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Old 03-09-08, 08:29 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 6th, '08

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"New statistics by British internet service provider PlusNet shows that peer-to-peer traffic on the internet is dropping." – Marc Chacksfield


"This film, really isn't for anybody other than the choir. But that's because I believe the choir needs a song to sing every now and then." – Michael Moore


"As an agent of creativity [Spore] is a landmark. But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different." – The New York Times



































September 6th, 2008




Michael Moore to Release New Film Online for Free
Jake Coyle

Inspired by Neil Young and Radiohead, Michael Moore will release his new film online and for free.

The film, "Slacker Uprising," follows Moore's 62-city tour during the 2004 election to rally young voters. It will be available for three weeks as a free download to North American residents, beginning Sept. 23. An official announcement of the film is planned for Friday.

Moore said he considered releasing "Slacker Uprising" theatrically as "Michael Moore's big election year movie" as he did with 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was highly critical of President Bush.

Instead, Moore opted for a symbol of gratitude to his fans as he approaches the 20th anniversary of his first film, 1989's "Roger & Me."

"I thought it'd be a nice way to celebrate my 20th year of doing this," Moore said. "And also help get out the vote for November. I've been thinking about what I want to do to help with the election this year."

The 97-minute long "Slacker Uprising" will be the first major film to be released in such a way. Last December, "Jackass 2.5" was streamed online and for free, but that was only a collection of left over material from "Jackass 2." Companies like ClickStar, which Morgan Freeman co-founded, have made films still in theaters — such as 2006's "10 Items or Less" — digitally available for purchase or rental.

Experimentation in distribution has been more common in the music industry, where the Internet has significantly damaged traditional business models. Moore took notice when Radiohead last year released their seventh album, "In Rainbows," online with optional pricing. In 2006, Neil Young streamed his anti-war album "Living With War" for free before its standard release — now a more common practice.

If history is any measure, "Slacker Uprising" could have made a decent sum in theaters. His last two films, "Sicko" ($24 million) and "Fahrenheit 9/11" ($119 million) are two of the three highest grossing documentaries ever.

Moore said that "Slacker Uprising" cost about $2 million to make and that he will end up paying about $1 million out of his pocket. Neither he nor the distributor, Brave New Films, plan to profit from the release.

The director's last film, "Sicko," leaked online and was downloaded illegally in large numbers. He says this download, offered by BlipTV, will be high-resolution and far better than "YouTube quality."

To receive the download, people can sign up at SlackerUprising.com. A "Night of a Thousand House Parties" is planned for Oct. 4, when local neighborhood screenings are hoped to be scheduled. A DVD will be released Oct. 7.

Moore last week released a paperback book, "Mike's Election Guide 2008" and is currently working on a movie for theatrical release next year. That film is expected to examine America as an empire, but the director declined to discuss any details about it.
For now, Moore hopes "Slacker Uprising" will help spur young people to vote this November. After more than 20 million 18 to 29-year-olds cast ballots in 2004 (an 11 percent increase from 2000), he's hoping even greater numbers of "slackers" vote this year.

Moore readily acknowleges this a film for Democrats.

"This film, really isn't for anybody other than the choir," said Moore. "But that's because I believe the choir needs a song to sing every now and then." http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...PPVbAD9303QDO0





Howell Verdict: RIAA Wins $40,850 P2P Judgment
Nate Anderson

How much does sharing "Waiting For A Girl Like You," "Money For Nothing," and "Sweet Child O' Mine" on P2P networks cost defendants if they end up in court? Arizona resident Jeffrey Howell has just found out the hard way. While Jammie Thomas came in for more than $200,000 of statutory damages in her Minnesota trial last year, Howell escaped with a (mere) $40,850 fine. Perhaps he should be grateful, though we doubt that's the emotion he's feeling today.

Few of the RIAA's thousands of cases against individual file-swappers ever make it to trial; fewer still reach a judgment, making these awards quite unusual. Howell, who served as his own counsel throughout the trial, did himself no favors by intentionally destroying evidence of his computer activity after being ordered by a judge to preserve it. According to the RIAA, Howell uninstalled KaZaA and deleted everything in the shared folder, reformatted his hard drive, downloaded and used a file-wiping program, and then nuked all the KaZaA logs on his PC. Anyone who has seen even a single episode of Perry Mason knows that this is a huge no-no.

Ruling last week that Howell had acted in bad faith, the judge was forced to call the case to a premature close and issue judgment against Howell. Howell's punishment was to come at a later date, and the judge has now issued his ruling.

Howell is ordered to pay $350 in court costs—an incredible bargain when set against a whopping $40,500 in statutory damages. In addition, he will pay 2.12 percent interest on the unpaid balance until the entire amount is paid off; in essence, Howell has just taken out a pricey new car loan, except that instead of a car, he gets a big pile of nothing to park in his driveway.

The judge also ordered him to stop infringing copyrights, "including without limitation by using the Internet or any online media distribution system to reproduce (i.e., download) any of Plaintiffs' Recordings, or to distribute (i.e., upload) any of Plaintiffs' Recordings."

And, just for good measure, Howell is instructed to "destroy all copies of those downloaded recordings transferred onto any physical medium or device in Defendant's possession, custody, or control."

Given that Howell didn't have the cash even to pay a lawyer, the RIAA may never see all of this money. Not that it matters; the PR value of winning these sorts of cases is no doubt reward enough.

The RIAA takeaway from the case will surely be a lesson about how the group will hunt down and then win cases against file-swappers. The lesson that EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann takes from the case, though, is a different one: get yourself a lawyer.

"He never had an adequate opportunity to explain what happened on his PC, while the RIAA had forensics experts and lawyers to tell the story," von Lohmann told us last week. "I think if Howell had an expert and lawyer to speak for him, he would have told a different story."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-judgment.html





BitTorrent Tracker Araditracker Shut Down
Andre "DVDBack23" Yoskowitz

The private torrent tracker AradiTracker has been closed down by its administrators, exactly one year after having legal action pursued against them by the anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Last year BREIN forced the shut down of six torrent trackers and had their webhost LeaseWeb hand over all personal details of the administrators of the sites including that of AradiTracker. Surprisingly though the site was only down for a day then reappeared on a new host and seemed to have survived the attack.

Today however the tracker was again down and all visitors received a homepage message saying that the site would not be back.

TorrentFreak was able to find more details, getting in contact with a staff member of the site. The staff said “Early Thursday morning (BST) legal action was taken directly against Araditracker. For the moment we are unable to divulge details. As a direct result the decision has been taken to close the site. It is very unlikely to return as a torrent tracker.”

The site was very proud of its community and thanks everyone for their commitment.

“There are not enough words that can express our thanks for all support from the staff, past and present, Knights, VIPs, Uploaders, and members of all levels that have shared Araditracker over the last three years. Araditracker had a real sense of community and this more than anything will be missed by most.”
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15291.cfm





MPAA Wants ISPs to Cut Off Pirates
enigmax

Following on from the IFPI-inspired Italian blockade of The Pirate Bay, the MPAA’s President has been in Italy offering ideas on how to deal with the ‘problem’ of unauthorized file-sharing. Not wanting to flirt too much with originality, Robert Pisano is backing a 3 strikes-and-you’re-out policy. Just how far will the Italian government go in its currently tough anti-piracy mood?

Having previously warmed up with the The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) in April and on the back of the IFPI Pirate Bay block in Italy, MPAA President, COO and donor Robert Pisano was in Venice taking part in a panel at which the heads of Italian movie producing groups were complaining heavily about the state of Internet piracy, which they claim threatens their business.

Although Pisano suggests the ‘carrot’ - encouraging file-sharers to use legal services of which he says there are dozens - the truth is they have completely failed to get into the minds of file-sharers with these services. “..our goal is not to punish anyone but rather to give them a reason to do the same downloading, but through legal channels,” said Pisano, according to a THR report.

But it seems the outcome is inevitable - the use of the ’stick’. Like the IFPI, the MPAA now seems to be taking the line that if you can’t deal with individual file-sharers effectively through the legal system with civil action, it’s time to deal with millions all at once by pressurizing their ISPs to take measures against them instead. It’s likely the MPAA will issue complaints to ISPs about file-sharers in the same way as it has always done - except with a sting in the tail.

“Maybe the first couple of times they get a warning e-mail, then perhaps the speed on their account is reduced,” said Pisano, “and if they keep doing it then maybe their account is closed.”

The Italian Society of Authors and Editors is also calling for action against file-sharers, and wants to back this up with ‘educational campaigns’ targeted at schools. In contrast, Riccardo Tozzi, President of the National Union of Producers wants to convert pirates into paying customers by offering movies at an affordable price.

In 2003, Silvio Berlusconi’s government passed one of the harshest copyright laws in Europe, but it hasn’t really been enforced to the extent the MPAA and IFPI would like. Unfortunately for them, January 2007 saw the top criminal court in Rome announce that downloading films, music or software from the Internet is not a crime if done for no profit. Although this announcement seemed like good news for individual Italian file-sharers, it didn’t turn out particularly well for Italy’s largest BitTorrent site. Colombo.BT was shut down after it was alleged the administrators illegally profited from the site.

Although Italian Minister for Culture Sandro Bondi said the fight against piracy is a priority for the government, it seems that support for the movie industry doesn’t stop there. Bondi previously announced that the government’s movie interests department ‘General Direction for Cinema‘ had announced to the EU it will take measures to give “fiscal incentives” to movie production and distribution companies via tax shelter and tax credits.

In October a technical roundtable will get underway in Italy which will promote collaboration between the music, movie and ISPs, i.e they will discuss the possible implementation of a “3 strikes” policy. Stay tuned for an update.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-wants-i...irates-080902/





ISPs Hand Over Details of ‘Several Thousand’ Pirates
enigmax

Two major UK ISPs have been ordered by the High Court to hand over the identities of several thousand alleged file-sharers. BT has confirmed it is involved while Virgin Media was less direct in admitting that lawyers Davenport Lyons, working with Topwear Inc., are about to start threatening thousands more people.

US game developer Topware Interactive, the people behind the now infamous ‘Dream Pinball‘ affair, are about to turn up the heat. Operating through London lawyers Davenport Lyons, they have managed to convince the High Court to send out an order demanding that ISPs in the UK start to hand over the details of “several thousand” alleged pirates.

According to Samknows, BT, one of the UK’s largest ISPs and like many, currently caught up in the middle of a Davenport Lyons versus P2P battle, confirmed it had been ordered to hand over details of alleged copyright infringing file-sharers. It could not confirm whether they had already handed over the details or not. However, BT was surprised at the “strong arm” tactics being employed by the games industry, in contrast to the fairly civilized warnings currently touted by the BPI, which were toned-down under duress.

“It does seem a much more strong arm approach compared to the music industry,” said the BT spokesman. “However, it is only one company pursuing a limited number of miscreants at the moment. I doubt the music industry will follow suit as the potential numbers are too great, but who knows.”

Virgin Media was a little more slippery in its response but reading between the lines it seems obvious they are involved too. While noting that they take the privacy of their customers very seriously, if faced with a court order to hand over names and addresses, they simply have to comply. Virgin Media also indicated that it prefers the ‘educational’ approach, i.e the compromise reached between ISPs and the BPI recently. Virgin media spokesman told Samknows:

“We certainly prefer the education route we pioneered with the BPI because you can’t assume people are guilty of anything, so we don’t, we let them know of what might have happened and give information on how to ensure they enjoy legal downloads. This would definitely seem to be a very different approach from a different industry.”

I’m sure it’s just a slip by the Virgin spokesman but the entire ‘games industry’ isn’t taking this aggressive approach against alleged file-sharers. It is actually just Topware Interactive, and in the other active cases, Atari, Codemasters, Techland and Reality Pump, just a handful of developers.

As a gamer of more than 25 years I agree with the boss of EA Sports, Peter Moore, that it’s not particularly clever to start taking legal action against your customers. In a superb article, Rob Fahey over at GamesIndustry.biz says that he believes the losses claimed by the industry are a ‘complete crock‘ and he’s not on his own.

In any event, if you take a look at the games being ‘protected’ in these actions, with the possible exception of Codemasters titles, they’re mostly second rate and didn’t sell many anyway. The developers would have everyone believe this is due to file-sharing but people know otherwise. The suspicion in the file-sharing community is that this isn’t about protection of copyright at all, but a way to make poor games pay. Any revenue stream in a storm, eh?
http://torrentfreak.com/isps-hand-ov...irates-080904/





isoHunt Sues the CRIA to Legalize BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

Following Demonoid and QuebecTorrent, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) has threatened isoHunt with legal action. However, isoHunt has decided to launch a preemptive strike, as it turns the tables and sues the CRIA instead.

The CRIA is known for taking on BitTorrent sites. In the past year they have threatened Demonoid and other BitTorrent sites, and taken legal action against QuebecTorrent. Now, they have set their sights on isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, but this might just backfire.

In May 2008, isoHunt received a Cease and Desist letter from the CRIA, in which they demanded that isoHunt founder Gary Fung should take the site offline. If Fung didn’t comply, the CRIA said it would pursue legal action, and demand $20,000 for each sound recording the site has infringed.

A similar tactic worked against Demonoid, but the isoHunt founder didn’t back down so easily. “We have since tried to come to an understanding, but just as with the MPAA in the US, they ignored our offers of cooperation by the take down of .torrent links to their content files, so long as they provide sufficient identification,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.

Fung has pointed out that, like most other BitTorrent sites, isoHunt has a Copyright Policy, and takes down .torrent files when they receive an appropriate request. The CRIA simply ignored this, even though they have sent correct takedown notices to isoHunt before (and isoHunt complied), and continued to threaten with legal action.

As an act of self-defense, isoHunt has decided to sue the CRIA instead, and today Fung will file a petition to ask the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt –and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis– do not infringe copyright. “This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak.

“Our petition summarizes BitTorrent technology, its open nature and a whole ecosystem of websites and operators that has developed around it, that CRIA does not own copyright to all files distributed over BitTorrent or on isoHunt websites, and we seek legal validation that we can continue to innovate within this emerging BitTorrent ecosystem on the Internet.”

“Think of this as a follow up to the QuebecTorrent case,” Fung says. “We intend to take this all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court unless CRIA settles with us out of court in any reasonable way,” Fung said “There are some interesting parties in Canada in our camp I’m not disclosing yet, this is going to make an interesting case and the most important copyright case in Canada currently.”

This is the first case worldwide where a court will be asked to decide whether .torrent files, and BitTorrent search engines in particular, are infringing copyright or not. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. The site is indexing other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention, and allows its users to find content that is scattered across the web.

So, should BitTorrent search engines be held liable for the .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data? If so, what does this mean for other search engines, and sites such as YouTube? This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online, let’s hope the Court of British Columbia will make the right decision.
http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-sues...-sites-080905/





Contentious Copyright Bill Would Die with Election
David Akin

The copyright bill would have created a new set of restrictions on Canadians who download music and other media.
Made-in-Canada copyright legislation is among the bills that will die if Prime Minister Stephen Harper goes ahead with a widely expected election call at the end of this week, a prospect that bitterly disappoints many artists.

It will be the second time in as many governments that copyright legislation designed for the era of the iPod has died on the order paper at the dissolution of Parliament. The Liberals had tabled copyright legislation in 2005 but it was killed when they lost power in early 2006.

Now artists, copyright reformers, lawyers and others are bracing for what could be another bruising round in a decade-long attempt to craft legislation that balances the rights of creators with the rights of users.

"It would be disappointing and unfortunate," said Duncan McKie, the CEO of the Canadian Independent Record Production Association, a group which represents musicians and producers not aligned with major multinational labels. "We had a lot of sweat equity in this one. We were hoping we wouldn't lose it all."

Government bureaucrats first looked at updating Canada's copyright laws when John Manley was Industry minister in the late '90s.

But because the file was jointly shared between the Industry minister and the Heritage minister, political and bureaucratic squabbles over the reforms prevented much progress. Heritage bureaucrats -- widely seen as supporting tighter copyright controls which artists want -- fought tooth-and-nail against Industry bureaucrats -- widely seen as the group fighting for more liberal controls that would favour users or buyers.

The internal government battle has been mirrored by a similarly fierce fight in public as grassroots consumer advocates battled industry groups led by multinational record labels, who have claimed they were being bankrupted by Canadians who could trade digital music files on the Internet without fear of punishment.

Though the bill would die with the current Parliament, if the Conservatives win, they could quickly reintroduce it.

"The copyright bill is an important piece of legislation," Industry Minister Jim Prentice said Tuesday after a news conference here about the Canadian Space Agency. "I look forward to getting the bill in front of Parliament when the time comes. It's a complicated piece of legislation and I would like to be the minister that sees it through."

The Conservative legislation, known as Bill C-61, has been criticized for tilting the balance too far toward creators. Some critics said it could make criminals out Canadians who wanted to make a backup copy of music, movie or software discs.

"I think the interest in copyright took many politicians by surprise," said Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor and one of those who galvanized grassroots support against the Conservative bill.

"It is readily apparent the next bill -- and there will be a next bill -- must do a far better job of navigating the copyright balance and ensuring that the law does not render everyday activities illegal."

Mr. McKie said his association, too, had some problems with the Conservative legislation.

"There were areas we weren't happy with but we were happy that it was there to be worked on," Mr. McKie said.

Some Liberals have promised to scrap C-61 and start all over again if they form the next government.

"Each party should clarify where it stands on copyright and C-61 during the upcoming campaign," Mr. Geist said. "Would the Conservatives reintroduce it unchanged? Would the Liberals scrap it and launch a public consultation as some have suggested? I think many Canadians may ask these questions when candidates knock at their doors seeking their vote in October."

Cultural industry sources say the absence of any modern copyright legislation is preventing Canadian firms from developing new business opportunities because Canada is seen by cultural producers from other countries as having weak protection for digitized cultural content.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/can...html?id=764309





When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder
Janet Rae-Dupree

“It is the policy and objective of the Congress to use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development” and “to promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations, including universities.”

— The Bayh-Dole Act, a k a the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act

THE law of unintended consequences is perhaps less a “law” than a simple statement of fact: We cannot accurately predict all the results of our actions. We may do something with the best of intentions, and sometimes even accomplish the good toward which we aim. Yet, at the same time, we are all too often surprised by results that didn’t occur to us beforehand.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 started out with the best of intentions. By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery.

University “tech transfer” offices have boomed from a couple dozen before the law’s passage to nearly 300 today. University patents have leapt a hundredfold. Professors are stepping away from the lab and lecture hall to navigate the thicket of venture capital, business regulations and commercial competition.

None of these are necessarily negative outcomes. But more than a quarter-century after President Jimmy Carter signed it into law, the Bayh-Dole Act, sponsored by the former Senators Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, and Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, is under increasing scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics. The primary concern is that its original intent — to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation — has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities.

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today’s universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely sharing techniques and results, researchers increasingly keep new findings under wraps to maintain a competitive edge. What used to be peer-reviewed is now proprietary. “Share and share alike” has devolved into “every laboratory for itself.”

In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America’s universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses.

Of course, there is precedent for scientific secrecy, notes Daniel S. Greenberg , author of “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism” (University of Chicago Press, 2007). When James Watson and Francis Crick were homing in on DNA’s double-helix structure in the 1950s, they zealously guarded their work from prying eyes until they could publish their findings, to be certain that they would get the credit for making the discovery.

“They didn’t try to patent it,” Mr. Greenberg notes, “but somebody doing the same work today would certainly take a crack at patenting the double helix.”

In fact, it was the life sciences — in particular, biotechnology — that started universities down the slippery commercial slope in the first place. Even before the Bayh-Dole Act, pharmaceutical companies were eagerly trolling campuses, looking for projects to finance. After the law was passed, they stepped up their efforts, but now with renewed zeal for keeping potential trade secrets from competitors.

While patients have benefited from the growing supply of new medications, the universities have obtained patents not only for the actual substances but also for the processes and methods used to make them, potentially hampering discovery of even more beneficial treatments.

“Bayh-Dole tore down the taboos that existed against universities engaging in overtly commercial activity. Universities really thought that they were going to make it rich,” said Jennifer Washburn, author of “University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education” (Basic Books, 2005). “Each school was convinced that if they came up with that one blockbuster invention, they could solve all their financial problems.”

Ms. Washburn says that was “extremely wrong-headed.” Initially reacting to the law by slapping patents on every possible innovation, universities quickly discovered that patents were an expensive proposition. The fees and legal costs involved in obtaining a single patent can run upward of $15,000, and that doesn’t count the salaries of administrative staff members. Instead of bringing home the bacon, university tech transfer offices were throwing money into the void with little hope of returns.

To date, Ms. Washburn says, data gathered by the Association of University Technology Managers, a trade group, show that fewer than half of the 300 research universities actively seeking patents have managed to break even from technology transfer efforts. Instead, two-thirds of the revenue tracked by the association has gone to only 13 institutions.

Part of the problem has been a lingering misunderstanding about where the value lies in innovation. Patenting a new basic science technique, or platform technology, puts it out of the reach of graduate students who might have made tremendous progress using it.

Similarly, exclusive licensing of a discovery to a single company thwarts that innovation’s use in any number of other fields. R. Stanley Williams, a nanotechnologist from Hewlett-Packard, testified to Congress in 2002 that much of the academic research to which H.P. has had difficulty gaining access could be licensed to several companies without eroding its intellectual property value.

“Severe disagreements have arisen over conflicting interpretations of the Bayh-Dole Act,” he said. “Large U.S.-based corporations have become so disheartened and disgusted with the situation, they are now working with foreign universities, especially the elite institutions in France, Russia and China.”

THE issue is further clouded by “reach through” licenses, complex arrangements used by many tech transfer offices. A reach-through lets the patent holder claim a share of any profits that result from using, say, an enabling technology, even if those profits come several steps down the market transfer line. Several universities are already embroiled in messy lawsuits trying to sort out who is entitled to what.

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of campus commercialization is that research decisions are now being based on possible profits, not on the inherent value of knowledge. “Blue sky” research — the kind of basic experimentation that leads to a greater understanding of how the world works — has largely been set aside in favor of projects considered to have more immediate market potential.

In academia’s continuing pursuit of profit, the wonder of simple serendipitous discovery has been left on the curb.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/te...y/07unbox.html





NebuAd Halts Plans For Web Tracking
Ellen Nakashima

Tech firm NebuAd has put on hold plans to widely deploy an online advertising technology that tracks consumers' every Web click while Congress reviews privacy concerns associated with the technique.

The Silicon Valley company announced this week that founder and chief executive Bob Dykes was resigning. His departure comes as a number of Internet companies have suspended or canceled trials of NebuAd's controversial tracking technique, known as deep-packet inspection, marketed to companies seeking to target ads to Web users.

"Our platform was architected to be a multi-channel ad system," spokeswoman Janet McGraw wrote in an e-mail. "With the Internet service provider channel currently on hold with the events of the summer, we have broadened the focus of our business but continue to enhance our technologies for that ISP channel."

She said that NebuAd supports the companies "who have put their trial deployments on hold so that Congress can spend additional time addressing the privacy issues and policies associated with online behavioral advertising."

Critics have likened deep-packet inspection to the phone company tapping a call. The technology allows a window into potentially all of a consumer's online activity, from Web surfing and search terms to any unencrypted Web communication.

Dykes had led the company's drive to apply the technique to targeted online advertising. He is resigning to take a job at VeriFone, an electronic payment systems provider, but will remain NebuAd's chairman of the board.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee this summer opened an inquiry into online advertising and privacy, focusing in part on tests conducted by Internet companies using NebuAd. Many of those tests were carried out without consumers' prior, explicit consent.

The outcry among lawmakers, consumers and privacy advocates led at least seven companies to suspend or cancel partnerships with NebuAd, including The Washington Post Co.'s Cable One, with some saying they would hold off until privacy concerns are addressed.

"The sense I get is the air is out of the tires as it relates to targeted advertising through deep-packet inspection," said Robb Topolski, a technology consultant. "The users have made it very clear that they don't want any part of ISP monitoring regimes that watch everything they do and say on the Internet."

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said that NebuAd "seriously underestimated the privacy concerns."

NebuAd is not the only company in the United States to experiment with the technology, though it was the most high-profile. NebuAd's president, Kira Makagon, will become chief executive. She will attempt to expand the firm's advertising systems "across more traditional channels," McGraw said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090303566.html





Station Owners Make Settlement Offer
Tracy Breton

Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, the owners of The Station nightclub where a fire claimed 100 lives and injured more than 200, have agreed to pay $813,218.82 to the victims to settle a raft of civil suits brought against them in federal court.

The amount represents the balance of a $1-million liability insurance policy the brothers had on their West Warwick club through the Essex Insurance Company.

The rest of the money from that policy –– a little over $186,000 –– has already been paid out to some of the victims for medical expenses they incurred as a result of the disastrous fire at the nightclub.

After the Feb. 20, 2003, fire, the Derderians filed for bankruptcy protection. Their debts –– except for the insurance policy –– were discharged by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur N. Votolato on Sept. 1, 2006. They are now immune from further liability as it pertains to the fire victims.

The tentative settlement agreement offered by the Derderians, announced yesterday afternoon in a federal court filing, also covers the corporate entity known as DERCO LLC through which they operated the nightclub. The offer brings the pot of money being offered to the fire victims to about $176 million.

The Derderians are among the last defendants to offer settlements to the fire victims. Their settlement agreement was announced just one day after the announcement of a similar agreement with Great White, the rock band whose pyrotechnics ignited the fire.

Like all the other proposed settlements, the one offered by the Derderians is premised on a number of conditions. It must be approved by all the victims and by the judge who is presiding over the mass tort case, Senior U.S. District Judge Ronald R. Lagueux. It is also contingent on the court’s approval of an allocation plan being developed by a special master, Duke University Law Prof. Francis E. McGovern, and the approval of the bankruptcy court.

The settlement agreement says that the bankruptcy court may reduce the amount of the proposed settlement to pay unspecified fees and expenses.

In September 2006, the Derderians each pleaded no-contest to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter –– one count for each person who died in the fire.

Michael Derderian was sentenced to four years at the Adult Correctional Institutions. He is scheduled to be released one year early from his sentence, in October 2009, over the opposition of victims’ families.

Jeffrey Derderian received a sentence of community service and no jail time. He completed 534 hours of community service last fall.

The brothers were faulted for installing highly flammable polyurethane foam as soundproofing in their club; allowing overcrowding at The Station; failing to provide proper exits; and allowing musicians to set off fireworks inside the club without the required permits.

Their negligence, the lawsuits allege, “caused deaths and severe personal injuries to plaintiffs.”

The fire at The Station broke out when Great White started its show with a display of pyrotechnics. Within minutes, the wood-frame building was a death trap filled with flames and toxic smoke. The club went dark. There were no fire sprinklers. The building was totally engulfed within three minutes; many of those who died were caught in a stampede for the door.

Michael Derderian was out-of-state the night of the fire; Jeffrey was at the club when the fire broke out.

After the fire, lawyers representing the victims sued nearly 100 defendants. Settlement money has been offered by most of them, including corporations that allegedly made the highly flammable foam that lined the walls of the nightclub and sponsors of the Great White show, among them the beer manufacturer Anheuser-Busch.

The Town of West Warwick and the State of Rhode Island have each agreed to pay the fire victims $10 million based on victims’ claims that they failed to properly inspect The Station and cite its owners for the flammable foam, and for allowing overcrowding at the Great White concert.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/DE...4.3a3eb2e.html





He's Giving You Access, One Document at a Time
Nathan Halverson

California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online.

This Web site contains the Sonoma County Code and the 38-volume California Code of Regulations. Sebastopol resident Carl Malamud put the laws online in hopes California and other governments will drop their claim to copyright.

But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.

The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.

It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.

That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.

"When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court."

Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment.

To purchase a digital copy of the California code costs $1,556, or $2,315 for a printed version. The state generates about $880,000 annually by selling its laws, according to the California Office of Administrative Law.

Malamud isn't just targeting California. He posted safety and building codes for nearly all 50 states, and some counties and cities such as Sonoma County and Los Angeles.

This is not uncharted territory for Malamud. In 1994, he pushed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to post corporate filings online, opening the door for companies such as Google and Yahoo to create elaborate financial Web sites. In June, Malamud helped convince the state of Oregon to stop claiming copyright over its laws.

Now Malamud wants to do the same for California -- and everywhere else. And he's willing to go to court to make his point. He thinks the court system will rule in his favor, establishing a precedent that all government agencies must follow.

"If that happens, it opens the doors to innovation," Malamud said.

To get the California Code online, he digitally scanned a stack of documents that weighed 150 pounds. Now anyone can download the 33,000 pages, and print whatever they want from his Web site, public.resource.org.

Traditionally, governments provided publishing companies such as LexisNexis copies of laws to print and bind for people. It was practically the only way to get the laws distributed to people. LexisNexis claims to have the "world's largest collection of public records."

But the Internet has changed how people can share information. Increasingly, government agencies -- including Sonoma County -- contract with LexisNexis and other publishers to post their laws online.

"Most of the county staff now just look up the codes on the Internet," said Jennifer Barrett, Sonoma County's deputy planning director. "You can quickly search for keywords or a section. It's quite easy to find what you are looking for."

But LexisNexis does not format the online laws for easy printing or downloading, Malamud said. And that hampers how people can access the laws.

LexisNexis is the exclusive distributor of Sonoma County statutes, selling print versions for $220. It offers free access to the county's codes on the Internet, but its Web site is relatively archaic and doesn't include the features common in newer sites.
If the county provided those laws in a free, standardized digital format, others could design Web sites with more modern search and presentation features, Malamud said. Social Web sites could pop up where, for instance, plumbers could provide useful annotations to building codes -- perhaps blending Wikipedia with Facebook for a more useful law site.

LexisNexis declined to comment for this story. Its primary competitor, Thomson West, which publishes California laws under a contract with the state, does not claim copyright over government statutes, a spokesman said.

California asserts copyright protections for its laws, contending it ensures the public gets accurate, timely information while generating revenue for the state.

"We exercise our copyright to benefit the people of California," said Linda Brown, deputy director of the Office of Administrative Law, which manages the state's laws. "We are obtaining compensation for the people of California."

Malamud must get permission from the state to post codes online, Brown said. She was not familiar with Malamud's actions, and could not comment on what steps would be taken to protect the state's copyright.

Malamud might be seriously outgunned in regards to the financial and legal resources of the governments he is facing. But Malamud has a track record of defeating much larger foes, said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society.

"I think his work is extraordinarily important," Lessig said.

While there is a lot of commercial interest in stopping Malamud, his strategy of showing how easy it is for governments to post laws themselves makes a strong argument to the public, Lessig said.

Malamud thinks it will take him another three years to establish that no one can assert copyright over any U.S. law.

Like in his previous battles, he's not going it alone. His nonprofit has received about $2 million so far, with money coming from Internet pioneers such as the foundation of Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay. Malamud expects it will take several million more to finish his campaign.

He also has some heavy-hitting legal academics on his side.

Professor Pamela Samuelson, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, has also questioned the legality of copyrighting standards and laws.

"If it's the law, the public should have access to it," she said.

Samuelson points out that the idea of copyright was established to provide people incentive to create. People are given exclusive legal rights to their paintings, writings and other works because by selling those rights they can attempt to make a living.

There is no similar need for financial incentives to establish standards such as building codes, Samuelson said. For the most part, volunteers spend long hours drafting proposed standards for things like plumbing and building. Governments often take those standards and adopt them into law.

Once the standards become law, she doesn't think people can claim copyright protections. But like Malamud, she sees the courts making the final ruling.

"I don't think it's an airtight case for either side. But I think the law favors that if something is a law, it's in the public domain," she said.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...ment_at_a_time





Court Says AT&T Can't Force Arbitration

The Washington state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld an AT&T customer's right to file a class-action lawsuit against the company, saying the customer-service agreement stripped away some important consumer protections.

Michael McKee, of East Wenatchee, filed a class-action suit against AT&T, alleging it wrongly charged him and others for city utility surcharges and usurious late fees. McKee didn't think it was fair that he got charged a city-utility fee even though he lived outside city limits. Though the charges were small -- no more than $2 in any given month -- he noted that it added up after many years and many customers.

So McKee took his case to court. Meanwhile, AT&T argued that the dispute should be settled through arbitration, noting that McKee agreed to mandatory arbitration when he signed up for service in 2002. Such arbitration clauses are ubiquitous, and often consumers must agree to them as a condition of accepting a credit card, a cell phone or other services.

A Chelan County Superior Court found the dispute-resolution provision of AT&T's Consumer Services Agreement "unconscionable" and denied AT&T's motion to compel arbitration. AT&T appealed.

On Thursday, in an unanimous decision, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling. Justice Tom Chambers concludes:

Quote:
A&T's Consumer Services Agreement is substantively unconscionable and therefore unenforceable to the extent that it purports to waive the right to class actions, require confidentiality, shorten the Washington Consumer Protection Act statute of limitations, and limit availability of attorney fees.

We emphasize that these provisions have nothing to do with arbitration. Arbitrators supervise class actions, conduct open hearings, apply appropriate statutes of limitations, and award compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorney fees, where appropriate. Courts will not be easily deceived by attempts to unilaterally strip away consumer protections and remedies by efforts to cloak the waiver of important rights under an arbitration clause.
Read the Supreme Court opinion here (PDF).
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/c...ves/147348.asp





Comcast Sues FCC, Wants P2P Throttling Order Overturned
Nate Anderson

Ever since the FCC handed down its 3-2 decision against cable operator Comcast's network management techniques, Comcast has been expected to sue the FCC. Today, the cable giant made good on those predictions, filing an appeal of the FCC ruling in the DC Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over FCC decisions.

The appeal itself is brief: a two-page document, a cover letter, and a $450 check. But the fight that it spawns will no doubt drag on for quite some time, centering on one major question: can the FCC rule against Comcast based on a policy statement that the FCC said was not enforceable at the time?

In a statement today, however, Comcast did admit that the FCC does have the authority to regulate ISPs "in appropriate circumstances and in accordance with appropriate procedures."

As the legal process plays itself out, Comcast has pledged to abide by the order and continue its work to move towards a protocol-agnostic throttling system that could slow "heavy users" down to DSL levels for 20 minutes at a time (another piece of the bandwidth management puzzle, hard bandwidth caps, were also announced last month).

"Although we are seeking review and reversal of the Commission's network management order in federal court, we intend to comply fully with the requirements established in that order, which essentially codify the voluntary commitments that we have already announced, and to continue to act in accord with the Commission’s Internet Policy Statement," said David Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president.

"Thus, we intend to make the required filings and disclosures, and we will follow through on our longstanding commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year."

With Comcast pledging to abide by the FCC's decision, what's the point of the lawsuit? The FCC's finding and order are precedent setting, in that the Commission has rendered a decision on how far ISPs can go in managing their networks for the first time. That's a precedent Comcast and its cable and telecom brethren would rather not have, as they would prefer to manage their networks in any manner they see fit without directives from the FCC covering what kinds of management techniques are over the line.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...verturned.html





Europe Weighs Caps on Roaming Fees for Text Messages
Kevin J. O’Brien

The European Union’s telecommunications minister will propose price controls that would substantially reduce the roaming fees that individuals are charged to send text messages and limits that could reduce the cost of using the Internet.

Details of the proposal, obtained Wednesday by The International Herald Tribune, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or S.M.S., within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 American cents, a message.

That would be a 62 percent reduction from the current average of 29 cents, according to the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union.

Ms. Reding also intends to recommend a cap on the wholesale cost of using cellphones to gain access to the Internet — the fees operators charge each other — that would halve the average cost to one euro a megabyte.

Roaming prices range from 6 cents in Estonia to 80 cents in Belgium, according to the European Regulators Group, a panel of the European Union’s 27 national telecommunications regulators.

“S.M.S. prices are really too high, so bringing them down is best thing that can happen for consumers,” said Monique Goyens, the director general of the European Consumers’ Organization, based in Brussels, which represents 41 consumer groups.

In 2007, Europeans spent 800 million euros on roaming charges for short text messages and 560 million euros on data roaming services, according to the commission. They also spent 5.2 billion euros on voice roaming charges that year. Over all, 300 billion euros was spent on telecommunications in Europe, the European Information Technology Observatory said.

Ms. Reding devised the European Union’s limits on charges for voice roaming, which took effect a year ago and have, she says, saved European consumers an average of 60 percent for the service.

Her new proposal cleared a commission economic assessment panel last week and is circulating for comment among the commission’s 27 ministries. The commission could vote on the proposal as early as Sept. 15.

Commission approval is considered likely, given the support of France, which holds the rotating European presidency through 2008.

In July, Luc Chatel, the French junior minister for consumer affairs, said his country supported efforts to lower charges, which in France have not dropped below 12 cents on average since 2004, even as the volume of messages has doubled, according to a study by Arcep, the French telecommunications regulator.

The European Parliament and ministers’ council could vote on Ms. Reding’s plan this year or next. The caps could take effect in July at the earliest, when the new legislative session begins.

Support is likely in the Parliament, which voted overwhelmingly last year for caps on voice roaming.

Erna Hennicot-Schoepges, a member of the industry, research and energy committee, which will consider Ms. Reding’s proposal, said broad support for data price controls was likely.

“My sense is that there is strong support for this in Parliament,” said Ms. Hennicot-Schoepges, who is from Dudelange, Luxembourg. “As a conservative, I am generally opposed to price controls, but I think in this circumstance it is the only way to get the mobile operators to cooperate.”

She said she was personally frustrated by the fees she must pay to travel the relatively short distances among Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg.

“Every time I cross a border, the operators change and I am charged again,” she said. “I think the charges are basically arbitrary and bear no relation to the actual service.”

The European mobile industry, which fought unsuccessfully last year against the limits on voice roaming charges, will fight the caps on data roaming, said David Pringle, a spokesman for the GSM Association, which is based in London and represents wireless operators.

“In our view, these markets are healthy, competitive and functioning well,” Mr. Pringle said. “There is no need for Brussels to set prices.”

The operators say they base their roaming charges on the actual cost of connecting voice and data calls between networks. The charges have so far been set largely by operators without government oversight.

But prices have fallen recently as large operators like Vodafone, the 3 Group and KPN have begun offering reciprocal wholesale data roaming fees to other operators of 50 cents or less per megabyte.

Efforts to regulate the fees with a single uniform price cap ignore important differences in data services, Mr. Pringle said. Those who use push e-mail, a service that forwards messages to cellphones, for example, stay in constant contact with their network, placing a greater drain on an operator than the 30-minute Internet session of a traveling laptop user.

The European Regulators Group said the average rate telecom operators charge each other for data roaming fell 38 percent to 2 euros a megabyte in March from 3.22 euros a megabyte in June 2007.

The average retail roaming price in Europe for downloading one megabyte of data was 3.50 euros in March, according to the regulators group, a 40 percent decline from 5.81 euros in June 2007.

Ms. Goyens, the director general of the European Consumers’ Organization, said it had found that many European consumers were unaware of the fees for data roaming. In one case this year, she said, a Belgian woman on vacation in Spain received a bill for 18,889 euros from her operator for Internet use. She was billed at 9.68 euros a megabyte.

Ms. Reding’s new proposal would allow customers to ask that operators cut them off when their data roaming costs reach a designated level.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/bu...4regulate.html





Two Months Left in Battle for National Broadband
Karlis Salna

A national broadband network is a step closer with the Federal Government announcing the deadline for bids for the multi-billion project.

The seven bidders have until November 26 to submit their proposals to provide Australians with high-speed broadband services.

''The national broadband network is part of the Rudd Government's plan to drive investment in critical infrastructure and ensure that Australia takes advantage of the many opportunities presented by the digital economy,'' Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy said.

The Federal Government has set aside $4.7billion of taxpayers' money to build the network which, it says, will deliver high-speed internet services to 98 per cent of the population.

The winning bidder, who will assume ownership of the network, is expected to make up the rest of the cost.

The Government has been criticised for delays to the tender process, which it promised to have finalised within six months of coming to office.

Senator Conroy said the last of the network information had now been made available.

''It has always been the Government's position that the provision of appropriate network information to proponents is vital for the success of the national broadband network process and that this should be done assoon as possible,'' Senator Conroy said.

Telstra and Terria, two of the confirmed bidders, both welcomed the announcement, and resumed their debate over whether the company that wins the rights to build the network should be structurally separated.

The majority of bidders, including Terria, say the winning company should have separate network and retail businesses to ensure effective competition and the best deal for consumers.

Terria chairman Michael Egan said better, faster and cheaper internet services could only be achieved if the new network provided genuine and assured open access for all internet service providers.

''And that can only be achieved if the new network is structurally separated from any access seeker and if both price and non-price terms of access are monitored and enforced by a strong andindependent regulator,'' Mr Egan said.

Telstra rejects that notion, claiming structural separation would increase costs and destroy investment.

Nonetheless, Telstra has guaranteed other telecommunication companies would have open access to the network if it won the project.

Telstra spokesman David Quilty said competitors would be able to access the network on an equivalent basis to Telstra's own business units.

''This is a critical promise and we fully expect it to be enshrined in law and to be policed by the ACCC and we have no difficulty with these protections,'' Mr Quilty said.

''Telstra's guarantee of open access renders obsolete the 'fool's gold' debate around separation.

''Separation increases costs and kills off investment and it has not worked anywhere in the world.''
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news...d/1262625.aspx





Coming Soon: PC-as-a-Service Over Broadband
Allan Leinwand

Broadband service providers are looking to add higher-value services to their offerings, services that could soon include a virtual desktop for consumers. Indeed, the idea of a service provider offering a PC as a Service (PCaaS), essentially a PC in the cloud, may be coming to your broadband connection sooner than you might think.Here is how a virtual desktop would work: You’d have an access device at your location, called a thin client, which would connect your keyboard, video screen and mouse (KVM) to the service provider’s broadband network.

The thin client could be a hardware device or it could be a piece of software running on your current PC. In either implementation, the thin client sends all of your KVM data from your location to a server hosted in the service provider’s network. All PC functions and applications would be running on the server in the network and the only data going between your location and the server would be KVM information.

That is the major benefit of a virtual desktop: All operating system files, applications, documents, security software and so on are located on the server. All you need at your location is the thin client and you get access to your full desktop. These benefits, however, also highlight the main drawback of a virtual desktop: lack of portability. Moving your data from one virtual desktop to another may not be a trivial task and some applications may not be portable into a virtual desktop at all.

The technology to offer a virtual desktop has been around for a number of years. Companies such as Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and others already provide software to virtualize user desktops and connect to thin clients. The main issue with these offerings has been their performance relative to local computers. I, for example, was subjected to the horrors of using a software-based thin client connected to a server in a remote location, and the performance was abysmal at best.

But two fundamental technologies that may solve the virtual desktop performance issues already exist. The first is the proliferation of broadband Internet. Using a thin client to connect to a remote virtual desktop server over a multimegabit link that is within the same metropolitan area can provide reasonable performance. The second technology is KVM enhanced by hardware. Companies such as Teradici and Pano Logic provide hardware acceleration and compression for the KVM data passing from a thin client to the server — to the point where the performance difference between a local computer desktop and a virtual desktop is nearly indistinguishable. Using these technologies, the performance of the virtual desktop could even provide a graphics-intensive experience, such as playing a 1080p HD movie in one window and playing an action-packed game in another.

Assuming that the technologies exist to enable service providers to offer virtual desktops for consumers, from a business perspective, PCaaS has numerous appealing qualities. Broadband customers that use a virtual desktop will more than likely pay for a higher-bandwidth broadband service. Given the portability issues around virtual desktops, this also provides a clever mechanism to lock the consumer onto a specific network, which would ostensibly result in lower churn. I can also envision different product bundles for consumer-focused virtual desktops: a basic desktop with a browser only, an enterprise desktop with Microsoft Office applications enabled and a gaming/HD desktop that comes bundled with a hardware-based thin client branded by the service provider (Here’s your AT&T desktop access device!). Additional options could be storage space, accessibility options (Do you want to access your desktop from any TV and your mobile phone? Please pay us $5 more per month) or peripheral device support (such as printers and webcams).

One question that needs to be answered is how service providers could offer virtual desktops in conjunction with their metered bandwidth services. If I am sending lots of KVM data to a virtual desktop hosted by my service provider, you can be darned sure I don’t want be billed on a bandwidth meter.

But perhaps the biggest unknown around the PCaaS business is the user support that would be required. Service provider support organizations are better known for frustrating their users than helping them. Extending these support organizations to answer a myriad of desktop, application and device peripheral issues might be too much for them. An alternative may be for service providers to outsource the application and peripheral support to someone like Microsoft, similar to today’s relationship between MSN and Qwest.

With all of this to consider, are you ready to give up the hassles of managing your own desktop for a virtual desktop run by your service provider?
http://gigaom.com/2008/08/30/hello-a...desktop-icons/





Microsoft Faces New Browser Foe in Google
Steve Lohr

The browser war is back on.

This time, Microsoft’s opponent is Google, a familiar foe.

On Tuesday, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser.

The browser is a universal doorway to the Internet, and the use of Internet software and services is rapidly growing. Increasingly, the browser is also the doorway to the Web on cellphones and other mobile devices, widening the utility of the Web and Web advertising. Google, analysts say, cannot let Microsoft’s dominant share of the browser market go without a direct challenge.

Google already competes with Microsoft in online search and Internet advertising. They both make operating software for cellphones. Google is increasingly competing with Microsoft head-on in software that handles basic productivity like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs. Google has Web-based software in these markets that are low-cost or free alternatives to Microsoft’s lucrative desktop software.

Despite the frequent clashes with Microsoft — including the role Google played in thwarting an attempted acquisition of Yahoo — Google has come out on top only in search and search advertising. But Google does not have to win the browser war. Strategically, opening yet another front against Microsoft forces it to divert resources to defend franchises.

Now, Chrome heightens the rivalry and marks a shift for Google, which has strongly backed Firefox, the open-source browser that has gained about a fifth of the market against the dominant Internet Explorer.

Google’s browser project has been under way for more than a year, a person close to the company said.

In a brief statement, Microsoft welcomed the new entry and expressed confidence that people would prefer Explorer, which is on every Windows PC sold.

“The browser landscape is highly competitive,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group. “But people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.”

Google has clashed with Microsoft before, saying it had designed IE to gain ground in search, a market where Google is the runaway leader.

After Microsoft introduced IE 7 in 2006, Google complained that the browser’s search box favored Microsoft’s search service. Microsoft responded and made modifications, and a federal judge overseeing the antitrust consent decree against Microsoft determined that the browser design was not anticompetitive.

The first round of the browser wars in the 1990s led to a sweeping federal antitrust suit against Microsoft for the tactics it used to stifle competition from the commercial pioneer in browsing software, Netscape Communications. A federal appeals court ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Microsoft later reached a settlement with the Bush administration, which included some sanctions but left the company free to bundle browsing software with Windows, which runs more than 90 percent of all personal computers.

Microsoft recently stepped up its own browser development efforts, given the increasing importance of the browser and signs that Firefox is nibbling at its lead. Microsoft released a new version, IE8, last week to generally favorable reviews.

Microsoft still holds 73 percent of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a research firm. The market share for Firefox has climbed to 19 percent, while Apple’s Safari has 6 percent.

Chrome also puts Google in competition with an ally, the Mozilla Corporation, which manages the Firefox project. Just last week, Google renewed its deal with Mozilla. Under the arrangement, Google Search is the home page for Firefox and Google is its default search bar, and Google makes substantial payments to Mozilla. The agreement runs through November 2011, and will continue.

Google’s cooperation with Mozilla, however friendly, meant that it was ceding control of the Internet’s vital gateway technology — and the dominant supplier of that technology is its archrival, Microsoft.

Given the increasing importance of the browser and its widening competition with Microsoft, Google’s entry into the market is not surprising, said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla.

“It would be more surprising to me if Google didn’t do something in the browser space,” Mr. Lilly said. “After all, Google is 100 percent on the Web.”

Google’s move, he said, would put “more competitive pressure on us to keep coming up with great browser technology. But having more smart people competing to improve browser technology and the user experience is a good thing.”

Mr. Lilly also noted that Mozilla, while a private company, is entirely owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The browser project was begun to provide an alternative to Microsoft’s browser. “The mission of Mozilla is to keep the Web open, a pure public benefit,” he said. “Others have other motivations and Google’s move also serves to highlight our position in the marketplace.”

Chrome will be available to download in a test, or beta, version on Tuesday, Google announced on its Web site Monday afternoon. The browser will run on Windows. Google is also working on Chrome versions for Apple’s Macintosh, as well as Linux, an open source operating system.

In a curious twist, Google made its online announcement after its plans appeared as a digital “comic book” that was posted by Google Blogoscoped, a Web site that tracks the Internet search giant.

According to Google’s Web site post, by Sundar Pichai, an engineering director and vice president for product management, Chrome is designed for speed and ease of use.

But the other design goal, it seems, was to make sure Google could control how well the growing range of Web-based software it is developing will perform, instead of having to run on a Microsoft browser.

“Under the hood,” Mr. Pichai wrote, “we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex Web applications much better.”

Later, he wrote, “we improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

Chrome is based on an open-source rendering engine, WebKit, and an open-source version of Google’s Gears technology. Chrome will also be able to run in a privacy mode, InCognito, so that no information about a person’s browsing is collected. With IE8 last week, Microsoft added a privacy mode of browsing, called InPrivate.

The privacy features, analysts note, could undercut the Internet advertising business of Google, but also Microsoft, Yahoo and others that depend on ads aimed at users based on their browsing behavior. But it is unclear, analysts say, how large a share of users will opt for the privacy browsing mode and give up the convenience of having a browser store sites recently visited in tabbed settings for easy navigation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/te...google.html?hp





Be Sure to Read Chrome's Fine Print
Ina Fried

Moments ago, Google went live with its Chrome Web Browser. I immediately clicked download, but not before I saved a copy of its terms of service. I like to know what I am agreeing to.

Here are a few things that stood out to me.

1. Google reserves the right to automatically update and install Chrome.

This is becoming standard fare with much software these days, but worth noting.

Quote:
"The software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the services."
2. Although you retain any copyrights to content you own and use in the browser, Google says it has a right to display some of your content, in conjunction with promoting its services. Here's their exact wording.

Quote:
"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."
3. Don't be surprised to see more ads.

Traditionally, it is Web pages and not the browser itself that serves ads. Google isn't saying it will change this paradigm, but it's terms of service don't rule that out either.

Quote:
"Some of the services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the services, queries made through the services or other information.

The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the services are subject to change without specific notice to you."
Also worth paying attention to are the settings when you install it. By default, Chrome will add all manner of shortcuts, so if you don't want it to do that, be sure to click "customize these settings." Of note, it does not make itself the default browser without a user agreeing to do so.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10030522-2.html





Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome
Frederic Lardinois

Google Chrome has quickly become one of our favorite browsers here at RWW, but as Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, reports, Chrome has also inherited a potentially serious security flaw from the old version of WebKit it is based on. An attacker could easily trick users into launching an executable Java file by combining a flaw in WebKit with a known Java bug and some smart social engineering.

Security expert Aviv Raff, who first discovered this flaw, set up a demo of the exploit here. (Note: This page will automatically download a Java file onto your desktop). You can safely click on the download, as it only opens up a notepad application written in Java.

Carpet-Bombing

The problem here is that, after a user double-clicks the download at the bottom of the screen, this application is opened without any warning, which would allow a malicious hacker to easily execute any Java program on a user's machine.

Two facts make this exploit especially embarrassing for Google. First of all, Google stressed the security of Chrome in both the official announcement as well as in today's live video demo just before the launch.

Apple Already Did It

More importantly, as ZDNet reports, Apple already patched WebKit against this flaw when it released Safari 3.2.1 in July, though only after the flaw had been known already for more than two months. Google, however, is using an older version of WebKit as the basis for Chrome.

Social Engineering

Obviously, this exploit only works because of the social engineering behind it. Just like some pop-up ads trick users into clicking "OK" because the ad mimics a typical system message in Windows, this exploit would trick users who are not yet familiar with Chrome's interface into believing that the download is actually just part of the web page.

We assume that Google will patch this flaw a lot faster than Apple did, but this news definitely puts a bit of a damper on our enthusiasm for Chrome.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...gle_chrome.php





Google Restores Chrome's Shine
Chris Mellor

Google has acted with speed and retracted the objectional sentences in Chrome's EULA, so that any content you post via Chrome is yours and yours alone.

The ruckus (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...me_eula_sucks/) was caused by our old friends, the paralegal firm Cut 'n' Paste Inc. Their employment has now been terminated and a new contract arranged with Fink First, Cut 'n' Paste who have produced a revised section 11 reading:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

There are no qualifying sub-sections at all.

So why did this happen?

Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, wrote:

In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product.

We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.


Googler Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, blogged: (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google...nse-agreement/)

It was clearly a mistake on Google’s part to include that language when it shouldn’t have been there, and I should have been grateful to the people that pointed it out. Instead of getting snippy with people, my reaction should have been more along the lines of “Oh crap, I don’t think that’s intentional. Thank you so much for noticing that and pointing it out. I’ll see if we can get an official clarification or reaction as soon as possible.”

I apologize for that, and I appreciate the people who push Google to be better.


Thaddeus P Fink, founder, chairman and CEO of Fink First, Cut 'n Paste, said he had a one-time-only, special offer deal for cutting out Completely Redundant Arcane Prose (think acronymically) from EULAs, and was open for further business.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...me_eula_terms/





Internet Explorer 8: Over 2x “Fatter” Than Firefox

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 arrived last week amid great expectations and some heated controversy. The latter was due to Microsoft’s decision to adopt a standards-compliant rendering model that breaks a great many IE-specific web sites.

However, while various bloggers and pundits waxed breathlessly about all of the new bells and whistles (including the much-reported “porn mode”), we were busy putting Microsoft’s new browser under the microscope of the exo.repository.

Note: For more information on the exo.performance.network, or to register for your free Analysis Portal account, visit www.xpnet.com.

Over the course of several days, we evaluated IE 8 under both Windows XP (SP3) and Vista x86 (SP1) to determine how this major update behaves and what, if any, new burdens it might place on today’s over-taxed (in the case of Vista) Windows PCs.

What we found was another example of unchecked Microsoft code “bloat,” complete with “shirt-bursting, waistline-stretching” memory consumption and the kind of CPU-hogging thread growth normally reserved for massively parallel server farms.

For example, on our Dell OptiPlex 745 (Core 2 Duo @ 2.66GHz) Vista/XP test bed with 2GB of RAM, IE 8 consumed just under 380MB of memory during a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario of popular general media, technical media and humor-related Web destinations (see bottom of this article for a list of sites).

By contrast, IE 7 consumed just under 250MB rendering this same workload, while Firefox 3.01 put both IE versions to shame by completing the same browsing scenario in just 159MB of RAM.

The story gets worse for IE 8 when you examine the number of threads spawned to complete the scenarios. Under Firefox, the count never exceed 29 concurrent threads. IE 7 spawned a hefty 65 execution threads, while IE 8 tried to choke the life out of the CPU with a massive 171 concurrent threads.

By comparison, the instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 x64 Edition that hosts the exo.repository rarely spins more than 100 concurrent threads – this on an 8-way, 8GB server machine servicing over 3000 actively monitored PCs.

One area where IE 8 came out ahead of Firefox is in overall CPU utilization. Firefox consumed an average 33% Processor Time under XP (48% under Vista), while IE 8 took-up 22% of the CPU (33% under Vista) and IE 7 was the least aggressive at 13% (24% under Vista).

Considering how much faster Firefox is than IE 7/8 at displaying most web sites, the additional CPU cycles are understandable and likely attributable to a more efficient rendering engine employing fewer threads in exchange for faster linear performance.

Some observations:

• With a massive working set approaching 20% of our test bed’s 2GB RAM configuration, IE 8 may be the long awaited “killer app” that drives customers towards 4GB+ systems and the 64-bit flavors of Windows Vista/7.
• By greatly increasing the number of concurrent execution threads, and then spreading them out across multiple, discrete processes (in our case, 6 separate instances of iexplore.exe), Microsoft seems to be positioning IE 8 to take advantage of the greatly expanded core counts of future Intel and AMD CPUs – at the cost of overwhelming today’s single and dual-core PCs.
• By delivering superior performance while maintaining a nearly 2x smaller memory and CPU footprint across the board, Firefox 3.01 proves once again that the open source community can often trump even the most well-funded commercial projects when it comes to delivering efficient, streamlined code.

Bottom Line: No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Meanwhile, the Firefox folks continue to embarrass Microsoft by “doing it better” (including delivering superior performance and overall standards compliance) while consuming fewer hardware resources. How these efficiencies will play in the aforementioned multi-core future remains to be seen.

It may be that Microsoft’s focus on parallelism will reap dividends once the hardware catches up with the software - much like Vista has looked better as the Windows PC ecosystem has evolved to support its epically porcine girth. Such massively-threaded products will likely feel more at home on the 4, 8 and 16-core systems of tomorrow, but for right now they represent the worst kind of code bloat.
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2008/09...tter-than.html





A New Battle Is Beginning in Branding for the Web
Steve Lohr

To marketers large and small, the Web is a wide open frontier, an unlimited billboard with boundless branding opportunities.

For the empirical proof, look at the filings with the government for new trademarks that, put simply, are brand names.

Applications surged in the dot-com years, peaking in 2000 and then falling sharply for two years, before rising to a record last year of more than 394,000.

Recently, a new front has opened in the Internet branding wars.

It lies beyond putting trademarks on new businesses, Web site addresses and online logos. Now, companies want to slap a brand on still vaguely defined products and services in the uncharted ephemera of cyberspace — the computing cloud, as it has come to be known.

Cloud computing usually refers to Internet services or software that the user accesses through a Web browser on a personal computer, cellphone or other device. The digital service is delivered remotely, from somewhere off in the computing cloud, in the fashion of Google’s Internet search service.

Dell has tried to trademark the term cloud computing itself. But in August, the United States Patent and Trademark Office sent a strong signal that cloud computing cannot be trademarked.

It issued an initial refusal to Dell, which filed its application 18 months ago, when the term was less widely used in industry conversations and marketing.

Dell had passed early steps toward approval, but the office turned it down, after protests from industry experts that cloud computing had become a broadly descriptive term, and not one linked to a single company. Dell can appeal, but that seems unlikely.

In recent years, patents — not trademarks — have been the main focus of intellectual property experts and the courts, especially around the issue of whether patents on software and business methods have become counterproductive, inhibiting innovation.

But some legal experts say trademark issues may take on a higher profile, fueled by the escalating value of brands in general and trademark holders increasingly trying to assert their rights, especially on the Internet.

“Trademark is the sleeping giant of intellectual property,” said Paul Goldstein, a professor at the Stanford law school.

Microsoft, for example, is developing a technology that is intended to synchronize the data on all of a person’s computing devices, even synchronizing it with family members and work colleagues as well, automatically reaching across the cloud.

When Microsoft announced the concept this year, it said the technology would be called Live Mesh. Just what it is and how it may work remains unclear, but Microsoft filed for a trademark on Live Mesh in June, an application that awaits judgment from the Patent and Trademark Office.

Mesh and mesh networking are widely used terms for technology that connects devices.

“This is the challenge for our examiners,” said Lynne G. Beresford, commissioner for trademarks in the Patent and Trademark Office. “With emerging marks in a field that is changing quickly, you have to make a determination about what the common understanding is.”

That challenge, legal experts say, is one of several for trademark policy and practice in the Internet age. Instant communication, aggressive business tactics and an unsettled legal environment, they say, mean that trademark disputes on the Internet will increase in number and intensity.

The first round of trademark conflict on the Internet, focused on cybersquatting, has subsided. Cybersquatters were early profiteers who bought up the Web addresses, or domain names, of well-known trademarked brands, and then tried to charge the companies huge amounts of money to buy them.

In 1999, Congress passed a bill against cybersquatting that allowed companies to sue anyone who, with “a bad faith intent to profit,” buys the domain name of a well-known brand. The same year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit oversight agency, established a system for resolving domain name disputes.

The new areas of conflict, according to legal experts, include trademark owners trying to assert their rights to stifle online criticism of their products, and to stop trademarked brands from being purchased as keywords in Internet search advertising.

Early court rulings in keyword cases point to the uncertain legal setting and the international differences in trademark law. In the United States, lawyers say, the initial rulings have tended to allow companies to buy the trademarked brand names of rivals as keywords in search. Ford, for example, can bid on and buy “Toyota,” so that a person typing Toyota as a search term would see a link to Ford’s Web site in the paid-for links on the right hand side of Google’s Web page.

In the United States, that practice has not been interpreted as causing any fundamental consumer confusion. Google also argues that because any bidder can make an offer for any word — Google supplies no list — it is not a user of trademarks. “We are not using keywords, we are not selling keywords, we are selling ad space,” said Terri Chen, Google’s senior trademark counsel.

But in a French court ruling in 2005, Google was enjoined from allowing others to buy as a keyword the trademark brand of a French luxury goods maker, Louis Vuitton. For countries other than the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Google has a trademark complaint system, so holders can generally prevent their brands from being purchased as keywords by others.

The speed of Internet communication and heightened competition to claim and establish brands have drastically changed trademark tactics over the years. Compare the positioning and pre-emptive moves around cloud computing with the gradual pace of building one of the most valued brands in the world, Microsoft’s Windows.

The use of personal computer windows and graphical user windowing systems were around long before Microsoft announced its plans for a Windows operating system in 1983. The first version was introduced in 1985, and Microsoft did not file for a trademark until 1990. Its application was initially rejected as “merely descriptive.”

But, as so often, Microsoft persevered. It kept investing in advertising, branding and product development. It presented the Patent and Trademark Office with surveys showing people had come to associate the term Windows with Microsoft, and in 1995 the trademark examiners finally agreed.

With its cloud computing project Live Mesh, Microsoft is taking a far faster, more focused approach. It is employing Live, which it uses in other Internet offerings, like Windows Live and Xbox Live, as half of a two-word trademark — or composite mark, in legal terms. “Mesh networking is the generic category, but Live Mesh is Microsoft’s implementation and acts as a source identifier,” said Russell Pangborn, Microsoft’s director for trademarks.

One thing that has been undeniably transformed by computing and the Internet is the trademark office itself. Ms. Beresford, a professed “trademark nerd,” recalled that when she joined the office in 1979, searches for the same or “confusingly similar” trademarks began in the “search room.” The applications and registration documents were kept in wooden cabinets, filed alphabetically.

Trademarked images were kept in separate drawers and grouped into visual categories, she recalled, like “grotesque humans” (the Pillsbury doughboy) and “human body parts” (the Yellow Pages’ walking fingers).

Examining attorneys, Ms. Beresford noted, were issued rubber covers for their index fingers for going through files faster and with fewer paper cuts. The technology tools have been upgraded considerably since then. The work is now done mainly on computers, searching the Web and specialized trademark databases. Eighty-five percent of the office’s 390 examining attorneys work primarily from home.

The search room, Ms. Beresford observed, has “gone the way of the buggy whip.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/te...copyright.html





Introducing the Twiller
Matt Richtel

You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it.

Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.

Introducing the Twiller.

Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller. (Cheap word play is what you get when you disintermediate, as they say, your agent and editor).

It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cell phone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.

The appearance of my story on this new medium has apparently confused some people. But many of my newspaper colleagues write novels. I’ve already published one. This is just an experiment in a new medium.

Plus, it’s a short story with a proverbial long tail — albeit a short, long tail. Only about 400 people are reading the story — a few get added every few days. It’s whatever is the opposite of mass market.

I don’t know if the story will catch much attention, but, then again, it doesn’t require much attention at all.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ler/index.html





Playing God, the Home Game
Seth Schiesel

What is the difference between a game and a toy? Does a game that feels more like a toy — even a scintillating, empowering toy — fall short on its own terms? Or is it enough just to be a great toy?

Those questions came to mind again and again as I spent more than 60 hours recently with Spore, the almost impossibly ambitious new brainchild of Will Wright. Best known for his popular evocations of urban sprawl (SimCity) and suburban Americana (The Sims), Mr. Wright has spent the last eight years trying to figure out how to convey the vast sweep of evolution from a single cell to the exploration of the galaxy as an interactive entertainment experience. His answer, Spore, is being released in stores and online for PCs and Macs in Europe on Friday and in North America this weekend.

As an intelligent romp through the sometimes contradictory realms of science, mythology, religion and hope about the universe around us, Spore both provokes and amuses. And as an agent of creativity it is a landmark. Never before have everyday people been given such extensive tools to create their digital alter ego.

Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.

But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.

The quintessential toys, like a ball or toy soldier, captivate with their versatility. Children can see in a toy what they wish, and are content. Adults, however, tend to lose interest in toys after a little while. Instead they can find deep intellectual and sometimes emotional engagement in the games that emerge around those simple toys, like soccer and chess. Those games are eternal not because I can make my rook look like a slavering alien or because David Beckham occasionally sprouts wings, but because their basic dynamics and rules are perfectly tuned to foster an almost infinitely interesting variety of tactics, strategies and results.

Spore does not have that magic, at least not at the world-beating level it so clearly could have. People who are more interested in playing Spore than in playing with Spore — that is, people who are more interested in a game than a toy — are likely to come away feeling a bit let down.

Yes, Spore is undeniably gorgeous; Mr. Wright and his development team at Maxis have accomplished a prodigious technical feat with the programming that allows members of Spore’s interstellar menagerie variously to walk, stalk, flop and fly as they befriend and devour one another. For that matter, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real). And yes, millions of people will surely spend countless hours, and dollars, on the fabulous computer toy that is Spore. And they should.

Yet like me, many players will end up crestfallen that the genius bestowed on Spore’s creative facilities was clearly not matched by similar inspiration for deeply engaging gameplay. Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.

At some level that seems by design. As perhaps befits its subject matter, Spore is not one game but a collection of five discrete mini-games, each reflecting a different stage of biological and social evolution and a different archetypal game style.

Life begins in the cell stage, basically a simple prologue. Think of Pac-Man but more colorful. Drifting in the primordial soup, your cell eats pellets (plants or prey) and avoids ghosts (bigger organisms). After maybe 30 minutes (if you survive), you evolve onto land and into the creature stage.

That stage is where Mr. Wright’s team seems to have spent the most effort, and for me it has been by far the most enjoyable and interesting part of the game. The entire Spore project might have been better handled if the cell and creature levels had been released together a couple years ago at a lower price (Spore now costs $49.95), allowing the more pedestrian later phases to receive a comparable level of time and attention as expansions.

Keep in mind that Spore includes no real-time multiplayer; that bizarre monster on the horizon is not being directly controlled by another player. Yet if you are connected to the Internet, that monster may have been made by another player in his own single-player universe and then used to populate your planet.

And so the creature stage rules Spore, because only there can you fully appreciate the range of expression possible using Spore’s tool set. As you explore the planet and meet other players’ progeny, the DNA you collect allows you to customize your creature with any of dozens of different body parts. Various mouths, hands, feet and wings convey different abilities, perhaps singing or dancing (for making allies of other species) or biting or clawing (for fighting).

But Spore goes a bit off the track as it reaches the tribal phase and beyond. Perhaps the biggest problem is that all that time you spent lovingly fine-tuning your otherworldly avatar in the creature phase basically doesn’t matter anymore. After the creature phase the cosmetic appearance of your species is locked in, but the abilities it developed are largely meaningless. Instead, in the tribal stage, you get just a few choices of different weapons and clothing. In the civilization phase you devise airplanes, land vehicles and ships, and in the space phase you obviously make spacecraft. But as Spore goes along, those choices matter less and less in shaping how you can actually play the game.

Progressing out of the tribe and civilization stages requires either conquering or co-opting all the neighboring tribes or cities. These “conquer the world” stories are classic computer game styles, and Spore borrows heavily from the basic mechanics of some of the best strategy games ever made, like Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Civilization. (For example, send peasants to gather supplies while you deploy forces against your rivals.)

Once you leap to the space stage, Spore’s strategic gameplay becomes a bit of a hash reminiscent of games like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, only with horrendous, almost carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing interface controls and insufficient tools for managing what is meant to be a galaxy-spanning empire. The exploration and planet-shaping functions of this phase are enjoyable, but they are largely obscured by a gratuitous amount of low-level tasks like warding off pirate invasions and manually moving trade goods from one system to another, over and over. In none of its later stages does the depth of Spore’s play come close to matching the best-of-genre games available in each of the categories it derives from. (And then there are the inexplicable lapses in basic functionality, like the absence of an auto-save feature. The first time the program crashes, probably in the space phase, and you realize that hours of effort have been lost, you’ll be mad. The second time, you may quit forever.)

In fairness, one could also note a similar lack of depth in the basic play systems of The Sims, which has proven enduringly popular. But there are some intersecting design reasons why that works better in The Sims than in Spore.

Most important, The Sims is profoundly noncompetitive and open ended. The Sims is structured so you can help your family putter around the house forever. There are other families in the neighborhood to interact with, but they aren’t trying to eat your children or burn your house down.

Spore, like real life, is largely about the survival of the fittest. In each stage your species either becomes dominant and evolves, or it becomes extinct (meaning you try over and over again until you “win”). In The Sims making a family dysfunctional is half the fun. In Spore a dysfunctional species basically loses the game. That competitive nature is one reason why, despite its cutesy looks, Spore is aimed both at adults and children. And that competitive aspect is why a relative dearth of rich and interesting play mechanics hurts Spore more than The Sims.

The real frustration with Spore is that the team behind it was capable of such high achievement in the areas it focused on, while other parts languished. As reflected in its prodigious creation tools, it succeeds on so many of the most important levels for media these days. Like Facebook, YouTube and the Internet itself, Spore is about giving people both the tools to express themselves and a group to share with. The fun of trading creatures with friends and family and exploring new worlds in Spore will probably never get old.

Now if Mr. Wright and the Maxis team just take another few passes through Spore’s later stages and release a big revision patch next year, they may finally end up with a game to match the stellar toy they have already unleashed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/ar...on/05spor.html





New Film by "Spirited Away" Director Wows Japan
Naoto Okamura

Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki of Oscar-winning animated film "Spirited Away" has captured the hearts of Japanese moviegoers again, this time with a tale of a mermaid which will soon be seen around the world.

"Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea," about the friendship between a five-year-old boy and a mermaid girl who wishes to live in his world, has become one of the most popular Japanese movies in its home market in its first month of release.

Box office sales have surpassed 10 billion yen ($91 million), and the film's theme tune features as a ringtone on thousands of Japanese mobile phones.

The film is also set to be shown at the Venice Film Festival, which starts next week, and then it will be distributed in the United States, said a spokesman for Japanese distributor, Toho Co Ltd, although details have not been set.

"It was full of dreams and heart-warming. I think many people are seeking something like this," said 39-year-old Miyuki Ueda, who watched the film with her sons.

"Ponyo was really cute," said Yuta, her 14-year-old son.

Miyazaki has released a string of hit animation films that have helped revive the Japanese movie industry, directing three of the top five selling movies in Japan in the past seven years, industry figures from the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan show.

As well as 2001's "Spirited Away," about a little girl who wanders into a spirit world and which won an Academy Award for best animated film in 2003, Miyazaki has wooed Japanese filmgoers with 2004's "Howl's Moving Castle," about a boy wizard who fights for justice in a magical world.

Ponyo's story line is similar to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," which was also the basis of 1989's popular Disney animated film by the same name.

"Spirited Away" launched Miyazaki on to the world stage, but film critic Ryusuke Hikawa says it's too early to say if "Ponyo" would be as successful.

"Miyazaki sticks to creating animated films by hand-drawing. In that sense his works are old-type animation," he said.

"But that's what makes them universally appealing."

In 2006, local films outperformed foreign movies in Japanese movie theaters for the first time in 21 years.

While Miyazaki did not have a movie that year, his son, Goro Miyazaki, carried on the family tradition with animated cartoon, "Tales of Earthsea," based on a U.S. tale of two battling wizards. The film was the top grossing movie in Japan in 2006.

($1=109.87 Yen)

(Editing by Rodney Joyce and Miral Fahmy)
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmN...26847720080821





Japan's Miyazaki Keeps Computers Out Of Cartoons

Revered Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki has no intention of swapping his pencil for computer graphics and will keep hand drawing his films for as long as he can, he said on Sunday.

Miyazaki's new animation "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea," already a big box office success in his home country, is vying for top prize at the Venice film festival, where the Oscar-winning director received a career award in 2005.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale "The Little Mermaid," the film tells the story of a little goldfish who longs to become a human to be with her love, five-year-old boy Sosuke. It uses hand-drawn art throughout.

"I think animation is something that needs the pencil, needs man's drawing hand, and that is why I decided to do this work in this way," the silver haired, notoriously shy director told reporters after a press screening.

"Currently computer graphics are of course used a great deal and, as I've said before, this use can at times be excessive," he added, speaking through an interpreter. "I will continue to use my pencil as long as I can."

An economics and politics graduate who developed an interest in children's literature at university, Miyazaki toiled over hand drawings for Japan's Toei Animation before creating Studio Ghibli, which he still heads despite repeated announcements of his retirement, in 1985.

Now 67, Miyazaki said he planned to recruit young cartoonists for future projects.

"When I do my next work I'll be more than 70, so I think I'll probably have to get help from a younger generation."

Warm Reviews

Early reviews of Ponyo, which features Miyazaki's trademark blend of the everyday and magic, were full of praise and the film was warmly applauded in Venice.

"It is a work of great fantasy and charm that will delight children ages 3 to 100," wrote the Hollywood Reporter, adding: "Excellent commercial prospects loom."

Miyazaki, who won an Academy Award for best animated film in 2003 with "Spirited Away," has directed three of the top five selling movies in Japan in the past seven years. Ponyo, released in its home market last month, has already become one of Japan's most popular movies.

Miyazaki's films have often failed to match that success abroad, although he has a cult-like following among fans of the animation genre.

He said that by placing a Western classic like Andersen's tale in a contemporary Japanese setting, Ponyo "appeals to anybody in the world" and that, while it was primarily meant for children, he had not targeted a particular audience.

Japan looms large over the Venice film festival this year, with another animation film, "The Sky Crawlers" by Mamoru Oshii, and Takeshi Kitano's "Achilles and the Tortoise" also featuring in the main competition of 21 titles.

(Editing by Robert Hart)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...-miyazaki.html





Hollywood Asks: Who Needs Harry Potter?
Bob Tourtellotte

Boy wizard Harry Potter won't be whipping up his magic when the fall film season begins next week, but Hollywood is hoping momentum from summer hits like "The Dark Knight" and a wide mix of new movies will keep audiences happy into the holidays.

Two weeks ago, Warner Bros. yanked "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from a November release and pushed it to next July, which could spell trouble at box offices because the previous four "Potter" films averaged $920 million in worldwide ticket sales. That is a lot of movie magic.

But a range of films from broad comedies such as "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" to thrillers like "Eagle Eye" and art house fare including "Flash of Genius" could sustain the summer upswing, studio executives and box office watchers said.

"You've got it all," said Paul Dergarabedian of box office tracker Media By Numbers, when assessing the outlook from September through mid-November, when the new James Bond flick, "Quantum of Solace," kicks off holiday season moviegoing.

Last year, Hollywood also came off a strong summer after raking in a record $4.18 billion in North American receipts, but then came a slate filled with war films such as "In the Valley of Elah" and dark dramas that tanked at box offices.

When the summer movie season officially ends on Monday's U.S. Labor Day holiday, box office watchers again expect a summer tally of over $4 billion. A good chunk of that comes from the blockbuster Batman sequel "The Dark Knight."

This fall Hollywood seems to have learned a lesson from its bleak 2007 as it dishes up such light-hearted entries as Joel and Ethan Coen's wacky new comedy "Burn After Reading" starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney; the animated sequel "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa"; and Disney's latest teen confection, "High School Musical 3: Senior Year."

On a more serious note, Clint Eastwood provocative thriller, "Changeling," starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, will also make its commercial debut.

Bad Economy, Good Movies

"Part of the reason the summer was successful is that most studios made a lot of films people really loved, and it is a great comment on the power of films that even in bad economic times, audiences come to theaters for good movies," said Adam Fogelson, marketing chief for Universal Pictures.

Of course, the question for movie fans is: "what is good?", and that question has as many answers as there are films.

For clues, cineastes should watch the current and upcoming film festivals in Venice, Toronto and Telluride, Colorado -- major launch pads for movies looking to garner good reviews.

Last year, the Coen brothers went into Telluride with clips from "No Country for Old Men," and came out with good buzz that propelled the movie to Oscars for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. Teenage pregnancy comedy "Juno" was a hit at Toronto in 2007, and three years ago gay cowboy drama "Brokeback Mountain" won the top prize at Venice.

This year the Coen comedy "Burn After Reading," which stars Pitt as hyperactive gym teacher who attempts to extort money from a former CIA analyst, divided some critics at Venice but will have a chance to wow a new group of reviewers at Toronto.

Other September and October releases winning early buzz are director Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna," about four black American soldiers caught behind enemy lines during World War II, and "Appaloosa," a crime thriller set in the Old West directed by Ed Harris, starring Viggo Mortensen and Harris.

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have paired up as a couple of New York City cops in "Righteous Kill," and Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe appear together in "Body of Lies."

Finally, there is the drama "Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys," and on the lighter side, "Ghost Town," starring British comedian Ricky Gervais as a man who can see ghosts, and "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist," about two teenagers who find love.
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmN...48771820080831





For Web TV, a Handful of Hits but No Formula for Success
Brian Stelter

When the Writers Guild of America strike stopped television production last fall and winter, Hollywood writers and producers rushed to create new scripted series for the Web, often called webisodes for lack of a more artful term. The strategy seemed simple: make money by going straight to the Internet.

Months later, they are realizing that producing Web content may be easy but profiting from it is hard. While a small number of writers, producers and actors are making a living with webisodes, they are still a long way from establishing the form alongside television and feature films. The newfound industry lacks clear business models and standardized formats.

And so far, it also lacks audiences. Ask most average media consumers what Web shows they watch, and the reaction is likely to be a blank stare. If they have heard of webisodes at all, it is probably in the context of “Quarterlife,” a Web series that leapt to TV and flopped spectacularly in the ratings in February, or “Prom Queen,” an online drama backed by Michael Eisner, the former chief of Walt Disney.

The “Lost” of the Web — or maybe it will be a “Friends” — has yet to be born. Even the medium’s first hit, Lonelygirl15, struggled to retain an audience. The Lonelygirl videos made their debut on YouTube in the summer of 2006. Initially, they reached millions of Internet surfers, introducing the concept of professionally produced webisodes to the public. But the videos kept coming well after the buzz faded. On Aug. 1, when the series ended with a 12-episode finale, hardly anyone noticed.

The lack of attention and advertising dollars may be an ominous sign for big media companies looking to offset lost television revenue by entering the Web video business. Nonetheless, more companies are dabbling in digital entertainment, hoping that professional Web video will stand out in a sea of user-generated content.

“Squeegees,” a 10-episode series by Stage 9, a digital subsidiary of ABC, about a merry band of high-rise window washers, illustrates the challenge. The show made its premiere in April on five Web sites. On the most prominent site, YouTube, the second episode showed 312,000 views as of Sunday, helped by prominent links on YouTube’s home page in April. By the fifth episode, the view count had dropped to 3,000.

For big media companies, the revenue raised by Web shows is “not the kind of money they are used to,” Herb Scannell, a former president of Nickelodeon, said.

Mr. Scannell now runs Next New Networks, a collection of niche Web video series. It is perhaps best known for Barely Political, an online channel starring the Obama Girl, a flirty young woman with a professed crush on the presidential candidate. Obama Girl videos now draw at least a million views each, making them an attractive buy for niche advertisers. Still, “we’re not seeing seven-figure deals yet,” Mr. Scannell said. “It’s still an emerging market.”

The one thing the industry does not lack is enthusiasm, whether from writers, producers or actors. Webisodes are usually inexpensive to produce, costing a few thousand dollars for an episode. They are usually short, similar in length to a segment of a TV situation comedy. And they are usually distributed widely, from video-sharing sites like YouTube to social networking sites like Bebo.

Strike.TV, a site inspired by the writers’ labor actions, will soon start to unveil shows by dozens of Hollywood writers. Rosario Dawson, one of the first prominent actresses to migrate to the medium, is starring in a new Web series bankrolled by NBC. And Warner Brothers is introducing an online video site, complete with a half-dozen original Web shows, at TheWB.com.

Some companies, independent of the major studios, are also casting themselves as digital studios with ambitious plans for Web production. 60Frames, which finances and distributes Web shows, has plans for 50 original series in the next year and has lined up a batting order of Hollywood names, including the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, the comedian David Spade and the “Oz” creator Tom Fontana.

“There’s never been an easier moment to get content to an audience,” Brent Weinstein, the chief executive of 60Frames, said. “Everybody is trying to figure out how to turn that into a business.”

Perhaps the best known webisode induced by the strike was written by Joss Whedon, the TV producer who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Mr. Whedon’s 45-minute Internet musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” made its debut in July and quickly rose to No. 1 on iTunes. Mr. Whedon explained the genesis of “Dr. Horrible” on the show’s Web site, writing:

“The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap — but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the Internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way.”

“Another way” worked well for Mr. Whedon, who benefited from already having a fan base. In a suite of offices in Los Angeles, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the co-creators of Lonelygirl15, think they can recreate their 2006 success. Backed by $5 million in venture capital financing, the two men have founded EQAL, one of the digital studios vying to develop the next Web hit.

“All of the different pieces that have come together to make the traditional media industry — financing, production, distribution — are still being figured out online,” Mr. Beckett said.

Most commercial webisodes rely on video advertising before, during or after the episode, or product placement and brand integration within the show.

“Ask A Ninja,” an irregularly scheduled series of comedic videos starring an anonymous ninja, now attracts $100,000 a month in advertising, licensing and merchandising. It is represented by the ad network Federated Media. “In the Motherhood,” a Web show created by a marketing company, recorded an average of three million views an episode last spring, exceeding the expectations of its sponsors, Sauve and Sprint.

The shows have turned a profit by tapping niches. “If your Web show has 35,000 people watching it, but all of those people are valuable to a certain advertiser, you can make good money from that show,” Dina Kaplan, a co-founder of the video site Blip.tv, said.

To get to the point where viewers are choosing between “Two and a Half Men” on CBS and a situation comedy on YouTube, the industry needs better distribution models, more professional backing and financing, and third-party measurement of traffic.

The medium is missing something like a TV Guide for Web video — that magazine’s owners and others are scrambling to become the industry standard. As a result, advertisers “sometimes have trouble navigating” the market, Mr. Scannell said. Similarly, the industry needs a reliable third-party arbiter of traffic analytics, something akin to Nielsen’s ratings service for television. Not surprisingly, Nielsen and a plethora of other companies are striving to be that source, but an industry standard has not yet emerged.

Then there is the living room problem.

“We need the TVs in the living rooms to be integrated with the Internet,” said Ron Richards, the director of marketing and product management for Revision3, which calls itself a “television network for the Internet generation.”

Perhaps most important, people in the industry say, Web shows need serious promotional support. New television shows benefit from multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns; webisodes do not.

While the idea that webisodes should become more like television is anathema to some producers, Mr. Beckett says the medium needs a more established set of formats. “On television, there are a handful of defined formats,” he said, citing half-hour situation comedies and one-hour dramas as examples. “I think formats will help codify what we are actually producing.”

In time, webisodes may start to look more like TV — and TV may look more like the Web, as well. ABC is developing “In the Motherhood” as a television series, for instance. And Comedy Central is showing comedic videos from Atom, a Web site acquired by Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent, in 2006. Some executives think Web video will act as a petri dish for television projects. With the barriers to entry so low online, a breakout hit webisode may be only a matter of time.

“Having a big hit that people around the water cooler in Louisville are actively discussing will be a turning point for the industry,” Ms. Kaplan said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/bu...webisodes.html





Sony Sued Over Blu-ray Patents
Tim Conneally

Sony has been sued for patent infringement for its Blu-Ray technology once again, this time by California intellectual property company Orinda IP USA.

In May 2007, a company called Target Technology sued Sony, alleging that Blu-ray infringed on patents discussing the reflective materials used on optical discs. The suit from Orinda, filed on August 20, involves the method of reproducing data on "disk-shaped media," namely Blu-ray discs.

All products containing a Blu-ray drive allegedly infringe upon Orinda's patent. This includes the PlayStation 3, all Vaio computers with Blu-ray drives, and any essentially any Blu-ray player made by Sony or other OEMs.

In addition to an injunction on Blu-ray, Orinda is seeking royalties, treble damages, interest, and legal fees.

Like many other cases of this nature, it has been filed in the "Patent Troll Mecca" of East Texas, and will be presided over by the famous patent judge, T. John Ward.

An interesting side note to this case is that Orinda's patent was originally filed in 1993 by Hyundai Electronics Industries. Justice Ward's first patent law case was defending that company in Texas Instruments v. Hyundai Elec. Indus. Co., 49 F. Supp. 2d 893, when TI sued Hyundai for infringing on several patents for DRAM and other semiconductor devices. Texas Instruments won the suit, and signed a multi-million dollar cross-licensing agreement with Hyundai.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Sony...nts/1220040780





Blu-ray 'GONE in Five Years', Samsung Claims
Kathryn Small

Samsung expects Sony’s Blu-ray technology to be superseded within five years, despite winning the high definition format war in February.

"I think it [Blu-ray] has 5 years left, I certainly wouldn't give it 10", Andy Griffiths, Samsung UK’s director of consumer electronics, told website Pocket-lint.

Griffiths said that for the next few years, HD technology would boom -- and Blu-ray would be at the heart of it.

"It's going to be huge," he told Pocket-lint. "We are heavily back-ordered at the moment."

"In 2012 we will be in a true HD world. Everything from your television to your camcorder will be offering you pictures in high-definition, and we plan to offer you that HD world from all angles."

But Samsung is backing a different technology in the long-term. At the IFA trade show in Berlin this month, both Samsung and Sony demonstrated cutting-edge OLED screen televisions.

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens use films of organic compounds to emit multi-coloured light. Because there is no need for a backlight, OLED screens are much thinner than LCDs and require less power to run.

Griffiths said that the technology is “ready to rock” but the screens would not be available commercially until manufacturing costs were reduced.

"We will launch the OLED technology when it's at a price that will be appealing to the consumer, unfortunately that's not yet.”

Griffiths said that the technology might become mainstream by 2010.

"It's gonna be big, but at the moment it's a great story, not commercial product."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/84046,...ng-claims.aspx





Ghostbusters is First Film to be Released on USB Stick
Ben Hardwidge

Now there’s something you don’t see every day: PNY’s 2GB flash drive comes with Ghostbusters pre-loaded

Are you the USB keymaster? You could be soon if you pick up PNY’s new 2GB USB flashdrive, which comes with Ghostbusters pre-loaded. While the music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, the movie business is still relying on discs, but that may change following this partnership between PNY and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

We don’t know what file format and compression settings are used on the film yet, but a spokesperson for PNY explained to Custom PC that it does come with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. ‘They have DRM protection,’ explained the spokesperson, ‘so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.’

PNY’s sales and marketing director for the UK and Nordics, Stefanie Summerfield, says that there will also be room on the 2GB stick for ‘12 hours of video play, 33 hours of music and 1,080 pictures,’ and added that ‘this is all in addition to getting a preloaded movie on the USB flash drive.’

The PNY 2GB USB key with Ghostbusters is available from Argos now.
http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/60478...usb-stick.html





Nokia to Start Music Service with UK Launch
Tarmo Virki

Mobile phone maker Nokia said on Tuesday it would launch its "Comes with Music" package with an offering in Britain, signing a deal with Carphone Warehouse to sell the first model.

A source familiar with the deal told Reuters the phone would go on sale next month.

The free music package is a cornerstone of the cellphone maker's push into the services business, but also sets a trend for other gadget makers, like Apple, to follow.

Nokia says its "Comes with Music" package will differ from other market offerings because it will allow users to keep all the music they have downloaded during the 12 months.

Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group have signed deals with Nokia to offer their tracks on the service, bringing the world's three largest labels on board.

Meanwhile Carphone will get exclusive rights for unsubsidized Nokia 5310 XpressMusic "Comes with Music" edition sales in Britain, the Finnish company said in a statement.

Nokia has not unveiled sales numbers for the almost year-old 5310 model, one of its first mid-tier music phones, but it said that in the January-March quarter it sold more than 4 million units of its 5310 and 5610 models combined.

Nokia, which plans to roll out further details about its music service on October 2, said Carphone would start taking British pre-orders on Tuesday, but declined to say when sales would start or offer any pricing information.

The ailing music industry is struggling to find ways to make up for falling CD sales and the digital music market totaled just $2.9 billion in 2007.

Nokia sold 146 million music phones last year, and if all of those had included the "Comes with Music" bundle, just an extra $20 per phone would make Nokia's service bigger than the total market.

With its iconic touch-screen model, Apple's iPhone shocked the handset industry last year, but due to high prices it has not captured a mass following in Europe.

Now, Nokia has stolen the spotlight from Apple in the digital music world, analysts say.

Record labels are looking to Nokia and others to challenge the dominance of Apple's iTunes as they have struggled to negotiate with the American group on a level footing when it comes to issues such as pricing.

(Editing by Greg Mahlich)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090200082.html





Retro Computing Corner: The World’s First MP3 Player (c. 1998)
SmellyGeekBoy

Today we all take MP3 players for granted. iPods are ubiquitous, mobile phones can play the format, even most new car stereos support MP3 right off the showroom floor. But it wasn’t always like this - Back in 1998, highly illegal sites like Audiofind were giving away artist’s songs quite openly and completely for free in pretty poor-sounding 112 and 128KBps MP3 format, and we were downloading them with our 56K modems - often taking up to half an hour a time.

You could play the files on your computer or you could even transfer them to CD - provided you didn’t mind paying out £10 for a blank disc in the first place, and waiting 30 minutes for it to write while saying a little prayer to the CD-R gods, due to the media’s high failure rate at the time.



The $250 MPMan F10 came along and changed all that, however. Most people remember the Diamond Rio (pictured left) as being the first widely-available MP3 player due to a high-profile RIAA lawsuit, however the MPMan was knocking around the more upmarket hi-fi dealers for a few months beforehand, packing a heady 32MB of storage. Thankfully, this could be upgraded to 64MB thanks to a mail-in programme.

Shortly after the MPMan’s launch, Napster came along and helped us to share and organise our music files. Transferring those files to the device was a painfully slow process over a serial connection, but it didn’t matter - music was taking its very first steps towards escaping the physical formats that it had forever been associated with. Little did we know that 10 years later, even granny and grampa would be downloading their music from the internet, and the man in the street could carry hundreds of gigabytes of high-quality music in his pocket.

It’s all thanks to the MPMan F10.
http://www.teamteabag.com/2008/08/31...player-c-1998/





BBC to Launch Music Download Store

BBC Worldwide, Auntie's commercial arm, is developing a music download service, offering streamed for free and paid download works from its archive of music that bands have recorded for TV and radio in BBC studios.

The Beeb's radio and television music shows frequently feature live sessions recorded at BBC HQ, often of current singles, acoustic versions of popular tracks, or cover versions of other artists' work. Radio 1's Live Lounge is a popular destination for pop artists, not to mention the John Peel Sessions. And don't forget the BBC has exclusive rights to broadcast Glastonbury.

Naturally, performances are always well-recorded, and on Radio 1 often get requested for replay by fans. But what's better than playing these tracks for no extra cost over the airwaves? Why, getting fans to pay for them, of course.

Beeb there, done that

It's not untrodden territory, however. BBC sessions have featured as B-sides to CD singles before now and as bonus tracks on albums, such as on Gomez's recently released anniversary version of Bring It On. And of course back in 1994, a massive collection of The Beatles' BBC recordings were finally released on CD.

So far, major label support for the BBC Worldwide project comes only from EMI, but MusicWeek reports that talks are underway with other major labels. A source also claimed that the earliest the service could launch is January 2009.

I'm totally behind this venture, assuming it doesn't abuse us with DRM and low bit-rate encoding. After all, we paid for these recordings as part of our TV licences in the first place. Well, our dads did.

The free streaming option is said to be ad-supported -- a move that may annoy UK licence payers.

If nothing else, it'll allow smaller bands to release their BBC sessions without becoming the next Beatles or Led Zeppelin -- another band that released a live BBC session CD.
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/natelanxon...9298691,00.htm





Universal Music Posts Gains; Vivendi Turns A Profit
FMQB

Vivendi expects to meet its 2008 fiscal goals, in part due to The Rolling Stones jumping ship and joining Universal Music Group earlier this year. Vivendi announced its Q2 EBITA earnings were up 3.2 percent to approximately $2 billion. Profits for the quarter were up 12 percent.

Universal Music saw a 17.7 percent increase in its EBITA earnings to 259 million Euros (approximately $376.1 million). UMG saw its market share increase in both the U.S. and Japan, with digital sales continuing to rise. The music division saw further growth with the acquisitions of BMG Publishing and Sanctuary, according to Reuters. However, operating profit for the division fell by 9.2 percent.

Vivendi also owns the Activision Blizzard video game division, which saw its forecast for the year increased, thanks in part to the popularity of Guitar Hero.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=868321





Berkeley-Based Music Site Gives Fans a Cut of Tune Sales

Buy a tune, get credit when others buy it
Rachel Metz

Being a trendsetter can be pricey. As any fashionista or gadget hound knows, the latest frocks and tech toys don't pay for themselves. But a new Web site is trying to make it profitable for music lovers to stay ahead of the curve — by paying them when other people purchase MP3s they've bought.

Berkeley-based Popcuts, which publicly launched its Web site in early August, charges users 99 cents per song. Thereafter, whenever someone else buys the same song, those who have already bought it get paid in credit that can be redeemed for more Popcuts music. The earlier you buy a song, the larger your cut of future sales.

And while credit is currently the payment option, the site's founders hope to eventually pay users in cash, too.

Hannes Hesse, 28, one of the company's three co-founders, said the idea came from a desire to better align the interests of artists who want to sell their music and fans who want to get it for free.

"We thought that by providing this extra incentive to buy a song legally, namely, owning a stake in that song, would make it more attractive to buy," Hesse said.

Popcuts user Gary Yao, 25, said that while he'd prefer cash to the current site credit that users earn, he likes being rewarded for buying songs. So far, he's earned $5.25 by buying tracks.

"It gives me an incentive to go out there and see what's new and available," the San Francisco product analyst said, adding that he's discovered a few new bands by using the site over the past month.

The site's selection is still pretty slim — it includes about 700 songs from about 200 artists — but Popcuts is adding musicians through a deal it recently made with music distributor DashGo and is looking to connect with more distributors and with record labels.

Anyone making music can sell their tunes through the site, while maintaining full rights to their work. The agreement between artists and Popcuts is not exclusive, Hesse said, so music makers can sell songs through services like Apple's iTunes Store as well.

Popcuts takes 10 to 20 percent of song sales. Artists can determine what cut they get, and the rest goes to fans.

Since fans who buy songs early get a larger cut of subsequent sales, Hesse thinks a lot of people will search for new tunes and buy those that sound promising.

Popcuts' future is uncertain, though.

Besides its small music catalog, it's navigating a market populated by several large, established players like Apple and Amazon.com that already have the allegiance of many digital music buyers.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown
Claire Cain Miller

Judy Estrin, 53, has spent her entire career in Silicon Valley, a region that thrives on constant innovation. Ms. Estrin, the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, has founded four technology companies.

Yet she is deeply worried that Silicon Valley — and the United States as a whole — no longer foster the kind of innovation necessary to develop groundbreaking technologies and sustain economic growth.

“I am generally not an alarmist, but I have become more and more concerned about the state of our country and its innovation,” she said last week, explaining why she wrote her book, “Closing the Innovation Gap,” which arrives in bookstores Tuesday. “We have a national innovation deficit.”

Ms. Estrin’s book is the latest call to action during the last several years by scientists, technologists and political leaders worried about the country’s future competitiveness in technology.

In 2005, the National Academies published “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” a report requested by Congress, which found that federal financing of research in the physical sciences was 45 percent less in 2004 than in 1976 and that 93 percent of students in grades five through eight learn science from teachers who do not hold degrees or certifications in the topics. In 2007, the book “Innovation Nation” by John Kao, a business consultant, revived the debate.

And this year, both presidential candidates have made government support of innovation and technology a central part of their campaign platforms.

Still, not all technology watchers agree with Ms. Estrin about the extent of the innovation problem — or whether there is a problem at all.

“The whole innovation crisis thing is a bit overblown,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster. Innovation in the natural world, in the form of mutation, is lethal, so species do it only when they are under dire stress, he said. “What makes Silicon Valley unique is that this place has stumbled onto a way to sustain innovation even when the place is doing well,” he said.

Ms. Estrin argues that short-term thinking and a reluctance to take risks are causing a noticeable lag in innovation. She cites a variety of contributing factors. A decline in federal and university financing for research has dried up new ideas, she said. When research does produce new technologies, entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who back them have been too cautious to make big bets — especially after the costly failures of the dot-com bust. If start-up companies do find financing, she said, new regulations make it hard for them to grow, and the focus of investors on short-term performance discourages companies from taking risks.

Ms. Estrin’s suggestions for bolstering innovation range from the vague, like advising venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to take more risks, to the specific, like mandating that schools pay teachers higher salaries.

Some of her prescriptions are unlikely to become reality, like her idea for a new government body modeled after the Federal Reserve that sets science policy without Congressional input.

Some thinkers on innovation agree with Ms. Estrin’s assessment. “There is a remarkable telescoping in of vision and an unwillingness to make long-term bets,” said Vinton G. Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist at Google.

Mr. Cerf led the development of the networking protocols that form the basic architecture of the Internet, a project to which Ms. Estrin contributed as a graduate student. He points to the Internet as an example of the need for long-term research and financing, since development of the technology used to transmit data online required two decades of government support.

Robert Compton, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, said that the United States is losing its innovation edge to China and India. Chinese and Indian children are required to take more science courses than students in the United States, said Mr. Compton, who recently produced a documentary comparing high school education in the three countries. Of college graduates, 30 percent to 45 percent in India and China have engineering degrees, compared with 5 percent in the United States. Venture financing and patent applications are falling in Europe and the United States and rising in China and India, he said.

Most alarming to Mr. Compton is that 60 percent of engineering doctorates from American universities are granted to foreign nationals, but they are no longer staying here to work. “The American economy is not as exciting as China and India, and a lot of them are going back home,” he said.

Ms. Estrin and others acknowledge that the recent surge in financing for alternative energy companies is a sign that innovation is alive and well in some sectors. Still, she is concerned that investors will not have the patience to build these companies.
“If they treat these companies the same way they treated others — a couple years in, they need to see returns or cut the burn rate or start cutting people — they are not going to get to where we need to go,” she said.

Some who track innovation in the United States say the alarm bells are unnecessary and sound like a repeat of similar fears in past decades that turned out to be unfounded.

A June study from the RAND Corporation found that 40 percent of the world’s spending on scientific research and development comes from the United States. The country employs 70 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners and is home to 75 percent of the top 40 universities.

“The United States is still the world leader in science and technology,” said the study’s co-author, James Hosek.

But Ms. Estrin said that the technologies at the root of new products like Apple’s iPod or the Facebook social networking service were actually developed several decades ago. If a new round of fundamental innovation isn’t seeded now, the country will suffer in the next decade.

She compared the situation to a tree that appears to be growing well, but whose roots are rotting underground.

“Too much of it is short-term, incremental innovation, and the roots of the tree aren’t happy,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/te.../01estrin.html





Stanford's "Autonomous" Helicopters Teach Themselves to Fly
Dan Stober

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.

The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

The stunts are "by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter," said Andrew Ng, the professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley.

The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of "apprenticeship learning," in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.

Stanford's artificial intelligence system learned how to fly by "watching" the four-foot-long helicopters flown by expert radio control pilot Garett Oku. "Garett can pick up any helicopter, even ones he's never seen, and go fly amazing aerobatics. So the question for us is always, why can't computers do things like this?" Coates said.

Computers can, it turns out. On a recent morning in an empty field at the edge of campus, Abbeel and Coates sent up one of their helicopters to demonstrate autonomous flight. The aircraft, brightly painted Stanford red, is an off-the-shelf radio control helicopter, with instrumentation added by the researchers.

For five minutes, the chopper, on its own, ran through a dizzying series of stunts beyond the capabilities of a full-scale piloted helicopter and other autonomous remote control helicopters. The artificial-intelligence helicopter performed a smorgasbord of difficult maneuvers: traveling flips, rolls, loops with pirouettes, stall-turns with pirouettes, a knife-edge, an Immelmann, a slapper, an inverted tail slide and a hurricane, described as a "fast backward funnel."

The pièce de résistance may have been the "tic toc," in which the helicopter, while pointed straight up, hovers with a side-to-side motion as if it were the pendulum of an upside down clock.

"I think the range of maneuvers they can do is by far the largest" in the autonomous helicopter field, said Eric Feron, a Georgia Tech aeronautics and astronautics professor who worked on autonomous helicopters while at MIT. "But what's more impressive is the technology that underlies this work. In a way, the machine teaches itself how to do this by watching an expert pilot fly. This is amazing."

Writing software for robotic helicopters is a daunting task, in part because the craft itself, unlike an airplane, is inherently unstable. "The helicopter doesn't want to fly. It always wants to just tip over and crash," said Oku, the pilot.

To scientists, a helicopter in flight is an "unstable system" that comes unglued without constant input. Abbeel compares flying a helicopter to balancing a long pole in the palm of your hand: "If you don't provide feedback, it will crash."

Early on in their research, Abbeel and Coates attempted to write computer code that would specify the commands for the desired trajectory of a helicopter flying a specific maneuver. While this hand-coded approach succeeded with novice-level flips and rolls, it flopped with the complex tic-toc."

It might seem that an autonomous helicopter could fly stunts by simply replaying the exact finger movements of an expert pilot using the joy sticks on the helicopter's remote controller. That approach, however, is doomed to failure because of uncontrollable variables such as gusting winds.

When the Stanford researchers decided their autonomous helicopter should be capable of flying airshow stunts, they realized that even defining their goal was difficult. What's the formal specification for "flying well?" The answer, it turned out, was that "flying well" is whatever an expert radio control pilot does at an airshow.

So the researchers had Oku and other pilots fly entire airshow routines while every movement of the helicopter was recorded. As Oku repeated a maneuver several times, the trajectory of the helicopter inevitably varied slightly with each flight. But the learning algorithms created by Ng's team were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was seeking. Thus the autonomous helicopter learned to fly the routine better—and more consistently—than Oku himself.

During a flight, some of the necessary instrumentation is mounted on the helicopter, some on the ground. Together, they continuously monitor the position, direction, orientation, velocity, acceleration and spin of the helicopter in several dimensions. A ground-based computer crunches the data, makes quick calculations and beams new flight directions to the helicopter via radio 20 times per second.

The helicopter carries accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, the latter of which use the Earth's magnetic field to figure out which way the helicopter is pointed. The exact location of the craft is tracked either by a GPS receiver on the helicopter or by cameras on the ground. (With a larger helicopter, the entire navigation package could be airborne.)

There is interest in using autonomous helicopters to search for land mines in war-torn areas or to map out the hot spots of California wildfires in real time, allowing firefighters to quickly move toward or away from them. Firefighters now must often act on information that is several hours old, Abbeel said.

"In order for us to trust helicopters in these sort of mission-critical applications, it's important that we have very robust, very reliable helicopter controllers that can fly maybe as well as the best human pilots in the world can," Ng said. Stanford's autonomous helicopters have taken a large step in that direction, he said.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/new...er-091008.html





Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data
Anne Eisenberg

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. “We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience,” he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

“The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database,” he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. “The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books,” Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. “It’s great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats” on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. “So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that’s where the conversation starts.”

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called “NorthStar Nerd Tutorials.”

“Many Eyes is unusual, because it takes advantage of the collective intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set,” he said. For the tutorial, Mr. Hoeg exported enrollment data for graduate engineering students to the site, then used one of the tools there to display the information in various ways.

“I wanted people to understand that you can take the same data and have it tell lots of different stories,” he said.

Dr. Wattenberg noted an example from the site. In charting a particular topic — deaths resulting from human violence in the 20th century — one user originally presented a bubble graph in which the size of the circles represented the number of casualties tied to an event — for instance, World War I or World War II. After discussion on the site about the substantial growth in population during the 20th century, the originator offered two new time-based visualizations of the data, one a line graph and the other a stack graph — plotting the number of casualties against this growing population.

“You could see a new downward trend emerge,” Dr. Wattenberg said. “Violent deaths declined in the latter decades of the century. It’s a slightly more optimistic view.”

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the tools of visualization. “The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience,” he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. “But sometimes it’s like driving with your eyes closed,” he said. “With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you” — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.

“The great fun of information visualization,” he said, “is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/te...y/31novel.html





Obama Outwits the Bloviators
Frank Rich

STOP the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion — yes, that’s Greek too — to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”

As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.

But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech — each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” — has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.

At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders — played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time — would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.

On TV, each of these hot-air balloons was inflated nonstop right up to the moment they were punctured by reality, at which point the assembled bloviators once more expressed shock, shock at the unexpected denouement. They hadn’t been so surprised since they discovered that Obama was not too black to get white votes, not too white to win black votes, and not too inexperienced to thwart the inevitable triumph of the incomparably well-organized and well-financed Clinton machine.

Meanwhile, the candidate known as “No Drama Obama” because of his personal cool was stealthily hatching a drama of his own. As the various commentators pronounced the convention flat last week — too few McCain attacks on opening night, too “minimalist” a Hillary endorsement on Tuesday, and so forth — Obama held his cards to his chest backstage and built slowly, step by step, to his Thursday night climax. The dramatic arc was as meticulously calibrated as every Obama political strategy.

His campaign, unlike TV’s fantasists, knew the simple truth. The New York Times/CBS News poll conducted on the eve of the convention found that the Democrats were no more divided than the G.O.P.: In both parties, 79 percent of voters supported their respective nominees. The simultaneous Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also found that 79 percent of Democrats support Obama — which, as Amy Walter of National Journal alone noticed, is slightly higher than either John Kerry and Al Gore fared on that same question (77 percent) in that same poll just before their conventions.

But empirical evidence can’t compete with a favorite golden oldie like the Clinton soap opera. So when Hillary Clinton said a month ago that her delegates needed a “catharsis,” surely she had to be laying the groundwork for convention mischief. But it was never in either Clinton’s interest to sabotage Obama. Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow.

The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.

The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

Given the press’s track record so far, there’s no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans — even if much of our audience doubts that — and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.

We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then.

It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

The Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives. Its ability to tell its story under the radar of the mainstream press in part accounts for why the Obama surge has been so often underestimated. Even now we’re uncertain of its size. The extraordinary TV viewership for Obama on Thursday night, larger than the Olympics opening ceremony, this year’s Oscars or any “American Idol” finale, may only be a count of the horses. The Obama campaign’s full reach online — for viewers as well as fund-raising and organizational networking — remains unknown.

None of this, any more than the success of Obama’s acceptance speech, guarantees a Democratic victory. But what it does ensure is that all bets are off when it comes to predicting this race’s outcome. Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of those of recent and not-so-recent memory, it keeps defying the templates. Last week’s convention couldn’t be turned into a replay of the 1960s no matter how hard the press tried to sell the die-hard Hillary supporters as reincarnations of past rebel factions, from the Dixiecrats to the antiwar left. Far from being a descendant of 1968, the 2008 Democratic gathering was the first in memory that actually kept promptly to its schedule and avoided ludicrous P.C. pandering to every constituency.

Nor were we back at Aug. 28, 1963. As a 14-year-old in Washington, I was there on the Mall, taken by my mother, a tireless teacher, with the hope that I might learn something. At a time when the nation’s capital, with its large black population, was still a year away from casting its first votes for president, who would have imagined that a black man might someday have a serious chance of being elected president? Not me.

But even as we stop, take a deep breath and savor this remarkable moment in our history, we cannot linger. This is quite another time. After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the troubles that afflict us on nearly every front almost make you nostalgic for the day when America’s gravest problems could still be seen in blacks and whites.

As Obama said, this is a big election. We will only begin to confront the magnitude of our choice when and if we stop being distracted by small, let alone utterly fictitious, things.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/op...31rich.html?em





RNC Resumes, Tries Making Up For Lost Time

Convention organizers might ask networks for more airtime
Paul J. Gough

The Republican National Convention resumed in full force Tuesday as the GOP turned its attention toward its upcoming battle against the Democrats for the presidency.

GOP officials made the decision around daybreak Tuesday to return to the traditional convention after it was clear that Hurricane Gustav, while damaging to the Gulf Coast, didn't approach the level of Katrina three years ago.

The GOP wasted no time. A parade of speakers gave the hard and soft sell on behalf of the Republicans and the McCain-Palin ticket.

Getting primetime real estate were former presidential candidate and "Law & Order" star Fred Thompson and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Democrat who has come out strongly for his close friend McCain.

Thompson lauded McCain's character, telling his story as a Navy pilot in Vietnam and POW through his career as a reformer and Senator.

"Being a POW certainly doesn't qualify anyone to be president. But it does reveal character. My friends, this is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in our leaders," Thompson said. "Strength. Courage. Humility. Wisdom. Duty. Honor."

For his part, Lieberman gave his vote of confidence, pushing back against his former party's attempts to paint McCain as four more years of the Bush administration.

"If John McCain is just another partisan Republican, then I'm Michael Moore's favorite Democrat," Lieberman said. "And I think you know I'm not."

And speaking by video from the White House, President Bush boosted McCain as well.

"He's not afraid to tell you when he disagrees," Bush said. "Believe me, I know."

There was little doubt now that vp candidate Sarah Palin would address the delegates in primetime Wednesday, and Sen. John McCain would be in St. Paul to accept the nomination in primetime Thursday night.

"We are working to consolidate the programs for Wednesday and Thursday night," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said Tuesday. "We anticipate those nights going as planned, with modifications."

What also wasn't clear was whether the McCain campaign would ask the networks, particularly the broadcasters, for more time Wednesday and Thursday because they lost an hour previously promised Monday because of hurricane coverage. The Democrats received four hours of broadcast primetime, at 10 p.m. EDT; the cablers provided endless coverage.

Tuesday, all of the network anchors were back in St. Paul to cover their hour of RNC in primetime. The cablers also returned to normal convention coverage. An hour of primetime broadcast network coverage is planned per night through Thursday.

Mark McKinnon, former chief media strategist for McCain and President Bush, said that the one-day shortened convention was much more positive than negative for the McCain campaign.

"It goes to show that they were engaged and responding to a natural disaster," McKinnon said. "That boosted McCain's leadership profile."

Opinion at the network levels on Monday seemed to favor some kind of parity for the GOP, which wasn't able to put on the kind of convention opening night that it had long planned.

"We're having some conversations with the networks as to what possibilities exist to expand time," Davis confirmed Tuesday. But as the day progressed and no formal request was made, it seemed less likely that the GOP would get more than a few minutes extra per night.

"I think that they (the GOP) think it might be nice but they also understand about Monday (and hurricane coverage)," said one network executive Tuesday afternoon. "They might ask for a bit more and they might get a bit more but there's been no heavy pressure from the campaign."

The networks were waiting to take their lead from what the convention organizers came up with for programs Wednesday or Thursday. That's likely to be decided by Wednesday morning. Any request for additional time would have to be run by the network heads, as it would be out of the hands of the news divisions.

One proposal floating around Monday was to give the GOP two hours on Thursday night. But that would pose a major problem for NBC, which is televising the opening night of the National Football League season. Already the NFL moved the kickoff time an hour earlier to make sure the New York Giants-Washington Redskins game would be over in enough time so that McCain could give his acceptance speech in the 10 p.m. hour EDT.

The NFL probably wouldn't move the game any earlier and NBC is contractually obligated to carry the entire game. If it ended on time earlier than the three-hour block allotted, an NBC executive said that there might be extra time to give to the GOP. But that was far from certain.

There's no legal obligation for NBC or any of the other networks to carry more coverage, although fairness has been an issue. But one executive, echoing several said that the GOP might just be out of luck due to the storm.

"Let's be honest. They canceled the convention (primetime)," the executive said. "They chose to do that. Of course, they had no choice."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...cae0da8911d35d





Where Does Sarah Palin Stand on Technology Issues?
Ed Oswald

While Gov. Palin is fairly new to the political scene nationwide, the Alaska native's stance on key topics may give clues into the policies she would support if she were elected Vice President.

[M.E.'s NOTE: BetaNews contacted the press office of Gov. Sarah Palin earlier this week, and received assurances that we would be receiving responses to our inquiries about the governor's position on critical technology issues, five of which we listed and explained in detail. This has been the week of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, so any number of reasons may have delayed the press office's final response to us. However, they were aware of our already-once-postponed deadline, so in the interest of absolute fairness -- especially since we already profiled Sen. Joe Biden last week -- we will proceed with as thorough an assessment as we possibly can of Gov. Palin, given the information we do have.]

John McCain shocked the political world with his choice of Sarah Palin, a woman who has only served as governor of Alaska for 19 months, and whose previous political experience was as Mayor of Wasilla -- a town of about 9,000 residents -- for eight years, and city council member for four years prior.

With such a short time on the national political scene on a level where technology issues are, if not paramount, then at least prominent, there hasn't been much of a technology record for Gov. Palin to run on yet. It's not her fault; it's just the fact. However, there have been a few instances where she has taken a stance, or her positions on other important matters could be used as a sort of template, to deduce her likely thoughts on parallel matters in the technology arena.

Worked to ensure students are properly skilled

In 2007, shortly after taking office as Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin took advantage of the Internet to create a online training program for workforce development. Called Work Ready/College Ready (since shortened to Alaska Career Ready), users can take a set of surveys to find out what skills they have or may need for a variety of desired jobs.

A user may select online courses for improvement in weak or under-skilled areas. Classes may be taken at the user's own pace, and are given in the context of a work environment to make them more relevant.

In recognition of completion of the courses teaching the skills necessary, a "Career Readiness Certificate" is issued. At least 40 other states also offer these certificates, which some businesses and educational institutions recognize as valid proof of a particular skill set.

Made health care transparent through the use of technology

Another part of Palin's record as governor included the Alaska Health Care Transparency Act, which helped state residents access affordable health care. This included tele-medicine and tele-health initiatives for providing care to the state's most remote municipalities.

Tele-medicine has often been lauded as a solution for providing individuals living in rural or hard-to-reach areas (and Alaska has plenty of those) with care and good judgment from a qualified doctor who would normally be easy to reach in town.

Actions on gas pipeline suggest balanced net neutrality approach

An action that defines Gov. Palin's stand on long-distance distribution of services, was her effort to rework the natural gas pipeline deal forged by her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski. The former governor had struck a deal with major oil companies, prior to commencing the actual pipeline construction project.

She didn't like that much, and just about everyone in Alaska knew it. So she scrapped the deal, replacing it with one that involves a bidding process. Already, TransCanada has secured a deal with Alaska to build this pipeline which could dramatically improve the state's economy.

The way Palin approached this particular problem suggests she may be in favor of not having any one provider be given preference to build out broadband pipes to a specific area. While one Internet service provider could end up owning the entire pipe -- an approach that would be copacetic with that of her would-be boss, Sen. McCain -- that provider would likely need to provide proof of how it would handle competitors.

Transfer the natural gas pipeline affair to the net neutrality debate, and it seems like Palin would not object to companies agreeing on their own about how to handle traffic of competitors.

Broadband speeds lag in Alaska...along with candidate Palin

It does not seem that Palin has taken any substantive broadband policy as governor of her state, and has actually declined to take a position when asked. That failure to formulate an opinion could be telling, especially considering Alaska has one of the lowest median data rates in the country.

According to a study by the Communications Workers of America, Alaskans connect to the Internet at a slow average of 800 Kbps, the worst in the nation. While geography is obviously a key issue here, there's a viable argument in favor of prioritizing an information pipeline -- whether it's on the ground or in the sky -- equally with respect to a natural gas pipeline.

Stateside Associates, a government analytics firm, attempted during the 2006 gubernatorial election to get both then-Mayor Palin and Democratic candidate Tony Knowles' positions on broadband access issues. Palin declined to respond, and the agency could not find anything that indicated what position she might have taken. So there's a big blank on her record, which remains today, even after BetaNews' direct invitation for her to fill it in.

Used the Internet to make Alaska government more transparent

Sen. Barack Obama has made government transparency part of his platform. Gov. Palin has indeed taken that a step further by actually taking action in Alaska government. Currently, any check written by the state government over $1,000 is posted to the Division of Finance Web site.

While the service is not yet a requirement under law, there have been attempts to codify this requirement, including an effort to make government information searchable through a Google-like Web site
http://www.betanews.com/article/Wher...ues/1220649619





Googling in Person to Make Friends
Stephanie Clifford

On a July day in Chicago, Google employees swarmed a conference room at the advertising agency Leo Burnett, carrying in couches and beanbag chairs to create a lounge. They gave away candy and showed off Google’s advertising technology. Throughout the day, they emphasized a single message: Google is a friend to ad agencies.

No, really.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea of Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding — and infuriating — advertising agencies, now shifting to embrace them.

During the last year, Google has built a 40-person group that is charged with courting agencies, trying to persuade them that their clients should buy ads on Google sites and use the search engine’s tools. The Google team — like any ad team — is visiting agencies to show off the company’s products, like video ads on YouTube and display ads from DoubleClick. Its representatives are even making regular visits to ad agencies, soliciting suggestions and fielding questions.

“We understand that maybe we haven’t been the best partner over the years,” said Erin Clift, the director of agency relations at Google.

Google could avoid ad agencies when it sold only search advertising, where it is dominant. But now that it has a wider set of products in more areas — including social media and virtual reality — it finds that it must work harder to drum up business, particularly because of the lingering hard feelings.

Google is “definitely a must-buy in search, but in other things it’s not a must-buy,” said Jeff Ratner, managing partner and digital director at MindShare North America. “As they start moving more into ad networks and other mediums, they need the agency to help make it a reality.”

The most visible part of the new Google strategy is an event called Campus@, which started up in the spring. So far the Campus@ team, which has a core of six employees, has held six events, including one for Leo Burnett, which is part of the Publicis Groupe.

“We essentially take Google — our people, our products, our food, our tchotchkes — roll into the lobbies and give people the chance to interact with Google,” Ms. Clift said. The events are “a fantastic way to ingratiate ourselves,” she said.

Despite all the happy talk, there is still a good deal of skepticism. As Google begins trying to sell television, radio and print advertising and creates tools for buying and planning media campaigns, some advertising executives and academics say that the company is working with the agencies in order to eventually displace them.

Peter S. Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the Google approach as part of a master plan to get its corporate hooks into more of the agencies’ business.

“If Google were to just set up a shingle and say ‘Google ad agency,’ the traditional agencies will find a way to keep them out of clients’ offices,” Professor Fader said.

Instead, he said, “they’re almost like a virus, going to work their way into specific agencies and replace the DNA of those agencies with a more analytic orientation while trying to maintain some of the client relationships.”

Penry Price, Google’s vice president for advertising sales for North America, dismissed this view, saying Google had no desire to replace agencies or to take their clients.

“I don’t see how we would be able to actually provide a better customer experience to an individual client than an agency can today,” he said. “There’s no way we could actually line up behind one customer and offer the services and information that an agency can today.”

Agencies are not so sure, and they are having mixed reactions to Google’s overtures. Some welcome the company enthusiastically. Others say they are unimpressed with Google’s products outside of search and nervous about the company’s intent.

“I think they’re great at pushing and pulling together what suits their agenda,” said Peter Gardiner, the chief media officer at the ad agency Deutsch. “I would not necessarily put them on the same level as other media companies in terms of their partnering attitude.”

A lot of the mistrust stems from Google’s having built a sales force of several hundred people who court large advertisers. While many of Google’s sales to small advertisers are automated, the bigger clients get personal attention.

This prompts accusations from ad agencies that Google is courting their clients behind their backs. Agency executives are traditionally the people who decide where their clients should spend their marketing dollars, and while most media companies and technology providers must go through an agency to get onto the client’s radar, Google — with its cool-kid aura — had an easy time obtaining meetings directly with clients.

But Google also knows it needs the cooperation of the advertisers’ agencies. As Mr. Price put it, “we saw that if we had higher hopes and aspirations of getting larger budgets and being a part of these larger marketers’ decisions, a lot of decision-making was done at the agencies.”

The balance of power is not entirely clear. Google and the agencies behave a bit like “frenemies”: as much as the agencies might like to ignore Google, they cannot (indeed, the WPP Group’s chief executive, Martin Sorrell, called Google a frenemy, which he later amended to a “froe”).

The perks of Google’s power are on display at the Campus@ events. When Google visits agencies, it typically brings in a gelato cart or a coffee bar. It has even built a replica of Google’s office kitchens. It offers free food and prizes of iPod Touches.

At Leo Burnett’s headquarters, there were about 20 Google employees, almost all of them young, bright-eyed and peppy. They wore royal blue Campus@ T-shirts, some of the women with loose cotton skirts and flip-flops and the men with khakis or jeans.

Lisa Green, a senior agency-relations manager who was explaining a Google analytical product, told members of the Leo Burnett staff, “It’s very natural, as a human, to hear something and want more information, and Google just makes that easier.”

The Leo Burnett executives sounded appreciative. Speaking about the Google people, John Condon, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett America, told his employees, “You’ve got some of the best and brightest people in the industry here. Don’t hold anything back. Milk ’em.”

The dialogue was indeed two-way. For instance, in June, Google introduced a tool called Ad Planner that shows media buyers sites their likely audiences might visit, based on criteria like demographics. Google previewed Ad Planner with some agency executives and is now seeking more feedback. (The day the product was announced, the share price of a competitor, comScore, dropped 22.5 percent.)

Ad Planner is one element of a bigger product called a media dashboard that Google is working on. It would offer media planners a data-rich screen that would tell them where all the ads for a campaign were running, how they were doing and how much they had cost.

Some agency executives are excited about what Google has to offer. “You can see them as a threat, and we don’t at all,” said Ashley Vinson, an executive at the agency DDB, which recently held a Campus@ event. “It’s a complete opportunity. It’s like working with a world-class director or production company.”

Rob Norman, the chief executive of GroupM Interaction, a large media-buying firm, said he had some problems with Google but did not feel particularly threatened by it.

“I think there still may be at least one human media planner left, other than the one that pulls the handle on the Google machine,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/bu.../01google.html





Book Excerpt: The Numerati by Stephen Baker

By building mathematical models of its own employees, IBM aims to improve productivity and automate management
Stephen Baker

BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits—and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists—even lovers.

One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM (IBM), where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt:


On a late spring morning I drive up into the forests of Westchester County, N.Y., to the headquarters of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. It sits like a fortress atop a hill, a long, curved wall of glass reflecting the cotton-ball clouds floating above. I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.

Takriti, a slim 40-year-old with wide, languid eyes, opens the door of his small office. He wears a rugby shirt tucked tightly into blue jeans. I tell him that being modeled doesn't sound like much fun. I picture an all-knowing boss anticipating my every move, perhaps sending me an e-mail with the simple message, "No!" before I even get up my nerve to ask for a raise. But Takriti focuses on the positive. Imagine that your boss finally recognizes your strengths, he says—maybe ones that are hidden even to you. Then he "puts you into situations where you will thrive."

Commoditizing Workers

Still, Takriti confesses that he's nervous. His assignment is to translate the complexity of highly intelligent knowledge workers into the same types of equations and algorithms that are used to fine-tune shipping or predict the life span and production of a mainframe computer. With time, he and his team hope to build detailed models for each worker, each one complete with a person's quirks, daily commute, and allies, perhaps even enemies. These models might one day include whether the workers eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low. No doubt, some of them thrive even in the filthy air in Beijing or Mexico City, while others wheeze. If so, the models would eventually include this detail, among countless others. The idea is to build richly textured models that behave in their symbolic realm just like their flesh-and-blood counterparts. Then planners can manipulate them, looking for the most efficient combinations.

Takriti's team is hardly starting from scratch. IBM has long been a leader in converting all kinds of complex systems into numbers. Right after World War II, Big Blue used a new science called Operations Research to construct a mathematical model of the company's industrial supply chain. It included its costs and capabilities, as well as limitations, or constraints. Once the supply chain existed as numbers, engineers could experiment with it—optimizing it—and later incorporate the improvements in the real-life version. This drove efficiency and lowered costs. It was wonderful for manufacturing. But now, as IBM has shifted its focus to services, the corporate supply chain is made up less of machine parts than of people—Takriti and some 300,000 of his colleagues. His job, quite simply, is to start optimizing his co-workers.

To put together these profiles, Takriti requires mountains of facts about each employee. He has unleashed some 40 PhDs, from data miners and statisticians to anthropologists, to comb through workers' data. Personnel files, which include annual evaluations, are off-limits at IBM. But practically every other bit of data is fair game. Sifting through résumés and project records, the team can assemble a profile of each worker's skills and experience. Online calendars show how employees use their time and who they meet with. By tracking the use of cell phones and handheld computers, Takriti's researchers may be able to map the workers' movements. Call records and e-mails define the social networks of each consultant. Whom do they copy on their e-mails? Do they send blind copies to certain people?

These hidden messages could point to the growth of informal networks within the company. They may show that a midlevel manager is quietly leading an important group of colleagues—and that his boss is out of the loop. Eventually, say experts, e-mail analysis may single out workers whose behavior places them outside the known networks. Are these outliers depressed, about to jump ship, consorting with the competition? In companies around the world, the Numerati will be hunting for statistical clues.

Even without reading all the e-mails, managers can automatically spot the most common words that circulate within each group of workers. This permits them to establish the nature of each relationship. They can also see how communications shift with time. Two workers may discuss software programming Tuesday through Friday but spend much of their time on Monday sending e-mails about the past weekend's football games. "The next big step," says Kathleen M. Carley, a lead researcher in social networks at Carnegie Mellon University, "is to take tools like this and tie them to scheduling and productivity programs."

Takriti's scheme is even more ambitious. He is not given to bold forecasts. But if his system is successful, here's how it will work: Picture an IBM manager who gets an assignment to send a team of five to set up a call center in Manila. She sits down at the computer and fills out a form. It's almost like booking a vacation online. She puts in the dates and clicks on menus to describe the job and the skills needed. Perhaps she stipulates the ideal budget range. The results come back, recommending a particular team. All the skills are represented. Maybe three of the five people have a history of working together smoothly. They all have passports and live near airports with direct flights to Manila. One of them even speaks Tagalog.

Everything looks fine, except for one line that's highlighted in red. The budget. It's $40,000 over! The manager sees that the computer architect on the team is a veritable luminary, a guy who gets written up in the trade press. Sure, he's a 98.7% fit for the job, but he costs $1,000 an hour. It's as if she shopped for a weekend getaway in Paris and wound up with a penthouse suite at the Ritz.

Do The Math

Hmmm. The manager asks the system for a cheaper architect. New options come back. One is a new 29-year-old consultant based in India who costs only $85 per hour. That would certainly patch the hole in the budget. Unfortunately, he's only a 69% fit for the job. Still, he can handle it, according to the computer, if he gets two weeks of training. Can the job be delayed?

This is management in a world run by Numerati. As IBM sees it, the company has little choice. The workforce is too big, the world too vast and complicated for managers to get a grip on their workers the old-fashioned way—by talking to people who know people who know people. Word of mouth is too foggy and slow for the global economy. Personal connections are too constricted. Managers need the zip of automation to unearth a consultant in New Delhi, just the way a generation ago they located a shipment of condensers in Chicago. For this to work, the consultant—just like the condensers—must be represented as a series of numbers.

Eventually, companies could take this knowledge much further, using the numbers, in a sense, to clone us. Imagine, says Aleksandra Mojsilovic, one of Takriti's close colleagues, that the company has a superior worker named Joe Smith. Management could really benefit from two or three others just like him, or even a dozen. Once the company has built rich mathematical profiles of Smith and his fellow workers, it might be possible to identify at least a few of the experiences or routines that make Joe Smith so good. "If you had the full employment history, you could even compute the steps to become a Joe Smith," she says. "I'm not saying you can recreate a scientist, or a painter, or a musician," Mojsilovic adds. "But there are a lot of job roles that are really commodities." And if people turn out to be poorly designed for these jobs, they'll be reconfigured, first mathematically and then in life.

Different Strokes

Sound scary? It may depend on where you're perched on the food chain. Remember the $1,000-per-hour consultant who almost got dispatched to the Philippines? He didn't end up going, and instead, in IBM's scheme, he remained "on the bench." Takriti smiles. "That's what we call it," he says. "I think the term comes from sports." The question, of course, is how long IBM wants to have that high-priced talent gathering splinters. If there isn't any work to justify his immense talents, shouldn't they put him on something else, just to keep him busy?

Not necessarily, says Takriti. Job satisfaction is one of the automatic system's constraints. If workers get angry or bored to tears, their productivity is bound to plummet. The computer keeps this in mind (in a manner of speaking). As you might expect, it deals very gently with superstars. Since they make lots of money for the company during short bursts of activity, they get plenty of time on the bench. But grunt workers in this hierarchy get far less consideration. They're calculated as commodities. Their skills are "fungible." This means these workers are virtually indistinguishable from others, whether they're in India or Uruguay. They contribute little to profits. It pains Takriti to say this, because humans are not machines. They have varying skills and potential to grow. He appreciates this. But looking at it mathematically, he says, the company should keep its commodity workers laboring as close as possible to 100% of the time. Not much kickback time on the bench for them.

Where is this all leading? I pose the question one afternoon to Pierre Haren. A PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent member of the Numerati, he's the founder and chief executive of ILOG. It's a French company that uses operations research to fine-tune industrial systems, charting, for example, the most efficient delivery routes for Coors beer. ILOG makes allowances for all kinds of constraints. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. For example, a few years ago, the Singapore government wanted to avoid diplomatic spats at its new airport. So officials asked ILOG to synchronize the flow of passengers, making sure that those from mainland China wouldn't cross paths with travelers from Taiwan. Haren speaks in a strong French accent. We're talking in the lobby of a Midtown hotel in New York, and he has to yell to make himself heard over a particularly loud fountain.

Data Serfdom?

Haren says the efforts under way at places like IBM will not only break down each worker into sets of skills and knowledge. The same systems will also divide their days and weeks into small periods of time—hours, half-hours, eventually even minutes. At the same time, the jobs that have to be done, whether it's building a software program or designing an airliner, are also broken down into tiny steps. In this sense, Haren might as well be describing the industrial engineering that led to assembly lines a century ago. Big jobs are parsed into thousands of tasks and divided among many workers. But the work Haren is discussing is not done by hand, hydraulic presses, or even robots. It flows from the brain. The labor is defined by knowledge and ideas. As he sees it, that expertise will be tapped minute by minute across the world. This job sharing is already starting to happen, as companies break up projects and move big pieces of them offshore. But once the workers are represented as mathematical models, it will be far easier to break down their days into billable minutes and send their smarts to fulfill jobs all over the world.

Consider IBM's superstar consultant. He's roused off the bench, whether he's on a ski lift at St. Moritz or leading a seminar at Armonk, N.Y. He reaches into his pocket and sees a message asking for 10 minutes of his precious time. He might know just the right algorithm, or perhaps a contact or a customer. Maybe he sends back word that he's busy. (He's a star, after all.) But if he takes part, he assumes his place in what Haren calls a virtual assembly line. "This is the equivalent of the industrial revolution for white-collar workers," Haren says.

It's getting late in Takriti's office. I can see that he's concerned about my line of questioning. This virtual assembly line sounds menacing. The surveillance has more than a whiff of Big Brother. For those of us who aren't $1,000-per-hour consultants, life bound to a mathematical model is sounding like abject data serfdom.

Here's Takriti's counterargument. As the tools he's building make workers more productive, the market will reward them. We already use math programs to plot our trips and look for dates. Why not use them to map our careers—and negotiate for better pay? (Takriti, it turns out months later, masters these market dynamics: He was able to shop his gilded Numerati credentials to several Web companies and banks, and finally leaves IBM in late 2007 for a post as a top mathematician at Goldman Sachs. Work on the modeling project continues apace, says IBM.) All sorts of workers will be able to calculate their own worth with more precision. Let's say analytical tools show that a consultant's value to the company topped $2 million one year. Shouldn't she have access to that number and be free to use it as a negotiating tool? In a workplace defined by metrics, even those of us who like to think that we're beyond measurement will face growing pressure to build our case with numbers of our own.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...n_id=rss_daily





Newark and the Future of Crime Fighting

Mayor Cory Booker is betting that cutting-edge technology will reduce crime and spark an economic renaissance. But are citizens giving up too much privacy?
Spencer E. Ante

One recent spring day, two cops in the Newark Police Dept. watched a shoot-out erupt in broad daylight. Two suspected drug dealers started blasting away at each other in the middle of an apartment complex. The cops didn't witness the violence on the beat, though. They watched it from the city's new communications command center, which collects live video feeds from more than 100 surveillance cameras scattered across the crime-ridden city.

As the shooting broke out, the policemen zoomed in on the scene with a joystick controller. They saw one gunman flee, while the other dragged himself into a nearby apartment, one blood-soaked leg trailing behind. Because of the camera network, the Newark police were able to dispatch a team to the crime scene immediately—90 seconds before the first 911 calls. The gunman who crawled into his apartment was arrested on the spot. "Those complexes are like mazes, but we knew exactly where to send the unit," says Sergeant Marvin Carpenter, commanding officer of the communications post.

The surveillance system is the centerpiece of Mayor Cory Booker's ambitious plan to use cutting-edge technologies to slash Newark's violent crime rate. This August, Newark finished its initial deployment of 111 cameras, adding 76 to the 35 that were in place last summer. Newark is investing in a whole range of tools, everything from mundane PCs to more novel technologies such as a new citywide broadband wireless network that will let cops fill out police reports from their squad cars instead of schlepping back to the station house. By late fall, Newark expects to complete the deployment of an audio sensor system to pinpoint gunshot locations that cameras fail to catch. "We are trying to leave the Flintstones and get to the Jetsons," says Booker.

Major cities such as London, New York, and Chicago have rolled out larger video surveillance networks. But technology experts say Newark, New Jersey's largest city, is the first metropolis to combine an array of technologies on a large scale. "I haven't seen a city with this mix of technology all in one place," says Kevin Kilgore, president of Let's Think Wireless, a New York company that has built wireless networks for several hundred cities, including Newark.

Bangalore Across the Hudson

With a nod to New York City's revival, Booker is betting that crime reduction will trigger the economic rebirth of Newark, a city of about 280,000 with a proud industrial history that has never fully recovered from the upheavals of the 1960s. In a slowing economy, the charismatic 39-year-old, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Yale University Law School, is pitching Newark as a sort of Bangalore across the Hudson: a low-cost place to do business 10 miles from Manhattan, with the second busiest U.S. port, many transportation hubs, sports arenas, and a cluster of schools such as Rutgers University and Seton Hall University School of Law. "You can work your tail off on economic development, but businesses won't come if it's not safe," says Hans Dekker, president of the Newark Community Foundation.

Newark is also a test bed for the tensions between surveillance and privacy. Privacy advocates have raised concerns over the aggressive rollout of video cameras, audio sensors, and other technologies. Critics argue that such surveillance is susceptible to abuse, can have a chilling effect on public life, and hasn't been proven to reduce crime. "The costs are high, and the benefits in terms of law enforcement are low," says Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Whether Newark can strike an acceptable balance between crime-fighting and privacy may determine whether other cities follow similar strategies in the future.

Already though, the business community is beginning to throw its weight behind Booker's plan. In August, Newark scored a big win when London-based Standard Chartered Bank (STAN.L) opened a new office downtown that will hold more than 500 employees. Inspired by the mayor's vision, financial executives, such as New York hedge fund operator William Ackman, have financed some of the new technologies that the city can't afford because of its $180 million budget deficit. And the Newark offices of big companies such as Verizon Communications (VZ), AT&T (T), Cablevision Systems (CVC), Public Service Enterprise Group (PEG), and Continental Airlines (CAL) are beginning to hire more residents from the city.

Audible.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com (AMZN), is one of the companies that has jumped on the Mayor's bandwagon. Last March the company moved its headquarters and 165 employees out of Wayne, N.J., and into a 50,000-square-foot office in downtown Newark. Don Katz, Audible.com's founder and CEO, says the space is 50% cheaper than Manhattan real estate. And even though Katz expected Newark's reputation to scare away some employees, not one worker has left since the move. "For a long time, I thought it would be great if we could serve our shareholders and be part of an urban renaissance," says Katz. "All in all, it's been a complete win."

Improved Police Strategy

Newark does appear to be getting safer, though many areas outside the downtown district remain dangerous. This year there have been 37 murders, down 40% from 62 in the same period a year ago. Shooting incidents are down 19%. Over the last year, 101 arrests were made based on live or recorded video evidence. Police officials say the surveillance technology has helped but also stress the effort is one part of the police department's overall strategy. The department, for instance, has created a narcotics squad and added 159 cops since 2006, bringing the total force to 1,324.

Booker is encouraged by the drop in crime but says the city has a long way to go before it can declare victory. He hopes crime rates will continue to fall as the city rolls out the gunshot detection technology. "When I came in, a big consultant a told me a 5% to 10% reduction [in crime] is something to celebrate," says Booker. "I want people to see a 50%, 60%, 70% reduction in violent crime."

On a warm day this May, Matt Klapper, a precocious 25-year-old senior adviser, darts into the mayor's office. Standing in front of photos of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi that hang on the wall, Klapper unfurls a large map of the city on a table. The map is littered with red dots that mark the location of confirmed shootings. The vast majority of the dots, about 80%, are in the city's South Ward. His point: The city is not throwing cameras up everywhere but is placing them in a seven-square mile area where they can help the most. "This area will be saturated with cameras," says Klapper. "It's an area that has bled."

By taking a more targeted approach, Klapper and city officials believe, the surveillance network will reduce crime, while allaying concerns of privacy advocates. "The cost of pulling that trigger is about to go way up," he says.

To further limit the potential for privacy violations, Klapper and other officials have worked with the ACLU to develop a set of rules and standards. Among them: Cameras will not be allowed to peek inside homes, and the footage is only stored for 30 days. "There are a million ways this system could help if it's implemented intelligently," says Peter Lutz, Newark's director of Police Management Information Systems. "That's what's going to make the difference between us and other cities."

A Big Step Up

Booker is doing his best to shake up the city—and especially the police department. In 2006, when he took over from Sharpe James, a flamboyant and controversial figure who had won five straight elections, the police department had suffered from decades of underinvestment and corruption. Cops were writing on chalkboards and poking typewriter keys to file reports. There were nine cameras that no one was watching. "When I walked into our police precincts, I saw scenes that looked like Barney Miller," says Booker.

Soon after, he bucked the tradition of his predecessor by hiring an outsider to be his top cop: Garry McCarthy, a veteran of the New York Police Dept. McCarthy brought a higher level of professionalism to the force and rolled out Compstat, a data-centric system created by the NYPD that focuses on quality-of-life infractions and crime hot spots.

Crime began to drop. But in the summer of 2007 the city was convulsed by a triple homicide. Three kids, all of them either in college or on their way that fall, were gunned down in a city schoolyard. It was a turning point for the young administration. "This was just heartbreaking what happened to those children," says Newark Community Foundation board member and former New Jersey Bell CEO Alfred Koeppe. "There was a sense of: What can we do?"

The Mayor knew he had to respond forcefully. Days after the killings, Klapper, the young aide, set up a meeting at City Hall with police officials and local leaders to ask them to fund a pilot program for the camera surveillance technology. After hearing the pitch, Arthur Ryan, the former CEO of Prudential Financial (PRU), and private equity pioneer Ray Chambers decided to back not just a pilot but the whole program. They agreed to pony up $3.2 million so the city could roll out more than 100 cameras. "It is truly the grandest kind of social investment that I have seen in this city since the 1960s," says Koeppe, who helped broker the investment. Adds Klapper: "It was the best day in my life."

It's that kind of support that gives Don Katz even more comfort in his decision to make a bet on Newark. Now, Katz and other businessmen are hoping that the Newark revival will extend beyond downtown and into the city's more troubled areas. "You are aware that there is a disparity between your sense of safety downtown and some other neighborhoods," says Katz. "If Cory has his way, it won't end with downtown."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...822_240216.htm





UK Crime Fighters Grapple with iPhone Wipe Threat

PC-mobile shift causing headaches for forensics chief
Nick Heath

Criminals can remotely destroy incriminating evidence by exploiting security features on the Apple iPhone, a leading digital forensics expert has warned.

The head of the Serious Fraud Office digital forensics unit Keith Foggon cautioned that the ability to remotely wipe the iPhone and other smart phones used by enterprises could be exploited by lawbreakers.

Foggon said: "The 3G iPhone is brand new, there are not many tools for dealing with it and it can be remotely wiped. It's a bit like the BlackBerrys where users can carry out remote deletion."

He added the unit took precautions to guard against the feature being exploited. "Because we isolate the devices immediately, and never reconnect them to their network, the remote wiping capability does not present us with much of a problem," he noted.

The 21-strong unit, which sniffs out incriminating evidence from crime scenes, uses a number of high-tech tools to get the sensitive data the police needs to build a case. Advanced forensics tools such as the Logicube CellDEK allow the forensics organisation to pull data from more than 1,100 of the most popular mobile phones and PDAs, while its team carry suitcases containing handset connectors of every shape and size to help collect data from the devices.

However, Foggon warned that the shift away from PCs towards mobile devices is posing an increasing headache for the digital forensics teams.

He said: "It is a concern that society is moving more towards using mobile phones. The PC architecture is usually stable but with mobile devices they change daily. If a mobile device comes out tomorrow we will not be able to look at it until a tool becomes available.

"We can still analyse it by photographing every screen on it but we won't be able to get hidden data on it, so photographing every screen is not a very practical way of doing it.

"That is an area where we are almost playing catch-up."

Another growing obstacle to forensics' teams ability to recover evidence is the encryption features found in modern operating systems.

"With Windows Vista you have BitLocker that will cause us some problems," Foggon noted.

"It ties in the encryption to a chip, there are ways around it but it is something we can't crack, we need a pass to get around that."

The team cracks low-grade encryption using 100 quad-core PCs but for high-grade encryption it relies on the threat of a prison sentence for individuals refusing to hand over passwords or decrypted files.

Foggon believes that the unit's years of experience in unearthing evidence from everything from 186s to MacBooks will mean it will have a key role to play in any central UK e-crime policing unit.

The government has committed itself to funding such a unit and indicated it could be part of the proposed National Fraud Reporting Centre, under the Attorney General's Office, while the Metropolitan Police Service and the Association of Police Officers has put forward proposals to the government to establish a policing central e-crime unit.

Foggon said the unit's structure could soon be transformed and it may even tackle a wider range of criminal investigations, following the publication of its reaction, due imminently, to a review of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) carried out by former senior New York City prosecutor Jessica de Grazia.

The review called for clarity about the roles, responsibilities, and qualifications of case controllers and assistant directors within the SFO.
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0...9282266,00.htm





The Great Zero Challenge

"It is noble and just to dispel myths, falsehoods and untruths."
Update: As of September 1st, 2008 the challenge stands unaccepted.

Q. What is this?

A. A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional data recovery firm or any individual(s) or organization(s) can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. We used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. Three data recover companies were contacted. All three are listed on this page. Two companies declined to review the drive immediately upon hearing the phrase 'dd', the third declined to review the drive after we spoke to second level phone support and they asked if the dd command had actually completed (good question). Here is their response... paraphrased from a phone conversation:

"According to our Unix team, there is less than a zero percent chance of data recovery after that dd command. The drive itself has been overwritten in a very fundamental manner. However, if for legal reasons you need to demonstrate that an effort is being made to recover some or all of the data, go ahead and send it in and we'll certainly make an effort, but again, from what you've told us, our engineers are certain that we cannot recover data from the drive. We'll email you a quote."

Q. Why are you doing this?

A. Because many people believe that in order to permanently delete data from a modern hard drive that multiple overwrites with random data, mechanical grinding, degaussing and incinerating must be used. They tell others this. Like chaos, it perpetuates itself until everyone believes it. Lots of good, usable hard drives are ruined in the process.

Q. What exactly is the challenge?

A. You or your company or your organization or your group of researchers can have a crack at the drive. You don't actually have to recover any data to win the challenge, just tell us the name of one (1) of the two (2) files or the name of the one (1) folder that existed in this screen shot before the dd command was executed.

Q. What kind of hard drive is it? How much did it cost? Is it new? Does it work? How did you format it? Why did you buy this drive?

A. Western Digital (WD800JB) 80GB hard drive. We paid roughly $60 USD for the drive. It is new. Yes, it works. We did a default initialization and NTFS format from within Windows XP. It was the smallest and least expensive hard drive we could purchase new. It's also a very plain, common drive. Data recovery firms should have a lot of experience dealing with this type of hard drive.
The Terms were updated on January 16th, 2008. The underlined portions have been added

Q. May I enter the challenge?

A. Sure... here are the terms of the challenge: Send a self-addressed, postage-paid box you pay shipping both ways with packaging material to the address listed below along with a sixty $60 USD deposit United States Postal Service Money Order only and we will mail the drive to you.

When you receive the drive, you have three (3) consecutive days beginning on the day of receipt to analyze the drive. You must return the drive to us immediately on the end of the third day. The drive must be returned in the same condition that you received it in. Photos will be taken before shipment. It will be demonstrably functional before shipment. So, don't break it. If you damage the drive, then your deposit will not be returned. The challenge will last exactly one (1) year and will end immediately should someone win.

THE CHALLENGE BEGAN ON JANUARY 15th 2008.
THE CHALLENGE ENDS ON JANUARY 15th 2009 OR WHENEVER SOMEONE WINS.

You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive. If the challenger is an established data recovery business located in the United States of America (We would need to see Articles of Incorporation, a current business license and one other form of business identification in order to determine that they are indeed a professional, for-profit, established data recovery business) or a National government law enforcement or intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, FBI), then we will allow these type of organizations to disassemble the drive and to keep the drive for thirty (30) consecutive days. Fair enough? If you object to these terms, then don't participate or suggest changes.

Challenges are accepted in the order in which they are received at this address:

16 Systems, LLC
P.O. Box 356
Blacksburg, VA 24063
http://16systems.com/zero/index.html





Judge: Law Protects Anonymous Newspaper Commenters
Greg Tuttle

A District Court judge found today that the state shield law that protects reporters from disclosing anonymous sources also protects the identity of anonymous commenters on a newspaper's Web site.

Judge G. Todd Baugh granted a motion filed by The Billings Gazette to quash a subpoena that sought information that may lead to the identity of those who post comments on the newspaper's online edition.

Russ Doty, a 2004 candidate for the Public Service Commission, issued the subpoena as part of his civil lawsuit against Brad Molnar. The lawsuit accuses Molnar, who won the PCS election against Doty, of libel and slander during the campaign.

At the end of a hearing into the Gazette's motion on Wednesday, Baugh said the state's Media Confidentiality Act protects the newspaper from being forced to provide the information sought by Doty.

Baugh also noted that the information Doty was seeking from The Gazette was related to comments made long after the 2004 campaign. The judge asked Doty whether the anonymous comments, sometimes known as "blogs," have enough credibility to reach the legal requirements of libel and defamation.

"I can't imagine an anonymous comment has much credence whatsoever," Baugh said.

Doty said he sought the information from the newspaper to bolster his claim that his reputation in the community had been harmed by the alleged libel he attributes to Molnar. Several newspaper commenters would be valuable witnesses in his case, Doty told the judge.

Doty also sought the identity of newspaper bloggers whom he suspected as being Molnar himself. The subpoena, served on the newspaper in July, sought "all electronic information...you have including but not limited to IP addresses, e-mail addresses, and other identity and contact information" for Molnar.

In a deposition taken previously in the case, Molnar denied that he used the monikers "CutiePie" and "Always, wondering" to post comments on the newspaper's Web site. Doty said knowing the identity or contact information of those two bloggers would help him prove his libel case against Molnar.

"I have a right to test whether or not Molnar is telling the truth when he says in his deposition that he is not either of these people," Doty said.

Gazette attorney Martha Sheehy argued that the information sought by Doty is privileged under the state's Media Confidentiality Act, commonly known as a shield law.

The act protects from forced disclosure "any information obtained or prepared" by a news agency. Sheehy said the information sought by Doty in the subpoena clearly falls within the protection of the act.

"Whether posted on a message board or printed in the newspaper makes no difference," Sheehy said.

In an affidavit, Gazette Editor Steve Prosinski said the newspaper does not require or know the real names of persons who post story comments. Commenters are required to register before posting comments, but they are only required to provide an e-mail address when they create a "nickname."

The blogger's IP address, which is an Internet tracking number, is also collected as part of the registration process, Prosinski said. But the newspaper does not control the IP address or have access to the name of the person associated with each number.

Prosinski said the online story comments are a "core service and integral part" of the newspaper's business, and allowing anonymous comments serves the public "by fostering democratic discourse through communities of users."

Doty argued such information is not protected because it was not gathered as "news."

"The scope of the statute is to shield the news media from disclosing 'news' sources or any information obtained or prepared when 'gathering, writing, editing or disseminating news,'" Doty wrote in a court brief. "Blogs and online comment simply are not 'news.' Therefore, the persons who comment are not protected by a statutory privilege."

Molnar did not attend the hearing, but his attorney, Jack Sands, told Baugh that the information sought by Doty was not relevant to the lawsuit.

"All this discussion is really irrelevant to the case before the court," Sands said.

Doty filed the lawsuit against Molnar in 2006 in District Court in Helena. The case was later moved to Yellowstone County where Molnar resides. A trial date has not been set.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/artic...al/22-doty.txt





Thai Government Tries to Shut Down 400 Websites
Oliver Luft

Thailand's Information and Communications Technology Ministry sought court orders yesterday to shut down about 400 websites and advised internet service providers to block 1,200 sites it considers a danger to national security or disturbing social order.

ICT minister Mun Patanotai said the department had advised ISPs to immediately block these websites, which it claimed were detected between March and August this year, and had sought court actions against them under article 20 of Thailand's Computer Crime Act.

The Bangkok Post reported yesterday that the ministry claimed the sites "disturbed the peaceful social order and morality of the people, and/or which were considered detrimental to national security".

This move to shut down online dissent follows the Thai authorities' declaration of a state of emergency yesterday as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to demand the government's resignation.

Thai prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, announced sweeping curbs to civil liberties to maintain calm, after which the ICT Ministry said it had detected more than 1,200 websites that violated the Computer Crime Act.

In addition, a Thai court issued three orders to shut down about 400 websites, 344 of which, it claimed, carried material that was contemptuous of the country's royal family. The other blocked websites included two with religious content, one video sex game and five sites deemed to carry obscene content.

The ICT ministry, the Bangkok Post reported, also sought help from the police to "bring all the violators to trial".

Samak gave the army power to restore order on the streets of Bangkok yesterday after fighting started between his supporters and those demanding he quit.

One demonstrator was killed and dozens were injured during the worst violence seen since anti-government campaigns began in May.

The present crisis started just over a week ago as members of the People's Alliance for Democracy took over government buildings in an attempt to try to force the Thai government to stand down.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...media.thailand





With Site Block, Malaysia Seems to Break Promise
Lee Min Keong

The nation's vocal political bloggers and commentators are bracing for a government crackdown, even as Malaysia celebrates its 51st anniversary of independence this weekend.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission earlier this week ordered all 19 of the country's Internet service providers to block the controversial political portal Malaysia Today.

According to a report on Thursday by online news portal Malaysiakini, the MCMC chief operating officer, Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, confirmed that the commission was behind the site blackout. "It is being blocked because we found that some of the comments on the Web site were insensitive, bordering on incitement," Mohamed Sharil said.

Local news reports indicated that users were unable to access Malaysia Today through three major ISPs: TMnet, Maxis, and Time. However, a check by ZDNet Asia on Thursday evening found that the portal could still be accessed through a mirror site.

The MCMC's move is expected to send shockwaves across the IT sector as it appears that the Malaysian government has broken its promise not to censor the Internet--a commitment it first made when the nation launched its Multimedia Super Corridor strategy in 1996. Under the MSC Malaysia 10 Point Bill of Guarantees, the government pledges to "ensure no Internet censorship."

Asked if the move to block Malaysia Today went against this guarantee, Mohamed Sharil said the matter was "subject to interpretation."

"We are governed by the Communications and Multimedia Act (of 1998), which allows us to take preventive measures and advise our license holders (such as ISPs) when a service user may be contravening national laws," he said in the Malaysiakini report.

When contacted, a representative of Mohamed Sharil's office told ZDNet Asia that he was not available for comment, as he was "in Bali."

Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar said the block was justified, as Malaysia Today was publishing offensive content. He told reporters Thursday: "We do not intend to curtail people's freedom or right to express themselves. But when they publish things that are libelous, slanderous, or defamatory, it is natural for the MCMC to act."

"Everyone is subject to the law, even Web sites and blogs," Syed Hamid said, adding that the commission was only exercising its power in ordering the ISPs to block the Web site.

Broken promise not to censor

Malaysia Today's founder and editor, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, called the move a breach of the MSC charter. "The Government has clearly broken its own promise," Raja Petra said in a Thursday report by news daily The Star.

The editor is already facing sedition and defamation charges, after posting reports that linked Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife to the murder of a Mongolian woman.

Tony Pua, opposition member of parliament and economic adviser to the Democratic Action Party (DAP) secretary general, said the government's move to backtrack on its own guarantee sounded the "death knell" for the MSC.

"As it is, under (Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) Pak Lah's government, the MSC is already given very little room to grow and very little emphasis on its progress," Pua said in an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia. "Now it just (sounded) MSC's death knell, and it's doomed for mediocrity."

Regardless of how the government explains the MCMC's directive, he said it all boils down to "censorship with a capital C." "This government has reneged on its pledge not to censor the Internet...(and) does not have any commitment toward freedom of speech. The cyberspace has been of the new frontiers, in which the government has been trying unsuccessfully to control," he said.

"I expect its continued attempts to clamp down on blogs will fail and backfire, and the ultimate victims will be the government's credibility, as well as its various initiatives, such as the MSC," said Pua, a former technopreneur who sold his IT services company to become a full-time politician.

David Wong, chairman of the Association of the Computer and Multimedia Industry Malaysia (Pikom), said the government now needs to spend a lot of effort to convince its population and foreign investors on the "harsh" action taken against Malaysia Today.

"The government would have to explain exactly what major wrongdoings were committed by the Web site," Wong told ZDNet Asia, when asked if potential foreign investors would lose confidence in the Malaysian government over the apparent backtracking on its guarantee not to censor the Web.

If the government is not able to convince the public and overseas investors that it was necessary to block access to Malaysia Today, he said it would be an uphill task for the government to manage any potential fallout.

In a media statement, Salahuddin Hashim, secretary general of the opposition People's Justice Party, warned that this marks "the first step in a comprehensive and reprehensible attempt to curb the access of Malaysians to the Internet."

The Web has in the past few years been "the bastion of freedom" for Malaysians seeking alternative views, Salahuddin said.

When contacted, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) was not available for comment.

Lee Ming Keong, is a freelance IT writer based in Malaysia, reported for ZDNet Asia.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10030325-38.html





Anti-Kremlin Website Founder Dies in Police Custody: Report
AFP

A vocal critic of the Kremlin's policies in the Caucasus died Sunday from a bullet wound to the head while in police custody, Interfax reported, quoting prosecutors.

Magomed Yevloyev founded and ran the website ingushetiya.ru, a major source of information in the region, and was a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov.

Prosecutors have opened a preliminary manslaughter investigation after Yevloyev was shot in a police car in Narzan, the capital of volatile Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim region that borders Chechnya, Russian media reported.

A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Vladimir Markin, said "an incident" took place after Yevloyev was taken into a police car "resulting in a shooting injury to the head and he later died in hospital," Interfax reported.

The website meanwhile reported that Yevloyev was killed after police arrested him in Narzan.

"Magomed Yevloyev was arrested today in Ingushetia and was killed", said a report posted on www.ingushetiya.ru.

The website is among the most visited for news on Ingushetia and had openly criticised the Ingush president who had often threatened to shut it down.

Ekho Moskvy radio separately quoted local Ingush opposition activist Magomad Khazbiyev as saying that the website founder was arrested at gunpoint after his arrival in Narzan.

Yevloyev arrived on a flight that was also carrying the Ingush president.

"Yevloyev was arrested as he stepped off the plane," Khazbiyev said.

President Zyazikov was accompanied onto the tarmac "by his entourage, followed by that of the interior minister." Individuals from among the latter group whisked away Yevloyev at this point, according to Khazbiyev.

A source at Ingush police said the website founder had been detained as part of a criminal investigation and was being taken to a police station, Interfax reported.

"Along the way, a shot was involuntarily fired from a policeman's gun and the bullet hit Yevloyev's head," the source was quoted as saying.

Russian justice authorities had ordered in June that the site be shut down, saying it was disseminating "extremist" views.

Moscow had also blocked access to the site late last year after it called for protests against the local administration which the opposition accuses of corruption and mismanagement.

Ingusetiya.ru's chief editor Rosa Malsagova earlier this month announced plans to seek asylum in France.

"This was a murder that must be solved," said Alexander Cherkassov, from the Russian rights group Memorial.

Paris-based media-rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said they were "profoundly shocked," according to a statement.

"It is essential that the international community, and especially the European Union, demands an explanation for what really happened," it said.

A Moscow-based spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch (HRW), quoted by Interfax, said that Yevloyev's death, "in such suspicious circumstances, can only raise questions."

Russian opposition activist Ilia Yashin accused Zyazikov of "being behind the murder" of the website founder, in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio.

"If (Zyazikov) is once again cleared of guilt, that would mean that (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin and (President Dmitry) Medvedev are incapable of restoring order to the republic, and that Ingushetia is de facto not a part of Russia."

Ingushetia has been grappling with mounting security problems.

While major combat operations against separatist rebels in neighbouring Chechnya have ceased, Ingushetia and other nearby provinces remain plagued by shoot-outs between Russian security services and local guerrillas.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...Bpjr8ZuF8vLoOQ





Don LaFontaine, Voice of Trailers and TV Spots, Is Dead at 68
Dennis Hevesi

Don LaFontaine, who brought his sonorous, ominous, melodramatic baritone to so many thousands of movie trailers, commercials and television promos that he became known in the industry as “the voice of God,” or just “the V.O.G.,” died Monday near his home in Los Angeles. He was 68.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Kevin Motley. The official cause has not been released.

In a 33-year career Mr. LaFontaine did voice-overs for more than 5,000 movie trailers, 350,000 commercials and thousands of television promos, including dozens of “Next week on ‘E.R.’ “ spots.

“Don was an absolute treasure to the voice-over industry,” Joan Baker, the author of “Secrets of Voice-Over Success” (Sentient Publications, 2005), said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had a unique sound, a voice placed deep in his body that cut through the sound bites and the music.”

Ms. Baker said Mr. LaFontaine “understood the dynamics of each word and gave each word a musical note that was intuitive, which is why he could perform in so many genres — action, drama, comedy, romance, horror films, science fiction.”

Mr. LaFontaine wrote most of his voice-overs and, sometimes with collaborators, came up with familiar phrases like “a one-man army,” “one man, one destiny,” “from the bedroom to the boardroom,” and “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and no way out.”

But he is best known for “In a world where ... ,” which has become overused and the subject of parody. Ms. Baker could not say for what production that phrase was first used. But in an interview last year, Mr. LaFontaine explained its intent.

“We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to,” he said of his viewers. “That’s very easily done by saying: ‘In a world where ... violence rules,’ ‘In a world where ... men are slaves and women are the conquerors.’ You very rapidly set the scene.”

Comics have since pounced on the phrase, and in 2005 Mr. LaFontaine himself spoofed it in a commercial for Geico Insurance. It was one of a series in which celebrities commented on the tales of real people involved in accidents.

“People had heard his voice for decades, but the Geico spot put him on the map, visually,” Ms. Baker said. “In his commercial, this very plain woman describes her accident, and Don, in the background, narrates it in movie-trailer promo talk. The very first thing he says starts, ‘In a world where both of our cars are totally under water ... ’ “

Born in Duluth, Minn., on Aug. 26, 1940, Mr. LaFontaine joined the Army soon after graduating from high school and was assigned to an Army band as a recording engineer. After his discharge, he got a job with National Recording Studios in New York. There he met Floyd Peterson, a producer of radio commercials, and they formed a company to produce movie trailers.

In 1965, a scheduling mix-up prevented an announcer from making a session; Mr. LaFontaine took over the mike to read radio spots for “Gunfighters of Casa Grande.” To his surprise, MGM liked his first personal performance. In 1976, Mr. LaFontaine started his own production company. His first assignment was for “The Godfather, Part II.” Two years later, he became head of the trailer department at Paramount Pictures.

He later returned to independent production. Over the years, he did promos for films including “Terminator,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Batman Returns” and “The Elephant Man.” He did commercials for Chevrolet, Pontiac, Ford, Budweiser, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, among other companies.

Mr. LaFontaine is survived by his wife, the singer-actress Nita Whitaker, and three daughters, Christine, Skye and Elyse.

Working from a home studio that his wife dubbed “the Hole,” Mr. LaFontaine remained active until recently, averaging at least seven voice-overs a day. Last year, he did a promotion for the “The Simpsons Movie,” in which his comments were immediately echoed by characters from the film. At one point he says, “Hey, you’re just repeating everything I’m saying!” and Homer responds: “I know. It’s weird!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/ar...afontaine.html





Zombie Network Explosion

Long shadow cast by SQL injection surge?
John Leyden

The number of compromised zombie PCs in botnet networks has quadrupled over the last three months, according to figures from the Shadowserver Foundation.

Shadowserver tracks botnet activity and the number of command and control servers. It uses a variety of metrics to slice and dice its figures based in part on the entropy of botnet infections. The clear trend within these figures is upwards, with a rise in botnet numbers of 100,000 to 400,000 (if 30 day entropy is factored into equations) or from 20,000 to 60,000 (for five day entropy).

Entropy of botnets is calculated on the basis that if no activity is seen from a specific IP for a number of days - either 30, 10 or five - then it is removed from the botnet count.

Shadowserver figures suggest the number of command and control servers has actually decreased over the last month, following a spike in activity back in July.

Security watchers at the Internet Storm Centre have a number of explanations for the rise in the zombie population.

It could be that experienced botnet herders have got better at keeping control of compromised machines, or that more machines have been infected. Not much by way of email malware activity has been monitored, so if the latter explanation is true, then drive-by download attacks are playing a bigger role in spreading botnet client infestation. The recent rise in SQL injection attacks that plant malicious scripts on vulnerable servers could be to blame, but there's no hard data to support this plausible theory.

Improved detection of web-based attacks may be needed to gauge the extent of the problem, according to security watchers at the Internet Storm Centre.

"We are very good at tracking email-based malware (including lead-the-user-to-the-bad-website variety) and certainly network based attacks," writes ISC staffer John Bambenek. "Short of spidering the web on a consistent basis, it gets difficult to find infected sites for that malware. We at the ISC, and I'm sure many others, are working on ways to honeypot pure web-based attacks to capture this malware, but much work is left to be done."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/zombie_surge/





20 years on and the World's Greatest Supermodels are Back - Without a Wrinkle Between Them

Eclipsing younger rivals half their age, original supermodels Naomi, Linda, and Claudia front winter campaigns
Laura Roberts

In the fickle world of fashion, where youthful beauty is all, they should be well past their sell-by date.

But the original supermodels of the Eighties and Nineties are eclipsing many of their teenage rivals to front this season's most coveted collections.

Two decades older but mysteriously unwrinkled, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista currently dominate the pages of fashion magazines such as Vogue.

Mother-of-one Miss Evangelista, 43, is the face of Prada, having toppled 23-year-old Russian Sasha Pivovarova from her six-season reign at the fashion house.

Meanwhile, Miss Schiffer, 38, is fronting Chanel's main collection while Miss Turlington, 39, is promoting the designer's eyewear.


Christy Turlington, out of bed for Chanel

Miss Campbell, 38, has been chosen as the face of Yves Saint Laurent as well as garnering the front covers of French, Italian and Brazilian Vogue.

Each model is expected to earn around £300,000 from the campaigns.

Industry experts said their return can be explained by the fact that designers are keen to appeal to older women with more disposable income as the credit crunch hits.

Carol White, managing editor of Premiership Model Management, said: 'In times of financial instability, brands go for top quality - they want to sell dreams.

'There is much more punch with a girl like Linda than a beautiful face from the Ukraine.'

Didier Fernandez, of DNA Models in New York, said: 'People are starting to wake up to the value, both in the emotive and bankable sense, of the original supermodels.'

And the decision appears to be paying off.

L'Oreal's profits have soared by 20 per cent since Miss Evangelista first appeared in its adverts 18 months ago.

The supermodel phenomenon was first created in 1991 after Gianni Versace put the group - which also included Cindy Crawford, 42, Helena Christensen, 39, and Stephanie Seymour, 40 - on to his catwalk.

Renowned for their womanly curves, by 1996 their star had begun to wane amid reports of outrageous demands and diva-like behaviour.
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/femail....html?ITO=1490





BT Broadband Speeds Investigated
Rob

An IT businessman who uses the BT business broadband has claimed that BT is limiting his internet access at certain times of the day.

Sam Oliver, an IT professional from Shrewsbury, had his doubts when he found that although he had no problems accessing normal websites he found that when accessing streaming media his connection slowed to a crawl. He stated “The speeds for using the BBC iPlayer get very slow and unusable essentially,”
With the use of an independently provided piece of hardware supplied by a company called SamKnows he was able to run a variety of speed tests on his broadband line at different times of the day. The tests Sam ran were also being carried out as part of a nationwide internet speed check.

From these tests he discovered that although BT gave excellent results for general web browsing anything else caused his internet connection to drop to a speed that rendered it practically unusable. One of the main findings was that at certain times of the day use of peer-to-peer (commonly known as P2P) file transfers, which are increasingly being used by news and business sites for transferring big files or large amounts of data, caused the BT connection to drop in speed to almost nothing.

Mr Oliver said: “Anything that uses file-to-file or peer-to-peer on BT just falls over.” However, speaking to BBC News reporters BT official stated: “We restrict P2P speeds if it’s having a negative impact on the online experience of the majority of our customers. We normally place restrictions in the evenings at peak time, but we do apply them during the day if a lot of customers are using P2P at the same time. Without these limits all our customers using their broadband service would suffer, regardless of whether they are using P2P or not.”

It was claimed by BT that the restrictions are clearly laid out in the terms and condition and only apply to what they described as “heavy” users. However, BBC officials are threatening to “name and shame” ISPs who restrict P2P transfers in the way BT is doing.
http://www.broadband-expert.co.uk/bl...stigated/77161





Internet Traffic Grows 53 Percent from Mid-2007
Peter Svensson

International Internet traffic kept growing in the last year, but at a slower rate than before, and carriers more than kept pace by adding more capacity, a research firm said Wednesday.

The findings by TeleGeography Research are important because some U.S. Internet service providers say they are struggling with the expansion of online traffic, and are imposing monthly download limits on heavy users. The figures from TeleGeography don't exactly correlate to average Internet usage by U.S. households, but give an indication of wider trends.

TeleGeography said traffic grew 53 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008, down from a growth rate of 61 percent in the previous 12 months.

Growth on long-haul lines in the U.S. was even slower, at 47 percent. The big increase came in regions where the Internet is less mature. Traffic between the U.S. and Latin America more than doubled.

Meanwhile, international Internet capacity on ocean-spanning optical fibers increased 62 percent. On average, Internet traffic now uses just 29 percent of the available bandwidth.

TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin noted that the number of new broadband subscribers has been falling since 2001, but that the overall increase in Internet traffic remains high because of the increasing demand for online video.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090302365.html





P2P Traffic On The Wane

But it still accounts for 25% of internet traffic
Marc Chacksfield

New statistics by British internet service provider PlusNet shows that peer-to-peer traffic on the internet is dropping.

While P2P traffic takes up 25.9 per cent of all internet traffic whizzing through ISP PlusNet, this is down from last year.

PlusNet has revealed that while last year the total amount of P2P info was 13.4TB a day last year it has been lowered to 12.2TB a day this year.

Less filesharing

PlusNet thinks that it may not just be justice being served to people using P2P networks illegally, but because of the influx of streaming video on the web.

"It may be that services like iPlayer and 4OD are turning customers away from P2P downloads," said Dave Tomlinson of PlusNet back in June.

"Or it could be stories like the filesharing letters or the proposed three strikes policy that is changing peoples' thinking."

Video streaming in the UK now accounts for 6.6 per cent of PlusNet's traffic, with the likes of BBC's iPlayer driving this traffic.

This figured was boosted even more recently with the Olympics, where PlusNet saw another surge in video streaming.
http://www.techradar.com/news/intern...he-wane-462599

















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