Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 2nd, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists." – CNN


"Every week, radio airplay reaches 235 million Americans, promoting both new and legacy artists and generating more than a billion dollars in CD and download sales for record labels annually. By contrast, artists routinely sue their record labels for cheating them out of royalty money. We welcome an honest debate over which side has been a better friend to recording artists: America's hometown radio stations or foreign-owned record labels." – Dennis Wharton, NAB EVP


"Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low. [If Web companies] really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries." – Michelangelo Volpi, Joost CEO


"I was a little Southern, ignorant white female and would have been one forever." – Lauren Hutton



































May 2nd, 2009




Italian Courts Target Pirate Bay

A prosecutor is expected to seek trial of The Pirate Bay founders, who were just convicted in Sweden.
Philip Willan

Italian antipiracy campaigners have welcomed the recent Stockholm court verdict on the founders of The Pirate Bay Web site, saying it should clear the way for a similar case under the Italian justice system.

The Swedish court on April 17 sentenced the four founders of the torrent-tracking Web site -- Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrick Neij, Carl Lundstrom and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg -- to one year in prison and a US$3.6 million fine for assisting copyright infringement.

"An acquittal in Sweden could have created difficulties for the Italian prosecution. The guilty verdict will strengthen the hand of the prosecutor in Italy," Enzo Mazza, president of the Italian Music Industry Federation (FIMI), said in a telephone interview.

Giancarlo Mancusi, a public prosecutor in the northern town of Bergamo, is investigating The Pirate Bay's founders for alleged violations of Italy's copyright law, the first justice authority to take action against the Swedish Web site outside its home territory. The Pirate Bay hosts torrent files that enable its more than 22 million users to locate music, movies and software on third-party uploaders' computers.

Mancusi obtained a court order in August 2008 blocking access from Italian ISPs to all Pirate Bay addresses, but the ban was lifted on appeal two months later.

The validity of the blocking order is due to be considered in September by the Court of Cassation, Italy's top appeal court, Mazza said. The FIMI president said he expected the prosecutor to seek a trial of The Pirate Bay founders at around the same time, and he was confident he would be able to secure a conviction.

"The charge is the same as the one in Sweden, so one can be optimistic about obtaining a similar verdict in Italy," Mazza said. "The courts have already confirmed that they have jurisdiction and that Italian law has been violated. The problem is always that of achieving effective enforcement, but it's becoming increasingly hard for copyright violators to find a safe haven."

The Bergamo appeal court that lifted the block on access to The Pirate Bay via Italian ISPs also acknowledged that there was a possible valid case that Italian law had been violated by the Swedish Web site. In a ruling published in October 2008, the court said the finance police had presented evidence that the Web site had received hundreds of thousands of contacts from computers located in Italy and that those contacts "must be reasonably related, at least for a significant part, to the acquisition over the Internet of items protected by copyright in breach of the applicable laws."

The court said the access ban must be lifted because a law normally invoked to obtain the seizure of criminal assets had been transformed into "an atypical prohibitory order" obliging the ISPs to refrain from providing their services.

Simona Lavagnini, a lawyer representing the interests of the Italian music industry, said she was confident the Court of Cassation would uphold the validity of the ISP ban. "This instrument has already been used to combat child pornography and phishing. If it wasn't possible to use it in this case in relation to foreign Web sites, it would mean there is a gap in our legislation," Lavagnini said in a telephone interview.

Lavagnini said there was no prospect of The Pirate Bay founders ever being extradited from Sweden to serve a term in an Italian jail, but there were better chances of a possible fine being levied and of assets being seized to compensate the plaintiffs in the case for damages.

The Pirate Bay's founders have shown no sign yet of having been deterred by the Swedish verdict. Sunde sent a Twitter message after his conviction saying: "Stay calm -- nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media."

Sunde's Italian lawyer, Giovanni Battista Gallus, also professed optimism about the likely outcome of an eventual Italian trial. "I continue to maintain that no punishable activity has taken place in Italy. We can't allow the criminalization of an instrument such as torrent tracking, which can be employed for perfectly legal uses," Gallus said in a telephone interview.

The response to torrent trackers was similar to the initial official reaction to the introduction of video-recording machines, which can be used for both legal and illegal activities, Gallus said.

Sunde had not been notified that he was under investigation by the Italian authorities and had only found out about it because it had been widely reported in the media, Gallus said. "He was amazed to discover that he was subject to criminal proceedings in Italy, a country that he has never visited and where no servers associated with The Pirate Bay are located."

Gallus said the Italian court would have to consider how the European Union's directive on e-commerce applied to operators who mediated between third parties but did not make any copyright material directly available themselves.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16411...irate_bay.html





Pirate Bay Lawyer Files for Retrial, Cites Bias

Four men jailed for breaching copyright in connection with Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest free file-sharing websites, should be given a new trial because the judge was biased, a court heard Monday.

Judge Tomas Norstrom's memberships of several groups for copyright protection should have disqualified him, the lawyer for one of the men, Carl Lundstrom, said in a document sent to the district court.

"Tomas Norstrom was biased during the trial ... Secondly, he neglected to inform the defendants and their lawyers of the facts that constituted the bias," defense lawyer Per Samuelson said in the document obtained by Reuters from the court.

The court of appeal now has to decide on whether to send the case back to the district court.

Norstrom is a member of The Swedish Association for Copyright, an organization whose board includes Peter Danowsky, who represented the music and film industry in the trial. Norstrom is also a board member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

Carl Lundstrom and three other men linked to the Pirate Bay were earlier in April each sentenced to one year in jail for breaching copyright and ordered to pay $3.6 million in compensation.

Lundstrom's lawyer last week filed an appeal, asking the court of appeal to change the verdict and dismiss the prosecution and the claims for compensation.

He also said the court should turn to the European court of justice for a preliminary ruling.

The four men behind Pirate Bay -- Lundstrom, Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij -- were charged early last year by a Swedish prosecutor with conspiracy to break copyright law and related offenses.

Companies including Warner Bros, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI sought damages of more than 100 million crowns ($12 million) to cover lost revenues.

(Reporting by Veronica Ek; Editing by Matthew Jones)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssC...24095020090427





Suburban NYC Family Settles Music Piracy Suit
Jim Fitzgerald

After battling a suburban family for four years over music downloads, the recording industry has agreed to accept $7,000 _ paid in installments _ to settle its federal piracy lawsuit.

If approved by a judge, the settlement will end a well-publicized tussle that began with five record companies accusing Patricia Santangelo, a mother of five, of illegally downloading and distributing music.

Santangelo, 46, of Wappingers Falls, said she couldn't have downloaded anything because she didn't know how.

At one point during the lawsuit, which alleged the use of file-sharing computer networks, a federal judge described Santangelo as an "Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo."

Santangelo, one of thousands of people sued in the Recording Industry Association of America's anti-piracy campaign, refused to settle. Instead, she took her case to national news outlets and became a heroine to supporters of online freedom. An Internet campaign raised about $15,000 for her defense.

Her lawyer, Jordan Glass, said Monday that the industry "didn't expect someone like Patti to fight back. ... She was up against billions of dollars of corporate power. They had the money, they had the legal intellect, they had the experience, they had everything. She had nothing."

The industry eventually dropped its suit against the mother. But it filed a new one against two of her children, Michelle and Robert, ages 20 and 16 at the time. The new lawsuit alleged the youths had downloaded and distributed more than 1,000 songs, including "MMMBop" by Hanson and "Beat It" by Michael Jackson.

It said that Michelle had admitted piracy in a deposition and that Robert had been implicated by a family friend. They denied wrongdoing.

Under the terms of the settlement, filed in court in White Plains late Friday, the Santangelos will pay $7,000. They paid half the amount April 20 and are to make six payments of $583.33 by October.

"We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the Santangelos," Cara Duckworth, spokeswoman for the RIAA, said in an e-mailed statement. Asked how much had been spent to win the $7,000 settlement, and whether it was a victory, she said, "We don't break out costs per case, and it's not a question of it being 'worth it' or a 'victory.'"

She said the lawsuit had succeeded in showing that breaking the law has consequences and in steering music fans toward legal online services "that fairly compensate musicians and labels."

Glass pointed out that the Santangelos never admitted wrongdoing, and that with both Santangelo children now in college, the settlement offer was accepted to control costs.

"This was preventing the kids from moving on," he said. "Sometimes you reduce the damages so much it's time to call it quits."

Most of the file-sharing networks that were used for downloading and distributing music have been forced out of the business.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...z2Y3QD97R265O2





‘Bad’ BitTorrent and Warez Sites Raided By Police
enigmax

Just recently the police in Hungary conducted raids on various torrent and warez sites, but few will have sympathy for those arrested. The site operators charged users for access via premium SMS, many of them unsuspecting kids. The police seized an impressive amount of equipment and also took some impressive photographs.

In 2007 the US planned to put a federal prosecutor in Budapest, Hungary, to “assist in the coordination of the enforcement of intellectual property laws”. Almost immediately action was taken against some BitTorrent and warez sites operating in the country.

In 2008 it was recommended in an International Intellectual Property Alliance report that Hungary should remain on a piracy ‘watch list’ for that year. The reasons were wide and varied, but included were problems related to widespread ‘pay to leech’ torrent sites, and pay for access warez sites. “It is difficult to energize police and customs officials to investigate Internet cases because Hungarian court decisions are not a deterrent,” said the report.

The authorities, undeterred by the lack of a court deterrent, have been involved in various raids and site closures ever since, and this year is no different. In mid April, Hungarian police carried out raids on four BitTorrent trackers including Bitlove, BitMusic and Indep - and shut them down. In the same operation they closed down warez sites and a significant source of spam. The police arrested up to ten individuals, eventually detaining six for further questioning.

The reason that police were able to move so forcefully against these sites is because they were operated on a purely commercial basis. Unlike most regular torrent sites or warez blogs, users paid for access via premium SMS. The operators were pretty unpopular in the ‘regular’ BitTorrent community too, having had conflict with other sites.

Over 40 servers were confiscated in the end, filled with 250TB of data. Here are the police photos from the raid, and remember folks; paying for warez is like paying for oxygen, it’s unnecessary and it gives decent pirates a bad name
http://torrentfreak.com/bad-bittorre...police-090428/





Pirate Jailed Down Under
Lars Brandle

A Sydney magistrate has sentenced a man to nine months jail for piracy offenses, the longest custodial sentence ever handed down for copyright infringement in Australia.

Magistrate Pearce in the Burwood Local Court today sentenced 45-year-old Qing Wang in relation to more than 30 offenses relating to copyright theft. Wang, who had entered a guilty plea, was arrested in May 2008 during a New South Wales police raid on a market in Western Sydney where he was selling illegal music CDs and DVDS.

The Music Industry Piracy Investigations unit welcomed the stiff sentence. "This should be a wake up call to criminals who continue to profit from the hard work and creativity of other Australians," commented MIPI investigations manager Dean Mitchell. "Today the court has sent an important message: that piracy is a serious crime and those involved will be investigated, prosecuted and may ultimately find themselves in jail".

MIPI collaborated with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft and NSW Police in the investigation.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...af4c91965ef95f





New Zealand Officials To Scrap Copyright Law; Start From Scratch

There was a lot of controversy over the past few months concerning an attempt to change copyright law in New Zealand. After tremendous uproar over the fact that the law (a version of three strikes) basically would declare people guilty based on accusations, rather than proof or conviction, the government finally agreed to dump the plan with plans to revisit it. However, it looks like now the government has decided to completely start from scratch, and to recreate copyright law anew. This is quite surprising. Historically, changes in copyright law tend to be patches. Every time a new technology changes things such that copyright law doesn't make sense, regulators duct tape on some "patch" that tries to deal with that new situation. Yet, New Zealand officials seem to be recognizing this, and want to see about rewriting copyright law from scratch:

The Copyright Act was written in the pre-internet age, and does not address any of the complexities surrounding file sharing, format shifting, and other modern issues such as DVD copying -- problems the last government was attempting to fix in a piecemeal fashion.

Of course, the real question is who will rewrite the law and how the process will work. If it's the industry, then you can expect the law to be much worse. But if it's designed with the full spectrum of interests taken into account, New Zealand could represent a useful sandbox for really (finally) rethinking some of the myths and talismans that some copyright maximalists insist are true, but for which no evidence exists. Hopefully, the government will consider ideas from outside the industry, and recognize both the public interest and the intention of copyright law.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090430/1400034708.shtml





EU Telecoms Bill Compromise May Still Threaten French Internet Law
Leigh Phillips

A second attempt by the French government to push through its "three-strikes" bill to crack down on internet piracy may yet fall afoul of European Union rules, following an ambiguous compromise agreed between the European Parliament and EU member states on a piece of telecoms legislation.

Paris is confident that it can move ahead, while others believe to do so establishes grounds for the European Commission to begin legal action against France.

On Wednesday (29 April), the French government placed before parliament for a second time its controversial "three-strikes" law. On 9 April, the same bill went down to defeat because not enough deputies from the governing party had bothered to turn up for the vote. French lawmakers are not expected to be caught out to lunch a second time and will likely approve the re-introduced law sometime in May.

However, late on Tuesday (28 April), the European Parliament and EU member states, which legislate jointly in this area, reached an informal compromise over an amendment to a wider telecoms package that had in an earlier version threatened to outlaw legislation like the French three-strikes scheme.

The French bill would cut off internet access to users for up to a year if they are caught downloading copyright content without permission of the copyright owner after having received two warnings to cease doing so.

By a large margin, the EU parliament had found such sanctions to be grossly disproportionate to the crime and, in a deliberate targeting of the French law, had attempted to tack onto the telecoms bill an amendment requiring a court order before internet access could be interrupted.

The telecoms bill originally solely concerned itself with telecommunications infrastructure rather than content, further liberalising the sector and creating an EU-level telecoms regulator.

But EU member states, heavily lobbied by Paris, felt that the amendment would in effect create a new 'fundamental right to internet access', and strongly opposed the change.

The Pirates are coming

MEPs for their part stood firm in their support for the amendment, emboldened or concerned ahead of the June European Parliament elections by the strong popular outrage, particularly amongst young voters, at both the French bill and a recent one-year prison sentence for online copyright violators in Sweden.

In Sweden, a new political grouping whose platform focuses on internet freedoms, the Pirate Party, is vacuuming up the votes of young people and is on course to win at least one seat in the June elections.

In the end, a compromise between the two sides on the amendment softens the requirement for a court order before internet access can be cut, but still requires a judgement by "an independent and impartial tribunal".

On Wednesday, the member states approved the compromise text, and the full sitting of the parliament is also expected to endorse it next week in Strasbourg.

However, the amendment's previous wording had been very clear that a judicial ruling was required prior to access being cut, while the new language does not indicate whether this is still the case or whether now the onus is on the accused to appeal to a court after access has been cut.

La Quadrature du Net

Christine Albanel, the French minister of culture, declared that the EU has now said that the three-strikes bill is "still alive".

Catherine Trautmann, however, the French Socialist MEP responsible for shepherding the telecoms bill through the European Parliament and a former French minister of culture herself, believes the compromise does indeed block the French law.

The European Parliament "has managed to obtain a recognition of internet access as an essential means of exercising fundamental rights ... and that any restriction of these rights can only be made by the judgement of an independent and impartial court," she said.

La Quadrature du Net, an internet-freedom pressure group prominent in campaigning against the three-strikes bill argues that the French law "remains as contradictory" to the compromise as it was to the original amendment. However, the group also thinks that there is sufficient ambiguity that now a lengthy court case will be required to prove that it does not respect the right to due process.

French Socialist MEP Guy Bono, the author of the amendment, believes that the compromise "is still loyal to [its] spirit."

He will however still vote for his original wording because it is more "legally precise", he said in response to the announcement of the compromise.

Nevertheless, he said the new language "has the advantage of constituting a tight legal basis that makes it possible [for the European Commission] to launch infringement procedures against the French government for not respecting community law if the [three strikes] bill is adopted."

The MEP intends to push the commission to do so in such an event.
http://euobserver.com/19/28047





12 Nations Top US List on Copyright Piracy
Martin Crutsinger

China, Russia and Canada were among 12 countries targeted by the Obama administration Thursday for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The U.S. placed the 12 nations on a "priority watch list" that will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization.

It marked the first time that Canada has been placed on the list. Also added to the priority list this year were Algeria and Indonesia.

The administration said Canada was elevated to the priority list because of increasing concerns about the need for it to implement copyright reforms and better police its borders to seize pirated goods.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said the findings in the report, which has been done annually for 20 years, would guide the administration's efforts to protect American producers of copyrighted products.

"Our creative and innovative products can hit the global marketplace sometimes with just a keystroke," Kirk said in a statement. "If we and our trading partners are not vigilant in protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights, they can vanish just as quickly."

China and Russia have been on the priority watch list for a number of years because of ongoing concerns about what the U.S. sees as rampant piracy of movies, music, computer programs and other copyrighted material.

Kirk said he was "particularly troubled" by reports that Chinese officials are urging more lenient enforcement of intellectual property rights laws because of the financial crisis and the need to protect jobs.

"China needs to strengthen its approach to IPR protection and enforcement, not weaken it," Kirk said.

The other nations placed on the priority watch list in this year's report were: Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela.

Another 33 trading partners were placed on a lower level watch list, indicating the administration is concerned about various copyright issues in those nations but does not view them as the largest threats to U.S. businesses.

The 33 trading partners placed on this year's watch list were: Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Brunei, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

In addition, the administration said Paraguay would continue to be monitored under a special procedure covered by a bilateral agreement with that country.

Industry groups praised the new administration's efforts to crack down on copyright piracy.

"The entire music community continues to face a serious and significant challenge from both online theft and traditional piracy," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Turkewitz said in Canada, that country's laws remain "seriously outmoded and it has fallen far behind the rest of the developed world in providing a modern framework for effective protection."

Eric H. Smith of the International Intellectual Property Alliance said his group was pleased that Kirk has pledged to use all the tools available to pursue copyright violations.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...9HMYAD97T0S200





Profanity Ruling Could Boost Net Neutrality
Wendy Davis

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision this week to back the Federal Communications Commission in its hard line against profanity on TV could also boost the FCC on a seemingly unrelated matter: its decision to sanction Comcast for violating net neutrality principles.

In the case decided this week, the Supreme Court upheld the FCC's finding that broadcasting "fleeting expletives" -- in this case, instances of swearing by celebrities on live TV -- was indecent.

Prior to 2004, the FCC took the opposite position -- that the use of fleeting expletives wasn't indecent.

Fox and other TV broadcasters argued that the FCC's sudden reversal wasn't fair. But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, in part because the FCC didn't impose fines or other penalties on the networks. (The Supreme Court didn't decide whether the FCC's stance violates the First Amendment. Instead the court told the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to consider that question.)

In Comcast's case, the FCC sanctioned the cable company for violating net neutrality principles by slowing peer-to-peer traffic, but didn't fine it. Instead, the FCC ordered Comcast to stop throttling peer-to-peer traffic (which Comcast had already done by the time the FCC ruled on the case) and to provide the agency with details about a new traffic-shaping plan.

Comcast is now arguing in court that the FCC had no authority to even make that order because it was based on a 2005 policy statement and not an official rule.

But some lawyers say that if it's OK for the FCC to do a turnaround on fleeting expletives, the agency also has the power decide that particular methods for shaping Web traffic are unlawful without first issuing formal regulations. Harold Feld, legal director of digital rights group Public Knowledge, for one, made that argument in a blog post about the issue. "It is hard to argue that the FCC can reverse policy consistent with due process, but cannot announce/clarify policy consistent with due process," he wrote.
http://www.mediapost.com/publication...art_aid=105106





Cablevision: 101Mbps For $99.95

15Mbps upstream, no usage caps...
Karl Bode

Confirming our earlier reports that Cablevision was cooking up a speedier new DOCSIS 3.0 offering, Cablevision tells us this morning that the company will be launching a new "Ultra" tier on May 11. The new tier features speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for $99.95 a month. That's an unprecedented amount of speed at an unprecedented price, suggesting that Cablevision just took the gloves off in their fight against Verizon FiOS.

While we know that Verizon is testing 100Mbps FiOS connectivity in employee homes, no U.S. incumbent is currently offering 100Mbps, whether FTTH or cable. Several cable operators have started offering 50Mbps or 60Mbps connectivity, but pricing for these services usually start around $140 -- after bundled discount. Cablevision's pricing and the lack of a cap highlights how seriously they have to take the FiOS competitive threat. Did we mention we love competition?

Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella confirmed for me that the $99.95 price is unbundled, and the new tier does not come with any kind of a usage cap or overage fees. Cablevision recently came out against metered billing, arguing that the practice would only serve to confuse customers. According to Cablevision, broadband is "a pretty powerful drug" that they'd like users to consume more of. This new 101Mbps/15Mbps tier would appear to be the broadband equivalent of a morphine drip.

Cablevision says they're spending $300 million, at least $70 per user, to deliver both DOCSIS 3.0 connectivity and free Wi-Fi to the company's more than three million customers. In addition to the new DOCSIS 3.0 tier, the company tells us they're also boosting the downstream speed of their Wi-Fi service to 3Mbps from 1.5Mbps.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/c...33?nocomment=1





Even When Not Explicit, ISP Data Caps Still Haunt Users

Time Warner Cable's data cap plan might be history (for now), but unpublished data caps live on thanks to the "acceptable use policy." ISPs that continue to rely on ambiguous metrics for abuse had best tread carefully, as Comcast was sued last year by the state of Florida over that very issue.
Nate Anderson

Time Warner Cable's plan to impose tiered data caps on Internet users imploded last week, but that doesn't mean TWC users can download to their heart's content. No, like many other ISPs without explicit data caps, TWC retains an "acceptable use policy" that lets it curtail any "abuse" of its network, as one user found out the hard way.

StoptheCap.com has been covering the TWC case in obsessive detail (seriously, we're a little worried), and it yesterday published the story of a TWC user from Austin, Texas who ran afoul of the acceptable use policy.

Ryan Howard had his Internet connection cut off by the company with no notification; only after a full day of phone calls and two new cable modems did a service rep suggest he call TWC's "security and abuse center." Turns out, Howard had transferred 44GB of data in a single week, enough to put him in the penalty box. (He apparently violated this clause: "The ISP Service may not be used to engage in any conduct that interferes with Operator's ability to provide service to others, including the use of excessive bandwidth.")

He asked about the limit so that he could stay under it in future, but couldn't get an answer. Instead, it was suggested that he use "perhaps half or a quarter as much" data in a week.

Assuming that the trigger is somewhere around 40GB/week, that works out to 160GB/month—still a full 90GB under Comcast's 250GB/month cap. And if Howard is really supposed to use only "half or a quarter" of this amount, that means TWC imposes a de facto limit of between 40GB/month to 80GB/month.

When services like Netflix require 3GB just to stream one high-def movie to an Xbox 360, it's not hard to see how a household with a few computers, a game console, and (say) an iPhone might hit such caps without doing anything piratical or "abusive."

Such practices aren't limited to TWC, of course. While ISPs like Comcast have adopted explicit caps, others like AT&T have not, even though they reserve the right to curtail abuse on the network. Given the importance of an Internet connection for everything from telecommuting to entertainment to phone service to e-mail to keeping up on politics, this is one of those areas where ambiguity should give way to clarity. People simply need to know what's allowed and what's not.

ISPs have sometimes tried to solve the problem by calling people first and asking them to rein it in, an approach far preferable to simply shutting off someone's Internet access after they hit some unpublished threshold.

This isn't just pro-consumer—it's pro-business, too, unless you're in a business that enjoys lawsuits. Comcast last year paid the state of Florida $150,000 to deal with this exact issue and the ambiguity that surrounded it. Each month, Comcast would contact the top 1,000 users of its 14.4 million user network network, regardless of how much data they had transferred, and warn them that they were violating the acceptable use policy. When users asked what the limit was, they were simply told that they needed to stay out of the top 1,000 user list—something impossible to know.

The state attorney general said that "a 'top 1,000' criteria, as previously applied, did not clearly and conspicuously disclose to the consumer the specific amount of bandwidth deemed to be excessive under Comcast's subscriber agreements." In response, Comcast adopted the explicit 250GB/month cap.

In any event, whatever the realities of traffic on TWC's data network, the cable company's situation just can't be all that dire. As StoptheCap.com noted today, TWC has just given San Antonio users a free bandwidth upgrade from 10Mbps to 15Mbps—basically begging them to transfer more data in a month.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...aps-remain.ars





$62,000 Movie Download a Result of Poor Travel Planning

On vacation and want to download a movie for your kids to watch? Don't do what Alberto did: downloaded Wall•E in Mexico without activating a data roaming plan. It was a painful, $62,000 lesson.
Jacqui Cheng

$62,000 to download a movie? That's what happened to a caller named Alberto, who told his data roaming tale of woe on the air to HLN "money expert" Clark Howard on CNN. Alberto made the grave mistake of downloading Wall-E for his nephew while vacationing in Mexico over his data card and was slapped with a $62,000 bill from his wireless carrier when he returned home. Alberto tried to contest the charge and the carrier reduced the bill to $17,000, arguing that the five-figure charge was what it cost them to deliver the movie.

Needless to say, both Alberto and Howard were completely incredulous that a simple movie download would generate such an impressive data bill. Indeed, $62,000—or $17,000—is pretty daunting for a 98 minute animated movie about an robot. However, it's pretty clear that Alberto made a rookie mistake after he purchased the data card for his laptop that could have been easily avoided. Instead, he inadvertently joined the legions of other mobile users who failed to pay attention to the fine print before traveling.

Stories of users receiving unexpectedly huge bills after using their phones and data cards are easy to find on the web. In fact, there's even a class-action lawsuit brewing over an iPhone owner's receiving a $2,000 bill after roaming in Mexico (hey, $2,000 is nothing compared to $17,000). Whether or not it's fair for carriers to charge these outrageous fees is up for debate—the carriers insist that the roaming charges overseas are extravagant and that they are just passing along the fees to their customers.

However, all major carriers offer international roaming plans that users can set up on their accounts before they get on a plane that can apply to both voice and data use. T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all have web pages that describe the rates, and some even offer packaged plans for regular jet setters. Making sure your account is set up for international roaming can help save you from headaches and massive bills with minimal planning ahead of time. Then again, those who get slapped with $62,000 in international data charges—and find themselves shocked—may not be the type to "plan ahead of time."
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...l-planning.ars





Down the Tubes

Internet television moves from the computer to the living room

IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. Yet a growing number of people are poised to do just that.

At your correspondent’s home-from-home in Japan, he can get broadband at 160 megabits a second from his local cable company for Y6,000 ($60) a month. Compare that with broadband prices demanded by cable companies in America. As they slowly roll out the latest version of their transmission technology, called DOCSIS 3, Comcast and Cablevision want up to $140 a month for a stingy 50 megabits a second. Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable remains in the dark ages with its Road Runner service dribbling out three megabits a second (if you are lucky) for $35 a month.

Selling broadband connections to the web is the most profitable business for cable companies. They also have better—and cheaper—technology than the phone companies and mobile carriers for doing so. It costs only around $100 a home for the cable companies to upgrade their networks to the latest DOCSIS 3 standard—and that includes providing each customer with a new high-speed modem.

Wiring a neighbourhood with optical fibre—as phone companies like Verizon are doing—costs more than $1,500 a home. In the few places where it can supply the service, Verizon charges $165 a month for 50 megabits a second. In short, the cable companies could easily use their cost advantage to grab a bigger chunk of the lucrative broadband market.

But they are not doing so because they are afraid of the consequences. Cable-television companies make money by selling packages of channels. The average American household pays $700 a year for over 100 channels of cable television but watches no more than 15. Most would welcome the chance to buy only those channels they want to watch, rather than pay for expensive packages of programming they are largely not interested in.

They would prefer greater variety, too—something the internet offers in abundance. A surprising amount of video is available free from websites like Hulu and YouTube, or for a modest fee from iTunes, Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand. Prices can be as little as a dollar for a television episode or as much as $24 for a new release of a film in high-definition. But the best thing about watching television over the internet is you pay only for what you want—and a lot of the programming is free if you are prepared to wait for a day or so after it has been broadcast.

Consumers’ new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet television’s steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snail’s pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favourite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte.

Yet the measures to suffocate internet television being taken by the cable companies may already be too late. A torrent of innovative start-ups, not seen since the dotcom mania of a decade ago, is flooding the market with technology for supplying internet television to the living room.

Even television makers are getting into the act. The latest digital sets from LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Vizio come with Ethernet sockets ready to be connected to the internet, so they can download video from YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and the like.

The video-game industry is also cashing in on the internet-television boom. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 can now stream films and television shows from Netflix. Likewise, you can rent films and television episodes using a Sony PS3 game console. Nintendo and Sony have also done deals with YouTube to gain access to its huge repository of web video. Meanwhile, set-top boxes such as Apple TV, Roku, TiVo and Vudu are all jockeying to become the television set’s primary gateway to the internet.

Eventually, all these external services will be built into the television set’s motherboard. In the meantime, the specialised boxes do a better job of finding and fetching video from the internet.

At present, the slickest is unquestionably the $149 box from Vudu, which can access over 7,000 films (three times more than Apple TV) as well as zillions of television shows, YouTube offerings and podcasts. With its roomy 250 gigabyte hard-drive, it can even provide high-definition films in full 1080p glory, just like a Blu-ray disc player.

At $100, the Roku box lacks a hard-drive but is simplicity itself to set up and use, while offering a treasure trove of content thanks to arrangements with Netflix and Amazon. The $229 Apple TV box is, in effect, an over-sized iPod that connects the television set to the internet to provide access to 2,500 films and 30,000 television episodes for a fee.

An interesting newcomer is the SageTV HD Theater. This works like a TiVo video recorder with an integrated programme guide, but minus the subscription fee. Plugged into a television, the little Sage box plays high-definition videos, photos or music stored on a computer, or downloaded directly from YouTube, Hulu or dozens of other sources of free content. Your correspondent has finally laid his hands on one, and will be testing it over the next week or two.

He is also building an open-source web-television box of his own, based on a Shuttle PC. The tiny computer is to be loaded with the Ubuntu version of the free Linux operating system and will run an open-source application called Boxee. Although it is still under development, Boxee has unnerved lots of internet-television providers. Hulu has even demanded that its content be removed from Boxee’s offerings. But the open-source community that has taken Boxee to its heart is far too smart to let Hulu spoil the fun.

The interesting thing about Boxee is the way it combines the social networking of a Twitter with the power of a browser like Firefox to funnel internet content recommended by friends to your television screen. As it does so, it bypasses aggregators like Hulu that seek to make money from inserting advertising slots into content downloaded from their sites. Your correspondent thinks Boxee will be one of the most disruptive things to happen to television in ages—and not before time.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ry_id=13562114





Comcast Profit Up On Cost Controls

Comcast Corp posted a rise in first-quarter profit on Thursday as it added more subscribers than expected and kept costs under control in the midst of a tough U.S. economic environment.

The largest U.S. cable TV operator's net profit rose to $772 million, or 27 cents a share, from $732 million, or 24 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue rose 5 percent to $8.84 billion.

Philadelphia-based Comcast added 329,000 high speed Internet subscribers and another 288,000 digital video subscribers. Analysts at Credit Suisse had forecast Comcast adding 257,000 Internet subscribers and 282,000 digital video subscribers.

The company also added 298,000 phone subscribers. It lost 78,000 basic video subscribers, but that loss was smaller than analysts had expected. Credit Suisse forecast a loss of 170,000 subscribers.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...53T31W20090430





Time Warner Profit Slips 14%
AP

Time Warner Inc. said Wednesday that its first-quarter profit fell 14 percent as AOL and publishing results continued to crumble under the weight of deteriorating ad sales. Still, the media and entertainment conglomerate's adjusted results were better than Wall Street expected.

The owner of Time magazine, Turner Broadcasting and HBO also maintained its full-year adjusted earnings forecast.

Time Warner earned $661 million, or 55 cents per share, for the period ended March 31, down from the year-earlier result of $771 million, or 64 cents per share.

Excluding investment losses and other items, earnings from continuing operations were 46 cents per share. That's better than the 38 cents-per-share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters predicted. Analysts' estimates typically exclude one-time items.

Quarterly results reflect a 1-for-3 reverse stock split.

New York-based Time Warner, which spun off Time Warner Cable Inc. in March, says revenue dropped 7 percent to $6.95 billion from $7.47 billion. Aside from the pressures of its AOL and publishing units, the company said lower DVD sales at its filmed entertainment division also squeezed results.

Analysts expected revenue of $6.78 billion.

Time Warner sliced its net debt to $10.4 billion from $20.7 billion at the end of 2008, primarily because the spin-off of Time Warner Cable resulted in a one-time dividend payout of $9.25 billion to Time Warner.

The separation is expected to help the parent company concentrate on its strengths in content, especially if it can also shed all or part of AOL, acquired as part of AOL's $106 billion purchase of Time Warner in 2001.

Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said in a statement that the company is currently ''working to determine the right ownership structure for AOL.''

Time Warner still expects 2009 adjusted earnings to be about flat with a year ago, which comes out to $1.98 per share. The forecast accounts for the stock split as well as the Time Warner Cable spin-off.

Analysts forecast profit of $1.96 per share.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...me-Warner.html





Time Warner Is Moving Closer to AOL Spinoff
Tim Arango

Time Warner is inching closer to an untangling of what many consider one of the worst mergers in American corporate history by shedding America Online.

Could the company’s vast magazine empire under Time Inc., which publishes Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People, be next?

In a regulatory filing Wednesday, Time Warner said it was nearing a decision to spin off America Online, and put an end to the travails that began with the merger in 2000 of the two companies, a deal that has resulted in the evaporation of more than $100 billion of shareholder value.

“Although the company’s board of directors has not made any decision, the company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions,” the company said in the filing.

The announcement, which was not unexpected, came on the same day that the company reported first-quarter earnings, which surpassed Wall Street analysts’ expectations. But the numbers for both AOL and Time Inc. were equally dismal.

When asked during a conference call about the future composition of Time Warner, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the company’s chief executive, said it “may well include publishing, but we’re not making a religious statement about it either way at this point.”

That seemed to leave open the door for a potential sale or spinoff of Time Inc. “They’ve been smart to not box themselves in either way,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “I think they are going to see if this downturn is more cyclical than secular, and see if they can start charging for some of their online content.”

By this, Mr. Nathanson meant the company would wait to see how much of Time Inc.’s troubles were because of the cyclical nature of the economy and how much was permanent because of the flight of readers to the Internet.

Robin M. Diedrich, an analyst at Edward Jones, said much of Time Inc.’s revenue loss was “not necessarily going to come back when the economy improves.” Ms. Diedrich added, “It’s not surprising that the company is considering what the long-term options are.”

As for AOL, Mr. Nathanson echoed what many on Wall Street believe. “We’re pleased AOL will finally be on its own,” he said. “It’s been a distraction for a number of years.”

If Time Inc. were eventually to be lopped off, Time Warner still would include several profitable cable networks — TNT, TBS, CNN and HBO — as well as the Warner Brothers movie studio. It would be in keeping with Mr. Bewkes’s stated vision of Time Warner as a company centered on producing television and movies for a mass audience.

“Today, we are a much more content focused company,” he said.

Time Warner, under Mr. Bewkes, who became chief in 2007, has become a stripped-down conglomerate focused on producing content rather than delivering it. This year the company, which was once the world’s largest media company, spun off its cable division, Time Warner Cable, into a separate publicly traded company.

Revenue at both AOL and Time Inc. declined by 23 percent compared with the previous year’s first quarter. In the case of AOL, revenue fell to $867 million. Subscription revenue fell 27 percent, while advertising fell 20 percent.

Revenue at Time Inc. fell by $239 million, to $806 million. Advertising fell by 30 percent, or $167 million, and subscription revenue declined by 16 percent, or $58 million.

“Advertising at AOL and Time Inc. especially is proving tougher than we expected when we last talked a few months ago,” Mr. Bewkes said during the conference call.

Over all, the company said revenue declined 7 percent to $6.9 billion, when compared to the same period last year.

Revenue from publishing, AOL and Warner Brothers all declined, while revenue at the cable networks, which have been the most durable segment of the media industry during the recession, rose to $2.8 billion from $2.7 billion.

Net income for the quarter was $661 million, or 55 cents a share, compared with $771 million and 64 cents a share in the previous period. Excluding some items, earnings were 45 cents a share. By this measure, the company beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations of 39 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

At Warner Brothers, while revenue dipped 7 percent, operating income increased 10 percent to $308 million, partly because of reduced marketing and advertising costs for movies.

Time Warner received a nearly $9 billion dividend from spinning off Time Warner Cable, cash that Mr. Bewkes said he would use to buy back stock after the company announces firm plans for AOL. The company still has $2.2 billion left on a stock repurchase plan approved by the board.

The rest of the Time Warner Cable cash could be used to pay dividends or make acquisitions, but Mr. Bewkes was cautious on this last point.

“We know that most M&A in the media sector has not created value,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/bu.../30warner.html





Not Smart: Warner Music Issues DMCA Takedown On Larry Lessig Presentation

If there were anyone out there to whom you would not want to send a random takedown notice for an online video, it would probably be Larry Lessig. Given that Lessig has become the public face for those who feel that copyright has been stretched too far, as well as being a founder of Stanford's Fair Use Project, and who's written multiple books on these issues, you would think (just maybe) that any copyright holder would at least think twice before sending a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation.

Apparently, you'd be wrong.

Lessig has announced that Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown on one of Lessig's own presentations, in which his use is almost certainly fair use. Lessig, of course, is a lawyer, and a big supporter of fair use, so it's no surprise that he's also said he's going to be fighting this.

The thing that I can't understand is who at Warner Music would decide this was a good idea? We've seen Warner make a number of highly questionable moves over the past six months, but this may be the most incomprehensible. Warner Music may claim it was an accident or that it didn't mean to send the takedown, but that's hard to fathom as well. The DMCA rules are pretty clear, that the filer needs to clearly own the content, and previously lawsuits have said they need to take fair use into account. I'm guessing we haven't heard the end of this yet...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...738424686.shtm





CBS Wins Court Ruling on Use of NFL Player Names, Statistics
Cary OReilly and Jef Feeley

CBS's Internet unit won the right to use National Football League players' names and statistics for free in fantasy sports leagues it sponsors after a judge ruled the information is in the public domain.

A federal appeals court decision in 2007 that companies operating fantasy leagues have a First Amendment right to use names and data of baseball players without paying a licensing fee applies to football as well, U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery said in Minneapolis.

The court declined to indulge in a philosophical debate about whether the public is more fascinated with baseball or football, Montgomery said in her ruling, issued April 28.

The ruling is the latest setback for professional sports leagues and players unions looking to control the fantasy market. As many as 15 million people participate in fantasy football leagues, generating more than $1 billion a year in revenue, court documents show.

CBS Interactive sued the National Football League Players Association last year to prevent it from demanding royalties for use of the publicly available material. The associations licensing arm countersued, saying players deserved to be compensated for use of their likenesses, statistics and other information.

CBS is pleased that the court confirmed the use of player names, statistics and other materials in CBS's online fantasy games is protected under the First Amendment, Alex Riethmiller, a spokesman for CBS Interactive in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said in an e-mail.
Richard Berthelsen of the NFLPA didn't immediately return phone and e-mail messages.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June rejected an appeal from Major League Baseball and its players association that sought to overturn the St. Louis appeals court ruling allowing a fantasy-sports company to use players' names and statistics without paying licensing fees. MLB had support in the case from other pro leagues, including the NFL, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12265580





Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders
Ernesto

In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided.

Like many new releases, Metallica’s latest album “Death Magnetic” was uploaded to the popular file hosting service Rapidshare one day prior to its official release date last year. Since users don’t broadcast their IP-address or distribute files to the public directly though Rapidshare, it came as a surprise when the police raided the house of an uploader a few weeks ago.

At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law. It turns out that several record labels are using this to take legal action against those who share music on Rapidshare.

Previously the paragraph was only used by rights holders to get the personal details of those who share copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. It basically enables the copyright holders to get “permission” from a civil judge to ask ISPs to disclose the personal details of a user behind a certain IP. Now, however, this also seems to be the case for file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, which is based in Germany.

This of course opens up the possibility for rights holders to go after a wide range of file-hosting services and potentially even BitTorrent sites. Indeed, everyone who now uploads a torrent file to a site hosted in Germany is at risk of having his personal details revealed. Although it will be impossible to prove that the uploader actually seeded the file it might be seen as assisting in copyright infringement.

Pretty much all torrent sites keep track of the IP-addresses of their (.torrent) uploaders, and if the rights holders can get the IP-address of people who upload to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, they can easily extend this to BitTorrent sites hosted in Germany. A dream come true for copyright holders, but a nightmare for the privacy of Internet users.

Too bad for Metallica’s Lars Ulrich who only just started sharing files himself.
http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-s...olders-090425/





Conficker Virus Begins to Attack PCs: Experts
Jim Finkle

A malicious software program known as Conficker that many feared would wreak havoc on April 1 is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm, security experts said.

Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware, they said.

The worm started spreading late last year, infecting millions of computers and turning them into "slaves" that respond to commands sent from a remote server that effectively controls an army of computers known as a botnet.

Its unidentified creators started using those machines for criminal purposes in recent weeks by loading more malicious software onto a small percentage of computers under their control, said Vincent Weafer, a vice president with Symantec Security Response, the research arm of the world's largest security software maker, Symantec Corp.

"Expect this to be long-term, slowly changing," he said of the worm. "It's not going to be fast, aggressive."

Conficker installs a second virus, known as Waledac, that sends out e-mail spam without knowledge of the PC's owner, along with a fake anti-spyware program, Weafer said.

The Waledac virus recruits the PCs into a second botnet that has existed for several years and specializes in distributing e-mail spam.

"This is probably one of the most sophisticated botnets on the planet. The guys behind this are very professional. They absolutely know what they are doing," said Paul Ferguson, a senior researcher with Trend Micro Inc, the world's third-largest security software maker.

He said Conficker's authors likely installed a spam engine and another malicious software program on tens of thousands of computers since April 7.

He said the worm will stop distributing the software on infected PCs on May 3 but more attacks will likely follow.

"We expect to see a different component or a whole new twist to the way this botnet does business," said Ferguson, a member of The Conficker Working Group, an international alliance of companies fighting the worm.

Researchers had feared the network controlled by the Conficker worm might be deployed on April 1 since the worm surfaced last year because it was programed to increase communication attempts from that date.

The security industry formed the task force to fight the worm, bringing widespread attention that experts said probably scared off the criminals who command the slave computers.

The task force initially thwarted the worm using the Internet's traffic control system to block access to servers that control the slave computers.

Viruses that turn PCs into slaves exploit weaknesses in Microsoft's Windows operating system. The Conficker worm is especially tricky because it can evade corporate firewalls by passing from an infected machine onto a USB memory stick, then onto another PC.

The Conficker botnet is one of many such networks controlled by syndicates that authorities believe are based in eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China and Latin America.

(Editing by Jason Szep and Philip Barbara)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...53N5I820090424





Botnet Creator Escapes Jail

Five years probation
Nick Farrell

A US BLOKE from Wyoming has escaped spending time in the clink after he was sentenced to five years' probation for creating one of the world's most sophisticated botnets.

According to Computerworld, Jason Milmont admitted to writing the Nugache worm, which infected between 5,000 and 15,000 computers in 2007. The botnet of infected computers stole online account information and credit card numbers from his victims.

Prosecutors wanted Milmont inside for five years but Judge William Downes said that he had quite a bit of talent and hoped he would use it for good.

Milmont's botnet used advanced cryptography and created a novel way of controlling the botnet via peer-to-peer networks. It made it hard to find out who was controlling the zombie computers.

According to Milmont's father, Chris Milmont, his son suffers from Asperger syndrome and started to behave oddly before he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...r-escapes-jail





G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc
Steve Lohr

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The promising work by the G.E. researchers is in the field of holographic storage. Holography is an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images like the ones placed on many credit cards for security purposes, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well.

The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of laser-etched marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.

Many advances have been made over the years in the materials science, optics and applied physics needed to make holographic storage a practical, cost-effective technology. And this year, InPhase Technologies, a spinoff of Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent, plans to introduce a holographic storage system, using $18,000 machines and expensive discs, for specialized markets like video production and storing medical images.

To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.

A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.

The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.

“We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”

In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.

“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.

The G.E. team plans to present its research data and lab results at an optical data storage conference in Orlando next month.

Yet, analysts say, the feasibility of G.E.’s technology remains unproved and the economics uncertain. “It’s always well to remember that the most important technical specification in any storage device, however impressive the science behind it, is price,” said James N. Porter, an independent analyst of the storage market.

When Blu-ray was introduced in late 2006, a 25-gigabyte disc cost nearly $1 a gigabyte, though it is about half that now. G.E. expects that when they are introduced, perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte — and fall in the future.

“The price of storage per gigabyte is going to drop precipitously,” Mr. Lawrence said.

G.E. will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios, television networks, medical researchers and hospitals for holding data-intensive images like Hollywood films and brain scans. But selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal.

To do that, G.E. will have to work with partners to license its holographic storage technology and expertise, and the company is already talking with major electronics and optical storage producers, said Bill Kernick, who leads G.E.’s technology sales unit. The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/te...ng/27disk.html





New York Times Falls Most Since 1987 on Declining Ad Revenue
Greg Bensinger

New York Times Co. fell the most in almost 22 years in U.S. trading after reporting a 27 percent drop in first-quarter advertising revenue and saying that the rate of decline won’t slow until at least the second half.

The net loss expanded to $74.5 million, or 52 cents a share, from $335,000 a year earlier, the newspaper publisher said today in a statement. Sales fell 19 percent to $609 million, trailing the $634.3 million average of four analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Times Co. cut jobs, slashed pay, halted its dividend and sold assets to help preserve cash after ad revenue slipped 13 percent last year. It’s seeking to sell its minority stake in the Boston Red Sox baseball team and is negotiating additional pay and job cuts with unions.

“It’s clear from these results that it’s a very, very bad environment for newspapers,” Edward Atorino, a New York-based analyst at Benchmark Co., said in an interview. “There’s no sign of relief.”

Atorino, who recommends holding the shares, estimated ad sales may fall 18 percent in the second quarter.

Excluding a 7-cent loss on leases and 11 cents for severance costs, Times Co. posted a loss of 34 cents per share, compared with the average analysts’ estimate of a 3-cent loss.

The New York-based publisher dropped 91 cents, or 16 percent, to $4.94 at 4:04 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the biggest drop since Oct. 19, 1987, the so- called Black Monday crash. The shares have fallen 33 percent this year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Media Index slipped 8 percent.

Red Sox Stake

Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson said the company was “progressing” in its discussions to sell the Red Sox stake and is considering new methods for building revenue at its Web site, including charging for some content.

Industrywide advertising sales may plummet 22 percent this year, Barclays Capital has estimated. Last year, they dropped 17 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, last week reported a 60 percent decline in first-quarter profit as total revenue fell 18 percent.

Ad sales will decline in the second quarter at a similar pace as in the first, New York Times said.

“Advertisers as the economy improves will understand that they have a strong need to advertise,” Robinson said on the conference call. “That bodes well for a stronger third and fourth quarter.”

‘Saving Dollars’

Advertisers may be “saving dollars in the first half to do possibly more in the second half,” she said.

Ad sales at the New England Media Group, which includes the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, fell 32 percent, the most among Times Co.’s units. Revenue at the division declined 21 percent to $104.5 million.

Times Co. has said it may close the Boston Globe if the newspaper can’t agree with unions on $20 million in savings, according to the Boston Newspaper Guild.

Ad revenue at the New York Times Media Group, which publishes the namesake newspaper and the International Herald Tribune, dropped 27 percent to $201.2 million. The New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes yesterday for reporting, photography and criticism, the most for any newspaper this year.

The ad decline will probably bottom out this year, said Thyra Zerhusen, managing director at Optimum Investment Advisors, which held 4.7 million Times Co. shares on Dec. 31.

“They have to do a better job monetizing their online revenues,” she said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Circulation revenue rose in all of Times Co.’s divisions.

Times Co. trimmed operating expenses 9.5 percent to $654.3 million, helped by the closing of a newspaper distributing unit.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...boA&refer=home





It’s Official: Models Look Good
Guy Trebay

“WHAT would ‘Dovima With Elephants’ have been without Dovima?” the curator Kohle Yohannan said last week, referring to a celebrated Richard Avedon photograph of 1955 that depicted the attenuated mannequin Dovima (nee Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba) wearing a Christian Dior sheath and sandwiched between monumental pachyderms.

One could just as easily ask what “Dovima With Elephants” would have been without the elephants, of course, but then three-ton pachyderms don’t rate the cultural attention devoted to beautiful clothes-hangers who weigh 100 pounds.

Elephants don’t have fanzines, magazines, Web sites and blogs devoted to their images and antics. They don’t attract the thumb-tapping haiku artists of the Twitter-sphere. They do not rate museum shows consecrated to their essentially unsung contributions to fashion, art, feminism, commerce, body imagery and art. In truth, models have never garnered the full-scale museum treatment, either. Or they didn’t until now.

Opening at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 6, “The Model as Muse” aims to give credit to the assorted women who, at least since the invention of photography, have helped set the standard of Western feminine beauty. The sophisticates (Dovima, Lisa Fonssagrives, Sunny Harnett) of the 1950s, with their distant gazes and angular figures, became the hippie goddesses (Veruschka, Penelope Tree, Twiggy) of the 1960s. And they in turn were transformed into the ruddy athletic types of the following decade (Lisa Taylor, Patty Hansen), who gave way to the glamourpuss supermodels (Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista) of the 1980s. And, with the notable exceptions of Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen, that is pretty much where the occupational and cultural needle got stuck.

“The Model as Muse” seeks to examine the relationship, as Mr. Yohannan writes in the big glossy book that accompanies the exhibition, “between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models who posed in the salons, walked the runways and exploded onto the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and even Life and Time.”

Action verbs are one of the enduring tropisms of fashion-speak and so naturally models never “land” in either Vogue or our lives with a passive thump. Models are locomotives, to use an archaic Vreeland-era formulation. Models rocket. Models explode. Whether or not models are icons, they incontestably excite our attention and draw us in.

“I was a little Southern, ignorant white female and would have been one forever,” Lauren Hutton once told me, had modeling not propelled the Carolina tomboy from her simple beginnings and onto a string of Vogue covers and lucrative advertising campaigns.

Now in her 60s and still working, Ms. Hutton is among the few models to have improvised a durable career in a business where the talent is often considered a necessary nuisance and in which it is commonplace for people to talk about a model’s “use by” date.

“Modeling is a heinous job,” said Mr. Yohannan last week and, having been a model himself, the curator should know.

Yet an awful lot of people seem to want to be a model or else look at or look like or learn about one (check the Google hits for Gisele Bündchen). And it almost goes without saying that a reason for all this interest is that these gorgeous and petted and idealized creatures are passive — their beauty that of a butterfly pinned to a collector’s tray.

Still, models’ images “tell the story of entire generations of women,” or one aspect of it, anyway, claimed Mr. Yohannan, who shared curatorial duties with Harold Koda, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute. He cited the example of the 1920s model Marian Morehouse, whose lean physique and sleek modernist beauty marked a dramatic shift away from the simpering and corseted beauties of the Belle Époque to a newly liberated and unfettered type.

“In a nutshell, the show is about expanding the way we see a fashion photograph to include the model,” Mr. Yohannan said.

Whether or not “The Model as Muse” sustains this notion, it does provide a guilt-free opportunity to revisit fashion’s back pages (literally; many of the images in the show exist only as tear sheets from magazines). The crowds likely to throng this show may include some of the kooks who carve out spooky cultist Web-caves devoted to favorites (one such site features 15,000 images), but also anyone looking to become reacquainted with a face from the past.

And what faces they had, and what surprising kinds of beauty. True, there are the symmetrically formed goddesses like Suzy Parker or Jean Shrimpton or Rene Russo. But there are also plenty of oddballs like Twiggy, whose gangly limbs and freckled androgyny seem as startling now as when Life magazine gushingly nominated her the “Face of 1967.” There is Vera von Lehndorff, or Veruschka, the double-jointed German aristocrat with slightly rubbery features, an Amazonian physique and a quirky intelligence that made her an ideal photographer’s foil.

There is Penelope Tree, the society girl with the high forehead of a Memling Madonna and eyes so wide-set she looks like a Martian bug. There is Peggy Moffitt, the model whose impassive face and stylized posture added a compelling Kabuki element to her collaborations with provocateur designers like Rudi Gernreich (she modeled his famous “Topless” bathing suit in 1964). There is the haughtily aristocratic Donyale Luna — born Peggy Anne Freeman in Detroit — an early African-American model whose phenomenally long limbs and ethereal aura made her an ideal vehicle for the futuristic creations of design innovators like Paco Rabanne.

Are models perhaps the last silent film stars? A preview of “The Model as Muse” suggests they are. A model’s face on a magazine cover may sell fewer issues than that of the latest hot actress, but they are ultimately a lot more compelling to look at and this is because we hardly ever have to hear about their private lives or be burdened with their thoughts.

It cannot be accidental that Kate Moss, the most persuasive contemporary example of a model as an artistic catalyst, has assiduously guarded what she says throughout her career. Ms. Moss is no dummy. She knows that the basic requirement of her particular job is silence. A model is a muse to the precise extent that a model is mute.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/fashion/30model.html





U.K. Backs Down on Plan for Internet and Phone Database
Jill Lawless

The British government said today it wants communications companies to keep records of every phone call, email and website visit made in the country. But it has decided not to set up a national database of the information, a proposal that had been condemned as a "Big Brother"-style invasion of privacy by civil liberties groups.

The government said in October it was considering a central database of phone and Internet traffic as part of a high-tech strategy to fight terrorism and crime.

But Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said today the plan had been dropped.

A document outlining the department's proposals said the government "recognizes the privacy implications" of a database and "does not propose to pursue this approach."

Instead, the government said it was backing a "middle way" that would see service providers store and organize information on every individual's phone and Internet traffic so that it could be accessed by police and other authorities on request.

The Home Office estimated introducing the new system would cost up to $3 billion (U.S.).

Under current rules, British Internet service providers are already required to store records of Web and email traffic for a year. The new proposals would also require them to retain details of communications that originated in other countries but passed across British networks – for example if someone in Britain accessed a U.S.-based email account.

The government said providers would not store the content of calls, emails or Internet use. They would retain details of times, dates, phone numbers, email addresses and website URLs.

Smith said officials had to strike "a delicate balance between privacy and security," but insisted police and intelligence agencies needed more tools to fight crime and terrorism in an ever-more complex online world.

"Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who would seek to do us harm," Smith said.

The proposals are still a long way from becoming law. The government is seeking public comment until July, and widespread opposition is expected.

The government said there would be strict safeguards on who could access the information, but critics say existing surveillance powers have been abused by local authorities investigating relatively trivial offences such as littering or failing to clean up dog mess.

That led the government to say in December that it would clamp down on abuses of surveillance laws.

Trust in the government has also been weakened by a series of lost data incidents. In November, a government department lost a disk that contained the names, addresses and bank details of 25 million people.
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/624937





The EFF Digs Deep Into the FBI's "Everything Bucket"

A new EFF report pulls together everything that's now known about the FBI's monster internal records system.
Jon Stokes

Earlier this week, the EFF published a new report detailing the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which appears to be something like a combination of Google and a university's slightly out-of-date custom card catalog with a front-end written for Windows 2000 that uses cartoon icons that some work-study student made in Microsoft Paint. I guess I'm supposed to fear the IDW as an invasion of privacy, and indeed I do, but given the report's description of it and my experiences with the internal-facing software products of large, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracies, I mostly just fear for our collective safety.

The idea behind the system, which the FBI has been working on since at least 2002, is that the Bureau can dump all of its information in there so that it can be easily searched and shared. IDW contains more documents than the Library of Congress—a stew of TIFFs with OCRed text, multiple Oracle databases, news streamed in from the Internet, reports and records in various in-house data formats, watch lists, telephone data, and an alphabet soup of smaller databases and records repositories—all accessible as one sprawling system that processes batch jobs, runs queries, and issues alerts. In short, the IDW is an "everything bucket" for the FBI.

Complicating the picture is the fact that some parts of the system are classified as "secret," while others aren't. I'm sure the entire thing is a joy to use.

The EFF's report is based on information obtained over the past three years through litigating a FOIA request; the organization didn't get everything it wanted from the FOIA, but it got quite a bit. Some of the e-mails obtained are bureaucratic classics, in which correspondents are fussing over phrasing to be used when testifying before Congress so as to give the proper impression (e.g., that they care about privacy) and generally stay under the radar.

Ultimately, though, the EFF still doesn't have a complete picture of all of the data sources that have been added to the IDW, but the group is pretty clear on the direction that the expanding database is headed: data mining for the purpose of catching bad guys before they commit crimes or acts of terror.

Last year I wrote a pretty detailed explanation of why these attempts to use data mining to catch bad guys before-the-fact are all doomed to fail, based on an National Research Council report that made the same point, so I won't recap that here. It suffices to say that the precrime stuff does not work, and will never work, and government should take the money they spend on these projects and hire linguists and other human agents instead.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ing-bucket.ars





One Internet Village, Divided: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit
Brad Stone and Miguel Helft

Facebook is booming in Turkey and Indonesia. YouTube’s audience has nearly doubled in India and Brazil.

That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.

But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”

Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth.

MySpace says it may make Profile Light the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google, which owns YouTube, disputed the analysis but offered no details on the site’s financial situation.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

“We may choose to set a limit to how much we are willing to pay in bandwidth cost,” Mr. Pickett said. In some countries, he said, “there may be particular peak times where instead of high definition, we might decrease the resolution.”

The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.

“We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.

Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

Facebook, which says it favors membership growth over profitability for now, is trying to increase revenue overseas by hiring advertising sales staff in countries like Britain, Australia and France.

In other parts of the world, Microsoft serves ads on the site and Facebook offers self-service tools to advertisers. But those ads are far less lucrative than the ones Facebook itself sells in the United States and Western Europe.

As a result, speculation has swirled about Facebook’s finances. Industry analysts wonder aloud how fast the company is losing money and whether it needs to solicit another round of investment.

Facebook said last month that it was on track to become profitable next year. But as it did, Gideon Yu, Facebook’s experienced chief financial officer, left the company. Three people familiar with the internal maneuverings at Facebook said Mr. Yu objected to such a rosy projection as the company was struggling to finance its expensive global growth.

Web entrepreneurs like Mr. Shapiro of Veoh, still struggling with his decision to restrict his site from much of the world, might have to find a way to soothe their battered consciences.

“The part of me that wants to change the world says, ‘This is unfair, it shouldn’t be like this,’ ” Mr. Shapiro said. “On the other hand, from the business side of things, serving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/te.../27global.html





Tired of Old Web Friends? A New Site Promises Strangers
Douglas Quenqua

Even from its earliest days, the Internet has promised to bring together people based on common interests rather than ZIP codes. But the sudden rise of a new Web site suggests some people are growing weary of all that sameness.

Omegle.com connects its users with random, anonymous strangers for a private, real-time chat. The site, which started last month, was developed by Leif K-Brooks, an 18-year-old amateur Web programmer and high school student in Vermont who was worried that people’s Web interactions had “become stagnant.”

“You can’t learn anything from someone exactly like you,” said Mr. K-Brooks. “The goal was to create a new kind of association: anonymous interaction with a stranger that complements existing social sites and helps people broaden their horizons.”

Less than a month after its debut, Omegle is drawing about 150,000 page views a day, according to Mr. K-Brooks, and is growing quickly through word of mouth.

Whether the site is actually broadening anyone’s horizons is another question. Mr. K-Brooks says he doesn’t monitor the conversations and has no data on how people are using the site. “As long as people are having fun, I’m happy,” he said.

Mr. K-Brooks’s aspirations for the site are modest. He makes some money by selling advertising on Omegle’s home page, but is realistic about the limits of anonymous chat. “I think most of the features I add over time will be relatively small, building on the core I’ve already established,” he said. Then, there is this suggestion, on the Web site’s “Start a Chat” page: “Send feedback to Omegle (or a job offer to its founder).”

It is perhaps not surprising that Omegle has arrived in the age of Facebook, where etiquette and accountability threaten to squeeze some of the fun out of Web surfing. But that could also be its downfall, says Jason Tanz, a senior editor at Wired.

“The first person I connected with said, ‘let’s have cyber right now,’ ” he said of his experience on Omegle, referring to cybersex. “The second was a 14-year-old kid from London. It’s not hard to see how this is going to be a problem.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/te.../27omegle.html





Computer Program to Take On ‘Jeopardy!’
John Markoff

This highly successful television quiz show is the latest challenge for artificial intelligence.

What is “Jeopardy”?

That is correct.

I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human “Jeopardy!” contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward.

I.B.M. scientists previously devised a chess-playing program to run on a supercomputer called Deep Blue. That program beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a controversial 1997 match (Mr. Kasparov called the match unfair and secured a draw in a later one against another version of the program).

But chess is a game of limits, with pieces that have clearly defined powers. “Jeopardy!” requires a program with the suppleness to weigh an almost infinite range of relationships and to make subtle comparisons and interpretations. The software must interact with humans on their own terms, and fast.

Indeed, the creators of the system — which the company refers to as Watson, after the I.B.M. founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr. — said they were not yet confident their system would be able to compete successfully on the show, on which human champions typically provide correct responses 85 percent of the time.

“The big goal is to get computers to be able to converse in human terms,” said the team leader, David A. Ferrucci, an I.B.M. artificial intelligence researcher. “And we’re not there yet.”

The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can “understand” human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications.

Despite more than four decades of experimentation in artificial intelligence, scientists have made only modest progress until now toward building machines that can understand language and interact with humans.

The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking “grand challenges” like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval.

Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the “Jeopardy!” producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show’s host, Alex Trebek.

The computer will respond with a synthesized voice to answer questions and to choose follow-up categories. I.B.M. researchers said they planned to move a Blue Gene supercomputer to Los Angeles for the contest. To approximate the dimensions of the challenge faced by the human contestants, the computer will not be connected to the Internet, but will make its answers based on text that it has “read,” or processed and indexed, before the show.

There is some skepticism among researchers in the field about the effort. “To me it seems more like a demonstration than a grand challenge,” said Peter Norvig, a computer scientist who is director of research at Google. “This will explore lots of different capabilities, but it won’t change the way the field works.”

The I.B.M. researchers and “Jeopardy!” producers said they were considering what form their cybercontestant would take and what gender it would assume. One possibility would be to use an animated avatar that would appear on a computer display.

“We’ve only begun to talk about it,” said Harry Friedman, the executive producer of “Jeopardy!” “We all agree that it shouldn’t look like Robby the Robot.”

Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy!” contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004.

I.B.M. will not reveal precisely how large the system’s internal database would be. The actual amount of information could be a significant fraction of the Web now indexed by Google, but artificial intelligence researchers said that having access to more information would not be the most significant key to improving the system’s performance.

Eric Nyberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is collaborating with I.B.M. on research to devise computing systems capable of answering questions that are not limited to specific topics. The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.

The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

The way to deal with such problems, Dr. Ferrucci said, is to improve the program’s ability to understand the way “Jeopardy!” clues are offered. The complexity of the challenge is underscored by the subtlety involved in capturing the exact meaning of a spoken sentence. For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.

“We love those sentences,” Dr. Nyberg said. “Those are the ones we talk about when we’re sitting around having beers after work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/te...7jeopardy.html





Students Make Atari Games Look Like Atari Again
Ian Bogost

One of the main themes of Racing the Beam is the strong affinity between the Atari VCS and the CRT television. The system was designed around the TV and it interfaces with that display in an unusual and specific way.

In today's world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it's hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an ordinary television of the late 1970s. Emulators like Stella make it possible to play Atari games on modern computers, serving the function of archival tool, development platform, and player for these original games. But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression of what Atari games looked like on a television.

An Atari game played on a television would exhibit a number of visual characteristics that cannot be seen on an LCD display:

Texture. The display itself is not constructed out of pixels like a monitor, but out of the phosphorescent glow of an electron beam as it shines through a focusing grate. The result produces slightly separated colored dots on the screen, which become less visible as the viewer moves away from the set.

Afterimage. The phosphor glow padding a bit of time to "burn off" and leaves more of an afterimage on the human retina compared to an LCD display. As a result, images might linger after they had moved or changed. Atari programmers took advantage of this feature to "flicker" objects between frames.

Color Bleed. The edges of sprites and scanlines appear as sharp edges in an emulator. But on a television, luminance from these areas would bleed into neighboring sectors, both softening the hard edges of pixel-objects and blending colors together.

Noise. A television transmission is sent via RF, so a natural amount of noise is introduced into the image ... this is hard to see in a normal TV broadcast, but the large, flat areas of color in a videogame will exhibit slight vibration.

Many of today's players may only experience Atari games in emulation. Indeed, many of my students may have little to no memory of CRT televisions at all. Given such factors, it seems even more important to improve the graphical accuracy of tools like Stella.

In Spring 2009, I tasked a Georgia Tech Computer Science capstone group to modify Stella, adding settings to simulate the CRT behaviors described above. The group consisted of five committed and talented CS seniors: Edward Booth, Michael Cook, Justin Dobbs, Will Rowland, and Prince Yang.

The results are, to my eyes, fantastic. Take a look at the before/after comparisons and you'll see the difference immediately (please click for full-resolution images; the results are harder to see scaled down).

Despite being mighty impressive, the results in a live game are far more remarkable. Edward and his colleagues have done a fantastic job.

They are currently working with the maintainer of the free, open-source Stella emulator to patch their changes into the main build, where the effects will be available as a configurable option. Expect to see it there shortly, where hopefully it will benefit players, creators, educators, and archivists alike. Given that we'll be placing the code back into Stella's repository, I'm also hopeful that this software might be extended for use in other emulators for computer systems that used televisions as their primary output.
http://www.digitallounge.gatech.edu/...x.html?id=2824





Customer Service? Ask a Volunteer
Steve Lohr

HERE’S the job description: You spend a few hours a day, up to 20 a week, at your computer, supplying answers online to customer questions about technical matters like how to set up an Internet home network or how to program a new high-definition television.

The pay: $0.

A shabby form of exploitation? Not to Justin McMurry of Keller, Tex., who spends about that amount of time helping customers of Verizon’s high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service, which the company is gradually rolling out across the country.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. There have been case studies of early skateboarders and mountain bikers and their pioneering tweaks to their gear, for example, and of the programmers who were behind open-source software like the Linux operating system. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers.

But can this same kind of economy of social rewards develop in the realm of customer service? It is, after all, a field that companies typically regard as a costly nuisance and that consumers often view as a source of frustration.

A look at the evolving experiment that Verizon Communications began in July suggests that company-sponsored online communities for customer service, if handled adeptly, hold considerable promise.

Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, is a software engineer by training and an avid consumer electronics tinkerer whose home projects have included installing high-end audiovisual systems. In those projects, he has often visited Web sites where users offer one another tips and answer questions. Verizon, Mr. Studness determined, needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

“You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that’s where the magic happens,” Mr. Studness said.

Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that online user groups conform to what she calls the 1-9-90 rule. About 1 percent of those in the community, she explained, are super-users who supply most of the best answers and commentary. An additional 9 percent are “responders” who mainly reply and rate Web posts, she said, and the other 90 percent are “readers” who primarily peruse and search the Web site for useful information.

“The 90 percent will come,” Ms. Petouhoff said, “if you have the 1 percent.”

Verizon explored the alternative of building the Web site and managing the forums itself, but it decided to call on outside expertise. Several suppliers, including HelpStream, Jive Software and Telligent, offer corporate social networking software with customer service features. Verizon chose Lithium Technologies, a fast-growing start-up based in Emeryville, Calif.

Lithium comes to online customer service from a heritage in gaming. Its chief executive and co-founder, Lyle Fong, was a founder of GX Media, which developed a leading Web site, Gamers.com, and created technologies for professional rankings and tournaments.

Lithium’s current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy and Nintendo.

The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Mr. Fong. Lithium’s customer service sites for companies, for example, offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and “kudos counts.”

“That alone is addictive,” Mr. Fong said. “They are revered by their peers.”

Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm that invested $9 million in Lithium last year, was impressed with the company’s gaming background and its focus on catering to super-users to build communities. Peter Fenton, a Benchmark general partner, said that many of the most popular consumer Web sites and services, from Wikipedia to Twitter, are animated by a relatively small percentage of avid users.

“In customer service, it’s still very early, but I think it’s likely the same pattern will play out,” said Mr. Fenton, who serves on the boards of both Twitter and Yelp, a site where users post reviews of restaurants and other local businesses.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

But the online forums, he added, also provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.

“One answer can help thousands,” he said.

Mr. McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, is supplying answers by the bushel. He joined the Verizon-sponsored forums in August after reading about them on another technical Web site. A scan through his lengthy list of posts shows a range from the straightforward (programming a DVR remotely by computer) to the arcane (the fine points of HDMI technology, for High-Definition Multimedia Interface).

As a software expert, Mr. McMurry has taught training classes. “Seeing the light turn on in their eyes when they understood was exciting,” he said.

His online tutoring, he observed, brings a similar satisfaction.

“People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it,” he said.

MR. McMURRY has a lofty ranking as a “Silver II” contributor to the site and as a community leader, denoted by “CL” in a red box next to his name. Community leaders also have their own forum, have direct access to Verizon technical staff members and get early glimpses of new products — all a part of cultivating super-users.

“Who knows how long I’ll keep doing this,” Mr. McMurry said, “but I’m enjoying it now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26unbox.html





Force Behind New Copyright Law
Matt Schudel

Barbara A. Ringer had just graduated from Columbia University law school in 1949 when she joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. Within a few years, she set about revising an archaic set of laws that had been in place since 1909 -- before the invention of television or commercial radio, before copying machines and the modern recording industry, let alone cable TV, home computers and the Internet.

Ms. Ringer believed, above all, that copyrights should protect the creative people in American life -- the authors, songwriters and performers whose work was too often printed, plagiarized or broadcast without permission. By 1955, she was writing papers and commissioning studies on how the nation's copyright laws should be revised.

For years, Ms. Ringer devoted much of her time to drafting a new, comprehensive copyright act and educating congressmen about why it was needed. Foreseeing the rise of the Internet, she inserted provisions into the law to protect authors from the unauthorized reproduction of their work, even by means not yet devised.

"The basic human rights of individual authors throughout the world," she warned in a 1975 speech, "are being sacrificed more and more on the altar of . . . the technological revolution."

Ms. Ringer spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. She wrote most of the bill herself.

"It brought an essentially 19th-century law up to date with the late 20th century and 21st century," said Arthur S. Levine, a copyright lawyer who worked with Ms. Ringer at the Library of Congress. "I don't believe there would have been a Copyright Act if there hadn't been a Barbara Ringer."

The act established the principle of "fair use," whereby scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. But it is better known for allowing authors to retain greater control over their work.

Under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication. Unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. With the 1976 act, which Ms. Ringer conceived, the author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime, plus 50 years.

"That was a monumental change," said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights, and one of Ms. Ringer's proteges. "Barbara was an absolutely spectacular leader and thinker in copyright law. She was responsible for the first major change in copyright law in 70 years."

Barbara Alice Ringer was born May 29, 1925, in Lafayette, Ind., and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of George Washington University in 1945. She received a master's degree at George Washington in 1947, then went to Columbia as one of the few women in her law school class.

Ms. Ringer -- who was 83 when she died April 9 of complications from dementia at a Lexington, Va., nursing home -- loved opera, literature and film and never wavered in her belief that artists should be properly rewarded for their work.

In 1971, after 22 years at the Library of Congress, Ms. Ringer was passed over for the job of register of copyrights, the nation's top copyright position. She had stellar performance reviews and had held the office's No. 2 position for five years, but the post went to a man. Ms. Ringer filed a job discrimination suit, then moved to Paris for two years to work for the United Nations.

A federal hearing examiner found "a consistent pattern of discrimination" and concluded that Ms. Ringer had been wrongfully denied the position because she was a woman and because she was a vocal proponent of promoting African Americans at the library. In 1973, a federal judge ordered that Ms. Ringer be installed as the register of copyrights. She was the first woman to hold the job.

She received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker, in 1977. She retired on her 55th birthday in 1980 and moved to rural Bath County, Va., where she lived alone on 100 wooded acres. She never married.

Ms. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court. She returned to the Library of Congress in 1993 and 1994 as acting register of copyrights.

Mostly, though, she was content to stay in rural Bath County, where she catalogued the books at the local public library and established its audiovisual department -- all for free.

Ms. Ringer owned several properties, which she placed in conservation easements to be preserved in perpetuity as wilderness. She also amassed an enormous collection of 20,000 movies and 1,500 books on film, all of which she donated -- where else? -- to the Library of Congress.

"Her contributions were monumental," said Peters, the current register of copyrights. "She blazed trails. She was a heroine."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042502917.html





In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit
David Barboza

The phone’s sleek lines and touch-screen keyboard are unmistakably familiar. So is the logo on the back. But a sales clerk at a sprawling electronic goods market in this Chinese coastal city admits what is clear upon closer inspection: this is not the Apple iPhone; this is the Hi-Phone.

“But it’s just as good,” the clerk says.

Nearby, dozens of other vendors are selling counterfeit Nokia, Motorola and Samsung phones — as well as cheap look-alikes that make no bones about being knockoffs.

“Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” says Xiong Ting, a sales manager at Triquint Semiconductor, a maker of mobile phone parts, while visiting Shenzhen. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it. Within 100 miles of here, you can find all your suppliers.”

Technological advances have allowed hundreds of small Chinese companies, some with as few as 10 employees, to churn out what are known here as shanzhai, or black market, cellphones, often for as little as $20 apiece.

And just as Chinese companies are trying to move up the value chain of manufacturing, from producing toys and garments to making computers and electric cars, so too are counterfeiters. After years of making fake luxury bags and cheap DVDs, they are capturing market share from the world’s biggest mobile phone makers.

Although shanzhai phones have only been around a few years, they already account for more than 20 percent of sales in China, which is the world’s biggest mobile phone market, according to the research firm Gartner.

They are also being illegally exported to Russia, India, the Middle East, Europe, even the United States. “The shanzhai phone market is expanding crazily,” says Wang Jiping, a senior analyst at IDC, which tracks technology trends. “They copy Apple, Nokia, whatever they like, and they respond to the market swiftly.”

Alarmed by the rapid growth of counterfeits and no-name knockoffs, global brands are pressing the Chinese government to crack down on their proliferation, and are warning consumers about potential health hazards, like cheap batteries that can explode.

Nokia, the world’s biggest cellphone maker, says it is working with Beijing to fight counterfeiting. Motorola says much the same. Apple Inc. declined to comment.

Even Chinese mobile phone producers are losing market share to underground companies, which have a built-in cost advantage because they evade taxes, regulatory fees and safety checks.

“We’re being severely hurt by shanzhai phones,” says Chen Zhao, a sales director at Konka, a Chinese cellphone maker. “Legal cellphone makers should pay 17 percent of their revenue as value-added tax, but shanzhai makers, of course, won’t pay it.”

So far, however, China has done little to stop the proliferation of fake mobile phones, which are even advertised on late-night television infomercials with pitches like “one-fifth the price, but the same function and look,” or patriotic appeals like “Buy shanzhai to show your love of our country.”

Last month, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did warn consumers about the hazards of shanzhai phones, saying “their radiation usually exceeds the limit.” China’s consumer protection agency says faulty mobile phones were the No. 1 consumer complaint last year.

A few weeks ago, a 45-year-old man in south China was severely burned after his cellphone exploded in his shirt pocket, according to state-run news media.

But that hasn’t seemed to affect sales of black market phones, which typically sell at retail for $100 to $150. In the spirit of what is called “shanzhai” — which suggests rebels or bandits and which applies to counterfeit products of all kinds — many consumers are willing to take a risk on a cheap item that looks stylish.

“I saw iPhone pictures on the Web; it’s so cool. But it costs over $500 — too expensive,” says Yang Guibin, 30, an office worker from Chongqing. “So I decided to buy a shanzhai iPhone. I bought it in a digital market here; it looked exactly like the iPhone.”

Some experts say they believe the shanzhai phenomena is about being creative, Chinese style.

“Chinese grass-roots companies are actually very innovative,” says Yu Zhou, a professor at Vassar College. “It’s not so much technology as how they form supply chains and how rapidly they react to new trends.”

While the phones may look like famous brands, companies actually add special features like bigger screens, dual-mode SIM cards (which allow two phone numbers) and even a telescopic lens attachment for the phone’s camera.

Since it is the SIM card that makes a phone run in China, as in most places other than the United States, all you have to do is insert a valid SIM card into a shanzhai phone and it works.

All this innovation comes from an industry that only took off in 2005, after Mediatek, a semiconductor design company from Taiwan, helped significantly reduce the cost and complexity of producing a mobile phone.

Using what experts call a turnkey solution, Mediatek developed a circuit board that could inexpensively integrate the functions of multiple chips, offering start-ups a platform to produce a low-cost mobile phone.

The industry got another boost in 2007, when regulators said companies no longer needed a license to manufacture a cellphone.

That set off a scramble by entrepreneurs in this electronics manufacturing center. Counterfeiting and off-brand knockoffs flourished. Tiny companies would buy a Mediatek chip loaded with software, source other components and ask a factory to assemble them.

Marketing strategies were simple: steal. Designs and brand names were copied identically or simply mimicked. (Sumsung for Samsung or Nckia for Nokia.)

Tapping into the supply chains of big brands is easy, producers say. “It’s really common for factories to do a night shift for other companies,” says Zhang Haizhen, who recently ran a shanzhai company here. “No one will refuse an order if it is over 5,000 mobile phones.”

The people who make fake iPhones admit it’s a shady business.

“We are a kind of illegal producer,” says Zhang Feiyang, whose company, Yuanyang, makes an iPhone clone. “In Shenzhen there are many small mills, hidden. Basically, we can make any type of cellphone.”

The competition is already forcing global brands to lower prices, analysts say. And new Chinese brands are emerging, like Meizu, a would-be Apple that has opened stylish stores here.

“Our phone is even better than the iPhone,” says Liu Zeyu, a Meizu salesman in Shenzhen. “Our goal is to create a phone that makes Chinese proud.”

Chen Yang contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/te...gy/28cell.html





Intelligent NIC Downloads While Host PC Sleeps

Developers at Microsoft Research and the University of San Diego say massive power savings can result from embedding an ARM-based CPU into a network interface. The "Somniloquy" can handle file sharing and long downloads on its own, and only wakes a host PC when necessary.

According to the team of six researchers, who are reportedly scheduled to present Somniloquy research and prototypes at next month's USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Diego, 67 percent of enterprise desktop PCs remain powered on outside work hours, and the average residential computer is on approximately 34 percent of the time. Enterprise PCs are often left on for remote access, while home PCs are left on for quick availability, file sharing/downloading, instant messaging, and email, the researchers say.

As developer Yuvraj Agarwal and his colleagues point out, most desktops and laptops commonly feature an energy-saving S3 "sleep" (suspend-to-RAM) mode, but they cannot respond to remote network events while they are in this state. And, while WOL (wake-on-LAN) technology has been touted as one solution to this problem, it typically does not work remotely because of firewalls, because of the need to know in advance when a system is sleeping, and because of the need to know the MAC address of the sleeping PC.
The energy cost of all this is significant, according to the researchers. They measured five PCs (Dell Optiplex 745 and Dimension 4600 desktops, and Lenovo X60, Toshiba M400, and Lenovo T60 laptops) and found that while the systems used between 0.55 Watts and 3.6 Watts when in S3 sleep, they used much more electricity when in a "base power" mode -- the lowest-power mode they could be in and still be responsive to network traffic. Here, consumption ranged from a low of 11 Watts for the Lenovo X60, to a high of 93.1 Watts for the Optiplex 745, with an overall average of 43 Watts.

To get around this problem, the researchers propose Somniloquy -- the word for "talking in your sleep" -- a intelligent network interface that includes its own ARM processor and can perform many operations even when the host PC is asleep. To build it, they turned to various tiny modules from Gumstix, selecting the connec 200xm processor module, etherstix and network interfaces, and a thumbstix USB interface/breakout board.

The resulting device, pictured above, includes a 200MHz Marvell PXA255 processor with 64MB of RAM and 16MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, WiFi, and an SD slot which was fitted with a 2GB memory card. So that the Somniloquy can detect a host PC's state and wake it up when necessary, it includes a second USB port and a custom-designed circuit board using an FTDI FT232RL USB-to-serial converter, the researchers say.

As a result of all this technology, it's said, the Somniloquy can work in a variety of different ways, as follows:
When a host PC is powered up, the Somniloquy does nothing and is transparent to the host OS. In a production version, the Somniloquy's processor would be powered down in this mode, though the researchers say they were unable to implement power-down on the prototypes.

When the host PC initiates sleep, the Somniloquy detects this and transfers network state to the secondary processor, including ARP table entries, IP address, DHCP lease details, and wireless SSID, thereafter becoming capable of "impersonating" the host.

Since it continuously monitors incoming packets and watching for events such as requests on specific port numbers, the Somniloguy can wake up the host PC within a few seconds. This caters for applications such as remote file access, remote desktop access, telnet, and ssh requests.

Popular host applications such as web downloading, BitTorrent file sharing, and instant messaging, can be rewritten with "stubs" that run on the secondary processor. For example, in the case of downloading, when a host PC goes to sleep, the status of all interrupted downloads is sent to the Somniloqy, which resumes the downloads and stores data on its flash memory. Similarly, IM presence can be maintained. If flash storage becomes full, or a remote user asks to initiate a chat session, the Somniloquy responds by waking up the host PC.

The power savings that can be realized with these techniques are significant, to say the least. The Somniloquy is said to consume only from 1070 to 1300mW with an active network interface (or just 290mW if it's using a WiFi interface that's in power saving mode), and it uses only about 1675mW when data is being downloaded and written to flash. The device's power consumption is about 1/10th that of an awake laptop in base power mode, and approximately 50 times less than that of a desktop, the researchers say.

Operating systems

According to the researchers, the Gumstix-based Somniloquy prototype runs an embedded Linux distribution, including a full TCP/IP stack, DHCP, configurable routing tables, a configurable firewall, SSH and serial port communication. However, they note -- no doubt reflecting the fact that four of the team members hail from Microsoft Research -- that Windows CE would also be a suitable operating system for the Somniloquy to run.

As for the host PC, this could run any operating system, but the initially implemented host software is for Windows Vista. A Somniloquy daemon detects any attempted transition to S3 sleep state and, before this is allowed to occur, transfers network state (MAC address, IP address, SSID, and other information) to the low-power processor.

Further information

Further information on the Somniloquy project can be found in the paper, "Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage," by Yuvraj Agarwal, Steve Hodges, Ranveer Chandra, James Scott, Paramvir Bahl, Rajesh Gupta. Of the authors, all hail from Microsoft, except for Agarwal and Gupta, who are with the University of San Diego.

The paper is available in PDF format, here.
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS7625324099.html





Judge Seals Courtroom in MPAA DVD-Copying Case
Greg Sandoval and Declan McCullagh

A federal judge sealed a courtroom on Friday after attorneys for the Motion Picture Association of America and another Hollywood group claimed that confidential information might be disclosed during testimony about DVD-encryption technology.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel kicked the public out of the courtroom at around 2:30 p.m. PDT, overruling objections from CNET News and RealNetworks, which also said it opposed the unusual request.

An attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, which is involved in a lawsuit here over DVD-backup software sold by RealNetworks, said details about the technology used to encrypt DVDs justified the request to give the public the boot during witness testimony--which, according to legal precedent, should be reserved only for rare cases.

"I find that this does meet the requirements for a trade secret," Patel said. "We're going to protect what needs to be protected. I'm ordering everyone not signed off on a confidentiality agreement to leave the courtroom."

"The MPAA is trying to seal proprietary specifications," said DVD-CCA attorney Reginald Steer. He added: "This is critical to our presentation."

Steer said the trade secrets related to licensing technology and CSS, or Content Scrambling System, which is an algorithm used to encrypt DVDs. DVD-CCA once filed a lawsuit against programmer Jon Johansen, who wrote a DVD-descrambling utility that circumvented CSS--a suit that had the unintended consequence of publicizing the code widely, including on ties, T-shirts, and at least one haiku poem.

Corynne McSherry, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been following this case and was in the courtroom, said Patel chose an unfortunate procedure when barring the public from the room on Friday.

"She implied that we should have filed a motion preemptively," McSherry said. "If that's true, the public shouldn't have to go to court to make the courtroom stay open...Presumably the plaintiffs had known for months that they were planning to close this hearing. This is not the right way to do it."

CNET News contacted the MPAA in advance and asked if the group would attempt to close the courtroom on Friday; the MPAA replied earlier this week it would not seek to do so.

The MPAA, the lobbying group for the six largest film studios, alleges that RealDVD violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because it bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs. The DMCA generally restricts companies from developing products that circumvent antipiracy protections, but Real says that its RealDVD product complies with the law.

When arguing for the courtroom to be cleared of anyone that was bound by a non-disclosure agreement, attorneys for the DVD-CCA acknowledged that some of its technology had been cracked and published on the Web. But, they said, that information represented only a small fraction of the keys, algorithms and other trade secrets which have never been appeared publicly.

Details about CSS and Johansen's DeCSS code --which was the subject of an injunction nine years ago by a court in New York--is widely distributed including through a online gallery published by a Carnegie Mellon University researcher. In addition, programs like the DVD-descrambling utility Handbrake are in common use.

Patel's initial response in the morning seemed skeptical. She joked that if DVD-CCA and the MPAA wanted to close the courtroom, "You should have gotten yourself a private judge. This is an open forum."

Under long-standing U.S. law, courtrooms are open by default. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is binding on Patel, has said that judges considering closing a courtroom or sealing records "must provide sufficient notice to the public and press to afford them the opportunity to object or offer alternatives. If objections are made, a hearing on the objections must be held as soon as possible."

Once that hearing is held, the courtroom can only be closed if specific conditions are met, including that there are no alternatives that are practical. Also, the judge must "make specific factual findings," and not just claim it was necessary.

A CNET News reporter objected to the courtroom closure. CNET News' publisher, CBS Interactive, is weighing its options in terms of a legal challenge. CNET intervened last year in federal court in a case pitting Facebook against ConnectU to unseal documents, a dispute that ended up before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10227195-38.html





'Wolverine' Starts Summer Strong

'X-Men' spinoff hauls $35 mil since midnight Thursday
Carl DiOrio

Fox's Hugh Jackman starrer "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" didn't need to claw its way to No. 1 over the first day of the summer boxoffice season.

A spinoff of Fox's lucrative "X-Men" franchise, "Wolverine" easily topped the daily rankings Friday with an estimated $35 million in its first day of release. The tally included almost $5 million rung up from more than 1,500 performances at midnight Thursday.

Still, with piracy problems imperiling its opening and the swine flu complicating projections for its first weekend, it comes as welcome relief to studio execs that "Wolverine" remains likely to register upward of $80 million through Sunday. That was the consensus forecast headed into the weekend, and its Friday boxoffice seems to bear out that projection.

"X-Men: The Last Stand" -- the second and most recent "X-Men" sequel -- stands as the franchise's top grosser. "Last Stand" bowed in May 2006 with $122.9 million and grossed $234.4 million overall domestically.
Elsewhere among this weekend's wide openers, Warner Bros.' romantic comedy "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" -- starring Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner -- registered $5.8 million Friday. That was the second highest total of the day.

And Roadside Attractions' Lionsgate-distributed "Battle for Terra" -- a sci-fi animated feature with a voice cast topped by Dennis Quaid -- fetched just $255,000 Friday, in 12th place among the daily rankings. The PG-rated pic is expected to draw primarily young boys with parents in tow and should turn in more respectable numbers once the weekend's matinees kick in.
Last weekend's No. 1 opener -- Sony's Beyonce Knowles starrer "Obsessed" -- attracted $4.1 million in third place on Friday, or a big 63% less than its daily tally from a week earlier.

Warners' Zac Efron starrer "17 Again" registered a fourth-best tally of $2 million in Friday coin, yielding a $44.1 million cume through three weekends.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...af23fb8750ead3











In Digital Age, Can Movie Piracy be Stopped?
Lisa Respers France

When the highly anticipated movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" opened Friday in theaters, many fans had already seen it.

The online leak of a pirated, unfinished version of the 20th Century Fox film a month ago sent federal authorities springing into action and stoked a heated conversation within the entertainment industry about digital piracy.

Piracy of upcoming films is not new, but the theft of "Wolverine" is especially troubling for an industry concerned with a stalled economy and the financial bottom line.

It's rare for high-quality copies of a big-budget blockbuster to appear on the Internet more than a month before the film's release, experts say.

Within a week of "Wolverine's" March 31 leak, more than a million people had downloaded the movie, according to TorrentFreak, a blog devoted to the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.

"Unfortunately, the recent leak of the Fox film 'Wolverine' provided a stark backdrop to the impact that digital piracy has on the large investments that producers make in creating state-of-the-art films," said Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who oversaw a congressional hearing on piracy after the leak.

"During our hearing in Los Angeles, director Steven Soderbergh said that in 2007, the entertainment industry generated a trade surplus of $13.6 billion," Berman added. "Imagine what those numbers would be if we could rein in piracy."

Bootleg, or illegally copied, movies have long been a thorn to the film industry.

In 2003, a version of Universal's "The Hulk" appeared on the Internet two weeks before the film opened. A New Jersey man pleaded guilty to the theft. And in 2005, a pirated print of "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" was uploaded to the Web within hours of the movie's release.

But where Hollywood's biggest headache used to be murky, muffled copies of films taken by someone who snuck a camcorder into a theater, today's pirates are getting more sophisticated and gaining access to better-quality goods.

Greg Sandoval, who covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News, said that in the digital age, thieves can gain access to near-perfect advance copies of films on DVD that have greater potential to undermine a movie's box-office prospects.

And even studios' attempts at safeguarding their products against piracy, such as by encoding DVDs with digital watermarks that allow authorities to trace individual copies, aren't enough, Sandoval said.

He said tech-savvy thieves have figured out how to strip such watermarks from DVDs.

"When you're talking about digital content ... it's impossible to lock it down completely" from theft, Sandoval said. "These hackers are very creative. Sometimes, they're one step ahead of the security experts."

20th Century Fox issued a statement vowing to prosecute the "Wolverine" thief "to the fullest extent of the law." The FBI is investigating, but as of Thursday, no arrests had been made.

Darcy Antonellis, president of technical operations for Warner Bros. (which is owned by the parent company of CNN), said the growth of technology has aided the pirates.

"Digital piracy has continued to increase with greater access to [files] and improved broadband services," said Antonellis, who helps oversee Warner Bros.' anti-piracy efforts.

"As broadband services increase their capacity to support legitimate services, they also enable increased illegal file-sharing. Technologies have evolved to encumber such distribution but must compete with the strength of viral or super distribution of content."

The bad guys aren't the only ones keeping up with the technology.

Keith Bolcar, special agent in charge of the FBI's cyber division in Los Angeles, said agents and their partners as "doing everything we can to keep up with the learning curve of technology, hopefully just as fast as our criminal subjects."

The FBI meets routinely with studio representatives to share intelligence, to discuss strategy and to detect and fix vulnerabilities in security measures, he said.

"While I can't discuss investigative techniques, we employ a myriad of sophisticated methods to solve these crimes," said Bolcar, whose office is investigating the "Wolverine" leak. "Our investigators receive extensive training and are technologically savvy."

Hollywood also faces the challenge of protecting digital files that pass through so many hands while in production and post-production. Antonellis said Warner Bros. works diligently to safeguard its properties.

"Each project, for us, is unique, with its own unique set of challenges," she said. "Whether there are 50 or 500 people involved in the process, we try to focus on ownership/responsibility of our assets throughout the entire production through to distribution process."

John Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America, said digital piracy can take many forms, including peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming.

Malcolm said the association is conducting a lot of outreach to universities and Internet service providers to help them address piracy that occurs over their systems.

The issue is global, Malcolm said, as evidenced by pending litigation in France that would shut down Internet accounts of illegal downloaders.

The association is in litigation against an Australian service provider, iiNet, to try to establish the legal parameters of its responsibility in policing its system, Malcolm said.

"In some cases, we are making great progress with ISP, and in some cases, it's a little bit tougher going," Malcolm said. "After all, it's their broadband that's being eaten up, and it slows down their systems."

Berman, D-California, said advances in technologies that enable filtering and other anti-theft tools will help curb piracy. So will creating more sites where viewers can legitimately access movies, shows and music, such as Hulu and the recently announced Vevo, a partnership between Universal Music and YouTube.

"Given how pirated materials often damage computers with viruses, spyware and other problems, consumers will continue to embrace the innovative, legitimate sites that are becoming more and more available," Berman said.

Malcolm agrees. He said there are more than 350 sites that legitimately distribute digital content.

If a person is a true movie lover, they will want to respect the art, the artists and the countless people behind the scenes who make the magic happen, Malcolm said.
"I hear periodically, 'Well, Tom Cruise has enough money' or 'Tom Hanks has enough money,' " Malcolm said. "I would say to movie lovers, stick around and watch all of the credits. When you see hundreds of names scrolling across the screen, those are the people whose talents contributed to making that movie, and they need to make a living."

CNN.com's Brandon Griggs contributed to this story.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/01/w...e.movie.piracy





Fordham Law Class Collects Personal Info About Scalia; Supreme Ct. Justice Is Steamed
Martha Neil

Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.

This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:

"Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any," the justice says, among other comments.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman confirmed to the ABA Journal in an e-mail that the Scalia blast to ATL "is accurately attributed to Justice Scalia."

In response, Reidenberg tells the ABA Journal that the information gathered by his class about Scalia was all "publicly available, for free," and wasn't posted on the Internet by the class or otherwise further publicized. He views the dossier-gathering about a public figure as a legitimate classroom exercise intended to spark discussion about privacy law, and says he and the class didn't intend to offend Scalia.

The availability of such information on the Web makes it possible for the government to conduct surveillance that otherwise would be much more difficult or even impossible to pursue through court orders and other official mechanisms, Reidenberg contends. And aggregation of various bits of information also can lead to more troubling use of the compiled information, he says.

"When there are so few privacy protections for secondary use of personal information, that information can be used in many troubling ways," he writes in an e-mail to the ABA Journal. "A class assignment that illustrates this point is not one of them. Indeed, the very fact that Justice Scalia found it objectionable and felt compelled to comment underscores the value and legitimacy of the exercise."

An ABA Journal request for comment from Scalia, routed through the court's media information office, has not been returned.
http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/for...ice_is_steamed





Campfire Horror, Through a Kaleidoscope
Nathan Lee

The low-budget horror film “I Can See You” has a plot as old as the hills — or at least as old as “The Hills Have Eyes.” A group of city slickers heads out to the country: trouble, madness and some very nasty bodily harm ensue.

But the twist — and this is a very twisty movie — is that the city folks are Brooklyn hipsters taking digital photographs for use in a marketing campaign, and the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with deranged mutant hillbillies.

What it does entail is open to interpretation. The multitasking filmmaker Graham Reznick (who wrote, directed, co-produced, edited and partly scored the movie) calls his debut “a psychedelic campfire tale,” which is as good a description as any for this elusive, experimental scare flick.

There are intimations of standard horror developments: Ben (Ben Dickinson) is afflicted by unnerving perceptual phenomena; Doug (Duncan Skiles) goes missing one night and later turns up mysteriously traumatized; a woman they meet (Heather Robb) suffers an equally inexplicable fate — and perhaps becomes a zombie.

Yet up to and including an overtly horrific climax, nothing can quite be pinned down, explained or identified. Rife with ominous close-ups, strange superimpositions, surrealistic digressions and a sound design that hints at all manner of inchoate terrors, the movie itself seems to be descending into a fearful, broken consciousness.

David Lynch is the key influence here, and Mr. Reznick proves himself a keen disciple of the master. “I Can See You” heralds a splendid new filmmaker with one eye on genre mechanics, one eye on avant-garde conceits and a third eye for transcendental weirdness.

I CAN SEE YOU

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written, directed and edited by Graham Reznick; director of photography, Gordon Arkenberg; music by Jeff Grace; produced by Peter Phok and Mr. Reznick; released by Cinema Purgatorio. At the Cinema Purgatorio at the Kraine Theater, 85 East Fourth Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Ben Dickinson (Ben), Duncan Skiles (Doug), Chris Ford (Kimble), Heather Robb (Summer Day), Olivia Villanti (Sonia) and Larry Fessenden (Mickey Hauser).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/movies/29ican.html





"Johnny Got His Gun" A Musing On War
Larry Williams

Dalton Trumbo brought his 1939 novel to the screen during the Vietnam War, when its angry anti-war theme made it especially timely. To help it find its audience, its famous poster was dominated by a hand making a peace sign. But the soldier silhouetted within the hand is from a different time: World War I.

Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms) is an 18-year-old American who goes off to fight in France, and nearly makes it home unscathed. But in the last hours of the war, an artillery shell blows away his arms, legs, ears, eyes and jaw. Ironically, he was exposed to enemy fire as he was burying an enemy soldier whose corpse had been hung up on barbed wire near the trench. That's gratitude for you.

But Joe's not dead, though he'll soon wish he were. Doctors attach him to tubes and house him in a hospital's utility closet, where they hope only his nurses will see him. Most of the film takes place in Joe's mind, as he fantasizes about meeting Christ ( Donald Sutherland), talking with his recently deceased father ( Jason Robards) and reuniting, in a fashion, with his girlfriend.

One fantasy features Trumbo himself, lecturing on how war is good for scientists, freeing them of the usual societal constraints on inventing more terrible weapons. In another dream, his father tells a 10-year-old Joe that he'll make the world safe for democracy. When Joe asks what democracy is, his dad says he's not sure, but that it seems to require young people to kill each other.

That typifies the ham-fisted speechifying that makes this film more allegory than story. And a 106-minute allegory can get tiresome, like a long lecture on why war is bad. The film gets more involving toward the end, when Joe discovers he can communicate with his keepers by Morse code, only to have this breakthrough backfire, increasing his isolation instead of relieving it. The last thing the Army wants is for this torso with a brain to tell the world what he's thinking.

The DVD includes several good extra features: an hourlong documentary about Trumbo, who is probably the most famous victim of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, and the making of "Johnny Got His Gun," plus a 30-minute radio version, starring James Cagney as Joe, that aired in 1940. Not long after, preaching against war fell out of favor in a world threatened by the blatantly evil Nazis.

>> JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN: Shout! Factory release of a 1971 drama directed by Dalton Trumbo, from his own novel. 106 minutes, rated PG. Extras include 1940 radio adaptation of the play starring James Cagney, Metallica music video for "One," featuring footage from the film, and documentary "Dalton Trumbo: Rebel In Hollywood."
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,1727181.story





U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Cyberspace Warfare

This article was reported by David E. Sanger, John Markoff and Thom Shanker and written by Mr. Sanger.

When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights.

When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan for an experimental covert program — its results still unclear — to bore into their computers and undermine the project.

And the Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets — in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons.

Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them.

Thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States — many from China and Russia, some malicious and some testing chinks in the patchwork of American firewalls — have prompted the Obama administration to review American strategy.

President Obama is expected to propose a far larger defensive effort in coming days, including an expansion of the $17 billion, five-year program that Congress approved last year, the appointment of a White House official to coordinate the effort, and an end to a running bureaucratic battle over who is responsible for defending against cyberattacks.

But Mr. Obama is expected to say little or nothing about the nation’s offensive capabilities, on which the military and the nation’s intelligence agencies have been spending billions. In interviews over the past several months, a range of military and intelligence officials, as well as outside experts, have described a huge increase in the sophistication of American cyberwarfare capabilities.

Because so many aspects of the American effort to develop cyberweapons and define their proper use remain classified, many of those officials declined to speak on the record. The White House declined several requests for interviews or to say whether Mr. Obama as a matter of policy supports or opposes the use of American cyberweapons.

The most exotic innovations under consideration would enable a Pentagon programmer to surreptitiously enter a computer server in Russia or China, for example, and destroy a “botnet” — a potentially destructive program that commandeers infected machines into a vast network that can be clandestinely controlled — before it could be unleashed in the United States.

Or American intelligence agencies could activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when they are manufactured, enabling the United States to take command of an enemy’s computers by remote control over the Internet. That, of course, is exactly the kind of attack officials fear could be launched on American targets, often through Chinese-made chips or computer servers.

So far, however, there are no broad authorizations for American forces to engage in cyberwar. The invasion of the Qaeda computer in Iraq several years ago and the covert activity in Iran were each individually authorized by Mr. Bush. When he issued a set of classified presidential orders in January 2008 to organize and improve America’s online defenses, the administration could not agree on how to write the authorization.

A principal architect of that order said the issue had been passed on to the next president, in part because of the complexities of cyberwar operations that, by necessity, would most likely be conducted on both domestic and foreign Internet sites. After the controversy surrounding domestic spying, Mr. Bush’s aides concluded, the Bush White House did not have the credibility or the political capital to deal with the subject.

Electronic Vulnerabilities

Cyberwar would not be as lethal as atomic war, of course, nor as visibly dramatic. But when Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, briefed Mr. Bush on the threat in May 2007, he argued that if a single large American bank were successfully attacked “it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the global economy” than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. McConnell, who left office three months ago, warned last year that “the ability to threaten the U.S. money supply is the equivalent of today’s nuclear weapon.”

The scenarios developed last year for the incoming president by Mr. McConnell and his coordinator for cybersecurity, Melissa Hathaway, went further. They described vulnerabilities including an attack on Wall Street and one intended to bring down the nation’s electric power grid. Most were extrapolations of attacks already tried.

Today, Ms. Hathaway is the primary author of White House cyberstrategy and has been traveling the country talking in vague terms about recent, increasingly bold attacks on the computer networks that keep the country running. Government officials will not discuss the details of a recent attack on the air transportation network, other than to say the attack never directly affected air traffic control systems.

Still, the specter of an attack that could blind air traffic controllers and, perhaps, the military’s aerospace defense networks haunts military and intelligence officials. (The saving grace of the air traffic control system, officials say, is that it is so old that it is not directly connected to the Internet.)

Studies, with code names like Dark Angel, have focused on whether cellphone towers, emergency-service communications and hospital systems could be brought down, to sow chaos.

But the theoretical has, at times, become real.

“We have seen Chinese network operations inside certain of our electricity grids,” said Joel F. Brenner, who oversees counterintelligence operations for Dennis Blair, Mr. McConnell’s successor as national intelligence director, speaking at the University of Texas at Austin this month. “Do I worry about those grids, and about air traffic control systems, water supply systems, and so on? You bet I do.”

But the broader question — one the administration so far declines to discuss — is whether the best defense against cyberattack is the development of a robust capability to wage cyberwar.

As Mr. Obama’s team quickly discovered, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies both concluded in Mr. Bush’s last years in office that it would not be enough to simply build higher firewalls and better virus detectors or to restrict access to the federal government’s own computers.

“The fortress model simply will not work for cyber,” said one senior military officer who has been deeply engaged in the debate for several years. “Someone will always get in.”

That thinking has led to a debate over whether lessons learned in the nuclear age — from the days of “mutually assured destruction” — apply to cyberwar.

But in cyberwar, it is hard to know where to strike back, or even who the attacker might be. Others have argued for borrowing a page from Mr. Bush’s pre-emption doctrine by going into foreign computers to destroy malicious software before it is unleashed into the world’s digital bloodstream. But that could amount to an act of war, and many argue it is a losing game, because the United States is more dependent on a constantly running Internet system than many of its potential adversaries, and therefore could suffer more damage in a counterattack.

In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the National Research Council will argue that although an offensive cybercapability is an important asset for the United States, the nation is lacking a clear strategy, and secrecy surrounding preparations has hindered national debate, according to several people familiar with the report.

The advent of Internet attacks — especially those suspected of being directed by nations, not hackers — has given rise to a new term inside the Pentagon and the National Security Agency: “hybrid warfare.”

It describes a conflict in which attacks through the Internet can be launched as a warning shot — or to pave the way for a traditional attack.

Early hints of this new kind of warfare emerged in the confrontation between Russia and Estonia in April 2007. Clandestine groups — it was never determined if they had links to the Russian government — commandeered computers around the globe and directed a fire hose of data at Estonia’s banking system and its government Web sites.

The computer screens of Estonians trying to do business with the government online were frozen, if they got anything at all. It was annoying, but by the standards of cyberwar, it was child’s play.

In August 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, the cyberattacks grew more widespread. Georgians were denied online access to news, cash and air tickets. The Georgian government had to move its Internet activity to servers in Ukraine when its own servers locked up, but the attacks did no permanent damage.

Every few months, it seems, some agency, research group or military contractor runs a war game to assess the United States’ vulnerability. Senior intelligence officials were shocked to discover how easy it was to permanently disable a large power generator. That prompted further studies to determine if attackers could take down a series of generators, bringing whole parts of the country to a halt.

Another war game that the Department of Homeland Security sponsored in March 2008, called Cyber Storm II, envisioned a far larger, coordinated attack against the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It studied a disruption of chemical plants, rail lines, oil and gas pipelines and private computer networks. That study and others like it concluded that when attacks go global, the potential economic repercussions increase exponentially.

To prove the point, Mr. McConnell, then the director of national intelligence, spent much of last summer urging senior government officials to examine the Treasury Department’s scramble to contain the effects of the collapse of Bear Stearns. Markets froze, he said, because “what backs up that money is confidence — an accounting system that is reconcilable.” He began studies of what would happen if the system that clears market trades froze.

“We were halfway through the study,” one senior intelligence official said last month, “and the markets froze of their own accord. And we looked at each other and said, ‘Our market collapse has just given every cyberwarrior out there a playbook.’ ”

Just before Mr. Obama was elected, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research group in Washington, warned in a report that “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration.”

What alarmed the panel was not the capabilities of individual hackers but of nations — China and Russia among them — that experts believe are putting huge resources into the development of cyberweapons. A research company called Team Cymru recently examined “scans” that came across the Internet seeking ways to get inside industrial control systems, and discovered more than 90 percent of them came from computers in China.

Scanning alone does no damage, but it could be the prelude to an attack that scrambles databases or seeks to control computers. But Team Cymru ran into a brick wall as soon as it tried to trace who, exactly, was probing these industrial systems. It could not determine whether military organizations, intelligence agencies, terrorist groups, criminals or inventive teenagers were behind the efforts.

The good news, some government officials argue, is that the Chinese are deterred from doing real damage: Because they hold more than a trillion dollars in United States government debt, they have little interest in freezing up a system they depend on for their own investments.

Then again, some of the scans seemed to originate from 14 other countries, including Taiwan, Russia and, of course, the United States.

Bikini Atoll for an Online Age

Because “cyberwar” contains the word “war,” the Pentagon has argued that it should be the locus of American defensive and offensive strategy — and it is creating the kind of infrastructure that was built around nuclear weapons in the 1940s and ’50s.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is considering proposals to create a Cyber Command — initially as a new headquarters within the Strategic Command, which controls the American nuclear arsenal and assets in space. Right now, the responsibility for computer network security is part of Strategic Command, and military officials there estimate that over the past six months, the government has spent $100 million responding to probes and attacks on military systems. Air Force officials confirm that a large network of computers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama was temporarily taken off-line within the past eight months when it was put at risk of widespread infection from computer viruses.

But Mr. Gates has concluded that the military’s cyberwarfare effort requires a sharper focus — and thus a specific command. It would build the defenses for military computers and communications systems and — the part the Pentagon is reluctant to discuss — develop and deploy cyberweapons.

In fact, that effort is already under way — it is part of what the National Cyber Range is all about. The range is a replica of the Internet of the future, and it is being built to be attacked. Competing teams of contractors — including BAE Systems, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and Sparta Inc. — are vying to build the Pentagon a system it can use to simulate attacks. The National Security Agency already has a smaller version of a similar system, in Millersville, Md.

In short, the Cyber Range is to the digital age what the Bikini Atoll — the islands the Army vaporized in the 1950s to measure the power of the hydrogen bomb — was to the nuclear age. But once the tests at Bikini Atoll demonstrated to the world the awesome destructive power of the bomb, it became evident to the United States and the Soviet Union — and other nuclear powers — that the risks of a nuclear exchange were simply too high. In the case of cyberattacks, where the results can vary from the annoying to the devastating, there are no such rules.

The Deterrence Conundrum

During the cold war, if a strategic missile had been fired at the United States, screens deep in a mountain in Colorado would have lighted up and American commanders would have some time to decide whether to launch a counterattack. Today, when Pentagon computers are subjected to a barrage, the origin is often a mystery. Absent certainty about the source, it is almost impossible to mount a counterattack.

In the rare case where the preparations for an attack are detected in a foreign computer system, there is continuing debate about whether to embrace the concept of pre-emption, with all of its Bush-era connotations. The questions range from whether an online attack should be mounted on that system to, in an extreme case, blowing those computers up.

Some officials argue that if the United States engaged in such pre-emption — and demonstrated that it was watching the development of hostile cyberweapons — it could begin to deter some attacks. Others believe it will only justify pre-emptive attacks on the United States. “Russia and China have lots of nationalistic hackers,” one senior military officer said. “They seem very, very willing to take action on their own.”

Senior Pentagon and military officials also express deep concern that the laws and understanding of armed conflict have not kept current with the challenges of offensive cyberwarfare.

Over the decades, a number of limits on action have been accepted — if not always practiced. One is the prohibition against assassinating government leaders. Another is avoiding attacks aimed at civilians. Yet in the cyberworld, where the most vulnerable targets are civilian, there are no such rules or understandings. If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker’s power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system or its banking system?

“We don’t have that for cyber yet,” one senior Defense Department official said, “and that’s a little bit dangerous.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/us/28cyber.html





How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
Brian Stelter

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”

Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. “I think it was sanitized by the way it was described” in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group.

During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

On “World News,” ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding.” Still, he told ABC that the actions had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

“It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

Mr. Kiriakou subsequently granted interviews to The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and other media organizations. A CNN anchor called him “the man of the hour.”

Eight months after the interview, Mr. Kiriakou was hired as a paid consultant for ABC News. He resigned last month and now works for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

His ABC interview came at an especially delicate juncture in the debate over the use of torture. Weeks earlier, the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general was nearly derailed by his refusal to comment on the legality of waterboarding, and one day later, the C.I.A. director testified about the destruction of interrogation videotapes. Mr. Kiriakou told MSNBC that he was willing to talk in part because he thought the C.I.A. had “gotten a bum rap on waterboarding.”

At the time, Mr. Kiriakou appeared to lend credibility to the prior press reports that quoted anonymous former government employees who had implied that waterboarding was used sparingly. In late 2007, Mr. Ross began pursuing Mr. Kiriakou for an interview, “leaning on him pretty hard,” he recounted.

On Dec. 10, in the subsequent interview, Mr. Kiriakou told Mr. Ross that he believed the waterboarding was necessary in the months after the 9/11 attacks. “At the time I was so angry,” he told Mr. Ross. “I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States that I felt it was the only thing we could do.”

Mr. Kiriakou was the only on-the-record source cited by ABC. In the televised portion of the interview, Mr. Ross did not ask Mr. Kiriakou specifically about what kind of reports he was privy to or how long he had access to the information. “It didn’t even occur to me that they’d keep doing” the waterboarding, Mr. Ross said last week. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

He added, “I didn’t give enough credit to the fiendishness of the C.I.A.”

Mr. Kiriakou refused an interview request last week. In a statement to ABC, he said he was aware only of Mr. Zubaydah’s being waterboarded “on one occasion.”

The C.I.A., which considered legal action against Mr. Kiriakou for divulging classified information, said last week that he “was not — and is not — authorized to speak on behalf of the CIA.”

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “This agency did not publicly disclose the frequency with which the waterboard was used, noting only that it was employed with three detainees. If reporters got that wrong, they weren’t misled from here.”

In the days after Mr. Kiriakou’s media blitz, his claims were repeated by an array of other outlets. For instance, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cited the 35 seconds claim to ask a congressman whether the interrogation program was “really so bad.”

Months later the claims continued to be amplified; the National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used Mr. Kiriakou’s assertions in a column last year to argue that the waterboarding was “right and certainly defensible.”

Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about the covert program for The New York Review of Books, said the news reports had fed the idea that brutal interrogations could instantly glean information about terrorist plans.

“There was a completely mistaken impression put about that this technique was not cruel because it could break detainees so quickly,” he said.

(An article in The New York Times on Dec. 13, 2007 described his comments to ABC and added a quotation from Mr. Kiriakou: “I think the second-guessing of 2002 decisions is unfair. What I think is fair is having a national debate over whether we should be waterboarding.”)

When Mr. Kiriakou was later hired by ABC to provide commentary on terrorism cases, Mr. Ross said that network officials had been concerned about the appearance of a tie between the interview and the job. For that reason, “I felt that we should sort of wait,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to think that he was promised something for the interview. He was not.”

Mr. Ross, who received a George Polk Award for a series on interrogation, expressed no regret about the Kiriakou interview and praised him for speaking publicly. He said ABC was preparing a story that would address the previous reporting.

“Kiriakou stepped up and helped shine some light on what has happening,” Mr. Ross said. “It wasn’t the huge spotlight that was needed, but it was some light.”

As talk continues about possible prosecutions of people involved in the interrogations, waterboarding is once again a hot topic. Last week, Sean Hannity, a conservative Fox News host, said he would agree to be waterboarded (for charity) when a guest proposed that he experience it.

But the recent Justice Department memo has led some commentators to revisit their earlier impressions about the technique.

“I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture,” Mr. Goldberg of the National Review wrote last week, but if the figures are true, “then I think the threshold has been met.”

He added: “Debating whether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/bu...dia/28abc.html





Survey: Support for Terror Suspect Torture Differs Among the Faithful

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small. See results of the survey »

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The survey asked: "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?"

Roughly half of all respondents -- 49 percent -- said it is often or sometimes justified. A quarter said it never is.

The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations -- such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- categorized as "mainline" Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/rel...ure/index.html





Study Finds 'Massive Waste' in Misdemeanor Cases
Tim Klass

Treating petty, nonviolent misdemeanors as infractions rather than crimes would save millions of dollars and better protect defendants' rights without hurting public safety, according to a study commissioned by criminal defense attorneys.

That is the top recommendation in "Minor Crimes, Massive Waste: The Terrible Toll of America's Misdemeanor Courts," a report released Tuesday by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Researchers with the Defender Initiative at the Seattle University School of Law reviewed statistics and visited misdemeanor courts in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state.

They reported that cases per public defender ranged from 360 a year in Benton County, Wash., and 380 in Seattle, both set limits, to 2,403 in Chicago, 2,502 in Utah and 18,720 in New Orleans.

The National Advisory Committee on Criminal Justice recommends a maximum of 400 cases a year per defender.

John Wesley Hall Jr., a lawyer from Little Rock, Ark., and president of the association, said he looked forward to presenting the findings to the House Judiciary Committee in a congressional hearing June 4.

"Misdemeanor court is a black hole for justice and resources," Hall told reporters. "I don't think there is a bigger waste of human potential and taxpayer money in the entire criminal justice system."

Because of state-to-state differences, the precise number of misdemeanor cases nationwide is unknown.

Based on an estimated 12-state median misdemeanor rate of 3,544 per 100,000 residents by the National Center for State Courts in 2006, misdemeanor prosecutions more than doubled from 5 million in 1972 to 10.5 million in 2006.

Law professor and chief researcher Robert C. Boruchowitz said uncounted millions of dollars were wasted in criminal prosecution for such offenses as feeding the homeless in parks, jumping turnstiles at subway stations or sleeping in a cardboard boxes.

Boruchowitz, who once ran a public defender office, said prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges could accomplish most of the needed changes by exercising prerogatives in their official positions without regulatory or statutory change.

"I think education is a big part of it," he told reporters. "I think most lawyers and judges don't understand what's going on in these courts."
http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_12252458





Apple is Sued After Pressuring Open-Source iTunes Project

The fight is over efforts to get iPods, iPhones working with non-iTunes software
Robert McMillan

The operator of a technology discussion forum has sued Apple Inc., claiming that the company used U.S. copyright law to curb legitimate discussion of its iTunes software.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, could test the limits of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It centers around an open-source effort to help iPods and iPhones work with software other than Apple's iTunes. Last November, Apple's lawyers demanded that the Bluwiki.com Web site remove a project called iPodhash, saying that it violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.

The lawsuit was filed jointly in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and attorneys representing OdioWorks, the small Herndon, Va., company that runs Bluwiki. The lawyers argue that the iPodhash discussions were about reverse-engineering software, not breaking copy protection, and want a court ruling to clarify the matter.

The EFF has previously argued that reverse-engineering in order to build new products is permitted under the DMCA. However, this case is a little different, according to Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the digital civil liberties organization. "This is the first time I've seen a company suggest that simply talking about reverse-engineering violates the DMCA," he said. "All of the previous cases have been cases that involved actual successful reverse-engineered tools."

Bluwiki is a free wiki service that hosts discussion pages for a number of projects. After Apple's November takedown letter, three Web pages that talked about a cryptographic function used by iTunes were removed from the Bluwiki Web site.

Open-source developers have been working on breaking cryptographic mechanisms used by iTunes since 2007. That's when Apple first introduced a special operation, called a checksum hash, into its products to ensure that Apple's devices were communicating with iTunes and not some other type of software.

Developers reverse-engineered Apple's checksum mechanism, but in late 2008 the company introduced a new version of the crypto-technique with its iPod Touch and iPhone products. That's what was being discussed when Apple filed its takedown notice.

The EFF and OdioWorks said that iPodhash was trying to get the iPod and iPhone to work with other software, such as Winamp or Songbird, and that the work would also help iPod and iPhone users who run the Linux operating system, because Apple doesn't ship a version of iTunes for Linux.

However, in a Dec. 17 letter to the EFF, Apple's law firm said that the EFF is "mistaken" to assume that this technology is only used to authenticate the iTunes software. The work also threatens Apple's FairPlay copy-protection system, the letter states.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

In an interview Monday, OdioWorks Founder Sam Odio said he believes that the iPodhash's lead developer, who went by the pseudonym Israr, would pick up the discussion if OdioWorks and the EFF win the case. "What this guy was doing was legitimate," Odio said. "He was just trying to reverse-engineer Apple's products to try to get them to work with Linux and other third-party software."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/... =news_ts_head





Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal
Miguel Helft

The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.

The inquiry does not necessarily mean that the department will oppose the settlement, which is subject to a court review. But it suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department was not immediately available to comment. A spokesman for Google declined to comment. Representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild could not immediately be reached.

The settlement agreement stems from a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from libraries for use in its Book Search service was a violation of copyrights.

The settlement, announced in October, gives Google the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual texts and selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

But critics say that Google alone would have a license that covers millions of so-called orphan books, whose authors cannot be found or whose rights holders are unknown. Some librarians fear that with no competition, Google will be free to raise prices for access to the collection.

Separately on Tuesday, Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in New York, who is overseeing the settlement, postponed by four months the May 5 deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement and for other parties to oppose it or file briefs. The decision follows requests by groups of authors and their heirs, who argued that authors needed more time to review the settlement.

Google, as well as the authors and publishers, have defended the settlement, saying it will bring benefits to authors, publishers and the public. They say it will renew access to millions of out-of-print books.

If the Justice Department decides to take action against the settlement, it will not be the first time that Google has found itself in the sights of federal regulators. Last year, Google abandoned a prominent advertising partnership with Yahoo after the department threatened to go to court to block the deal.

The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have wrangled over jurisdiction over the book settlement, and the Justice Department won out, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/te.../29google.html





Judge Delays Google Books Hearing
Elise Ackerman

A federal judge Tuesday postponed a hearing to determine the fairness of the Google Book Search settlement, a landmark court case involving Google and a group representing the nation's authors and publishers.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York said he was moving the date of the hearing from June 11 to Oct. 7. He said he would also extend the deadline for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement from May 5 to Sept. 4.

A group of authors that included the sons of John Steinbeck and musician Arlo Guthrie had requested the four-month extension, saying they needed more time to consider the settlement. In an interview, Gail Knight Steinbeck, chairwoman of the Creative Property Rights Alliance, said she didn't want to miss the opportunity represented by the settlement but that she was also concerned the deal could help Google assemble an information monopoly over media such as books, movies and music.

The settlement provides a mechanism for Google to compensate authors and publishers for including digital copies of their work in a giant database. It also gives Google a license to copy works whose copyright was previously considered in dispute — so-called orphan works that appeared to have been abandoned by owners of their copyrights.

An increasing number of authors, copyright specialists, academics, law professors and public interest groups have opposed the 134-page settlement, saying that it goes too far. "It is clear to us that the settlement, if approved, will shape the future of reading, research, writing and publication practices for decades to come," Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law wrote in an April 27 letter to the judge.

Neither Google nor the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which had sued Google for copyright violations, objected to the extension.
Separately, Reuters and the New York Times reported Tuesday that the Justice Department has begun an antitrust inquiry into the implications of the deal, although it was unclear what steps if any the department would take.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12248048





NAB Goes Underground To Promote Free Radio
FMQB

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has placed a series of ads opposing the Performance Rights Act in the Washington D.C. transit system's Capitol South Metro station, located two blocks from the Capitol Building. Commuters entering and exiting the subway system will see 45 advertisements promoting free, local radio and opposing an effort to levy a fee on radio stations for airing music. The ads highlight noteworthy statistics about radio as well as quotes from record label executives and artists who have recognized radio's promotional power. The signs are part of a recently-launched marketing campaign to direct radio listeners to visit NoPerformanceTax.org to learn more about the issue.

"Every week, radio airplay reaches 235 million Americans, promoting both new and legacy artists and generating more than a billion dollars in CD and download sales for record labels annually," said NAB EVP Dennis Wharton. "By contrast, artists routinely sue their record labels for cheating them out of royalty money. We welcome an honest debate over which side has been a better friend to recording artists: America's hometown radio stations or foreign-owned record labels."

The ad campaign was unveiled as Congress continues to review the Performance Rights Act, which would force radio stations to pay royalties for playing music. Countering that legislation is the Local Radio Freedom Act, which opposes "any new performance fee, tax, royalty, or other charge" on local radio stations. To date, bipartisan support for the resolution has reached 178 House members. An identical resolution was recently introduced in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the musicFIRST Coalition, an artist advocacy group that favors radio royalties, held an event at the Capitol Visitor Center on Tuesday to promote their side of the issue. Singer Tony Bennett performed at the private gathering of guests and lawmakers, including Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), where he said that musicians in symphonies and big bands who play live concerts with him should also get paid when their music goes out over the airwaves.

"The radios don't want to give up one penny," Bennett said, according to the Washington Post. "There's an army, a huge army, of great artists that just get paid for the date."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1297980





RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet
Jens Roland

Until recently, the recording industry were committing publicity suicide by routinely issuing legal threats to file sharers. Now, they seem to have changed the routine, going for fewer, but bigger targets. The goal is clear: if you own the Internet, you don’t have to worry about pirates — or anyone else.

Earlier this month, four Pirate Bay visionaries were given harsh fines and jail sentences. Their only crime: creating the largest, free, uncensored, versatile file sharing platform on the Internet. Soon after, Taiwan passed 3-strikes legislation for copyright violations. The recording industry is no longer targeting pirates - they are actually trying to hijack the very fabric of the Internet.

The apparent strategy:

1. Outlaw file sharing
2. Outlaw personal encryption and anonymization services
3. Set up a global, privately-run Internet surveillance program to spy on everybody all the time without a warrant — run by ISPs and paid for by the taxpayers
4. And finally, get the authority to block anyone from the Internet entirely, without the involvement of police, courts or any verifiable trail of evidence

We can not let this happen.

“It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.” - Bruce Schneier

One of the main reasons why the recording industry are currently succeeding in this hostile takeover of the Internet, is that most people simply don’t understand what file sharing is, or why it matters to them in the first place. Whenever civil liberties are sacrificed, it is always on the bonfire of ignorance. We need to educate the world - neighbors, parents, judges and lawmakers - as to why the Internet must remain free, neutral, and uncensored.

It sometimes helps to explain that a file sharing technology like Bittorrent is the digital society’s equivalent of the wheel. It allows fast and easy transportation of data between users and businesses alike. But like the wheel, file sharing needs a stable, flat surface to perform at its best. In this analogy, The Pirate Bay is nothing short of the largest, best maintained, and most stable network of such ‘digital roads’ in the world. And it’s free to use for anyone, at any time, for any purpose.

Naturally, as is always the case where people congregate in a free society, some of the people who drive their wheeled carts on this network of roads will be carrying things in their carts of questionable quality, purpose or origin. In any system or society that is based on freedom rather than censorship or distrust, there is no question that individual transgressions can take place. This is the most basic cost of liberty.

As a digital society in its teens, we have yet to realize the enormous potential of file sharing in culture, education, knowledge sharing, and business. But already, we are seeing massive opposition against it from the likes of IFPI, the RIAA and the MPAA. This opposition, of course, stems from some of the aforementioned wheeled carts transporting ‘questionable goods’, in the form of copyrighted material.

The ensuing battle has been disguised as a legal matter concerning rights holders and ‘pirates’, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. It is true that the recording industry wants to stop criminals, but they are attempting to prohibit the wheel and all building of roads to pull it off. These lawyers are prepared to sacrifice our liberties, our privacy and our digital freedom in order to reach their goal. It is a grossly disproportionate and misdirected attack, and it has already begun: Once the verdict of the Spectrial was in, the Swedish anti-piracy office immediately began issuing legal threats against other file sharing networks. They are bulldozing every street and burning every car to prevent any possible (mis)use of the wheel. And worse yet - we are letting it happen.

The case of The Pirate Bay was not a case of artists vs. freeloaders, or even the recording industry vs. pirates. There were no artists on the accusing side, nor were there any pirates on the defending side. It was, and is, a case of misguided frustration by industry executives and lawyers, directed not against the actual violators of copyright law, but against the most outspoken proponents and enablers of a fundmental digital technology. A technology that allows fast and easy transportation af data - all data - between users and businesses alike.

We must never blame the network for the actions of individuals. Both rights holders and lawmakers must respect the fundamental principle of personal, individual responsibility. Let each peer be responsible for his own actions, just as every driver is liable for his own car.

The Pirate Bay is not illegal. File sharing is not illegal. Using file sharing for illegal purposes is illegal. The difference may be subtle to a layman, but in legal terms, the distinction is clear as day. The fact that the judges in the Pirate Bay case failed to recognize this, is a judicial travesty bordering on flat out corruption.

It cannot be stressed enough: this is not a question of copyright, of music, or of piracy. This is a question of a private organization now aiming to subvert several of the most important digital inventions since the World Wide Web, and our judges and politicians turning a blind eye in a staggering display of ignorance and corruption. This fight is about much more than The Pirate Bay. When our liberties are taken from us, we must rise, united in one voice, and fight for them.

It is a fight for basic digital liberties. It is a fight for our right to privacy. It is a fight for net neutrality. There is no getting around it. This is the fight of our generation, and it is too important to lose.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaas-hostil...ternet-090429/





The Pirate Bay Verdict Goes English, and We Dish the Dirt

The Pirate Bay ruling has been translated into English, and it's full of little surprises. Ars dives in to answer the big questions: who possessed those Klomifen tablets, how much did the state pay to defend The Pirate Bay admins, and why did the backers consider moving to Argentina?
Nate Anderson

Thanks to music trade group IFPI, the recent Pirate Bay ruling has now been "Englished" (PDF). While the verdict itself is well-known, numerous case details will be surprising to non-Swedish speakers—such as who paid for The Pirate Bay defense, which defendant was also arraigned on drug charges, and what happened to all that Pirate Bay computer equipment confiscated by the police?

A masterpiece of prose, the verdict is not. "A number of different filesharing programs and technologies have been developed over the years," says one representative section. "There have been or are two main types of filesharing systems."

But it does offer plenty of fascinating detail that was difficult for those not at the trial to learn. Let's take a look.

Confiscated equipment. All the confiscated servers and routing equipment from a police raid on The Pirate Bay "is declared forfeit," while other seized computers will remain confiscated "until the sentence has become legally binding." That process could take years, given the appeal already filed in the case, so by the time the equipment could be released, it will be obsolete.

Confiscated drugs. In the section devoted to defendant (and lover of wispy beards) Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, we come across this curious section. Not only were computers confiscated, but police picked up "three confiscated tablets of Klomifen," "narcotic drugs," and a "spoon containing traces of amphetamine."

Turns out that Warg wasn't just accused of aiding copyright infringement but also of violating Sweden's Prohibition of Certain Health-Impairing Goods Act. As part of the 2006 police raids on The Pirate Bay, the cops searched an apartment belonging to Warg's parents, where they found several of the listed items in "a drawer unit" and "a cupboard at the desk." Warg said that the apartment had been rented out to others at the time and that he had no knowledge of the drugs there; the court agreed that nothing had been proven against him.

But there was a second incident in June 2007, when a police patrol was called to an apartment and found Warg "heavily intoxicated." In his backpack, other "preparations" were found. Warg told the court "that, despite being intoxicated, he can remember the event. He has also stated that the backpack was his, but that he, at some point during the evening, had lent it to some individuals at the party. He knows 'approximately' who he lent the backpack to, but he does not want to reveal the names of these individuals."

This didn't go over well with the court, which found "beyond reasonable doubt that Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been in possession of the preparations in question, and that he should, therefore, be sentenced for breach of the Prohibition of Certain Health-Impairing Goods Act."

Who paid for the lawyers? The older (and much richer) defendant Carl Lundström apparently paid for his own lawyer, but the three Pirate Bay admins did not. Their lawyers were all supplied and eventually paid for by the Swedish government, and they weren't cheap. Fredrik Neij's lawyer, for instance, was given 949,025 kronor (about $115,600) for his services; 35,525 kronor of that amount was given for "time wasted."

On moving to Argentina or Russia. As it became clear that Sweden might not be the best long-term base for The Pirate Bay, Carl Lundström explored the possibility of moving the site to Russia or Argentina—and he asked the Swedish Embassy for help.

"A request by Carl Lundström to the Swedish Embassy in Argentina for assistance in relocating the operation there, since the situation vis a vis copyright in Argentina could be assumed to be more user-friendly than in Europe, was turned down by the Embassy," says the verdict. "Carl Lundström then contacted an Argentinean lawyer with the aim of ascertaining the cost of establishing the operation as a company in Argentina."

Similar moves were made in Russia; nothing appears to have come of them.

Legal advice. Why the interest in getting out of Sweden? A new copyright law came into effect in 2005, and Lundström worried that it would make the site illegal. "Carl Lundström contacted a lawyer," says the verdict. "Following discussions with his legal representative, he e-mailed Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and mentioned that as of 1 July 2005, the operation would be unlawful and that they should, therefore, consider relocating the operation to another country."

In the meantime, Fredrik Neij sought some legal advice of his own. Rather than pay a lawyer, though, he sought out the advice of a "law student who, in turn, checked with his teachers and professors." Based on advice from the student, Neij told the court that he believed The Pirate Bay was legal.

The Pirate Bay meets... TV? One other curious revelation was that Lundström had the idea back in 2006 "for new services in the form of a pooling of The Pirate Bay’s website and a digital television receiver." Few details are offered, but this sounds a bit like a set-top box that could tune TV and also grab video content from The Pirate Bay. As with many of the other schemes mentioned in the verdict, nothing came of this.

The Google defense. During the trial, the defendants harped on the fact that Google also indexes .torrent files, many of them infringing; why was a search engine like The Pirate Bay on trial while a search engine like Google was not?

Here is the judge's answer in its most condensed form: "In accordance with what will be further demonstrated below, all the defendants were aware that a large number of the website’s users were engaged in the unlawful disposal of copyright-protected material. By providing a website with advanced search functions and easy uploading and downloading facilities, and by putting individual filesharers in touch with one other through the tracker linked to the site, the operation run via The Pirate Bay has, in the opinion of the District Court, facilitated and, consequently, aided and abetted these offences."

What happened to the "safe harbor"? US law offers immunity (under both the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to certain websites and ISPs for the actions of their users. Europe's "Electronic Commerce Act" contains a similar provision, but the judge found that The Pirate Bay didn't qualify. Why not? Because the law requires that a service provider was "not aware of the existence of the illegal information or operation, and was not aware of facts or circumstances which made it obvious that the illegal information or operation existed or who, as soon as he received knowledge about or became aware of this, prevented the spread of the information without delay."

Since they posted many of the takedown letters sent in by copyright owners, the admins certainly knew about all sorts of copyright infringement taking place on their site. They did nothing about it and instead mocked the rightsholders. "It must have been obvious to the defendants that the website contained torrent files which related to protected works," said the court. "None of them did, however, take any action to remove the torrent files in question, despite being urged to do so. The prerequisites for freedom from liability under §18 have, consequently, not been fulfilled."

Translation: no immunity.

The end of the beginning

Despite the verdict, the case is just getting started. Defense lawyers have already filed an appeal and have since accused the judge overseeing the case of a conflict of interest. Judge Tomas Norström belongs to a couple of Swedish copyright associations, a fact no one managed to dig up before the trial.

While the court's judgment sheds plenty of light on how The Pirate Bay operated and what its backers believe, the least relevant part of it may in fact be the legal reasoning.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...h-the-dirt.ars


















Until next week,

- js.



















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