds.”

For bloggers who do not wield as much influence as Mr. Moulitsas, paying for the trip to Denver meant appealing directly to their readers for contributions — an uneasy bargain for many writers who value their independence.

This summer marked the first time that Mr. Anderson of the Albany Project asked readers for donations on his own behalf. “I would never go to my readers and say, I really need a vacation,” said Mr. Anderson, who makes his living as a consultant, and earns a few thousand dollars a year from the advertising revenue his blog generates. “It’s kind of humbling that people value what we’re doing to the point where they’re willing to give us $20.”

Through contributions as small as $5 or $10, Mr. Anderson said, he was able to raise about $1,500 for his Denver trip.

John Odum, 40, the lead author of the political blog Green Mountain Daily, felt similarly conflicted. Though his readers did supply him with a new laptop computer on his 40th birthday, Mr. Odum, who lives in Montpelier, Vt., and works for a local environmental nonprofit, was reluctant to ask them for further acts of generosity. In an election year, he said, “People ought to be giving it to a candidate, not giving me their spare money.”

Now a yellow “donate” icon on his site links to a separate PayPal account, where readers can contribute toward Mr. Odum’s estimated $1,000 travel costs. He said he had received enough support to pay for the $400 air fare.

“It takes me back to my hippie-ish youth, thrown in a situation with very little to fall back on and not 100 percent certain where I’ll be sleeping,” Mr. Odum said. He said he might have to unfurl his sleeping bag on someone’s hotel room floor if the housing space he reserved on Craigslist does not pan out.

Among the devoted readers who believe Mr. Odum deserves their donations is Nate Freeman, one of two Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor of Vermont. Mr. Freeman, 40, gave about $100 to Mr. Odum’s laptop fund, and said he would contribute $50 for Mr. Odum’s convention trip.

“Barack doesn’t need my 50 bucks,” Mr. Freeman said, “but John does.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/fashion/24blog.html





Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?
Michiko Kakutani

IT’S been more than eight years since “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in the show’s approach to its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of the show’s striking evolution.

In 1999, the “Daily Show” correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off Senator John McCain’s overflow press bus — “a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders” — and onto the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican Convention Mr. Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of “all the day’s events — at least the ones we’re allowed into.” In this year’s promotional spot for “The Daily Show’s” convention coverage, the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team — “the best campaign team in the universe ever,” working out of “ ‘The Daily Show’ news-scraper: 117 stories, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers,” and promising to bring “you all the news stories — first ... before it’s even true.”

Though this spot is the program’s mocking sendup of itself and the news media’s mania for self-promotion, it inadvertently gets at one very real truth: the emergence of “The Daily Show” as a genuine cultural and political force. When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”

While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls “the coolest pit stop on television,” with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program’s signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by “real” news shows, while Mr. Stewart’s interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Offices for “The Daily Show” occupy a sprawling loftlike space that combines the energy of a newsroom with the laid-back vibe of an Internet start-up: many staff members wear jeans and flip-flops, and two amiable dogs wander the hallways. The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.

What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

To make the more alarming subject matter digestible, the writers search for ways to frame the story, using an arsenal of techniques ranging from wordplay (“Mess O’Potamia,” “BAD vertising”) to exercises in pure logic (deconstructing the administration’s talking points on the surge) to demented fantasy sequences (imagining Vice President Dick Cheney sending an army of orcs to attack Iran when he assumed the presidency briefly last year during President Bush’s colonoscopy).

Gitmo, the Elmo puppet from Guantánamo Bay, became a vehicle for expressing the writers’ “most agitated feelings about torture in a way that is — not to be too cute — that is not torture to listen to, and that is not purely strident,” Mr. Stewart said. And the cartoon strip “The Decider,” featuring Mr. Bush as a superhero who makes decisions “without fear of repercussion, consequence or correctness,” became a way to satirize the president’s penchant for making gut calls that sidestep the traditional policy-making process.

As the co-executive producer Rory Albanese noted, juxtapositions of video clips and sound bites are one of the show’s favorite strategies. It might be the juxtaposition of Senator Barack Obama speaking to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin while Mr. McCain campaigns in a Pennsylvania grocery store. Or it could be a juxtaposition of a politician taking two sides of the same argument. One famous segment featured Mr. Stewart as the moderator of a debate between then-Governor Bush of Texas in 2000, who warned that the United States would end up “being viewed as the ugly American” if it went around the world “saying we do it this way — so should you,” and President Bush of 2003, who extolled the importance of exporting democracy to Iraq.

Often a video clip or news event is so absurd that Mr. Stewart says nothing, simply rubs his eyes, does a Carsonesque double take or crinkles his face into an expression of dismay. “When in doubt, I can stare blankly,” he said. “The rubber face. There’s only so many ways you can stare incredulously at the camera and tilt an eyebrow, but that’s your old standby: What would Buster Keaton do?”

Given a daily reality in which “over-the-top parodies come to fruition,” Mr. Stewart said, satire like “Dr. Strangelove” becomes “very difficult to make.” “The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true,” he observed. “You go: I know what I’ll do, I’ll create a character who, when hiring people to rebuild the nation we invaded, says the only question I’ll ask is, ‘What do you think of ‘Roe v. Wade?’ It’ll be hilarious. Then you read that book about the Green Zone in Iraq” — “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran — “and you go, ‘Oh, they did that.’ I mean, how do you take things to the next level?”

Mr. Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal.” Though he has mocked both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama for lapses from their high-minded promises of postpartisanship, he said he didn’t think their current skirmishes were “being conducted on the scale that Bush conducted things, or even the Clintons; I don’t think it has the same true viciousness and contempt.”

SOON after Mr. Stewart joined “The Daily Show” in 1999, in the waning years of the Clinton administration, he and his staff began to move the program away from the show-business-heavy agenda it had under his predecessor, Craig Kilborn. New technology providing access to more video material gave them growing control over the show’s content; the staff, the co-executive producer Kahane Corn said, also worked to choose targets “who deserved to be targets” instead of random, easy-to-mock subjects.

Following 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the show focused more closely not just on politics, but also on the machinery of policy making and the White House’s efforts to manage the news media. Mr. Stewart’s comedic gifts — his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy, his talent for excavating ur-narratives from mountains of information, his ability, in Ms. Corn’s words, “to name things that don’t seem to have a name” — proved to be perfect tools for explicating and parsing the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints.

Over time, the show’s deconstructions grew increasingly sophisticated. Its fascination with language, for instance, evolved from chuckles over the president’s verbal gaffes (“Is our children learning?” “Subliminable”) to ferocious exposés of the administration’s Orwellian manipulations: from its efforts to redefine the meaning of the word “torture” to its talk about troop withdrawals from Iraq based on “time horizons” (a strategy, Mr. Stewart noted, “named after something that no matter how long you head towards it, you never quite reach it”).

For all its eviscerations of the administration, “The Daily Show” is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology. A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,” parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches. He has characterized Democrats as “at best Ewoks,” mocked Mr. Obama for acting as though he were posing for “a coin” and hailed MoveOn.org sardonically for “10 years of making even people who agree with you cringe.”

TO the former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Mr. Stewart serves as “the citizens’ surrogate,” penetrating “the insiders’ cult of American presidential politics.” He’s the Jersey Boy and ardent Mets fan as Mr. Common Sense, pointing to the disconnect between reality and what politicians and the news media describe as reality, channeling the audience’s id and articulating its bewilderment and indignation. He’s the guy willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to wonder why in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It’s 3 a.m.” ad no one picks up the phone in the White House before six rings, to ask why a preinvasion meeting in March 2003 between President Bush and his allies took all of an hour — the “time it takes LensCrafters to make you a pair of bifocals” to discuss “a war that could destroy the global order.”

“The Daily Show” boasts a deep bench when it comes to its writing, research and production and has provided a showcase for a host of gifted comedians who have gone on to other careers — most notably, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report,” as well as Mr. Carell, Rob Corddry and Ed Helms. But while the show is a collaborative effort, as one producer noted, it is “ultimately Jon’s vision and voice.”

Mr. Stewart described his anchorman character as “a sort of more adolescent version” of himself, and Ms. Corn noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”

“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”

Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.

“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

Mr. Stewart can be scathing in his dismantling of politicians’ spin — he took apart former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s rationalizations about the Iraq war with Aesopian logic and fury — but there is nothing sensation-seeking or mean-spirited about his exchanges. Nor does he shy away from heartfelt expressions of sadness and pain. The day after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, he spoke somberly of the tragic situation there and asked his guest, Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi minister of defense, how his country handled “that sort of carnage on a daily basis” and if there were “a way to grieve.”

Most memorably, on Sept. 20, 2001, the day the show returned after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Stewart began the program with a raw, emotional address. Choking up, he apologized for subjecting viewers to “an overwrought speech of a shaken host” but said that he and the show’s staff needed it “for ourselves, so that we can drain whatever abscess there is in our hearts so we can move on to the business of making you laugh.”

He talked about hearing, as a boy of 5, of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He talked about feeling privileged to live where you can “sit in the back of the country and make wisecracks.” And he talked about “why I grieve but why I don’t despair.”

Mr. Stewart now says he does not want to listen to that show again: “The process of the show is to bury those feelings as subtext, and that was a real moment of text. It’s laying bare the type of thing that is there hopefully to inform the show, but the show is usually an exercise in hiding that.”

In fact, Mr. Stewart regards comedy as a kind of catharsis machine, a therapeutic filter for grappling with upsetting issues. “What’s nice to us about the relentlessness of the show,” he said, “is you know you’re going to get that release no matter what, every night, Monday through Thursday. Like pizza, it may not be the best pizza you’ve ever had, but it’s still pizza, man, and you get to have it every night. It’s a wonderful feeling to have this toxin in your body in the morning, that little cup of sadness, and feel by 7 or 7:30 that night, you’ve released it in sweat equity and can move on to the next day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/ar...on/17kaku.html





Intel Moves to Free Gadgets of Their Recharging Cords
John Markoff

Intel has made progress in a technology that could lead to the wireless recharging of gadgets and the end of the power-cord spaghetti behind electronic devices.

It says it has increased the efficiency of a technique for wirelessly powering consumer gadgets and computers, a development that could allow a person to simply place a device on a desktop countertop to power it. It could bring the consumer electronics industry a step closer to a world without wires.

On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.

“Something like this technology could be embedded in tables and work surfaces,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, “so as soon as you put down an appropriately equipped device it would immediately begin drawing power.”

The presentation is part of the company’s Intel Developer Forum, a series of events here that the company uses to showcase new technologies in personal computing and related consumer technologies.

The research project, which is being led by Joshua R. Smith, an Intel researcher at a company laboratory in Seattle, builds on the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Marin Soljacic, who pioneered the idea of wirelessly transmitting power using resonant magnetic fields. The MIT group refers to the idea as WiTricity, a play on wireless and electricity. Both the M.I.T. group and the Intel researchers are exploring a phenomenon known as “resonant induction,” making it possible to transmit power several feet without wires.

Induction is already used to recharge electric toothbrushes, but that approach is limited by the need for the toothbrush to be placed in the base station.

The M.I.T. group has demonstrated efficiencies of 50 percent at ranges of several meters.

Intel is in the midst of an internal debate over whether the technology may also permit the shift to supercapacitors, which can be recharged far more quickly than today’s batteries. “In the future, your kitchen counters might do it,” Mr. Rattner said. “You’d just drop your espresso maker down on them and you would never have to plug it in.”

The Intel team describes its system as a “wireless resonant energy link,” and is experimenting with antennas less than two feet in diameter to remotely light a 60-watt light bulb.

In 2006, the M.I.T. researchers demonstrated that by sending electromagnetic waves around a waveguide it was possible to produce “evanescent” waves that could permit electricity to wirelessly tunnel to another waveguide “tuned” to the transmitting loop.

Several start-up firms , including WildCharge, based in Boulder, Colo., and WiPower, based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., have already announced related wireless charging technologies. But these demonstrations have required that the consumer gadgets touch the charging station.

The Intel researchers said they were thinking about designing a system that would make it possible to recharge a laptop computer without wires.

“From Intel’s position that seems like the thing to shoot for right now,” Mr. Smith said. The receiving antenna is about the size of something that could easily fit against the bottom of a conventional laptop computer. “It could be that cellphones and P.D.A.’s are even more compelling, but I think we are going to start with the laptop. It’s easy to dial down from laptops,” he said.

The researchers said that Intel could produce a prototype design and that it might contribute to products by developing chip sets for manufacturers. At Thursday’s research presentation, Mr. Smith plans to demonstrate an application using an electric field sensor — a natural capability of some fish — to give added dexterity to robotic arms and hands. He has designed a sensor system that makes it possible for a robot hand to gauge the size of an apple and then grasp it. The hand then carries the apple to an outstretched human hand. When it senses the hand, it drops the apple.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/te...y/21intel.html





Thinking Outside the Square Finds Light in Oven
Deborah Smith



FOR her 10th birthday, Nicole Kuepper received an inspirational present from her parents - her first solar-energy kit.

It sparked a fascination with solar technology that last night led to Ms Kuepper, 23, winning two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes for her scientific research.

She has developed a simple, cheap way of producing solar cells in a pizza oven that could eventually bring power and light to the 2 billion people in the world who lack electricity.

Ms Kuepper is a PhD student and lecturer in the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of NSW.

"I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty by thinking and experimenting outside the square," she said.

Today's photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight to electricity are expensive and need sophisticated, "clean" manufacturing plants.

Ms Kuepper realised a new approach would be needed if affordable cells were to be made on site in poorer countries: "What started off as a brainstorming session has resulted in the iJET cell concept that uses low-cost and low-temperature processes, such as ink-jet printing and pizza ovens, to manufacture solar cells."

While it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology, providing renewable energy to homes in some of the least developed countries would enable people to "read at night, keep informed about the world through radio and television and refrigerate life-saving vaccines". And it would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Ms Kuepper said that the solar cells should be of high enough quality to be used anywhere in the world, including Australia.

An advocate of green technology, she gives talks about solar energy to the public, has held miniature solar car races to teach indigenous children about renewable energy, and was a delegate at the 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra in April.

Ms Kuepper was awarded the British Council Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change and a $10,000 study tour to Britain.

She also won the People's Choice Award, in which almost 16,000 members of the public voted for their favourite scientist out of six finalists. Twenty Eureka Prizes worth $200,000 were awarded last night at a ceremony at Royal Randwick Racecourse.

Other winners included Professor Robert Clark, of the University of NSW, for quantum computer research, Professor Stephen Simpson of the University of Sydney, for studies of locusts and human obesity, and Professor Matthew England and his University of NSW team for discoveries linking ocean temperature and rainfall.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/energy-sm...911717526.html





Apple Sued Over iPhone 3G Reception Issues
Steven Musil

An Alabama woman has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the iPhone 3G's network is slower than advertised.

In a 10-page complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Northern Alabama, Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith charged Apple with breach of express and implied warranty and with unjust enrichment. Smith, who refers to the phone she purchased throughout the complaint as "Defective iPhone 3G," is seeking class action status.

The lawsuit claims that Apple's iPhone 3G advertising campaign is misleading.

"Defendant intended for customers to believe its statements and representations about the Defective iPhone 3Gs, and to trust that the device was 'twice as fast at half the price'," the lawsuit states.

The charges in the lawsuit mirror widespread complaints about the iPhone 3G's reception that have crisscrossed the Internet since Apple and AT&T released the successor to the original iPhone on July 11. Affected owners have said the iPhone 3G will switch between 3G networks and EDGE networks even when the device is sitting still and that they will lose reception in the middle of a call while in a 3G-rich environment.

"Immediately after purchase, plaintiff soon noticed that her Internet connection, receipt and sending of e-mail, text messages and other data transfers were slower than expected and advertised," the lawsuit states.

After weeks of silence regarding the complaints, Apple finally acknowledged earlier this week that reception issues existed. An Apple representative told the Associated Press that the iPhone OS 2.0.2 software update, released Monday, is designed to provide "improved communication with 3G networks."

But Monday's update was labeled with the briefest of descriptions--"bug fixes"--making it difficult to know exactly what was addressed with the update.

The suit asks that Apple be ordered to repair or replace all defective devices and pay unspecified damages, interest, and attorney fees.

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10021885-37.html





FAQ: iPhone 3G Reception -- What's the Problem?

Complaints of dropped calls, weak signals and slow data speeds reach critical mass
Gregg Keizer

Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers.

"I am suppose to be in a strong 3G coverage area at home, [but] I only have 1 bar," said user Doug Clements in a message posted July 13. "Traveling around town (Sacramento area) my 3G coverage changes dramatically. From 1 bar to full bars? Not sure if its working properly or not??"

Within a month, what had started as a few news reports grew dramatically, with several prominent newspapers, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today adding their voices to the chorus.

What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Here's our take on the griping about iPhone 3G reception.

What's the beef about? Users started complaining about crappy reception -- lousy signal strength, dropped calls and slow data speeds -- just days after the iPhone 3G's July 11 debut.

Those complaints have filled Apple's support forum with nearly 2,000 messages in a series of three long threads, the first two of which were shut down because they were too long for some browsers to load. (This is the current thread open for comment; the first two are here and here.)

The gripes can be broadly characterized as:

• Weak 3G signals in areas supposedly flush with 3G, and/or in places where other 3G-enabled phones on AT&T's network have no problem acquiring a strong signal.
• Consistent dropped calls, often as the iPhone automatically switches from 3G to EDGE when the user moves between coverage areas.
• Slower-than-expected Web browsing that doesn't match Apple's claim that 3G gives users a 2.4x speed boost over EDGE.


Who should I blame? Take your pick:

• Apple
• AT&T
• Both
• Someone else

Okay, smart guy, really, what causes the problems?

Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T -- and maybe a chipmaker or two -- really knows, that's not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources.

According to BusinessWeek's Peter Burrows, who cited a pair of unnamed sources, the iPhone 3G's troubles stem from a faulty chip or chipset from Infineon Technologies AG, a major mobile chip designer and manufacturer.

Burrows' story echoed comments made earlier in the week by Richard Windsor, a Wall Street analyst with Nomura Securities, who put out a research note last Tuesday that also laid the blame on Infineon. "We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain that Infineon is the 3G supplier," Windsor said in that note.

Windsor also said that it's unlikely the problem, if it is chip-based, could be fixed by a software update from Apple.

Others blame AT&T for a poorly-designed 3G network, or insufficient capacity to handle the flood of calls -- and especially data -- as iPhone 3Gs continue to fly off store shelves.

Still others pointed fingers elsewhere. The Swedish engineering weekly Ny Teknik last week cited a study by unnamed mobile experts alleging that some handsets, including Apple's, had a substandard signal sensitivity. The supposed cause: an unspecified problem somewhere between the antenna and the signal amplifier. The original article, in Swedish, is here; a rough translation via Google is here.

That's a lot of reasons. Anything else you want to toss into the pot? Sure, why not?

While Jack Gold, an analyst with Strategic Consulting, said it could be some, or several, of the possibilities cited above, he offered up a bunch more possibilities. "We are dealing with high frequency radio waves," Gold said in an e-mail Friday. "Lots of things make them work or not work. Even people's sweaty hands could have an effect, or how close they hold the device to their heads, or what direction they are pointing the phone."

What's Apple doing? Apple's not talking -- its usual stance -- but a report in BusinessWeek last Friday said sources close to the issue claimed Apple was working on a firmware update that would fix the problems.

Such an update would be carried out through the normal iPhone update process, which requires the phone to be connected to a Mac or PC, from which iTunes -- an integral part of the iPhone ecosystem -- downloads updates and then installs them to the iPhone.

Apple has updated the first-generation iPhone five times -- 1.1 through 1.3, then 2.0 in July and 2.0.1 earlier this month -- and updated the iPhone 3G's firmware just the once, to 2.0.1 on Aug. 4. The company provided no details about what the 2.0.1 update contained, however.

If a firmware update is the fix, when will Apple roll it out? Again, Apple's not talking, but reports on enthusiast and technology sites such as AppleInsider have reported ongoing releases of iPhone 2.1 betas to testers, most recently a week ago.

What's unknown, however, is whether a 2.1 update will include a reception fix. AppleInsider hinted that the focus would be on other issues, including the iPhone's relatively new background push notification service, and the GPS support within the iPhone 3G.

Bottom line: It's conceivable that Apple has diagnosed the reception and dropped call bugs, and can produce a fix soon, but it's also possible that an update is weeks or months away. That's Apple.... You never know, since they don't discuss much of anything, certainly not details of updates, before they're released.

The only definitive date on Apple's iPhone calendar is Aug. 22, this coming Friday, when the company will unveil the iPhone 3G in another 20-plus markets. Apple has a history of doing software updates when it launches a new version of hardware, so it's possible that the Aug. 22 debut in new countries will coincide with a firmware fix.

Is everyone convinced a firmware update to the iPhone will do the trick? Nope.

Gold, for example, said he doubts that a firmware fix is the answer. "I'd be surprised if it is as simple as a firmware upgrade of the chip, so it is more likely that existing devices will have this defect forever," he wrote in an e-mail to Computerworld.

What's AT&T doing? The mobile operator, which is Apple's exclusive partner in the U.S. market, has not admitted that a widespread problem exists, but spokesmen for the firm have acknowledged complaints from customers. They insisted that the numbers are small.

AT&T, in fact, is still in the process of expanding its 3G network in the U.S. to the 350 cities it's promised to serve by the end of the year. Last month, when it released its second-quarter earnings, AT&T said that it had 3G service in about 300 U.S. metropolitan areas. At the time, the company claimed it was beginning work on boosting 3G capacity. "AT&T also has started doubling the data capacity of its 3G markets, and nearly half of all cell sites will receive additional 3G capacity by the end of the year," AT&T said in a July statement.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...icleId=9112758





Apple's iPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs
NewsFactor

After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned.

Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions.

The glitches were reportedly related to a chip inside Apple's music-playing cell phone. BusinessWeek reported last week that Apple was working on a remedy through a software upgrade.

Fix Causes More Problems

Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included "bug fixes." However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others.

"The first thing I noticed was the really jerky scrolling in applications like looking at photos and e-mail lists. Anything that had long lists didn't like to scroll, but on the previous firmware it was very, very fast!" Demlotcrew wrote in the Apple support forum.

Other iPhone users reported having no issues with the original firmware, but now having problems with Monday's fix. One user reported the firmware turned the iPhone into a virtual brick. Many users are trying to reinstall the original firmware to avoid the new issues, opting for what they see as the lesser of two evils.

Still Looking for the Root

Richard Windsor, a financial analyst at Nomura Securities, could be right after all. In a research paper released last week, he pointed to similar complaints with 3G phones launched in Europe five years ago and speculated the culprit could be the chipset inside the iPhone 3G. The handset runs on an Infineon 3G chipset.

"We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain that Infineon is the 3G supplier," Windsor wrote. "This is not surprising as the Infineon 3G chipset solution has never really been tested in the hands of users. Some people will not experience these problems, as it is only in areas where the radio signal weakens that the immaturity of the stack really shows."

Infineon could not immediately be reached for comment. Apple has not yet acknowledged any issues with its latest handset beyond issuing the firmware fix. If Apple has to issue a recall, it could cost millions.

The Ongoing Soap Opera

"This is almost like a soap opera. There's so much negative press and blogging this. These firmware-update issues are another problem Apple doesn't need. AT&T as a seller of this doesn't need from a PR standpoint," said Bill Ho, a wireless analyst at Current Analysis.

People new to the iPhone are upset that they have to go through two patches in a month and a half, Ho said, and the hard-core loyalists are beginning to question Apple's shine. Before this, it seemed Apple could do no wrong, Ho said, but the iPhone problems are tarnishing its image.

"The question is, will it impact sales despite the allure of the $199 price?" Ho asked. "People will have to take it on faith that this will eventually get fixed because Apple needs to fix it."
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nf/61404





Japan Demands Probe Into Cause of Nano Flameouts
Erika Morphy

Several incidents of iPod nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire.

There have been at least two recent incidents in Japan in which iPod nanos overheated and caused minor fires, prompting the country's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to issue a warning about the popular portable music player.

In all, there have been 14 such incidents in the country, according to news accounts, including one that occurred in March. The latest meltdowns prompted the Ministry to order Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) to investigate the device's safety and report its findings within a week.

Bad Batteries

Apple has determined that the batteries in first-generation iPod nanos sold between September 2005 and December 2006 are to blame.

The company received very few reports of such incidents -- less than 0.001 percent of first-generation iPod nano units, it said. They have all been traced to a single battery supplier.

The defect has not caused any serious injuries or property damage, the company maintained, and no similar problems have been reported in connection with any other iPod nano model.

Apple is advising owners of first-generation nanos to contact AppleCare for a replacement if their battery should overheat.

There have been similar incidents in the United States. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission would be the agency to issue a recall for first-generation nanos -- if one were warranted.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesperson for the agency, declined to say how many, if any, similar reports the agency has received.

"Because this is brand-specific and there have been no recalls, that information can only be had through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request," Wolfson told MacNewsWorld.

The agency typically responds within 30 days, he added.

Dangerous Devices

Every now and then, news of a DVD player, laptop, cell phone or music player catching on fire makes its way into the headlines. Usually, the repercussions have been minor -- but there have been some reports of laptops catching on fire during flights, a clear potential hazard.

Last year, a California man suffered second and third degree burns when his cell phone caught on fire.

The source has usually been the lithium battery powering the device.

In 2006, the number of PC manufacturers having to recall defective batteries seemed to reach epidemic proportions: Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo, IBM and Dell all issued recalls that numbered into the tens of millions.

There were also cases in which Apple laptops caught on fire.

Their batteries were short-circuiting and bursting into flame when microscopic metal particles came into contact with other parts.

Cell phone batteries have also been recalled -- in some cases, because it was determined that they were counterfeit and posed a potential fire hazard.

Counterfeit Goods

Indeed, the number of counterfeit electronic components, such as batteries, that have made their way into the global manufacturing supply chain is an increasing source of concern, Christopher Lindsay, director of programs with the Electrical Safety Foundation International, told MacNewsWorld.

"It is very difficult to positively determine how many counterfeit batteries have started fires," usually because the evidence has melted. But safety experts, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, warn that counterfeit products are fire hazards.

The data that ESFI can verify is discouraging, Lindsay said. "In fiscal year 2007, Customs seized US$200 billion dollars worth of counterfeit goods. By midyear 2008, shipments seized had risen 28 percent over the same time period last year."

Based on a recent survey it conducted, the organization concluded that more than 60 percent of adult Americans could not distinguish a counterfeit product or component from the real thing.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/J...uts-64224.html





Copy and Paste for iPhone
Cali Lewis

When Apple released the iPhone, the praise was consistent and so was the criticism. The praise was about the revolutionary interface and the criticism was about the lack of 3G, GPS and Copy and Paste. Apple made 3G and GPS happen, but they said Copy and Paste isn’t a priority. The first place we saw copy and paste for iPhone was on an application called MagicPad. The guy behind that app, Juviwhale, met a college student, Zac White. Zac White figured out how to implement copy and paste on any iPhone App without violating the iPhone SDK agreement.

Zac started a non-profit, open-source community project called OpenClip. When a developer adds the OpenClip framework to an iPhone app, that app gains copy and paste functionality. On Brief 410, I demo copy and paste on the iPhone using un-released versions of Twittelator, WordPress and MagicPad.

Apple forbids applications from running in the background because it would take up too much of the iPhone’s resources. Also, developers are not allowed to create plug-ins that make their apps work with other apps on the iPhone. Zac White’s Open Clip framework uses a shared space on the iPhone. Any application that includes Open Clip can then access the common area and write to it, and read from it, thereby enabling copy and paste between participating apps.

The key to making OpenClip work is adoption. Zac’s framework is non-profit. It’s open-source, and his project makes the iPhone even more useful. I recorded an audio interview with Zac so if you want to listen, it’s here. In our audio conversation, Zac talked about the ideal implementation and problems to be solved. Developers who are interested in finding out more can find the video here.
http://www.geekbrief.tv/copy-and-paste-for-iphone/





So, It's All Good, Right?
Steven Frank

I don't think I've ever been as conflicted about something as I am about the iTunes App Store. There are so many intersections at which it is both the best and worst at the same time that I'm having an incredibly hard time sorting out how I feel about it.
Some of my most inviolable principles about developing and selling software are:

1. I can write any software I want. Nobody needs to "approve" it.
2. Anyone who wants to can download it. Or not.
3. I can set any price I want, including free, and there's no middle-man.
4. I can set my own policies for refunds, coupons and other promotions.
5. When a serious bug demands an update, I can publish it immediately.
6. If I want, I can make the source code available.
7. If I want, I can participate in a someone else's open source project.
8. If I want, I can discuss coding difficulties and solutions with other developers.

I work in the software industry so I can (A) solve problems that annoy me, and (B) make money on which to live. While I respect the GPL and Open Source movements, I believe that commercial software is a necessary and important part of the ecosystem -- however NOT at the expense of the above basic freedoms.

The iTunes App Store distribution model mangles almost every one of those tenets in some way, which is exasperating to me.

But, the situation's not that clear-cut.

Apple's approval process ensures at least a basic adherence to expected UI behaviors and acts as an effective filter for malicious software.

The App Store puts my product directly in front of EVERY SINGLE person who is capable of using it. Let's not understate the value of that. There has never really been a true equivalent to this in the traditional distribution model. They also cover hosting and payment-processing fees and associated strife.

Apple's restrictions on what applications can and cannot do (with respect to sandboxing and not running in the background) prevent exactly the kind of terrible experiences I've had with other (crashy and slow) mobile devices.

And, although inconvenient, Apple's non-repeal of the NDA on iPhone development probably does protect information about iPhone technology from their competitors. At least, the ones who are concerned about not getting sued. Which, in a backhanded and perverted way, protects the very platform that the developers depend on.

So, it's all good, right?

Well, no.

What I have here is a list of what I consider to be basic developer rights and a distribution model that uses that list as toilet paper, while in return presenting me with an equally long list of genuine and tangible benefits. How do I respond to that?

Despite the store's restrictive terms, Apple's generally a "good guy" about things, right?

One thing that haunts me is the specific case of the "I Am Rich" application, which cost $999 and served no function other than providing you with bragging rights that you had enough disposable income to buy it in the first place.

Yes, it's a silly and diabolically clever idea, and I've been outspoken (especially on Twitter) about my feelings on frivolous iPhone apps. But silly ideas have a right to exist. After a tidal wave of negative comments, Apple appears to have removed the app, citing a "judgement call".

The most cited argument against I Am Rich seems to have been that someone might "accidentally purchase" the application, and there is anecdotal eveidence that this actually happened. You have to be dumber than a box of dried-out paintbrushes to "accidentally purchase" something, and even if you're unwilling to accept personal responsibility for your own actions, it should be an open-and-shut case of giving the unwitting user a refund and moving on. The fact that it's so difficult/impossible to issue a refund for an iPhone application merely highlights another glaring problem with the App Store.

Although silly, the application did not violate any of the App Store's terms of sale, to the best of my knowledge, and sat proudly amongst the menagerie of equally useless flashlights, dice-rollers, and tip calculators. Nobody was forced at gunpoint to lay down their credit card. The mere notion that software I write may be subject not just to a set of written guidelines but also arbitrary undocumented "judgement calls" after it has already been approved for sale quite frankly sends chills up my spine. I'm not sure I could ever be truly comfortable publishing software into such an environment.

I've been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on "how things should be" ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can't make it all line up. I can't question that it's probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don't even have anything for sale on there yet.
http://stevenf.com/archive/on-the-app-store.php





Apple Finally Ready for iTunes Subscriptions?
Tom Krazit

Three Mac rumors sites have received anonymous tips that Apple is getting ready to introduce a subscription iTunes service in September.

We were already pretty sure that September would bring new iPods, but Apple might have something more ambitious up its sleeve. MacRumors, MacDailyNews, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog are all saying a tipster spilled the beans about a $129-a-year iTunes service that would piggyback on Apple's MobileMe service.

The reports are all eerily similar, suggesting that accurate or not, all the sites heard from the same source. Under the new service, Apple would offer unlimited access to half of its iTunes Store--as of an October launch--for $129 a year, or $179 for an iTunes/MobileMe combo deal, in the U.S. only. If you're already a MobileMe subscriber, you'll only have to fork over $99.99 for the subscription service, perhaps as a mea culpa for this summer's disastrous MobileMe launch.

Rumors of an iTunes subscription service are not new; I found reports dating back to 2005 that Apple was getting ready to introduce such a thing. CEO Steve Jobs has historically pooh-poohed the idea of rental music--and such services haven't exactly taken the world by storm--but Jobs has also said he wasn't crazy about video-playing iPods and Apple-designed mobile phones, either.

This service introduction would also reportedly include an expanded MobileMe service that would let you access "the cloud" (Apple calls it iDisk) from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

While we're on this track, let me be the first to revive--based on absolutely nothing--the Beatles on iTunes rumors for September. It has to happen one of these days.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10021716-37.html





Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod.
Jonathan D. Glater

Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students.

The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.

While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.

Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.

“When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out,” acknowledged Naomi J. Pugh, a first-year student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try harder to make classes interesting if they were competing with the devices.

Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to concoct useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education.

“We think this is the way the future is going to work,” said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall.

Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around laptops, but that most always carried a cellular phone, Dr. Dickson said.

It is not clear how many colleges plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were coy about the subject and said they would not leak any institution’s plans.

“We can’t announce other people’s news,” said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases.

At least four institutions — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman — have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall.

Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it’s necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew J. Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M.I.T.

“We would have probably gone ahead of this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out,” Mr. Yu said.

The University of Maryland, College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey C. Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. “We don’t think we have all the answers,” Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, “We’re trying to get answers from students.”

At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cellphones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones have Wi-Fi capability.

University officials say they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface.

“My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality,” said Christopher J. Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University. “Alien Contact,” for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard.

“You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines,” like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. “It’s important that we do research so that we know how well something like this works.”

The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multitasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)

Robert S. Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week — in a detailed, footnoted memorandum — that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law.

“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.”

The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet).

“We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content,” said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke.

But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own “content,” making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/te.../21iphone.html





iTunes ‘Banned’ in China after Protest Album Stunt

Ok, this is pretty breaking news. Apparently Apple’s iTunes has been blocked by “the great firewall of China” (awesome name btw), as a reaction to a pro-tibetan album that’s been getting really popular there. To be more exact The Art of Peace Foundation’s Songs for Tibet compilation, featuring tracks by Alanis Morissette, Sting, Moby and 17 more artists.

The album was released as a download on the iTunes Store on August 5 - three days before the start of the Olympics - with the physical CD launched on Tuesday this week. Funds raised by the non-profit Foundation are donated to peace-related projects “that are dear to the Dalai Lama”, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom China regards as subversive. Furthermore, the album was given to athletes attending the Olympics, who were encouraged to put the songs on their iPod and play them as a form of protest.

This Monday, the pro-tibet organization announced that “over 40 Olympic athletes in North America, Europe and even Beijing” had downloaded the album. This was enough to pull the plugg, apparently. The same day, apple users who were momentarily expatriated in the Chinese space began to experience issues with their iTunes software. The problem resonated across most of China. Apple’s customer forums contain numerous examples.

This goes even further. A lot of Chinese internet users have been really offended by the Songs For Tibet album, released over iTunes, and intend on planning a boycott. According to a report published in the semi-official Chinese news portal, china.org.cn:

“angry netizens [internet users] are rallying together to denounce Apple in offering Songs for Tibet for purchase. They have also expressed a wish to ban the album’s singers and producers,most notably Sting, John Mayer and Dave Matthews, from entering China.”

Can you guys, like, ban Dave Matthews from the entire world? That’d be graaand!

Anyway, Chinese internet users are also planning on blocking anything related to Apple, including the new iPhone 3G, the device that’s been turning head all around the world. Apple officials are in talks with Chinese mobile phone operators to launch the highly successful mobile phone in the panda’s home, but from the looks of it, their attempts might prove unfruitful.
http://www.zmemusic.com/feature/news...t-album-stunt/





Two Women Sentenced to ‘Re-education’ in China
Andrew Jacobs

Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.

During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.

Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.

A man who answered the phone at the Public Security Bureau declined to give out information about the case.

At least a half dozen people have been detained by the authorities after they responded to a government announcement late last month designating venues in three city parks as “protest zones” during the Olympics. So far, no demonstrations have taken place.

According to Xinhua, the state news agency, 77 people submitted protest applications, none of which were approved. Xinhua, quoting a public security spokesperson, said that apart from those detained all but three applicants had dropped their requests after their complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.” The remaining three applications were rejected for incomplete information or for violating Chinese law.

The authorities, however, have refused to explain what happened to applicants who disappeared after they submitted their paperwork. Among these, Gao Chuancai, a farmer from northeast China who was hoping to publicize government corruption, was forcibly escorted back to his hometown last week and remains in custody.

Relatives of another person who was detained, Zhang Wei, a Beijing resident who was also seeking to protest the demolition of her home, were told she would be kept at a detention center for a month. Two rights advocates from southern China have not been heard from since they were seized last week at the Public Security Bureau’s protest application office in Beijing.

Ms. Wu and Ms. Wang were well known to the authorities for their persistent campaign for greater compensation for the demolition of their homes. Mr. Li said his family had given up their home in 2001 with the expectation that they would get a new one in the development that replaced it. Instead, he said, the family has been forced to live in a ramshackle apartment on the capital’s outskirts.

“I feel very sad and angry because we’re only asking for the basic right of living and it’s been six years, but nobody will do anything to help them,” Mr. Li said.

He said that he and Ms. Wang’s daughter tried to apply for their own protest permit on Tuesday but that the police would not even give them the necessary forms.

The two elderly women were given administrative sentences to re-education through labor, known as laojiao, which seeks to reform political and religious dissenters and those charged with minor crimes like prostitution and petty theft. Government officials say that 290,000 people are detained in re-education centers for terms ranging from one to three years, although detentions can be extended for those whose rehabilitation is deemed inadequate.

Human rights advocates have long criticized the system because punishment is handed down by officials without trials or means of appeal. Last year, the government briefly grappled with revamping the system but backed off in the face of opposition from public security officials.

Although it is unlikely that women as old as Ms. Wu and Ms. Wang would be forced into hard labor, many of those sentenced to laojiao often toil in agricultural or factory work and are forced to confess their transgressions.

Tang Xuemei contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/sp...21protest.html





More Americans Held as China Steps Up Scrutiny
Ralph Jennings and Lindsay Beck

At least eight American blogger-activists and several other foreigners have been detained in Beijing as the government intensifies a crackdown on pro-Tibetan protests in the home stretch of the Olympics, rights groups said on Wednesday.

Students for a Free Tibet earlier said authorities detained five self-styled "citizen journalists" who were in Beijing to promote Tibetan freedom on Tuesday. The New York-based group said activist-artist James Powderly had also been nabbed.

Later on Wednesday, the group said four more protesters, including two Americans and a British national, were also detained after unfurling a Tibetan flag outside the National Stadium, or "Bird's Nest."

The Beijing Olympics have not been dogged by the widespread demonstrations that authorities had feared. Several protesters advocating for Tibet independence have nonetheless managed to breach tight security, in one case hanging a "Free Tibet" banner outside the headquarters of the state broadcaster.

China is particularly sensitive to criticism of its rule in Tibet, the far-western region Communist troops entered in 1950.

"In relation to foreigners holding demonstrations in Beijing in support of Tibet independence, competent authorities have the right to handle these things according to law," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference on Wednesday.

"I'd also like to emphasize that in China, activities that support Tibet independence will be strongly condemned by the Chinese people and will not be welcomed."

Web Sites Blocked

The Committee to Protect Journalists said China had blocked more than 50 Web sites carrying news or advocating on behalf of pro-Tibetan groups, including the group's site (http://www.cpj.org), before the Games began, reneging on pre-Olympics promises of Internet freedoms.

A member of Students for a Free Tibet said the group had experienced cyberattacks aimed at making its U.S. Web site hard to use.

New York-based Human Rights in China says 24 protesters -- critics of the Communist Party and their family members -- were detained or put under watch before the Olympics opened.

Beijing resident Dong Jiqin said his wife Ni Yulan was jailed in April when authorities began clearing out activists and others they felt may draw media attention away from the Games.

"I cannot watch the Games," Dong said from his cluttered apartment in the heart of the capital. "I'm afraid my wife isn't safe. We think the Olympics should be held, but I am just not in the mood to watch it."

In another case, petitioners Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, were sentenced to one year of "re-education through labor" after repeatedly applying to demonstrate in areas set aside for protests during the Games, Human Rights in China said.

"In China, as in other countries, applications for demonstrations must go through legal procedures," the Foreign Ministry's Qin said when asked about the two petitioners.

None of dozens of applications to protest has been approved.

"They wanted to see us stuck in jail so the Olympics would look better," Dong said.

(Additional reporting by Gary Crosse in New York)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNe...0?feedType=RSS





Airline Captain, Lawyer, Child on Terror 'Watch List'
Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government's defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there's one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government's terrorist "watch list."

That means he can't use an airport kiosk to check in; he can't do it online; he can't do it curbside. Instead, like thousands of Americans whose names match a name or alias used by a suspected terrorist on the list, he must go to the ticket counter and have an agent verify that he is James Robinson, the pilot, and not James Robinson, the terrorist.

"Shocking's a good word; frustrating," Robinson -- the pilot -- said. "I'm carrying a weapon, flying a multimillion-dollar jet with passengers, but I'm still screened as, you know, on the terrorist watch list."

The American Civil Liberties Union estimates more than 1 million names have been added to the watch list since the September 11 attacks.

The FBI, which manages the Terrorist Screening Database, disputes that figure. It says that there are about 400,000 actual people on the list and that about 95 percent of those people are not U.S. citizens. Watch how three people found themselves on terror watch list »

"There's going to come a point in time where everybody's on the list," Robinson said.

Robinson is not the only person with that name flagged on the list.

Since airing a story this summer about how Correspondent Drew Griffin began getting told he was on the watch list -- coincidentally after he wrote a series critical of the TSA's Federal Air Marshal Service -- CNN has received dozens of e-mails and iReport submissions from viewers who also have found themselves on the watch list.

It turns out that three people named "James Robinson" found their names on the list in early 2005. iReport.com: Do you think your name is on the list?

Besides the airline pilot, there's the James Robinson who served as U.S. attorney in Detroit, Michigan, and as an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration; and James Robinson of California, who loves tennis, swimming and flying to the East Coast to see his grandmother.

He's 8.

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know."

Though he doesn't even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.

Denise Robinson said that no one in the government even told her her son is on the watch list but that it wasn't hard to figure out. Checking in at curbside three years ago, the family was told they couldn't get boarding passes and were hustled to the ticket counter.

She said the ticket agent made a number of phone calls and kept asking which among her husband and two sons was James.

"And all of a sudden he says, 'How old is he?' " Robinson recounted. She said she responded numerous times, "He's 5."

The agent handed them paperwork and refused to tell them what the problem was but urged them to fill out the forms. The documents were Department of Homeland Security paperwork to get off the watch list.

Not knowing which of the three might be targeted, she sent in the required documents for the entire family -- and got back one letter, addressed to James.

Congress has demanded that the TSA and Homeland Security fix the problems with the list that are making travel so difficult for so many Americans. Prominent lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and civil rights leader-turned-Georgia congressman John Lewis, also have encountered watch list difficulties.

"I want the burden of clearing this up to be on the agencies that are the holders of responsibilities: the Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general of the United States," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who has called for investigations into why Griffin wound up on the list after his critical reporting.

The FBI won't confirm any name on the list. And the TSA says Kennedy and Lewis aren't on the list, even though they have been stopped.

But although the list is clearly bloated with misidentifications by every official's account, CNN has learned that it may also be ineffective. Numerous people, including all three Robinsons, have figured out that there are ways not to get flagged by the watch list.

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as "J. Pierce Robinson" also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

Capt. James Robinson said he has learned that "Jim Robinson" and "J.K. Robinson" are not on the list.

And Griffin has tested its effectiveness. When he runs his first and middle name together when making a reservation online, he has no problem checking in at the airport.

The TSA has said the problem lies with the airlines and threatened to fine airlines that tell passengers they are on the watch list. That didn't sit well with the airlines, who through the Air Transport Association said they have been waiting for four years for the TSA to come up with a fix.

Those comments apparently sparked a recent meeting between TSA chief Kip Hawley and airline representatives. Following that meeting, a spokesman for the ATA said the airlines and TSA would cooperate to make things work.

But then last week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff seemed to re-ignite the controversy over who is to blame for the watch list failure.

"We told the airlines we would allow them, if someone gave a birth date, to exclude that person from the list," Chertoff said during a question-and-answer session at the University of Southern California.

"Let the person get their boarding pass directly at home or at the kiosk, just like everyone else. Some airlines have done this; some have chosen not to because they don't want to spend the money."

Chertoff then implied that the financially strapped airlines might comply if they could make money from the process.

"And their attitude is, 'Well, TSA gets the blame for it,' so I guess if they can do what they are doing now with food and can charge you for it -- but I hate to suggest that. I may give them an idea," he said.

The ATA, the trade association for the airlines, said carriers will work with the TSA and said enrolling in a frequent-flyer program could help.

"We are now awaiting TSA's announced January 2009 implementation of the Secure Flight Program, which is expected to reduce the number of misidentified passengers," the association said in a written statement.

"In the meantime, the airlines worked collaboratively with TSA to further minimize unnecessary passenger inconvenience. ... A key part of that short-term solution relies on frequent-flier program enrollment to help resolve misidentification issues and as a result we are urging passengers to enroll."
All the Robinsons are enrolled in frequent-flyer programs, and all have filled out the paperwork that Chertoff said is an easy way to get them off the watch list. But it has been three years since all three James Robinsons filled out those forms, and their cases have yet to be resolved.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/19/tsa...ist/index.html





TSA Inspector Damages 9 Planes At O'Hare

Nine American Eagle aircraft were grounded today at Chicago O'Hare after they were damaged by a TSA inspector according to ABC News. TSA spokesperson Elio Montenegro confirmed the incident occurred when an inspector was conducting an overnight security check and decided to see if he could climb on top of parked aircraft in order to gain entry into them. Unfortunately, instead of using a ladder, the TSA inspector decided to use the aircraft's sensitive exterior probes to climb up on top. Specifically the TAT (Total Air Temperature) probe was selected as a foot hold.

No word on what type of aircraft were damaged but American Eagle pilots were obviously furious with this act and one was quick to post on an online forum, "The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers." Another commented the TSA agents, "are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk." Forty Eagle flights were delayed today as a result of the inspector's action.

Montenegro assured that the "inspector was following routine procedure for securing the aircraft that were on the tarmac." Interesting tactic by the TSA as I guess a plane that can't fly is the most secure plane.
http://www.pointniner.com/2008/08/ts...-at-ohare.html





How Big Brother Watches Your Every Move

In our ever-growing surveillance society, the average Briton is being recorded 3,000 times a week. Richard Gray reports.

With every telephone call, swipe of a card and click of a mouse, information is being recorded, compiled and stored about Britain's citizens.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has now uncovered just how much personal data is being collected about individuals by the Government, law enforcement agencies and private companies each day.

In one week, the average person living in Britain has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, most of which is kept in databases for years and in some cases indefinitely.

The data include details about shopping habits, mobile phone use, emails, locations during the day, journeys and internet searches.

In many cases this information is kept by companies such as banks and shops, but in certain circumstances they can be asked to hand it over to a range of legal authorities.

Britain's information watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, has called for tighter regulation of the amount of data held about citizens and urged the public to restrict the information they allow organisations to hold on them.

This newspaper's findings come days after the Government published plans to grant local authorities and other public bodies access to the email and internet records of millions. Phone companies already retain data about their customers and give it to 650 public bodies on request.

The loss of data by Government departments, including an incident where HM Revenue and Customs mislaid computer disks containing the personal details of 25 million people, has heightened concerns about the amount of information being stored.

David Smith, deputy information commissioner, said: "As more and more information is collected and kept on all of us, we are very concerned that appropriate safeguards go along with that.

"People should know what is happening with their information and have a choice.

"Our concern is that what is kept with the justification of preventing and detecting terrorism, can then be used for minor purposes such as pursuing people for parking fines."

Earlier this year the Commons home affairs select committee recommended new controls and regulations on the accumulation of information by the state.

Mobile phones

Every day the average person makes three mobile phone calls and sends at least two text messages.

Each time the network provider logs information about who was called as well as the caller's location and direction of travel, worked out by triangulation from phone masts.

Customers can also have their locations tracked even when they are not using their phones, as the devices send out unique identifying signals at regular intervals.

All of this information can be accessed by police and other public authorities investigating crimes.

The internet

Internet service providers (ISPs) compile information about their customers when they go online, including name, address, the unique identification number for the connection, known as an IP address, any browser used and location.

They also keep details of emails, such as whom they were sent to, together with the date and time they were sent. An average of 50 websites are visited and 32 emails sent per person in Britain every day.

Privacy campaigners have expressed concern that the country's three biggest ISPs – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – now provide this data to a digital advertising company called Phorm so that it can analyse web surfing habits.

ISPs are already voluntarily providing information they hold about their customers if requested by law enforcement agencies and public authorities. A consultation published last week by the Government would make it a legal requirement for ISPs to provide a customer's personal information when requested. A total of 520,000 requests were made by public officials for telephone and internet details last year, an increase from around 350,000 the previous year.

Internet search engines also compile data about their users, including the IP address and what was searched for. Google receives around 68 searches from the average person each day and stores this data for 18 months.

Dr Ian Brown, a research fellow on privacy at Oxford University, said: "Companies such as Google and internet service providers are building up huge databases of data about internet users.

"These companies may be compelled, through a legal action, to hand over this information to third parties or the Government, or the companies may lose the data and it can then be misused."

Loyalty cards

Store "loyalty" cards also retain large amounts of information about individuals who have signed up to use them. They link a person's personal details to the outlets used, the transaction times and how much is spent.

In the case of Nectar cards, which are used by more than 10 million people in Britain once a week, information from dozens of shops is compiled, giving a detailed picture of a cardholder's shopping habits.

A spokesman for Loyalty Management UK, which runs the Nectar programme, insisted that information about the items bought was not compiled, but some partners in the scheme, such as Sainsbury's, use their till records to compile that information.

She admitted that the personal information that is compiled under the Nectar scheme is kept indefinitely until individuals close their account and ask for their information to be destroyed. In criminal inquiries, police can request the details held by Nectar.

Banks

Banks can also be required to hand over personal account information to the authorities if requested as part of an investigation.

They also provide personal data to credit reference agencies, debt collectors and fraud prevention organisations.

Debit and credit card transactions can give information about where and on what people are spending their money.

CCTV

The biggest source of surveillance in Britain is through the network of CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras. On average, an individual will appear on 300 CCTV cameras during a day and those tapes are kept by many organisations for indefinite lengths of time.

On the London Underground network, Transport for London (TfL) keeps footage for a minimum of 14 days. TfL operates more than 8,500 CCTV cameras in its underground stations, 1,550 cameras on tube trains and up to 60,000 cameras on buses.

Network Rail refused to say how many CCTV cameras it operates or for how long the footage is kept.

Britain now has more CCTV cameras in public spaces than any other country in the world. A study in 2002 estimated that there were around 4.2 million cameras, but that number is likely to now be far higher.

Number plate recognition

The latest development in CCTV is the increased use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which read number-plates and search databases for signs that a vehicle has been used in crime.

A national automatic number plate recognition system is maintained by the Association of Chief Police Officers along motorways and main roads. Every number plate picked up by the system is stored in a database with date, time and location for two years.

Public transport

Travel passes such as the Oyster Card used in London and the Key card, in Oxford, can also reveal remarkable amounts of information about an individual. When they are registered to a person's name, they record journey history, dates, times and fares.

A spokesman for TfL, which runs the Oyster Card system, insisted that access to this information was restricted to its customer services agents.

Police, however, can also obtain this information and have used Oyster Card journey records as evidence in criminal cases.

The workplace

Employers are increasingly using radio-tagged security passes for employees, providing them with information about when staff enter and leave the office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...very-move.html





Terrified Mexicans Splash Out On Chip Implants So Satellites Can Trace Them If They're Kidnapped
Daily Mail Reporter

Middle-class families in Mexico are having tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so that satellites can track them if they are kidnapped.

Sales of the device have jumped by 13 per cent this year after kidnappings surged by almost 40 per cent in the country between 2004 and 2007.

The crystal-encased chip, which is the size and shape of a grain of rice, is injected into clients' bodies with a syringe.

Detractors say the chips, which cost £2,000 plus an annual fee of £1,100, give a false sense of security.

Mexico ranks with conflict zones such as Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions.

One client, Cristina, 28, who did not want to give her last name, said: 'It's not like we are wealthy, but they'll kidnap you for a watch. Everyone is living in fear.'

The recent kidnapping and murder of Fernando Marti, 14, the son of a well-known businessman, sparked an outcry in a country already hardened to crime.

Most kidnappings in Mexico go unreported, many of them cases of 'express kidnapping' where the victim is grabbed and forced to withdraw money from automatic cash machines.

Official statistics show 751 kidnappings in the country last year, but the independent crime research institute ICESI says the number could have exceeded 7,000.

Xega, based in the central Mexican city of Quererato, designed global positioning systems to track stolen vehicles until a company owner was kidnapped in broad daylight in 2001.

Frustrated by his powerlessness to call for help, the company adapted the technology to track stolen people.

Most people get the chips injected into their arms between the skin and muscle where they cannot be seen.

Customers who fear they are being kidnapped press a panic button on an external device to alert Xega, which then calls the police.

'Before, they only kidnapped key, well-known economically successful people like industrialists and landowners. Now they are kidnapping people from the middle class,' said Sergio Galvan, Xega's commercial director.

Katherine Albrecht, a U.S. consumer privacy activist, says the chip is a flashy, overpriced gadget that only identifies a person and cannot locate someone without another, bigger GPS device that kidnappers can easily find and destroy.

She said fear of kidnapping was driving well-off Mexicans to buy a technology that had yet to prove useful.

'They are a prime target because they've got money and they've got a worry and you can combine those two and offer them a false sense of security which is exactly what this is,' she said.

President Felipe Calderon has come under heavy pressure to stamp out violent crime. He hosted a meeting on Thursday of security chiefs and state governors.

Outside of Mexico, U.S. company VeriChip Corp uses similar radio-wave technology to identify patients in critical condition at hospitals or find elderly people who wander away from their homes.

Xega sees kidnapping as a growth industry and is planning to expand its services next year to Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worl...kidnapped.html





Pope Warns Italy in Danger of Returning to Fascism

Berlusconi moves to limit damage caused by anti-racism comments
John Hooper

Silvio Berlusconi's government was today engaged in a vigorous damage limitation exercise after Pope Benedict appeared to lend his immense moral authority to speculation that Italy was in danger of returning to fascism under the tycoon's hardline, rightwing leadership.

In his customary midday Sunday address, the pontiff expressed concern at "recent examples of racism" and reminded Catholics it was their duty to steer others in society away from "racism, intolerance and [the] exclusion [of others]".

On any other day, his remarks might have been seen as no more than a restatement of official Catholic doctrine. But they came instead in the midst of a furious dispute over an editorial published by Italy's bestselling Catholic weekly, Famiglia Cristiana.
In an editorial on Friday, condemning recent government moves against immigrants and Roma, the magazine said it was to be hoped fascism was not "resurfacing in our country under another guise". The jibe outraged Berlusconi's supporters, many of whom are themselves pious Catholics.

The leader of his parliamentary group in the upper house, Maurizio Gasparri, announced he would personally sue the priest who is Famiglia Cristiana's editor while the junior minister with responsibility for family affairs, Carlo Giovanardi, said the magazine was "possessed by ideological malice".

In an effort to calm the row, the Vatican's spokesman put out a statement stressing that Famiglia Cristiana was not authorised to speak on behalf of either the Holy See or the Italian bishops' conference - something which, as the magazine's editor noted, it had never anyway claimed to do.

Coming against this background, the pope's comments were interpreted by Berlusconi's critics as a signal that the Vatican was not climbing down or distancing itself from Famiglia Cristiana's interpretation.

Benedict cited in his address the story from Matthew's gospel of Jesus's encounter with a pagan woman and how he rose above his initial misgivings to perform a miracle for her daughter.

The pope said: "One of humanity's great conquests is indeed the overcoming of racism. Unfortunately, however, there are new and worrying examples of this in various countries, often linked to social and economic problems that nonetheless can never justify contempt or racial discrimination."

Berlusconi's family minister, Giovanardi, denied Benedict's words were aimed at the government. "The pope has a global perspective", he said. "He wasn't talking about Italy."

Famiglia Cristiana's editor, Father Antonio Sciortino, agreed that the pope "was certainly speaking to the whole world". But he added: "And therefore also to Italy where, sorry to say, there are many signs of racism that trouble us and which cannot be hidden."

Urged on by his allies in the anti-immigrant Northern League, Berlusconi has ordered a crackdown on crime, and the illegal immigrants his government says is responsible for a disproportionate share of it.

Earlier this month, the Berlusconi government ordered troops onto the streets to combat an alleged crime wave it blames largely on illegal immigrants and Roma. Interior ministry figures show that more than a third of the arrests carried out by police last year were of non-Italians.

Illegal immigration has been made an offence; mayors have been given new security powers, and deportations have been stepped up.

So far, church leaders have been far more outspoken in their criticism of the government's policies than Italy's main, centre-left opposition party. Earlier this month, they succeeded in blocking an attempt by the mayor of Rome to pass a measure - seemingly aimed at Gypsies - that banned people from rummaging in garbage containers.

In June, Famiglia Cristiana said a government plan to take the fingerprints of Roma children was "indecent".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2008/aug/18/italy





SPAIN: Green Light to Warrantless Internet Searches by the Police

The Spanish Supreme Court has given a green light to internet tracking by the police force, namely, the peer-to-peer file sharing programme E-mule, with a view to track down paedophiles. The high court therefore overturns a judgement of 2 May 2007 by the Tarragona Regional Court, which found a woman innocent of a crime for facilitating children pornographic material, considering it had caused a serious harm to her fundamental right to secrecy in communications.

According to the Supreme Court ruling, the purpose of these searches are to unveil the concealed identity of those who access files containing children pornography and prevent that access to such information, considered illegal or unlawful, may be carried out by any user, thereby it is not required to have an authorisation by the Court in order to reach information which is public and has been disclosed by the user himself. There are always traces of such accesses and the user knows this. Anyone who uses software such as E-mule assumes that much of the data disclosed becomes public to Internet users, something which is or should be borne in mind by them, and data known to the police, which were publicly available on the Internet, were unprotected.

As a result, it should be stressed that by carrying out such searches, the judicial police were performing their duties to fight against crime and arrest the criminals responsible for such crimes, thus such searches are fully lawful.

However, the Tarragona Regional Court questioned the methods being used by the police force as they had been carried out without a court order. The Court deemed that the defendant could not be accused of having downloaded child pornography content from the internet as evidence thereof had been obtained by means seriously infringing her own right to secrecy in communications. The only fact supported by evidence was that she was a regular user of the e-mule programme, which she used to download music, films or pictures. The Regional Court''''''''s judgment further stressed that by carrying a search on e-mule, one cannot be assured that the content inside a file actually corresponds to the words written in the title, as it often occurs. The defendant, in effect, conducted several searches but there was no evidence she was trying to download child pornography, although sometimes, such searches did lead to the download of such contents, which the defendant would erase from her computer.

The Prosecutor appealed the decision nevertheless and the Supreme Court has ruled that the Regional Court has to consider the rejected evidence and pass a new judgement.
http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_new...x?s=sa&id=1353





New Guidelines Would Give F.B.I. Broader Powers
Eric Lichtblau

A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations.

Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by what they heard.

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

As the end of the Bush administration nears, the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Congress overhauled the federal wiretapping law in July, for instance, and President Bush issued an executive order this month ratifying new roles for intelligence agencies. Other pending changes would also authorize greater sharing of intelligence information with the local police, a major push in the last seven years.

The Justice Department is already expecting criticism over the F.B.I. guidelines. In an effort to pre-empt critics, Mr. Mukasey gave a speech last week in Portland, Ore., describing the unfinished plan as an effort to “integrate more completely and harmonize the standards that apply to the F.B.I.’s activities.” Differing standards, he said, have caused confusion for field agents.

Mr. Mukasey emphasized that the F.B.I. would still need a “valid purpose” for an investigation, and that it could not be “simply based on somebody’s race, religion, or exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Rather than expanding government power, he said, “this document clarifies the rules by which the F.B.I. conducts its intelligence mission.”

In 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites like mosques or monitor Web sites in the course of national security investigations. The next year, Mr. Bush issued guidelines allowing officials to use ethnicity or race in “narrow” circumstances to detect a terrorist threat.

The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.

Michael German, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. agent, said the plan appeared to open the door still further to the use of data-mining profiles in tracking terrorism.

“This seems to be based on the idea that the government can take a bunch of data and create a profile that can be used to identify future bad guys,” he said. “But that has not been demonstrated to be true anywhere else.”

The Justice Department said Wednesday that in light of requests from members of Congress for more information, Mr. Mukasey would agree not to sign the new guidelines before a Sept. 17 Congressional hearing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/washington/21fbi.html





Man Arrested and Locked up for Five Hours After Taking Photo of Police Van Ignoring 'No Entry' Sign
Andy Dolan

Living on a one-way street, Andrew Carter is always careful to obey the rules of the road.

So when he saw a police constable ignore no entry signs to reverse up a one-way street to reach a chip shop he went over to protest about the illegal manoeuvre and photograph the officer and his vehicle.

It led to the 44-year-old being arrested and slung in a cell after PC Aqil Farooq first fired off a volley of abuse before knocking the camera to the floor.

He was then cuffed, arrested and bundled into the back of the vehicle over claims he had 'assaulted' an officer with his camera, resisted arrest and was drunk and disorderly.

Mr Carter, from Bedminster, Bristol, was locked in a police cell for five hours and was released on police bail at midnight.

He immediately lodged an official complaint and has since received a personal apology from PC Farooq and Rob Beckley, Deputy Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

The force today refused to comment on the case, except to say that the disciplinary process was resolved to Mr Carters 'satisfaction'.

It is understood no further action was taken against the PC, a member of the Black Police Association's(BPA) Avon and Somerset branch.

According to a report from the Bristol Equalities Network published two years ago, PC Farooq's duties within the BPA included work with the wider community on 'good relations with the police'.

At the time he was the branch's general secretary.

Today, Mr Carter said he was unaware of any further action taken against the officer.

He described his ordeal as a 'very frightening experience' but said he was 'relatively happy' with the outcome.

The bachelor was walking his dogs close to his home when he saw PC Farooq ignore 'no entry' signs to reverse down the road in January this year.

The plumber called out to PC Farooq and a female colleague to stop but the officer parked outside a fish and chip shop and simply told Mr Carter that the pair were on 'police business'.

Mr Carter decided to photograph the van but when he then snapped the two officers PC Farooq rushed out from the chip shop and smashed the camera from his hand.

He was then arrested.

Mr Carter said: 'The no entry signs mean you are supposed to drive all the way around the block, like I do every night, but there are a fair number of people who don't obey them.

'I was nearly knocked down once so when the police van did it I sort of said: 'Hey mate no entry' but he just shouted out the window: 'F**k off, this is police business.'

'But when I took a photo of them he came running out, battered the camera from my hand onto the floor and arrested me for three crimes, none of which I'd committed.'

PC Farooq was accompanied in the van by an unnamed WPC and the pair claim they were at the takeaway to examine CCTV footage relating to a separate event.

The self-employed plumber was never charged with any offences and his official complaint over his wrongful arrest led PC Farooq to face a disciplinary tribunal in July, which Mr Carter attended.

PC Farooq - who has kept his job - made a face-to-face apology at the hearing.

A letter written to Mr Carter by Deputy Chief Constable Beckley, who chaired the tribunal, added a 'personal apology' for PC Farooq's 'totally unacceptable' behaviour.

It read: 'I wanted to write to you to thank you for attending and also add my personal apology for the way you were treated.

'We expect the highest standards of our officers and PC Farooq fell below what was required. His colleagues feel he let us down and he has learnt a difficult lesson.

'He realises his actions were totally unacceptable and he could and should have apologised to you much earlier.

'His performance will be monitored in the future. I will be meeting him in the next few weeks and will reinforce our expectations of his behaviour.'

Mr Carter, who is still pursuing compensation from Avon and Somerset Constabulary, added: 'I said from the outset that I didn't want a head on a stick.

'As he long as the police officer acknowledged what he did was wrong and apologised to me then I didn't want him to be sacked.

'At the end of the day I'm just glad my complaint was upheld because if the WPC hadn't told the truth I could have been prosecuted myself.'

PC Farooq was today unavailable for comment.

'But when I took a photo of them he came running out, battered the camera from my hand onto the floor and arrested me for three crimes, none of which I'd committed.

'Although I'm relatively happy with his personal apology it was a very frightening experience and not one I'd want to go through again.

'All I had done was photograph these police officers doing something illegal, which is ironic because I was the one who ended up being arrested.'

The incident occurred at around 7pm on January 3 in Bedminster, Bristol, outside a fish and chip shop near Mr Carter's home.

PC Farooq was accompanied in the van by an unnamed WPC and the pair claim they were at the eatery to examine CCTV footage relating to a separate event.

After his arrest Andrew spent five hours in a cell at Broadbury Road police station - where he returned to answer bail a week later with his solicitor, which took another five hours.

The self-employed plumber was never charged with any offences and his official complaint over his wrongful arrest led PC Farooq to face a disciplinary tribunal in July.

Mr Carter chose to attend the hearing, where PC Farooq - who has kept his job - made a face-to-face apology.

A letter written to Mr Carter by Deputy Chief Constable Beckley, who chaired the tribunal, added a 'personal apology' for PC Farooq's 'totally unacceptable' behaviour.

It reads: 'I wanted to write to you to thank you for attending and also add my personal apology for the way you were treated.

'I know that PC Farooq apologised personally to you but I would also like to add my apologies on behalf of Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

'We expect the highest standards of our officers and PC Farooq fell below what was required. His colleagues feel he let us down and he has learnt a difficult lesson.

'He realises his actions were totally unacceptable and he could and should have apologised to you much earlier.

'His performance will be monitored in the future. I will be meeting him in the next few weeks and will reinforce our expectations of his behaviour.'

Bachelor Andrew, who is still pursuing compensation from Avon and Somerset Constabulary, added: 'I said from the outset that I didn't want a head on a stick.

'As long as the police officer acknowledged what he did was wrong and apologised to me then I didn't want him to be sacked.

'At the end of the day I'm just glad my complaint was upheld because if the WPC hadn't told the truth I could have been prosecuted myself.'

Avon and Somerset police declined to comment further.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ntry-sign.html





Student Files Are Exposed on Web Site
Brad Stone

The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks.

A flaw in configuring the site allowed anyone to type in a relatively simple Web address and have unfettered access to hundreds of files on the company’s computer network, including educational materials and internal communications.

Another test-preparatory company said it stumbled on the files while doing competitive research. This company provided The New York Times with the Web address of the internal files on the condition that it not be named. The Times informed the Princeton Review of the problem on Monday, and the company promptly shut off access to that portion of its site.

One file on the site contained information on about 34,000 students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla., where the Princeton Review was hired to build an online tool to help the county measure students’ academic progress. The file included the students’ birthdays and ethnicities, whether they had learning disabilities, whether English was their second language, and their level of performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is given to students in grades 3 to 11.

Another folder contained dozens of files with names and birth dates for 74,000 students in the school system of Fairfax County, Va., which had hired the Princeton Review to measure and improve student performance.

The Princeton Review said the student information should have been protected by a password, but that the protection was most likely lost when the company moved its site to a new Internet provider in late June. The company said it was looking into how many people might have accessed the files, some of which could be found through search engines.

“As soon as I found out about this security issue we acted immediately to shut down any access to this information,” said Stephen C. Richards, the company’s chief operating officer. “The Princeton Review takes Internet privacy seriously, and we are currently conducting a review of all of our procedures.”

Several other companies have recently committed similar Internet blunders. The British mobile operator O2 misconfigured its cellphone photo service so that its customer’s private images were accessible to anyone using Google. And Facebook recently exposed the birth dates of some users who had wanted to keep them private.

Natalie Roca, executive director for research and testing at the Sarasota County public schools, said she was “surprised and troubled” by the release of the student data. She said the student information the county gave to the Princeton Review to build the testing tool was strictly confidential.

In addition to the information on students, the site contained the Princeton Review’s educational materials for the LSAT, PSAT and SAT exams, course schedules, an internal analysis of the effectiveness of the company’s instructors, and the entire texts of some Princeton Review books, like the 2008 edition of “Cracking the LSAT.”

One folder on the Web site gave unusual insight into how test preparation companies use older exams to prepare their practice tests. The folder contained digital scans of eight official SATs and six PSAT exams from 2005 through 2007. The tests are created by the Educational Testing Service, a nonprofit organization in Princeton, N.J.

An accompanying guide for Princeton Review exam writers, dated January 2008, said that the company’s “current SAT course diagnostic tests are not as reflective of the real E.T.S. tests as they should be.” It then described “spiraling,” or writing a new practice question based on an old question from the official test. The document instructs authors to avoid copyright infringement by obeying the “three word rule” — ensuring that no three consecutive words remain the same.

Ray Nicosia, the executive director of test security for the Educational Testing Service, said the company had retired the exams that were made available on the Princeton Review Web site and now sells them to tutorial companies. He said he would need more information to determine whether the Princeton Review had properly attained and used the exams.

The Web error indicates that the Princeton Review neglected several accepted online security practices.

In addition to failing to properly restrict access to the student information, the company combined confidential and innocuous files on the same computers — which security researchers say is never a good idea.

“In this case it would have made sense for the company to separate information such as the names of the students from their test scores and whatever confidential information the company had,” said Mike Haro, an analyst at Sophos, an Internet security firm. “But we are finding that companies today don’t change until they have experienced the pain of a data breach that is exposed to the public.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/te.../19review.html





U.S. at Risk of Cyberattacks, Experts Say

A cyberattack on the U.S. could hobble utilities, transportation and other infrastructure
Brandon Griggs

The next large-scale military or terrorist attack on the United States, if and when it happens, may not involve airplanes or bombs or even intruders breaching American borders.

Cyberattackers shut down one Georgian government site and defaced another with images of Adolf Hitler.

Instead, such an assault may be carried out in cyberspace by shadowy hackers half a world away. And Internet security experts believe that it could be just as devastating to the U.S.'s economy and infrastructure as a deadly bombing.

Experts say last week's attack on the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in which a Russian military offensive was preceded by an Internet assault that overwhelmed Georgian government Web sites, signals a new kind of cyberwar, one for which the United States is not fully prepared.

"Nobody's come up with a way to prevent this from happening, even here in the U.S.," said Tom Burling, acting chief executive of Tulip Systems, an Atlanta, Georgia, Web-hosting firm that volunteered its Internet servers to protect the nation of Georgia's Web sites from malicious traffic.

"The U.S. is probably more Internet-dependent than any place in the world. So to that extent, we're more vulnerable than any place in the world to this kind of attack," Burling added. "So much of what we're doing [in the United States] is out there on the Internet, and all of that can be taken down at once." Watch experts discuss threat »

"This is such a crucial issue. At every level, our security now is dependent on computers," said Scott Borg, director of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute. "It's a whole new era. Political and military conflicts now will almost always have a cyber component. The chief targets will be critical infrastructure, and the attacks will emerge from within our own computer systems."

Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.

Hackers shut down the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for 24 hours and defaced the Georgian parliament site with images of Adolf Hitler. Saakashvili blamed Russia for the attacks, although the Russian government said it was not involved.

Web sites and computer networks have been targeted by hackers for decades, although large-scale, coordinated cyberattacks are still a relatively new phenomenon. Some Internet-security experts believe that the Georgia conflict marks the first time a known cyberattack has coincided with a ground war, but others said that similar computer attacks have accompanied military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The challenge to U.S. security experts is that such attacks can be mounted anonymously, and relatively cheaply, from anywhere in the world. Georgia's attackers employed "botnets," or malicious automated programs that take root undetected in far-flung computers and barrage their targets with useless data. By last Friday, some of those botnets were originating from Comcast Internet addresses in the United States, Burling said.

"It only takes a couple of experts; it doesn't take a whole cyber infantry division to pull something like this off," said Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based computer security firm. "For a very small investment in resources, you can have a huge impact."

In the United States, government computer networks parry millions of attempted intrusions every day, Internet-security experts say. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a National Cybersecurity Center this year to coordinate federal cyberdefense efforts and quicken responsiveness. However, a recent Homeland Security Department intelligence report, obtained by The Associated Press, concluded that there are no effective means to prevent a coordinated attack on U.S. Web sites.

"When it comes to our government IT security, we're pretty strong in protecting against [attacks]," Homeland Security spokesman William R. Knocke told CNN. "But I wouldn't say ... we're 100 percent impenetrable."

So what would a cyberattack on the United States look like? And where is the U.S. most vulnerable? It depends on who you talk to.

Borg does not believe that the U.S. is susceptible to the kind of attacks launched at Georgia.

"We can command so much bandwidth that it's hard to overwhelm our servers," he said. "We are vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks, but right now most of the people who want to do us harm don't have those capabilities."

The Web sites of key government security agencies, such as the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, are difficult to bring down, experts said. So are the computer networks of large American banks. But experts say a successful, large-scale attack on U.S. computer systems could hobble electric-power grids, transportation networks and industrial-supply chains.

"You'd see some disruption of essential services, like electricity. You'd definitely see espionage," said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Would it be decisive? No. Nobody's going to win a conflict with the United States in cyberspace. But would it be disruptive and irritating? Yes."

Federal researchers who launched an experimental cyberattack last year in Idaho caused a generator to self-destruct, prompting fears about the effect of a real attack on the nation's electrical supply.

And a May report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplies power to almost 9 million people in the southeastern U.S., had not installed sufficient cybersecurity measures. Spokesman Jim Allen said the TVA, the nation's largest publicly owned utility company, is "on track" to correct the problems.

What frustrates computer-security experts is that the features that make the Internet such an invaluable resource -- its openness and interconnectedness -- also make it easier for hackers to do harm. As a staple of 21st-century warfare, cyberattacks will become increasingly sophisticated, forcing governments and private industry to build ever-stronger firewalls and other defenses, experts said.

Also, vague international laws and a lack of accountability will continue to make tracking down and prosecuting cyberattackers difficult.
"We don't know quite what the rules are for this kind of conflict. If it's spying, it's illegal. But is it an act of war? And who do you arrest?" Lewis asked. "We're much safer [in the U.S.] than we were a year ago. But we still have a long way to go."
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/...are/index.html





States Throw Out Costly Electronic Voting Machines
Deborah Hastings

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines. Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap.

A few more are holding out hope that the machines, some of which were purchased for as much as $5,000, could one day be resurrected.

"We store them very, very carefully in the hopes that someone, someday may decide that we can use them again," said San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, whose jurisdiction spent $25 million on the devices.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the disputed 2000 presidential recount, Congress provided more than $3 billion to replace punch card and lever-operated machines. State officials across the country said the new systems would eliminate human error and political tampering.

But problems with the machines soon followed: vanishing votes, breakdowns, malfunctions and increasing evidence that the devices were vulnerable to hackers.

Beginning last year, states including California, Ohio and Florida abruptly ordered election officials to mothball their electronic machines. Over the last two years, the percentage of registered voters relying on touch-screen technology dropped from 44 percent to 36 percent.

In November, when the presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain ends, an estimated 57 percent of voters will rely on paper ballots.

But reverting to paper has caused its own problems. During this year's primary season, record numbers of voters showed up. That caused ballots to run out, which delayed the often-cumbersome task of feeding paper ballots into scanning machines.

Changing to paper also meant that local election districts had to spend extra money on printing costs.

November's general election could bring more of the same difficulties.

As of December, 30 states had spent more than $253 million on new voting systems, according to a report by the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that oversees spending of the $3 billion federal allotment.

But the agency does not know how many election districts have since abandoned those newly purchased systems.

"You'd have to talk to every one of the 10,072 election jurisdictions across the country," said Kimball Brace of Election Data Services, which tracks voting systems. "After 2000, everyone thought you could throw a bunch of money at the problem and make it go away right away. Elections ain't that kind of thing."

San Diego's Seiler said she was forced to shrink-wrap 10,200 machines after Secretary of State Debra Bowen banned the devices, saying they were susceptible to fraud.

Seiler disagreed. Like many local election officials, she likes the system just fine. She also is a former employee of the system's manufacturer.

"There has been no evidence of any tampering on these machines," she said. "It was all based on a probability."

Leading makers of voting machines have made similar statements and blame poorly trained poll workers and human error for most glitches.

Unlike most of her colleagues, Seiler does not have to spend any of her budget on printing paper ballots. The county's vendor _ Premier Elections Solutions Inc., which changed its name from Diebold Election Systems following years of controversy over the reliability of its machines _ bears those extra costs.

"I think we're the only county in the country that has that contract stipulation," Seiler said.

Kari Verjil, elections director for sprawling San Bernardino County, north of San Diego, is not so lucky.

"We're paying for the printed ballots," she said. "It's coming out of my budget."

In 2006, using electronic machines, the statewide primary cost her county $2.5 million. In 2008, using paper ballots cost $3.4 million.

"I have a huge inventory of machines that I am not able to use," she complained. "They are just sitting in our warehouse basically useless." Stacked to floor to ceiling are 4,000 machines purchased at $3,500 each. Total cost of that system: $16 million.

What will she do with them?

"It's a little difficult," she replied. "Who wants to buy a system that has been decertified? Especially when other states are following suit?"

Five months ago, Florida began unloading nearly 30,000 touch-screen machines to a recycling company, which will strip, crush or try to sell the devices to other countries and states. The recycling company earns part of all sales.

Ohio can't do anything about selling its $138 million system until lawsuits filed by the manufacturer and the secretary of state get sorted out.

The legal battle follows a string of problems dating to 2004, when malfunctioning machines led to hours-long lines at the polls. Days passed before votes were tallied.

Company management claims that election problems were caused by human error and complications from an antivirus software system.

And so in November, most of the state will still be using e-voting machines.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...081901984.html





A Third of New PCs Being Downgraded to XP, says Metrics Researcher

Vista may be what Microsoft sells, but XP remains popular
Gregg Keizer

More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to the older Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, a performance and metrics researcher said today.

According to Devil Mountain Software Inc., which operates a community-based testing network, nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.

"Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell or HP, or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine," said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain. "In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista."
Barth used data provided by users to Devil Mountain's Exo.performance.network — which it kicked off last year and has expanded by partnering with InfoWorld, a Computerworld sister publication — to come up with his numbers. By collating such things as the vendor and system model number with manufacturers' catalogs, Barth was able to identify machines that were probably shipped within the past six months, a period when virtually every new PC was offered with Vista preinstalled.

"The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base," Barth said. "People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights."

Under the terms of Microsoft's end-user licensing agreement, Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can be "downgraded" to XP Professional; businesses that purchase Vista Enterprise can also downgrade to XP.

Although Microsoft retired Windows XP from mainstream availability at the end of June — it stopped shipping the seven-year-old operating system to retail and large computer makers — some OEMs have continued to offer new PCs with XP preinstalled by doing the downgrade at the factory. Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, has promised that it will offer the downgrade option on its business-class desktops, notebooks and workstations through July 2009.

"Vista's installed base certainly doesn't equal the number of Vista licenses [that Microsoft has] sold," Barth said, citing the Exo.performance.network data as proof. "We're seeing this a lot in the financial sector."

Devil Mountain's primary product, the DMS Clarity Studio performance-analyzing software, is installed in large numbers at several major financial firms. "One client is not doing Vista at all, but they're refreshing their entire platform this year," Barth said. The company, a nationally known securities firm, is instead downgrading to the 64-bit version of Windows XP, he said.

Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. "Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn," he noted.

Even when stripping Vista down to core components to make it as close in functionality to XP as possible, Vista was 40% slower, Barth claimed, citing recent tests Devil Mountain has performed. "Vista's performance had been an ongoing problem, and the only thing that's saving Microsoft's bacon is the faster processors and more RAM on today's PCs," he said. "Moore's Law is always on their side."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9112885





Grokking SCO's Demise

Groklaw key to SCO's demise.
Frank Hayes

The SCO Group 's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. On Friday, Aug. 10, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled that SCO doesn't actually own the copyrights that it was using to threaten -- and in some cases, sue -- Linux users.

Of course, you already got that news, thanks to everyone from The Wall Street Journal to IT news sources.

And they all got it thanks to Groklaw.

It was the Web site Groklaw.net that broke the news and posted the complete 102-page ruling; after that, it was picked up by mainstream media and trade press. In fact, it's Groklaw that has covered every aspect of SCO's legal fights with Linux vendors IBM , Novell and Red Hat and Linux users DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone ever since paralegal Pamela Jones started the site as a hobby in 2003.

It's Groklaw that has published every scrap of legal and technical information available on the cases -- every brief, deposition and ruling, along with press releases, technical documentation and historical information.

It's Groklaw's loose network of volunteers that has haunted the Utah courthouse, collecting paperwork, reporting on hearings and transcribing everything in sight.

It's that same crowd of volunteers that has picked apart arguments, dredged up old news stories and computer manuals, and generally followed the SCO lawsuits with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for rotisserie baseball or, well, Linux.

All that has made it easy for reporters, analysts and deep-thinkers keeping an eye on the lawsuits. We just filtered out the partisan crowd noise -- no mistake, this is a pro-Linux crowd -- and dug into that virtual mountain of legal documents. Everything was there, posted, transcribed, organized and searchable.

That's why we all picked up the ruling from Groklaw.

And that treasure trove of documents is how we know now that SCO is stick-a-fork-in-it done.

See, those of us who have actually read our way through the SCO legal saga over the past four and a half years have already heard the claims and counterclaims in excruciating detail, walked them past legal eagles and made sense of the minutiae along the way. ---PB--- So when Judge Kimball ruled this month that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to Unix, we know he eliminated the basis for SCO's copyright claims against IBM, Red Hat and AutoZone, too. (DaimlerChrysler went to court in 2004 and demolished SCO's lawsuit against it with a different set of arguments.)

And when the judge ruled that Novell has the right to quash any lawsuits based on Unix licenses, we know he gutted what remained of SCO's legal threats.

We even have a good idea of how likely SCO is to successfully appeal. (The odds aren't good.)

But those rulings weren't much of a surprise, either. Once documents in the lawsuits started to pile up, it was possible to draw hard conclusions based on the evidence presented to the court, rather than public-relations bluster.

Which explains why so many analysts were able to tell their clients there wasn't much legal risk to worry about with Linux -- and tell them that literally years before the hammer finally fell on the litigation.

All thanks to the Groklaw crowd's desire to pile up every suit-related document they could find.

Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah. The impact was on the rest of us. That collection of documents gave SCO's suits a transparency that's impossible to come by with most IT industry litigation.

And we need it. It's tough enough to make IT decisions based on vendor claims, technology promises and user requirements. Lawsuits just muddy the waters more. Anything that helps provide a little more clarity is good news.

For that, we all owe Groklaw thanks.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php?id=670179122





Everything You Need to Know About USB 3.0, Plus First Spliced Cable Photos
Norman Chan

No doubt you’re familiar with the Universal Serial Bus – we ranked it as our top PC innovation of all time. But what do you know about the next version of this ubiquitous interface? USB 2.0 (otherwise known as USB Hi-Speed) boosted the original 12Mbps data rate to 480Mmb/s over eight years ago, and now USB 3.0 (dubbed USB Superspeed) is set to multiply that bandwidth tenfold. The USB Implementers Forum (led by Intel) released the USB 3.0 spec to hardware partners last week after some reported disputes with AMD and Nvidia (who, afraid Intel would have a jump start in incorporating the tech in chipsets, threatened to develop their own USB standard). But how does this affect you? We dug up some new information about USB 3.0, got our hands on the new connectors, and even took a look inside the new cables.

USB 3.0 will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0

Like the upgrade from USB 1.1 to 2.0, the new 3.0 connectors and cables will be physically and functionally compatible with hardware from the older specs. Of course, you won’t be able to maximize your bandwidth unless you’re using a USB 3.0 cable with Superspeed devices and ports, but at least plugging a 3.0 cable into a 2.0 port won’t blow up your PC. The spec’s compatibility lies in the design of the new connectors. USB 2.0 cables worked off of four lines – a pair for in/out data transfer, one line for power, and the last for grounding. USB 3.0 adds five new lines (the cable is noticeably thicker), but the new contacts sit parallel to the old ones on a different plane, as opposed to being adjacent to them. This means you’ll be able to differentiate between 2.0 and 3.0 cables just by looking at the ends.

The maximum speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8Gbps

It’s true: USB 3.0 SuperSpeed will be 10 times faster than the 480Mbps limit of the 2.0 spec. The example Intel likes to give out when talking about the new speed is that transferring a 27GB HD movie to your future media player will only take 70 seconds with USB 3.0, while it would take 15 minutes or more with 2.0. Keep in mind that you’re only going to be able to take advantage of this speed if your portable storage device can write data that quickly. Solid state devices will benefit most from the speed boost, while magnetic hard disks will be limited by their RPM and corresponding read/write speeds. Also, new Mass Storage Device drivers will have to be developed for Windows to take advantage of the spec.

Uploads and downloads are kept on separate data lanes

Remember those five new lanes we mentioned earlier? With USB 3.0, two new lanes will be dedicated to transmit data, while another pair will handle receiving data. This not only accounts for the significant speed boost, but also allows USB 3.0 to both read and write at the same time from your portable storage device. In the old spec, the pair of lanes used for data transfer weren’t split between send and receive – they only could handle traffic in one direction. Bi-directional data transfer will be very useful for syncing up information on PDAs and storage backup.

USB 3.0 will charge more devices, quicker

Not only will USB 3.0 cables facilitate faster transfer speeds, but they’ll carry more power, too. The USB-IF recognizes the growing number of portable devices that charge via USB (cellphones, MP3 players, digital cameras), and have bumped the power output from about 100miliamps to 900 milliamps. That means not only will you be able to power more than 4 devices from a single hub, but the increase current will let you charge up heftier hardware as well.

USB 3.0 will be more power efficient

One of the mandates of the new spec is more efficient power-usage protocols. USB 3.0 abandons device polling in favor of a new interrupt-driven protocol, which means non-active or idle devices (which aren’t being charged by the USB port) won’t have their power drained by the host controller as it looks for active data traffic. Instead, the devices will send the host a signal to begin data transfer. This feature will also be backward compatible with USB 2.0 certified devices.

The spec that Intel released mid-last week is only 90% complete. Ravencraft says that they expect the spec to be finalized by Q4 of this year. Hardware partners are expected to have USB 3.0 controllers designed by mid 2009, and consumers won't see the first end products utilizing the spec until early 2010 (though a late Holiday 2009 push for new products isn't out of the question).

What about Wireless USB?

With the internet in a USB 3.0 frenzy (keep in mind we won’t see hardware for a year), the USB-IF’s other iniative – Certified Wireless USB – often gets lost in the shuffle. Wireless USB technology has largely stayed away from the spotlight since the 1.0 spec was first completed in 2005. It’s not surprising, since adoption from hardware markers has been slow – the Wireless USB promoter group has only certified 75 products, with only 45 of those actually consumer end products that you can find in stores. Belkin, Dell, IOGEAR, and Kensington are a few of the partners that have signed on board, releasing hubs that unfetter your existing USB devices.

At this week’s IDF, Intel will be releasing more information about the next Wireless USB spec, version 1.1. Here are the key updates to the new spec:

- Support for NFC. Near Field Communication technology is a short-range, high-frequency spec while allows for wireless data transfers between devices up to 20cm apart. The 400kbps data rate of this tech obviously won’t do any heavy lifting, but instead will be used for proximity-based device association and connection establishment. One of the big pitfalls of the existing Wireless USB spec is that syncing up devices to a hub or host takes too long. NFC will allow devices to “swipe to connect,” similar to how new credit cards can register with cashiers just by brushing against a sensor.

- Speed and power usage optimizations. Power is one of the big concerns for Wireless USB, since no one (not even Tesla!) has figured out a practical way to transmit power wirelessly. Wirelessly connected devices like speakers or monitors will still need an external power source, but battery-powered peripherals will be able to sit idle longer.

- Ultra-wide band (UWB) support. Wireless USB already runs in the 3GHz frequency range, which allows it to theoretically transfer data at speeds of 480Mbps at 3 meters and 110Mbps at 10 meters. Bluetooth, in comparison, operates at 2.4Ghz. UWB support will boost the frequency of Wireless USB to the 6GHz and up range, which lays the groundwork for higher data rates and throughput in the future (though at the cost of range).

We also got a demo of Wireless USB in action, running natively on a Thinkpad X300 laptop. The Thinkpad synced up with a nearby Belkin dock station, which had audio and video jacks that were connected to speakers and a LCD display. A WMV file streamed high definition video and five-channel audio to the hub and recipient devices, and playback was pretty smooth (though interference did cut in occasionally).

Another dock station from Kensington demonstrated similar features, offered a DVI port for video in addition to Stereo audio and 5 USB 2.0 ports, and includes a transmitting dongle for non-wireless USB integrated systems. Video streaming took most of the bandwidth, and we noticed that wireless video was capped at 1680x1050 resolution. Still, the setup was impressive in that it gave the laptop more mobility. We could definitely imagine using our laptops in bed while streaming video and audio to devices across the room. The docking station is a little pricey at $230 – hopefully prices will drop as more products are released to market.

Look for more USB 3.0 and Wireless USB coverage this week as we hit up the Intel Developer’s Forum!
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...cab le_photos





T Hacking Exposes a Deeper Clash

Where agency sees attack, MIT students talk of constructive exploration
Michael Levenson

Recent inventions to emerge from the workshop of Zack Anderson include the "Killbot," a radio-controlled robot with a "1,500,000-candlepower spotlight to blind the victim," a bullhorn "to terrify victims," and a spinning drill bit "to bore through obstacles."

Anderson, a 21-year-old electrical engineering major at MIT, has also designed a security system for his workshop that features sirens, flashing lights, and a digitally altered recording of his voice bellowing "Intrusion detected! Initiating auto-lockdown sequence!" and "releasing toxin into atmosphere!"

Impressive stuff. But it's not generating half the attention as his project for Professor Ronald L. Rivest's Computer and Network Security class last semester. That endeavor, for which he earned an A, has gotten the fresh-faced senior from Beverly Hills, Calif., a visit from an FBI agent, an MBTA sergeant detective, nationwide press attention, and a starring role in a federal lawsuit.

Anderson, along with his freshman-year roommate, R. J. Ryan, 22, and another student in the class, Alessandro Chiesa, 20, claimed in their project to have developed a way to hack into the MBTA's recently installed $180 million automated fare-collection system and provide fellow hackers with "free rides for life."

Not surprisingly, the T was not pleased to learn of the development. The agency, which is strapped for cash and contemplating a fare increase in 2010, successfully sued the students to prevent them from presenting their findings at DEFCON, a hacker's convention that recently drew more than 6,000 people to the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The trio face a hearing in Boston's federal court tomorrow when a temporary restraining order keeping them from releasing their findings expires.

The T, which did not return calls for this story, has said the students' findings could cause "significant damage to the transit system." The agency has also sued MIT, saying the institute failed to teach its undergraduates "to responsibly disclose information concerning perceived security flaws."

The students strongly disagree, and their case has electrified the cowboy community of hackers, where the line is often blurry between those who break into a system so the system's flaws can be exposed and patched and those who crack into a network merely to create mischief.

"It was all the discussion at DEFCON," said Dave Marcus, security research and communications director at McAfee Avert Labs in Santa Clara, Calif., who attended the Aug. 8-10 convention. "Anytime you suppress research, it goes through the research community like wildfire. We can all feel like 'the man' is coming down on us as security researchers."

Anderson said the MBTA should consider his project an opportunity to improve security. He says the students omitted enough key details from their 87-page PowerPoint presentation, titled "anatomy of a subway hack," that others would not be able to program free rides onto their CharlieCards. The students also say that after they were visited by FBI agent Jacob Shaver and MBTA Sergeant Richard Sullivan on Aug. 4, they gave the MBTA a confidential "vulnerability assessment" so the agency could fix the gaps in its fare-collection system.

"It wasn't to enable others to get a free fare or cause any sort of havoc," Anderson said, calling over the Internet from Mexico, where he was on vacation last week. "It was really to show how major the issues are in this system, which also might resonate in many other systems around the world."

Anderson - who got his first computer (a Compaq Presario) in the fourth grade, taught himself QBasic, a programming language, in the sixth grade, and started building robots in the eighth grade - said part of the motivation for the hack was the challenge.
"I've always been interested in electronics," said Anderson, who grew up scouring alleyways for discarded machines. "Ever since I was a little kid, I would take things apart to see how they work."

These days, he proudly calls himself a hacker.

"If a lot of people think hacker, they think of someone who illegally breaks into systems," he said. "I don't at all think that's what hacker means. I think hacking is a culture of curiosity and exploration and learning and building and creating new things."

Hackers say they generally divide into three camps: do-gooder "white hats," nefarious "black hats," and "grey hats," who fall somewhere in between. Some say the MIT students' project might fall in the middle of the ethical gray scale.

"I can understand the MBTA's response," said Joe Grand, a 32-year-old hacker who calls himself Kingpin and was part of a 1990s hacker crew in Boston called L0pht Heavy Industries. "Nobody likes to have their work broken and publicly announced. I also agree that people need to know about systems that are broken. So there is definitely a fine line."

The students' PowerPoint presentation includes photos of MBTA police badges and hats that they purportedly bought on eBay, diagrams showing how to reprogram a CharlieCard to contain $653 in value, and cheeky warnings that "this is very illegal! So the following is for educational use only!"

Eleven computer scientists have signed a letter arguing that to block the project "could have a devastating chilling effect" on future research.

"Discussing vulnerabilities and discussing problems that are out there improves security as a whole," Anderson said. "When you put things out in the open, other researchers can look at them and see how these things can be fixed."

Chiesa declined to comment for this article. Ryan did not respond to messages. But Anderson said the trio hopes to resolve the battle with the T and move on to other projects.

He said he eventually wants a career "building and growing companies," and noted that he is working on a new endeavor, a socially conscious start-up company that will seek to convert heat from a car's shock absorbers into energy for the engine.

"Definitely," he said. "It's a lot more rewarding to work on a problem that's going to help people."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/art..._deeper_clash/





Judge Lifts MIT Students' Card-Hacking Gag Order
Jim Kerstetter

The three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who have been barred by a court order from discussing subway card vulnerabilities are now free to say what they want.

In a ruling certain to be cheered by computer researchers, a federal judge here Tuesday let the 10-day-old gag order expire. U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. refused to grant a preliminary injunction requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority that would have blocked the students from talking about their findings until January 1, 2009.

The MBTA's requested injunction would have replaced a temporary restraining order granted during the Defcon hacker conference, which under federal court rules automatically expires on Tuesday.

First page of subway-hacking presentation that was the subject of an injunction to stop its distribution--after it had already been distributed.

The MIT students planned to make a presentation at Defcon on security vulnerabilities in the Massachusetts transit authorities electronic card and ticketing system. But a different federal judge who was on duty that weekend blocked the presentation after MBTA sued the students and MIT.

Judge O'Toole said he disagreed with the basic premise of the MBTA's argument: that the students' presentation was a likely violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to protect computers from malicious attacks such as worms and viruses.

Many had expected Tuesday's hearing to hinge on First Amendment issues and what amounts to responsible disclosure on the part of computer security researchers. Instead, O'Toole based his ruling on the narrow grounds of what constitutes a violation of the CFAA.

On that basis, he said MBTA lawyers failed to convince him on two points: The students' presentation was meant to be delivered to people, and was not a computer-to-computer "transmission." Second, the MBTA couldn't prove the students had caused at least $5,000 damage to the transit system. Lawyers for the MBTA claimed Tuesday they had proof the students had violated the law, but stopped short of specifying what they did.

It's unclear what transit officials will do next. Lawyers for the MBTA weren't immediately available after the ruling, but they could appeal O'Toole's ruling to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals. Unless either side backs down or a settlement happens, a trial on the T's lawsuit against the students and MIT will eventually occur, but so far no date has been set.

Lawyers for the students, in a case that has generated more attention in local media concerned about problems in the transit system than it has among national media concerned about privacy issues, welcomed the judge's decision. "This was a case of shooting the messenger," said Cindy Cohn, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco advocacy group that was representing the students along with the Massachusetts affiliate of the ACLU and the Fish & Richardson law firm.

But Ieuan Mahony, a lawyer for the Boston law firm Holland & Knight who is representing the MBTA, said the transit authority had no interest in chilling computer security research. Instead, he said it merely wanted to ensure a method for wide-scale fare violations wasn't disseminated.

Security researchers working for the MBTA spent the last several days working through a confidential 30-page analysis--which has not been made public--that students had sent to the court and T officials. The document detailed the complete method for breaking the local Charlie card payment system, including specific details the students say they didn't plan to reveal at the Defcon conference.

MBTA said in documents filed with the court said that fixing the security flaws would take five months. ("Students have the ability to cause significant harm to the CharlieTicket system, during the roughly five-month window that remedial actions will require.")

T officials concluded that the students had, in fact, found a way to break the paper Charlie card system, but had only found theoretical methods for breaking the plastic Charlie card, an RFID smart card that can have T fares electronic added to it.

Mahony said the 30-page analysis was a "very useful document," adding, it's "invaluable, but there are additional materials that cause us great concern." In particular, the transit authority wanted correspondence with Defcon officials and materials from their class with MIT professor Ron Rivest, a cryptographer best known as one of the co-inventors of the RSA public key encryption system, which is commonly used in e-commerce.

Despite the First Amendment implications of the case, O'Toole made it clear he intended to steer clear of the Bill of Rights. "I appreciate the breadth of views of others," he said, "but my views are considerably more limited." (Federal judges generally try to avoid constitutional issues if the dispute can be resolved by interpreting the text of a statute. In this case, it was a 1986 law that he decided didn't properly apply in this case.)

What the students intend to do now that the gag order has been lifted is unclear. If they wished, they could still make the Defcon presentation at some other forum. Cohn said she hasn't spoken with the three, who are still on summer break.

One of the students, Zack Anderson, told The Boston Globe in an interview published Monday that after the dust-up with the MBTA is done, he intends to work on a company that converts heat from a car's shock absorbers into energy for the car's engine. He reiterated in the interview that the students never intended to cause harm to the transit system.

. "It wasn't to enable others to get a free fare or cause any sort of havoc," Anderson told the Globe. "It was really to show how major the issues are in this system, which also might resonate in many other systems around the world."

But one thing is certain: they have no intention of revealing the 30-page document that contained the specific details that told someone how to break the Charlie card system.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10020252-83.html





MIT Students Get Top Marks for Hacking Boston Subway
Charlie Sorrel

In a story straight out of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, three MIT undergraduates concocted a scheme to hack Boston's transit payment system, the Charlie Card (no relation). The students managed to reprogram the cards to increase their credit balance, thus allowance them to ride the subway for free.

Of course, being MIT students, they decided to write up their prank as an academic paper. But the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), already stinging from such a thorough pwning, took it to the courts, citing computer fraud, and asking for time to fix the system before the paper was presented. It is also thought that an MBTA official was overheard saying "It's not fair. I'm telling my mom."

MBTA lost. Judge George O'Toole ruled that "presenting an academic paper would not violate computer fraud laws." Go hackers.

The students, Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa, went on to receive "top marks" for their paper, from which we can conclude the following: RFID is very insecure, and MIT is awesome.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/0...udents-ge.html





Nonprofit Distributes File Sharing Propaganda to 50,000 U.S. Students
David Kravets

Propaganda is probably too light of a term to describe this piece of propaganda.

We're referring to an educational comic strip (fat .pdf) on unlawful file sharing of music developed by judges and professors to teach students about the law and the courtroom experience.

It was produced by the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit describing itself as an "organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to court systems in the United States."

But the story line here is a miscarriage of justice at best -- even erroneously describing file sharing as a city crime punishable by up to two years in prison.

What's more, the organization said Thursday, it has distributed some 50,000 copies of the 24-page leaflet to students across the United States. Threat Level's sister blog, the Underwire, wrote about the leaflet's debut in October.

"The Case of Internet Piracy," however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America's public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines.

"The purpose is basically to educate kids -- middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director.

The center just published its second educational leaflet, "The Case of Stolen Identity," Montgomery said.

The piracy story has two plots. One is of the file sharer's grandmother fighting eminent domain proceedings to keep her house while Megan the criminal file sharer deals with the charges against her.

The story is simple: Megan learns to download music from a friend. About 2,000 downloads and three months later, a police officer from the fictitious City of Arbor knocks on her door and hands her a criminal summons to appear in court.

All the while, her grandmother is trying to save her house from the city that wants to pave it over. When the grandmother gets home from a day in court (she eventually beats the city and keeps her house) the criminal Megan is crying. "Oh, Nana. What have I done? I've ruined everything," she said. "I'll lose my scholarship. I know I will."

The two embrace. "Hush now. We will find a way to get through this. I promise," the grandmother tells her granddaughter, whose parents were killed in a traffic accident 12 years before.

To the criminal courtroom we go …

In the case of Megan Robbins, "Criminal Case Number 67589B," a city prosecutor urges the maximum two-year sentence after Robbins pleads guilty. The city appoints her a public defender. (Criminal copyright infringement is when somebody sells pirated works and not sharing on a peer-to-peer network. And it’s the federal government, not local cities which prosecute the criminal cases.)

The local prosecutor, Terry Williams, tells the judge that the defendant "is charged with theft, at the state level" and adds that the girl faces "stiff penalties – up to two years in jail and $25,000 in fines."

"Many consider downloading music without paying for it to be a victimless crime, but nothing could be further from the truth," the prosecutor says.

The prosecution added that "Her conviction sends a message that illegally downloading music is a crime, and anyone involved will be held accountable."

The criminal is handed a three-month suspended sentence and 200 hours of public service.

The bigger crime is this leaflet.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...fit-distr.html





Pass it on

World.Wide.Weed

Will the easy availability of drugs on the Internet open the door to a depraved new world? If current trends are any indication, U.S. drug policy is an endangered species
Michelle Goldberg

It came in a plain brown wrapper--two varieties of high-grade marijuana totaling a quarter ounce, delivered to a downtown San Francisco office building via regular mail. The pot had been ordered off a website in Amsterdam, members.xoom.com/drugsstore/, which is designed to look just like a Dutch coffee-shop menu. The site offers two types of weed and five types of hash, all pictured and listed on a pull-down order form with boxes to let buyers specify how many grams of each kind they want. After ordering, customers receive an email with an address on it. They're instructed to send cash. It's a risk, but in this case it paid off. The twentysomething professional who ordered it found the marijuana to be not only a bargain at $92 including delivery, but sweet, green and potent.

Of course, buying marijuana online is illegal. But enforcing marijuana prohibition online isn't easy, especially when sellers live in countries with more tolerant drug laws, such as the Netherlands. Even harder to detect is the flourishing online seed trade, since packages of pot seeds are usually undetectable by the U.S. Department of Customs drug dogs. The result is that the Internet, which for years has been making national borders increasingly porous, is slowly helping to subvert marijuana prohibition. The new trade is thriving on two fronts: filling up the stash boxes of recreational users who want the same convenience buying their weed that they have purchasing books and CDs at amazon.com, and supplying medical marijuana patients, especially those in places like San Jose without a local pot dispensary.

"The government is going to learn what the music industry is learning. The net is a wall buster," says technology journalist Jon Katz, who wrote the Netizen column for Hotwired and who now writes for the tech news site Slashdot. "It's not policeable. There are not enough cops in the world to monitor all the communications and digital commerce that's going on. The effort to control the flow of drugs into the U.S. is a complete failure with or without the Internet. The Internet is just going to make it harder. There are millions of new ways for consumers and retailers to find each other. The DEA can sniff all the packages it wants, but it can't make more than a fraction of a dent in the business."

In real life, a person without a regular marijuana connection may spend days or weeks searching for a dealer. Online, it takes just a few clicks. Though he's never done it, Katz says he would feel comfortable buying pot online. "I feel I can buy almost anything online safely," he says. "I know enough people online that could get almost anything for me in minutes."

In fact, Katz believes that the Internet is going to force a reconsideration of domestic marijuana policy. "That's the power of the Net--it's really not for the government to be telling people whether they should be using marijuana or not, and the Internet makes it possible for people to make these judgments on their own. The Internet has killed off traditional notions of moral policing."

International Marketplace

OF COURSE, THE ONLINE marijuana business is just the latest example of ways the Internet has made national borders amorphous and national laws hard to enforce. The wide distribution of prescription drugs online without prescriptions is well documented but difficult for the government to fight, especially with Internet doctors willing to write virtual prescriptions after brief questionnaires.

There are dozens of online overseas pharmacies that will ship drugs which are controlled in the United States but not abroad. Try typing "Viagra" or "Xanax" into a search engine and see how many offers come up. In a recent issue of The Industry Standard, James Ledbetter wrote, "There's a pile of drugs on my desk. Dozens of pills of different shapes, sizes and colors, designed to treat obesity, baldness and erectile dysfunction. My doctor did not prescribe them, and--knock on wood--I have no medical need for any of them. How did they get here? Through the magic of the World Wide Web."

Online gambling, another illegal activity in many states, also thrives. Though a congressional commission recently recommended a ban on Internet gaming, they couldn't come up with a viable way to enforce it. Writes Declan McCullagh in Wired News, "The commission identified overseas betting sites as a major problem. Such sites are often located in countries that license those businesses, as the state of Nevada does for physical casinos. The group appears to have recognized that the only way to stop eager Americans from connecting to offshore sites would be to censor all overseas links, much as Singapore and China do when restricting access to information that their governments find objectionable. The report notes that such a law 'may be easily circumvented.' "

The same is true, it seems, for marijuana law.

Chain of Contraband Command

WHEN I CALL the San Francisco office of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Postal Inspection Service they both claim to be unaware of the Internet marijuana trade, suggesting how easy it is for digital dealers to escape notice. And even if they are caught, the DEA has no jurisdiction outside the United States. Not that they're admitting powerlessness. "In cooperation with authorities in other countries, we can arrest and extradite dealers," says Evelyn James, DEA special agent and public information officer. Dutch police, she points out, have shut down marijuana websites before, usually at the request of foreign governments.

Nevertheless, the possibility of legal trouble doesn't much worry Joey Phdfort, a 35-year-old Amsterdam man who runs a website (people.A2000.nl/lpafort/) where people from around the world can order weed. "I live in the Netherlands, where cannabis is allowed. I do nothing wrong," he says. Phdfort, who is suffering from liver cancer, believes he is doing humanitarian work. "In Holland, doctors give cancer patients cannabis and it helps. I can help other people who need it also. Most of the people who are buying from me are ill. Most of them have cancer themselves. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. That is why they buy it on the Internet." He points out the logistical troubles that many cancer patients have in acquiring marijuana. It's not like they can call up an old college pal who knows where to score. "If somebody is 40 or 50 years old, how can he buy it if the government won't allow it?" he asks. "If you are sick and you need it and you know that it helps, why not?"

Phdfort says that he used to send out 1,000 packages a week, but now that his sickness has progressed, he only has time to serve a few dozen regular customers, making about 25 mailings a week. Customs, he says, are rarely a problem--he estimates that 99 percent of the marijuana he sends out makes it to its addressee intact. In the case of the order placed from and delivered to San Francisco, the marijuana came in small, plastic zipper bags, placed inside a padded envelope. Nothing fancy about it.

Recipients in the United States are obviously subject to our drug laws, but, although importing drugs is a federal crime, buyers are unlikely to face penalties much stiffer than they would for possession of the same amount in their city and state. "The whole purpose for having federal law enforcement as opposed to state, county or municipal law enforcement is so that we can most efficiently and effectively utilize taxpayer resources. It is not appropriate for federal-level resources to be used to prosecute someone in possession of one joint," concedes DEA spokeswoman James. "That does not mean we won't arrest you and prosecute you through the state system. If you're using the mail, that's a separate crime that you can be charged with."

But the Postal Inspection Service, the government agency in charge of investigating crimes involving the mail, is also unlikely to throw the book at minor buyers, especially those with a medical excuse. "If a website is in Amsterdam we don't have any jurisdiction there," says U.S. Postal Inspector Linda Joe. "If marijuana does come here and if customs doesn't catch it and we do, then of course we'll seize it. There we run into the issue of whether it will be prosecuted. That varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Sometimes if the U.S. attorney's office doesn't want to prosecute, a local DA will. It would depend on the quantity of drugs and how often a person had been receiving them. We'd definitely look into it to see if this was a one-shot deal or if they'd been getting packages every week."

The Postal Inspection Service is much more concerned, it seems, with dealers sending huge packages via the mail to other dealers. A quote from the chief postal inspector published in the agency's 1998 annual report reads: "Marijuana is the most prevalent drug found in the mail, and Postal Inspectors focus investigative efforts on the large quantities associated with drug dealers." Last year, for instance, three Californians were arrested for mailing 11,000 pounds of pot to the East Coast. Of the 651 marijuana-related arrests that the postal service made last year, most were of members of huge drug-trafficking rings, like the 106 people busted in Southern California in a sting involving the seizure of 2,824 pounds of weed.

The fact that the feds are unlikely to prosecute small-time recipients isn't always good news for buyers. Joe recalls one case in which a man in Virginia was receiving pot in the mail from a relative in New Jersey. The sender's case, which the government considered more serious because he was dealing, was prosecuted federally, and he got probation. Since the feds weren't interested in going after the recipient, his case was pursued by his own county DA in Virginia, and he ended up getting six years.

Locally, Santa Clara County's prosecutors say they'll certainly go after those ordering pot online for fun. "Without hesitation we would prosecute them. We prosecute people who possess marijuana every day," says assistant district attorney Karyn Sinunu. But she throws in the caveat that her office would probably leave those with legitimate doctor recommendations alone. "If someone has marijuana and they have a recommendation to have it, under state law we're not going to prosecute," she says. "We don't have any state agencies investigating what goes through the mail, so if the feds have a hands-off policy, there probably wouldn't be a prosecution. I'd have to see an actual case and make a determination based on the person's criminal history, medical need, the amount and whether they had a legitimate [medical] recommendation. I truly believe that marijuana has some medical purpose, and I truly believe that some people are abusing Proposition 215 [the proposition legalizing possession of medical marijuana]. Legitimate patients should be able to use medicinal marijuana without being hassled by the police."

Medical Quandary

EVER SINCE San Jose police shut the Santa Clara County Medical Cannabis Center down in March of 1998, it is unclear where San Jose's medical marijuana patients have been getting their pot. Buying marijuana online may be the best option for those who can't score on the street or through friends or make the journey to Santa Cruz or San Francisco.

"Patients are scattering. It's all underground. They're just getting it off the street," says Suzie Andrews, owner of Rainbow Smoke Shop, a store on West San Carlos Street that sells marijuana accessories. Andrews is currently working to open a new dispensary in San Jose--she hopes to be operating by the end of the year. Until then, she says, "People will try to gain access any way they can."

Of the online marijuana trade, Andrews says, "I think it's a great idea, as long as what they're selling is what they're advertising. Patients don't have too many choices these days." Andrews says patients often come into her shop asking where they can buy marijuana. "We go through all the options," she says. "I talk to people about growing, tell them about the right lights to use. A lot of people can't grow their own so they try to find out who is selling it. It breaks my heart that they have to scramble around like that."

Right now, Sinunu is recommending that patients grow their own. "One of the problems with 215 is they say you can have marijuana for medicinal purposes, but where the hell is it supposed to come from?" Sinunu says. "You're either going to have to grow it or have a caregiver grow it for you. Right now that's all the law permits." Besides sticking to the letter of the law, she adds, patients who grow their own can be sure that their marijuana is free of additives that could exacerbate their illnesses. "I had a very good friend use marijuana at the end of her life, and you want your marijuana to be clean; you don't want people who are already sick to have stuff that might be contaminated. Some of the stuff that comes up from Mexico is often padded with other ingredients, really foul ingredients. That's why I always recommend to bona fide patients that they grow it themselves."

Growing the Grass

WHILE GROWERS can always pick through a bag of pot for seeds, if they want to know exactly what they're raising, the Internet can be a huge help. There are dozens of seed banks online based both in the Netherlands and in Canada, where possession of marijuana seeds is legal. The seed trade is flourishing both because seeds, tiny and odorless, are easy to ship, and also because selling seeds is more profitable than selling actual marijuana.

"In the economics of marijuana, cultivating for seeds is a better industry than cultivating for bud," remarks John Entwistle, legislative analyst for Californians for Compassionate Use and one of the authors of Proposition 215. "Those little seeds are just worth so much money. It takes years to get them because you have to do all this genetic work--when you buy seeds, you're buying knowledge of what the plant is. If they tell you, for example, that the plant will mature in exactly 92 days, it generally will."

Indeed, the language on seed sites drips with the kind of reverent connoisseurship often found among wine snobs. On Heaven's Stairway (www.hempqc.com), a strain called Amstel Gold that sells for $50 per packet of 10 seeds is described as "soft with a citruslike aroma and a good high. Easy to grow, grows with long compact resinous buds." The more expensive Durban Poison ($75 for 10 seeds) is said to be "100% Sativa. Large long bud leaves, buds are also large and long with lots of resin. A sweet licorice or anise flavor. 'Up' high similar to Thai. ... Also does very well under artificial light." To order, you simply send an international money order or certified check (all prices are in U.S. dollars) to a post office box in Quebec.

Self-Regulation

FOR MANY WOULD-BE Internet pot buyers, even those who aren't afraid of running afoul of the law, the fear of being scammed is a strong deterrent. But unlike the real-life black market, the Internet fosters a community of users who constantly rate sites and trade advice. "The odds online overwhelmingly favor the buyer," Katz says, based on his observations of the online drug community in action. Discussions flourish at www.yahooka.com and www.cannabis.com, and on newsgroups such as alt.drugs.pot.cultivation. There's even a Zagat guide of sorts for seed banks at www.suresite.com/ca/r/razzmat/, where online seed stores are rated for reliability, speed of delivery and convenience of ordering. Here you can learn which sites take checks, which take money orders at no extra charge and which provide free shipping. Additionally, the webmaster warns users against sites known to burn would-be buyers.

Joel, a recreational grower who buys seeds online, used the site as a guide and was very pleased with the results. "I went with one of his five-star guys. It took about a month, but I got my product and I was very happy with it. They did an excellent job." Before the Internet, Joel says, buying seeds could be difficult "unless you knew someone, went to Canada or flew over to Amsterdam."

The Internet also makes growing easier by providing access to a group of experts ready to answer questions from novices growing the first plant or from veteran cultivators attempting new, more difficult strains. "The guys on the cultivation newsgroup are really nice," Joel says. "It's the greatest source on the Internet for growing advice. There are four or five guys who are really cool and will answer pretty much any question."

Anyway, he adds, growing pot, even indoors, is pretty simple. "It's easier than growing a house plant," he says. "I'd kill a house plant. Marijuana literally grows like a weed. You can buy a cheap fluorescent light and keep it over your seeds and in a 120 days you'll have a cheap, jumbo crop."

Joel says he's not too concerned about being busted. "I worry to some extent, but really they'd have to be kind of silly to pay attention to me. Why would anyone spend an ungodly amount of money to catch someone buying 10 seeds? I do take precautions, though. I use proxy servers and remailers to post to the newsgroups, which makes it a real pain to trace it back to me."

He's probably right. "Technically seeds are illegal, but there isn't THC in the seeds, only in the plant itself," says postal inspector Joe. "They would be seized, but as far as prosecution, it would depend on the local climate."

Paranoid Collusions

STILL, MOST OF THOSE involved in the fight for marijuana legalization caution against buying anything illegal through the Internet. "I would be very cautious about putting my name out there as a consumer of marijuana," Entwistle says.

"We have run several messages on our website saying that one of the stupidest things you can do is buy pot through the Internet. It's even riskier than going up to somebody in the street," says John Holmstrom, multimedia director for High Times magazine. "Who knows who's behind the website? What if it's a government agency and they're keeping a list of everyone they're sending pot to?"

Suspicions run especially high around sites that offer to ship marijuana domestically, because people worry that such sites are government sting operations. Arizona Company Medical (www.medical-marijuana.com), for example, is a pot website registered to an address in Anaheim, Calif. It's run by Anaheim resident Mike Aranov, who refused to answer questions except to say that his site ships to people throughout the country, which is, obviously, illegal. To order, buyers must send a check or money order along with a copy of a medical report or a doctor's note and "proof of ID" (what constitutes proof is unclear) to 5051 E. Orangethorpe Ave., Suite E, in Anaheim. The prices are low, starting at $65 for a quarter ounce. One Bay Area marijuana dispensary worker said that he'd heard about successful buys through the site, but he doesn't recommend using it. "I met a gentleman from the company who said they were doing fine. It's strange that they're able to survive," he says. "I have hesitations because of the federal government's ability to tap into it. They might even be dealing with a narc to catch people who are propositioning them. You don't know what you're getting into."

Enwistle said he's been getting lots of inquiries lately from people who want to know whether Arizona Medical is safe. "While in theory the idea of being able to click for pot is good and in practice it is happening, it's a very temporary thing, I suspect. I wouldn't do it. It's frightening. I think that people should be clear about what they're doing. When you're breaking the law, you shouldn't let yourself get caught. The government can just trace where the clicks came from and round up enormous numbers of people. It lends itself to a conspiracy prosecution. People get away with breaking the law for a period of time, but it does catch up to you."

Net Scum

BESIDES PROBLEMS WITH the law, online buyers must also be wary of scams. Seed buyers tend to protect themselves by constantly exchanging information, but those who actually order pot online are less likely to fess up to it. "Most of my clients have been ripped off many times on the Internet before they came to me," says Phdfort. "There's a lot of scum on the Internet."

Indeed, if you do a web search for the words "buy marijuana online," many of the resulting links will be to a site called the "Netherlands High Shoppe," which had dozens of separate URLs. The site even promises free samples. But before you get in, you have to buy something called an "adult check ID" for $20, which, in addition to providing access to the Netherlands High Shoppe, also lets you in to a variety of porn sites. The ID won't, however, get you any closer to actual marijuana, because all the Netherlands High Shoppe offers are the phone numbers of U.S. companies selling legal herbal marijuana substitutes with names like "Wizard Smoke."

And as with Arizona Medical, buyers on some sites are required to provide far more information than they'd ever dream of giving to a guy skulking around the park with a pocket full of dime bags. A few months ago, an email was circulating with the URLs of two websites, civildisobedient.net and antae.org, said to be working in concert, that promised to deliver free medical marijuana to patients in San Jose. "This is one more step in our movement to launch a pacifist guerrilla medi-pot dispensary for the chronic suffering patients of San Jose, but which we will operate from a virtual location," said the email's attachment. At first, it seemed thrilling. But no local activists knew anything about it, no phone number was given, and there was no response to repeated requests for more information. Users were instructed to send a signed, notarized copy of their photo identification, a signed "oath" with the name of their primary caregiver, and a "Police or Police Agent Waver (sic) form signed" (what this means is unclear) to CivilDisobedient.net, c/o Mahlon, Gen Del PO, Washington DC, USA 20090.

It turns out that both domains are registered to the same person, one 'Mahlon Coats.' People who register domain names are required to provide phone numbers, and of the numbers Coats used, one is for a Motel 6 in Oakland and the other is for an Internet company in Australia.

But most disturbing of all is the fact that Mahlon Coats writes like a schizophrenic. "If our website seems slightly irreverent toward the so called 'drug war' (and so called 'drug warriors') we apologize but we needed the dark humor for novel extents of parabolic range and breadth," it says on www.antae.org. "And the Internet novel approach is intended to hopefully bring a quicker end to any unnecessary suffering of patients today, now--before even more of them join the already-deceased patients (who now feel no more pain, but) who were forced (as a result of political positioning) to endure their suffering without a safe source for this simple herbal remedy. If our web sites also seem slightly fanatical at times, it is because the stratified contradictions in the so called 'Drug War' become hilarious when exposed. And this is also to heighten the novel experience."

The bizarre ramblings continue on civildisobedient.net: "For those who believe that we who used an illegally smoked mantra as a unifying element, especially those who used it with us but then after our goals were achieved in halting the Vietnam War, should have stopped the smoke, I argue that our next goal needed to be to expose the government complicity in causing such a benign substance to be so feared and maligned--and thereby better prepare the government against such a flawed policy 'Achilles heel,' from future protester strengths against the government."

This, needless to say, is probably not a person many would want to trust with their name, address and medical history.

"The Internet can't gloss over the fact that it's not Walgreens on the other end of the line. It's still just a drug dealer with a home page," Entwistle says. But for some, especially the old and the ill, a drug dealer with a home page is easier to find than a drug dealer on the street. As long as there are people who want pot badly enough to send cash blindly through the mail, there will be people all over the world more than happy to sell it to them.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/me...uana-9929.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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